Jun 22, 2021 City Council on 2021-06-22 2:00 PM

Good afternoon and welcome to this meeting of the Denton City Council. It is 2 p.m. and we do have a quorum, so I will call the meeting to order. The first item on today's agenda is to have citizens comment on the consent agenda and I think we have one caller. I'm looking for staff to give an indication, but I do believe we have one. Hi, Mayor. This is Rachel. Yes, we do have one caller. I'll get him there now. Okay, thank you. And Z, is it three minutes or four minutes? I think it's three. Three on the consent. Got it. Yes, thank you. And are you able to keep the time on the... Thank you. Are you there? Yes. Okay, so if you could give... Please give your name and address. You will have three minutes to address the council. Thank you. My name is Joshua Happen. My address is 1414 Auburn Drive in Denton. I want to thank first the workers of the city secretary's office for providing information to me about how to participate in today's meeting and especially to Stuart and Rachel for the help with working out the phone communications. Again, my name is Joshua Happen. I'm an organizer of the No Bus Cuts Denton campaign, which today submitted to DCTA and City Council a petition with 563 signatures to stop the DCTA GoZone plan, which would harm bus drivers, bus riders, and the greater Denton community. Our campaign is against the proposal in consent item... I'm sorry, consent agenda item T, which would award a contract to Bird Advocacy and Consulting, which could be worth up to nearly $120,000. We oppose this proposal to award this contract because of the harm that Bird Advocacy and Consulting have already done and the damage that they would do if given this contract. So regarding the harm that they have already done, according to exhibit item... Exhibit one, the agenda information sheet for agenda item T, Bird Advocacy and Consulting is the architect of the GoZone plan to cut bus routes and lay off drivers. According to this document, one of the accomplishments listed there, inexplicably an accomplishment, was that the Bird company analyzed bus routes and proposed microtransit. Microtransit here is of course a euphemism for the GoZone cuts to the bus routes. As far as the future damage that Bird Advocacy and Consulting would do if awarded this contract, these are the implementation of the GoZone plan and also performing a propaganda function. And again, I read from the agenda information sheet, under a section of future activities, the document says that a future activity would be working to ensure the microtransit implementation is seamless, the public outreach campaign is thorough and reaches all segments of the population. So in summary, we ask that City Council not approve consent agenda item T and not award a contract to Bird Advocacy and Consulting. Did I take questions from counselors? No, it was not posted, your call was not posted, so we can't take questions, but I thank you for your comments. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. And so I don't think we have any other callers. That concludes item one of our agenda, takes us to the consent agenda questions for staff with respect to the consent agenda. And I'll go Councilmember Beck, Mayor Pro Tem Melter, Councilmember Guare. Mr. Mayor, do you want them all at once? If you would be so kind. All right. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I have a question on B. Okay. And let's see, who would cover that? Item B is. This is DME. Okay. Yep. Is Terry available or on the, on the call? All right. We'll give him a minute to get unmuted. Hello, Mayor. Can you hear me? This is Terry Nalty. Yes, sir. Councilmember Beck. Yes. Thank you, Mayor. Terry, I had a question about B and I wanted to clarify in the backup, the two, the two coastal wind proposals, when they were compared to bilateral competitive markets, that was bilateral renewable competitive markets? That is correct. This was part of an RFP that was done quite some time ago. And the item before you is really a cleanup item to reject this bid was delayed because of COVID and because the, the lowest cost bidder ended up changing their bid, increasing their bid, which made it no longer cost effective. But just to clarify, we were comparing that as being unreasonable because they were being compared to other renewable bilateral contracts. Is that correct? Yes, sir. Okay. Well, that clarifies that. Thank you so much, Terry. Okay. And then I had a question on C and D. And that is, I guess the HUD plan. Okay. Sorry, not D. Is that Danny that would speak to that? We'll give her a minute to unmute. Oh, I'm sorry. This is Danny Schauer on the call. Luis Garcia is also here. So just waiting on the question. Thank you. Thank you. Yes. Thank you, Danny. The, if on page six of your, of your, of your, of the backup on expenditures, if I'm just confirming that we have only spent approximately give or take 50% of what was allocated. I can't hear you. And for clarification, Council member Beck, is this item C or D? This is C according to my notes. Thank you. Yes. Council member Beck, this is Luis Garcia. The information in the action, in the Consolid Action Plan includes the expenditures up to the end of last year. But that, and that's still just to clarify, we've, we're only, we've only expended approximately half. Is that correct? That is correct. Okay. That clarifies that one. In a three, in a three year plan. Yes. In a three year plan. In a three year plan. Yes. I understand that. Thank you. And then the next item question I had was O. This is about the polygraph services. Okay. Go ahead and you can go ahead with your question in the right. Okay. Thank you. My question while we get ready is, well essentially about the whole, the whole service, to be honest. Is this something we have a statutory or legal requirement to maintain? And while we get ready, the rationale for that is that the American Psychological Association shows no merit for, for polygraph testing. It's, it's basically considered bunkum by neurophysiologists. Go ahead, staff. This is Michael Behrens with the police department. Can you hear me? Yes, sir. Yes, sir. We do the polygraph as due diligence as part of our background investigation for applicants. And where we typically find value from it is the, the people that are doing their applications will change their answer between their initial application and the time they go to the polygraph. And it's, it's not that they failed, failed the polygraph itself. It's just that things come up that they would rather us not find out until they, until they get about to take the polygraph and then they suddenly remember, oh, hey, this is something that I need to tell you or I forgot to tell you. And that's where most of our disqualifications come from. Okay. Well, how long have we been doing this? And, and I'm just curious, how long is this part of our hiring procedure? I don't know exactly. It was in place when I was hired 26 years ago. All right. Well, all right. I won't, I won't proselytize other than to say that, that scientists don't think this is worth anything. So I'd rather you have the $50,000 to do something else. Okay. Do you have any, uh, is that all your questions? I had, uh, okay. Chief Dixon. Bless you. Bless you. Uh, chief police Frank Dixon. I don't think that Lieutenant Barons heard the second part of your question. Uh, it is a statutory requirement from TECO as well. It is a statutory requirement. Correct. Well, that is most unfortunate. Okay. Thank you, chief. Appreciate that chief. Okay. And you had one more, you said, uh, well, I, I mean, in, in general, I would just like to pull, I, I, I misquoted in the email earlier, you and V, uh, and T just, I'd like to pull those to individual consideration if we could please. Okay. So if everyone can note that's you, is that, did I hear you right? UVT, UV and T. Great. So then no need for others to pull that that's been pulled. Okay. Uh, then I have, uh, Mayor Pro Tem Meltzer. Uh, yeah, I was just going to request T. Okay. Got it. Uh, Councilman McGuire. Thank you, Mayor Hudspeth. Um, I, uh, some of mine were already covered. I had a correction on consent agenda item A, uh, regarding the meeting minutes from June 8th. We did have a caller on item K. Um, uh, for item B, um, if we could get Terry Nolte back on the line, um, I just want to confirm, um, does this rejection of proposals, um, mean that DME is no longer pursuing, uh, these coastal wind contracts or, or is it just, are we just saying we haven't had an adequate proposal yet? Uh, yes. Uh, Councilmember McGuire, this is Terry Nolte, Assistant GM at, uh, DME. Uh, we, uh, because of the age of these proposals, we, um, have rejected them all now and to, uh, in our overall portfolio, at this point in time, we are not in need of additional renewable resources. We will be, uh, contracting for more, uh, over time, but we have another solar resource that's coming online in late 2022 that meets our growth needs. So, um, when we see a need, we will issue a new RFP for additional coastal and solar, and we will make a recommendation based upon the best fit and lowest cost for, uh, for our portfolio. Okay. Thank you so much, Mr. McNaul, Mr. Nolte. Um, I had, um, I also had a question regarding, um, item C, um, well, I, okay, this is more of, perhaps more of a comment, but since, since I was not on council, um, at the time that this was being sort of discussed, um, I, I don't know if this is worth, you know, pulling it necessarily, but I, I just want to express my, um, belief that, um, projects like park improvements, playground improvements, um, sidewalk improvements, I would, I would prefer going forward to see those funded out of the general fund. Um, I, I think that we ought to be using, uh, community development block grants and home grants, um, for projects that would more directly impact, um, uh, low income residents, um, and that, you know, don't overlap with projects that we do elsewhere in the city for, for, um, you know, residents, uh, in, in other neighborhoods. Um, I know, is, is there someone on staff who can perhaps speak to that or if there's something that I'm not quite understanding about, uh, those projects? Can you, can you help them, uh, I had a hard time zoning, zoning in on, I understand the philosophy, the difference, but is there, is there a question more specific that, that they could speak to directly? Okay. So, um, I guess it would need to tie in city, miss, uh, city attorney helped me. It would need to tie into the budgeting aspect of it. Yes. So for example, uh, uh, improvements to Fred Moore park, um, are, are slated to, to come out of, um, you know, this federal grant money. Um, is it too late for us to budget for that from the general fund instead? Well, and look, I can speak to that while staff's coming. The benefit of that is we get more bang for our buck. My understanding and staff will correct me when I'm wrong because you can spend those federal dollars in low and moderate income areas. Then you can double up in other areas where we cannot apply those dollars. So it's because by, by statute we're required to spend it in certain areas. This park fits that then we can apply them there, then allow the general fund dollars and other budgets where you, there are no stipulations to be spent in other parks. So it raises the profile of all the parks, but help me when I'm wrong. Sure. I'm going to see if Danny is on the line and if not, I will answer that. Yeah. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay. Uh, yes. So the federal funds are eligible as long as the neighborhood income qualifies. So any projects that are slated for those, uh, do you benefit, uh, income qualified neighborhoods and provide additional community development opportunities for them? So the, the, the funds are eligible. The question you're asking is the philosophical one and how we want to utilize or leverage the funds. Uh, so, uh, I think mayor Hutz has accounted for some of that original thought process for that. Um, but we would take direction in that have opportunity to, to make adjustments should that be desired. I think the one additional thing to add in Danny, correct me if I'm wrong is this year, the number of applications we got in and the total amount of dollars was underneath the total amount of dollars we had available to allocate. So it wasn't competing with other applications that we had received. Um, if it was competing, you know, that could be up to the committee to determine which is the best use of that money. So it has an impact on the past years, but I think this year we didn't have that conflict based upon the submitted applications. Okay. Yeah, that, that, that's correct. The last three years, that's accurate. Okay. Any other questions? Councilman McGuire? Um, yes, I, I just generally like more information about item L. Um, uh, you know, I don't see, um, you know, uh, any bids. Um, I, I don't see any like, you know, uh, RFQ RFP on, on in the backups. Um, could, is that something that staff could provide now or is that something that staff could speak to us about if we were to pull that item? [inaudible] Either Stephen Gay or Preetam, uh, could respond to this or as well as Christine who may have, who was also involved with the, um, procurement process. Hi. So this is Christine Taylor, procurement director. So just, I wanted to point out for the process. So we brought forward a few months ago, a pre-qualified engineering list for water and wastewater projects. So they are utilizing a firm off of the already pre-qualified engineers who we ranked upon qualifications. Okay. So there was, um, no like bidding process as far as the cost of the project. Correct. So with the RFQ process, anytime we're engaging an engineer, we base it solely on qualifications. So the city went through a process in which we did a pre-qualified list for engineering firms based on the type of work we want to do. Once they do select based on qualifications, we do negotiate prices. And if it's not within our price point, they move on to the next most qualified, but it is opposite from like a request for proposals where we are reviewing and comparing pricing. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. That clarifies that for me. Um, yeah, my other items were, were covered. I was going to object to the use of polygraphs because they are, um, not reliable at all. But, um, if, if it's required by statute, then there's not much we can do, I suppose. Um, and that's all. Thank you. Thanks. Uh, yeah, but I was going to see any other questions here. Okay. Councilor Armitage. Yes. Uh, thank you. Uh, so I just wanted to say, I too wanted to have T pulled, uh, for individual consideration. Will that be getting, uh, any kind of presentation or will that, was that just for discussion? No presentation has been requested. Okay. Uh, I'm, I'm fine with that. I was just curious. Thanks. Okay. We, we, we do have one if needed though. Okay. Well, um, I've, I've just to have a clear record. What I've seen is, is you VT pulled and I've seen no requests for any presentations for any of those. So if that, if that's wrong, uh, say so before we move forward. Yes, I was going to touch on that as well. So, uh, counselor, why are you touched on, um, the minutes for item a, which meeting was that? What date? June 8th. June 8th. And item a, you represent, there was a caller that item K. June item K. Item K is in kangaroo. Okay. June 8th. Okay. Does that give you what you need Z? Yes, sir. And we'll make sure to add those on. Okay. Thank you. All right. Any other questions for staff consent agenda? Uh, then I think, well, what I'll do is because I, we've received the emails and I, I, I would like to have a discussion about it. If someone could have a brief, uh, for my interest, item T, just a brief highlight of what, uh, the, what services the, um, consultant has provided, uh, that, that, that staff could earmark, that would be great. So. Okay. Great. All right. That's it then. So we'll have UVT T with a brief presentation on accomplishments and that takes us to our first work session item, um, which will be, let me get there wrong way. Okay. So it's, uh, one a, which is ID 211066, receive report, hold discussion and give staff direction regarding audit project zero to one, uh, dash water system operation rate structure. Hello. Hi. Can you hear me? Yes. A little bit. All right. Uh, hello mayor and city council. I'm Madison Rorschach and city auditor. I'm going to pull up my presentation. So. All right. Uh, and I'm here to present our findings from, uh, phase one of our audit of city, the city's water system operations, uh, which is focusing on water demand management through the rate structure. Um, so the audit generally evaluated the effectiveness of the city's water demand management strategies as a part of water system operations. Um, so in order to sell water, the city must obtain water rights from the Texas commission on environmental quality, um, which limits the amount of raw water and entity may draw from Texas's rivers, lakes, and aquifers. The city then pumps this raw water into its two water treatment plants, which have the combined capacity to treat about 50 million gallons of water a day. These trip treatment facilities must be equipped to meet peak daily demand, uh, which can often be much higher than the average daily demand. And then the treated water is then distributed to the city's customers, uh, who generally pay for the volume of water that they consume per the city's adopted rate ordinance. So currently the city has adequate access to raw water and adequate treatment capacity to meet the demands of its customers. Uh, however, as water demand increases due to growth, the city, um, may be required to attain additional water rights and must, uh, invest in, uh, costly production capacity expansions. So for that reason, we have to be able to, uh, monitor and manage our water demand in order to effectively and economically utilize, uh, our limited water resources. So the audit generally evaluated the city's water demand management strategies, uh, in, including rate structure and reduction programs and incentives. So begin by discussing the city's different rate structures. Um, water demand is primarily managed through rate setting, uh, because economic theory customarily suggests that the higher price for, uh, the prices for good, the lower the quantity demanded. And in general, the city has three significant classes of water customers whose rate structures are each designed differently. So I'll begin by discussing, uh, residential customers. Um, so the city uses an inclining price block structure during the summer, as shown in the table for residential customers. This type of rate design is generally intended to charge higher prices for discretionary water usage, uh, such as landscape irrigation, pools and fountains, uh, car washing and other things like that. Um, because that gen- that kind of usage generally drives water system expansion. So these higher prices, um, allow for a more equitable allocation of the cost of service and help to defer capacity expansions by discouraging discretionary usage. According to best practices, in order for this type of price structure to be effective, uh, the consumption blocks should j- uh, should be defined so that the first block, uh, typically covers the amount of water needed, uh, for the norm- the normal household health and sanitary needs of- of customers, which is considered non-discretionary usage. And- and then the price increases between each blocks, uh, should be no less than 25 percent, um, to effectively signal that- that price. Uh, so based on an analysis of water consumption data from 2018 through 2020, we found that the city's residential consumption blocks, uh, appear to be too large to effectively impact discretionary water usage. Uh, most notably, the average monthly usage per customer never exceeds the 15,000-gallon Block 1 threshold, as shown in the figure on the slide. Uh, in addition, the average usage for residential customers during the winter months was about 5,200 gallons, which is almost a third of the city's current Block 1 consumption threshold. So, um, and best practices typically use that- that winter month average, uh, as an indicator for the amount of non-discretionary water usage. Moreover, um, based on a benchmarking study that we conducted of 10 peer cities, uh, the majority had a lower Block 1 consumption threshold than the city of Denton, with an average being around 11,000 gallons. Um, so furthermore, best practices suggest- uh, they would suggest that the rate increases between each of the residential blocks, uh, would be effective price signals, um, except for very few residential customers ever actually consume water at Blocks 3 and 4, even during the summer, um, which indicates that the consumption blocks are too large to effectively impact customer behavior. Um, most notably, just over 10 percent of monthly residential customers, uh, their usage ever exceeds that 15,000- 15,000 gallon block, um, which is shown in the figure on the slide. Um, finally, city's residential rate structure does not appear to have changed recently. However, based on discussion with, uh, finance department staff, adjustments to the consumption blocks were identified as an area for improvement as part of the most recent water and wastewater cost of service study. Uh, but changes to the structure were not originally proposed as part of the fiscal year '21-'22 budget, uh, because they prioritized changes in response to winter storm Yuri, uh, instead, basically. Um, however, based on their management responses, the water and, uh, finance department's now plan to present, uh, potential consumption block changes to the P- to PUB and the city council as part of the current budget process. So next to address the commercial rate structure, uh, the- in general, the city charges a flat fee per thousand gallon of water, uh, consumed for commercial customers. This practice appears to be reasonable as it's more difficult to determine what level of water usage, um, is discretionary due to the diversity of commercial customers. Uh, that being said, city has implemented an irrigation subclass of commercial customers, which includes, um, a seasonal upcharge for landscape irrigation water, uh, during the summer. And in order to be defined as a commercial irrigation customer, an organization must have a- a separately metered landscape irrigation, um, system. Uh, and currently, about 20 percent of the city's 6,000 commercial customers are actually just irrigation accounts. I do wanna note that the city has kind of a similar setup irrigation subclass for residential customers. However, there's only about 200 of these, uh, which indicates that the subclass is generally not having a significant impact on, uh, the system's water demands. Currently, the city allows commercial customers to request separate metering on- of their irrigation system, uh, and based- but based on our analysis of this customer class, increased usage of kind of that irrigation account would allow the city and its customers to more accurately, um, monitor commercial usage for landscape irrigation, uh, which is generally considered to be discretionary. Uh, for this reason, we're recommending that the city consider requiring commercial customers to separately meter their irrigation systems, um, which will just create additional rate structure flexibility. Um, based on management- their management responses, the water department plans to work with development services to evaluate the feasibility of requiring that separate- uh, separate irrigation meters for new developments or existing properties with significant improvements, uh, or remodels. Uh, so then the final significant customer category is the city's wholesale water customers. So the city sells both treated and raw water to wholesale customers, um, through a contract with the Opportunity Regional Water District per the adopted rate ordinance that's kind of outlined in the table. Um, it should be noted that currently the city sells just over half of its available raw water to its raw water wholesale customers, and in addition, the city's two wholesale treated water customers are its- are top two largest consumers of treated water. So based on these rates, the city generally appears to be billing its wholesale water customers accurately. Uh, that being said, we found that the city's treated water customers, the demand charges based on, uh, the peak rate of flow projections that were received from the water district, and these were, um, sent to us in- they're still based on the ones sent to us in 2017. Uh, so we- we basically tested that, um, using the current 2020, uh, rates of flow, um, for the average because we couldn't get the peak rates. Um, and so based on that kind of test, uh, the 2017 rate of flow projections may be inaccurate for current billing. So for that reason, we- we recommended that the city require the Opportunity Regional Water District to provide rate of flow projections annually in order to ensure that these customers are billed appropriately. Um, in addition, the city should consider monitoring flow rates with these customers to ensure that they're being billed accurately as well so that the projections actually match what they use. Um, that being said, based on a review of the documents provided by the water department, uh, the city's wholesale water contract expired, uh, around 2012. So according to staff, the city has been working on a new wholesale water agreement with the district- water district, um, since at least October of 2020. Uh, however, this initiative has been hindered by staff turnover. Uh, since the city of Denton's wholesale water customers are its single largest consumers, it is important that the city have adequate, uh, valid contracts in place to ensure water demand, um, from these customers is effectively managed and that the city is protected in times of drought or water shortage. So for this reason, we w- recommended that the city execute, um, either a new or an amended contract with the whole- its wholesale water customers. Uh, and based on their management responses, the finance and water departments, they're working to establish a process to require annual submittal- submittal of those peak rates of flows that I talked about and to execute a new contract with the water district. And then, um, other than rate structure, uh, water utilities can create incentives or programs to encourage water demand reduction. In general, um, the city has not implemented any formal demand reduction programs, although it does perform on-site water audits for customers, uh, for, uh, customers' properties upon request, um, or in response to high bill complaints. Um, however, we found that there was no clear indication that this program reduces water usage. Um, that being said, it does appear to be a way to educate customers, um, about the city's water rate structure. So then, it should be noted that these types of incentives or programs are generally most effective if the water utility analyzes its customer base to identify end-use water efficiency measures. Um, the city's current water metering process may hinder its ability to actually effectively perform this type of analysis. Um, however, the planned implementation of an AMI system for water meters, uh, should provide the additional data needed, um, to create these types of targeted incentives and programs. Uh, and then similarly, the city currently communicates its water rate structure to all customers, uh, in October after the rates are adopted each year and just after the seasonal rates end, seasonal inclining block rates end. Um, other than this, there is no regular communication to customers about the water rate structure. While this information is available online, additional communications to customers about how the rate structure affects their water bill, um, and the benefits of water demand reduction strategies, um, especially just before kind of that peak water demand season may help to reduce customer usage. Uh, and then based on their management responses, water plans to look into creating kind of those programs or incentives once AMI is implemented. Um, and then in addition, the Public Affairs and Customer Service Department, uh, plan to include additional educational materials, um, about rate structure and demand reduction strategies as part of regular city communications, um, that go out in October and May. So, in summary, uh, we issued a total of seven recommendations, all of which the department either concurred or were partially concurred with. Uh, based on their responses, we plan to conduct a follow-up review in 18 to 36 months, which is a little bit longer than our normal period, but I believe it's necessary to effectively analyze any rate structure changes that are made, um, and it allows the city to select an AMI system and, uh, before we return. So, there's that and I'll stop sharing. Okay. Thank you very much. Questions for SAF. Mayor Pertz and Meltzer. Yep. Thank you. Uh, thanks for the presentation. Incidentally, I'm somebody who had the residential audit, uh, when I was a new homeowner and they gave a lot of useful information about where to locate sprinklers and I think it was effective. Uh, uh, back on residential, there seems to be a missing term in the analysis. Uh, you know, we hear that the block of 15,000 gallons per month isn't low enough, uh, to, to inspire reduced consumption. We hear that other communities have the block averaged at 11,000, although we don't see that. Uh, but what, uh, we don't hear is whether similarly situated as far as climate, you know, water demand, uh, cities who have the lower first block, whether they have reduced water consumption or is it, or does it just monetize the consumption? I don't, you know, I don't have a, uh, a particular feeling of confidence or not about whether the water usage is elastic based on the pricing or not. So I guess that's my question to you is, uh, do you have any insight into whether the communities, well, first of all, are they climate wise similar to us? And secondly, if they do have that lower block, is their water consumption less in the peak months? Um, yeah. So the results of our peer, uh, benchmark study were included in the end of the report. So you can go and see their rate structure. Um, I think even if we could figure out what their actual water consumption was, it would be very difficult to do a realistic comparison, um, based on that. I don't know how I would do that basically. Um, we could try to get that information. Um, we just have to contact them, whereas all of their rate structure is online and is publicly available. Um, they are all Texas cities, um, and they are based, uh, based on analysis we did that was based on population, um, population growth, um, uh, income per capita and, uh, college, college admission. Cause that's kind of just how we selected our peer, our peer group. If, if it's a, you know, available, uh, and I don't know if it's worth the lift or not. I'm just responding to your comment that you wouldn't, you wouldn't know how to do it. Um, you know, perhaps if we just knew the composition of their usage by block during peak months, right? And maybe ours is sort of 97, two zero zero and maybe theirs is goes from that in peak months to 80, you know, 15, five, something like that. We can certainly try to find that out. I, I would bet it would take more than two staff hours. Um, uh, the other thing is the other thing about the rate structure is that while it does encourage or sorry, discourage discretionary usage, it also helps to more equitably allocate costs, which is a different kind of benefit that, yeah. Okay. Any other questions for staff? Council member Beck, then council member Brevoir. Thank you mayor. Um, Madison, first of all, I just want to say that all these, these risk assessments and reporting makes, makes your department one of my favorites in all the city because we really see where the rubber meets the road. And I, I love that. Um, a couple of, uh, issues can, when you were doing research and talking to the other departments, did you, uh, was, was there a causative reason why, um, the commercial use was, uh, roughly 5.7 to six times the residential use or the volume was the same roughly, but the per capita use was six times, but the rate was only 1.04 times. And, and I guess what are we trying to incentivize by tweaking down the commercial rate relative to the usage? Yes. So the, I think I mentioned during the presentation, the city did a cost of service study just recently, but it wasn't finalized. So we didn't actually look at that data because it wasn't, it wasn't ready, I guess. Um, so we did, I think I did see some preliminary results and when you look at it, it's about equal, um, the cost burden basically, um, even with the lower rate. But I, I'd have to defer to finance to speak more about that cost of service and why we're setting it up that way. I guess if, if you or somebody else in staff could, could just give me the, the less than two hour version of why we're incentivizing like that, that would be useful. Um, let's see. My, oh, um, the two other questions that I had were, um, the, um, it seems like, uh, that one of the suggestions was that metering, um, might have some prohibitive cost, uh, impacts, but have, again, in your research, did you, did you look at the relative savings versus the costs of the metering? I didn't quite see that element. Yeah. So we, as part of the audit, we didn't have time to basically do that cost analysis. That was the recommendation to do that. Um, we, I believe that if you separately meter, you'll be able to understand that kind of discretionary irrigation use on the commercial side better. Um, but there will be costs associated with that, just installing the meters and maintaining them. Um, but we don't have a feel for the, the relative size of those. Uh, because if, if it's, if we, if it costs us a little, but we save the time, right, then it's, it's clearly a good investment. Well, I think just, I think just separately metering wouldn't necessarily reduce to make water demands. We'd have to implement some sort of, I mean, obviously there is the, the six, six dollars versus $4. Um, so there is a price signal already there, but I don't know without the enough data to really see how much is actually going to irrigation versus how much is going to non-discretionary use for commercial customers. It's really hard to tell. So we really need to do that to get out in front. Then we can do the analysis and then adjust the rates. Right. And I think that's part of, it goes into a lot of the, the way that we are metering currently and, and, um, collecting that data, we collect it once a month, um, from every meter and that's it. So we don't, we don't have a lot of very in-depth data on how customers are actually using the water. Okay. And, and my last question was on the, uh, the, the feedback in the education outreach and training components that you mentioned about like page 13 on the end. You don't have to flip to it, but just a reference for you. Uh, that was, um, one of the things that I saw in the reporting that you did and then in my own bills is there's, uh, over the course of a year, there's not a clear distinction until you hit October and see with how you did. And it feels like that fidelity is not fine enough to change my behavior over the course of the summer. So is there a mechanism by where we can, I don't know, splash a big box around when you change from block one to block two to block three, even for the, you know, even whether we adjust the rates down, but if you don't get feedback, you don't know if you've changed your behavior or not. Right. So there needs to be something in the billing, some push notification that we we've changed our behavior for good or for ill. So that would be my recommendation going forward. That was my recommendation as well. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Um, first of all, thank you for this presentation. It was really clear and really informative and I appreciated it. Um, is there yet a proposal for specifics as far as how those residential blocks might be altered? I don't believe there's a specific proposal yet. Finance could probably speak more to that. Um, and then I think they are looking for some direction as far as that goes also. Okay. Um, follow up question. Um, has there been any discussion of, um, perhaps raising the rates for blocks two, three and four while lowering the rate for block one? Is that something that's been discussed? I don't know. I don't have, as the auditor, I just give advice basically. Um, and, uh, so I don't have those kinds of discussions about managerial. How are we actually going to change operations? Um, in that those specifics, right? So, okay. Yes. Yeah. That makes sense. Um, was there a staff member who had wanted to speak to that? Yeah. Nick Benson, assistant director of finance. Um, we do have some conceptual thoughts about how we could possibly structure the rates. We plan to bring this forward to you in the budget discussions here in the next couple of months. So we have talked to the consultant that did the cost allocation study and they did make some recommendations. We do plan to bring those forward to you in this budget discussions. Okay. Thank you. Any other questions? Councilmember wire. Thank you. Well, let me skip to, uh, council member Davis first. Thank you mayor. So understanding that you're not here with a new rate structure for us to consider, you're offering advice and observations and analysis of the existing rate structure. I'm curious mostly about, um, that 15,000 and understanding, I guess your advice is that a lot of cities have a lower threshold, that that threshold may not be appropriate for Denton. But I'm curious if, if our average peak, not our top 25% peak or people who consistently go over that, if our average peak is consistently under the 15,000, isn't that first block kind of doing its job that the average residential customer should always be under that peak? Cause it looked like that blue line, which I think that was 20, 21, I can't remember. Um, that might've been 2019. It looked like that blue peak 2018. Thank you. It looked like that blue peak got awfully close to that 15,000. So isn't that doing its job that we should always, that residential average reverent residential peak should always be under that 15,000? I think that that depends on the policy that you want to set with your rate structure. Um, we assumed based on the inclining block rates that you wanted to discourage discretionary usage. There certainly is discretionary usage within that, um, uh, that, uh, that peak because you can see that based on the winter month usage versus the summer month usage, basically where the peak is that indicates that there's mostly landscape irrigation, right? Is what happens during the summer. Um, so if you, that is basically a policy question of, do we consider landscape irrigation to, you know, to what extent do we consider that to be a nondiscretionary usage or usage that we don't want to discourage basically. That gets to my next question. To what extent did you consider development code requirements and that some landscape irrigation is not discretionary, that we have certain code requirements that require, uh, you know, maintain your lawn when you build a new home in the city of Denton, you're required to add an irrigation system. You can't build a house that doesn't have, uh, some irrigation to it, that if you have a, a brown dead dirt with no zero escaping or something that you might get a red tag on your door telling you you've got to fix your landscaping. Did any of that get considered as we kind of look at discretionary versus nondiscretionary? We did not consider specifically any of the effects of the Denton Development Code on what that would be. Um, that's, no, we did not. I mean, I think most of the literature indicates that landscape irrigation, at least to some extent, is considered discretionary usage. Um, so, uh, and then it indicates that the winter, the winter kind of average is what you need for health and sanitary reasons. So I think there potentially could be a gap there, right, of, um, you know, we, we, there's more discretion, or nondiscretionary usage that's required by the Denton Code. I think it would be very hard for us to determine that, um, without additional data. Sure. I, I guess the, the disconnect for me is I'm not, I'm not quite ready to accept that the entirety of the gap is nondiscretionary between winter and summer, that there's, there's some number in there that is discretionary, fill in pools, water in the lawn more than you have to, but there's some portion of that that's not. I'm not quite ready to say that, that 5200 or whatever winter month average is the, is the discretion, the nondiscretionary by itself. And we're not saying that it is. Sure. Yeah. Sure. We're not recommending setting 52 as the low, the threshold for that gap. Do we have any idea in the data that we have available? Um, we know that there are some commercial irrigation accounts. Um, we know that there are a smattering of folks out there who have two meters, uh, residential meters. There's ones for irrigation and ones for, uh, just the, the home use. Do we have any indication of how many of those residential customers are operating small sale agriculture? Watering their garden, uh, either for personal use, something they sell at the community market, that kind of stuff. I, my, I was told that they're mostly HOAs, but I haven't done analysis on that 200, those 200 customers to figure that out. Um, I'd have to go into every single account. Right. And then do research on the account holder to determine that. Um, so I do not know the answer to that. And I know that we've done a cost of service, uh, study. We've had a lot of discussion about that already. Has there been any, in this proposal to move more commercial customers to a, a dual meter system, to where they've got an irrigation meter and a other commercial use meter? Has there any, been any cost analysis, um, not just for the city, but for the, the cost impact to those commercial users? I mean, a meter and tap fees are very high. Um, I mean, you could, you could be telling a small apartment complex, you need to spend another $10,000 on putting another meter in, um, just so we can have, you know, on two different accounts. Have we considered that at all? We did not do that cost analysis. I think, again, I think the recommendation was to do that basically to, because I believe that the, the, the rate flexibility that we have with, and the monitoring ability that we would have with the two meters, even if we don't change our rates, we would know how much we're spending on irrigation. It gives us better data. Sure. Um, uh, that's why we recommended doing that analysis basically, because we believe that that was a benefit to the city. Um, but we did not recommend that they, the city require separately metering because we didn't do that cost analysis. And I would, I'd also just add, um, well, I don't know what it was, but nevermind. I appreciate your answers. