Jun 09, 2015 City Council on 2015-06-09 3:00 PM

There he is. I will speak very slowly. So you'll be here. Good afternoon. I want to welcome you to this Tuesday, June 9, 2015 Denton City Council meeting. We do have a quorum. And this is a second Tuesday work session. We'll go through our agenda items. Agenda item A, receive a report, hold discussion, and provide staff direction regarding organizational programs which increase efficiency, effectiveness, and productivity of City of Denton operations. Thank you, Mayor. I'd like to first of all express in advance our appreciation for the council's diligence in listening to these two presentations today, both item A and B, because for the last several years we've been working particularly directly with so many of our great employees in helping us identify things that would increase efficiencies and improve the city's operation and save us money and all of those kinds of things. And the leadership team has worked going back two or three years to put a lot of this program together, or more than that, to listen to and to work with the employees of the city who are putting this program together and who have gone through the first year. So we have here with us today a number of employees who have been involved in this. This is kind of the exciting, good part of what we do every day, and I think you're going to find it very rewarding. Brian Langley has been kind of coordinating this whole event with the two teams that are going to present to you today, and I'm going to let Brian give you more detail and then introduce the programs. Thank you, Brian. I'll go for it. Thank you, George. Mayor, members of the council, it's my pleasure to be here today talking to you this afternoon about several programs that we've put into place, and I'll be talking about three specific ones with you today. They've all been designed to improve our productivity and efficiency in the city, and each program, in our opinion, is innovative, and it's substantial in its own right. It probably deserves each of them their own separate presentation. So today I'm really going to try to just briefly outline each of them for you so you really have just a flavor for some of the types of things that we 're doing, a very general understanding of some of the things that we're doing. This also is going to be an interactive presentation. I do have some speakers up here. We're going to show you a few videos that I think will illustrate some of these programs a little bit more in detail. So let's jump ahead into it. Again, we have created three separate programs. We call these process and workforce improvement programs. They're lean government, innovation program, the leadership excellence and enhancement program, better known as LEAP. Again, I'll be talking to you about each one of these specifically so you have a better idea of what we're talking about. But collectively, all of these programs combined, they're all trying to do the same thing, encourage creative thinking for our employees. And as George said, we have a great group of employees that is always thinking ahead, trying to be efficient and productive. These are really tools to help them be more productive and have an opportunity to even enhance those skills even more. So they're also improving efficiency, productivity, engaging our employees in continuous quality improvement and most importantly, improving customer service. So all of these things are trying to do all of these things together. So let's first talk about lean government. You may have heard about the lean process improvements before, it originated in manufacturing operations, but it has been adapted to governmental settings. It's a series of techniques that are used to identify and eliminate waste and processing, whether it's manufacturing or administrative processes, anything that's causing our work product to be produced. So it's trying to eliminate that. There's a series of tools that we use to try to do that. And I'm going to explain these briefly and then I have three videos I'm going to show you which I think will illustrate these a little bit better . The first is 5S, sort, set in order, shine, standardize and sustain. And again, the video I show you will help you kind of see that a little bit more clearly. The 5WISE, this is a use of asking why's a series of questions to get to the root cause of an issue rather than looking at just the surface level of that issue. And then swim lanes, it's used to document processes and identify issues that we may have in a particular process and identify how we can improve it. So let me switch over and show you those videos. By the way, all of these are on our website. We have all of our improvement programs on there, LEAN, the LEAP, the Innovation Program. So I'll turn first to the 5S. So my name is Tyler Hurd. I work for the SAUGWASE Department. I am a coach with the LEAN group. We're going to do a little bit on a 5S. Sort, eliminate those things that are unneeded. Clean, organize needed items for easy and immediate retrie val. Shine, keep the workplace neat and clean. Make sure that it stays tidy. Standardize the method by which you sort, straighten, and shine and kind of have it. And sustain is maintained by the established procedures. Don't look at him. As much as I connect, you have to go from 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5. It seems to get to the number 50 in less than 60 seconds. 3, 2, 1, stop. Okay, what was difficult about this? How would you make this better? Sort. I would make it all the same size. You'd make it all the same size. What else? Making the window online. That would be very simple, wouldn't it? Let me give you a scenario. This is a customer walking in the front door there. This is what they see. Do we do steps that just add confusion? Yes. What are we doing that is too much that does not need to be done? There's a considerable amount of waste in the office. What does that do for you all? Are you checking all this stuff out? We're trying to sort through right now what needs to go and what needs to stay. So all this stuff that's piled out here needs to go. So as we eliminate waste, it's also going to improve productivity. Makes sense as you refine so you can go to the closet and say that's what I need. You can go to the file cabinet and you can find exactly what it is that you're looking for. You guys may need a new carpet after this. You wanted a full remodel, right? I will. This is a way to kick off a whole much larger process, but we're taking it one step at a time. Okay, just so you know, we did comply with our workers retention policy on that. I heard Jennifer get a little nervous over there. A couple more for you just to show you a couple of other techniques, the five whys. Hi, I'm Jamie Lindsay, customer service supervisor and lean coach. Lean is a culture of continuous improvement that invests in employees by providing opportunities for more meaningful work. We can accomplish this with all types of processes and workflows by using lean tools like the five whys. We are all accustomed to asking how things are done, but we should also ask why things are done. Before any improvement can take place, we must identify the root cause. How can we do that? We ask why, five times. My family and I recently visited the Washington Monument in D.C. There was obvious repair work that had been done. And while I'm told that that was due to an earthquake, rumor has it the monument is still there. And as it, the monument was already eroding. Why was it eroding? Because of the harsh chemicals used to clean it. Why use such harsh chemicals? Because of the large pigeon population and the mess they leave behind. Why were there so many pigeons? Because they were attracted to the large spider population. Why so many spiders? Because they were attracted to the large gnat population. And why so many gnats? Because the gnats were attracted to the monument lights that were turned on at dusk. By asking why, five times, the real root cause of the erosion was found. Turning the lights on at dusk. By altering that choice and turning the lights on later, all the problems could be solved. Stopping at the first or second why and jumping to a solution would never have actually solved the real problem. So that's the five whys. You just learned an easy and quite powerful lean tool that you can use every day. This is just one example of lean thinking that can create a more rewarding and more meaningful work experience. This is Denton's Lean Journey. Okay, just one final video to show you. It's a very quick video on swim lanes. Again, another lean technique. All of these things are combined to form the lean process. We use these to identify efficiencies and productivity improvements. Hi, I'm Marissa Barrett with the Fleet Services Department. Lean is a culture of continuous improvement which provides opportunities for our employees for more meaningful work. We can accomplish this by using lean tools to help slim down our processes and workflows, like swim lanes. The Fleet Department was up to our ears in paperwork. We were figuratively swimming in it. We wanted to explore ways to shorten timelines and eliminate duplicative steps for those involved in the vehicle and equipment procurement process. We were already trying to assess the functionality of our procurement process, but it was difficult considering that many departments have very unique needs. That's when we learned about swim lanes through lean coaching. It's a way to visualize a work process and determine where job sharing is occurring and where different parties' responsibilities lie. By visually grouping steps and decisions into lanes, it's easier to see where delays and mistakes are most likely to occur and if there are any redundancies to be eliminated. So, we were able to literally see where we were swimming in circles and where we could really make some improvements. Eliminating non-value added steps of paperwork should make everybody happy, which is one of the many benefits of using swim lanes. This is just one example of how lean thinking can create a rewarding and more meaningful work environment. This is Denton's Lean Journey. All right. Hopefully those were helpful to just explain a little bit more in detail some of the techniques that we use. We think all those are great videos, again, that are on the website for the public to see as well as all of our employees. It's something that we continue to process through. There's our lean group, our lean participants, the coaches and also the steering committee put together what we call elevator speeches. We have two of these. One is for our external stakeholders, so all of the citizens, people in the public, and we have one internally that we use too. And when I was thinking about this presentation of how I was going to describe to you what is a lean process, I was looking at these and I really couldn't think of a better way to tell you what it was than looking at these elevator speeches. So normally I wouldn't put this much text on the slide and I certainly wouldn't read it, but I think this really succ inctly kind of captures what is this program. So pardon me as I read through this, but what is lean, the elevator speech for external stakeholders? Our city is experiencing tremendous growth. It's visible and palpable. In fact, Denton is on track to have a 65% increase in population to over 200,000 by 2030. This growth will place great demands on the entire organization from the utilities to public safety, recreation, leisure to general government. To meet this demand, we intend to have control growth in our capabilities by innovating and reinventing ourselves rather than just adding equipment, staff, and layers of bureaucracy. By applying methodologies proving in manufacturing, healthcare, service industries, and my favorite, even government, Denton can remove many of the annoyances and obstacles to our jobs that we run into every day and take our focus away from the real work. This work is rewarding, meaningful, and creates a better community. This is Denton's lean journey. So again, I think that kind of provides a better overview of what it is. I couldn't say it better, so I wanted to provide that to you. And then quickly, the internal stakeholders elevator speech is Denton's employees are our most important assets. Lean is a culture they invest in employees by providing opportunities for more meaningful work. Lean practices draw upon employees to remove redundant and inefficient processes and enhance skills in order to provide outstanding customer service. So those came from our employees. I think they're really important because that's an employee speaking to you about what are they trying to do through this process. Remove redundancies, remove inefficiencies in these processes. Here is a brief summary of all the different lean projects that we've had. We're still conducting many of these. I know there's a lot on this slide, but I wanted to call to your attention two things. First is the soft savings that we've been able to generate. These were savings in time that we've been able to achieve with these programs, about $134,000 worth of savings that we've identified. That is through staff time savings of about 3,800 hours that have been eliminated in work processes that are redundant or inefficient. And we've also had some hard savings of about $8,500. This list is incomplete. It doesn't include some of the development review process improvements that we've made and also some other projects that are ongoing. So it's preliminary, but it gives you an idea of many of the things that we're in the process of doing, and I think it's very significant. So going forward, our lean journey is going to continue. We're proposing to continue it. We initially engaged a consultant to help us facilitate the process, understand what it meant, how it would work, and then we trained the trainer. So we had a series of meetings where we had internal staff who were trained by this consultant and figured out how to do that and start this for our own organization. We conducted three, what are known as Kaizen events. These are week long type events where we look at a process, they map out processes on a wall, understand where the problems are, and try to identify how to improve that. The lean trainers internally were developed and we currently have five coaches. There are five teams of two. They're in all different departments around the city. You have a list of those here on the screen. But each team is assigned four different departments and divisions. And so as we go through our work processes and look at all these different areas in the city, we'll be covering all the major processes at some point in the future. And so finally, additional projects will be tracked and reported to the council on at least an annual basis. So all these types of reports that I've been showing to you , we plan to bring that back at least on an annual basis to show you our progress. So that's lean government briefly. Hopefully that makes sense. I don't have