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. Any other questions before? Councilman Berg? I've always been curious about the, um, the beautification of some of these byways that we have, University Drive, Carroll, Bell. And, uh, I know that we, you know, we like trees. The question is, is that, is the city its own customer in those terms or, and it has, was that included in the, um, the information here? Who pays for that? I know we have to, we have to put it in and then someone pays to water. I, so I believe that those kinds of things that you're talking about are separately metered and charged as government accounts. Okay. So they would not be included in the residential or commercial or wholesale analysis that we did. Okay. All right. That's all my question. Thank you. Okay. Any other questions? I understand. I'm just waiting to make sure I get everyone for a shot. All right. Mayor Pro Tem. I think I figured out a better way to, a simpler way to get at what I was trying to ask you earlier. You've got average residential usage per month for us. If we could get average residential usage per customer per month for however many two hours covers, you know, two or three, that would at least give you an indication whether there's a difference in the result. I mean, if that's the objective is to affect that number, we might want to see who's good at that. Yeah. Then it might, then it might be the rate structure might be something else, but at least you know, if somebody's actually doing better, you might be able to get fairly easy. That would be awesome. We'll see. I'll try. Okay. Thanks. For two hours. Okay. Councilmember Davis. Thank you, Mayor. One small request. Knowing that we're going to get some suggestions from staff, a recommendation on rate structure later in the budget cycle, could we include Madison's chart on that 15,000? If there's going to be a request to lower that 15,000 and thus increase the summertime bills for your average residential customer, could we make sure that we have that chart and then whatever other granularity and more specific data that staff thinks is relevant to that conversation? Thanks. Yes, we can. Okay. I would just like to add, depending on the way the rates are structured, you wouldn't necessarily change most people's bills. If you can lower the smaller block, you don't necessarily do, you don't necessarily lower the price of water at lower levels and have higher prices at higher levels, you can do that to where it's rate neutral. Although I haven't done that, I don't, I might be speaking for finance and they don't want me to. Could I add an additional request then, if you would cover that in your presentation because it seems like if you have, and granted I'm a lawyer, not a statistician, but it seems like if you have a peak up here and you move the bar down and the peak remains above the bar, and that's where the block is, if you'll explain that for me in layman's terms when we get to that portion, when it's time for us to look at water rates. Okay. Councillor McGuire. I'm feeling it. There we go. It takes some getting used to. All right. I'm ready to provide staff direction. I think that the recommendations as laid out are great. I would encourage staff to move forward with them. I also agree with, on recommendation two, regarding commercial customers separately metering their irrigation systems, that that one maybe requires a little bit of a closer look because that's kind of an expensive proposition. So there maybe needs to be some allowances for that. I would very much like to see staff dig a little bit deeper into what you were just talking about as far as along with lowering the threshold between block one and block two, also lowering the rates for that lowest block so that our residents who are doing what we want them to do and using less water can perhaps see a decrease in their water bills that could maybe be offset by those residents who use more water. I want to speak to Council Member Davis' point about the development code, that we need to make sure that we're approaching this issue from a variety of angles. Our goal here is to reduce usage. One way to do that is to alter our water rate structure. Another way to do that would be to look at the development code and incentivize zero scaping or planting of native grasses or other things that require less irrigation or no irrigation. So I think that that's something Council needs to keep in mind as well, that we need to support these efforts by encouraging residents to find ways to use less water. Okay, and based on your summary, I mean, there's no direction needed. I mean, they concur to everything, right? Am I wrong? Yeah, I did mention earlier I think finance wanted some direction on the rate, but I think they're going to come back with a work session for that or during the budget. I'm happy to receive, just in general, on any of our items, I'm happy to receive direction on the recommendations. Usually we only really, I only really request it if there's disagreement on a recommendation. Right, okay, great. Okay, then question Councilmember Armitage? Yes, just bouncing off what Councilmember McGuire said, you know, I think moving forward, given that the city auditor's department looks at this kind of situation in our city holistically instead of simply department by department, I think not only looking at how we could incentivize zero scaping and other low water methods, but also looking at how we can remove barriers that we might have in our codes and/or in code enforcement to low water use for both commercial and residential buildings and properties, as well as also our drought condition requirements. Those are worth looking at as well. Our low water usage requirements, you know, could be, for instance, even lower. So anyway, I would just recommend as kind of part of the follow up looking at that. Okay, and so just to, Councilmember Mayor Pro Temelter? Yeah, I'm just saying, once we find out if anybody's actually succeeding at this, it doesn't have to be you, Madison, it could be, you know, our water people. Can we find out if someone is succeeding to what do they attribute that? Could be development code, could be price structure, you know, but let's see if someone's succeeding and then see why. Okay, so note for me for the water department coming back, I think really what I'd like to see is a way to normalize the usage and I know that's a huge undertaking, but it could be part of the budget discussion, meaning if you have one acre of land versus a quarter acre, it's all billed equally by use, and so that there needs to be some attention to that because then I think that puts a finer point on the discretionary use, right? I think you have to normalize for property size and adjust accordingly, then look at how much they're using. If you just look at how much they're using, they may just have a bigger lot and they're using more and we're saying, you know, we're attributing that to discretionary and it's not. I think there's also a beautification component to that, kind of what the city demands of people or if we give credit for green lawn at a week or whatever, that comes from water, right? And so there needs to have to be something to be said for that and conversely it's true. I don't want us all to think that, or at least I don't, maybe I'm just unique in that way, but I'll tell you that zero scaping has pluses, yes, but we also have a parking lot across from the development services that have a whole bunch of little tiny weapons right next to cars, right? If you look in the news and search the guy that picked up the zero scaping at Love Field a while back and smashed a car with it, right? I mean, so there's pluses and minuses and all things balanced, but I think it is just noteworthy to say that zero scaping isn't, you know, all good. There's negative sides to a large rock next to someone's car. So we got to try to plan accordingly. And so I'd like to just kind of have some understanding about the beautification process. Also for staff, I would note the new homeowner. So new homeowner comes in, so you had Mr. Wastewater that lived there before and then Mrs. Wastewater, Mrs. Conservewater moves in. Well, they're billed as though the person, based on the person before them, so there's got to understand that, but I hope that we can come back with something that at least gives the new person a puncher's chance. Yes? We did not look at the wastewater rates. I say wastewater, but yeah, not waste per se, but waste is in using too much. Sorry. Not waste. Yeah, sorry. But yeah, just the excessive user, right? If you follow someone and you buy that home from someone, you're billed according to their use. And I understand, I think at least that launching point is, you know, I think the deposit is derived from that and those sort of things. So if I'm wrong, that's great, you know, but I think... You're correct about wastewater, but not for water. Got it. Okay. Thank you. So from a budget look at it, I'd love to see what we can do to maybe there's a chance. I don't know how that works, because I understand why it's being done. Then I'll say for my notes, kind of the two-hour-ish follow-up stuff, I'll just go over these, what I noted. So there's a commercial incentive or kind of follow-up for dollars, incentives that Council Member Beck mentioned. There's a follow-up with respect to a push notification. That's another thing that Council Member Beck suggested. Question for finance. There's three that I see, kind of financial direction regarding the budget, on the budget discussion, kind of what staff would recommend. Obviously that's coming back, but then also meter tap fees and kind of including that into your discussion, or at least a slide that would touch on those. I think that's Council Member Davis. And then there's a chart with the specific data across the board. That's Council Member Meltzer and Davis mentioned something along those lines. And the effects of the development code obviously has been mentioned, kind of if you, however you want to visually represent that during your budget, that would be great. Okay. So that's what I have. And then I guess another thing would be rate samples, I guess, based on when you lower that threshold, how you would manipulate those numbers to see if there's any differences there. So that's the gist of it. And thank you very much, Madison. Appreciate it. Thank you. All right. That'll take us to our budget discussions. I'm sorry. Council Member Beck. Well she ran out before I could get on the mic. There's just a couple of typos. Oh, there she is. There's just a couple of typos on page three that you might look at. The incentive versus incentivize and cities, plural versus cities possessive. I know that's really super pedantic, but I just thought I'd mention it. Okay. So item B is ID 21453, receive report, hold discussion and give staff direction regarding FY 2021-2022 preliminary budget and departmental budget presentations. Good afternoon, Mayor, City Council, Cassie Ogden, Director of Finance. I'm going to kick off the budget presentations with just a brief overview of our preliminary budget kind of forecast and assumptions. And then you'll get to hear me present the finance department budget. Before we'll move on to parks, fire, HR and risk are going to present tech services, public safety communications, police and safety. So just really quickly, we're going to go over the budget structure and process. Kind of our focus on the general fund will be for today. We'll be bringing back the utilities budgets later in July for your review and consideration. We're going to go over some revenue assumptions, the supplemental package requests and the process and the next steps for your budget. So you've probably all seen this slide. This is just the budget cycle that we go through every year. Our fiscal year runs from October 1 to September 30th. In February, we did have the City Council retreat where council indicates their priorities for our annual budget, which we do try to tie our supplemental requests in our proposed budget to those council priorities. And then in March, we had our internal budget kickoff with our departments. April and May, the departments submit their budget requests and we review those with the City Manager's Office. And now in June and July, we present those budgets to City Council. In August, we'll go through our budget workshop with you that goes through the certified values and all of your supplemental requests that have been received from the departments. And then in September, we have our public hearings on the budget and tax rate along with the budget and tax rate adoption. For the proposed budget, I do want to point out that staff will be preparing the proposed budget based on the feedback that we received in the council retreat in February. We're going to put it based on the council priority of the MNO no new revenue rate. I realize that there are different council members now than there were in February. So we are going to build in the budget workshop discussions. We're going to build in some time to discuss the supplemental request into a tier format so that if council decides to fund other supplementals above the no new revenue rate, then you'll have that option and you'll see what that would look like, similar to what we've done in previous years. Just some other considerations for you as we go through these budget discussions, we will be bringing back the streets fund, the discussion in July that was requested in the council retreat, as well as the catalyst fund. The funding options will be coming back to you. I know we had that discussion a couple of weeks ago. We're working on some different funding options for you and we'll be presenting that in July. The supplemental requests that are included right now in the department presentations are what we are planning on funding through the proposed budget. That may change depending on what our certified values come back with because right now we're still receiving preliminary assessed values, so those have not been finalized. But those are subject to change, but right now, and I'll show you those assumptions later on in this presentation, that is the plan for the proposed budget. So our assessed values, right now we are tentatively projecting a 6% increase from last year. We do receive weekly updates from the CAD on our assessed values. We've received five reports to date, and based on that, we are projecting the 6% increase. However, this is still highly uncertain because those protests are still ongoing and we do not have the certified values. We are expecting them by July 30th, really I'm expecting them by July 25th, and that will mean that less than 5% of those properties are still under protest, which will give us a much better understanding of how the assessed values will come in. We use the certified values as the basis for our proposed budget. And so with our sales tax assumptions, the good news is our sales tax is holding very strong this year. We've actually revised our year-end estimate this year. It's five million above budget. Current year to date, we've already collected four million over what we budgeted this year, so definitely in a much better position than what we were forecasting the same time last year. But we will be bringing that back for you to see in the proposed budget. So some other items that we're folding into the proposed budget. We are assuming, we are building in 3% average merit increases for our employees for next fiscal year, so starting October 1, and then we've included those in the future year in our estimates as well. We're assuming no change to the city contributions for health insurance, as well as no changes to the employee contribution rates. And then the TMRS, our retirement, our city contribution rate decreased slightly from 17.79% to 17.65%, and then the fire pension contribution remains the same from last year at 18.5%. And those are folded into our, will be folded into our proposed budget that you'll receive the end of July. So just really quickly, we've had a couple of questions to date about the budget process and what the supplementals that you see versus the supplementals that you don't see in the presentation. So we do ask the departments to submit what we call supplemental packages, and those are new programs, new services, employee additions, staff additions, or any type of new program that's over $5,000. All of those requests are consolidated by the finance and budget team, and we present those to the city manager's office based on the justification, the need, the revenue kind of forecast. Then we package those to present to council in the department presentations. So the city manager's proposed budget only includes the recommended supplementals to meet the, that we feel like we can fund through the no new revenue rate. But again, additional supplementals will be included for council consideration during the budget workshop. So you will have an opportunity to see all of the supplementals that were presented and ask questions and more detailed information, and then make a decision on whether or not you want to fund those. So just to recap those supplemental packages that you've seen, these are ones for the general fund that we are contemplating folding into the proposed budget. Again, this is based on the early projections of the assessed values. So do you want a caveat that we still have not received the certified values, but based on our preliminary estimates, this is what we think that we can afford to fund in our proposed budget. And I do want to point out, I did have a mistake on my total in the presentation that was posted. So it's actually decreased. It's 2 million, not 2.2 million. So I apologize for that mistake. But you've already seen some of these department presentations. So Animal Services is requesting an Animal Control Officer. Libraries, additional staffing. You'll hear from Fire today and Police today. You've heard from Community Development. Municipal Court presented a couple of weeks ago, as well as Internal Audit, Public Affairs, the City Manager's Office, and then you'll hear from Parks and Rec today. And then other presentations, other departments, from Stilt to Present, Airport, they have some requests, as well as Procurement. You heard last week, Tech Services, you'll hear today, as well as Customer Services requesting additional FTEs. And again, these are tentatively scheduled to be part of the proposed budget. And then we have listed the council requests for funding that we've received so far, and we will be bringing these back as part of the budget workshop in August. So some community engagement opportunities throughout the budget. We would like to get feedback from all of our residents and citizens about the budget process. And so we have obviously these meetings scheduled June, July, and August. We do have a budget web page where you can actually go online and fill out a form, give us feedback about your comments on the budget. We have worked with Procurement. We have a budget simulation tool that we're working on rolling out on our web page that will allow residents to make the decisions that you as council get to make about what to fund and what not to fund, and then provide feedback that will fold into our proposed budget presentations. As well as community meetings, we're looking at doing some community meetings on the budget later in the summer. And then we have our tax rate and budget hearing meetings scheduled in September. So next steps for the budget, obviously we have several department budgets today. Next week we will be presenting the utility budgets for PUB. And then we will be discussing those budgets and rates through July to PUB. Later in July, the utilities will be presenting their budgets to you, July 20th and 27th. And then we will come back, like I said, August 2nd is our budget workshop. That will be the chance where you get to see all of the supplementals. And then September obviously is budget adoption. Okay. Questions from finance. Councilmember Davis, Mayor Proctor Meltzer, Councilmember Beck. Thank you. So last year when we were waiting and waiting and waiting for the certified values and we, big question marks, we didn't know what values were going to look like during the COVID times, but we also didn't know what tax receipts, what tax revenue was going to look like. Were we going to have a lot of folks going belly up, not paying their tax bills, large business establishments not being able to pay their tax bills, all that kind of stuff. Do we have any, and it doesn't have to be today if we don't have it readily available, but do we have any idea of how well actual tax receipts, actual property tax revenue has tracked with projections that we made assumptions based on last year or the current fiscal year? Yes. So the current fiscal year, we did reduce the collection rate to 96%. We have reached out to the cat and we're waiting to see how our current collection rate is trending. Based on the numbers I'm seeing, I believe it's higher than that, but we're still waiting to find out. Good deal. Thank you. Mayor, Professor Meltzer. Thank you. So I got that the supplemental positions that have been presented so far and the ones that are anticipated fit within caveats all over it, noted taxes rate. Are you also modeling that the 3% average merit increases also fit within the noted taxes rate? Yes. Caveats, caveats. Yes, caveats. Okay. Council Member Bet. Thank you, Mayor. Yeah, I had two quick questions. The first one is related to that merit pay. Is this merit really merit or COLA? We call it merit. It could be construed as COLA. Is it based on job performance or just being in the job? It is job performance. It is job performance. So we do annual performance reviews and that's what the merit increase is tied to. Okay, thank you. And the other one was it would be helpful if it's not too onerous, if we could have a lot of these year-to-year percentages compared to the rate of inflation because anything that's south of the rate of inflation is basically a cut. So in that sort of apples-to-apples comparison, let's say it's three, then we need to be at least three to be sticking up with inflation. So that would be helpful. I mean, I was sitting there subtracting three or going back through in the years and 2.8s and 2.9s and trying to make sure, you know, see where we compared to staying flat versus the actual percentage. So that would be helpful to me in a comparison. Thank you. Okay. Mayor, I've got David here. I want to just give you just a little bit of information because your question regarding cost of living is really quite good because this is exactly what we're trying to look at now. Is this really a merit or is it really a cost of living adjustment? Sure. David Gaines, Assistant City Manager. Traditionally, we've done merit increases where it's been performance-based and there's a range based on your performance and the review process. This year, HR is implementing a new software right now. So our anticipation is that software is still going to be ongoing, that this year it will be more of a COLA where it's kind of across the board as we implement the new performance review process. Now, we are having conversations internally of what's the best method. Is it merit increases? Is it COLA? So we're going to have that going forward, but just some kind of history and kind of where we are right now. And also just point out for kind of tracking back to last year, we didn't have merit increases last year. We gave a one-time increase. So employees haven't had that increase to their base salary in a couple of years outside of promotions or something like that. So just a little bit of more information. Thank you, David. So we're anticipating, I guess, basically something along the spectrum between merit and COLA. Is that kind of what I'm hearing? This fiscal year, it'll be a COLA most likely. And then moving forward is what we're just going to -- since we've done merit in the past, we're going to do more of a COLA this year. I think the determination in future years, FY23 and so on, will be what we'll make moving forward. So this fiscal year, what you see in the budget will be in that COLA frame. Mostly COLA. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. Councilmember Armitage. Yes, I had a question about how those cost of living adjustments would be calculated. Will that take into account disproportionate increases in cost of living with regard to income, for people in the lower pay rankings on city staff? And will it also consider factors such as number of children or dependents, et cetera? Or will it be just kind of, is the plan for across the board, city of Denton cost of living increase? Sure, it's just across the board for all employees based on their salary. And thank you. And I would like to see some just, you know, acknowledgement given when considering that of how especially hard it is for our city employees in the lower pay rankings, especially those who are tenants and especially those who have dependents and children. I just, I hope that's considered as well. Okay. Any other questions? Bear with me. Councilmember McGuire and then Mayor Pro Tem Melter. Thank you. You may not be able to answer this right now. And if not, I'd be happy to take it in an email. But I'm just curious about how many, like what percentage of staff typically qualifies for merit increases? I don't have that information offhand, but I can certainly get it to you. Mayor Pro Tem Melter. I think this has been done in the past, if I remember correctly. But when we get to supplementals that would be above the no new taxes rate, I would just request that in addition to seeing the impact on tax rate, that we always see also the impact in actual dollars on average tax bill. Yes, we are planning to present that in the proposed budget. Thank you. And I do have one more slide that I did forget to show, so I apologize. We did get a question from about the FTE numbers in the proposed budget. And so I did want to show the position summary report. Right now, this is what we are tentatively proposing in the proposed budget. So you can see 1920 we had 1736 number of FTEs. We did reduce that because of COVID in 2021. And so we have a couple of reinstatement requests that are in the department presentations that you've seen, as well as some additional new positions being requested, which still brings us, it's still less than that 1920 FTE total where we were at pre-COVID. So I did want to share that with council before we moved on. Thank you. Okay. And then I'll just add that I do want to acknowledge and recognize, I'm sure it's economic development at AL, but I just think when you show that statistic about the sales tax, even holding the line through the projection, through the pandemic, and then exceeding that, that's significant. That's a significant balance in businesses, right? Because there were the grocery stores and online purchasing, et cetera, et cetera, kind of took off. Others dipped. But we were well balanced as a city in those sales tax dollars. And so I just want to say I appreciate all that goes into making sure we get the right businesses and keeping an eye on those things to make sure those hit right. And so I want to acknowledge them. Then just kind of as a note, as you took, it's the request, going forward request was percentage of dollars compared to the rate of inflation. And then also a percentage that was the merit, who qualifies for merits, right? So that's the things I have. So with that, whichever department is that going to be? It's me. Oh, yeah. You get to see me again. I'm going to present the finance presentation and then I'll turn it over to someone else. Let me make sure I'm sharing the correct one. Nope, that's not it. Okay, sorry. Couldn't find it. Okay. So, before I get started, I do want to recognize the finance team. We are kind of administrative in nature. We stay kind of in our back offices and don't get out much. But I do have a fabulous team that does a great job, who gets our employees paid every other week on time, makes payments to our vendors every week. They work on our, obviously, our annual budget that has received awards every year for several years in the past, as well as our accounting folks who stay busy during the holiday season while they're working on the annual financial report that has also won awards. And then our treasury folks, who you really don't hear from a lot, but they do make those debt payments on time every six months, as well as our electric and energy payments that are due monthly. So, I just wanted to give a big shout out to my team. It's sometimes finance isn't the flashiest department. I don't have key chains or cool things to show you. But I do have a fabulous team and I'm very proud of the work that they do every day. So, with that, just want to introduce my team. Not everyone is here because of, you know, COVID restrictions, but I do have Nick here. He's our assistant director of finance, does a fabulous job with the budget team. He has AP that also reports to him, as well as the payroll team. And then Heather Gray, we actually stole her from Parks. We were lucky enough to, Gary, let me take her. So, she's our new budget manager and doing a fabulous job with all that we do with budget. She came in mid-budget and she's really doing a great job. Randy Klingle is our treasury manager. She's the one that makes our debt payments and calculates our bond sales, does a fabulous job. And she has a very small team, but does a lot with it. Laura Barons is our grants administrator. That's a new division that we created last year, actually out of an audit recommendation. And her and her team are doing a fabulous job trying to find new grants and make sure that we are meeting the reporting requirements of our current grants. And then Brian Hogan is our controller. He's over our accounting division. And Brian does the day-to-day, helps manage our accounting group and all of the things that go into that. So, with that, here's our org chart. I'm sorry, it's not fancy. I am in finance, so I do have numbers on it, I will say that. But this is our org chart. Very plain vanilla, but a lot of good people and good work going on. So, some of our accomplishments from last year, we were able to effectively mitigate the financial impact of COVID and completed our reimbursement requirements for our COVID expenses. We did receive our CARES Act funding as well as some FEMA reimbursements, which our team worked really diligently on. I'm very proud of them for that because it was a lot to take on in one year. We did complete a reserve requirement analysis for each fund, which we did present to you earlier in the year. We'll be bringing back a revised fund balance policy for your consideration later in the year. We have developed citywide budget and AP training for all city employees. It's not necessarily the most popular training, but it's definitely necessary and keeps everybody on track. As well as we're in the, we're hoping to complete our cost allocation study for general fund. We'll be bringing that back as part of your budget workshop in August. Some of our goals for next fiscal year, obviously, effectively utilizing our American Rescue Plan Act funding. That's going to be, we're going to get significant funds from that and making sure we utilize those according to council's priorities. We are in the process of implementing our accounts payable automation software to really streamline our accounts payable processes. We're hoping to implement our virtual card program. It's just another option for vendor payments so they can receive their payments a little bit faster than what they're receiving them now. We are planning on applying for our four remaining transparency stars through the Texas Comptroller. Those are debt, public pension, contracts and procurement and economic development. So we're hoping to have those online and we do have a financial transparency page where all of that information is available if anyone would like to go look through it. We are updating our JD Edwards, which is our financial software. We are updating our training material and our training program to better assist our internal customers. Just some metrics so you can kind of see what we do on the day to day. The accounts payable, the chart at the top, really shows our vendor payments as well as some of those refunds that we process. You can see 2018-19 was a very busy year, but 2021 is on track to meet that. They are a very busy group. We do process vendor payments weekly. Some of those refunds are things like parks. When things get canceled, those are the refunds that they process. The journal entries in JDE, this may not look like anything or mean anything to anyone else, but it's really a transactions to update our financial system to provide accurate financials for our CMO and our directors to make decisions. These include transfers to and from our general fund, depreciation and creation of fixed assets. These are done monthly, quarterly and annually. You can see we are definitely on track this year to reach what we have done in previous years. Then our CIP metrics, we did a reorg of the budget team within finance last year, I guess. We set up a team specific for the utilities and the public works group to assist them. These are any type of job, any construction project, this is what they are doing. They are setting up that project in the financial system. Then they are transferring money when it's over or when it needs additional funding. They are also closing it out to make sure that we are capitalizing our fixed assets correctly. We just have the current year, but we plan on tracking this going forward to ensure that we are monitoring our workload. Then some payroll metrics, you can see this is the one that all of our employees are really concerned about. They want to get their checks and they want to get them on time. You can see we process a lot of payroll checks every year. Those COVID payroll transactions, because of the things that we did during COVID, we did not give the merit increases, but we did end up doing kind of one lump sum payment. That causes some additional work for our payroll folks, so I wanted to capture all of the work that they do in this metric. Then budget, grant, and treasury, you can see on the left-hand side the budget workload metrics. The direct deposit bank setups, what that really means is when any employee changes their direct deposit information, it goes through HR and then to the budget office to finalize it, so that's what that means. Budget transfers or any budget line adjustments, so if a department knows they're not going to spend money in office supplies, but they want to move it to equipment, that goes through the budget office for review and approval and then processing. Then position changes, this is to update those position control reports like the chart that I showed you earlier. We keep track of where positions are moving, when they're added, when they're reduced, so those are all the transactions associated with position changes. You can see the grant data. We did create that group this year. We've already submitted 13 applications. We have 21 active grants right now and we've been awarded a little over $1 million this year through that grant department, so very exciting initiative with that one. Then our treasury data, like I was saying earlier, the payments, those initiated wires, those are our payments that are made for energy, debt payments, real estate closing, things like that, and then the hot receipts as well. Just some budget highlights for our expenses. You will see we have increased our FTEs by two, but we also, last year we looked at kind of over the whole city, we looked at who was doing financial things in other departments and we tried to consolidate and streamline some of those. We brought some positions over from capital projects into the finance group and we just had some changes and turnover with that group, just trying to find the best way to support our internal customers, and so that's some of the personnel services changes that you're seeing there. And then the operations, you can see in 19-20 we had an increase of our operations expense. That was really to pay for that GEO commercial paper program. That was that increased expense, so we don't expect that to continue. That was one time. So just a quick FTE summary. You can see we reduced one position in accounting from 19-20 to 21-22. Those two increases in budget and treasury, that's the capital projects team that I mentioned earlier. We added two positions that were already in a different department. We just moved them over to finance. We did reduce one administrative assistant in finance, and then we added the grant management group. And with that, I'll take any questions that you have. Thank you. Questions for staff? Okay. Councilmember Armitage? Yes, so this is not a question that only applies to the finance department, but to other budget requests as well, but I noticed that there has been a trend in recent years from the one slide of projected supply budgets being about half of what they end out being in reality. And I was wondering, and again, I realize this is not just the finance department, but I was wondering if you could comment on why this is and if budgeting for future years could or should maybe try to be a little closer to what the actuals might be. That's a great question. Yeah, no, great question. We're forecasting a decrease in that particular line item, mainly due to COVID, because most of our staff haven't been in the office, so we haven't been buying as many office supplies and things for our offices. But as we continue to reopen, our staff did come back part time, so a couple of days a week starting June 1st. And I have seen an uptick already in the office supply expenses, but as part of the budget every year, we do look at certain object codes. We basically zero them out and then ask departments to justify their requests. So they have to give us justification for what they're buying or why they're requesting additional money, and that is part of our regular budget process. Well, thank you so much for explaining it. It makes sense that it's related to COVID. Okay. And just to have a clear, I'm going to run through some acronyms just to make sure we have a clear record. So on your journal entries page, JDE is? That is JD Edwards. It's our financial software. So it's all of our accounting software for the whole city. Got it. And then if someone saw CIP, that's capital improvement projects. Correct. Right. And then HBU, that's not historically black universities, I don't think. No, that's home business units. There we go. That was close. And then obviously hotel occupancy tax, right? Yes. Okay, great. And then I do have a question around that, so it's perfectly in there. Do we have a separate line item for Airbnbs for the hotel tax? Or do we capture that or do we track that? We do capture it. I'll have to get the specifics from Randy. She's the one that manages that fund, but I do know we capture it. Okay. My request is if we could include that process or a snapshot of that in the Friday report because what we have is oftentimes it'll be hotels. Obviously it's easier to track that from hotels. And so I want to try to get better as a city about tracking those businesses and those taxes as well. I know it's not a ton, but if there's a way to automate that and hold those individuals accountable, I think that would be important. So I just want to understand what we have currently, and then that'll guide my direct ask or look at that process. Sure. I can put that in the Friday report for you. Great. Thank you. Any other questions for staff on finance? Councilmember McGuire. Thank you. I had a question about the budget and AP training. Is that something that is available to people outside the finance department? Is that something that could be made available to council or is it something that's? Yeah. I'm happy to provide it. It's really tailored to kind of budget entry and the request. So what's included in a supplemental request versus a baseline adjustment, which is kind of those COLA increases. And so it's really, really specific to our internal departments and how they enter the budget. But we do have a lot of budget information about kind of the process and what the city does on our budget website that is available to the citizens. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. If it's something that's really, really deep in the weeds, then that might not be something that I'm particularly interested in. But big overview things I'm very interested in. So a question, and I know that there is definitely way more to it than this, which is why I'm asking about it, that I'm seeing an increase in $620,165 in the personnel budget, but I'm only seeing an increase in two FTEs, which averages out to $310,082.50 per FTE. I'm sure that those 3% increases are probably part of that, but if you could speak to that a little bit. Sure. So what happened was part of it is the new FTEs, so the two FTEs for the grant management group, as well as we did some shuffling of the capital projects teams that came over to finance and those were just, they were higher paid positions than what we typically will pay in finance. But they, we have reclassified those positions to be analyst positions and then we have some other additional kind of business analyst in our group now. So it really is the 3% merit increase, the additional FTEs, and then kind of just a change of the mix of FTEs. Okay. Any other questions? Seeing none. Thank you very much. Okay. That'll bring up Parks Department. Okay. Good afternoon, Gary Pack and Director of Parks and Recreation. I'm a technician. I'm here today to talk to you about our upcoming fiscal year and budget opportunities. Really our vision for this fiscal year is a number of things, but it's also using technology and sustainability and we have one of our newer employees, this is FTE. This is one of our robots that we use. It's an autonomous robot that we use to paint our athletic fields. It saves approximately 2000 hours of staff time a year where we can, everything is pre-programmed in regards to the field paintings. It's down to less than an inch. Staff fill it up with paint, hit go, and then they go do restrooms, do whatever they need to do in the park while that's running. So in the past we'd have to have staff sitting there manning this, numerous staff at one time. So this is an investment in technology that it's actually saving us time and money. Just wanted to share that with you. That was in the parade this weekend. But for this budget presentation we're going to be doing a number of things as we continue to try to achieve our gold medal standard and that's the highest level and honor within our parks and recreation industry is winning the gold medal within our population as a municipality. We're planning today for tomorrow. We want to tell our story, all the great things that we're doing for the community. Yep. It's on my screen here. Okay, hang on. Sorry to interrupt. No, you're fine. There you go. Okay, and continued efforts to engage our community and listen and hear feedback from the community so we can make sure we respond to them appropriately. The key to our organization is our staff. We have 169 FTEs, a large number of seasonal employees, part-time employees, and then full-time employees both in our parks and our leisure services group. Nikki's asking this. She's our assistant director. Drew Huffman who's playing with his toys. He's an assistant director as well. And Caroline Seward is our business manager. She replaced Heather Gray that we loaned over to finance department. But it really would need to thank this group of our administrative team and our entire organization for everything they've done over really the past year and a half with COVID. Our park maintenance staff, our parks were heavier, more used than ever during COVID and our recreation staff had to really rebuild and change and shift gears with going virtual and really working in different positions throughout the pandemic. One of the big couple points that are pretty important to us right now is land acquisition. I know we've talked about this a number of times. A few years ago, city council adopted our 10-minute walk initiative and that was a goal to try to get every resident with a 10-minute walk or a half mile from open space or a park. Right now, we're at 48%. We have some work to do. The national average is 55%. We can move that. That 48% is only our developed parks. And that's the way the Trust for Public Lands uses their algorithm for this. So with the development of our existing parks, we can move that percentage about 4%. But that's a significant investment as well. But we can also partner with our schools. We can utilize other city property. And we're looking at all of those to try to enhance that level of access to our community. As you see on the map, there are circles around these. TPL has changed their algorithm a little bit as opposed to the way the crow flies to more walkability. So that's increased or actually decreased our percentage slightly because a circle doesn't necessarily mean you can get over a railroad track type of thing. So we're going to be switching that on our plan as well. Clear Creek is not included in that because of its location technically outside of the city. As well as the bottom left corner is the Hunter Cole Ranch. And those are all the parks that have been planned in that agreement just so we can articulate and see where those parks are going to be going long term for the future. From our land, we're currently at 5% of the city's 90 acres is parkland. The national average is 15%. So we do have some work to do there. We are putting together a database and tracking comparisons to other cities in Texas and DFW that we feel are role models that we want to work towards as well as national role models to compare ourselves that we can use best practices from them. And then October 10th, you'll be seeing more about this is our 10 minute walk to a park day. That's a new initiative that's coming out this year. The one thing you could see here from a child, adult, and seniors, it's fairly even in regards to access to park. Our low income community does have a higher access than their higher and middle income which is good to see some of the other communities have a little bit more of a negative social impact in that aspect. So we are definitely trying to reach out to all aspects of the community. This year over the past, during COVID, we've started to put a lot of effort into our data collection. We've been using Smartsheet and Power BI to start showing that database to really help build business acumen within our entire organization. Just wanted to show some highlights of our parks and how we're starting to track them based off of typology as well as our parkland by acre, whether it's developed or undeveloped, and then our cemeteries. Our trails, we talked to council on May 11th about our planned trails. We have 200 plus miles of hard surface trails, another 100 of paddling trails that we have planned moving forward. Then our existing trails there in orange at 51 and other trails is the green belt as well as some of the on street trails that our CIP team works on. And then you can see it by typology based on length. And then the right-of-ways is really an unspoken area that we really don't talk a lot about because it's not fancy, but it's a headache in regards to maintenance challenge. We have 373 acres of right-of-ways and medians that we maintain, and they're in 165 different locations. So that is challenging for our staff. I had mentioned earlier that our data collection, we're tracking our strategic plan items from our KFAs all the way down to our tasks. We're also tracking our art inventory, our playground improvements and when they need to be replaced and what those costs are going to be, as well as our maintenance work orders and our volunteer efforts. We are broken into two components, so you'll see two separate sections here, a general fund section