any more videos where I'm in. I'm in government so that's good. Yes, sorry, go ahead. So Brian, does it start by the identification of a problem or is it just we're going to go into this department and do an event and find opportunities? What we've asked departments to do is to identify an area where they think there could be improvement and they come forward to us. And then we identify the coaches that would go out to them and work through that process and improve it as part of the budget process this year. We've asked every department to submit to us ideas for lean improvements that they would make and then we're going to be going through over the coming year to go through all those processes. So it's really voluntary as they coming to us trying to tell us as the experts in their area, what are the issues that they think we can help them with. Okay, thank you. Two questions, employees, is there an anonymous confidential ability for an employee because they don't want to step on their boss's toes to be able to submit a suggestion on how to improve because we've all worn those shoes in a job. Here's how we can do it better. Here's how we can save money. And even if it's here's how we can save time, time is money . That's question one. If we don't have it, I'd like you to think about implementing that department by department. I think that could help. Two, is there a way for the public because occasionally when they have interface with city employees or departments , they too can see a way to, again, time is money. But it's the key here is confidential and anonymous because the public is going to come forward when they can do it anonymously. The same holds true for our employees to be able to step up and say, here's how we can do it better. So food for thought on two different avenues. Sure. Currently we don't have an anonymous way to do that. Some of the challenges I've seen in other organizations when it's done is that you don't get as good of results when they don't really have some ownership of that idea. But something we can certainly take a look at and see if there's a way to do that to get those ideas. But sometimes make sure that we're getting something that we can take action on. Thank you, Mayor. How did the coaches become coaches? How were they selected? We talked to folks around in the city who we thought might be interested in doing that kind of work, asked them if they would be interested. It's a commitment of their time and making sure that they would be available to do that, that they had the skills to do that and identify them that way. It's really more of a voluntary basis of people coming forward saying they're interested in it. So what levels would you -- are they at all different levels? Most of them are managers across the organization, mid- level managers and above. I particularly enjoyed the first video where they were doing the number activity and then they tried to put themselves in the position of a citizen who doesn't know the ropes. A lot of times some of the things, the steps and the processes are intuitive to folks who have been working in the city for a long time, but not to citizens. I thought that was a great insight. This is just another verification to me of the experience I 've had as a citizen and as a volunteer with the city about the staff being professional and very conscientious. I love this project and looking at ways to do our work better, to do it more efficiently, to save money and to give our citizens a better experience when they're coming to the city for help. Thank you. Question? My question is, since it's not anonymous, is there any incentives or rewards for employees? We're going to talk about the innovation program in a moment and it does have rewards and incentives for employees to come forward with ideas that actually get implemented. There are rewards for that one. For the lean process, there hasn't been any kind of reward system, more of just trying to help those departments perform their job in more productive and effective ways. Brian, could you go back to the one where it shows that one right there? It looks like the two largest areas were finance and purchasing and it says 1,100 hours and finance/purchasing 1 ,400 hours. Is it work here 2,000 hours? 2,080 hours is the standard work week. That's 40 hours, 52 weeks. Okay, so you're looking at a little bit more than one FTE. You combine both of those. What was it in those, and it may be too detailed, but maybe a staff report would be good, because that's a lot. Sure. I mean, it'd be curious to what were those things that were implemented at that kind of time? Quickly on the P card limit, that's a procurement card that we have. It's a credit card, but it's paid every month by the city. It's meant to be for small dollar purchases that are made by employees around the city. By increasing that limit up, it makes the effectiveness of our employees go up. It's less processing time that we have to have for a purchase order, a cutting, a check, the costs that are involved in that. So that was designed by increasing that for certain employees. We've increased their effectiveness and we've reduced the processing costs. So that's what that one was. By increasing the limit that, okay. And what was it, what did it go to for M-500? I believe it was 500, and then it went to, I'll check maybe have the answers on that one. Behind this spreadsheet, not on here, but we do a detailed sheet for each of these improvements. We actually go out and evaluate them. On that one, we have a $3,000 monthly limit on the purchase card for most individuals in the city. And we had a $1,000 daily limit. What we did was take away the daily limit. We found about 50% of the exceptions we had to make to people were administrative people who were booking travel. For say a couple people are booking travel and a registration and all of that on one day. They ended up going over that $1,000 one day limit. So we took that away and still maintained the 3,000 monthly limit, but just took the daily limit away. I found that reduced our kind of exceptions where they had to email purchasing. Purchasing had to increase their limit for the day, go back and forth. By over 50% of those that were occurring was just that one area. So we evaluated how much time was saved on the individuals and the other portion on that. So it was pretty simple once we found the data in terms of why are these problems and exceptions occurring. And then on the financing and accounting, oh, not financing and purchasing, I'm sorry. Was that sort of the same thing, purchases over 50,000 in a single sole source? Was it just a matter of adjusting something? Well, that one was a little bit more complex. That was a five-day Kaizen event where we looked at our purchasing process with what the departments had to do, what purchasing had to do in preparing everything for council and took away some steps in that process as well as shorten some steps in that process in terms of those are all the purchases that come to city council that are 50,000 or higher. And most of those have to go out to the community. They have to go out for RFP or some type of bid. So there's a lot of documentation. A lot of that was we standardized some of the documentation . We put together a checklist for those that were responding so they could make sure that they were responding with everything that needed to be there. It's in a checklist. It's in a certain order. And we also went to electronic means, kind of one of the last steps as we're going to electronic signatures. If you remember, we came to the council by electronic signatures. So then we can route those around electronically to the vendors and back through administration. And just a lot of the time it took to physically walk those things around, mail them to do those kind of things electronically. So it was a lot of different changes to that process. Thank you. Yes, Joe. It's probably for Brian. Sorry, Chuck. That's okay. When the program started, did we hire a third party to kind of get us going and then now all of our trainers are internal? Yes, that's correct. We did hire an outside consultant who had experience doing this in other organizations. We brought him in and trained the trainer. Okay. And are there any issues with departments needing to pick up some slack while those trainers are training? Or how does that work with job description? Yeah, it's a challenge sometimes because they have to fulfill their current job requirements as well as do the lean coaching. And they have to manage that with their supervisor and their department to make sure they're able to get the current job done plus it's additional work. But I think they've all found that they're able to do that. They found it to be very rewarding work, something they want to do and make time for. But it's a challenge sometimes. Thanks, Brian. Okay. Unless there's any other questions, that's it for the lean program. The next one I want to talk about with you briefly is the innovation program. It's a little bit different. In late 2014, we started this program and it was an online -- I'm sorry? He's still on the same one, isn't he? You're still on A, right? Yes. That's the second program of the three. Okay. The innovation program, it was an online employee innovation program. This is one where we set up an online forum, almost like a chat type forum where people could submit ideas. They could have a discussion about those ideas electronically on that online forum, vet that idea, improve it, make changes to it, and they kind of grew organically on that forum. But the purpose of that was to engage and recognize employees. So as Councilmember Brooks pointed out, we did have an incentive component to this to try to recognize folks and provide some incentive compensation for when they came up with a great idea. We wanted them to solicit great ideas and implement those suggestions to improve our service. So as a result of that, we had 170 employees participate in the program with a pretty good response of the 1,500 employees we have to have 170 participate. Over 46 ideas were submitted and discussed in that online forum. 18 went to the second round. So the 46 that initially went through, 18 advanced to the second round. The employees, as they discussed it, felt like it was worthy of moving to the next round and being considered further and getting refined. And the nine ideas of the 18 were submitted to the directors for consideration. So after review and evaluation of all those different ideas that came forward, the management team is recommending the implementation of five of those. So we think all five of these ideas are excellent and they 're great benefit to the organization and the community. The first idea that's being submitted for recommendation is the employee child care solution. And this was, child care is an important issue for our employees. Many employees have children, multiple children, and finding a place for them during their working hours is really difficult. And so this idea really got a lot of traction with the employee online forum. We looked at some opportunities of providing in-house child care or outsourcing child care to another provider. But what we landed on was, I think, a really innovative solution. He's using a third party network of providers, low cost options. So employees could go to that, go to the network, utilize one of the network providers or a center that's available in various areas of the Metroplex. So this is a low cost solution for us to do that. The second idea that came forward was an employee online forum. And this is a way for employees to communicate about important issues, various things that are going on in the organization. Just to have a forum to do that and a way to do that was really important to the employees. So that's one of the ideas that we're implementing as well. The one that I think probably impacts service the most is the notification of hold time for utility customer service. And this is something when you call in, sometimes you get in the queue, you don't really know what number you are in the queue. Well, this system will tell you your number 10, your number 5 in line. And if you prefer to just be called back, you'll have an option to select that, put in your phone number, and we can call you back at a time when there's not a high call volume . So this is something that we think really will improve service for customer service quite a bit. Another idea was a one login for city employees. We have a variety of different applications that we operate . I'm sure in your own personal lives you have many different websites, different programs that you operate. Keeping up with all the usernames and the passwords for those is very difficult. Same thing is true for our city employees with the applications that we maintain. So what we're doing is we're going to have one login, one username, one password, which will provide access to all of your applications, which will provide a lot of functionality improvements for our employees. That's something that we're really proud of. Finally, the last idea that we've implemented is the management of our underutilized fleet vehicles. And this is something we have a lot of pieces of fleet equipment around the city. This group came up and these employees came up with an idea to improve that and to try to find a way to make better use of those assets through looking at underutilized fleet reports, trying to make sure that we had people who actually needed the vehicles to look at the activity that they had with it, the mileage that they had with it, trying to make sure that we were best utilizing those vehicles. So that's another idea that we came forward with implementing. So all of those are in the process of being implemented. They came from this innovation program. We're really proud of the employees that brought these forward and we're going to continue this program in the future. Kevin. Thank you, Mayor. The previous slide alluded to 46 ideas submitted. How does that track with the 170 employees that participate in the program? Do the ideas kind of get advanced and then you develop groups around each of those ideas? Yes, sir. Some of those were submitted by one employee. Some of them got together in teams and submitted an idea. Some people just came in. They didn't submit an idea, but they participated in vet ting the idea in the process. So they didn't all submit one-to-one. And have you guys tracked the -- I don't know how to say this -- the level of the employee who's submitting the ideas? In other words, are these coming from kind of senior level or, I mean, anyone? I know it's open to anyone. But in terms of where you tend to get the ideas from in the organization, is there any trend lines on that? You know, I don't have the exact numbers on that, but I'll tell you, a lot of the lower-level employees in the organization presented these ideas. We had a lot of comments from employees who were not directors, not managers, who were just in the line of the field and working and really wanted to improve these processes. So I think it was pretty -- crossed a lot of different categories of employees, but we had a lot of those lower- level employees that participated. That's great. And so if someone gets wind, say someone in some department , they get wind of one of the 18 ideas that's kind of being funneled down and they have a particular passion. Maybe they weren't involved too much in the process, but they're interested in helping out with one of those. Is there a way that they get plugged in or they can raise their hand and say, hey, I've got some interest in that? How does that work? Or I guess how are those teams formed to kind of help move something along? Well, it was really organic. I mean, however the idea was coming forward, whichever department the employees were in or even cross departments, they got together and kind of managed those ideas. But as we got them, we brought them back periodically to the leadership team, the directors, and we talked about here are the ideas that are moving forward. Here are the ones that are gaining interest. And so there were lots of different opportunities for people to get engaged. Even if they weren't at the beginning of the process, they could come back when even there was only 18 or 9 and then comment on those ideas at that time. There were lots of opportunities. Great. It's something that we hope -- I'd love to have 1,000 employees involved in this and to get even more employees going forward. It was a new program for us. We got 170. I think that's pretty good. But I'd like it to increase dramatically over time. Hopefully get even more of the activities that you're talking about. Great. I've got a question for Bill. Thank you. Did you compare this year's list of ideas with last year's list? Did any of them bubble up again? Did any of them make the cut this time that didn't quite make the cut this time? This was the first year of the program. Oh, I thought that we had done it last year. We did it in 2014 and just finished it this year. I think of a different program. It's brand new. Would it be possible for you to share that -- I don't know -- the group of 46, the group of 18 so we could kind of -- Sure. We'd be happy to share it with you. Absolutely. Thanks. Any other -- okay. Okay. So that's the innovation program. That's the second of the three. So the third one I want to briefly mention to you is the leadership excellence and enhancement program. This is also the subject of item B. I'm going to briefly describe it. In item B, we're actually going to have the presentations for you. I need to follow up. This is still part of -- This is part of this item. All right. Okay. So the LEAP program, the LEAP overview, it was created in 2014. So again, a lot of these things are happening at the same time. The innovation program, the lean program, and LEAP are all going on at the same time. So it was created in 2014. This was a formal program to develop leadership and management competencies for employees that we had in the organization. We also wanted them to focus on project tasks of real-world issues that we had in the organization to try to develop solutions to those. So again, very similar to what we're talking about for innovation and the lean, focusing on a particular issue that we had. The first class began in January 2014 and consisted of 12 employees. We had a real high interest in this program, 42 applicants applied. 12 employees were accepted into the program and have been going through a lot of classroom training, 104 hours of classroom training from UNT on various compet encies that we wanted to cover. And they've also completed project work and will present those projects that I was mentioning to you at the next item on your agenda. I do have one final video to show you on the LEAP program, which I think will describe this a little bit. [Music] It's all about employee development. And the cool thing about it too is that it really pushes you outside of your comfort zone. And so I think you get opportunities to do things that if you were just staying in your current role, maybe attending a training class here and there, that's not what this experience is all about. It's about kind of pushing your limits and seeing what you can do. And you definitely come out the other side a different person. [Music] I felt like this project and the whole process, the whole program kind of ignited everybody and got them passionate about being involved and participating. And you were working with people in other departments that offered different insights and perspectives that you don't normally see. [Music] It's a huge time commitment. It really is. 12 to 18 months is a big commitment. And I didn't know, didn't see that before. As I went through it, I learned that, yeah, it takes time. It takes more than just that 104 hours of classroom time, but I can guarantee you it was well worth the time and the effort. It has helped me tremendously. [Music] One of the best things about the program is that you can take project idea and run it through from beginning to end and come out with something at the end, a project at the end. And that's not always something you can get out of government, to be honest. And we had a lot of, we had help and we had input and guidance from the city manager's office, but it was ours. We got to do it ourselves from beginning to end, and that's really unusual. And I know those projects are going to benefit the city. [Music] I think it made a big difference to me to feel like some of the changes that we've put in place have affected people. People have come up to me and said, thank you. I didn't have my review for a couple of years and you changed that. And our group did, and it really, it makes you feel good. It makes you feel like you really accomplished something. [Music] Okay, that is my last video of the day. You're about to meet some of those actors from LEAP. They did a great job. This was a program, when we created it, we really didn't know exactly what we were going to get out of it. We knew we had some great folks in the organization and we wanted to continue to develop them, but they exceeded all of our expectations, have just done an outstanding job, and we're really proud of that program, and you're going to get to see some of the very specific project recommendations that they made in just a moment. So the next steps that we're recommending that we move forward with is to complete the implementation of the ideas generated from all these different programs, LEAP, LEAN, and the Innovation Program. Some of that may require some funding decisions in the budget process coming forward. I know in particular in the right-of-way program that you 're going to hear about in just a moment, there's some funding aspects associated with it, so this isn't the last time you'll hear about that, through the budgeting process and the strategic plan process, we'll talk some more about that and see kind of where the council wants to go from a funding allocation standpoint. We also want to begin a new round of the Innovation Program . We're looking at doing that in the late summer, so this online forum I was talking about, where we had the 170 employees involved. We want to get even more employees, start this over again, get more access and more discussion going on on those different ideas. And then we're looking at initiating a second LEAP class in the fall of 2015. We're going to use all these guys as ambassadors for that program to try to get more interest in that and have the same kind of great results from the second program that we did from the first. So that's my presentation. Again, just wanted to provide you with an overview of all those different things that we're trying to do to improve efficiency and productivity. Okay, so now I can call the second out. Okay, all right. Okay, all right. Anybody have questions on this so far? Yes. Kathleen. Is there any way to track the participants, especially with this last program, and employee retention? On the LEAP program? Yeah. Sure, we can certainly do that. We did lose a couple of folks through the process that didn 't make it all the way to the end of the program, but we can certainly look at that with the retention of people going through innovation and the LEAN and the LEAP programs. Sure. Retention as in working at the city? Yes. If this is something that helped them want to stay here and improved in that area. So I'd be interested to see if those, because 104 hours of classes, that's a lot. And so I'm hoping that that helps people feel vested and a part that they are important, even though it's a growing city and a busy city and city employees are busier than ever, that it helps maintain them as city of Denton employees. Okay, we can certainly look at that. Thank you. Okay, seeing no more questions, we'll go on to agenda item B, which is receive, report, hold discussion, and provide staff with directions concerning the Leadership Excellence and Enhancement Program project recommendations. Okay, well, I'm going to call up Mary Dickinson with the right of way group. She'll introduce the rest of her team and go through her presentation. At this time, I also wanted to recognize Philip Nsuzza from UNT, the University of North Texas. He was one of the professors for the program, went through all the classroom work, just did a great job, and I appreciate you being here. Thank you. [applause] Can you all see me over this? I feel like I'm-- [laughter] Okay, I'm on the Destination Denton LEAP team, and my team members--and I'm going to ask them to stand up so you can see them-- Noreen Hausreid, she's an engineer in the Transportation Department, Lansing Bentley, Manager of Community Information Services, and Jim Mays, he's the Superintendent of Planning and Construction in the Parks and Rec Department. And our project was to look at the right of way in Denton, and we feel like that Denton is a great place to live and work. Denton is ranked one of the 25 fastest growing cities in the United States. It's also ranked as having one of the best main streets in America, and it is ranked as having the number six high- tech hotspot in the nation, which is kind of different. Anyway, what we're going to do is I'm going to take you on a drive through Denton so that you can see what people coming to Denton see on our right of ways as they drive through town. This is I-35, and you can see there's lots of trash and debris and unmaintained vegetation along the roadways. The upper picture is in 2014, and the lower picture is in 2015, and you can see it needs some attention. Question? Yes, sir. Anita, on some of these pictures, is it okay to ask where they--I mean, like the location of this? I mean, do you know where these were taken as far as close proximity? No? I was just curious. I mean, I'm trying to recognize some of the--but it's okay. I just was curious. If you don't, that 's fine. No, I'm sorry. I don't know exactly where along. This is again along the access road on I-35, and those vegetation along the freeway are weeds that grew up. That's not plantings. Those are weeds. We like to not see those kind of things. You can see the access road is really overgrown and unmaint ained, and this was again was in 2014. This is along University. This is on the east end of University, wasn't it? The east end of University. The ruler is how high the grass can get, and Lansing's group went out and measured it. And we actually have some specific complaints in one of our surveys about this particular intersection. That is at Red wood University. So you can see there's lots of unmaintained vegetation. This is along Mingo Road, and in parts of Mingo Road, there 's a lot of dumping that goes on and that has to be picked up by various departments in the city. I think it ends up getting called around a lot. Who's going to pick this up? Who's going to pick this up? Lots of unmaintained vegetation again. And the top picture is 2014, the lower picture is 2015, so it stays about the same. In a minute I'm going to figure out which one of these to push first. This is Country Club Road, and it's a rurally maintained road, so it's mowed about seven times a year because it doesn't have curb and gutter. So it gets a rural maintenance. And you can see the top pictures in 2014, the lower pictures in 2015, and the sidewalk is pretty overgrown there if you were going to try to use it. I don't know, I'd be kind of hesitant. This is along Loop 288. More unmaintained vegetation, trash blowing around. Again, 2014, 2015. This is the Hickory corridor at the Union Pacific Rail yard . And this is what people are seeing when they come in on the train. Right before it pulls into the station, they're seeing all this vegetation. The cement pieces are actually footings from buildings that have been demolished in the past. And this is the DCTA light rail station. And you can see that the top picture on this side is where Union Pacific stores a lot of their equipment that they need to maintain the railroads. And then there's trash and overgrown vegetation and just kind of junk blowing around in the yard. And this is what people see when they come in on the train. They get off and they get off and they're at the station and it looks fairly nice on one side and then the other side is this. And they have to walk past this to get to the square. We have a question. Greg? Thanks Mayor. So do we know if Union Pacific own that little parcel right there or is that just a right of way? Does anybody know? They own it. There's several different owners to that rail yard. They own a piece of it but there's other owners as well. Yeah. And our group has met with Union Pacific and Lane T ienagorover. We've worked out some agreement or are working with them to get some agreement so that we can maybe deal with some of that. Thank you. So our project approach was to identify the problems and look for opportunities to improve the current level of right of way maintenance throughout Denton. We evaluated the problem. We looked at the current right of way maintenance. We looked at the community impact. We did some pilot, some surveys and we're doing a pilot project. We looked at upcoming right of way maintenance and that's going to have an impact on the city in the future because there's a lot of new roads coming in with all the growth that Brian talked about. So we set some goals for our project on what we would like to see maintained, what we think recommendations that would work. We looked at beautification. We looked at resources, possible ways to get funding other than through the city, through other entities, through TextDOT, partnerships with other entities. And then our group made some recommendations. Jim Mays is going to come up and talk to you about our evaluation. Thank you, Mary. As you can see, Mary did a very effective job of identifying what we have a problem. And so we went through the course of steps in order to evaluate that problem. Currently, the majority of our major roadways and arterials through town are TextDOT roadways. And with that, we have a municipal maintenance