as well as a recreation fund. This is the general fund, some of our accomplishments for 2021. We've had over 6,600 hours. Carly Weld is our volunteer coordinator. She does a fantastic job and we're actually improving. We've had volunteers in some areas of our organization that we haven't tracked, so we're cleaning up some of those opportunities. We adopted an urban forest master plan last October. We've initiated seven sculptures and a mural and three master plans this year that are in the works and under fabrication and going through process right now. We've acquired 75 acres and we're probably working on 20-plus properties throughout the city, either with a potential purchase, donation and/or through the development process for future park and open space. Construction of the American Legion Hall, this project has been a challenge. We're hoping to have that open in October, so we're working diligently with our facilities team to make that happen. The Pro Shop is completed at the tennis center and the courts will be going out to bid here soon. The Nook, we had a dedication yesterday just before at Downport, so we had to squeeze that in, so thank you for everybody to help with that. Quaker Town restrooms were completed, so we had a chance to see that. They haven't been open yet. We're finishing the floor, so they'll be open real soon. McKenna Park is under renovation with a new loop trail. We tried reducing the length of that trail for you, Councilmember Davis, but it's not going to happen. And then we replaced a number of playgrounds this year as well. We spent a lot of time working on our trails plan and our KDB team was awarded first place for our GCA award was just $290,000 for right-of-way enhancements and beautification efforts. We did implement a citywide mowing and illegal dumping program. Our illegal dumping, we've had so far 263 reports created. That's a significant increase. That's September to today. We've collected 28 tons of debris, approximately 100 tires and 1,227 staff hours picking up dumping across the city. Some of our goals, obviously, is complete the construction of North Lakes as well as the South Lakes Park tennis courts. Those are out to bid as we speak as well. The renovation of the pond and the dam improvements and dredging at Lake Forest Park, obviously we've had 15, 16 inches of rain over the past six weeks. That's really not conducive for dredging ponds, so that's a slight delay. Our parkland dedication and development ordinance we've been working on for about 18 months. That'll be coming to City Council in the near future. We're going to be replacing some of our athletic lighting. It's very old. It's from the '70s as far back and we're looking to improve that and that is all up to standards for light pollution. Our 10-minute walk, we've talked about this already in regards to working with our developer community in regards to acquiring land for our future parks. We're installing lighting at Carl Young and Quaker Town as enhancements to our trails. Some budget highlights from the general fund. Revenue is low. Obviously, this is going to be a trend. We cut in April of 2020, we eliminated about $4.9 million in our operating budget because of COVID and a lot of our facilities being shut down in order to achieve about a $2 million savings, so we cut a lot out of our budget. You'll see it's starting to reopen and some numbers starting to go up. Water Park obviously wasn't open and that is where we opened last August and our camps were not in operation as well. Then '21-'22, you'll see that Clear Creek that was transferred over to Parks and Recreation about this time last year and so we've created a new HBU for that facility. From an expense standpoint, we have some increases, about $600,000 in personal services, some Clear Creek enhancements with the budget being transferred over to our department and then some reinstatements for our IPM efforts that were eliminated as cost saving measurements during our budget reduction. And then from a recreation side of things, obviously reopening our facilities and our programs is a major focus for us right now. We've been slowly trickling that out and this spring we officially reopened just about everything that we have. Staffing permitting, that's been the biggest challenge for us is finding staff that could actually help run our programs, keeping safety in mind for all of our participants. The Epic Freeze was a big challenge for us for two or three weeks last year. It was all man on board in regards to that program. I mentioned earlier about data collection. We're doing a lot in trying to collect data and look at our business from the numbers standpoint as opposed to emotionally. So that's a little bit different for our industry. So that's a great opportunity for us to improve. And then we won the Lone Star Legacy Board for Quaker Town Park through our Texas Recreation and Parks Society last year as well. And then some of our goals, we're working towards CAPRA accreditation. The last component is the completion of our master plan in order for us to submit that. And we're also working on our ADA transition plan where all of our trails and our parks are being evaluated. And we'll provide priority improvements in regards to which we're not compliant with. And then working with the Denton Parks Foundation for non-traditional revenue sources where they can help either get donations or raise money for our park system. From a recreation budget component, some of the highlights, again, regrowth from our COVID closure in 1920 and then 2021, you know, growing back into 22 numbers. So there's some challenges there in regards to regenerating revenues and seeing how people are coming back to our programs. Our camps have been very strong so far. Our pools have been very strong. So we're hoping to see, we've had a number of 1,500 days over the past couple weeks with the hot weather. Obviously yesterday was not great because it rained, but the weekends, if we get Saturday and Sunday in, those have been fantastic days for us. If we lose a Saturday, that hurts. You can't get that back. So that's definitely an opportunity for us, especially with the reduced hours. We may actually see a better outcome this year because we have less expenses and a little bit more revenue. So it'll be interesting to see how the year finishes up. From an expense standpoint, again, personal services, we're adding back a number of our staff members, both full-time and seasonal, and then some operational reinstatements that we cut during the COVID budget concern. FTEs as a whole, we had a number reinstated this year with the aquatic supervisor, recreation supervisor, two rec coordinators, and two field service workers, and then two full-time equivalents for legal dumping, which were added this year for the pilot project for that effort that's ongoing. So in 19-20, we're at 166 FTEs. We dipped down to 161, and we're trying to get those employees back so we can continue our customer service efforts for the community. And then our supplemental requests are these positions to be reinstated that I just mentioned. There are six positions there, and then some funding for new parks and our operating and maintenance of those facilities. And with that, I can take any questions. Great. Thank you. Questions for staff? Mayor Tim Melter and Council Member Warr. Thanks, I always enjoy seeing how much you've done and how much you're going to do. Just one small item. I was very excited when we heard your proposal some months ago for no mow right-of-ways with wildflowers. Yeah. Where's that at? That's in the works. In fact, we have a wildflower area being prepped right now next to the foundations of our history. The black landscape fabric down, that's what that's for. And we have some other areas that have been seeded. We did a controlled burn at the fire department down off Vintage, and we just got an email today with some of those wildflowers, and we went out there and checked them out about two weeks ago, and they're looking really good. So it's starting to come up. Not every place is going to happen right away. I think we say it was a three-year plan, so I know the community's anxious to see a lot of those come out, but we're going to chip away at it as we can to try to take out some mowing space. We'll have to do that and then implement more wildflowers. I'd prefer to see it everywhere instantly, but I understand. Thank you. Okay. Councilman McGuire? Thank you. First of all, yesterday's Nook dedication was lovely. What a beautiful space. I encourage the public, if you haven't been there, go visit the Nook. It's just south of Emily Fowler Library, kind of part of the whole Quaker Town Park thing, and it's just gorgeous. I'm curious about the revenue, the new revenue from Clear Creek. If you could kind of explain where that's coming from. Yeah. About 60% of the Clear Creek land, basically on the eastern side of the Elm Fork, is used for hunting purposes. I think it was 200 permits that we've had in past years. This is the first year that we've run it. We've restructured it and broke it into smaller segments so more people can go out there and utilize it. Then we also implemented a non-resident fee to give the residents, obviously, a cheaper opportunity for that. Most of that $47,000 is about $42,000 is from rental hunting permits. Okay. Thank you. I also have a question, basically the same question that I asked finance, and I'm probably going to ask everybody about personnel funds. Parks and Rec added together between the 2019-2020 fiscal year and the projections for this coming fiscal year, we're looking at adding $3,441,949 to the personnel budget, but only adding 3.16 FTEs, which averages out to a little over a million dollars per FTE. I kind of just, you know, napkin math, I'm thinking that, you know, with 3% pay increases and three plus additional FTEs, you know, the personnel budget should be somewhere in the neighborhood of 8.5, 8.6, 8.7 million, but it's 11,352,604. If you could speak to that, please. Let me go to the general fund. Okay. Personal service of the general fund, we were at 5.9. We had a number of positions that were frozen during that fiscal year and then some, a lot of those did not come back, that they were eliminated from the budget, so we're adding those back. And then we had some midyear adds during fiscal year '20-'21 as well that elevated that number, so that is those additional positions as well as seasonal positions that were not hired, those are being added back as well. So we were, at one point in time, we were 19 FTEs down during COVID with vacancies and just being shorthanded. So we've slowly trickled them back over the term in regards to getting back up to full speed. Okay. So are those, those numbers are not reflected in the FTE summary slide though? Let's see. So the 54, so we went, we went down and back up. So the positions were frozen and then added back in during that same fiscal year. I'm not sure I understand. I'm sorry. Sure. I would just jump in real quick. If, I'm not sure if I can get to the slide or not, but when you see that $5 million number, that's actuals from '19-'20. So COVID really just, our personnel expenses went well under budget that year. If you saw the budget for '19-'20, it would change the story a little bit. Oh, okay. So you see the budget the next year. It's really, you're just seeing the difference from '19-'20 actuals where COVID reduced those expenses significantly on personnel costs. And then you're seeing the budget. So that comparison is, is causing that large delta that you see. Okay. Okay. And I was kind of, I was looking at 2019-2020 rather than 2020-2021 because I was trying to avoid that, that COVID issue, but I see what you're talking about. Okay. Would there be a way for us to kind of get this updated with the '19-'20 budget just so we can- Sure, sure. Do a clearer, yeah, later. It's fine. It doesn't have to be right this second, but. Okay. Any other questions? Oh, can you pull the slide down? Oh, sorry. Thank you. Seeing none. Councilman Byrd? I'm sorry. I have to remember to do that. The American Legion Hall not anticipated to be open until October. That's pretty sad. I thought it would be a little earlier than that. What do we have left on, on that project? They were putting up the drywall last week when we were out there cleaning up around the building. And then from that point in time, it's just carpet, painting, you know, other windows, those types of things, ceilings, and the air conditioning units I think are still waiting on. I don't think those have been delivered yet. Still waiting on those. We hope we can get it open sooner. That's the timeline we've been given. We're hoping the design has been a challenge. So they've had a number of requests for information to have clarification from the architect company. So that has been a challenge. It has caused delays as well as COVID. Okay. Does the 10 minute walks include the HOA parks? No. They can be included as long as we have an agreement, similar with the school system that it's public accessible. Some of the HOAs, you know, don't want the general public in their neighborhood. Some of them are gated. So we need to make sure that they're publicly accessible for the community in order for them to count for that 10 minute walk. So just because it doesn't show that there's a park there, that doesn't mean there's not a park there. That's just the, how they calculate through TPL on the formula. I see the word "athletics" located on the screen here. Explain that a bit for the public as to, you know, a cost for athletics. What is that? Is that a location or it's all the parks? Well, we have an athletics group within our recreation, the leisure services team, and they provide athletic programs, whether it's volleyball, you know, soccer outdoors, those types of things. Tennis, golf, all of those are a part of our athletics team. And then is there a cost associated with naming parks? I understand that there's a real program that people can ask for parks to be named for certain people. What kind of cost is associated with something like that? There is no cost. We've worked about the last two years on a naming policy and people can submit an application and there's a process that you go through in order to have a name considered. If someone wanted to sponsor something, that's a different process that they can go through and we can entertain that, you know, piece by piece and that would come to City Council for consideration. Thank you. You're welcome. Okay. Any other questions for staff? Councilman Bet? Thank you, Mayor. I had a question about, so for the Urban Forestry Master Plan, I noticed that, like, while most of what you've been showing us and what I've seen on the websites and whatnot is great, we're seeing a lot more Power BI, a lot more dashboards, a lot more of the utilities. I'm not really seeing sort of updates in that area and a big ask that people are asking me is they're just, they're not sure what's happening there. So if we could get some of what Haywood has already put in to the UFMP to, like, maybe push it out to the GIS division or something and make a map. The mobility maps were really great in terms of, you know, forward thinking planning and so if we could do something like that where your trails, you pushed into those maps, those are great. I think people appreciated the layers on that and if we could get an idea for pushing that forward as part of your overall, you know, data project, that would be great. And then I know that we control, not control, we manage a lot of the cemeteries and they're included in our park inventories. And yet there are also quite a number of, I don't know, I'll just call them private cemeteries, although they're fairly public. What is our relationship with these other cemeteries? Anything at all? None. None. We maintain the two cemeteries. In fact, this is the first year in the number of years that we've actually started to maintain them where we had a contract, mow them, and the service wasn't acceptable. So we actually brought that back in-house and we've been mowing them internally, but we manage them. The private sector, private cemeteries like Rose Lawn, we have nothing to do with those cemeteries. But you would entertain an interlocal agreement to do more of that sort of cemetery management that would be conceivable in your overall future plans? I mean, give it council direction. Yeah. I mean, we'd be willing to entertain anything with council direction, you know, if there was exploratory opportunities to help with those facilities. Okay. Thank you. Any other questions? Mayor Pro Tem Meltzer. Just a small point back on Clear Creek. Who's the governing body on what counts toward the 10 minute walk? Did you mention TPL? Trust for Public Land. Trust for Public Land. And is that a TPL thing that would exclude a park that falls outside the city limits, but that is adjacent to the city? Yeah, I don't necessarily agree with that, because I mean, the way we are looking at it is, if we take the 90 square miles for the city, and then we just add in the 3,000 acres into that, and that gives us our city boundary. There's not a lot of people that live up in that sector right now. So there's not a huge impact from that. But that's kind of the rules that they put in place. Because to me it's, you know, 10 minutes walk from a park that happens to also be inside the city limits. Sort of like the Gaswell discussion we had a meeting or two ago. We want you to be a certain distance from Gaswell, not independent of where that well is in relation to the city line. Okay. Just back to council member, back in regards to the cemetery. It's not a profit-oriented cost recovery facility, obviously, in regards to a cemetery. So that's the biggest challenge. And they are challenging to maintain. Right, thank you. Yeah. Councilman Davis. Thank you, Mayor. Just want to know if we can get a quick update on aquatic staffing this summer, and if we've had any kind of mid-season hires, or if we think we might be able to expand ours later in the summer, or if we're kind of, are where we are for the season. Yeah, we had our last crew go through about two weeks ago, and then we're pretty much shut down at that point in time and trying to get through the summer with the team we have. There's just a slow drip of people that leave for various reasons and they start going back to school before you know it. So yeah, we're pretty much where we're at for this year, trying to get through and then start planning for next year and trying to get those staff members to come back. Okay, any other questions? Seeing none, I'll just, more highlights than anything, Gary, I think it would be good for, in future discussions or when we come back for supplementals, just to kind of highlight that distinction. I think you and your staff do a great job at managing kind of and placing donations, sponsorship dollars, and leveraging those against grants, that sort of thing. So a slide that kind of features that, maybe a scenario where if this was just applied here, here's the net result, but we applied in other ways and nets out to be an enhancement for the community. I think that would be a good visual. And then I'll say, picking up where Council Member Davis left off, if those, if you have not visited the natatorium, I mean it is pretty inspiring, the times of it out there. So there was the private swim lessons going on inside, then there was the school districts going on, and then there was the scuba classes. So just a line of revenues, you know, and all that, all separate and apart from the outside, the concessions and the cabana rentals and those sort of things. So really a good job of kind of diversifying a piece of property and leveraging it and serving the community well, but at the same time, you know, trying to capture cost. So a really good job of that. And then I think it would be good to just kind of highlight the conversions, right? So you talk about the conversion between the, so I don't know the street, so it's, what is it? It's Teasley and is that Lakey or Duncan at that stretch? That stretch we converted from the asphalt to the green space used to be the old recycling place. Dallas and Teasley. Yeah, so that's significant, maybe to spotlight that. And then you just finished, I'll bring up a source subject in Eagle Drive, but a positive in that we got rid of that abandoned road and that's finished. And so that's really good. So I think that's... We're still going to be putting a sign in there too. It says... Oh yeah, that's right. That's right. Yes. Yeah. So that's shaping up very well. And then, let's see. And then also you touched on it, but on the Friday report, with those watching, we're working on the North Lake trails, right? That area, trying to solidify that and with the granite and everything. And then I think it would be noteworthy, again, when you're talking about equipment wise to feature the electric mowers, I think that's important, right? And some of those features, just to kind of highlight those. And those things are very difficult to drive. And then you touched on it already, but it may be worth putting in the Friday report so people understand where you're coming from on the labor intensiveness of the cemeteries, right? And so that may be noteworthy just to kind of lay out some of that so that those watching could understand that. So other than that, thank you very much. I appreciate it. Well done. And so we're going to take... We've been at it a little over two hours, so we'll take... And it's going to be brief because we're going to keep it moving. So we're going to take a five minute break. So it is 414. We'll come back at 420 as soon as we have four people sitting down. We'll start again. So thank you. And welcome back to this meeting of Denton City Council. It is 423 PM. We do have quorum seated, so we'll get started. The others will be joining us here shortly. We are to the fire presentation. So I'll turn it over to you, Chief Hedges. Hello, Mayor of City Council. Kenneth Hedges, Fire Chief. Let me go ahead and pull up my presentation. Hello. Okay, kicking off the fire presentation, really presentation team here today is myself. I'm going to share responsibilities with our fire administration manager, Lindsey Garrison, and she'll go over the numbers. Org chart, a simple layout here. We really are broken down into three different divisions. On the left side, you have support services, which is primarily our prevention division. We have our administration division. And then we have emergency services, which is really our operations division. One thing I want to point out here also that's really noteworthy is you see here under Battalion 1 and 2, this just was created in October this past year. We were able to work with the city manager's office, and we transitioned three lower classification positions to battalion chiefs, and then we were able to split our battalion, our city, into two. So we have two different supervisors per shift to oversee now eight different stations. That has dramatically helped with professional development and even response to incidents as well. So going into our budget overview. So what have we accomplished in 2021 besides COVID? So just some of the highlights. Complete construction of Fire Station 3 in McCormick. Completed construction of Fire Station 8 at Colorado and Brinker. Big thing is what we did internally is we did complete a five-year strategic plan. So this is the five-year roadmap for the Dent Fire Department to see where do we need to be in 2025. This is available on our website. We have made this very public. We made it very transparent what our goals are through the process. And I included everybody in the department had opportunities to participate through SWAT analysis and informal meetings. We really identified five overarching goals with 30 different objectives we want to complete now in the next four years. The next big thing I really want to point out is further down under the accreditation process. So we have begun the process of accreditation through the Centers for Public Safety Excellence. This organization was formed in the 1980s, joined with ICMA and the International Association of Fire Chiefs. And it's really about continuous improvement. It's looking at best practices. Standard time complete accreditation is anywhere from 18 months to eight years. So I'll tell you what our timeline is here and our next goals. COVID-19 response. I mean, say no more. You know, it's so much we could sit here and talk about starting March of last year. And this is really, I want to give kudos to the entire Fire Department team that as the nation, the world kind of retracted back into their homes and operated from their house, not one of our employees did. They still stayed on the front lines. They still responded to every call. Whenever somebody called 911, they were there to support. So definitely appreciate every bit of work they've done. We have continually assisted Denton County Health with COVID vaccination clinics, even two last week, one held at Strickland and the other at Cumberland Children's Home. And the last thing is winter storm jury response. That's another anomaly that was thrown on top of COVID. I don't think anybody could ever prepare for what we have experienced over the last 18 months. But the interesting note I want to point out on the winter storm is I think we can document that Tuesday, February 16th was the busiest day in the history of the Denton Fire Department. So call volume for the previous Tuesday was around 55 calls for service in a 24-hour period. On that day, Tuesday, February 16th, our units responded to over 387 calls for service in 24 hours. So that was a 600% increase in calls for service that day. So just to be pictures. We all like pictures. So Fire Station 3 opened, grand opening June 9th, 2021. That was to replace an aging station that was located adjacent to this current one in McCormick in 35. New Station 8 opened February 26, 2021. Important part on this is the fact that this is the first station that has added to our response capabilities in the last 14 years. Station 7 was opened in 2007. That was the last one that has expanded our response capabilities across the city. So a collage of pictures. So what do we have here? If you look on the upper left, all these people, that was actually our entrance exam in January this year. We followed COVID guidelines to keep everybody six feet apart. The notable point on this is the fact in 2019, our entrance exam, only 37 applicants showed up. So through intense recruitment, sending our recruiter out on this, in this vehicle across Texas, across the Southern U.S., honestly, what you see right there is the results of it. And this year we had 297 people show up to take our test. So that is something significant and kudos to him. He did a lot of work and that was during COVID time as well. So it was a challenge. If you look the picture right to the right of that, that is our recruits from last year completing what we like to call just a very small physical training exercise. They're in the T.W. clock tower. They're in shorts and t-shirts. So we let them have that, but they are wearing air packs. So the goal is to climb that staircase 17 stories, 10 times up and down in 60 minutes. So if you get hired in the fire department, please look forward to that. As we go further to the right, that's just more storm, a picture from winter storm Uri as well. Go down, you see our employees in the gowns. That was when the state actually reached out and asked fire departments across the state to go into these long-term nursing care facilities and do COVID testing. So in about seven days, our employees, all this doing on their days off, this is over time duties as well. They test over 850 residents in the city of Den in long-term care facilities. So the excellent job. Bottom right, once again with COVID, we weren't living in normal time. So what could we do to give back to the community? We saw there was what we called Operation Rudolph. We outfitted two different fire trucks with lights, inflatable Christmas decorations, and we had music. And we'd always start every night about 6.30, make a couple laps around the square, then we'd head out to designated neighborhoods. In total, we did this for 15 nights. And this is where, once again, I'm going to thank our membership. So all this was on volunteer basis. So a member and family participated in this and both those vehicles for 15 nights in a row. And I still had a wait list that people still want to do that. So thank you to the department. Thank you to the citizens for showing us great appreciation for that. To the left is just what we do every day. We have fires. We still have EMS calls. 65% to 7% we do is EMS calls. And then a new addition of service is the bottom is the new airport rescue firefighting vehicle that was taken delivery November of '20. That will add capabilities for us to respond to incidents at the Den Airport. So what's our goals for next year? Well, if you look at the icons right here, these are actually tied. These are in our strategic plan. So we had five different goals identified. And I'm not going over them right here. Feel free to go onto our website and look at that. But I want to point out just a few key goals we want to try to achieve. The big thing is the accreditation from the Center for Public Safety Excellence. I told you it's 18 months to eight years, what normally fire departments have to go through. Our goal is we are, I wouldn't say we're midway into it, but our goal is to be complete by March of '22 this next year. With that, if we achieve that, we bring in a peer assessment team. They go through all our documentation to see are you really capturing everything? Have you done a full assessment of your entire department? If they give us a green light to go ahead, we will be awarded in San Antonio in August of '22. So it's very fitting that the conference, the national conference is going to be held in Texas, and we hope to achieve our accreditation at that point. And we will keep the council updated on that. Second goal is we're working on job-specific fitness programs. This isn't just for the fire department. We are actually partnering with police and then public safety dispatch. So we're really driving to look into what are our injuries resulting from. I know one thing the fire department has is a rash of shoulder injuries. So are we designing our vehicles wrong? Are the motions our employees doing repetition and were damaging their joints as well? So we're going to work with the local universities and try to develop a comprehensive fitness program and try to address some of this. Last thing is really just to highlight is really the second from the bottom is we want to collaborate with technology services and develop a fire department technology master plan. That's one thing. The DIN fire department, we're good on technology, but I know we can be better. And that's a thing. As we really look for data-driven organizations, it's all about making the computers and software work for us. So work smarter, not harder. So that's really our ultimate goal and see what's out there. Because that's one thing is we don't know what's available in the industry. So we're going to have to rely on tech services. We're going to rely on outside resources to show us really a pathway on how we can improve customer service. With that, we move to budget numbers. I'm going to turn it over to Lindsay for right now, but I'll be right back in just a minute to talk about supplementals. Good afternoon, Mayor, Council. I'm Lindsay Garrison. I'm the fire administration manager. I just wanted to go and highlight a few of our numbers for this presentation. You'll notice some decreases in revenue for fire inspections, fire fines, and CPR training. And that was all due to some COVID-19 closures that we had. Conversely, the fire training facility almost doubled the estimated revenue amounts as a result of an increase in outside agencies using our facility. Currently, this month, we're at about $48,000 in revenue. For expenses, you'll also notice, as discussed previously today, the increase in personnel. The increase in personnel is the result of an addition of a second battalion, as well as some increases per our meet and confer agreement. Materials and supplies, as well as maintenance categories, also showed decreases because of production stopping during COVID-19, services being unavailable, products being unable to be shipped on time, things like that. Another decrease is shown in the miscellaneous category, and our miscellaneous category is funding that is used to cover the public education events, which, of course, we had to cancel because of COVID-19. So those are just a few highlights there, and I'll hand it back to Chief to finish up for us. Thank you. So FTE summary, you see, 1920, we were looking at administration, we had 16.25. We reduced that in 2021. Really, we had a retirement, and we have not filled that position. I'll discuss that in the next few slides. Operations, you'll see, 1920 was at 170. We did have pre-programmed end staffing for our Fire Station 8. That was a staffing strategy. We hired three employees over the course of three years. We needed nine people to finalize staffing for that station, so you'll see that, and the prevention has remained flat. Budget request. First budget request, this should actually – and it says host program, but it's really our fire hose program. So a little history on that is, in the past, when we ordered a new vehicle, we just included some of the other accessories and supplies, and part of that was fire hose. The strategy was good until we started realizing that fire hose has an end of life around ten years. We had to follow both NFPA 1961 and 1962, which are National Fire Protection Association standards on design, testing, and then the standard carry use of fire hose. So it seems something maybe minor, but as far as safety, I would say this is probably the third most important thing a firefighter needs, going into a structure fire right behind their personal protective gear and their SCBA, their self-contained breathing apparatus. If you have damage in fire hose, you're retreating from the incident as well. So we realized that the firefighter apparatus are lasting 15 to 20 years is what we're expecting them to last. Fire hose has end of life around ten years, so there's a difference there of our fire hose is expiring. We had no dedicated funding to replace fire hose. So two years ago we asked for a one-time funding of about $15,000 to replace some, so what we're asking for this year is just to create a line item of $30,000 so we can work on scheduling this over the next five to ten years so we don't have those cyclic moments we have up and down on needing hose when it's end of life versus new hose. And some interesting facts that we actually had pulled from our logistics captain, so right now in the fire department we own over 42,000 feet of hose, and that's five different types of hose. So we're right shy of eight miles of hose that has to be replaced every ten years and we have no funding to replace. So we have a significant amount of hose burst during annual testing, we're going to city manager's office, we're going to finance, asking can we have money, so we're just trying to simplify this and let us do some internal management on budgeting moving forwards. Second is the emergency management program manager, and let me go ahead, I'm going to go to the next slide, I'm going to go back to this. So a little history on this, so in 2004 an ordinance was created and really you see down at the very bottom last bullet point the emergency and disaster planning response, that's an ordinance that really kind of laid out the structure of our EM program in the city of Denton. The mayor is the director of emergency management and there's a emergency management coordinator, which currently I am that position, and then there is a emergency management program manager that actually manages the day-to-day activities of our EM program. The person that previously was in this position retired in June of 2020 and we did not fulfill that position, simply had a consultant come in and do an in-depth analysis and really kind of determine what do we need. Do we need a single person to run that program? Do we need 1.5 people? What are efficiencies and efficiencies as well? So what you see on the right, that is the final document and just summarizing that, they came back and said the city of Denton at this size needs at least one person dedicated at all times to manage your emergency management program. They came back with several other recommendations that were actually working on implementing as well. So the interim duties has actually been covered by one of our existing battalion chiefs who work EMS. So he's been doing this, he's been doing EMS, he's been doing COVID vaccines, one thing after another. So we're asking for us to fill this position this year and get somebody in full-time and really kind of bolster our EM program. So with that, that's our two requests for now and that is it. Okay. Questions for staff? Seeing none. Okay. Great. Well, I'll just note, could you remind me, so you said the ratio fire to medical is what percentage? Right now we're hovering around 65 to 70 percent is EMS calls. Average structure fire calls per annual year is around 3 percent. Got it. And then I would just ask also, I know you started maybe a year or so ago, but if we could keep an eye and track the service calls for those that are unhoused, right, because I think it'll be a great metric as we go forward and we get on board out on loop 28 to track our successes, right. So it'll give us kind of a baseline initially, we'll get up and running, then we'll have kind of a number a year or so in, are the services working, are the calls going the right way, that sort of thing. So if you could, that's just a suggestion I know, you know. In our current patient care reporting system, we are able to track some of those metrics. Right, right. Great. Thank you very much. Any other questions, comments? Great. Thank you very much, Gene. Thank you. Okay, then that concludes, fire takes us to human resources. Good afternoon, Mayor, City Council, Tiffany Thompson, Director of Human Resources. I am sad to report I do not have a cool robot like Parks and Rec. However, I did dress up as Chewbacca for the Juneteenth Parade. So for whatever that's worth, maybe I can do that for you at some other time in the future. Something to look forward to. So no robot, but again, Chewy loves Denton and I was there. So Human Resources, we're really supporting every department that you've come, had the presentations to you and just everything that this organization's do, we're here to support them. So we're really made up of a couple different disciplines with civil service, training and development, employee relations, talent acquisition, and then also risk management and compliance. So some of our big things this year, just like a lot of other presentations, COVID-19 and the response. Our HR department quickly in March of 2020 established a dedicated 24/7 email communication channel for employees to ask any and all questions COVID related. There was three individuals that have manned this what we call the box email box since March of 2020, myself, Debbie and Stephanie back here. So if any of our employees watching got an email, these are the lovely people who were doing it. We had 272 positive COVID employees throughout the pandemic and we also conducted 435 contact tracing cases. We also responded to almost 5000 emails just related to COVID and all the different variables for that. So while many cities and organizations were adding resources to be able to respond to the demand of COVID, we did all of that in-house and internally. So that is a big accomplishment for this year. We also worked with Denton Fire, as you just heard, and Highland Village Fire Department to get any and all employees vaccinated and their family members. So any employee that wants to be vaccinated has been vaccinated at this point. So a big shout out to those two fire departments that helped us make that happen. Also, we created and dedicated diversity and inclusion resource page. So that's been a big emphasis for us. And I'm also going to focus that with our goals coming up. So our big goals is to continue to incorporate diversity and inclusion in addition to all of our training programs. And one of the things that we have done recently is added inclusion into our core value. So we're really going to be working on that strategic plan of what the training, development, diversity, and inclusion looks like. And we're going to be focusing on five things with education, education, engagement, recruitment, our workplace, and our community. The other things we're going to be working on is implementing a performance review, a new performance review process. I know that David and Cassie were talking earlier. We're in the process of implementing a brand new HRIS, Human Resource Information System currently. The performance review module is one of those things that we're working through. So this year, as mentioned, we're going to focus on a COLA, and then next year we're going to have a more dedicated robust system for the performance review process. And then lastly, we're going to be developing an internship program. You've seen a couple interns in other budget presentations. We really want to partner with the amazing resources we have in our back door. Backyard is North Central Texas College, TWU, UNT, the universities, just resources, and also with the school districts as well. Because we really want to create that talent pipeline, not only for the universities to give them exposure, but just for the city as overall as we plan for succession planning. So our budget highlights. We do have a slight increase. Personnel Services is one of those. We did have an additional 1.5 FTEs that I'll talk about in just a minute. But for our operations, we had a big increase there that I wanted to focus on. And really what that is is with our HRIS, Human Resource Information System that we took over, that was previously budgeted in tech services budget, and that's just been moved over to our budget. So that is the lion's share of that increase for that. So that just means that we're going to manage all the contract versus tech services doing that. We have 16.5 FTEs. We did add a talent development coordinator who helps with all of the hiring and processing of employees and then a part-time talent development specialist. That's helping out with our training and development programs as well. And then one of the things I really want to highlight is 16.5 FTEs focus on and support the entire employee life cycle of 1,842 current employees. So just a big shout out to our HR team. I like to call us the friendly HR. If you've ever worked anywhere, sometimes HR feels like the principal's office. If I can give you a face, we are not mean. We're not the principal office by any means, but we really are here to help our employees. And we just, it's a privilege to do that and serve them. So here's some of our glorious faces and HR, the friendly HR right here. Don't we look friendly? Yes, absolutely. Thank you. So those are the lovely people that support our organization. And with that, I'm most happy to answer any questions you may have. Okay. Questions for staff? Seeing none. Any questions for staff? Oh, counselor Davis. Thank you, mayor. I just missed the number of current employees we have. You gave it and I didn't have my pen ready to write it down. 1,842. Thank you. Okay. Any other questions? I'll just say that I can't agree more with the internship. I mean, that's the number one thing when I'm talking to students from the universities that's in need. And I think we can help coordinate that even internally through economic development, et cetera, so we can maybe get them plugged in early on or at least kind of have those conversations when they're onboarding to try to make that easier for you. Once you have that template, let us know and let's see how we can incorporate that into our kind of review and hopefully give our local students a leg up in that competition. So that's great. Thank you. And the Chewbacca is ready whenever you want to borrow it. I know you asked me about that earlier. Yes, I hope it will fit. It may. It will fit. It might smell right now, but anyway. Thank you, mayor and council. She was thinking about how hot it was the other day. Yes, it was toasty. Okay. All right. There we go. While you're pulling up for planning purposes for those here, we will take a brief break after this presentation and questions. We'll grab dinners here and then we'll come back and we can eat in here and keep it rolling. So thank you. Good afternoon, mayor and city council Debbie Skowinski with deputy director of risk and compliance. And I have the unenviable position of following robots and huge fire trucks in Chewbacca with risk management updates. So I'm here to share with y'all some information about the risk management budget for the next fiscal year. This is my amazing team. I'd like to tell you a little bit about them about risk management in this and recognize our team members. Risk management is comprised of two core functions, employee benefits and leave. And then the risk management function and this amazing team has consistently gone above and beyond to assist, oops, teaser, to assist our customers during times of adversity, including COVID and sorry, going the wrong direction. I never said I could work PowerPoint. Sorry, my folder. Okay. Back to my amazing team. They've consistently gone above and beyond to assist and serve our customers during unprecedented and honestly sometimes scary times. So a little bit about risk management. Risk management moved under the HR umbrella in August of 2020. Since then we've had several accomplishments that we'd like to highlight. We've selected and implemented a new workers compensation third party administrator to provide improved service to our injured workers. We successfully completed the internal audit of our health plan related internal processes. So thank you, Madison and her team for help. We also developed a benefit specific site on the hub page or internet page to help our employees easily access information about their benefits at their fingertips when they actually need it. Looking forward to the next fiscal year we have a lot of things planned. A few of them are we are going to be adding voluntary benefit options to our health programs offerings. We're going to be offering AFLAC, accident and critical illness coverage, as well as a program called Cancer Guardian that will provide benefits before and after a cancer diagnosis. And those two programs are going to be completely voluntary to our employees. We'll also be completing a process that's actually ongoing at this point. It's our medical claims audit for our health plan. It's being conducted by an external auditor to ensure that our claims are being processed in accordance with our contracts and our service level guarantees. And I'm also very excited to share that we're going to be implementing a new EAP employee assistance program for first responders and their families. It's called responder health and it's by first responders for first responders. It's rather unique and we're very excited to be able to bring that support to our first responders and their families. So budget highlights, under the risk management umbrella we manage two internal funds, the risk retention fund and the health insurance fund. So the risk retention fund, like internal service funds are, our revenues come from interdepartmental reallocations. The expenses for the risk retention fund are inherently unpredictable, because claims for damages, workers' compensation injuries, COVIDs and Snowvids and insurance renewal premiums all fluctuate. And honestly, we've had some unprecedented, to use the overused term, things happen and those are impossible to predict. So for fiscal year '20 to '21, we had, risk had budgeted $4.1 million, but in October of 2019, we had a significant catastrophic injury to one of our police officers. Additionally, insurance policy renewals had increased, as we had seen across all markets, and we had an increase of costs due to implementing a new workers' comp TPA that I mentioned just a moment ago, and a new insurance broker on the property and casualty side. So earlier this year, council approved a budget amendment of approximately $2 million for the risk fund. And after carving out funds to create a new budget specifically for the safety team, the budget is trending slightly below at this time. The health insurance fund revenues come from interdepartmental reallocations, employee and retiree contributions and rebate programs that we participate in through our carriers. So the health insurance fund expenses, they cover employee and retiree benefits, the employee health clinic, the costs associated with that, and other services that are related to our benefits programs. The health insurance fund budget has remained fairly flat over the past few years. We've seen only slight increases to premiums in our health and other benefits offerings. Employee contribution amounts have also stayed fairly flat, with no increases to employee contributions for either of our plans since 2018. We're currently reviewing our plan options, and we haven't received our renewals yet for the 2022 plan year. But at this time, we don't anticipate an increase to employee contributions for the health plan. So this is our head count for risk management. We currently have eight FTEs. In early 2021, three of the safety positions were moved out of our budget. And we did add one additional position, our risk specialist. And shameless plug, we are recruiting our risk specialist position right now. So if you happen to know anybody with a work comp background, please, you know, take a look at our position and all of our other open positions available within the city at Denton County or DentonJobs.com. I'm happy to take any questions now that I finally got my presentation to work. Thank you. Questions? Questions for Seth? Oh, and if you could pull down the presentation. Certainly, sorry. Thank you. No problem. Okay. Thank you. And then, do you want to spotlight, so the new, and I'm going to get the terminology wrong, but the new service provider that we brought on to replace the other with the -- the TPA, for workers' compensation? Yes. Is that much improved? Any feedback? We're hearing very good feedback from our employees, of course. We're still working through kinks that come through in implementation, but it is much improved. Great. Okay. Good to hear it. And let's see. Oh, there's one thing, there's one note I would like. I talked to the city manager about this. I'd like to explore the path for, and it's unfortunate, right? I mean, but that's -- we have to plan for that. But if an employee of the city should unfortunately lose a child, you know, during birth or something like that, I want to try to make sure they have access to bereavement or -- I just don't know what the policy allows for that, and I want to make sure we have an allowance for that. Okay. And so if you could either an email to all of us, email to the city manager, whatever you could do about what the current policy is and then what we would need to change if there's not an allowance for that, but I want to try to make sure that that's covered and it's paid. And it's specifically related to the loss of a child? That's correct. Okay. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. Lord willing, that never happens, but I, you know, just want to make sure our employees are covered that way. Happy to. All right. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Okay. Then it is 4.56. We will take -- give everybody time, unfortunately. No, just kidding. So we'll do 15 minutes. So we'll do 15 minutes to make sure we have time, and I'll round up to that. So let's say -- let's come back at 5.15, and that'll give us time to grab food, come back, and then next up will be technology services. So we have technology services 5.15. We'll be on a brief break. It's 4.56. Thank you. And welcome back to this meeting of the Denton City Council. It is 5.16. We're back from that short break. Thank you everyone for your help. That takes us to the technology services budget. Good evening, everyone. I'm Lisa Miney, Chief Technology Officer, and I'm glad to be here. It's good to see everybody in person tonight. Dinner by technology services, I'm sorry. We'll continue on. Oh, goodness, what did I do? Sorry. There we go. All right. So I want to be able to introduce a fantastic management team. They're all sitting behind me. If you have any questions that I can't answer, we'll bring them down. I have Omar Rodriguez. He's our electric technology division manager. Curtis Cotten, yes. Oh, sure is it. Let me stop sharing and do it again. Okay. I think we're in business now. All right. So I've introduced Omar. So Curtis Conrad is my next manager. He's the enterprise infrastructure and support services manager. Drew Allen is our senior manager of applications and projects. And Lisa Colo is our administration manager and her team does most of the work on the budget. All right. So this is our org chart for technology services. We're divided up into six major areas. We are in information security, enterprise applications and projects, enterprise infrastructure and support services, administration, electric technology and utilities and then public safety communications and that team is led by Suzanne Coletta and she'll be coming up after me and sharing her budget with you after I am done. Okay. So technology services, the wind behind all of the wings of our departments. We are an internal services group making everything run technology wise. So our technology services department has worked very hard meeting all sorts of accomplishments this past year, but I could only put a few here. So it was a hard choice to pick some, but I did. So we did continue supporting remote non-site staff during COVID. We refreshed the city's intranet site using SharePoint modern. We affectionately call that as the hub around city of Denton. We coordinated technology outfit for two new fire stations in the development services building. We upgraded mobile and portable radios for our police and fire departments and we furthered work on an existing data warehousing project building several different department dashboards this year. Next year, I am a new director. I'm in my fifth month. So I have a lot of plans. I am very interested in the recommendations and a software audit that the department is going to be embarking on here in a couple of months. We're hopeful that the information from that software audit will be able to inform the city-wide technology assessment that I'd like to do as well. This will culminate in a multi-year technology strategic plan. So what we hope to do is be able to assess how the city of Denton is using technology. We want to look at gaps. We want to try to bring forward those best of breed products or, you know, best practices. So hopefully we'll be able to address all of that through this assessment. And then we also want to establish a technology governance process. What we're hopeful here is that technology investments will be able to be prioritized and we'll be able to work together to determine what's the best technology that we should be investing in and implementing here at city of Denton. We also are wanting to complete our technology coordination for the new police department public safety communications remodel as, you know, we've been working on that for several months. So here's some statistics that kind of give you an idea of what our technology environment is and what we're supporting. We have 1,700 FTEs that we support, 1,500 computers, 500 miles of fiber maintained, support 1,600 network devices, cameras, servers, and two data centers. We provide network services to 55 facilities and 30 departments and support over 50 enterprise applications. We do have a 1,250 subscriber two tower radio network. We manage 66 technology contracts valued at $58 million. We do manage many technology projects in house and we support approximately 1,700 phones and 1,000 voicemail accounts. And this colorful slide has a lovely pie chart that has all the colors in the rainbow. But what this is showing you is that we have performed service on 11,000 tickets and our top five customers are police, electric, customer service, parks and recreation and fire and wastewater tied for fifth place. We did maintain a 99.72% network services availability over the past 12 months so we've managed to keep the lights on and our departments are very thankful for that. We also received 1,006 customer satisfaction surveys and we were ranked 4.83 out of a potential five. So we're doing pretty good. And some numbers. So we are an internal service fund and finance makes the magic happen and they figure out, you know, what each fund that we devise benefit from working with us and services that we service and they figure out what our revenues are going to be. So we have two pages of that and that equals $17,723,786. And then our expenses balance out against the $17,723,786. And I just wanted to point out a couple of things. We're about $200,000 lower than the 2021 budget for our preliminary proposed and under operations and maintenance and repair I did swap some expenditures because I thought it made more sense but it didn't affect the bottom line. And this is all of our technology services teams. We do have 57 FTEs and technology services. And budget request. I do have two positions I would like to recommend bringing forward. The radio engineer is really a comes from a frozen position. Radio manager did retire and we froze that position during the COVID period. So we'd like to bring that back to give that team some more structure. And the network and communications manager I'm recommending because of the demand of services that that team is taking on, the complication of the maintenance windows and the devices they're bringing in really requires a really top level engineering network professional. And that is the end of my presentation. I'll be happy to answer any questions. >> Okay. Thank you and happy to have you here. Thank you very much. Questions for staff? >> Thank you, Mary. One of the things that I noticed that you didn't ask for but it was in your second or third slide was that your ISO is vacant. Who's doing the ISO role? I'm like every other end user. Everybody hates the ISO and they are a critical position. >> They are. And that's a great question because I just hired one. We went through our interviews a couple weeks ago and I made the decision and most of my team that was on the panel. And we've got one in place. We've hired Eric Yancey from the city of Irving. He was their ISO for two years and he has six certifications. He's very well qualified and we look forward to working with him. So we're very excited to bring him on. >> All right. I feel much better now. >> Me too. >> So thank you. >> Any other questions in the room? Okay. Councilmember Armitage? >> Yes, I have two questions. First, in this most recent Friday report, there was an update about the plan to ascribe city email addresses to all board and commission members. I'm excited about that. And it mentioned a -- implied that there would be a phased rollout over time and didn't mention a specific timeline. I was wondering if you could speak to the timeline for that and how that affects the budget. >> Yes, ma'am. I am working with a group of individuals with public affairs and the city secretary's office on that project. I believe the last I've heard that they're definitely interested in supplying email addresses to every single board and commission member. Probably be the easiest to track. There is a small budgetary amount that I'm getting a quote for currently. It shouldn't be too horribly much. So I think that that should be easily absorbed. But it shouldn't take long. It's just a matter of entering in the email addresses. I know that the city secretary's department was working on a policy and we've gotten that complete. So I just think there's a few details and this should be able to rolled out fairly quickly. Yes, ma'am. >> Wonderful. So by the end of the summer, end of the year. >> Sure. Even before then. I would say, yeah. We've already have the ability to add the licensing and we only have to true up once a year. It's a Microsoft enterprise agreement. So it's easy to add those licenses. We just have to pay for it later. So we'll get it done for you. >> Wonderful. Thank you. I'm really excited about that. And second, I had a question about municipal broadband. I was just wondering if that would be if a supplemental budget request to roll out some sort of municipal broadband program, would that come under tech services or would that be from the city manager's office? And you're welcome to answer that or the city manager, whoever would feel more comfortable. >> Well, I'll offer something and Sarah can certainly add. I would recommend for the size of Denton that you'd want to bring in a broadband consultant and to actually look at those kinds of things and look at the individual needs that the city might have. And then they'll be able to kind of design a program for us that we can send out for RFPs if that's where we want to go. And then I'm sure that would be a longer process and then just putting in the budget this year. So there's a study that would need to be that would need to be taken place before we can really put some dollars in. >> So a consultant, so assuming that that's because we don't have someone in-house who could do that. So would that come out of the tech services budget or city manager's budget or some other budget? >> Councilmember Arnmacher, this is Sarah. Excuse me. I think obviously if directed by council, we could look at it and hire a consultant. But I will say that it looks like the focus for the county is going to be broadband. And they may be hiring a consultant and looking at the cities that are in the Denton County area. So this would be something we would tack on after the fact, let them do their work to see where broadband needs to go. Let them do the consulting work to hire the consultant. And then as a part of that, the city of Denton, the city of Louisville and other cities would then be a part. >> Okay. Are you aware of their timeline on that? Are they voting on or deciding on a consultant this year? >> This is all based on where the judge and the commissioners would like to spend their American risk. >> Any other questions for staff? Seeing none, thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you, everyone. Okay. That brings us to public safety. >> Good evening, Mayor and Council. This is the public safety communications budget. We are part of tech services, but our budget is being presented separately here. This is our organization chart for public safety communications. Under myself is the public safety technology group, three people, and then our public safety radio personnel. But the main focus this budget is on public safety communications. That manager position that shows vacant has been filled. It was just filled two weeks ago. So we do have that manager in place, and this is our public safety communications team that goes across four different shifts, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. So our budget overview, during the calendar year of 2020, public safety communications answered 244,413 phone calls. Of those phone calls, 75,694 of them were 911 calls. The majority of those are wireless calls in the City of Denton. 168,719 of those calls were non-emergency calls. During that calendar year of 2020, public safety communications entered 126,411 calls for service. Those are calls where they request to be dispatched, you know, we dispatch personnel. 101,083 of those calls were for the police department to respond. 17,703 were for fire department response, and 6,712 were for animal services response. This year we began collaboration with the Town of Little Elm and Denton County Sheriff's Office to transition their dispatch function for the Town of Little Elm from Denton County Sheriff's Office over to the City of Denton based on that interlocal agreement that was signed by council, I believe, last October is when it was put in place. We began the design and planning of our new PSAP dispatch center. You'll see PSAP, Public Safety Answering Point, referred to often. It just means our dispatch center and is part of that police department remodel. So we began that design and planning for our eventual move over to that area. We are still currently in the area that is being demoed all around us. We began the project to transition to a paperless warrant solution as well, and that will solve manpower hours for entering those warrants, but also decrease liability due to, you know, human error, et cetera. So that was a big project that we took on this year and should be finished by the end of the year. Our goals for next year is to fill our remaining open public safety communications positions. When we, and I'll talk about it more further on, when we signed that agreement, we got eight positions, FDs, assigned to public safety communications that are actually being funded and paid for by the City of Little Elm. So that was a big hiring push to hire our remaining open positions plus the eight additional that we received at that time so that we could get them hired and trained in time to take on this dispatch function, which will now be September the 27th of 2021 when we start doing that for them. So then we need to complete the training of those personnel to make sure that they're ready to dispatch for both Denton and the City of Little Elm, excuse me, Town of Little Elm. So we will begin dispatching for them, and then we need to complete that design and build of that new dispatch center that's currently being built. And then we need to move in. This is a slide just to reflect some of the change in our workload. 911 calls are kind of cyclic, you know, month to month, but they've stayed pretty steady over the last couple years. But our change in administrative phone calls, our non-emergency phone calls has gone up a great deal. This was just due to moving that role from the front desk of the police department into the public safety communications dispatch center, because as you know, many citizens call the non-emergency line when they have a true emergency. So we wanted to make sure and get that role into public safety communications so that they don't accidentally call on the non-emergency line when they have a true emergency. This is also a function that we're going to begin doing shortly for the fire department as well. They have found some emergency calls left on their, you know, voicemails after hours and stuff, and we want to make sure that that phone is answered 24 hours a day. So that will be a function that will be moved over to us as well. So this is what caused the great change in the number of non-emergency calls that we received from 18 to 20. I did a snapshot of each month instead of the yearly call. So for the month of October in '18, our admin lines, our non-emergency lines was only 4,527 phone calls for that month. And then the month of October of 2020, our admin calls, our non-emergency calls, was 15,720 calls. So an 89.2% increase in our call load for our dispatchers. So some of our budget highlights. Our budget is rather small compared to some of these that you have been listening to. Of course, the majority of our budget is personnel related. But if you look at our overall numbers, our personnel costs are slightly down between '21-'22 and '20-'21, so no increase there. And our overall budget by the bottom line is actually down over the previous '20-'21 budget, so no increase in budget for us. A snapshot of the Little Elm dispatching, since we have new council members that were not here when we signed that agreement, a snapshot here was included. These are the eight FTEs I was referring to that are paid for by Little Elm. During the first year, this is the amount they will pay, and then the increase, 3% increase built in each year, that they will continue to pay us for those eight additional FTEs. And we included everything from training licenses, staffing, our admin fees are built in, a contingency fund in case of our capital equipment costs go up more than we project this first year, and then our total expenses this first year, close to 1.1, and then you see what it will be over the next four years. Overall, the project would bring in 4.8. So the Public Safety Communications FTE summary, that's why we included that slide, so we had 33 and a half positions in '19 and '20, but after that signature of that ILA, that's why they increased to 41.5. But again, that is funded not by the City of Denton, but by the City of Little Elm. Any questions for Lee? Great. Questions for staff? Any questions? Seeing none. Okay. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Okay. Last presentation is Public Safety, I do believe. Good evening, Mayor-Council. Frank Dixon, Chief of Police. I just want to take a moment while I'm pulling up this presentation to give my thanks for all the hard work of our firefighters, dispatchers, police officers, and the management teams over there, and definitely the directors. We've got a great public safety team put together right now. All right. We'll get going on the budget here. Our team that's here in the building tonight, myself, Assistant Chief Bobby Smith, and then our Assistant Director Shanika Mayo, if there's any questions that come up that I can't answer, then one of them will be happy to provide that answer for you. Our organizational chart is a little larger than most, so you're only going to see the high level positions of lieutenant and above that are notated on here, and some interesting points of note for this year. Some additions include the mental health division that you see on the upper left-hand portion of the screen, and then some of the reorganization that we did internally that really helped flatten out some of the, or begin flattening out some of the leadership across the department. Our budget overview for 2020, some of our accomplishments, we spoke about these earlier through Chief Hedges. Collaborating with him, we ended up thankfully filled in an emergency management coordinator within the police department about three months before the COVID pandemics began. So she was able to hit the ground running at a full-off sprint. She worked very well with first Mike Penaluna, and then with Brad Layhart, in really providing all of our resources for not just the police department, but the fire department as well, to help prepare all of our folks out on the front lines, keeping them safe. We launched some spider technology through dispatch that not only sends out an email or a text message, you get to pick which one you receive when a police officer is dispatched to your house, it lets you know which officer is coming out, the case number, and if they are held up for any reason, it will then send you a text message telling you they're held up. The best two pieces is once they're done with the report, it will tell you who your detective is and a contact number for them. And then the most critical part is it ends with a survey that you can fill out, so we get immediate feedback. Doing those annual surveys, as you know, if you go somewhere and you get bad service, customer service, you tend to forget towards the end of the year. So getting this immediate feedback has really helped us. And then of course, probably the biggest and most substantial is the creation of the mental health division and the CERT team. And I can tell you in the three weeks that they have been active, they have done 21 emergency detention orders. They have to date about 91 cases that they're working. They have also additionally done three emergency detention orders as they were out conducting their follow-ups on the consumers, which has been that's three calls that aren't dispatched. Those are three people that are not put into a severe crisis. They haven't deteriorated to that point. So you can already see a great benefit that this team is bringing to our city. So I couldn't be prouder of them. Some of the enhanced training and educational opportunities that we have brought over the last year, fair and impartial policing, and then the Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement or the ABLE program that has ran out of Georgetown Law. And it was a program born from the New Orleans Police Department many years ago, but now it is a national model for giving police officers an education on interceding or intervening on those incidents where they need to, to keep other officers from doing something they know they shouldn't do. Some of our goals for 2021 and then moving into 2022 as well is we want to continue prioritizing community engagement activities and not just the big ones, the things that we haven't been able to do, which is getting cops out of cars on the side of the road, playing pickup basketball on a whim, getting out talking to people while they're checking their mail or cutting their grass and just being able to connect better with our community. Because as it stands now, and we'll talk about it here in a minute, because we are a call-driven organization and calls are up, especially violent crime, our officers are spending an inordinate amount of time traversing the city, going from call to call right now. We're about 70% through with our best practice program accreditation. Again, you heard Chief Hedges talk about his accreditation process at their beginning and then dispatch is also beginning one. So what you're going to be looking at in the next 18 to 24 months is your entire, the entirety of the public safety services here in the city of Denton all being accredited, which is going to be huge. And that's something really to be proud of as a city. We're looking to implement a family violence strategic plan towards the end of this year, going into next year as well. That's really going to help us to again, go out and proactively look for people that are half committed family violence. They're out on a bond and we know the conditions of their bonds, whether they're on ankle monitors, they're not supposed to be within 500 feet of someone. We can proactively go out and hopefully catch them violating those orders before violence, further violence occurs. As we know that violence tends to escalate. And then we'll talk about the implementation of the community police mediation program. We're working with mediation Maryland. They're a program that started in 1999. They're a nationally recognized program for community police mediation efforts. They have stood those up in several cities across the U S and we're looking to bring them here to Denton. What that's going to do for us, for our community is for those minor, whether it's a minor rudeness, maybe the officer use some language that they weren't happy with. Maybe the officer seemed robotic and kind of aloof that we give them the opportunity for both sides voluntarily go into a third party mediator, sit down and have a discussion about what what happened that day. And what we tend to find because I've been a part of this program at a different agency is it really comes down to some misunderstanding or lack of understanding on one of two of those parties, and sometimes both ways. So that's something exciting to look forward to going into next year. Some of our budget highlights. Some things to note on this slide the police escorts you can see those numbers go down dramatically. We passed actually you all the council passed the city ordinance that allows for transportation companies to come into our city to do funeral escorts. They got us out of that business. So what you're going to see is that number go down to hopefully zero in the next year. Some other points of interest, if you look at the DSD SRO program. This year, there's a huge increase, not only did we add three SROs to the program, but we added a full time lieutenant. So in this year, you see the $1.017 million. That is because DSD is paying the entirety of the lieutenant salary for the first year, and then we're going to absorb that back in. So you see that drop substantially the following year. And then nothing has really changed on this slide. You're looking at a couple of increased costs for materials and supplies. That's going to be uniforms ballistic vest and things of that nature for the police department. And then of course, medical insurance is going up just a little bit. We look at our FTEs, we have really tried to right size the police department over the last couple of years. And it kind of bears out here, where you see the numbers change from the administration, and then Academy and training. So we broke those out so that 11 under Academy and training is going to be the staff that's over there right now working. And then our patrol staffing goes down a little bit because of the creation of a mental health unit. You have those FTEs are moved out, moved over to there. And then you'll see a couple of additional positions in neighborhood services is where our SROs are now housed under. And like I said, the mental health unit. So as we're going into our budget requests for this year, if by way of reminder, excuse me, for the council last year, we had the matrix group come in, and they conducted a staffing study for the police department based on not just our growth, but on our uncommitted time for our police officers. What we found from them was we had the lowest uncommitted time of any police department in the country that they had done this study on before. And what we had come to learn is we had not been appropriately keeping up with our growth and keeping up with growing the police department. In some points of reference, if you look at the city of Baytown, their population about 82,000, they have a police department with about 252 sworn police officers in it. Another frame of reference is the city of Mesquite just up the road, their population of about 142,000, and they have 239 FTEs. We have been very blessed over the last couple of years to be able to add to ours. Right now, we're sitting at an authorized strength of 203 sworn FTEs. So you can see there's still a gap. In the matrix report, again, bore that out. They said over the next six to seven years, we need to add up to 35 police officers and six administrative positions because our administrative positions had not been kept up with as well. So the one package that we are asking for is gonna be the addition of six new FTEs. Now, with these FTEs, there's only gonna be one that's gonna be sworn. The other five are gonna be civilian positions to help us right-size the civilian side of the police department. Additionally, those civilians are gonna help get police officers out of roles that they're doing now and back to doing police work. For example, we have a police lieutenant that is now doing our quartermaster in fleet. We can get one person that specializes that has done that in the civilian sector to do it and get that lieutenant back in charge of police officers and back out into the community where we need them. We also have lieutenants right now that have to put together electronic packets for the district attorney's office when we file charges on someone that's taking them off of the street for an inordinate amount of time. And for one frame of reference, we have one lieutenant who was off the street an entire night making those packets up. They were able to get 30 of those packets done in one night. They still had over 67 to do, and that's as people are still putting more of those cases in their queue. So you can tell that that's a need that I think we need to get our lieutenants back out managing their patrol shifts like we tasked them to. So we'll have two of those civilian positions doing that, and then the fifth position for the fleet, and then one for grants as well. So that'd be the five total. We have a lot of grants through both our federal partners, our state partners, and locally, and we want to make sure that we have one person that can manage those grants from an administrative perspective, and then they'll tie in very nicely with the grant office over here at City Hall with Laura Behrens. And with that, I'll stop and pull this down for any questions. Okay. All right. Questions for staff? Mayor Pro Tem Melton. Thank you so much. I was a little unclear on what the relationship would be between the grants position that you want to staff and the three grant positions that are inside the city structure. So the grant positions that are over here at City Hall, they don't manage the grants for individual departments. They collect those grants or kind of a hub, if you want to look at it that way. What I want to make sure that we're doing in the police department is properly managing our grants so we don't have, there's a lot of problems that are associated with them if you're not someone that's well versed at managing them. The money spent, the travel, the training, properly documenting those and making sure that paperwork is turned in in a timely manner. I have a second if I may. Thank you for that. Apparently not in this budget cycle, but going forward, do you imagine the mix of employees that respond to calls shifting more into the mental health group? Is that going to grow as a percentage or do you think we got the percentage about right in terms of responders? Well, I think because we hadn't really paid the proper attention to mental health in policing in total that we don't know. We don't know. But I can tell you that the stats that they're tracking for this first year are going to be way above and beyond what I would have expected prior to the unit launching. Thank you. Okay. Anyone else here? Any questions here? Councillor Betz? Thank you, Mayor. To follow on from that, so how are, as we're implementing these new mental health professionals into the team, into the response team, how are we judging that right ratio? So they're responding, it sounds like superbly. You're getting lots of calls prevented or lots of calls responded to without force and the other things you mentioned at the beginning. That all sounds awesome. When it's really steep like that, when you implement new people, you don't always know what the right ratios are. So what's your plan for figuring out, you know, when it's tapering off, when you need to adjust the ratios up and down, that sort of thing? Well, one thing we know now is we're collecting the data on the calls that they're responding to so we can capture that data. We have one team that's still not launched because we have one of our clinicians that was out after giving birth. So the numbers that we have now are based off of three teams. We only have our fourth team out there. So what I can comfortably say is those numbers are going to go up as that fourth team gets out there and they get involved. And then what I'm going to do is towards the end of this first year, with that data, sit down and look and see has it plateaued? Is it still getting is it still growing getting steeper? Or is it starting to trend down? And then we'll adjust accordingly. So to answer your question, it very well may be that next year, I'm looking to add more clinicians and more officers to that unit to grow it as appropriate. But I think only time will tell. We have to remember that we have both of our universities weren't all in person during this period. So we don't know what those numbers are going to look like. So I think there's a lot of unknown, which is why we're taking a great deal of time to track the numbers and try to track them appropriately. Okay, thank you. Yes, sir. Okay. Any other questions? Council member bird. Council member bird. Okay. Just a curiosity question. I guess it'll lead to what your budget will look like in future years. How does the police department determine how many officers they need? It's just strictly by growth, outward growth, or is it by crime related? How does something like that work for the public to know? So different firms will use different methodologies to do it. There used to be a ratio of per thousand that was kind of the national standard. We learned that that's an outdated standard. If you just strictly go by per thousand. So what the matrix group did is they went through and they looked at our cat history data, which is our dispatch data, how many officers we have, how long they're out on each call, how long it's taking them to get back in service, how many people are out for training, sick vacation, because those numbers change and fluctuate. And then they looked at what our growth pattern is. And what they tried to make some assumptions obviously because we're not fully grown out here in the city, there's so a lot of room to grow, is they anticipated the growth out west along that western corridor and they anticipated what it's going to look like as it impacts crime. Okay, any other questions? Okay, Councilmember Armitage. Yeah, a couple questions. So I was really intrigued by the comment in the slide that came from the matrix study that a patrol doesn't have capacity to handle calls plus be proactive. And I was wondering if you could flesh that out a little bit more along the lines of what is our, is the problem our response time to calls? Or is it the response time plus follow up, just the follow up? And what's the rationale for meeting that need by hiring new people instead of moving people from a patrol to on call or to a detective in criminal investigation work? And by the way, I should say I was also pleased to see the increase in criminal investigation full time staff, you know, corresponding with a slight decrease in patrol numbers recently. So I'll go backwards, I guess would probably be the easiest way to do it. So increasing staff in the detectives won't help with the call response on the front end. So what the matrix group said was, our officers had, I believe the number was 17 or 19% of uncommitted time. And that's time they're not directly responding to calls across the city. So what they're saying is our police officers are taking the majority of their day doing nothing but responding to calls for service. They don't have any time to proactively go out and engage in the community. Now this is strictly from a community engagement perspective with a little bit of crime hotspot perspective as well. Because what we're looking for is not for officers to be out looking for minor violations of crime. We're really looking for a bigger impact in working with our community, meaning we have to get out and build those relationships. And I can tell you over the last month that I've gotten a lot of conversations from our community members just wanting to see more police cars visible in their neighborhoods driving by and engaging them in conversation. And that's predominantly in Southeast Denton and Southwest Denton. Unfortunately, when you don't have a lot of crime in your neighborhood, you don't see a lot of police officers. So that's something we want to correct. And then on the part of follow up, our detectives right now are extremely busy. So part of the growth pattern is going to look to right sides, both sides of the house, both patrol for the initial response and then our detectives for that follow up in the criminal case building aspect. Okay, any other questions? Yeah, so I have one other question and thank you, by the way, for explaining that. My second question has to do with jail diversion, which I know is something that you've talked about previously. Police officers have a lot of discretion in terms of making arrests for certain smaller nonviolent crimes or violations. Can you speak to what we're doing to divert people from jail in terms of policy and budget with keeping in mind that it costs money to have people in jail and if they're not guilty of violent crimes, what else maybe could be done that would be better for them and also more economically efficient? And Chief, specifically with the budget, yeah, not the policy side of things. So some things that we're doing, which I'm really, really pleased to see is we have diverted a good majority of those mental health EDOs that I've talked about prior to and this is where traditionally people would have been booked into jail and then been seen for whatever medical condition they may have, whether it's physical or mental, and instead of taking them to jail, they're taking them to get services on the front end, which is good. There has been a couple of times during the follow ups where our mental health division, working with the officers that have been involved in these calls, are actually dropping charges on people that were found to be in crisis at the time. Did they commit the offenses? So I think there's a lot of really good things that are rolling out and we're working on some other things hopefully for this next year or two. Okay. Any other questions? Okay. Chief, I did have a hand raised. Mayor Pro Temelza. I know you don't want to see my hand, but I promised I must. Do you think it might make sense as we go through the budget process, given the demand that you're seeing as you're deploying the mental health division, to anticipate growth within the budget year there, that might it not be prudent to actually budget a little more for that group? Well it could be prudent, and that's a great question, Mayor Pro Temelza. That's a great question. But I do know that we don't want to budget for, one, we're looking at limited space for us as far as facilities right now, which is one portion of it. The second portion of it is, so we created the team out of existing positions to begin with, so we're still working back to try to recapture those. So if anything we're looking at potentially a mid-year, I want to make sure that we have a good handle on what we're doing, because on the other side of this equation is a mental health court has now been really seeing a lot of activity that they hadn't seen before, not just because of us, but there's a lot of other agencies that are starting to do their own emergency detention orders. So I think the mental health process and Denton County as a whole is going to have to adjust over this next 12 months so we can all kind of get a firm handle on what it truly looks like, because I don't think the picture has been clear up to this point. I guess I'll just ask the city manager to sort of have an eye on that, so that there's room to adjust to these challenges mid-year, because I think it's a really promising area. I think it's making Denton better, so thank you. Any other questions? Chief, I would just point out, I think probably it would be good to circulate a graphic, and I guess you could work with Assistant City Manager David Gaines, but I think to capture, I'm going to call it savings, it's probably not truly that, but because we acted on the second station when we did, there were some cost savings just baked in before the price of everything spiked, that sort of thing. So I think that's important to kind of get out