agreement with TextDOT. And over the course of years, the last 10, 15 years, the level of maintenance in that agreement has diminished significantly, although it's incrementally, but it has diminished from a period of where they used to maintain m owing cycles seven times per year with an additional two litter cycles to that of two mowing cycles per year and one litter cycle. With a town of over 130,000 people, we needed a significantly higher level of maintenance with this in order to encourage the economic growth and the strength of the community of Denton that we want to continue being and being in the future. Again, Mary showed us some photographic evidence. Joey, you had a question? Yeah, I didn't see you, Joey. I'm sorry. Okay. Is that typical of TextDOT having agreements with that with the city this size or does that go by, you know, or? What my perception is is with the growth in the North Texas region, TextDOT is in more of a building roads mindset. Whereas, you know, that's their key focus, and they're somewhat divesting themselves over the maintenance responsibilities. And we're going to tell you a little bit more about that here. Sorry about that. That's okay. And I apologize for not seeing you. Still working on getting these bifocals adjusted to me. So my apologies significantly. Again, with y'all's help, we were able to secure a pilot project of $125,000. And we're going to show you that at levels of increase in service, this is going to maintain. Again, what's this all about? It's about economic development. Denton is a strong, vibrant community. We want to maintain it being a strong and more vibrant community. Our population is going to increase significantly over the next 15 years as we go into 2030. And so these are the steps we took. We want to secure the citizens' impressions of the areas in the pilot project area. The pilot project is an area that is essentially six TextDOT roadways that we're making more increased maintenance from that of a rural type maintenance to that of a more significant 52 cycles a year, 20 mowings, and a total of complementary litter cycles to meet weekly maintenance. We used our GIS system. We identified all the properties in the area, these six roadways. We used internal services to get the contact data. We had a recorded message with an auto dialer that called a total of 2,403 homes in the affected areas, with the areas that we're increasing the maintenance on. And what that recorded message was to do was to encourage people to go out and fill out our online survey. Well, those 2,403 calls, we were successful in getting 150 fully completed survey responses. Of that, 52% of the people that replied thought that we had poor to need significant improvement as their responses. For an additional survey, we did an engaged didn't survey whereby we had it open to the entire public. We had 1,372 participants of that. We had 36 people that went forward and completed our online survey. And again, we had somewhat similar results. We had 38% of the people that thought we really need to be doing a significantly better job. And we had on average on both about 7 to 8% people that thought everything was as they as they would have anticipated. As we move forward with the pilot project through the course of the year, we're going to contact these citizens again at the end of the summer. And we're going to see if we had any significant improvements or additional comments and find out what our citizenry actually thought about the process. Among those comments we got on the surveys, let's go in in in brevity. In regards to US 380 University Drive, we had comments resulting as we have a real problem with tall grass and weeds. Makes it difficult to turn on 380. It would be good if the grass could be reduced in size. 2164 Locust always needs mowing and maintenance, litter strewn all over the roads and ditches. FM 1830 Country Club, big blind spot due to trees, weeds, etc. My husband picks up trash and mows the median by my home and my neighbor's homes numerous times a year because the grass gets too high. Hickory Creek Road, I pick up trash on this roadway every day as I walk my dog. People use Hickory Creek as a dumping ground. The area is always trashed. We have a lot of broad ranging comments that, you know, they're indicative of people that want a response. And that's what we're going to be working towards. And we 're already in some significant. Could you go back one slide? Absolutely. That that last comment. My husband picks up the median and mows the median behind my home. It seems to me that I recall maybe in the first couple of years I was on council. A real conundrum that we were facing, and this was along El m Street, further out north, Highway 77, where some folks were thinking that it was their responsibility to mow behind their fence, between their fence, you know, out to that sidewalk in the roadway. And others were told, no, you can't do that because that's a state right of way you're you're not supposed to be using machinery on that. What is. Do we know what the real rule is? Well, the. To answer that question, let me, let me give you. If I just opened up a can of worms. I'm always happy to answer any question you have, sir. Go ahead. Previously, earlier in my career in the area between 2001 to 2007 2008. We encouraged people it was it was even our, at that time, code enforcement division. They encouraged people that if it was a curb and gutter street. It was, you know, urbanized street section. They were responsible to the back of curb. Through a decision via text dot or legal or within the conf ines of the MMA, we no longer can encourage people to to mow in adjacency to a highway that has a believe speed in excess of 45 miles an hour or state roadway. We certainly do not discourage that. But we. There was there was a shift there due to safety and due to public policy. And so, with any shift, there's always going to an effective and correlating cost. It still has to be done. So, we never were really funded for that additional cost, and what we've made significant efforts to to meet that need. Majority of these roadways are mode at a class C section, which is our, our dollar terminology for seven times a year , more of a rural street section. So, essentially, that's kind of hope I answered your question. Thank you very much. But if you want to know that Outstanding. Again, these are all comments that they're not indicative of, of where we want to be in Denton, we want to make sure that we have a strong community, a community with it is vibrant and appealing aesthetically enhancing a place where people want to bring their children to go to our two universities with a place we want to have businesses wish to move forward and locate here in Denton. And by having an inviting and nice aesthetic appeal and clean community. We feel as though that is indicative of enhancing economic development. Okay, so that covers the here and now, and things that have led up to that point. But let's look a little bit further into the future. In the next five years we have an additional 21 miles of class C rural road sections that will be transformed into a, an urban street setting, which will go hand in hand with Additional maintenance concerns and additional costs at this current projected right. We're on target to have an additional $100,000 per year every year for a total of $500 ,000 more year in additional cost towards parks and rec. So what we want to do is we will make sure that we're not fixing the here now, and not disregarding what's coming, you know what we see coming over the horizon. So we want to make sure that we work these figures into our budget over the next five years. So we're not coming back and having this perpetuating same cycle. Well, I like to do is I'd like to introduce Noreen house right, she'll talk to you about our goals. I greatly appreciate your opportunity. Yes, real quick question on your pre survey locations. Yeah, the pre pilot project survey that those locations. Yes. When we talk about we want to. This is about people who are coming to our city. Yes, of course, don't eat peanuts before you start talking. But I 35, which is the basically major corridor through the city. That's not here. And plus I think in some ways. I know when y'all made this presentation I think last year, is this. I don't know if it was the same. Well I guess it was not the same location but I know 35 along 35 to 35 quarter was was one of the bigger concerns. So, is it not here only because that's so problematic because it's a text dot issue and we can't really do much on that. One of the reasons that we did it the way we did was we want to, you know, I 35 is is our front and back door. And so we wanted to show that showcase that. But as far as evaluation the problem or we can do right now. That entire section is under the control. That's right, of a GL or until they're done. And so, good point. We really can't. We realize that's that will be a cost and we have those figures that we can bring up to you, but we didn't feel it was pertinent or timely to bring something that'll be fantastic. I greatly appreciate your attendance. Yeah, thanks. Now, here's Noreen. Okay, our group came up with three goals I'm going to talk to you about two of them. Our first goal is right away maintenance, basically this is our core goal. This is the main thing we're looking at. And what we're talking about is an increase in the type of service. We're especially talking about our commercial corridors and entryways, which includes the DCTA rail station as they come in. We're talking about current services, mowing and litter pickup at different times of the year depending on what type of roadway it is. What we're talking about is new services that would add edge in tree removal tree trim and herbicides, illegal and again, the commercial corridors and entryways but 52 times a year for the litter and debris pickup and 18 times a year for the mowing. This is what we're doing on those pilot projects right now. So this is just kind of expanding it hopefully in the future to encompass all those roadways. Our second goal is beautification, really by accomplishing the first go, we're accomplishing a degree of this, but we wanted to take it to a next level so we contacted tech stop to talk about participating in their green ribbon program. We went there in November and contacted them and we left out a city that was earmarked for this year backed out. So we were able to come in and take that funding. Their landscape architects came up to the city drove around , discussed a few areas with us and these are the four locations that were chosen. If anyone doesn't know what the green ribbon program is it 's something that started in the Houston district to help mitigate the effects of air pollution. It has since expanded to other air quality non attainment areas. The city of Denton is in the Dallas district which is an air quality non attainment area so we qualify for the program. Now the funding for this program comes from any highway project in a non non attainment area. They have to put half a percent to 1% to landscape improvements. Now in a lot of projects, it's not feasible because it does not include sod or seeding. So it's actual landscape improvements. So whatever they can't use for that project has to go into this program to be used on other highway segments in the districts. As you can see these are all text out roadways. They're all entryways and they all make first impressions. Here's current pictures of them. You can see they're already landscaped. A lot of this has been there a while. A lot of these trees are kind of at the end of their lifecycle, the parks departments removing a portion of these trees every year just because they're dying. Some of the areas just didn't thrive the way they had hoped . So this is a great way to revitalize these areas. One thing I haven't mentioned yet is the program not only pays for the landscape plans, it pays for the installation of all the vegetation, soil bed preparation, the irrigation , and they maintain it for an entire year. As a city we just have to enter a landscape maintenance agreement saying that we'll maintain it after the year is up, which we already maintain it to a degree so we're not really increasing that much maintenance to this. This is a conceptual drawing they sent us a while ago just to give us an idea what they're looking at for the three other areas. The fourth area that's the slope on US 380. They're looking at replanting honeysuckle throughout that whole area. Right now, this is our schedule. Last week we received the final plans and the agreement. It has been signed and returned to TechStop. They'll start advertising and bid next month. We'll look at construction this fall. We won't have to take over maintenance until probably January 2017. So not only does TechStop pay for all this, but if you look at it as a savings for the city because we'll have it a little over a year where we're not maintaining areas that we already maintain. Do we know what the total value of that is? The total dollar amount between the design, installation, year worth of maintenance, all that? No, I do not have a number on the design, but we wouldn't know that until they bid it next month and they contracted, we'll find out what the value of TechStop is paying. I would love for us to be able to have that because that to me would be directly attributable to this initiative that you guys did. Because that's something I think we would all agree we would have wanted to do anyway. The fact that you guys took the initiative to go and meet with TechStop and were able to get in the spot of that other city. That's going to be a significant amount of money saved that we could attribute right to this team doing that. So I think you guys certainly deserve the credit for that and it would be good to know that dollar amount as we think about how we invest in these sort of initiatives going forward when you can show that kind of impact. We can definitely get that to you next month when it's out for bid. Okay, thanks. This is maybe more of a technical question. When they do this, they install this landscape and there's irrigation. Are they paying for getting the irrigation to the site? In other words, all the costs associated, whether it would be interesting for charging them an impact fee, but I'm sorry, I digress. I digress. So that includes all the infrastructure needed to irrigate those places properly. Correct. And some of the areas already have irrigation so they'll be expanded on. But the ones that don't then they would be extended to those locations. Yes. Okay, great. Yes. In the previous slide I think it is the identification of the projects, maybe it's before that. No, so this one right here, so do you have more specifics as to the segments of when you say Dallas Drive is at the medians from I-35 all the way to what, I guess, Eagle Drive ? Dallas Drive is where you get off the exit for Dallas Drive , but there's a point that it's textile right away and then it moves into city right away