there that we're saving some money with the new station there on Vintage Boulevard, kind of just highlighting that savings or just cost avoidance, if you will, something like that. But I'd love to have a graphic to kind of touch on that. And a follow-up question to that, is the gun range, is that flowing on time? Are we off schedule because of the rain? How's that, do you know how that's going? Right now we're still on schedule. We haven't come up into any major problems at this point, even with the weather. Great, great. And then, do you anticipate any need for policy or budget to, you know, obviously the budget side is what I'm trying to capture, but when it comes to the permanent list carry, we'll kick in in September, and so obviously our budget session will kind of end before that kicks in. Do we need to plan anything financially around that going into effect here in Texas? I don't see any local budgetary implications to it as far as the law enforcement is concerned. Okay. None that we're seeing right now. Got it. Okay. And then I would just kind of pick up where it was mentioned from a budget side of things. I'd encourage, I know we've had those conversations, I'd encourage those conversations to continue with the county and the sheriff's office with respect to pooling resources when it comes to the jail facilities. I mean, I know we've had those conversations, but I would just encourage those to continue, and that's all I have. Any other questions or statements? Got it. Okay. Thank you very much. Now I'm going to change hats and go into safety. Perfect. All right. Good evening, Mayor, Council, Frank Dixon, interim assistant city manager, and I'll be presenting a budget department presentation this evening. Joining me is Misty Jefferson, works for RizzCon, who's our safety director. She's sitting in the back if you have not met her. The safety organizational chart is pretty small, as you can imagine. With Misty as the director, you have Martin Walsh, and you have a training coordinator, Melissa Spencer. The ones that you see on the bottom don't actually report to Misty, but they are part of the safety program, so they work together very closely. And as you can see, once the city started looking at some serious employee health and safety concerns, specifically when it came to job specific training, aging equipment, outdated operating procedures, so they thought about what could we do to help streamline those processes, and that was to create our own safety department that had a holistic view across the city, and not just each individual department kind of doing their own thing. So some of the things that they did, and the reason we selected RizzCon to come in, so they could do an assessment of the safety program overall, again, and then we wanted to implement a safety management system so we could improve our safety performance. And as you can see through these pictures, like I said before, safety doesn't just go with DME or solid waste, it goes from animal services, water/wastewater, across the entire city, in the 1,600 and something employees that we have. So some of the accomplishments that they got early on was conducting skills-based safety training, and they utilized certified instructors. They also launched some employee-led safety committees citywide, which helped to increase that communication and getting the word across the entire organization. One of the important things that they did, not just for the fire department, but for DME and some other places where hearing and respiratory protection monitoring is important, is they got them the training that they needed. There's some things over, like water/wastewater, that people don't typically associate with respiratory training and equipment, but there are some hazards over there, some very serious hazards. Some of their goals going into next year is to better track those safety metrics and utilizing technology to help do that. And they want to implement a citywide safety recognition program, which is going to, again, keep promoting the safety of all of our employees across the city. One big change will be implementation of regular emergency drills across the city, and then ensuring that our safety equipment is maintained properly. And they're also working with a staff of public safety, both in police and fire, with their accreditation support, because there's a big component of safety interwoven in both of those as well. Now, if you look at their budget highlights, some of these numbers are going to be a little alarming because, again, they were all captured and you're breaking them out from where the city was doing the function to now you have Rizzicon doing a standalone function. And the contract with Rizzicon is about $718,000. So the delta that you see there are some of the things that they are forecasting for the next year, and that's in materials and supplies, the citywide safety recognition program, because obviously we haven't had one here in the city of Denton, so they don't know what that cost is going to end up being. So that was merely a forecast of what Misty thought she would need for the first year. And then obviously they'll adjust accordingly moving forward should they not reach that. And again, like their department is small, it's a pretty short presentation. All right. Questions for Seth? See you then? One more time? Great. Thank you. Thank you, Chief. Thank you. Yes. Excellent. Great to hear that. Okay. Well, that concludes staff presentations, right? So let's -- before we go to the next item, I want to give -- it's pretty about an hour-long stretch there. So we'll finish up the work session, but let's take a quick five-minute break. We'll come back 6.15, we'll pick up item C, and get through our work session, and then we're going to close. Thank you. And welcome back to this meeting of the Denton City Council at 6.18, and we're back on the record. We're on to our next work session item, which is item C, ID 21684, receive report, hold discussion, give staff direction regarding the possible merger of the Community Development Advisory Committee and the Human Services Advisory Committee. Okay. There we go. Good evening, Mayor and Council, Courtney Cross, Community Development Services Manager. I'm here to talk to you tonight about the proposed creation of a new committee to advise community services funding and activities. Historically, two committees were established to advise single grant programs related to community development activities. The Community Development Advisory Committee, also referred to as the CDAC, was established in 1978 to advise the Community Development Grant Program funded by federal sources, such as the Home Investment and Partnership Program, the Community Development Block Grant Program, and recently the Community Development Block Grant CARES Act Program. The Human Services Advisory Committee, also referred to as the HSAC, was established in 1989 to advise the Human Services Grant Program funded through the City General Fund with a percentage allocation from the Community Development Block Grant Program and also recently the Community Development Block Grant Program, CARES Act Program. This is an overview of the annual committee process, and it's worth noting here that duplicate activities are conducted for both committees throughout this process every year. Today, Council is considering an item on consent agenda, finalizing an amendment, changing the program year for our CDBG and home funds, which will allow for some very helpful efficiencies in this annual process, and we believe the creation of a single committee would allow for additional efficiencies, ultimately leading to increased staff capacity and a more strategically engaged committee. This is an overview of the membership structure of each of the committees, and I'll just note here that there are seven positions on the HSAC up for reappointment at the end of this current term in August, and six positions for the CDAC. So currently, one of the barriers of the two committee process and structure is the duplication of staff efforts to communicate data and important information to both committees. Additionally, the current process for both committees to evaluate available funding and make recommendations requires the HSAC to wait until the CDAC has finalized their decisions before making their final evaluations. Federal and local funding are also tracked and communicated to Council separately through both of these committees' actions, and as mentioned previously, both of the committees were established to serve very specific single grant purposes. We refer kind of colloquially to the CDAC as the bricks and sticks and the HSAC as the humans, but in reality, the grant rules for each of the committees is the same, and we don't really evaluate committee members based on their expertise in either of those areas. Over time, the city has developed a more diverse funding strategy and initiatives to address community needs, and the current committee structure doesn't really allow for the level of flexibility and infrastructure needed for either of the committees to respond to or advise on the increasingly complex nature of community needs. A single committee would allow staff to regularly engage members in a year-round strategic vision for a community-wide response to identified community needs. The city has experienced significant growth since the original establishment of both of the committees, and a single committee approach would streamline processes and provide the opportunity for members to focus on those community needs more comprehensively. The proposed new structure would help to alleviate duplication and disjointed communication associated with the current grant allocation process, ultimately optimizing staff and departmental resources for the highest level of impact. Staff did engage the committee in collecting their feedback in the form of a survey. We had about 70% or 14 of the 20 total members respond. The majority were in favor of the proposal, and we are currently coordinating a joint meeting of both committees on July 16th to discuss the proposal in more detail. The new committee structure would require some additional time for committee members rather than kind of having the processes split. They'd be consolidated, so it would require more time of individual members, and everyone expressed a willingness to be able to commit to that. And as you can see, some of our suggestions ranged from being in support and just wanting some more additional information or details, and we did have one member who was hesitant or against the proposal. As you all probably know, the city has appointees to three collective impact initiatives to address complex social issues. The Denton County Behavioral Health Leadership Team, Homelessness Leadership Team, and Workforce Success Leadership Team. And in order to provide a new committee with information on these efforts and the most knowledge possible of what's happening collectively in the county to address community needs, staff is recommending one ex-officio, non-voting appointee from United Way, to serve on the committee to help inform on the activities happening in these countywide leadership teams. So the proposed timeline of events, as previously mentioned, we're coordinating a joint meeting of both of the committees to discuss the proposal, which would allow us to come back at the end of July to council with a resolution establishing a new committee, allowing the city secretary's office to recruit for a new committee along the normal schedule, and that committee would meet in the fall to launch the new grant process. So our recommendations are the creation of a new committee with 11 members, one appointment per council member with four all seats and one ex-officio non-voting member from United Way. And option two there is always to accept other direction from council regarding the number and composition of members. And with that, I will take the presentation down and answer questions. And Danny Shaw, our committee services manager, is also here to help with questions. Thank you. Thank you, Billy. Okay, questions of staff? I'm going to go in the room here first. Mayor Proctor Meltzer. Thank you. If we look at the two committees as like a Venn diagram with some overlap, but how much is of what they do now, but how much is in the overlap which is really the same and how much falls in either side of the overlap? I think ultimately they're overlapping in all of the same community issues. So they're looking at housing, homelessness, human services. They're just addressing it through different programmatic interventions. So where one is looking at how we build nonprofit facilities or other structures that might support those community needs. The others are looking at how we provide public service funding to help support those needs. So there's overlap in the ideas that they're looking at strategically, but some differences in how they apply the grant funding that's available. So are there task differences once they look at the same set of issues? Are there distinct tasks involved in each of the, looking at each of the funding sources? At this point, no, because we, this year actually implemented a combined application process. So there was one singular application for everyone to utilize and the committees reviewed those applications and the process of how they review those was the same. They just met separately to review those applicant presentations and make considerations for recommendations, but the process itself was identical. Is there any other, like you've sort of said, the division that currently exists now isn't a rational division of work because you're saying the work's the same. Is there any other division of the work that makes sense? You know, like, okay, you wouldn't do it by funding source, but you know, are there different phases of the work or types of work that have to be done to complete their task? Yeah, I'm not sure. I think strategically and all of that looks the same. What is, what could be looked at theoretically is the expertise that might be required. So people who might be more familiar with construction might be more reasonable to be on a CDAC where people who are more familiar with social services might have an expertise for the HSAC. However, we've never sought that expertise when we've identified potential members, never asked for that as a qualification. So we get a lot of variety and usually we get folks who are just interested in helping people. And so they end up being the same skill set, the same interest, the same knowledge of what their community needs are. So they're the same as well. If I can just go a little further. I guess I'll just put this out there as a thought and you can tell me it makes no sense or let it influence you or whatever. But could there be benefit to consciously having some bricks and sticks expertise in one group and viewing them as in a sense, subcommittees and basically have a lot of joint meetings of the two. You know what I'm saying? There's no obstacle administratively that I'm aware of to having joint meetings. There's no rule that says you must do the same presentation twice. I get that. So we can have them in the same room and present. Yeah, we thought about that and so when we thought about if you give us direction to create a new committee that that would also be an option available to us to have that subcommittee function if there were some specialized expertise or training that would be necessary. But again, reality of the strategic view of it is very similar. So I think that's an option. Yes. Okay, thanks. I'll listen. All right. Any other questions here? No. Seeing none Councilor Arbiter. Yeah, so there are a number of things that I like about this and then I have some concerns and questions and things that I'm aware of. Number one, I'm wondering kind of what the rationale was to have the presentation to council before the joint meeting of these two groups. I don't mind, you know, have kind of sharing our input. I feel uncomfortable giving direction without hearing and watching that joint meeting of those two committees. I'm glad you're having it and if pinned against the wall, I will give direction. But I would much rather wait to hear. So I was wondering what the rationale was on coming to council first and then to the joint committees. So we thought we talked through how we might do this and what would be the optimal timeframe for planning for this. And we did look at this timeframe in June. But later on, we thought July would be a better option. So technically, we were looking at meeting with them first and then presenting to you later. But we were asked to move this presentation based on the council agenda and some other things. So it just ended up where we just changed when this meeting happened versus the other. Does that make sense? I like that that was your initial inclination. I think that was a good one, a reasonable one. And, you know, I would urge my fellow council members to kind of, you know, hold off and, you know, offer suggestions and input, but be open-minded to whatever these two committees are going to say when they meet together. I'm looking forward to that. So I like the idea of having these two, kind of consolidating these two groups because of the great overlap in their work. Like you say, you know, the people who are on these committees aren't interested in helping people, helping low-income people. And so it's a very common, you know, skill set and motivation. I'm, you know, I could possibly be convinced otherwise if the -- and I'll be listening very carefully to what the joint meeting of these two committees have to say, but I'm really wary about giving a spot, even an ex officio non-voting spot, to United Way or any other group that is not, you know, just members of the public and city staff because we don't have the ability to just audit, you know, other -- to audit these groups in the same way we can audit and control, you know, how transparent they are versus city staff and any government operations. You know, we have auditing and accountability to the public. And I'm not saying United Way is, you know, some sort of secret organization or anything, but just so -- you know, they're not government. So, you know, I would encourage them to, you know, make presentations as they always have to counsel if something comes up where they have to make a presentation or -- and to participate and provide input, not just United Way, but all of our service providers because, you know, the work that is -- that comes out of this, the grants given by these committees is done by our -- largely by our local nonprofits. So their voices are essential, but I don't like the idea of having them -- of having United Way on the committee, and I'll be curious to hear what committee members have to say about that. >> Okay. And I'll just say this. I support it. I think staff's kind of noted the key things. And the highlights for me, one, it's duplicative in their call to action, if you will. My words, not yours. But then the -- it's important what you touched on, that you need the flexibility to better serve the community, right, or the population we're serving, right? And so that's really important to me. That's the goal, right? If we're saying the people that do it and do the work day in, day out are saying this gives them a better way to serve those that we need to serve. That's the whole purpose of the committee. What else are we doing other than serving the people well and serving this community well, and if that expedites that and the people doing that every day say, yes, this will satisfy that and help us move forward in that way, what else are we trying to do? What other goals are out there? I don't know. And then I think that you touched on it in that vein, the flexibility. I'll touch on also the fact that when you talk about the committees, you did both, which I think is commendable. One, it's a survey, one, but then just to follow up with that with a conversation, too, right, just to make sure someone didn't just check the boxes or didn't understand. But to come back and have that conversation is another level of just confirmation for me. And then I have no problem with ex officio, because it's a public meeting, right? So you don't have a voting interest. It just says, yes, you get a seat at the table, right? That's all it says. You're not voting. It's a public meeting. Anyone could attend the meeting anyway. So it is not intrusive in any way. They don't have a vote in any way. It's just saying this group is going to send a representative every week and save them a chair. That's it in a nutshell, you know? And so I don't understand that. So, yeah, I support it. I'll hear from everyone else. We'll give direction, and we'll wrap up. Councilmember Beck, Councilmember Guara. Thank you, Mayor. So, Danny, harking back to Mayor Pro Tem's question, I mean, to make an analogy, we have one general fund. We have one P&Z and one PUB, or one mobility group or any other committee that we have in the city that are funded by the general fund, or the other sources of federal cares are everything else that we have. So those, we have two different roles or end different roles for our different boards of commissions, because as you said, they're sort of like, one of the goals was a bricks and sticks sort of goal, and I know we're being glib there, but we're not being so glib. The goal was to sort of take care of infrastructure, and the other goal was to handle people, and those are decidedly different things, even if we're dipping from the same pools of money. And so I guess my question is, why isn't something like the joint meeting with subcommittees more appropriate? So you, I mean, there's no argument that this is going to streamline staff time, and I think that's just clear, and I'm not even going to argue that point. The point is focus and the goal, and if the point is focus and the goal, if you have, you know, this actually gives you the opportunity to say to council, we need the CDAC to be bricks and sticks and have more developers and construction and other such people, or at least be biased in that direction. We need the HSAC to be more biased, and then as needed, we split off into those subcommittees and do those tasks and other ways we meet. I mean, it seems like the perfect blend of everything together. You save your time by having three quarters of your meetings overlap, and then you're also able to diverge in a way that you've never been able to before. So I mean, for me, it seems like we're not, we're creating a problem by solving a problem, and maybe we don't have to create the problem, maybe we just solve the problem. And I really like to just go, I mean, my direction would be to go with the sort of, you know, a subcommittee type approach like Mayor Pro Tem. Well, I think that's definitely an option to look at how they meet together. We would be challenged by the size of the group and then the quorum issues that we normally are, so those would just be general challenges to that process. But there's nothing to dictate that we couldn't do that. I think we heard the challenge from Mayor Pro Tem earlier on though, too, to look at how we operate more strategically and how we look at this from a very, very comprehensive view of it. And so we were just looking at a solution that would allow us to spend more time with the committees, get the investment in them to help them understand, and then also give them the tools to bring back that guidance to us. And we just felt like by streamlining it, we could do that better. So if there's another suggestion, we're obviously open to it. And I think I completely concur. I mean, you're going to streamline, and that's going to save. And I would be willing to hear, like, you know, maybe bringing the subcommittees down to, you know, lesser number of board members over a transitional period or something like that. I mean, I'd be willing to hear more about that. But I mean, I think it sounds like I haven't heard any argument that there's two different goals. And if you have two different goals, it sounds like maybe you should have two different committees. Well, again, I don't know that we do have two different goals. It's just maybe there's a different skill set for when we talk about the bricks and stick. But it was also historical. If you remember looking at the historical slide, the CDAC was formed first because it was just about federal funding that we received. It was only later that another council came forward and said we also want to look at general fund and how we help the nonprofit agencies in the community help serve people. And so that was formed in '89. So it didn't necessarily take that holistic view at the time that that was formed in '89. So now we're here. We're looking at the processes and what difficulties they create for us now in looking at how we allocate funding evenly, equitably, and with an understanding of what the overall community needs are. So that was why we proposed this idea as it is. Thank you. Okay. Council Member McGuire. Thank you. I have a procedural question. So Council Member Armitage's point is well taken that it would be nice to hear from the members of these committees prior to giving our direction. But of course, the timing is tricky. Would it be permissible within our rules of procedure for us to wait until the HSAC and the CDAC meet? Maybe staff can provide us with, you know, a link to a video of that meeting and/or, you know, a summary of the major points and then maybe we could provide our direction via email after we've seen that? Is that something that we would be allowed to do? Sarah Keckler, Chief of Staff. I think we're just seeking some of Council's initial feedback and questions. We don't need firm direction today, but are you generally supportive of us looking into this and proceeding with the Joint Committee meeting? You can see overwhelmingly just from the survey, there is indication of a combined committee somehow. We do want to work through that a little bit more with both committees. But we don't need firm direction today. We wanted to know if this is a -- you know, if it's no, then we'll stop and we won't go any further, but we did want to at least get Council's initial feedback before we go meet with the committees and we go further. Okay. Thank you. That's helpful. Council Member Davis. Thank you, Mayor. Following on to that, I think that these committees are -- I mean, look at the rosters. They're kind of a who's who of people who have been involved in human services in the Denton community, volunteers, most of us know, that we're familiar with their work or people who have stepped up to do the work. But having two of them just seems to be a historical anachronism. I mean, the way they came about just simply doesn't -- that division is artificial at this point. There's no reason why we can't have one committee that has that one shared vision. And I would like for that committee to be nimble. I mean, this idea of having 20-something people all get together and look through these applications, we have on the community partnership subcommittee of this council, there are three of us. And traditionally sometimes just those three people have trouble going through staff-prepared applications that are nicely prepared with spreadsheets and all those kind of things. And I know that Danny's staff provides all of that to these committees. It's a big lift that we ask of these committees. To me, it makes all the sense in the world to combine that expertise to have the -- a smaller, nimbler committee that's -- I'm not even sure I'd like to see the at-large members. I'd like to see maybe seven plus whatever the ex officio looks like. I don't know what the -- and maybe staff can answer this, but I don't really know what the utility of the at-large members is other than to add seats around the table to have other perspectives. I'm perfectly happy with a committee that is laser-focused, that is high in expertise. And that's not to say that any of our current committee members don't have that expertise. They certainly do. But it's like P&Z. When you join up with P&Z, there's a heavy -- a steep learning curve. You have to figure out what's going on. You have to get some training. You have some complex cases right off the bat. I'd like to see this committee be just as laser-focused as P&Z is, just as laser-focused on the job as ZBA. I'd like to see it elevated to that same kind of level. And the way you do that is not by having 20-something people around the table. It's by having seven -- I'd like to see seven -- highly focused, highly trained, very professional, maybe even meeting more often, like P&Z does, a very tight committee. >> Okay. Any other -- let me make sure I get everyone first. Councilman Byrd? >> I really appreciate the idea of the streamlined process. I think that it is just something that needs to happen. And I would agree that that would be my agreement on that. The communication, just have everybody sitting in the same room, hearing the same thing at the same time with their own tasks at hand, not necessarily needing, respectfully, Councilmember Beck, to put a subdivision in there. They're already there, you know, talking the same talk and hearing the same thing. I like the idea of the -- of meeting more often, staying on top of everything. Things change every day. Processes need to change every day. I also don't think that there needs to be a large number of people. It gets a little complicated with all of those voices but having additional people that are very well versed in why they're on that committee. I agree with this. I like the idea of pulling those things together. So I'll just leave my piece right there. And if it was up to me, I would say go for it. Thank you. >> I've never heard that phrase before. Leave my piece. >> Yeah, I concur with the idea of holding firm direction until after we hear from the folks there. You know, obviously there's overlap. Like I said, there's nothing preventing you now from having joint meetings and the idea of they're having a shared vision and looking at community issues holistically, you know, that's pretty easy to like. I'm not so clear that, you know, while those are sort of magic words to me, usually laser focused and so on, you'll probably hear me say them later in today's meeting. But in this particular instance there's another value, which is community input. And I'm not sure at this point whether I feel that having fewer members of the community provide perspectives and input is a good thing. So you know, I'm going to kind of keep an open mind about that. >> Okay. Councilmember Armitage. >> So I just wanted to add one thing that I forgot to mention before. That I'd just be curious to know what the joint committees would think about the possibility of having a -- this unified committee also, you know, on occasion, advise council when things come up that they have insight on. You know, friends, I mean, any number of things. You know, for instance, the way that sometimes if something gets funded by HUD, it can hold up the process and if it's a high priority item, sometimes general funds could, you know, get the same result faster and with less red tape. And that's the kind of -- that was just a random example. You know, but to hear from people who are dealing with these grant applications and following them through, dealing with HUD on a regular basis would be really helpful for me as a councilmember to hear their advice collectively when they have it. So it would be nice for them to -- I don't know if they have concluding remarks at those meetings, you know, but to allow for them to add just, you know, advice to council when that comes up. >> Okay. Well, and I'll just -- we're going to poll everyone and get a feel for direction and give you direction here in a bit. But the just of it is, here's what I'm hearing for those watching along. I hear staff clearly communicating what they need and their analysis and then it's almost like that's being challenged and that's unfortunate to me. I think you could not have been more clear about what works best for you and your function and kind of what gets you where you need to be from your perspective. And it's almost like, well, that's not the answer I want. Can I ask it a different way? And when you're talking about community input, I mean, I think that is valuable, right? All these decisions, one, come to council, right? So there's no unilateral decision at that level, one. So two, it comes to city council, everyone has our phone number and email address, and you don't have to be on the committee to go to that meeting. It also is a public meeting. So there's no -- there's no -- I don't want people following along to think that we're cutting off any level of communication, feedback, et cetera. You have the same two bites at the apple that you're able to then go -- attend that meeting and get into the details there, then come back. It will be a publicly posted meeting for city council to then communicate there. You can contact your city council person at any point and share your thoughts, which people do every day. So the communication is not stifled at all. All it is is the people doing the job every day are saying, hey, this helps us complete our task and serve our community better, and then, you know, either we agree or we disagree, but I think that's pretty -- in my mind, I've just not heard anything that counters -- and I think staff's been consistent in their answer. It's just there's these nuances thrown at it, well, what about this or what about that, but I don't think -- it would take someone to say, I've done the job, and I think it can be -- and to completely contrast what staff said, because I think staff's been consistent with their answer. The answer is that laser focus, that nimble ability helps serve our community, and I've not heard anyone talking about not challenging that. I've not heard anyone say that the community's -- the opposite, that the community's better served by a larger committee that is still -- however you tier it. I've not heard anyone say, well, the individuals we're trying to serve are better served by doing it a different way, and so I'm going to -- I'm going to lean and continue to trust those that do it every day, and I think, Councilmember Davis, you have a significant point. I mean, P&Z handles every case that comes before us when you're talking about planning and zoning, et cetera, plats, et cetera, and there's only seven of them, and they achieve those tasks, so there's something to be said for that number and that ability to just kind of get in and do it every day. So that's where I fall, so I just -- I'll take the other comments, but then I need -- I'm going to be gleaming from your comments, so if you would then summarize with whether you support staff's recommendation or not, that would help me not count you wrong, but I'm going to give staff direction by way of summary. Councilmember McGuire. >> Thank you, Mayor Hudspeth. So to give my non-firm, soft direction, I'm definitely open to the idea of combining these committees. I'm looking forward to hearing from the members of the committees, but in the meantime, I think that's something we mostly agree on. The only thing that's giving me pause is that, you know, as Councilmember Davis mentioned, the list of the members of these committees is a who's who of people who really deeply understand the community and have done an enormous amount of service, and their expertise is incredibly valuable, and I would hate to lose more of it than we have to, but, of course, 20 people is unwieldy, so I would just err on the side of keeping it larger, but not 20 people. You know, I think 11 to maybe even 14 people would be a reasonable size. >> Okay. Anyone else? Councilmember Davis. >> I'm going to continue to agree with the overwhelming majority of the committee members who were surveyed and said that they're in favor of this, and I'll also say, looking at this who's who list, I can't think of one of them who wouldn't say, I'm sure each of them does want to continue to serve in some capacity, I can't think of one of them who I know that wouldn't say, I would gladly give up my seat for somebody who would rather do it, somebody who could add a different expertise than I have or somebody. Each of these people is not on the committee because they just love being on city committees and need that little gold star or resume point. They're there because they want to do the work, and if a smaller, nimbler committee was better at doing the work, I think each and every one of them would be okay with that. That's me speaking for a large group of people all at once. And I continue to be in favor of a smaller group as opposed to a larger group. >> Okay. Councilmember Armitage. >> So obviously I, too, prefer the idea of a smaller group. I think 10 or 11 is a fine number for me. You know, even as many as 14 would be pushing it. Big committees of, say, 20 people or more. We add those sometimes for ad hoc committees, and it's interesting to hear all the voices, you know, including when they break into subcommittees, but it can get really messy and unwieldy and become a problem with making forum like we've had for some of those committees. I, you know, continue to feel really strongly that we shouldn't have a spot reserved on a committee like this for United Way. United Way could be a, you know, recipient of funds. They are, you know, under COVID, they've been kind of a middle person in distributing funds. I think it's important, it's really important not just for auditing and transparency reasons I mentioned previously, you know, but so that they can show that they're not involved in deciding who gets these, you know, who gets these funds in any kind of, you know, unusually influential way, that we just keep it to members of the community and as, you know, as the mayor mentioned, you know, because any member of the public or any member of any group can come and give input and participate in the meetings, even request to give a presentation, you know, someone from United Way could do that too. And then finally, I just want to underscore that everything that I've just said is, it's a very soft direction because I really want to hear first what these two committees together have to say. I appreciate the survey input, but I'm especially interested in hearing that conversation. Okay, anyone else? Mayor Perttu-Meltzer? Yeah, a couple of last bits. What is the quorum history of these two groups? We usually just make quorum. Do you generally make quorum? And did the survey include any kind of input on how big a group they thought they needed to get the work done? We didn't ask that question specifically, but we will. Okay, so that's something that might come up in the meeting. Okay, and just if you're keeping track, I personally have no problem at all with United Way being at the table. I think they have kind of an overview of community needs and have a kind of almost air traffic control type function that I think gives them good perspective and it's a non-voting position. So me personally, no problem with that. Okay, anyone else? Council Member Bet. Thank you, Mayor. I guess my concern is not about, you know, nobody wants a 20-person committee. I think that's pretty clear direction. But at the same token, my quorum, my hesitancy is the goals, again, like I said, and I won't reiterate it too much, is simply that it feels like there's different goals. And if there's different goals, then I guess if the will of the council overall is to merge them, then I think we need to be laser focused and you think we need two colors of laser here. We need some cross interference, if you will. And so I would be interested in making sure that the goals are carefully maintained and sequestered from the original need because we had them for 32 years. So I don't think you get stuck in the mud or stuck in cement, but same token, if you have something for 32 years, it wasn't breaking. And so I understand staff's issues and I concur with that. I don't want to see you doing double everything. So my direction is don't do double everything. But my soft direction is keep focused on those goals. It would be my encouragement. >> May I respond? Just quickly, we don't see it as breaking what exists. It's more of an enhancement to what we're able to do because right now we feel like they are just kind of focused on just that small slice of what we do, which is those specific grant funds. I think our goal is to look at how we expand that work and give them the tools they need to be better advisors for you. >> Okay. >> Thank you. Well said. So I think overall, so do we move forward? The direction is yes, but with the feedback from the meeting, but I think there's enough to at least warrant moving forward my account. And there's some nuances there, but I'll leave that to staff to evaluate tomorrow so that I don't poison the pool with my summary. But thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you, Courtney. Good to see you. Thank you, Denix. Okay. That takes us to item D, which is ID21562, receive report, hold discussion and give staff direction on pending City Council requests. >> Hello, Mayor and Council. I'm so excited to actually be here at this podium with y'all. This is my first time to do this, so bear with me as I try to abate my excitement for being in person with y'all. >> It's a good word, abate. >> Okay. Here we are, I believe. Okay, everyone. My name is Rachel. I'm assistant to the City Manager and I will present Councilmember Armentor's work session pending request items. Just by way of example, for those that may be joining us for the first time, or by way of reminder also, up to seven requests will be reviewed per meeting, and we just have the one tonight. I'll introduce it for y'all, and I will ask that Councilmember Armentor have one minute to describe it and justify it, and then the remaining elected officials will have up to one minute to provide your feedback and indicate support for the use of staff time to respond to the request, and we will respond to all requests where a consensus is established. Tonight, our work session pending request is from Councilmember Armentor, as I mentioned. It's updating and editing the Council rules and procedures, which is Section 229, for maximum public benefit, and we have this as it was written for you here, and then just a little bit of staff information, as it is in Article 2 of the City Charter, and I'll bring this down so that we can see Councilmember Armentor. Okay, I'm requesting a brainstorming work session on updating and editing our rules and procedures for maximum public benefit. Possible changes to deliberate would include but not be limited to, one, allowing members of the public to comment in work sessions, rather than just leaving it to the mayor to decide on a case-by-case basis; two, repealing the restriction that members of the public and staff address their questions and comments only to the group as a whole and not to individual Councilmembers; and three, updating the language of our rules and procedures for greater inclusivity and accuracy, such as changing citizens to members of the public or something similar, and changing any his or her or him and her constructions to theirs or them, and anything else the Councilmembers would like to discuss from our rules and procedures. For me, the highlight of this that I brought forward is the idea of having members of the public participate in work sessions. If you look at the justification in our rules and procedures, which says that public input in person isn't needed at work sessions, I don't think that makes sense. I think the public should be able to call in on individual items in work sessions, not only on consent agenda. Okay. Any other? Councilmember McGuire. Thank you, Mayor. I totally agree. I think those are very reasonable changes that would promote community involvement, engagement in our processes, and I would like to move forward with that. Okay. We'll reset the clock. To me, the question isn't whether they're reasonable or good ideas. It's whether we have a work session, and I'm holding a super high bar. I gave direction against one that the Mayor proposed last week. It's just this summer, just this summer, there's a comprehensive plan draft coming forward that will have many arms and legs, an affordable housing draft plan coming forward that will have many arms and legs, solid waste management draft strategy, lots of things to work out, City Hall West options, Catalyst Fund policy draft. I don't quibble with any of this, but if it didn't happen in a year, but these things did happen because even if we just reserved time for an update on our council priorities each session, I would prefer to have that. I've been here for three years, and some of these things have not yet gotten done. I feel the press of time. I want us to have focus and urgency. Okay. Councilman Beck. There we go. Sorry about that. Thank you, Mayor. I am actually interested, but I am actually mindful of the time as well. I think that there's a lot of really easy, low-hanging fruit that could be implemented really easily, so I would be interested, but again, I concur with Mayor Pro Tem. I think there's a lot of other elements that I would like to see prioritized. We don't, unfortunately, have a mechanism. I would love to have a mechanism where I could have a lower priority work session and a higher priority work session, and if I could just respond as like say, I like this, I agree with this, but would like a lower priority on this, that would be my thoughts on this. Councilman Davis. I'll be perfectly frank. These seem like well-intentioned solutions. They seem like well-intentioned solutions in search of problems. I don't see where any one of these suggested rules of procedure is preventing the public from contacting us or being involved in the process. I feel like I'm very in touch with the public and I'm contacted very regularly on work session items, even if they don't have a particularized point in the agenda to call in like they do on the IC items. I feel like some of these, the idea that you should be allowed to address a single member of a body, most legislative bodies have this rule in place to prevent individuals from being attacked. You have to address Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, Mr. whoever is in the office of the chair or the body as a whole. Those are for good and reasonable reasons. This is something that pulls us away from things that we should be focused on for no problem that I've seen identified yet. Okay. Anyone else? Okay. That concludes that item. It takes us to our closed session and so I'll go on to close. So we'll go to close the consultation with attorney under Texas Government Code 551.071 and then we'll go to our closed session Bat Caves and we'll call the first item. So we'll be in recess, let's say five minutes to get us all situated, technical issues. So 8.01 we will be back, we'll be in closed session. Thank you. Pardon me. 7.01. 