before it gets to Teasley. So that segment right there, I think there's pear trees planted right now. Okay. Fort Worth Drive. Let me think, I had the segments, I had all the segments in there at one point but it looked cluttered so I took them out so I'm trying to remember. It's, I'll have to, I can get that for you, I'm sorry. That's fine, it would just be nice to know what to expect. And we can even give you, show you a copy of the plans that they submitted if you want to see them. That's fine, perfect. Thank you. Any other questions? Wonderful. Now, now Lansine is going to talk about our final goal. Good afternoon. We've got the designs, I don't know if you all should have them in your backup. I'll just, I'll tell you this real quick on the Fort Worth Drive is 35E to Collins. Okay, Teasley is from 35E around to William Miller. Does that help? You asked the question. Okay, all right. That's a big advance. Okay, it's a lot. It's really a lot. They're doing a lot of work. Okay, Noreen covered the first two goals for us, and we have three goals. In order to achieve the first two goals, in order for the city to be able to move forward on improving maintenance and increasing maintenance and working on beautification efforts, we really knew that we needed to find some partners in this and we needed to try and find some resources. So obviously the main partner in all of this is TextDOT, and I think it might have been Jim who mentioned, or one of our people mentioned that, a lot of our roadways in Denton are TextDOT roadways. Almost every one of our entryways, our commercial thoroughf ares, we have an awful high number of TextDOT roadways in our community. So a natural partner is TextDOT. They helped us in two ways, and they were actually quite helpful. We worked with them on the green ribbon project, with Nore en reviewed with you, and they were helpful to us in getting us in this year, when really we shouldn't have been allowed to get in until next year. So they slid us in and did all the work for us, and like I said, you have the backup to kind of look at their designs. The second thing that they did is that they were willing, and it'll show on the next slide, we have a funding slide in a few minutes, they were willing to provide, it's a small amount of money, but to the city of Denton on an annual basis, if we will take over the care and maintenance of some specific roadways that they currently maintain, that they currently mow. So instead of paying their contractor, they will pay us. And we will only be the second city, maybe even in the state, that's actually worked out that kind of a deal with them. The other one is Dallas, and they started doing it in about 2009, 2010. Union Pacific is the other partner that we reached out to, and actually, even though it's been a very long process with them, they were very easy to work with. What we needed from them was permission, and in the form of agreements. If we want to get on Mingo Road and do any maintenance on M ingo Road or any beautification on Mingo Road, almost the entirety of that grassy area we discovered almost out to the pavement is actually UP right of way. That kind of surprised us to find that out. So in order to do any level of work on that road at all, any work at all really, we need an agreement from them. They provided us that agreement. It's in the legal department. Larry's reviewing it right now. And let me tell you one thing about that agreement that was very positive. We actually, the insurance is pretty high on these, and we were able to actually have them decrease the insurance requirements by 50%. And they said that we were probably only three cities that ever made the request and actually had it, received that, actually got it. So we were pretty thrilled about that. The second thing that UP is going to provide to us is after we start working on Mingo Road, and we have several months of working there without any interaction or problems with the tracks or a train, they're going to provide us a second agreement for the rail yard so that we can do beautification and clean up in the rail yard. The downtown TIF board was a potential partner. We have not met with them yet. We decided to wait until we get the UP agreement in, and then we would go to the TIF board and see if they might have an interest in some way funding it or supporting it since the rail yard is that very eastern edge of the tax increment district, the downtown tax increment district. So we haven't met with them yet. Same with the Hickory Street, East Hickory Street developer . We met with Amy a few times, and we've not met with the developer yet or developers yet. We want to wait until we get the agreement for the rail yard and then go to them and see if they have any interest in maybe funding or any type of resourcing at all because it's their front yard and see what they might want to provide towards this improvement to the rail yard. And then, of course, there's the general fund, our greatest resource. As you all know, you all provided us with $125,000 last year for our pilot project. It's a three-year -- I know, you're laughing. No, I'm not. Brian's been giving me the stink eye. Brian's been giving me the stink eye, so that's the only reason I'm laughing. Three years at $125,000 for us to work on our pilot project . I'm going to show you that in just a minute. And then also, we asked for another -- we brought another supplemental package forward this year to bring in more streets to just do a fuller job, funds that we think that we'll need just to go forward on a lot of streets. Let me show you a funding slide. A couple of questions. Sure, sure. Thanks, Mayor. Well, I think while it's awfully nice of UP to reduce our insurance requirement by 50% so we can go clean up their land, and then if we do a really good job cleaning up that land, they're going to let us go clean up their trash and their rail yard, which is a very nice gift on their part. Being the director of community improvement services, looking at those pictures, is there anything in those pictures that might be a violation that we can at least say, hey, how about if you clean up your mess here first before you let us clean up your mess at our expense? You know, there's a few things. We contacted DCTA. We have some good contacts there, and they're doing a better job of keeping that rail station mowed. They didn't have a person. They had a vacancy for a while, and now they've got that filled, and so we're working with them. Only a portion of the rail yard is actually UP. They sent us -- their real estate department sent us a map a while back, and they say there's several ownerships. That's the next thing for us to look at to see who actually owns what. At one point, they thought ReadyMix might own a portion of it. We've heard that maybe Denton has bought that portion, so we haven't looked into all that yet. Our main agreement we're focused on right now is the one on Mingo Road, and then we'll move to look at the rail yard one. We can actually send our complaints to UP up in Omaha, send it to their real estate department. They've told us they'll accept those complaints, and then they'll sort them. We were here earlier to sort, and they'll sort them, and then they'll get to them. Well, I'm just asking if -- so they've got those things stacked up there that I don't know what the -- you know, railroad ties or whatever they have. All that stuff was stacked up, and I don't know -- given what the zoning is there and all that stuff, I just -- all I'm getting at is -- Is there more they could do? If we're going to be good partners, can you be a better partner than giving me a 50% discount on the insurance I don't really need? You know, I tell you, we did meet in December with a man named Clint Shalbitzky, and he was, at that time, the public affairs director for like a five-state region. He came, and he looked at there, and he goes, oh, my gosh, that looks really bad. He said, we can do better than that. Very shortly after that, they moved him into another position, not because of that, but they moved him into another position. So not because of that, I realize. But now we have Dan Harbeck, and so we're working with him, and so they realize -- so some of the conversations will start about how they store it. Could they actually put containers out there and store them ? But we haven't even gotten to all of that yet, but those discussions have started because they came out and they looked themselves and realized that it looks pretty bad. And then there's a piece of private property there as well. It's privately owned next to the tracks on Sycamore Street, and our division is working with that property owner to try and clean that property up. Well, given that signs fall under your department, maybe you could just let them know if we can't work together to get that cleaned up, we could just put a sign up that said we'd love to clean this up, but it's owned by Union Pacific Railroad. I'm going to take notes. All right. Yeah. The question I have is when you're talking about Mingo Road -- Yes. -- and you're talking about primarily keeping the grass m owed, so if most of it is from the pavement towards the track, is there a right-of-way? Right. If I had a stretch of land like that and the grass was three feet tall, first of all, I'd be getting notices before it hit three feet tall. So is there something that exempts them from our ordinances or something that exempts them from -- You know, yeah. I mean, we can notify them, but I suppose we could send them a citation, but they're not going to sign it and send it back. I just don't know that there's a lot we can do about it. We find this -- we actually checked, and this goes on in a lot of communities. You know, UP will take the complaint and they will act on it, but it's probably not fast and as fast as we would want it to be. But if they -- Go ahead. If they don't act on it fast enough, then we can put a lien on their property, right? I'm going to let Anita answer that question. Well, the point being, I mean, I understand about us wanting to do this, and I applaud that, but yet also don't want to think that, well, people can just sort of not do anything, and then we're going to come in and make it better because it looks so bad that -- so I just -- Right. That's really sort of troubling to me, quite honestly, that -- That we have to take over their work. Well, I mean, they're subject to the same things that we all are, at least from my understanding, and then somehow we give them a pass on it. So that's my only thought about it because we've got enough -- I mean, we've got enough text outroads that they're not going to maintain, you know, that we can't do anything about that other than take it over. So that's my only thought on that is, I mean, yeah, anyway. So we were on the funding slide. The 125 is the funding that was approved last year for three years. It's the -- these are the roadways and the areas that are in the pilot project. I think we're going to be able to increase these. Right now, Mingo and UP aren't in there because we need the agreements. And then we came back this year with requested funding at 2 19-838 to include more roadways at higher levels. We got that 219. You all have this in your backup. There's an Excel spreadsheet. There's two spreadsheets. And basically what it shows is we got some of the estimates of the cost from parks, but we also got the estimates from bids that we received when we did our pilot project. We had low and high bids, and so we put low and high bids in the backup for you. But what we put on this slide here is what would be the highest. The low bid is probably $100,000 or $150,000 less than this , actually. So approved funding is in place. Requested funding is in front of you at this time. And then the TechStot funding, and it's not a lot. It's $25,730. But when you look at this in your backup, what you'll notice is that there are five streets that TechStot is willing to provide funding for if we take over the mowing. It's streets that they pay their contractor currently. But what this really showed to us is that they're only maintaining five streets. That's what this really showed us. And it also showed us the dollar amounts are not really high. This dollar amount on here is for three mowings a year that they're willing to provide to the city to do three mowings a year. What they actually pay their contractor for is two mowings a year. So, questions on that? So this figure does not include Mingo Road. It's not a TechStot roadway. I know, but I'm saying not the $25,000. I'm talking about the $370,000. Yes, it does. Not the $370,000. The $219,000, the requested funding. Yes. That doesn't include the UP. I thought you said it does not include the Union Pacific. No, it does. It would include that. Once we get all that. We've already put all those acreages in there. So it's in there. I'm sorry. I misunderstood you. Right now, it's in this approved funding for this year, but we haven't started those two areas because we don't have those agreements yet. But they're in there. When we get the agreements, we'll start doing those. And the Mingo Road agreement we have, and like I said, Larry is looking at that. And so we'll move forward at a later date on that. But just so I'm understanding, Textodot is saying that for two mowings a year, it's $25,730. Well, they're offering us -- they're saying they'll pay us for three. So this $25,730. There's five roadways back here. One of them is worth $2,900 to them for three mowings. They do $29 an acre, which is not anything that any contractor will ever get will do it for $29 an acre. But they have such huge contracts. So there's just $29 an acre. And so like on Teasley, if we mow it three times in the coming year, it's $11.83. So there's a menu in your backup of this Excel spreadsheet that we provided with our supplemental package. And as I said, they only pay their contractors for two mow ings a year. They're willing to pay us for three. So this $25,000 is even a larger number than what they're expending already on those roadways. There's very little being done is what we found out, basically. One other question, couple. Sure. So then we've got the $125,000. Then the requested is the $219,000. Correct. Is that in addition to the $125,000? Yes. OK. All right. That makes it $344,000. Again, when you have some time and look at the low and high bids, you'll see that that $370,000 is the high bid. But there's actually a low bid in this packet as well. And I know that there was something mentioned about a 52- week cycle of something. Of litter and debris removal, illegal sign removal, just a cleanup. So that's once a week? Is that once a week? Once a week. OK. All the roadways. Is that included in this? Yes. Yes. All right. Yes. All the mowing, weed eating, edging, tree trimming, tree removal, sign removal, everything is included. OK. Yeah. This is the pilot project you've heard us mention a few times. We took that $125,000. We went out to bid. We did an RFP. Had three vendors bid on it. TeraCare Associates got the bid. They started on March 24th. And the roadways they're doing right now are in that list. We want to add these additional areas because they're part of the pilot project. We just don't have the--we don't have one agreement final ized and we don't have the other agreement yet. It's been kind of a difficult season for mowing. When we started in March, they had plenty of time to get some stuff done, but since then, seven or eight weeks of rain. So we have a few before and after photos early on in the process. This was McKinney Street before they came through on March 23rd. This is on March 24th. This is a part of university. It's hard to tell the tall grass and weeds there. Some illegal dumping trash and debris March 23rd. And this is when they came through on March 26th. And I'm getting ready to go to a recommendation section. But one thing that our group was wanting to make--to really make a point of is that our goal is to see that our road ways, our rights of way look like this on an ongoing basis and don't return on occasion or very often to looking like this . We have five recommendations. We have three primary ones and then two additional ones I 'll tell you about briefly. Annual funding. Kind of going off of what Jim and all of our group was talking about with the city growing, the desire to economically develop, to bring in businesses, to bring in industries, to bring in people, to continue to grow our city, to improve our city. And we think one of the things that we need to look at is what are people's--what is the first impression of our city by some people who are just showing up here to look and they're driving down Dallas Drive or University Drive or Fort Worth Drive. And so we need to take that into consideration. And we think that we'd like to recommend the city to seriously consider annually funding a package, a program of improving and beautifying the main corridors, the commercial corridors, the entryways into the city. The second recommendation has to do with the rail yard. Once we get that UP agreement, if we decide we want that UP agreement, we sign off, we finalize that agreement. If we do that, we would like to recommend that we really seize upon that opportunity and develop some sort of an improvement plan to actually revitalize that rail yard right there at the DCTA rail and right there at the Hickory Street corridor. The green ribbon program, Noreen did a really good job describing that. It's an excellent program. It's been something the state's been--had in place for about 15 years. It is with regard to mitigate air pollution, but really for cities, it's very helpful in terms of landscape maintenance . So if we have any text out roadways that in the future that are current text out roadways or any new additions like Jim was talking about, that we would like to see landscaped and improved, we should probably look at entering back into the green ribbon program. It's not any cost to us at all. And the last two things basically is just something that kind of came to us as the last year and a half as we drove the roadways and took photos and read the survey results and talked to other departments , we realized that maintenance and beautification is really important. But we also realized that when the citizens and the staff got together and we formulated the 2030 plan, that there's some really good ideas in there about improving commercial centers and commercial corridors and aesthetics and streetscape and wayfinding signage and that kind of thing. So we just wanted to throw our support behind the good work that citizens and staff did on that 2030 plan. And we're down to our last slide. It's Denton, are we who we want to be and our team thinks Denton is a great town. We enjoy working here, we enjoy living here, we know most people do. And what we think though is that implementing some of these recommendations, all of these recommendations, would be one step, would point us in a good direction, for getting us to be the city that we really, really know that we can be and want to be. Thank you, Joey. I don't really understand how this works. If TxDOT were to participate in the city too, would the county participate in any of this kind of maintenance or how does that work? You know, I don't know if the county does, because we focused on internal to the city. We didn't go out, I mean TxDOT does maintain some of the farm to market roads like US 380 going further east outside the city limits and then further south. And so they do maintain some of those, not at a high level. And so we didn't focus on those since we were just focused on internally in the city. And I don't think that the county maintains any of the internal city roads. They may do some county roads and then that would require them and TxDOT to work together. Okay. No. I'm thinking about University Drive between the Loop and Locust Street. It was widened a few years ago to three lanes in each direction, nice median. Our parks department does a fantastic job with the trees and with the grasses that are there in the medians. We don't get any reimbursement at all from TxDOT for doing that? No. Did they pay to put a dent? You know, the one on University Drive was a Governor's Community Achievement Award. Keep Denton Beautiful applied for that funding and beat out other cities to get it. And so that was money allocated. TxDOT puts in a pot of money of $2 million a year and they provide it to Keep Texas Beautiful. And to Keep Texas Beautiful chooses nine cities in certain population categories. And so over the years we've won some of those. KDB won the money that went to do the Loop. So that money, so the installation and the plants and all of that and the initial maintenance was done by TxDOT through a Governor's Community Achievement Award grant. But then after that it goes back to the city and it's ours to maintain. I think those are important for the impression that it gives people as they're moving through the city. But it's, I'm just thinking about that in terms of what we call our partnership with TxDOT and reflecting on our, what we're maybe entering into in the partnership that Mr. Johnson pointed out with Union Pacific that's a rather one- sided partnership in terms of those looks. And I like the idea of partnering but I like the idea more of them being responsible businesses in the community just like the other businesses in our community are responsible. Keely. I'm really glad to see this project. Just driving around I notice these things and I see and just to hear that we're interested in really trying to beautify our city and work on the aesthetics is something that I think we need to be doing. And so I'm glad that this is happening. My only other question is that with the trash. Like why do you think we have such an issue with it on our roadways and everywhere because I see it even in our creeks with the bags and the, you know, is there something that we can do as a community to maybe try to prevent that instead of just kind of picking it up all the time? You know it's education and actually Denton would kind of be the poster child for nationally for a community that would be almost, I hate to say this, be expected to be more littered. Chronic litter as they say in this country are 18 to 34 years old. It used to be just male and now it's male and female. So it scales younger. We have a lot of pickup trucks and that's part of the issue . People put a lot of stuff in the beds of trucks and a lot of it blows out. There's a lot of different things. You know it's the youthfulness of it. It's the types of vehicles that we drive. Just kind of a lot too. We kind of meet the, like I said, kind of the model for a city that might be expected to be a little more littered with two universities and a very young population. It's an educational thing really. You're right. What we're talking about here is more of a reactive approach to a problem. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Kathleen. Kudos to your team. I'm impressed. You worked hard. I really like what I see. It goes beyond economic development and people driving through. It's about quality of life for the people who call Denton home. And so this is a priority for me. And I'm really happy with this presentation. I'm happy that things are moving forward and that there are , you know, people and plans and we are growing. And we've got to get this under control so that it's in process. As we do grow because it's raising the bar. And once that bar is raised, then we want to keep it there and make it better. So as somebody who loves this city, thank you and good job. You're welcome. Thank you. Kevin. Thank you, Mayor. This is a great report. Thanks for what you're doing with it. A couple things. On your list of recommendations, did you have a price tag associated with number one? Or is it kind of the funding as you've been getting up to this point? Right, that was the funding there. And as I said, you'll see some backup. You'll see two Excel spreadsheets in your backup that will show kind of the gamut from low to high and mid-range and that kind of thing on different roadways. But yes, that's the high end for an annual funding. And you know, right, right. And honestly, we've done -- March, April, May. So we've done three months of a pilot project and it's been raining for six or seven of those weeks during that pilot project. So going into next year, it may turn out that we can do a lot more with this dollar amount or we can take a lot less dollars and still do a lot. We haven't had a full year of a pilot project. And so just to be honest, that's -- you know, this is our best assessment, getting low and high bids and that backup. Is there -- a couple other questions. Is there anything you saw in terms of creative ways other cities are funding this? Obviously, you roll through certain cities and it just feels nice. There's landscape. I think George Bush is always the one that just looks good. And part of that is I think what they've used to landscape that area. It's probably lower maintenance, less water need, all sorts of things of what they used, which is probably somebody coordinated that when that was going in at some point. So are there some creative negotiations when we have road improvements, specifically text dot road improvements that you've seen other cities do that lock them in with a better deal on the front end? You know, we looked at a few different things. Like we mentioned, Dallas is the only other city that we're aware of, maybe in the state. For sure in the Dallas district. We think in the state that actually did this funding thing with text dot that if we take this over, just give us the money you give your contractors because we're not satisfied with the level of work done by the contractors. Or the number of times they come out. So there's that piece. But, you know, some cities have 4A and 4B, you know, and so that helps. Various TIFFs and PIDs and we didn't find anything too, I guess, unusual. We could probably look a little farther and a little harder . And we might find something. But those are kind of the standard funding mechanisms. And then I guess the final question is, as you think about the roads that you're identifying, wanting to work with, has there been any look at kind of what's happening in terms of planned road improvements? A lot of what the feel of an entryway is part of it, as you see, it's trash or weeds. But also what's the road feel like? Right, sure. And to get some sort of recommendation from your group, if we're looking at possible projects moving forward, we've got tons. Of needs, of course. But as it relates to a beautification project specific to entryways into the city, and some of these would be text out, some would be non-text out that we have a little bit more control of. But looking at timing of some road projects or at least even repaving projects or something like that, that just make an area pop as you're doing landscape as well. That would just be interesting to see. But I don't know if you guys have looked at how it charged with that. As to when they're actually going to, those roadways are going to come online being improved or maybe we have not. Okay, that's fine. Thank you. A couple of things. As far as this is out, this is sort of separate apart from just the normal parks budget of mowing city owned right of ways, you know, throughout the city as far as this is for this particular program. Do we as a city, and this may be an informal staff report, do we as a city maintain, I get calls from people who get a notice of tall grass and weeds and across the street is a city owned right of way that is taller. So, are we maintaining the things that we already are responsible for to the same level that we're wanting to also do these because these are primarily text out roads or not me go road but are we are we doing the same level or is it different or, you know, and Jim provided us with some information the other day and he said something a little bit earlier to you all a lot of them are on a cycle of seven mowings a year. And I do like 32 mowings or 20 or like a lot of the city buildings and all the medians, the day labor site and places like that. I think I think what's happened in this as we looked at all of the backup on this is that there was a time when text out was doing more. And so, and as they've decreased what they're doing. There's not been the funding basically for us to increase what we're doing. So, seven times a year is, and I noticed that in the backup Jim gave us the other day that that us 3 80 and loop 288 get more mowings only portions those certain portions, because we leave the rest of text on. Sure, the, and somebody if maybe staff could verify this because I thought I recalled that somewhere in a bond program there was funding for entry way markers way back and that somehow those that they didn't occur and then that was one reason why I was asking for the bond program before, and if they weren't paid, and because I think there was money for that and then somehow it went somewhere else, based upon, you know, advice and recommendation from, I guess the bond oversight committee so just would like to get a review on that. Julie. Julie Glover and Mike Bell have just been assigned to be over the entry markers, and I just talked to both of them today, and they just received that assignment, and there is some funding that funding is about, I think Jim said $600, 000 it's in the parks department that's for entry way markers. And so Julian Michael be okay starting up that project somewhere. Yes, that that fund that piece is I don't know how much it was. Yeah, and if there was some even in. And I will say this and there's maybe not a whole lot we can do about this. But, you know, as we're thinking about entry ways and beautification and so forth. I mean, and roads are good. Mowing is exceptionally good keeping trash picked up. But on a lot of our major entry ways for or drive. Coming in from our guy. The level of buildings and the way that the buildings are, I mean so they're private so I know we can't do much about that but it's, I mean, we can make everything look great but if you have very old sort of dilapidated buildings but ones that aren't there maintained to a standard that doesn 't require some type of notice. I think that's important that we keep that that we keep that in mind to as we move forward with probably this is great I mean I remember when you presented this last year, and how impressed we all were and just with the amount of work and the recommendations. I know Kevin's not in here but George Bush is impeccable. That's because when you drive down George Bush, you get your zip cash bill or you get your toll tag bill. And I'm sure that that's part of the reason. I mean, that's budget ed for in those. 