7. No. There we go. And welcome back to this meeting of Denton City Council. It is 7.24 PM. We're back from closed session and we pick up with our consent agenda item. If you're following along, items T, U and V were pulled. And so I'll take a motion on the consent agenda item. Mayor Pro Tem Meltzer? I move approval of the consent agenda, excluding items T, U and V. Thank you. Council Member Byrd. I second. Thank you. I have a motion and a second. Motion by Mayor Pro Tem Meltzer, second by Council Member Byrd. Discussion? Seeing none. Mayor Pro Tem, I'll say you. Aye. Council Member Byrd. Aye. Council Member Davis. Aye. Council Member McGuire. Aye. Council Member Vett. Aye. And is Council Member Armitage, we're on the consent agenda. Vote. We'll give it a minute. Council Member Armitage, we're on the consent agenda items, but for T, U, V. How say you? Yes. Okay. That passes 7-0. Texas to item T. I'll call that. We do have one caller, so don't let me forget that after the presentation. Let me see here. Sorry. T. So it's ID 2-1, 1-2, 1-4, consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton, a Texas Home Rule Municipal Corporation authorizing the city manager or designated to execute a professional services agreement with Byrd Advocacy and Consulting Inc. Good evening, Mayor and Council. I'm Rachel Wood, Deputy Director of Capital Projects. Just give me one quick minute. I'll pull up the presentation. As I'm pulling up the presentation, I did want to note that Brandy Byrd is on the call and available to answer specific questions once I get through the presentation. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Okay, I do apologize for that. So just a quick background regarding the city's engagement with Byrd Advocacy and Consulting. We first entered into a contractual agreement with Byrd Advocacy and Consulting Inc. in 2018. I will note that the city of Louisville is also under contract with Byrd Advocacy and Consulting for Transit Consultative Services. And there is a lot of synergy there with Louisville just because we are the two largest member cities. And so she is able, Brandy Byrd being the principal with Byrd Advocacy and Consulting, is able to do a lot of coordination for items. And some of the initial goals of that 2018 contract were to restructure the DCTA Board of Directors to ensure the cities with pledged sales tax dollars that fund DCTA had a majority of the voting seats on the board. So really looking at governance there, adoption of the Enhanced Local Assistance Program. I will note later on in this, this did result ultimately in the TRIP Program, Transportation Reinvestment Program, which the city does get $2.6 million for implementation of an efficiency study to understand the opportunities to improve service delivery with DCTA and the adoption of an administrative fee policy that ensures member cities were not subsidizing service in the non-member cities of Frisco and McKinney in Denton County. So a couple of the accomplishments to date of our arrangement with Byrd Advocacy and Consulting is that governance restructure as well as revised bylaws. She regularly reviews DCTA's board priorities and provides feedback to staff. I've already mentioned that administrative fee policy, the efficiency study conducted on DCTA's operations to identify efficiencies and areas of improvement within their service delivery model, and then the Transportation Reinvestment Program, which the city of Denton is receiving $2.6 million annually in capital funding to help support connectivity to bus infrastructure and transit infrastructure across the city. So some of the services in addition to the accomplishments that she's provided to date is she provides staff support and augmentation of staff, including the review of leadership updates, attends all DCTA board meetings, reviews all the agenda items, and provides staff with feedback on items that we need to be aware of. She serves as an advisor to the city's DCTA board appointees. As I mentioned earlier, she facilitates and coordinates between the member cities and she does serve as the consultant for the city of Lewisville as well. Provides knowledge and understanding of the operation of peer city agencies, including DART and Trinity Metro for comparison purposes. She also reviews DCTA's long range plan, also is responsible for fully vetting and understanding DCTA's cost of service model, and provides additional support as requested by staff to ensure the city of Denton receives the most efficient and effective public transportation service. So just a quick overview of the contract itself. It's a not to exceed amount of $117,000 over the full term of the contract, which is a one-year term with the option of two additional one-year extensions, paid in monthly installments of $3,250. So that's just an overview of the engagement that we have with Bird Consulting, and I'm happy to answer any questions. And again, I'll mention that Brandy Bird is on the phone to answer any specific questions you may have of her as well. Okay, thank you, question, and then we have the caller. Is that right? Because I may want to take that. Is Rachel there or? Yes, Mayor, this is Brandy Bird. I may be the caller, but I am on the line, and do you have a few comments, just if time allows? No, I'm sorry. Are you able to answer questions? Yes, no, there is a caller from the public that wanted to call in on this item that I may want to take first, and then take staff council questions, but I'm waiting to see if the caller is. Absolutely. So it's Rachel or Stuart listening? No. Okay, we'll take council questions. Commissioner Davis. It sounds like the caller. Of course. Mayor, the caller is on. Okay, thank you. Are you there? I am. Okay, so if you'll give your name and address again, you'll have four minutes. Thank you. My name is Joshua Happen. My address is 1414 Auburn Drive in Denton. As I said earlier today, thank you to the city workers who have made it possible for me to participate in the meeting today and this evening with Stuart and Rachel who have been very helpful. I'm an organizer for the No Bus Cuts Denton campaign. It's a group that's formed to stop the DCTA GoZone plan to cut bus routes and lay off bus drivers. As I said earlier today, we oppose the awarding of a contract to the Bird Agency because of the harm that the agency have already done as the architect of the GoZone plan and the future damage that the agency would do. And that's where I'll focus on for my statement this evening. But finally, we oppose the awarding of the contract to the Bird Agency because they simply give bad advice. It's bad in two senses. If GoZone proposal is morally corrupt and financially and fiscally irresponsible. Our campaign has learned a lot since I first addressed city council about a month or so ago about the GoZone proposal from DCTA, which was, as we know, initially proposed by the Bird Agency. We've learned a lot about the human cost, that the human cost would actually be much worse, much higher than we thought it would be. For example, for bus drivers, although the mayor has told us that bus drivers would be hired on by the contractor, VIA, under the GoZone plan, DCTA have admitted that there will be layoffs of drivers and that there is no plan or agreement with VIA to have the laid off drivers hired on. It's also the human cost would be much higher than we thought for bus riders. We understood that bus riders under the GoZone plan would need access to a telephone. We learned that DCTA spokesperson at a virtual town hall told us that DCTA have no idea how many current bus riders don't have telephone access. And then we just learned from Nicole Recker, I think I've gotten her name right, at last week's presentation the DCTA did, that if not only simply having a matter of access to a telephone to be able to book rides on the GoZone service, one would need a potential rider would also need a credit card or debit card in order to be able to book a ride. So the impacts for bus riders are even worse than we knew, or at least it was made obvious through the information produced by DCTA. So not only was the human cost, we were learning greater than what we thought, the financial arrangements and possibilities of the plan are also worse than we had thought they would be. Our campaign has formed a coalition with partners, including the Transit Center Foundation in New York, the International Office of the ATU, which is the Bus Drivers Union, and the Texas AFL-CIO in Austin. And what we've learned through them is that DCTA would certainly, if they implemented this GoZone plan, would certainly, there would certainly be lawsuits against DCTA, which is an agency that's funded in part by Texas. That is your time. Okay. I'm sorry, I can't understand. Thank you very much. Okay. Councilmember Davis. Thank you, Mayor. Do we have anyone currently on city staff who has either the experience or expertise to handle the same work that Ms. Byrd does for the city currently? We do not currently have anyone on staff with her level of expertise. And is that in part why we hired a consultant for this particular area, that we're not exactly equipped to answer some of these transit questions without some advice from an outside consultant? That is correct. And is staff recommending approval of this contract with the consultant? We have had benefits from the contract that we've had, mentioning primarily the restructuring of the board and the bylaws, which was a direct results of direction received from the city council. So using that assessment, yes, I've only had limited experience, so I'm only speaking from a very short time period. But when we do request objective information and research, we get that back in a timely manner and she's very responsive and she has that level of expertise that staff currently does not have and we would have to add or augment our existing staff to have that level of expertise in house if we were not to contract out for this service. Thank you. Okay. Any other questions? Councilman Brett. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So I have a couple questions. So the first one plays right off of Councillor Davis's question and that is, we have a representative on the DCTA, is that right? We do. And so that representative ostensibly represents our interests, our viewpoint, our needs here on council and towards the various issues related to the DCTA, is that right? That is correct. And then do we have a number of regional mobility councils, the NCTC-COG, the Dallas Regional Mobility, our own internal mobility council, where the staff and council opine on mobility, is that correct? We do. I will note that each of those do have extensive agendas and we do have staff assigned to those, but it's not something that with our existing staff capacity we could just say, can you add this to your existing workload? It would require some restructuring if we were to do that. Could we do it? Absolutely, but we do benefit from having this augmented service because it's not something that we're having to do in-house. Okay. And then I guess, I have two more questions if you will, Mayor. One thing is it was unclear to me in the list of accomplishments, seemed like a lot of those were DCTA accomplishments. Do we have a feel for those accomplishments that we feel Ms. Byrd is or her consulting agency were directly responsible for versus just general accomplishments of the DCTA? I know she has worked very closely with our previous city manager and deputy city manager on the restructuring in particular and the development of those bylaws. It wasn't something that just came from DCTA, but we did heavily influence that. Unfortunately, that predates my time in capital projects and so I'm only speaking off of the limited exposure that I had when I was in a different department. I don't know if someone else wants to add to that or I will note that we also have Brandy Byrd on the call and she can provide some specifics if the city council so desires to call on her. I've got some information. I have had some affiliations just working because I serve on the North Texas Mobility Commission, but specifically as someone who served as a consultant for us, she reviewed all the agendas and all the items that were being proposed and shared the information with Todd and the city manager in Lewisville, Donna Barron, particularly the efficiency study for DCTA's operations. That was something that she looked at and made recommendations because there were some concerns on the operations and things that occurred. She also worked to look at the fee policy for contract services. She's reviewed a lot of the issues related to North Texas Mobility Commission and has given staff recommendations. Prior to me, it's been Todd and Todd Heilman and Donna Barron, but she also analyzed the bus routes to ensure more services throughout the different cities and then provided that information to the representative, whoever was representing the city. At this time, it's former Mayor Watts, but that would be her role is to serve as that advisor. She reviews every agenda item thoroughly and then gets with that representative from that council and works with them to help them better understand what it is they're asking, what it is that they're wanting to do, how does it impact the overall effort? And so I would say just my little bit of time, it's been invaluable to me just to better understand and that's her role. Okay, take that. And then I guess my last question is sort of maybe I'll piggyback off that. So a series of events and it was potentially invaluable to those series of events. I guess going forward, it's proposed about $39,000 a year, which my estimate for bus fare passes 52,000 rides on various DCTA one-way routes that would be the equivalent of the contract. I guess we would be charged with making the estimation that her services are worth 52,000 rides. I guess I'm, regardless of what happened in the past, I'm a little unsure about that sort of that role going forward. Thank you, Rachel. Okay. Member Tim Meltzer. Yeah, I'll just make some comments. I don't question Ms. Byrd's skills or her contribution, particularly when the tasks were about the whole legislative side and the restructuring, which couldn't really come from inside DCTA. And I don't think that the fee is ridiculous or anything like that. But I think at this point, now on the operational side, we already pay DCTA, they have lots of staff that has transportation expertise, they have upper management who talks to us. Their staff has hired consultants. We have a council rep. I think there's kind of oversight on top of oversight. To me, it seems like, I would say job well done, but classic scope creep. And I think if DCTA needs perhaps even to hire Ms. Byrd, if they need consulting resources, I think that's sort of more of the analogy, we function like council functions almost like a board to the city, but we don't hire our own consultants to tell us how to talk with you. If you have a consulting need, we generally recommend that to us. So I think it's kind of organizationally weird and I don't support this structure. Okay. Any other questions? So I agree. I recently had a wonderful and really informative conversation with Ms. Byrd about a number of issues about DCTA and she provided a lot of information and that was great. As far as public expenditure, this is information that was primarily coming from DCTA staff. So I could have gotten that same information from DCTA staff. It feels like a redundancy at this point. And I don't like the look of Louisville and Denton both sharing the same consultant with no other cities having the same consultant. As Mayor Potem said initially, there was legislation that the DCTA couldn't do on its own. And so Byrd Consulting did this for the city, that's great. But now it feels like a redundancy and I feel like all of those things, that list of bullet points, that Byrd Consulting has been involved in are things that also come from DCTA staff who is really accessible to us as council members whenever we have a question or concern from members of the public or about Denton specifically. So to me, it seems unnecessary at this point but I thank Byrd Consulting for their service. I just don't see that it's necessary anymore. >> Okay. Any other questions for staff? Councilmember Byrd. >> I just have a few questions for clarification. My biggest concern here is just the negativity factor that I'm feeling right now that's stated in this gentleman's phone call and some feedback that I've gotten from some of my constituents and it's very, it's weighing on me that there is something that's underlying here that I probably just don't understand at this point. But it's a negative vibe that I'm getting out of this conversation. And so, you know, I'm listening to my counterparts here, my peers here, that's giving me some, the feedback that they're giving is also playing into what I've been hearing from my constituents and I want to always make sure that I'm on the side of what my constituents have asked me to do. And I don't know this group but I am agreeing that it seems like we are layering something here on top of something that's already being done. Such as working to ensure the A train is able to extend south to Dart Silver Line project. I mean that's already, it's here focusing on decreasing headways on the A train to increase the frequency of services on the train. Working to ensure the micro transit implementation is seamless, that's something that we should already be doing and already should have been doing and should be doing in the future anyway. So what's the value, what's the real value here? The other thing it says didn't receive 2.6 million dollars in the first year of the program but yet it's noted here that we're to receive 2.6 million dollars every year. So which, are we going to be assured something like that? Those are the kind of things that I have weighing on my mind right now, it just doesn't seem like a positive, forward, progressive thing that the, that my constituents are looking for. Thank you. So I guess if Ms. Byrd, if you want to speak to those questions and then we can, we'll wrap up. The question is, I'm sorry, I did not mean to, oh Ms. Byrd, the other Ms. Byrd, I'm sorry. I have no answers, so I'm sorry. I'm sorry Councilmember, I understand the confusion, thank you Mayor. So just to address a couple of the Councilmembers comments, I do think it's important for you to understand that all of the accomplishments that were listed, that several of the Councilmembers referenced, those were all initiatives that were driven by the board members from Denton and Louisville, so that was very much a coordinated effort to ensure that those things were accomplished at the DCPA board level and those were not staff driven initiatives. So that's the differentiator there that I think it's important for Council to understand. And then just to address Councilmember Byrd's concerns about some of the negativity that was expressed, I didn't want to say, I think it's very important for Council to understand what led the DCPA board to this decision. The architect of the on-demand service was really Accenture and Cambridge Systematics. Cambridge is a partner with Accenture, they're one of the premier transit planning firms in the country. They led an efficiency study that was requested by the DCPA board to understand what is the best mode to provide the most service to the most people in the city of Denton and throughout Denton County. And so it was really that study that led the board to consider making this move to on-demand and it was really only after they looked at all of the ridership data and understood that there are a significant number of bus routes in Denton that were much below the minimum threshold for fixed route bus service. We talked about this in the mobility committee that Jarrett Walker, who's known as a national expert on this issue, set that minimum threshold at 10 riders per hour and the bus routes that are being considered to be converted to on-demand are very much below that threshold. And so that was really the determining factor for the DCPA board in considering this policy change. And for me personally, I don't know that we've talked about my background. I don't know that that was included in the packet, but I have worked with Dart, Trinity Metro, DCPA, and Cog for the past 20 years. I'm a huge transit supporter, I actually founded an advocacy group for transit 10 years ago, the Transit Coalition of North Texas, so that's why I was really excited about this project when I took it on three years ago because the focus at that time and really continues to be was to expand transit service in Denton and to serve more people. And that's really where the DCPA board is coming from and this potential decision to convert some of these routes to on-demand, the bottom line for them is they're working hard to fulfill their mission and to move the most people with limited dollars. And based on all the data and all the information they've been given, they feel like this option will accomplish that goal. But I think Councilmember Armitage, we talked about this as well. I can assure you that if this pilot program of on-demand is not moving more people after two years, then the DCPA board will pivot, they've been very clear on that. We'll be back here talking about fixed routes, which ones to return, and at that point we'll have the origin destination data that we need to craft a successful bus system, which we do not have at this point. So I'll stop there and answer any additional questions that Council may have. Okay, thank you. And I'm just one second, Councilmember Davis. I guess for me, I'm going to speak to those watching, because I think the citizens deserve -- someone talked about the past, and the past is critical. And so I want the citizens to understand completely and clearly what's at stake here first. I'm shocked. It's $39,000, and we're a $1.3 billion budget city. And I say that because I think there's some ideologies here at stake that don't -- I take my duty to the taxpayers very serious. And to that end, this is a DCTA decision, and you have to ask yourself, if you're watching this meeting, why would advocates come to this body, advocating against a separate body, other than the ideologies don't match, and so you're looking for traction at this level. Which is -- that's in their purview to do. We're open to the public. But I'll say the past is key, and here's why. Because last year, I do believe it was around $13 million, the citizens of Denton paid into DCTA. This year, it will be around $14 million. But yet, the suggestion would be to pay DCTA staff to advocate. They've been taking that money and not being held accountable. So for those that are watching along, look at the budget, ask questions, and you'll find the answer is, what Ms. Byrd has been trying to do is get our money back. And so, no, the question is not a math equation of 39K times a number of rides. The question is, $39,000 netted us out $2.6 million to the positive on an ongoing basis to try to get our money back that they were just spending with -- they were just taking the money and spending it. We were then, as a city, then allowing Frisco to bankroll their transit department with the City of Denton sales tax dollars, and Ms. Byrd goes to battle that to now reduce the size of the board so that there's a lower voting number so that we have control or greater say in our own destiny. It's unbelievable. If you look at the past, I mean, just to say these things, it's -- I cannot believe it. And so then you look at City Council, because that was brought up. City Council has consultants, Capital Edge. So they advise staff, they advise the City Council members, it's the exact same thing. So there's nothing unique about the way it flows. Capital Edge does the research, then reports back to us, we process it. So there's nothing -- I would ask you not to buy into that, that there's anything unique about this arrangement. And when you're talking about isolating what this particular consultant does, just DCTA acts -- that board acts like a body just like this body acts like. You can't say that one individual member did anything. We all have to vote. It takes four of us, no different than any other board. So that's the thing that's confusing to me, that why are we trying to isolate and be divisive about how that board makes decisions. And then I'll point out the caller says -- so the caller points to nothing that Ms. Byrd failed to do. So if you're advocating that a consultant didn't do their job, that should be low-hanging fruit, right? You should say that consultant didn't do this number of things. The caller doesn't do that. The caller says they're upset about the bus cuts, they talk about the unions, they talk about the jobs, but none of that is a result of directly associated with Ms. Byrd, then goes further to become personal to say she's morally corrupt. How do we as a body support that? How do we not patently reject that and say we're going to treat people with respect? You know, so there's a lot wrong here for me. But I will just say why I support this, because we shouldn't waste 40 minutes talking about $39,000. It's noted, and I've had private conversations with Louisville and understand the value of the synergies, understanding that DCTA connects with DART, understanding the value of relationship. And so when you're talking about bringing back $2.6 million in one year when we've been doing nothing but paying in, that alone justifies the $39,000. Take that above and beyond to say that deal to carve out Frisco and to carve out these other cities that were just riding our coattails, if you will, that alone makes her time valuable and her efforts valuable and should continue. So yeah, and then just to -- I'll take her at a word that she says Accenture is the architect of that decision, and I'll take the collar at his word that there will be lawsuits. Well, that's fine. That's a DCTA decision, right? So it's not a city council decision, and I'm shocked that we're having this conversation. So again, that's my thing. It just -- I have a duty to the taxpayers. This bird has worked on this deal and I believe has achieved enough, and the cost of someone else getting up to speed on the three years that she's been at work. So if we bring in a new consultant that may net out the same suggestions, right, we're not -- I hope we're not seeking and hunting for an answer, right, just trying to find a consultant to tell us what we want to hear, but the data may point out to the same. No one's challenged the data that says this is the direction they're going, right? No one's challenged that. There's been no data provided me that says that the suggestions aren't correct. So we would then -- I guess this body, if we reject this, would then say instead of spending $39,000 for someone that's done it for three years, to then take that money and triple it, let's say, because you've got to pay someone to get up to speed on the last three years, then they've got to get up to speed on what DCTA has done, then they have to provide a recommendation, which may be the very same thing. So we're paying three to four times more for the same thing, because we're not guaranteed an answer. We're just saying we don't like what Ms. Bird has done, in theory, some of us, but I've not heard what she's done wrong. So staffs pointed out she orchestrated the $2.6 million in funding, the rearrangement of the deal, and I'm waiting to hear something that she's done wrong other than the personal attack and the fact that they don't want the bus drivers to have uncertainty about their jobs, but their contract, they're not full-on employees, and I don't want anyone to lose their job, and I appreciate that, but at the same time, a lot of staff lost their job. A lot of -- you know, everyone's had to scale back during this pandemic. It's a once in 100-year pandemic. It's a very unique situation. So that's my thoughts and why there's value add, and I'm just shocked that we're having this conversation over $39,000. Councilmember Davis? >> I'd like to engage in discussion on this, but to do that, I'd like to make a motion that we approve the item, and so we can move into discussion. >> Okay. >> We have a motion by Councilmember Davis, is there a second? >> I second. >> Motion by Councilmember Davis, second by Councilmember Byrd. Discussion. Councilmember Davis. >> Thank you. What I'm hearing here are two very fundamental misunderstandings, and I'm hearing it from the council dais, and I'm hearing it from callers, and I'm hearing it in the emails that I've been getting on this subject. The first misunderstanding is that the DCTA acts with Denton's interests in mind. They do not. DCTA is a separate governmental entity. Staff has to be diplomatic, Ms. Byrd has to be diplomatic, because she deals with them all the time. No pun intended, we were taken for a ride for over a decade with DCTA. We were one tiny voice on a board made up of member cities that paid nothing into DCTA. Zero. The restructuring was not DCTA getting their act together and deciding that things ought to be run better or more equitably. That was Denton and Lewisville fighting in the legislature to get that change. Ms. Byrd was the architect of anything, the architect of that. At our behest. That's what she was hired to do. The $2.6 million was clawed back from DCTA, and, I mean, no disrespect to the DCTA staff, but we're blessed here in Denton to be very -- we have a tight run ship. We expect a lot of our staff. We get a lot from our staff. You saw the kind of answers we got from DCTA staff when we asked very straightforward questions in our whole conversation with them. It may surprise some of you all to know, I'm being a little sarcastic and glib here, Denton and DCTA do not always see eye to eye. Look at this GoZone conversation. It behooves us to have a hired gun. That's what a consultant is. She works for us. She is our hired gun. She's not DCTA's. She's not shoving GoZone down anybody's throat. She is a consultant who advises us and gives us information. And that's the second misunderstanding. I don't know where it came from. I don't know who's spreading it out there, but these emails I'm getting from people primarily like to call her, folks from the no bus cuts, folks that don't want there to be changes to the fixed routes. I'm hearing from people saying that somehow Ms. Byrd is, one, the architect of this, or that she's pushing this, or that she has anything at all to do with the ultimate decision. She is our advisor. We are free to accept or reject her advice. The DCTA board will vote. We have a representative on that board. The other cities have representatives. The county has a representative. Ms. Byrd does not have a vote on that board. She has been nothing but -- and I'll tell you, I've never met Ms. Byrd. I've only seen the results of her work. And the fact that she sat down there, sat down and talked with Councilmember Armenter tells you, somebody who's obviously antagonistic to some of her work, she works for us. She is our hired gun, and she's been nothing but a value add to the City of Denton. And it frustrates me to hear these misunderstandings, fundamental misunderstandings elevated to the level they have been. This is classic shooting the messenger. This is not how you treat people. When they bring this kind of value add to our citizens, when they claw back millions of dollars of our tax money from an entity that was perfectly happy to hang on to it -- I guess I'm not getting a point into that board any time soon -- that was perfectly happy to keep millions of our dollars, she brought it back home for us. She's more than paid her way. Mayor Pro Temelza. I'm not the caller, and there's lots of different reasons people may have for their positions. Those who are supporting the motion have said nothing that contradicts anything that I said. And I completely value and appreciate the work that Ms. Byrd has done for which she was paid. And the question is, what do we need going forward, and what's the right structure? And I call the question. That requires a vote. So am I correct? Right? I've been through this. It's not an automatic trigger. So there's a vote to call the question, and then -- so then you vote on the item. So we'll have an extra vote. Am I right? But that needs a second? Okay. We'll just -- I'm sure there's one out there. Is there a second? Just in case. And then we don't need it if we don't need it. Do we have to call the question? Mr. Mayor, can we have some clarity on the call-to-question process? All that is is you call the question means you vote to then vote, and it terminates discussion. So basically you're voting to terminate discussion, and then you vote on the item. Yes. I'll second. I knew there was one. Got it. Okay. So we have a motion by Mayor Pro Tem to call the question. We have a second by Councilmember Beck. Discussion on that call of the question only. Seeing none, Councilmember Metz will now say you. Aye. Councilmember Beck, I'll say you. For clarity, would -- an aye indicates what, and a nay indicates what? A aye would indicate you want to terminate discussion. Aye. Thank you. Councilmember McGuire. Aye. Councilmember DeVos. Aye. Councilmember Burt. Aye. Councilmember Davis. Nay. I'd like to respond to the point. Okay. Councilmember Armitter. See, I'm a little confused on what this -- what we are voting on right now. Vote aye terminates discussion. The vote nay continues discussion in theory. Aye. Okay. I'll join -- I'll say nay, the ayes have it, 5-2. So we move to the vote. So -- yes, sir. Excuse me, two-thirds vote required to call the question. Thank you for the clarification. All right. So, Mayor Pro Tem, you have the floor. Do you want to continue discussion, or should I recognize the next councilmember? Point of order, Mayor Hudspeth, we have two-thirds. Did I miscount? I might have just miscounted. Okay. Two-thirds is 4.6. That's correct. 4.6. Okay. There you go. All right. Very good. Never mind. Okay. Motion on the floor to approve. There's -- and so we're back so that staff can track along. Councilmember Davis made the motion, Councilmember Byrd seconded discussion. Councilmember Davis? Discussion voting? Not discussion. No. Just vote. We just voted to end discussion. Okay. Yes. Got it. Yeah. I don't want to get taken advantage of any more. I vote aye. Okay. Let me make sure -- keep good records here. Bear with me. Councilmember Byrd. Aye. Okay. Councilmember Beck. Nay. Councilmember McGuire. Nay. Councilmember Marmotor. No. Councilmember Meltzer. Nay. Okay. Mayor Hutspeth is an aye, and I would say -- I think this follows in your -- I'll talk about it. Okay. Thank you. So that fails. That item T fails 4-3. Okay. That takes us to item U. There's no presentation. I'll take a motion. Councilmember Beck. Yes. I actually ask for questions on this when I ask to pull them. Okay. Do you need a presentation? I'm sorry? I don't need a presentation. I'd just like to ask some questions. Okay. So based on the material from the back -- may I proceed, sir? Yes. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Based on the material, Rosa, from the presentation for you, there was a rationale given, but this was after the date. Is that correct? If I'm understanding -- I might have my two mixed up. Yes. My U and V are very similar. Yes. Yes. So we received notification of the purpose for the absence only after the individual was notified that they had violated the attendance policy by missing over 50% of the scheduled meetings. But at the time that we notified, then they emailed and let us know. And that was for a health reason. Is that correct? Yes. Or at least that's the response? That was the response, yes, sir. And does the board member wish to continue? Yes. What they asked was that council consider excusing the absences versus considering removal. All right. Thank you. All right. Any other questions, councilmember Guara? I'd like to make a motion to deny the resolution to dismiss Commissioner Addison. Okay. Okay. Is there a second? Councilmember Beck? I'll second that. Okay. So motion by councilmember Guara to deny, second by councilmember Beck. Discussion. Councilmember Davis? So just so I'm clear, the motion is to deny approving the excused absence. The resolution, as I understood it, was to approve the absence as excused, to retroactively excuse the absence. That's B. Okay. Am I, are we taking? Thank you for the clarification. Okay. All right. So we have motion and second to end of the discussion. If I may, Mr. Mayor, please? Just to clarify, so the provision on the 50%, even though you may excuse the meetings, the provision does say 50% of scheduled meetings. So even though they may be excused absences, that 50% margin has still been met. So I would just need clarification that if denying the removal would also basically erase that 50% and we would start over with that member. It's, well, but I'm just going to ask, is that even in our purview, right? You can't go back and, right, it's- Well, having discussed it with one of the attorneys, the purviews, counsel's purview would be that because the provision in the code is that if a member misses 50%, whether the absences are excused or not excused, that 50% margin is still there. And it's okay if you choose not to remove. However, did you want me to start the, basically the attendance factor, that 50% all over again for that attendance factor? I think we, I mean, I don't know that, are we posted for that? My question, my thought would be this, no, because you can't, you know, we can't go back and erase- Can I wait? I'm sorry. Can I wait? Well, you can, I'll be glad to acknowledge you in just one moment, please, thank you. I do not think that's a slippery slope, right, to start removing actual items or, I mean, it's one thing we can waive it, we can reappoint, we can do, there's got to be another mechanism besides trying to go back in time and change the accounting, but I'll see where we end up, but that's, so before us though is a motion just to deny as it's presented, and then we can come back with- We'll consult with the attorney. Yes, right, so, and maybe we can get a legal opinion in the Friday report or something, so, Councilmember Davis. Yeah, no, Mayor, you just suggested exactly what I was going to suggest, that we're about to take up an item, excuse me, in a moment, we're going to take up an item to retroactively excuse some absences, so is there any particular reason we couldn't have a future consent agenda item to retroactively excuse the, what's been represented as medical absences, I mean, presuming we pass this motion to keep this person on the board, could we do exactly what we're about to do in V for some number of absences in U, at a future, on a future posting? No, I think there's a number of ways, I think you could, the easiest to me would be for them to be voted off and be reappointed, then you start over, right, it'd be your brand new appointment. That is an option. Yeah, so that's the easiest way, but we didn't, we didn't get there, so this is where we are. All right, any other discussion? Yeah, I just want to say, you know, as far as inclusivity to people with temporary disabilities and temporary health issues or permanent disabilities or permanent health issues, I think it's really important that they not be penalized for this, so when this comes forward, I'm fine with that 50% issue coming forward to us at a later date, I guess it's something that we haven't run into so far, but I think it's really important that any meetings that somebody has missed for reasons of illness or the like, they should not be, they should be removed and start with a clean slate, so if there's, maybe there's an absence in there that is not illness related, I don't know, but any absence that is illness related should not count against a person, and so that means give them a clean slate. Okay. Council Member Melton. Yeah, thank you. Mayor, I think you made an interesting point that it would be simplest to vote the person off and then have them come back on to achieve the result of basically clearing the slate. You said that would be the easiest way, but if we're going in this direction, what's the next easiest way or should we just, you know, wait on that question until we resolve this? I'm kind of looking at the direction of the City Attorney. I think you could wait on the direction on that until you've had a vote on this. Can I just ask, are there potentially easy ways without saying what they are, you know, or potentially straightforward ways to accomplish the objective without, like I said, without necessarily getting into what they will be? Sure. I think those have actually been identified. I think those could go either direction depending on the will of the council. All right. That's all I need to know. Thank you very much. Okay. So we have a motion and a second. Any other discussion? Okay. Council Member McGuire, how's that you? And this is the motion to deny. So I vote aye to the motion to deny the resolution removing Sendell Addison. Okay. Council Member Beck. Aye. Council Member Davis. Aye. Council Member Byrd. Aye. Council Member Armitter. Aye. Mayor Pro Tem Melter. Aye. Mayor Hatspeth, so I as well that the motion to deny is passed 7-0, that takes us to item V. No presentation. Is there questions? Council Member Beck. Thank you, Mayor. The button does not like me. So this is similar but in reverse, where this motion is to excuse the absence. Is that correct? Yes, sir. However, we do ask for a correction. It would be to excuse the absence from May 13, not May 31. I motion to approve the excuse of the absence. Okay. Is there a second? Council Member May Pro Tem Melter. I second. Got it. Okay. So there's a motion to excuse the absence on May 13th? Yes. Okay. And that's motion by Council Member Beck, second by Mayor Pro Tem Melter. Discussion? Seeing none, Council Member Beck, I'll say you. Aye. Mayor Pro Tem Melter. Aye. Council Member McGuire. Aye. Council Member Byrd. Aye. Council Member Davis. Aye. Council Member Armitter. Yes. Mayor Hotspot's aye as well, that passes 7-0, takes us to our individual items for consideration we get there. That's not right, sorry, bear with me. Okay. It's item A, ID211290, consider adoption of an ordinance of the City of Denton, Texas, a home rule municipal corporation extending the effective period of the declared state of local disaster to September 30th, 2021. Do I need to call the other one as well? Is it all together or no? The presentation is for both. Okay, got it. So then item B, which is ID211289, consider adoption of an ordinance of the City of Denton, Texas, a home rule municipal corporation promulgating the 13th order of the City of the, pardon me, order of council of the City of Denton suspending and replacing the 12th order of council of the City of Denton, issued March 16th, 2021, approved by ordinance number 21432. Thank you, mayor, council, Ryan Adams, director of customer service and public affairs. And again, this presentation is for both items on the disaster declaration extension and the proposed 13th order of council. Just to give a little bit of an overview, there we go, this item will just quickly walk through where we are at and where council has the option of going with regard to our declaration of disaster. We are currently under a declaration of disaster through June 30th, additionally, we do have a 12th order of council that will be in effect through June 30th as well. Staff did receive direction regarding both at our last meeting on June 15th, and we prepared two items, one that would extend the declaration of disaster through September 30th and another, a 13th order of council that would also be effective through that date. This is just a brief background of previous actions from council. And just to give a little bit of additional background, you got this at the last meeting, the local declaration of disaster is really what establishes the state of disaster. It serves as the basis for an order of council and can be a prerequisite for grant dollars. The order of council are the actions that are to be taken under that state of disaster. We have issued a number of different orders throughout the pandemic, and again, both are scheduled to expire on June 30th. Staff previously provided recommendation with regard to the disaster declaration. That was to actually extend it through September 30th, more than anything as a precautionary measure due to the fact that any future grant dollars may require a local declaration to be in place. Additionally, if the need arose to issue an order of council, that would be more easily facilitated with an existing declaration. So the previous direction that we received on June 15th was to actually postpone the declaration of an item that was up at that meeting so that it could be considered concurrently alongside a new order of council. We also received a direction to prepare a 13th order that would remove a majority of the provisions that were included in the 12th order, but retain the waiving of certain utility fees and the additional utility assistance funding. We prepared a couple of slides to walk through both of those issues for council to provide some extra information before you consider these items. So just as a reminder, with regard to utility assistance, the original budget for this fiscal year was $125,000 for utility assistance. The 11th order of council, which was adopted in December, doubled that. It gave us authority to use an additional $125,000 from utility reserves. Currently, about 53% of these funds are still available. That's as of May 31st. Staff has benefited from United Way of Denton County establishing a program using federal dollars for utility assistance alongside eviction assistance. And which is kind of standard, in normal years, the summer is our busiest time frame. So we typically expect to utilize a higher degree of our assistance funds in the summer. People use a lot more electricity, use a lot more water during this time. I will note that your item C tonight, council will consider a budget adjustment that will essentially lock in these dollars. So with that budget adjustment, it will permanently put in place these dollars in the customer service budget through September 30th. And we place that on the agenda in the event this order would change and we did not include the utility provision in the order or the order wasn't passed at all, council would still have the ability to retain that additional $125,000 for utility assistance. It's a mechanism to do that outside of the order. So it locks it in. Otherwise, we would just wrap this up with a budget adjustment at the end of the year once these orders have concluded. With regard to the waiving of utility fees, I did want to list the fees that we are waiving. So late fees is one of them, but we also have some additional fees that we are waiving that are related to disconnections and reconnections. Of course, these fees do provide relief to those with past due balances. They do not have to pay those fees and haven't had to since March of 2020. So even though council waived these fees in an order about midway through the pandemic, staff has been, I believe it was over the summer, staff has been waiving these fees since March of 2020 based on council direction. We do want to note that it does provide relief to our customers. Absolutely, that is truth. It does adversely impact operations in certain areas. One of those is that there is a value of the non-applied fees that is not coming into our fund. And that is a reality. So the act of assessing late fees and working with these accounts that are late that may be disconnected, that may need to be reconnected, that does take additional staff time. And part of the reason, purpose of having these fees is to recoup a little bit of that staff cost. So in addition to the value of the non-applied fees, which that's going back to March of 2020, there are an increase in interruption related notification calls. And I'll get to that here in the next slide. So we're seeing a lot of our late accounts, whereas we would send a courtesy call, we are now having to send more interruption calls. So they're not being dealt with at that courtesy call time frame. Additionally, there are the costs of interruptions and reconnections, which are born since we are not collecting those fees, those are born by all the ratepayers. We do want to mention that when it comes time that the fees are reinstated, we would like that direction early on from counsel, because it will take planning and communication so people are aware that those fees are going to be applied at a certain point in time, whether it's September 30th or some other date. We believe the acclimation to the lack of fees will have an impact. So people will, you know, it will be new, something they haven't had to deal with in the past year. I do want to mention, we mentioned this in our last meeting, so it bears repeating that staff can continue to waive fees for those utility assistance recipients. So if the primary concern of counsel is those folks who are in a very hard place financially that would qualify for utility assistance, we can waive those fees for them and can do that administratively. Counsel has granted us that authority by ordinance. So this slide is just to give a little bit of additional information. We did want to compare 2019, which is I'll call it our most recent normal year, with 2021, which may be a normal year. We are seeing that fewer accounts are past due compared to 2019, and these are monthly averages that you're looking at. However, those past due accounts aren't addressed as quickly by customers, and we believe that's due to just the fees not serving as that initial trigger for folks who probably have the ability to pay, but just they missed a notification and the fee isn't there to kind of grab their attention, let them know that it's something that they need to take care of. Additionally, I'll note that of all those past due accounts, utility pledges make up for about 2% of those. So out of our monthly average of about 7,000 past due accounts, 170 of those do get a utility pledge. So it's a very small, small percentage of those who are actually receiving utility assistance. And of course, any customer that needs assistance or just needs to talk about their bill or has a concern, we always encourage them to reach out to us. We can give them an extended time to pay, work out a payment agreement with them, or move them to prepaid. We have a lot of options to work with them. So to wrap it up, the council has a couple of different options. They can approve both items, extending the declaration and the proposed 13th order. They can approve the declaration item only and give staff direction perhaps to go ahead and waive those fees for utility assistance customers. And also, again, if the 13th order is not passed, we still have the budget adjustment, item C, on this agenda that would still provide that additional $125,000 for utility assistance. And of course, council can choose to not approve either item, and both the current declaration and the current order of council would expire on June 30th. And I'm happy to answer any questions council may have, as is Krista Foster, our utility -- our part of any customer service manager. Mayor Pro Temelter. Yeah. Thank you, Ryan. I keep thinking I got it, and then I'm not so sure. So let me go through it slowly. I feel like you're saying to me it will maximize the available funds to the maximum benefit of residents if we allow the fees to be posted on the bill. But then if somebody, you know, is late and is vulnerable to the fee because of financial hardship and they qualify for assistance when they are referred for assistance, we can waive that fee administratively. So I think I got that part. Am I right so far? You're right so far. Yes, sir. Right so far. Except then, you said otherwise we don't contact them at the courtesy call phase, we're contacting them at the disconnect call phase, and that's where I kind of got off the train a little bit. What triggers a courtesy call and what triggers a disconnect call? So every and Krista can correct me if I'm wrong, but every pass to account, they get a call. They get a notification. That is kind of your initial, in addition to receiving the bill where it would show that you are late, that you do get that call, then three days prior to any potential interruption, you would also get another call. You would also get another interruption notice in the mail as well. Okay, so the courtesy call in either scenario happens, but you're just saying they don't tend to perform, you know, they don't tend to catch up, they get the call, but without the fee, they don't bring their accounts current. I don't want to make assumptions on a big call. Does that have the implication? I believe it. Or at a lower rate? We believe that. Because you're not saying they don't get courtesy calls without the fee. They get the courtesy calls. They get all the notifications, but we believe without the financial impact, the financial nudge, good work, that they are not as quick to action on that. Maybe they put it away and don't pay attention to it right then. That's our assumption given the data. How much is the fee that we're talking about, by the way, just to put this in perspective for people? How many? What is the dollar amount of the fee that we're talking about, a late fee? I'm going to give Krista the floor on that one. She's seen the numbers a lot more recently than I have. Mayor, Council, Krista Foster, customer service manager, the fee is $23, so they would receive that. What actually happens is when an account is past due, we will process a call list and send you an automated call reminding you that you're past due three days prior to posting the late fee to your account. What happens is people get that call and go, "I don't want a late fee. I need to go ahead and take care of this." So they have the opportunity to not get that fee. Correct. And then they get the courtesy call three days prior to interruption, and then three days later they are interrupted for non-payment. And what we're seeing is even though there are fewer people going into that late status and having to receive a courtesy call, 28% more of them actually make it all the way through interruption because they don't have those other trigger events that kind of make them step back and go, "Dope, I'm going to take care of that." Okay. And the 13th order puts us on which path? So the 13th order retains the waiving of fees, so we will continue to not assess fees for all customers the way the 13th order is written. Thank you for clarifying all that. Yes, sir. Okay. Questions for staff? Councilman Beck, Councilman McGuire. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I think I was on the train, an understanding, and then I got a little confused. So thank you, Mayor Pro Tem, for knocking me off the train. The absolute numbers are down, but then 28% of those absolutely down numbers are recalcitrant. So, I think we need some absolute numbers on that end of the spectrum as well. How many numbers are we talking about are not following through, and are they less than typical? So I think, and it's easier to speak in monthly averages, but we are slightly down in the number of past due accounts. But of those that are past due, more of them are going to at risk of interruption or actually interrupted. And if you look, and I can pull up the slide one more time, but we are significantly, I think it was the number 28%, over on the number of monthly interruptions that we are doing. I don't want to interrupt you. Sure, sure. Go ahead. I'm done. No, so I guess how, if we're down 85%, but that 15% that's left is 28% higher, that's not a big deal. If we're down 10%, and we have 9% not meeting commitments, then the 28% is a bigger deal. So do we actually have absolute numbers that I can think about, or were they on your slide and maybe I just missed them? If you go to, and I can pull it up one more time, bear with me, make sure I don't mess this up. And if I miss them, I apologize. If you look right here where it shows the service interruption, so these are monthly averages across an entire year, because it does fluctuate seasonally. In 2019, we had a monthly average of 659 interruptions. And then in 2021 so far, we have 845 interruptions every month on average. And that is with less past due accounts overall. So 700 is variation, so we're really looking at, I mean, statistical variation, so we're really looking at, I mean, honestly, I don't even know what the error bar is on this. So those look like it's not a huge increase. I mean, I see the increase that you're referring to, but I mean, honestly, without error bars, I don't know what that means, and you know that we don't know what that means. So I'm not going to belabor that one too much. Anyway, the other question I had was, let me get back to my notes, thank you, for, you know, I was the one proposing this going forward, how much, if we're, one of our options is to direct, is for us to direct you to continue to waive the fees, and I believe you said it was like 1.8 million in losses, or in fee losses, but if we continue to waive the fees, what are those losses? So the 1.8 is an estimate, and that's just based on a similar time period from beginning, so the 15 months prior to the start of the pandemic, and so it's very hard to predict what we might be looking at if we waive fees for another three months. Of course, you know, we can work with the averages again. So am I wrong to assume that hypothetically it's on order of whatever our growth rate is, 845 plus our growth rate for the next, whatever, two months, three months? I don't think I follow you. So if we have 845 right now, 845 interruptions, yeah, over what time period? That's the monthly average over six months, so 845 a month on average through the calendar year 2021. So we'll have three times that, we'll have 2,400 interruptions roughly to get to September. No, no, you'll, well, yes, sorry, I did a quick math. Versus 1,800 interruptions, and so I guess my, and if we're waiving, and my question goes to more apples to apples, you know, the 1.8 million was total service interruptions. How much is 24 versus 1,800 service interruptions in terms of lost fees? The 1.8 million was just lost fees that was independent of service eruptions. That was just any fees that we have not collected based on all our past due accounts, the fees that would have been applied and what we estimate we would have collected during this whole pandemic. So the 18, the 1.8 million is the whole pandemic. Correct. I guess what I'm asking for is that, that's spent cost, that's gone. It's gone, we're not getting that back. What's the 2,400 interruptions versus 1,800 interruptions historically? That's really what we're talking about, losing. And I'm just curious, it was a $23 connection fee, so we're looking at 600 times $23 and now it doesn't feel like we're losing that much money? That's only, so that, you're talking about the, just the ones that go to an eruption, but that is not, there are also late fees that are applied to every past due accounts. So that would be more than just the ones that go to an eruption. Okay. I still feel like we're arguing over jumbo eggs versus regular sized eggs here. We're still arguing, I mean, there's still eggs. So I will pass the baton. Thank you, Mr. Moore. All right. Councilman McGuire. I was just going to bring up a procedural point since we have several items for consideration around this issue. I'd like to make a motion to approve item ID211290, extending the period of the declared state of local disaster. And then we can perhaps continue with getting into the weeds on the 13th order. Is there a second? Councilmember Davis. I'll second. Okay. So that's option two of item A. Is that, am I tracking right, staff? That's just item A. Well, that's just, that's part one. That's just to approve the declaration. And then I believe the intent is to have more discussion on the order, which is the next item. Yeah. I just, I'm going to be less confused if we can take the items one at a time. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. I just, I needed that. Okay. Okay. Got it. Okay. Motion by, so it's item A, and it's motion by council member Weier, second by council member Davis. Am I tracking right, right? I believe so. Okay. Thank you. Just making sure we're all on. Got it. Discussion? I'll just get it in now because I'm not going to talk about it later. I'm ready to move on. I just think, you know, I think it's, and I'll just speak to those watching, and those who watch this for historical purposes after the fact, and when it's a lot clearer, one, we cannot predict that you just can't predict, no matter how you ask the question, you can't predict it. Two, there's federal funds available now. And three, if you kick the can down the road past this summer month, that's already the summer months, which is the peak of all the bills, you'll have all the midnight moves, all the, I mean, you know, that's like people are going to not pay their bill and move and we got to go to collections and we got to try to find that money over the summer months with the largest bills. You know who's going to pay the price? The rate payers. Every decision we make, you know, you gloss over to 1.8 million, you add a few other million to it. It's all rate payer money. So everyone that's paying their bill that's watching, this falls on your back when the rate goes up. And what people don't understand maybe, and so I want to give some historical context to this. You understand, the utility bill is subsidizing the city's regular budget now. We added a 3% that's going to come back out. And so you got to understand, you got to look at it in its totality and understand the financial consequences potentially. No one knows, but I'm just saying you have to make fiscally sound decisions and there's federal dollars available. And all we're saying is, hey, allow us the tools to make people call to then get them access to the federal dollars so that they don't have to pay it after accumulating a bill after the summer months. September is the hottest month, trust me, I've been a victim of that. So I mean, it's just going to be brutal. The bills would stun an elephant that these people are going to get and all of a sudden, you know, and the federal dollars may be gone, you know. And so it is critical that we allow people or motivate people best we can to call in now to get access to the federal dollars, the assistance before it's gone or before they move on past the pandemic. And then you have this giant bill with no assistance, you know, because as you pointed out and if you look at the backup after the fact, there's not enough money available to help people absent those dollars. So we'll see how that works out. But I'm terrified if we don't get back to business as usual, as quickly as possible before these summer months starting to add on and put people in real harm's way. Other discussion. Councilmember Armitage. Yeah, so the procedural question first, shouldn't we be deliberating now the motion made by Councilmember Maguire seconded by I believe Davis about just whether or not to weigh these two separately. It sounded like we were just starting a conversation about this 13th order. I call them both. I call them both. Yes. Can I have clarification from staff before I ask a subsequent question? So the question is right now because the motion was taken to weigh these two things separately. Are we going to discuss one and then the other? They were called together, but the motion currently on the floor is a yes, which is just about extending the disaster declaration, correct? Correct. Yeah. So we should so so Mr. Mayor, you know, I'm not sure, you know, forgive me. I'm not sure if just based on what you just said, where you stand on extending the disaster declaration, or if you haven't had any questions about that. But my sense is that that's what we're supposed to be weighing in on right now, unless I'm mistaken. And then we're going to take a 13th order. Okay. Got it. Any other discussion? All right. I don't know. So I'll just I may as well just weigh in. So yes, I do think that we should extend the disaster declaration. Okay. Any other discussion? Okay. Councilmember Breguier, I'll say aye. Councilmember Davis. Aye. Councilmember Bec. Aye. Councilmember Byrd. Aye. Mayor Pro Tem Melter. Aye. Mayor Hutzpah, aye as well that passes that takes us to item B. Oh, wait, I forgot me, sorry. I'm sorry. Did I not? Councilmember Armitage. Yeah. All right. Thanks. 7-0. Sorry about that. Yes. Yes, I vote yes. Got it. Okay. So that takes that's item A, right? That takes item B. Do you have additional presentation or? No other presentation. Correct. All right. So Councilmember McGuire, you have the floor. We'll just go back there. I yield. I don't think I had. Anyone else before seeing none here. Councilmember Armitage. Yes. So I want to thank Councilmember Beck for asking those really important questions about that 1.8 million. It really wasn't clear from the presentation and I was going to be my questions were going to be about how can that possibly 1.8 million account for this percentage of late fees in this small period. So there's no way to tell based on the slide that it was that was a figure for the whole pandemic and a projected figure at that. So for what it's worth, you know, for future reference, I don't like that kind of, you know, projection without kind of a clear explanation, you know, in writing in the backup on kind of what data is making that up and where that projection is coming from. When we talk about late fees or fees of any kind for, you know, reconnection fees, anything like that for utilities, we're not talking about the amount that people owe for the power that they have used or the, you know, the water, their utility use, right. We're talking about additional fees on top of that. So I don't think it's fair to see fees as, you know, money that we're losing or missing. Our job is to, as a public service, is to provide people with power and we need people to pay for it so that we can continue to perform, right. But those fees are an extra and the people who are not paying it, the majority are, I believe, and I think that past data shows that these are people who don't have money to pay who benefit best from paying over a course of time. And so I think saddling them with these late fees, it's not going to make this money that they owe appear in their pocket any sooner. They're just going to now owe that money plus $23. And I would mention that, you know, even though this is not what's before us today, for those new council members, we're actually kind of unusual as a city in the way we determine late fees by having it across the board fee of $23 as opposed to a percentage of what people owe. So if you are a big company, you know, Walmart, and you're late, you know, you owe $23 instead of a percentage. That's nothing to them. But to somebody who's poor, to a poor working mom, who's also dealing with possible eviction and needs to be in and can't, you know, fill her car with gas to go to work, $23 is a lot. So anyway, all of that is to say that I strongly support extending this 13th order of council extending extending the utility fee waivers, it is actually a really small amount of money that we're talking about. And we are not losing these fees, these fees, this is a punishment that we choose to impose. And it does not make money appear in people's pockets any sooner. Okay. Mayor, if I can make one clarification, and my apologies to Councilmember Armitage for the confusion. The $2.8 million figure is not what we project going forward to be a loss. It is what we know Councilmember Armitage and she was correct is what we what we estimate that we have not collected in these 15 months of the pandemic based on a 15 month period prior to the pandemic, but it sounds like we're on the same page now. Sure. I just for those watching you if we're if you're both talking, they don't get to hear any of it. So we we got to not talk over each other, so that everyone can hear. So I'm someone got my direction, I'm going to make a we're going to get moving. And I'm going to I'm going to make a motion that we allow the staff to do what they've been doing, taking care of their customers, and allow this declaration to end in June 30. So I don't know how to make that motion because there's a million moving parts, but so I know we're on item B, and I think it's option to am I am I close. So that's the option. Okay. Got it. So it's denied be right. Okay, got it. So I moved to deny be. Thank you. That's a lot of moving parts. And that, let's see. So that's me. Got it. Sorry. Keep it all straight. Mayor Pro Tem Meltzer. Yeah, I'm considering seconding, but I'd like to ask a question. Yeah. So if somebody needs to go on a payment plan, they might not be in a situation where they're economically distressed, to the point where they would qualify for assistance from one of our sources, but they want to work out a payment plan, which I know we commonly do. Do we administratively typically waive fees when they agree to go on a payment plan? We don't typically do that now for payment plans. Is it administratively within our power to do it? Staff could. Staff's preference would to do that for a predetermined period of time, if that's going to be absent any changes long term from council. And what might, I'll ask you to coach me a little bit here, what might a relevant period of time be? Through the end of the disaster period, through September 30th would be a good start. So I'd like to offer, can I offer a friendly amendment before a second? Sure, because I'm sure it guides your second. So the friendly amendment that I'm offering is that staff would be instructed to administratively waive fees when a payment plan is approved for the duration of the disaster. Certainly. Yeah, I'm amenable to that. Okay. So that having been said, first of all, I want to make a prediction. I guarantee this issue will get demagogued both in the newspaper and on, in social media. Nobody needs to pay this fee. Everybody gets, they know about it before they get, before it goes into effect, they can, they can pay the bill and not pay this fee. If they go on a payment plan during the disaster, they don't have to pay this fee. So I guarantee you that this will be misrepresented, but I second the motion as amended. Okay. So the amended motion is a motion to, I'm still denying, right? Still denying B, but with a, with the caveat that staff has the, that has the discretion to waive fees through the declaration of emergency, which is September 30th. Am I? We understand that direction. Okay. Thank you. Seconded motion by me, seconded by mayor Pro Tem discussion, council member Davis, council member Beck, and then council member Armitage. Thank you, mayor. I think this is absolutely the right way forward at the same time that we don't want to stick folks with fees who by no fault of their own can't afford their utility bills or the fees. We also don't want to create a windfall for folks who can't afford their utility bill, but haven't hit the right triggers, the right financial nudges to get them either to pay the bill or to apply for the vast amounts of assistance that are still available, that are available and money we've already allocated or money that we're fixing to talk about allocating. There's lots of assistance still out there and not just from us from other avenues as well. Um, I would like to see, since we're giving staff additional direction with this motion to, um, uh, to have some discretion with how these are implemented, it would be nice to see that plan on the Friday report, um, so we know so we can communicate with folks what that implementation schedule looks like, who it's going to be, uh, who's it going to hit, who's it not. Um, and then also we can all keep pushing out there as we have throughout this pandemic, all the assistance available to folks for their utilities. Okay. Um, council member Beck. There we go. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, uh, I, I can, I can split the baby, uh, because the biggest thing was to, to not have a financial impact when people are trying to, to recover. Um, the, I do have a sort of procedural question, Mr. Mayor, you, you, you voted to deny and I just want to confirm, I thought the option number two was affirmative towards letting it expire, so motion to deny keeps order 12. I just want to be clear on that. I'm not trying to be pedantic. I don't want us to vote for the wrong thing. No, I, I appreciate you. No, I was, uh, I was, um, the option two is, is keeping the, if I may, mayor, it's item B, it says consider adoption. Yeah. Yeah. No, I meant, okay. Yes. Yeah, no, it is. So yeah, you got to disregard the presentation when you get to the B it's, it's, I am, yes, it is tricky, but I think I'm, I think I'm on the right track. All right. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Yes, sir. And council member Armitage. Uh, yes. So I wanted to ask for some of you, um, who are thinking, well, this seems like a reasonable solution, reasonable compromise, this friendly amendment, I understand that's the spirit of it. Um, I want to ask you to consider something. Um, if everybody, uh, who wanted a payment plan to let them pay long-term was given a payment plan, then we wouldn't have 659 and 845 quote service interrupt, right? This means people's power getting shut off, right? That's kind of the big elephant in the room here, um, that not everyone can make a, can make a payment plan. And, and I'm sure that there are some people who are just non-responsive and they're ignoring calls from customer service. I don't doubt that that's the case. Okay. But I, I know that not every single one of those 845 service interruptions are coming from people who haven't begged, uh, you know, for a payment plan because I hear from those people. I've been hearing from those people since I've been on council. This is my third year on council, beginning of my second term. I heard from those people when I was on the public utility board. Okay. So I think there's a real disconnect between the way things work in reality with payment plans and the way that things end up. Now I have also heard from people who get wonderful payment plans worked out with customer service staff. And that is wonderful. So I'm not saying that the idea of payment plans is a fiction, right? But the truth is that if you vote for this, for this friendly amendment, you're still, you know, you're not giving everybody the chance to work out a payment plan. You know, people will get their power turned off because not all payment plans, uh, end up happening. Like sometimes for some of these people have a payment plan and then they can't keep up their end of the bargain on that plan and it gets, and their power gets, wait, no, one moment. And their power gets cut off instead of having it extended. Okay. So I'm speaking to my understanding of the realities of how this is implemented. The people look at situations who I'm hearing from, who are struggling, right? So I'm going to be voting no on this because I think it's essential that we, uh, continue waiving utility fees and I look forward to having a discussion under this new council about reconsidering, uh, our approach to penalties for late payment. Mayor Pro Tem Meltzer. This is the, uh, the misrepresentation, I'm sorry that, that, uh, you know, I, I find so frustrating. The purpose of cutting people off is when they're not responsive so that they will talk to us so that we can get them assistance. There's an option other than a payment plan if someone is in financial difficulty and that's getting assistance where it's paid. So the, the, uh, the impression that the idea is we're going to turn people's lights off and leave them in the dark is false. The purpose is to connect them to assistance and I'm, and I, I suspect Council Member Armitter is going to reply. I'm not talking about the purpose. Council Member Armitter, you can't, Council Member Armitter, I'm going to ask you, please, I understand you're sensitive to this topic, I understand your passion for this topic, for the people you talk to, but you cannot continue to interrupt people when they're talking because no one can hear anyone if we're, if you're both talking at the same time. It just does not work. So, uh, we have a motion to second. We're going to move on. Uh, Mayor Hartsworth is an aye. Uh, Mayor Pro Tem? Aye. Council Member Beck? Aye. Council Member Maguire? No. Uh, Council Member Davis? Aye. Council Member Byrd? No. Uh, Council Member Armitter? No. Okay. And that's, um, so it passes 4-3. All right, the, the, you know, the motion to deny passes 4-3, thank you for clarification. That's A and B takes us to C. That is ID21126 consider adoption of an ordinance of the City of Denton, Texas, amending the fiscal year 2020-2021 budget and annual program of services of the City of Denton to allow for adjustment to the customer service fund. Good afternoon, Mayor, City Council Members, Nick Benson, Assistant Director of Finance. Uh, let me get the presentation pulled up. My goal is for this to be the shortest presentation that you'll have tonight. It's actually one slide long, so it should not take us very long. Bless you. Um, the proposed amendment will modify the customer service budget by 125,000, and this does support the +1 utility assistance program that's been discussed in the previous two items. Um, this is a formality item that we do bring forward to the, um, City Council and different boards throughout the budgeting season if something's not included in the adopted budget, um, somewhere in anything that will increase appropriations from 6.4 million to 6.59 million. And that's it. All right, questions for staff? Council Member Davis? I move approval. Is there a second? Council Member McGuire? I second. Okay, there's a motion by Council Member Davis, second by Council Member McGuire. Discussion? Seeing none, Council Member Davis, I'll say you. Aye. Council Member McGuire? Aye. Council Member Beck? Aye. Council Member Byrd? Aye. Council, uh, Mayor Pro Tem Meltzer? Aye. Mayor Hutzpah says aye. Council Member Armitage? Yes. That passes 7-0. Thank you. It takes us to item D, which is ID 21767, consider adoption of the Ordinance City of Denton text, City of Denton providing for an indefinite closure of a portion of Frame Street and East Oak. Good evening, Mayor and Councilor, I'm Becky DeVinney, City Engineering Director of Capital Projects. Today I'll be making this presentation with Chief Dixon. One slide as well? Unfortunately, sir, I hate to tell you it's not one slide, it's multiple. So come along on the journey with me. So today we're going to be talking about the Frame and Oak Street closure for the Denton Police Headquarters. Just a little bit of background, the renovation construction schedule for this facility commenced January 15th of 2021. Substantial completion is estimated to be around the June 2022 timeframe. This closure was requested by the Denton Police Department to comply. Oh, yes, uh-huh. Thank you, Steve. Okay, sorry. All righty. Sorry about that, I was not on screen. So the Frame and Oak Street closure was requested by the Denton Police Department to comply with industry standards, safety concerns and overall site plan design. Chief Dixon is going to go through some of those with you. Following the feedback from Traffic Safety Commission and Mobility Committee, we will provide notification to the residents and business owners in the area. Staff has been coordinating with the Solid Waste Department for delivery and pickup of trash to the facility during and after the construction. And after the roadway closure, if you consider the approval, we will be notifying motorcyclists and pedestrians about the changes to traffic in the area, along with updating our city GIS mapping system. To give you a little bit of an idea of where this closure is, as you can see the pink line in the area, the entrance and exit gates will be located in the Oak Street area. You can see from the arrow pointing to the Oak area, this is the actual gate location. And then also along the Frame Street area, you can see the other gate location. The yellow box that you see is the perimeter area encompassing the entire Denton Police Department facility, along with the City Hall East property and parking areas. And I'm going to go into another slide that will show you a little bit more graphic detail. This is a drawing I was provided by the project manager with the Facilities Management Department and Branstad or Carroll. As you can see, the existing building is being retrofitted and renovated to include additional parking. There will be approximately 57 secure parking spaces along the Frame Street area and approximately 109 secure parking spaces along the Oak Street area. This will provide secure access for the Police Department to come into this area and then also park their vehicles. You will also see public parking spaces of about 22 parking spaces that are outside the perimeter of the fence. It's probably difficult to tell, but the entire area is going to be fenced all the way around this facility. If you follow the line that looks like a solid line with a circle, that is the perimeter fencing area. Just a couple of things to bring to your attention. Council did approve the Branstad or Carroll design contract back in May 21st of 2019. The real estate property acquisition began in the summer of 2019 with City Council approval in subsequent dates of July 20th of 2019, November 19th of 2019, and December 17th of 2019. A presentation was made to the Bonds Oversight Committee June 6th of 2019 where they showed the overall renovation plan. There was also a City Council work session on the 2019 bond program in August of 2020, another City Council work session on the facade and upgrade recommendations in April of 2020, and then the Byrne contract was awarded, which was a construction manager at risk project awarded for vertical construction in December of 2020. We did make a traffic safety presentation to that traffic safety commission yesterday, and all these presentations included have referenced the parking concerns at the existing facility. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Chief Dixon to talk about safety, industry standards and a couple of other items. Thank you, Becky. Good evening, Mayor, Council, Frank Dixon, Chief of Police. By way of reminder, during the presentations that were in 2019, the same site plan and the plans to gate the property were also in those discussions as well. One of the reasons for that back in 2019 when we were first talking about this project, we went and looked at other properties and police facilities around North Texas. This is one example of North Richmond Hills where you can see that there are access gate points of entry here where the arrow is on top and on the bottom, and then there's a perimeter fence. Again, this is staying with industry standards. You don't want to have any vehicles specifically to be able to drive directly up to the building. If we don't close off the back of Freeman Oak, you'll be able to literally drive a vehicle up to the building, and there is going to be some very critical infrastructure specifically located on that northeast part of the building that's going to be essential, not just for us but for public safety across the city. Here's another example of McKinney where you have it fenced in and then you have controlled access gates to the property, so you can't get within 20 feet of the building except for the front, but in the front you see these bollards and such towards the front doors that prohibit vehicular traffic to get up to it. Then Grand Prairie is probably the most stark example if you've ever been through Grand Prairie and you've seen their police department, they have actually a combined police and fire building that's together, but it's very secured with tall fencing all the way around it. One of the other concerns that we had when we were looking at this is the ability for people to have access not just to the police vehicles and the private vehicles, but access to be able to set up opportunities to shoot at officers very easily, and while that may sound far-fetched, you can look no further than one month ago where we had two instances in North Texas of this happening, luckily officers were not injured in neither one, but they were in the back parking lot of their facilities, someone drove up and shot at officers, this was in Carrollton, shot multiple rounds at officers, luckily no one was injured. Another case about a month ago in Dallas, there was a young lady being chased by someone that was shooting at her, she again got up to a secured portion of the Dallas Police Department facility and that suspect was not able to one, enter into it, and two, it scared him away from it. And this is just another example over in Plano, and like I said, we were looking at these, if you look back to 2010, McKinney PD had a suspect shoot over 100 rounds at the building, set fire to his truck, it was containing explosive materials, obviously the one in 2015 in Dallas was very well covered, that was a national news of a suspect shooting at the building, planted explosives, Fayetteville, Arkansas, Carrollton again, what I just talked about, and Chicago as well. So I wanted the Chief to be able to explain to you some of the reasons why the closure is so important. The other thing that came up during our Traffic Safety Commission meeting, and also the Mobility Committee meeting when this was presented, was asking for what other improvements are happening in the area from a mobility concern. And we actually did a traffic study in the area, and we showed that there are approximately 25 cars in the hour that are going through this area, the majority of those being police vehicles, and there was also some pedestrian concerns and bicycle concerns, and those numbers were very small during the day in the order of 3 to 7 individuals either biking or walking in this area based on the study that we performed. A couple of the capital projects in the area that you can see, first of all the green lines that you see are the downtown storm sewer phase 1, that's a storm sewer project you've probably seen before, the most important thing that I wanted to mention is that we've added to this project to make a more holistic approach. The installation of sidewalk on the north side of McKinney from Bell to Frame, it was formerly a separate project and we found that it was important to add this to the overall downtown storm sewer project and get that portion completed. The other project that I wanted to mention was the Bell sidewalk construction, and that's actually 735 linear feet of 5 foot sidewalk on the east side of Bell from Hickory Street to Sycamore Street. So there are some other areas that folks can use sidewalk in the area. I also wanted to mention that this is also an area of the downtown quiet zone projects, you can see the railroad crossings at Prairie, Sycamore, Hickory and also McKinney are a project we're currently working on to perform quiet zones in those areas. This just talks a little bit about the timeline of the schedule, the scope of the project and then the estimate at completion, and we're hoping to have construction completed by Q3 of 2021 for those quiet zones. And the last thing I would like to mention is the staff recommendation of approval of the ordinance for the Frame and Oak Street closure to obtain the right of way, but to close that roadway for the Denton Police Department headquarters. And with that I will take any questions. And I know Chief will also. Okay, questions for staff? Councilman Beck and then Councilman McGuire. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So, yeah, no, I think the idea of securing the parking area is a good one and warranted. The questions I just had were, there are properties that access this. When I drove out there, when I Google mapped out there, it's not clear to me, do we own -- there's all the properties north of Oak. One of them looks like it's an exit of a private property or two, and I couldn't tell if we own some of the others. So can you clarify which properties we own north of Oak and which will need -- which will have their exits essentially closed and what we're doing about them? Yes, sir. We actually performed a auto turn, which is a truck radius turn that we'll show as folks come down exposition and turn on to Oak Street, how they would -- if they got into the area where the actual fence is, how they would be able to back up and maneuver back out of that area. That was a concern of myself that I didn't want folks to be stranded in that area. The actual fence will be installed further to the west of the last home that is the -- in the last business of that area so that it will not impact those structures. And I have an auto turn picture if you'd like to see that. I would and, yeah, this may follow in. Sure. Let me go back to the presentation. Now you're getting me to try to be technologically advanced, and that's not always the best thing, but we're going to do our best. So what you can see that will come up -- okay, the screen went blank. Okay. So if you want to just right-click, you can unhide it and then you should be able to -- there you go. Okay, perfect. Thank you, Rachel. She's good for many reasons, but there's another one that she's good for. Well, I'm not sure why it's not going to show. I don't know about council, but I can tell from the presenter view. Okay. Well, really what I wanted to be able to show you was this is exposition, and then you can see this property right here that's in the corner that probably was the property that you were most concerned about. So what we did was have Branstad or Carroll actually provide this as part of their overall design where they could show that trucks could actually enter the facility, go down exposition and actually make turnarounds so that they could actually get into that area back up and then turn to come back out. So it's not prohibiting them. And that last property actually has access -- their driveway will still be accessed without -- it will not be in the fenced in area. In the corner, but then there was one or two adjacent properties with gates onto Oak Street, is that correct? Several of those properties are already city-owned facilities and city-owned properties of that area. So none of the properties that are being impacted are within that fenced area. So I'm just going to restate it for clarity in my own head. None of the properties north of Oak in the fenced in secure region will need alternative access that they're either -- they're city-owned -- is that correct? Yes, sir. They're either city-owned property already and the right-of-way department has already acquired those properties or they are within that area where we produced this auto turn to be able to show that they could get into their driveway still or if cars were to travel down an exposition and get to that fenced area, they would still be able to maneuver and turn back around. Thank you. That helps a lot. And my last question on this exact same topic is what did those property owners tell you in terms of feedback when you talked to them about this project? That is actually a portion of the project that will be taken as the next step after the ordinance is approved. Real estate will be reaching out to those individuals and there have been conversations from the project manager of the facilities management department and previous conversations that have happened with the acquisition of the land next to that area but the actual public outreach will happen after the facility will be -- the ordinance will be approved. I want to give Chief Dixon this secure parking lot really, really, really bad for the reasons he specified. I am just concerned about the property rights of the people to the north. Understood? Councilmember McGuire. Thank you, Mayor Hadsbeth. When is this closure proposed to begin? The closure is going to be a part of the overall construction. I don't have a timeframe as when that's actually going to be something that's going to be constructed. I do know it will be before 2022 when this project is completed but I don't have an actual timeframe schedule but I could get that information from the facilities management department. The capital projects team is not delivering this project. We're simply just closing the road from an engineering standpoint. Gotcha. Railroad Avenue is closed to traffic other than buses. Is that correct? No, ma'am. Railroad is actually a roadway that can be used by anyone. It is a one-way street. It's also the parking currently for individuals who are going into City Hall East. Okay. Thank you. Never mind about that. I just want to echo Councilmember Beck's concern that residents of the area weren't consulted prior to this item coming before council for a vote. I think that the order of those events should have been reversed. Okay. Chief? Councilmember McGuire and Beck, actually when real estate was acquiring their properties, they did make contact with the family that would be on Oak, closest to McKinney. So we were very deliberate in where we were going to put that fence to make sure they had more than adequate space to be able to get in and out of their residence. That was a big concern of ours as well early on in this process. Okay. Thank you. I'm going to move approval of item D. Is there a second? I'll second. Thank you. You got a motion by Mayor Hutsworth, seconded by Councilmember Davis. Discussion? Councilmember Davis? Very briefly. I think another piece of property that you're most concerned about, the kind of wishbone shaped driveway that does not appear from the slides to be part of the project, that's a city owned parcel, so everybody who's got a driveway left on in this area has got real good access to, they still have access to the public road, and second what Chief said about during the property acquisition phase, we were interested in more than just what we acquired, what we eventually acquired. There are lots of conversations that went on in this whole block before the properties that we're building on were eventually acquired. Any other discussion? Seeing none, Councilmember Byrd? I for one am very appreciative that this has finally happened. I've driven through that area several times in my number of years, even back when I was a law enforcement officer and could just see the intensity of why this wouldn't be secured. So personally I thank the city for going on and getting that, hopefully we'll get this done with a vote, but my question is about, and this is where the people out there that are watching and talking about downtown quiet zones, what exactly is a quiet zone? What happens with a quiet zone? I don't, I mean I know we're probably not voting on it or anything, but we got people watching and probably don't know what a quiet zone is. I do believe it is, but. Yes ma'am, it was a part of the presentation to talk about the projects that are in the area. Okay. Sure. A quiet zone is basically an area of which the train will not sound its horn, but there will be apparatuses and different pieces of equipment that actually close off that area to really arms and other type structures that close that area. It's similar to what you see when the DCTA rail comes through different areas, and so it doesn't allow, the train will sound its horn if something is in its way, but it actually is blocking off that actual intersection so that the train doesn't have to have the opportunity to blow its horn. Thank you. Yes ma'am. Okay. Any other discussion? Seeing none. We'll vote. I'm going to. Aye. Council Member Davis. Aye. Council Member Beck. Aye. Council Member McGuire. Aye. Council Member Burt. Aye. Mayor Pro Tem Meltzer. Aye. And Council Member Armitage. Yes. All right. That passes 7-0, takes us to item E, which is ID 211105, consider approval of a resolution and see if it approves a primary member and alternate member of an official voting, as official voting representatives, to the current unexpired terms to North Central Texas Council of Governments. Good evening. My name is Rosa Rios and I'm your city secretary. I'm going to go ahead and bring up my presentation. Sorry there's so many over here. No problem. Thank you. So I'm here to present the item on the appointment to the North Central Texas Council of Governments Regional Transportation Council. So to provide some background, the RTC is an independent transportation policy body that is federally mandated by the Dallas Fortwith Metropolitan Planning Organization, and it is comprised of 44 members, which comprise 37 local elected or appointed officials that represent cities and counties, as well as representatives from each of the area's seven transportation providers. Their bylaws do outline that the local elected official representing the cities of Denton, Sanger, Corinth and Lake Dallas on the RTC shall be selected using a weighted vote of the maximum population or employment of cities represented. As a result, the city of Denton, who holds the highest percentage, possesses the authority to appoint on behalf of these entities. We do currently have two existing vacancies, the primary member seat and then the alternate member seat, and here of course you can see who formerly held the seats, and the appointments or the terms are for the unexpired term ending June 30, 2022 for both of those seats. So at the May 25 work session and regular work session, City Council did review, discuss and consider appointments for internal/external committees. The RTC was one of those that was reported to have an individual appointment process, and that is why we're here presenting this item. At that time, members indicating an interest in serving at that time were Mayor Gerard Hardspeth, who proposed to serve as the alternate member. Councilmember Allison McGuire was proposed by Mayor Hardspeth to serve as the primary member, and Councilmember Brian Beck did indicate a moderate interest. The next RTC meeting will be, actually they meet monthly on the first Thursday at one o'clock PM. Their next meeting is July 8, 2021 via Zoom, although they do anticipate having an in-person meeting for August 12. They do recommend that both the alternate member and then the full member attend the meetings, as it'll allow the alternate to kind of know where -- be up to speed on any matters that are discussed by the full RTC. So the action required is to appoint a primary representative for the term to expire June 30, 2022, as well as the alternate representative for a term to expire June 30, 2022. And I will take any questions if you -- let me just stop sharing. >> Councilmember Davis, Mayor Proctor Meltzer, Councilmember McGuire, and Councilmember Beck. >> Mayor, I move approval of the resolution with Allison McGuire in the blanks for primary member and Gerard Hardspeth in the blanks for alternate member. >> Thank you. Mayor Proctor Meltzer. >> Yeah, I really like the idea of having someone on the Mobility Committee serve as our primary member, and I observe Councilmember McGuire really making a sort of a study of mobility issues, and I note that the mayor gets an extra $250 a month versus anyone else. I think he should have some extra duties, so I second. >> Got it. We have a motion by Councilmember Davis, second by Mayor Pro Tem. >> Just a kind of a point of clarification, you mentioned that the RTC meets the first Thursday of every month, but July 8th and August 12th are both the second Thursdays of the month. >> I'll clarify that and provide you some information. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Councilmember Beck. >> Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I was actually, if I was recognized first, going to withdraw my name in favor of what Councilmember Davis did, so thank you, Councilmember Davis, I'm right on board. I support this motion. >> Thank you. Appreciate that. Okay. We have a motion and a second. Any other discussion? Seeing none, Councilmember Davis, I'll say you. >> It just came on. >> Okay. >> Councilmember Perkins. >> Aye. >> Councilmember Berk. >> Aye. >> Councilmember Beck. >> Aye. >> Councilmember McGuire. >> I appreciate this opportunity. >> Aye. >> Okay. Mayor Hartsworth, aye as well. Councilmember Armitage. >> Yes. >> Okay. That passes 7-0. Thank you. And you'll just follow up with those dates. It'll be fine. Okay. Let me go to item F, ID211223, consider adoption of ordinance of the city of Denton, a Texas home rule municipal corporation authorizing the city manager execute with our daily bread Inc. Yeah. A management services and operating agreement to manage and operate the facility located at 909 North Loop 288. >> And mayor, would I see you call the item G as well or do the presentation? >> Sure. >> Currently. Thank you. >> Okay. And that's I also call item G, which is ID211293, consider adoption of ordinance of the city of Denton, a Texas home rule municipal corporation authorizing the city manager to execute with our daily bread Inc. A termination agreement providing for termination of at least for 300 South Woodrow Lane and the extension and termination of the agreement for enhanced shelter services provided such leased property. >> Thank you, sir. Danny Shaw, community services, very exciting day for us to bring this back to council and this agreement and this conversation. As a reminder, our daily bread and Monsignor King are two organizations that have merged now under our daily bread. We currently have agreements with these two entities, the lease agreement at 300 Woodrow, which is the current MKOC shelter. That agreement is good through 2025. We also have the enhanced shelter agreement, which provides $400,000 for the enhanced shelter program. That program has been in place now a year and is in its second year. The agreement there is current to 2021 with the three-year renewal options to 2024. Our daily bread is also eligible to compete for other grant programs in the city and currently they are funded for our human services grant at $90,000 that covers the cost of salaries for case management and security and then the rapid rehousing grant that council has funded through council initiatives for $100,000. This is a proposed partnership to manage and operate the loop 288 facility. This is information we provided you in February, but I want to remind you the city will maintain the ownership of the facility at loop 288. We purchased the building with bonds and so it is for public purpose and then we will be responsible for the capital and major maintenance of the facility. What we will be doing today is if council approves is entering into a management service and operations agreement for them to operate and manage and provide services at the facility and then for our daily bread to receive funding for that service. Concurrently with the master service agreement, as we'll go through a little bit later, this also would terminate the current agreements that we have for the facility at Woodrow that's leased to them and the enhanced shelter agreement. Just to go through the key terms of the agreement, because the loop 288 facility is not completed yet, we've written into the agreement that it will initiate the 30th day after the facility is awarded its certificate of occupancy. The term of the agreement currently will be five years, also with three-year, one-year extensions available to council. We will begin that funding at $400,000 a year for that initial five-year period, but as we discussed with our partner in this program, we're looking at how we'll step down the funding from council over time as the organization stabilizes with its new operations and begins to fundraise in different ways for this program. The agreement does include significant reporting requirements and does give the city right to review and monitor and includes insurance coverage requirements and provisions for default cure and termination, should that be necessary. Consistent with our other agreements, and this is important even on our human services agreement, because of our system-wide view of how we're handling this initiatives around homelessness, the Dent County Homelessness Leadership Team and the Homeless Management Information System, reporting will be required in this agreement. Another key provisions in this term are in the scope of services. Because this is intended to be a 24-hour facility, it does require day shelter services between eight and five, and then overnight shelter between five and eight. One of the enhancements in this agreement is it reserves five beds for the crisis unit for the police department so that they have an option to place those who might be identified into the shelter as needed. And then the responsibility to co-locate the services and partnerships and organizations that are also working in this space to make this really a comprehensive collection of services for folks experiencing or at risk of homelessness. One of the kind of unique parts of this agreement is the good neighbor policies and practices. It's important that we make sure that this facility is a good neighbor to the surrounding area, and so the good neighbor practices, there are good neighbor agreements in here, and all of that to make sure that we're understanding that they are a neighbor and should behave accordingly. It also includes some monitoring in a property zone around the facility. This is to help ensure that there are folks who might want to access the facility outside of or encouraged to participate inside the shelter instead of outside. And then we have some other facility agreement components of it, operation and maintenance, so it's clear who does what within the facility. Regulations and guidelines for shelter, which is important just to understand how the shelter should operate, understanding that the operating personnel, this is really important to this organization as well, that it's guest-centered and housing-focused, and that there are monthly partner meetings to make sure that there's continual communication and collaboration across the agreement terms. Of course, there are a number of outcomes and indicators that are important in our current housing crisis response system. These are included in this agreement from our system performance measures that are already community-identified. The number of beds utilized, the number of days that folks are in shelter, again, looking at ways in which we can improve the system overall, and over time, it's important to collect data from a program like this and making sure those performance metrics are reported regularly. Some of the other items that we will make sure get reported are how many people are receiving services, how many guests are unduplicated over time, how many folks are enrolled in the different types of services, and then also focus on the housing resolutions, because that's important, not just who is in the housing, but who is actually accessing permanent housing solutions over time. Before we finish up, just wanted to acknowledge, and Winnie McGee and Emily Taylor are here today if you have questions, but this was a lengthy process, and they were great partners in it. We took us a long time not to negotiate the big points, but the fine points, and so they were great to work with, and we appreciate that opportunity. And then just a quick reminder here as well that you all received the fine points of this agreement in February, and also their board has reviewed and given approval for them to sign the agreement with us. So with that, we're looking at the two considerations today, and we are asking that you look at them collectively so that you're approving both or none for this particular process, because they do have to work together. So ideally, we're looking at the management service and operating agreement, which would be effective, as I said, on the 30th day of the certificate of occupancy. And at the same time that that happens, so again, these other agreements that are current will stay current until this new agreement comes into effect, but it would terminate then the lease agreement at the Woodrow facility at 300 Woodrow, and then also terminate our enhanced shelter agreement so that we didn't have those two operating at the same time. So council options today, of course, to approve ID 211223, the management service agreement, and then approve the ordinance to terminate the execute the termination agreement 1293. Okay. Questions for staff? Mayor Pro Tem Melter? Yeah, not actually a question. I know first with great anticipation that interviews for final selection for the RFP is coming up on July 6th for the building that will house all this. This is a huge step forward. I add with I hope enough significant weight that we're going to also pretty soon have to face up to the fact that there's a large population that will never go to shelter that's going to require our, you know, creative attention as well. But I move approval of item F. That's the first one. Yeah. Okay. Councilmember Davis. I'll second. Got it. Motion and a second. Councilmember Arbiter. I support this. I just wanted to say quickly that number one, you know, I agree with what council member Melter just said that, you know, there are some people for whom there are there won't be room in the shelter or various reasons don't want this kind of shelter. So we've obviously still got a lot of work to do, but this is a big step forward. And I also wanted to say that I'm really glad that the operating team is management team is keeping the name our daily bread because that's a name that that a lot of people trust people who go there. And so to see that continuity, you know, for people who are experiencing homelessness who have a lot of trauma in their lives, either past experience or just because being homeless is a traumatic experience. So having that sense of continuity with the name, even though it's a new place, I think it's really good. So I'm glad to see that there's not some new made up name and hundreds, you know, for the our daily bread managing this, I think it's good to keep that name. Okay. All right. So we have again, this is item F. We have a motion by Mayor Pro Tem Meltzer second by Council Member Davis. Any other discussion? If you're none, Mayor Pro Tem, I'll say you. Council Member Davis. Aye. Council Member Beck. Aye. Council Member McGuire. Aye. Council Member Byrd. Aye. Thank you. Council Member Armitage. Yes. Mayor Hotspot says aye as well. Item F passes 7-0. Take a motion on item G. Council Member Davis. Move approval. Thank you. Council Member Beck. I second. Thank you. Motion by Council Member Davis, second by Council Member Beck for item G. Any discussion? Seeing none. Council Member Davis, I'll say you. Aye. Council Member Beck. Aye. Council Member McGuire. Aye. Council Member Byrd. Aye. Mayor Pro Tem Meltzer. Aye. Thank you. Council Member Armitage. Yes. Mayor Hotspot says aye as well. That passes 7-0 as well. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Good job. Thank y'all. All right. Let's take a 10-minute break. We'll come back and finish up the last few items. So it is 9.43. We'll be back at 9.53 to take up the last few items. Thank you. And welcome back to this meeting of Denton City Council. It is, depending on your watch, it's either 9.54 or 5.6. But I'm going to go with 9.54. That's what's on there. But I think it's a couple of minutes behind. So welcome back. We are our last few items. I'll call the next item. It's item H, it's ID 211164, considerate nominations and appointments to the downtown tax increment financing reinvestment zone, also known as the TIFF. Right? Am I right? All these acronyms. Go. Go ahead. Good evening, Mayor and Council. Jessica Rogers, Director of Economic Development. I may not have the most brief presentation, but I'll go for second, if that's okay. So for this first slide, just to let you know that both by statute and by ordinance, you do have to make appointments to the downtown tax increment reinvestment zone. The board has a specific structure. Two members must be city council members. Two members shall be property owners or residents from the zone. Two shall be business owners from within the zone or members of the Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors. And one member has no specific category but must be a qualified voter in the City of Denton. There are currently two vacancies on the downtown TURS Board. One previously held by Councilmember Connie Baker and one previously held by our qualified voter representative, Mr. Eric Pruitt. They'll both be unexpired terms. The council member seat will expire on August 31st, 2021. So we'll be having this discussion again, believe it or not, in about a month. But the board does meet prior to then. So we wanted to make an appointment to ensure we had a quorum. And then the additional seat will expire on August 31st, 2022. So in the council previous discussions, Councilmember Beck had indicated that he was interested in being appointed to the council member seat. Councilmember, excuse me, Mayor Pro Tem Meltzer currently serves in the other council seat. And we received three applications for the qualified voter position. Daniel LoBosolo, Marybeth Renke Doyle, and Kevin Roden. And so with that, I will let council discuss those appointments and I'll take it down. Okay. Thank you. Councilmember Beck. Thank you, Mayor. I'd actually like to withdraw my name and nominate instead Councilwoman Byrd because much more of the TIF is in her district. And I think it would be appropriate if she had, as already the point of contact for district one, if she had the sort of louder megaphone that comes with being on the TIF. I do have a sliver of the TIF in district two. But at the same token, I think that would serve the needs of Denton a little better. Okay. Thank you. I'd like to actually go ahead if we, I mean, were we taking motions at this time or do we have a discussion? Councilman Byrd, are you willing to serve in that capacity? Perfect. Then, then are we separating these, these two council seats as one motion or, or two? I mean, the... You can separate them if you'd like. Then I'd like to make a motion for Council Byrd to be the council representative along with Councilor Meltzer in, for the TIF. Got it. Got to keep them separated. That's a great song. Mayor Pro Tem. Yeah, I, I strongly support the idea of having a voice for district one on, on the TIF board and I second. Okay. Got it. So we have a motion and a second. That's for the, just the one seat, right? Am I, am I tracking right? For the council member seat. Yes. Okay. Perfect. Any other discussion with that seat? Seeing none, council member Beck, I'll say you. Aye. Mayor Pro Tem. Meltzer. Aye. Council Member Guier. Aye. Council Member Byrd. Aye. Okay. Council Member Davis. Aye. Council Member Armitage. Yes. Okay. And Mayor Hutspeth is an aye as well. So that passes 7-0. Discussion on the other seat. Right. The qualified voters. Okay. Qualified voter seat. Council Member Davis. Whoa. I move appointment of Daniel LaBosolo to the qualified voter seat. Okay. Second? Council Member Maguire. I second. Okay. We have a motion by Council Member Davis, a second by Council Member Maguire. For Daniel. I'm not going to do the last name. I'm not as confident in mine. I've said I'm the second so far. Discussion. Any discussion? Any none? Council Member Davis, how say you? Aye. Council Member Maguire. Aye. Council Member Beck. Aye. Council Member Byrd. Aye. Mayor Pro Tem Meltzer. Aye. Council Member Armitage. Yes. Okay. Mayor Hutspeth is an aye as well. But I do appreciate all three applicants being willing to serve. That's really a talented bunch there. So thank you very much. That concludes Item H, takes us to Item I, and that's ID 211197, Consider Adoption of Ordinance of the City of Denton, a Texas home rule municipal corporation authorizing a city manager designee to execute a contract. Hemet. Hemet. Good evening, Mayor, members of Council, Brian Burner, Solid Waste Director. I'd like to talk to you about awarding a contract to Hemet Construction to construct our public disposal facility at the City of Denton landfill. This is within the current permitted area. As you may remember, about six or eight weeks ago, we passed a contract to go ahead and start building the next cell, which Hemet Construction was the contracted bidder on that opportunity, and they again are the proposed contractor to construct the PDF at the City of Denton landfill. In constructing the new cell, that is actually going to be co-located or it's currently co-located with our current PDF. In removing the dirt for the cell, we're having to relocate the public disposal facility. The purpose of this contract is to build a new facility. Construction will commence shortly and is currently due to be completed by December of this year. The work to be completed, it's about a quarter million square feet of construction, including earthwork, ramps, pads, support pillars, effluent water supply, electric, everything you need to create a safe place for our citizenry to drop their waste before we take it into the landfill. It keeps it separate from the large haulers and the people with the dump trailers and things of that nature. It allows us to keep our public safe while they're using the City of Denton landfill. In the request for proposals, we had construction bid documents prepared by Biggs and Matthews. March 12th, we did put this out for bid. We sent requests to 461 companies for responses were received on April 22nd. Results of the evaluation, the best and final offer came from Hammett Excavation with $2,337,120.31 with a discount of $4,000 to the almost $2.3 million with the 230-day construction. We do recommend awarding this the contract for the construction of public disposal facility to Hammett Construction. I'd be glad to answer any questions that you might have. Got it. So that's a PDF. That's not the searchable or non-searchable PDF document, right? That is correct. It's public disposal facility. Just making sure. Yes. Thank you. Council Member Beck. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Brian, so the proposal stands, I know we're voting on whether to award the contract or not. I guess looking over the characteristics though, if you are wildly successful, the way I know you will be, and the public uses this a lot, what is our likelihood to need to expand again and in what timeframe? Expand? The PDF. The PDF, as it's designed, is about a 35, 40-year facility. It's a 40-year, okay. Correct. It's designed, and again, as we get our strategy back and it looks like we'll be diverting, it could be even longer because it will be in the footprint of the expanded landfill area. But again, we'll start at the far north end, work our way back. But as we start diverting as much waste as possible, recycling more, finding alternate methods, it'll continue to extend that opportunity. So with proper maintenance, there's really no reason why this couldn't be a 40- or 50-year facility. That answers all my questions. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Any other questions for SAF? Councilman Davis? Just kind of in basic terms, what's the funding source for this project? This is revenue bonds, so we're paying cash for this. Good deal. Thank you. Okay. Any other questions for SAF? If not, I'll take a motion, Councilman Davis. Yeah, it went off. I think Billy did it. We'll blame Billy. Okay. I'll take a motion for approval by Councilman Davis. Councilman Byrd? I second. Thank you. Okay. I got a motion by Councilman Byrd. Davis is second by Councilman Byrd. Discussion? Seeing none. Councilman Davis, I'll say you. Aye. Councilman Byrd? Aye. Thank you. Councilman Beck? Aye. Councilman McGuire? Aye. Thank you. Mayor Partem-Melter? Aye. Councilmember Armitage? Yes. Okay. Mayor Hutz, with his ayes, will that pass 7-0. Thank you, Brian. All right. That takes us to item J, ID 211196, consider adoption of an ordinance of the City of Denton, a Texas home-rural municipal corporation authorized in the city manager or their designated executed contract with Hammett Excavation. Hey, Brian. Hello. Don't get rid of me that quick. I appreciate the opportunity again to discuss an additional construction project that we have slated for the City of Denton Landfill, a store contract to Hammett Construction for construction of our landfill gas header, water line, and concrete road at the City of Denton Landfill. City of Denton Landfill at the Mayhill location has been operating since 1980. We've been filling from the south and on the west, we're moving to the east. From an operational as well as a regulatory standpoint, it requires us to complete certain improvements at the facility, which includes Side Access Road, which is an all-weather road on the east side, and the completion of a water line as well as our landfill gas header loop that will tie the entire system together. Work to be completed again, it's almost a mile's worth of landfill 18-inch header around that side of the facility, 1,000 foot of leachate force main extension, 2,400 feet of effluent water line, and then a significant amount of 10-inch concrete pavement to allow for the trucks that want to move in to that east side for access to our new cells as we're finishing up the 1590A area. We did have this project designed by SCS engineers, and again on March 16th, we had a competitive seal proposal, went out to 463 companies, we had two respondents received on April 22nd, and again Hammett Construction was identified as the lowest responsive company with approximately $3.3 million, 205 days proposed construction. We do recommend awarding this contract to Hammett Construction. Be glad to answer any questions that you might have. Thank you very much. It's getting late, but it ties the system together, kind of like a rug ties the room together. It does. Love that movie. Councilmember Davis. Same question as before, funding sources for this project. Same point, we have funding resources for revenue and cash. Thank you. Thank you. Awesome. Councilmember Beck. Yeah, if you could help me understand, Brian, the previous one used the procurement rubric, and I didn't see the procurement, that's hard to say, procurement rubric, you say that three times fast. And on this one, so can you help me understand when we're using that and when we're not? We used the same rubric on both of these, they were both let, they had to go through an evaluation process, had best and final offer, and because these got a little bit of out of order on the agenda, but this one was awarded and then get the best and final offer on the PDF, that's when Hammett came and did the $40,000 list. I think hopefully I'm answering your question. All right, I had to walk it back through my mind, but okay. Yeah. Okay, any other questions for staff? I'll take a motion. Councilmember Beck. I motion approval. Thank you. Is there a second? Councilmember Davis. I'll second. I did the button ahead of time. Thank you. Motion by Councilmember Beck, second by Councilmember Davis for item J. Any other discussion? Seeing none, Councilmember Beck, I'll say you. Aye. Councilmember Davis. Aye. Councilmember McGuire. Aye. Okay. Councilmember Byrd. Aye. Mayor Pro Tem Meltzer. Aye. Okay. Councilmember Armitier. Yes. Okay. Mayor Husspitz. Aye. That passes 7-0. Thank you very much. Thank you. Appreciate it. That takes us to item K, ID 211265, consider adoption of an ordinance of the City of Denton, a Texas Home Rule Municipal Corporation authorizing the city manager or their designee to execute a tender agreement with Travelers Casualty and Surety Company. Hey. All righty. Good evening, Mayor. They may need to change that word, "tender." They may need to get a thesaurus. Yes, sir. All right. Good evening, Mayor and Council. My name is Seth Garcia. I'm a project manager with Capital Projects. So as you stated, this evening I'll be bringing forward our proposed tender agreement for the North-South Water Main Phase 3. So briefly for those of you who aren't familiar with the scope, the North-South Water Main Phase 3 is installation of approximately 4,300 linear feet of 42-inch poly-coated steel water transmission main. It also includes 900 linear feet of 12-inch water main, and the extents of the project is on Bonnebrae from Interstate 35E to just south of Panhandle Street. So to quickly walk you through the sequence of events with this process, on February 18th, 2020, City of Denton Council approved a construction contract with SNJ Construction. On May 26th, due to COVID, we delayed the notice to proceed, and SNJ Construction began on that date. October 16th, City of Denton issued a stop work order with SNJ Construction. So we kind of witnessed different issues with the existing contractor, and so that brought us up some concerns, and so we issued that stop work order. On October 29th, we did set up a conference with SNJ Construction and Travelers to go over kind of those issues that we had been having. Our contract stipulates that they do have 30 days to diligently work to cure those issues. On December 21st, they had not cured those issues, so the City of Denton issued a termination of the contract to SNJ Construction, and at that time we also issued a separate letter to the insurance company, Travelers, to begin performance of the project. On December 23rd, the surety responded to the notice of claim and requested documentation from the City. Over the next few weeks, we did provide different levels of documentation to the surety, and by February 5th, they did issue out a solicitation for offers by a consultant here locally. On February 10th, we held a pre-solicitation meeting with prospective contractors on site. Through that process, over the next probably six weeks, they did receive four different bids to complete the project, and on April 22nd, the City approved a pursuing Mountain Cascade of Texas as the completion contractor. On May 4th, we did conduct a site walk with City staff, the sureties consultant, and the completion contractor, Mountain Cascade, as long as the pipe company. The pipe company is one of the significant things with this tender agreement. This poly-coated steel pipe is specially made for this project, so it's not something that can be returned. So we wanted to make sure and cover any concerns with the insurance company, with the completion contractor, ahead of getting this tender agreement ironed out. So quickly for a funding summary, the original contract not to exceed amount with SNJ Construction was just over $4 million. We did issue three payments to that contractor, which leaves a remaining balance of just over $2.7 million with City funds. The completion contractor's price was just over $3.9 million, and that is what Mountain Cascade is proposing to complete the remaining work. That would leave us a contract shortfall of a little over $1.2 million. We also went through multiple rounds of negotiations with the surety company, and settled upon $694,000 in essentially liquidated damages. Those damages did encompass things, items such as the SW3P takeover that the City had to do through this process. It also captures delays to other capital projects, and the McKenna Park sidewalk leaveout, and a big chunk of that is also staff time to extend engineering and inspections efforts for the additional nine months to complete the contract. So the total surety settlement that we'll be accepting is a little over $1.9 million. The completion contractor proposed by Mountain Cascade is 265 days. So with the time for them to provide bonds and insurance, we're looking at starting the project in July of 2021, and that'll put a completion of the project in March of 2022. Also staff recommends the approval of a tender agreement with Travelers Casualty and Surety Company and Mountain Cascade of Texas for the completion of the North-South Water Main Phase 3. And I'm sorry it's so late, but with that, I will take any questions. Questions for staff. Mayor Proctor Meltzer? Yeah, not a question, but first of all, I just want to back staff up for holding to standards and it's probably easier to just let it complete and not have to come back to us. And I appreciate the fact that, you know, you kind of held them to account and got out of the deal. I look forward to getting it done, those of us who live over in District 3 do. I move approval of the item, and I'll explain for the benefit of those who don't have a business finance background, it's a tender agreement as opposed to a nugget agreement. Got it. Thank you. Thank you. And if I can just add, this was a huge effort with our legal team, with our procurement team, lots of hours, I can't give them enough credit for helping us out, big collaboration between a lot of the departments. Good. Thank you. Councilmember Davis? I want to second, but I do have a question also. Okay. So second by Councilmember Davis. Discussion. Councilmember Davis? Thank you for, especially in the legal backup, we have quite a bit of information on this whole process. I really appreciated the pipe walk breakdown. That was one of my big concerns, as I sat there watching those pipes start to rust away on the uncovered ends, and I'm glad you covered that. Can we expect generally better and tidier, is the only word I can think of, general site conditions? I feel like one of the issues I think that staff addressed with the previous contractor, and that we hear a lot about over there, is just barriers falling into the road, potholes that just stay and stay, and then we have to go out and fix them. In this whole interim, staff has had to kind of fix these issues. Can we expect just generally better site conditions with this new contractor? Absolutely. I think, like you said, one of the main issues that we had with the first contractor was keeping the site cleaned up. We understand that this is a rather large diameter pipe that's going down a tight corridor, and we're taking up two lanes of traffic, so it is one of our most important goals to keep that site tidied up. We do have a resident professional rep with Frieza Nichols, who is our acting inspector on the job, so we will make sure to stay on top of them, that they are completing roadway repairs and keeping those traffic control devices out of the roadway much better this time. Okay. Any other discussion? Council Member Batt. Thank you, Mayor. So, to piggyback off of Councilor Davis's question, and not necessarily about SJ in particular, but are there lessons we learned so that we don't have to -- I mean, nobody wants to go through this. So, what lessons did we learn that we're going to carry forward so we don't have something like this happen on the next major capital project? Yeah, I think absolutely. A big part that helped us was documentation. Having that documentation to back up why we were doing what we were doing and making sure that within the contract clauses we had justification for the termination to be able to closely follow those timelines and terminate when we wanted to, that kind of shrink in this process. So, typically, what we kind of saw on 2181 when the state went through a similar process was about a 12-month gap between construction stopping and construction starting with a new completion contractor. Granted, that was a much larger project. We were able to condense this through the help and coordination of legal and procurement to about six months. And not only that, but we're able to recover the majority of our damages from the surety. So, yes, I think that's probably the biggest takeaway is just making sure our documentation is lined up, our meeting minutes, our inspection reports, and just really generally documenting the concerns as they happen day-to-day with a contractor. All right. Thanks. Okay. Thank you. Good question. Any other discussion? Okay. Mayor Pro Tem Meltzer, I'll say you. Aye. Council Member Davis. Aye. Council Member Byrd. Aye. Council Member McGuire. Aye. Council Member Beck. Aye. Council Member Armitter. Yes. All right. Mayor Hutzpeth, it's aye as well. That passes 7-0. Thank you. Thank you. All right. That concludes our agenda for this evening. Concluding items. Council Member Beck. Thank you. I just want to say that here on June 22nd it is my mother's birthday. So happy birthday, Mom. Nice. It is my brother-in-law's birthday. Happy birthday, Mike. It is my PhD advisor's birthday. Happy birthday, Dosko. And I also want to comment that apparently it's also Council Member McGuire's anniversary. So I want to congratulate all these people on, well, three of them on a job well done with me and then Council Member McGuire on a job well done as well. That's great. Thank you. Anyone else? Concluding items. Mayor Pro Tem Meltzer. We're going to be away for a while, but we're reachable. And I'll tell you about the second Council Member Town Hall that's coming up. That'll be mine as a Facebook live event on July 12th, 6 to 7 p.m. I'm calling it Let's Talk. There's a lot to talk about. I know people have a lot of things they want to clear up and I'm happy to address all of them. But that's the second one. I know there's another one. Great. Thank you. That's good. Council Member Burke. I just want to let you all know that I will be meeting with the Southeast Neighborhood Association on Monday the 28th at 6 p.m. at the MLK and we're going to talk streets repair and upgrades and all of that. So I'm looking forward to my first outing as District 1 rep. Thank you. That's good. Anyone else? I will say so I'll piggyback on Council Member Beck and say happy anniversary to Council Member McGuire. I'll say I mentioned that Tim Sanchez, who's a teacher at Denton High School, had his services this evening. I think they have another set of services tomorrow. So he passed away. And then I went to the Forge ribbon cutting. That library is amazing. Kicked off the JPCA conference, so it's the Justice of the Peace and Constables Conference. It's at Embassy Suites. There's about 400 or so people. So that general area is probably as safe as it's ever going to be right now. So that's great. And then on a heavier note, though, I do want to say so last week there was some discussion about, well, it's made it out to the social media world and legal has issued an opinion about the how far reaching First Amendment rights are. And so I'm asking those that posted from this body, I can't control any of it, but I'm just asking those from this body that would have posted derogatory things about me allowing someone exercise their First Amendment rights to address those and self-correct. If not, I'm going to ask that we put it on the agenda to waive privilege to offer the city attorney an opportunity to share the legal status report and clear my name that way. I take it very personal when people accuse me of things, and that's fine if you're right, but if you're wrong, you need to adjust accordingly. So I'm asking people to self-correct. Again, the public can think what they want, but this body I hold at a different level and we all receive the legal status report and either come forward with a legal opinion that's different from that or correct your statement because I think it's the right thing to do and you shouldn't impugn me for allowing people to exercise their constitutional rights. So I will be looking for that, otherwise I'm going to bring that forward publicly and we'll try to see where people stand on that, but it is hurtful and regrettable. So that being said, it's 1024 and we'll conclude tonight's meeting. Thank you.