17 cents a mile. Yeah, does in terms of constructing, maintaining, and and taking care of the, the landscaping. We come close to, to, to covering 17 cents a mile. We're more like about four or five cents a mile. And so you see what we get for that price. Yep. But thank you very much for that great presentation any other questions I believe we have one more. All right. Thank you. We do have one more. We were expecting just one project from the leap group but being the overachievers they are they came up with two projects and split into two teams. So now I'm going to ask Kevin and Mullen to come up and talk about the next project. Good afternoon, and I'm proud to introduce the leap team that selected performance management and succession planning is our project. Our leader is Ethan Cox from customer service for Nell Doo ley from the police department. Rodney Patterson from building inspections and Megan shoot from for prevention. I'm Kevin and Mullen from accounting. It's going to kind of frame our discussion for performance management succession planning. So this story has to do has to deal with a golden egg. And specifically the goose that laid the golden egg. So there was a farmer and his wife, and they had a goose and every day, this wonderful amazing goose laid a single pure shiny golden egg. And they loved it. They really did. And see story time this is great right we're changing it up a little bit so every morning, the goose lay this golden egg and so the farmer is why I said you know what would be great is if we could get all the gold at once. I bet. If we kill that goose, cut it open we can get all the gold. So that's what they did. And to their surprise, when they killed the goose that goose was just like every other goose and inside there was no extra gold. And now, instead of receiving single golden egg each day. They had deprived themselves of future profitability. They had essentially killed their asset. So, how does this correlate to our project. Now and next. Well, for us as managers with the city didn't sometimes we 're like that farmer, and his wife, we get so focused on the here and now of the day to day operations. And to further correlate the story that goose. That's our employees that produce that great asset that great service to the citizens of the didn't that golden egg. So, once again, that that farmer and his wife they focus on a here now and they forget to to plan for the future. They become so you know short sighted that instead of just waiting in for you know developing and nurturing that asset . They kill it, and then they forgo the future profitability. And so that's what we're talking about today. This is a future project that's why it's called now. And next. And with that, I'll turn it over to Megan, and she'll go over today's presentation definition and scope. Good afternoon. So for today's presentation we're just going to define our project and scope will recap our project plan and then we'll share with you our findings and our recommendations. So our project is now and next. The goal of this project is to improve performance management and succession planning by creating a cultural change within our organization. This cultural change will not only improve employee morale, but also improve our workforce productivity. For all of us, the employees in the city of Denton are the city's most valuable asset, we want to ensure that each employee feels the same way. Our project scope includes performance management and succession planning throughout the cycle of the employee so it would start when the employees hired until the employee leaves the organization that employees should be continuously developed. Our deliverables include standard procedures to create a consistency throughout the city, a communication plan and a support network, not only for supervisors, but also for employees. Our plan for this project was to act like consultants. So the first thing we did was research. We researched organizations that are highly successful in the areas of performance management and succession planning. Once we finished our research, we compiled a list of best practices. Then we assessed the current state of our organization. We did this through an employee wide survey. We interviewed employees in different areas of the organization and we conducted focus groups comprised of mid-level managers in different job areas. Once we had this picture of the current state of our organization, we compared it back to our list of best practices. And then we based our recommendations on brid ging that gap between best practices and our current state. And with that, I'll turn it over to Ethan. Thank you, Megan. It's a pleasure to be here today. Thank you all for carving out the time. So like she said, we tried to act as consultants, only we were considerably cheaper than most of the consultants that you're used to. The bill is coming now, so bear with us. As Megan stated, really where we started is what's our current state look like? And before I dive into some of the things we found, I do want to basically state that what we found is there's a lot of rock stars in this organization. There are a ton of managers, a ton of leaders that are really doing an excellent job as it relates to performance management. And really what we're going to present today is what are some of those hurdles that prevent us from being the type of organization that we really want to be? And so as we started out on this project, really where we tried to draw the line of where we want to be was in the strategic plan. We want to be an organization that is based on excellence, high performing workforce. So we tried to evaluate those things and see are we falling short in some areas? Megan mentioned the survey, the focus groups. One of the things we found when we started this project was sometimes we struggle with a lack of compliance. What I mean by that is there is certain steps that need to be taken with performance management, and I'll detail those in a couple of slides. But as a manager, you have certain responsibilities to those in your charge. And if sometimes you don't meet those responsibilities, it can have a big impact. We're an organization that pays for performance. And so not only does it impact the employee development, it can also impact employees in the pocketbook if I as a manager fail to fulfill my responsibilities. So that's one of the things that we saw. And last year what we found is about 50 percent of the organization's employees, they received a performance review that was 30 or more days late. And so once again, it's depriving them that development for that 30 days or maybe longer, but it's also hitting them in the pocketbook. And that's something that has a big impact to morale and can affect the level of service. So one of the things that we found from the best practice, I'm kind of reading left to right here up top. One of the things we found when we studied some of the best organizations at performance management is they don't leave this just to the individual manager to fulfill. They make it a priority organization wide. And so here in a couple of slides, I'm going to talk to you about a few recommendations that we would make to make sure that this stays as a top priority for us so that we are that high performing organization. And we're providing excellent service to our citizens. The next thing we found in the current state is employees and supervisors sometimes have disagreements on how they're performing. And so if you've ever had a boss and you've had to sit down for your performance review, it can feel like something bad is about to happen to you. Not for my boss, Chuck. It's great. But sometimes you feel like it's just kind of washing over you and you don't have a lot of control about what's going on. And one of the things that we found, too, is employees in our organization sometimes disagreed with the ratings that they got. And so what we tried to do is find the root cause. And one of the things we came back to is maybe we're not having frequent enough conversations with our employees. Me as a manager, I sit down with my employee at the beginning of the year and we set goals. And if I check out and I don't check back in until 12 months later, a lot can happen in 12 months. And now I'm coming back and it's no wonder we have a disagreement because we haven't talked about this stuff in ages. So that's one thing that we want to try to tighten up in our processes. We're going to try to simplify the things that we need to do, kind of distill those down to their essence, make sure that compliance, we make that easy for the employee and the supervisor. And then we want to make sure that the process is collaborative. And again, I'll dive into these or the team will dive into these in the slides to come. The next thing that we found that could be improved is access to development. You know, that's kind of weird to say because the program that we're in, I will tell you that I haven't ever been in an organization that puts as much emphasis on development as the city of Denton does. One of the challenges that we have as an organization though is a lot of that is really based on classroom type training. And being a diverse organization like we are, some folks work nights, sometimes they're out in the field. Sometimes we have really busy seasons. For instance, our group right now, summer, we can't catch our breath. And so that makes attending a classroom session sometimes difficult to do. One of the other things that can happen too is managers. Like Julie said, we're focused on the here and now sometimes. And maybe we need a little bit of a reminder that it's not just the stuff that right now that's important. Maybe we need to make a little bit of a sacrifice now to get that employee into some training and make sure that they are better able to serve in the future. And lastly, one of the things that we found, and this was from the middle level managers, is a lot of their focus with the performance review is really on the administrative aspects of it. We heard from some managers that I'm staying nights, I'm working weekends just to get this stuff done. This is taking four or six hours of my time per employee. And when you've got 15 to 20 employees, that's a pretty heavy load for this. And so in addition to reprioritizing this and trying to make the process as simple, we do feel like an organization our size is fairly complex. We're kind of a conglomerate in a way. We have a lot of different things that we do. So it's not going to be one size fits all. We need some flexible tools that not only work with the complexities of our organization, but hopefully make life a little bit easier for that supervisor and at the same time allow that employee to collaborate. Oh, sorry, Dalton. You know, I have I have noticed the current state, the lack of compliance with our performance reviews because that shows up in the quarterly report. So I've noticed that I've been I've been concerned with some of the other areas of that report and been discussing that with the city manager before this. How did this bubble up to y'all's attention? How did this become? Is it because of the quarterly report and that? Or is it just because that's the way it is? I think there's a couple of things and I'm going to give some credit to Sergeant Dooley here. You know, we started the LEAP program and I think all of us as a group, we looked at it and said, wow, we've got a great opportunity here. And one of the things that Dooley said was it's kind of our our job now to pay this forward to others in the organization. And I know that probably brings a tear to your eye and you need some Kleenex. It's awfully mushy, but we really mean that. And that, you know, and I think also a lot of us, we we have a network and throughout the organization, we hear from these employees. I think in the video that Brian showed you, Kevin and talked about employees coming up to us after we've made some changes and some of the changes that Jordan has instituted. And I think it's one of those things that doesn't necessarily need to bubble up. It's just there. And so if an employee is a couple of months late on their performance review and they're missing a raise and times are tough, that stuff gets talked about. It kind of makes it through the grapevine. And talk about that in a little more detail about how the performance review is connected to the race. Right. And I'll show you in a couple of slides kind of the cycle that this goes through. But just for right now, we're an organization that pays for performance. So if you're performing exceptionally well, then if the council elects to provide a merit increase to the staff, then your level of performance impacts that. And if I don't receive my performance review, then I don't see that merit increase. And if I can ask one more question. We had another presentation about asking the whys and what they found out the why was that they turned on the lights too early. And that caused the net, which causes spiders, which caused the pigeons, which it sounds like another story that we could make with a goose and the golden egg. Have we have we asked those all those why questions about why supervisors aren't? I think that's really as we evaluated the current state, I think we saw symptoms. And so that was really where we tried to dig our teeth into as we went through the survey, we went through the focus groups and things like that. And as always, the answer is never simple. Sometimes it's a lot of stuff. One of the things that we kind of zeroed in on is it's a time management issue. And as a supervisor, as a leader, oftentimes we get promoted into these positions and there's not necessarily training wheels. Believe it or not, you wake up one day and you've got 15 people accounting on you. And there's not a lot of forgiveness in that. You know, they expect you to hit the ground running. And I think we do a great job in our organization of training our supervisors. I think it's the ongoing support and direction of, hey, listen, this is your top priority. This is not something that happens on top of your other stuff. And sometimes I think as a supervisor is once you're promoted into that role, it can be uncomfortable. And so what do we as humans sometimes do is we go back and revert to what's comfortable for us. And the things that are somewhat uncomfortable get kind of procrastinated, if you will. And I don't know, I think that's some of the stuff that we saw. But I think one of the things we're going to zero in on in terms of making this a priority is that consistent message is making that kind of relentless communication of, hey, this is important. Here's how you do it. Here's the support and resources that you need. And if we see it slipping a little bit, there's going to be some resources that come to you. We're not going to wait for you to come to us. And by uncomfortable, you're talking about an uncomfortable conversation when you have to sit on and say, hey, you're not really performing at the level that we need you to perform. Is that what you're talking about by uncomfortable? Sure, sure. And sometimes good feedback can be uncomfortable, too. And believe it or not, that's what some folks struggle with is taking and giving compliments and recognizing good work. And I think sometimes those things aren't necessarily done intentionally. When I talk about time management priorities, you know, that manager that told us that they're staying nights and weekends to get this stuff done, I don't know that we can necessarily expect that from everybody in the organization. And that's something that we've got to kind of attack organizationally is what is causing this to be an after hours type of project? Is it a lack of resources? I know Brian alluded to this when he talked about lean is we don't necessarily want to throw resources and stuff. But some of this may be let's improve the processes and make it to where you don't have to take that additional time. So I'm not sure if that answers the question, but I think it's definitely time management priorities are certainly something that we kind of honed in on. Thanks. So we're going to dive for the next few slides into just a few of our recommendations. And these are somewhat at a high level. But Dalton, to some of your points, we do want to make performance management a priority in our organization. And this is something that we really focused on for a number of years. But when you come back and look at the strategic plan, you say, are we this high performance organization of 50 percent of our performance reviews are not getting met? We probably need to do some things to improve. And so what these recommendations are designed to do is not focus on the individual manager, but to focus on us as an organization. And what can we all do as leaders in the organization to make sure this message is out there consistently, that we 're rewarding the folks that are doing this stuff right, that for the folks that are not complying with this, what can we do to help them kind of course correct? And so what we have here, one of the things we found from the best practices standpoint is organizations like ours that are kind of big and unwieldy and complex, they need to have some kind of support structure. And so a couple of things we're going to recommend is having an executive champion that is essentially charged with keeping their eye on the ball for this project and this program. George has graciously accepted that. He's already kind of dug his heels in and hit the ground running. And so we definitely want to thank him for that. He issued a memo in February, I believe it was, and we've already seen some behavior changes from our managers and leaders in the organization. So we are making progress already. And I think we are seeing late performance reviews now are down to like 2 percent year to date. I'm not sure if that's right. I'm looking around the crowd, but I'm seeing a head nod, yes. So 50 percent to 2 percent. And that's really encouraging. One of the other things that we're going to recommend is a cross functional advisory committee. And like I mentioned earlier, the city, we do a lot of different things. And so having a one size fits all approach to this type of initiative is probably not going to work. And so we want to make sure that we have the right voices in the room to make sure that we're approaching this the right way. Also, if there is a division or department, say my division , struggling with this, we're not getting the job done. It would be really helpful to have a liaison that's familiar with me to come out and visit with me and say, hey , look, something's going on here. How can we help? And so the advisory committee, we've actually volunteered to stay on for a little while longer. We'll negotiate the terms of our contract in a later time. But we are really tickled that we get to kind of continue carrying the ball in this in some way. And so we want to thank the executive team, human resources . I think all of our team is very passionate about this. And we want to bring others into the cause as well and make sure that their voices are heard. The big thing that these two groups are going to be responsible for is relentless communication. One of the things that we believe and we've mentioned that this is a cultural change initiative. For that to happen, you're probably going to have to repeat that message quite a bit. Our goal is two or three years from now to turn around and say, this is how things are done around here. It's not something that we have to remind people of because the message is repeated so relentlessly that the managers and the employees start repeating that message for us. So that's kind of the goal in terms of what are we trying to do in terms of making this a priority. And lastly, where it says hold managers accountable, once you get to that point, the managers kind of hold themselves accountable. We self-correct. And that's something that we want to see as an organization too. Ultimately, with the goal of all this resulting in improved service for our citizens. Councilman Gregory, a couple of slides ago I mentioned that we're going to talk about the process and this stuff isn't rocket science. It's pretty easy. One of the things we found when we looked at our current state and best practices, our processes are already pretty much best practice. They're pretty standard across our industry and others. So it's four steps and it's pretty simple. Step one, as a manager, I sit down with my employees once a year and I say, here's what we need to do as an organization or a department. Here's how I need you to contribute. Let's set some goals. So that's step one. Step two is we check in on a regular basis throughout the year to say, hey, here's our goals. Let's see how you're performing. Are we on the same page? Yes or no? And kind of rinse and repeat throughout that cycle. Step three is at the end of the cycle, at the end of that 12 months, we come back and say, let's review and see how we did. In our organization, we assign ratings. So if, you know, kind of like in college, you had a GPA, grade school, you had the grades, the A grade, B grade, that type of stuff. Same thing here. We do leading, strong, improvement needed. And those are what inform step four, which is the merit increase if one is approved for that year. So no changes to that. One of the things that we would recommend is that we try to look at reducing the administrative work that's associated with this. One of the complaints we heard from the mid-level managers. And instead, start shifting some of that emphasis to making sure that we have regular discussions with our employees. A question about that, too. Since pay raises are dependent on those reviews, is there anything in our process that increases the, in the school district, we called it inter-rater reliability. So that you could pretty much count on, or managers were trained so that we were trying to increase the probability that it didn't matter which manager was rating that person. That the rating was going to be very, very close to the same rating. That it was going to try to remove a little bit of the subjectivity and get a standard of clarity from managers into definitions of these standards that we're evaluating folks on. So do we have anything like that where managers are trained on an ongoing basis, that new managers are getting trained, so that there's a certain level of reliance that the evaluations are, or what you would, the same scores would be pretty much the same no matter who was evaluating. Right. There's a few things that we've included in recommendations to the executive team, and to that point one of them is having kind of a cross section of people evaluate an employee. I think in a lot of organizations that's called a 360 degree review. And so one of the things we're going to talk about systems here in a moment is very hard to do that type of stuff with , you know, Microsoft Word and Excel. And so last year there was a supplemental package approved for a performance management system. And it's my understanding that we have an RFP that's out on the street right now to evaluate something that will support that type of evaluation. One of the other things, and I think it was during one of the earlier presentations, I think it was Councilwoman Was ney mentioned, you know, do we have something where people can do something anonymously and kind of provide feedback. And so there are organizations out there that do kind of an anonymous survey of here's how this person's doing. And like Brian said, there's a danger in that, that you may not necessarily get reliable feedback. But I guess what, long story short, we do feel like as we implement these processes and programs that there needs to be a way to ensure that there's not just one person's bias there and that we are collecting more feedback. Even from the employee themselves is track your accomplishments throughout the year. Have some ownership in this. You know, you do a good job, you know, track it and report it to your manager. So I hope that helps. All right. So that's it for my piece of the presentation. I 'm going to turn it over to Mr. Rodney Patterson. Thank you much. Thanks, Ethan. We appreciate the time to be here to expand on Ethan's answer to Councilman Gregory as far as the five whys. One of the pieces of our project was an employee survey. We surveyed the entire organization. We got responses back from almost 30 percent of the employees in the organization to our survey. We took that survey. We compiled the results. There were individual comments as part of that survey. We took those. We presented them to focus groups. There were mid-level managers throughout the organization. That was part of a five-why exercise. It may not have gone five-wise deep, but okay, why are we getting these comments ? Well, because of A, B, and C. Okay. Why A, B, and C? Where are we falling short in the organization? So there was kind of a five-why process. It may not have extended five-wise deep, but there was that process that we went through. Support and resources. We're asking our managers to make performance management a priority, to make employee development a priority, to make succession planning a priority. What can we do to help them make that goal a reality? Basically, these are some of our recommendations. Performance management coaches, people in the organization that get it, people, those rock stars that Ethan mentioned earlier that are an exceptional job, allow them to share that knowledge with other supervisors. A mentor network. Somebody mentioned employee retention earlier. How do we identify those rock stars from top to bottom in the organization? How do we mentor those people, keep them around, provide them training opportunities, help them become what they want to be to realize their goal within the organization? On-demand training. Do we go more in depth into this? Prov ide training at people's fingertips. Rainy day training. I don't have to plan three months ahead for training. I can go online and get it that day. Ongoing direction and instruction. How do we provide them those tools? We invest in systems. Our recommendations, again, performance management simpl ifies the process, reduces admin work, promotes collaboration, involve the employee in their development. An involved employee is a vested employee. Make them have buy-in. Learning management software. Again, like I said, online training, training available at your fingertips. It tracks development. It allows supervisors and employees to go online, add in their training, add in what they've done throughout the year, and basically at the end it spits out that development, that review. Makes it simple. Let's face it. Most of our frontline supervisors admin work is not their specialty. They're field people. They're technical people. How do we help them reduce that admin workload? >> I'm going to take us home, guys. I'm going to tie all this together real quick here. So we talked a little bit about this software and that we're looking at proposing and buying. Some of the benefits to this software, performance and learning management software, is one, in the area of performance. It's going to allow us to evaluate talent across departments on multiple dimensions to ensure consistency in performance and succession-related decisions. Compensation. The system can establish controls to prevent providing employee compensation that increases past the limits set by policy. And thus helping the city government administrators to be even more transparent to the citizens we serve. This is a very internally focused project, but actually it 's a very externally focused project. I cannot in good faith come to you and ask you for another full-time employee position if I'm not effectively managing the 15 positions that are under me right now. Development. Tracks the employee's development training with input from both supervisors and employees. The current generation, they want to have more input on their work product. And we recognize that and this system will help us do that. Aggregate performance and development data. This software takes data from multiple sources, analyzes the data and provides specific and personalized career paths. This not only furthers employees, but retains them, saves us money. And that is key right now for organizations, the retention of those rock stars that we have in our organization. Automate and streamline workflows. Now with this software removed from a manual paper based evaluation process to a computerized system. Where supervisors can monitor when and how tasks on individual development plans are completed. Imagine the dashboard on your car that you're driving and all the information you get from that dashboard as you're driving that car down the street. Average miles per gallon, miles to a limpy. How fast you're going. What radio station you're listening to. What coffee shop is near you on the square, right? Gives you all this information. Cars are great like that. It's because of that dashboard that they have. This system, the software that we're looking at, has a dashboard for us to monitor exactly how our organization is performing day in and day out at a moment's notice. Not just the organization, but each employee in the organization. Easy access for managers and employees. And track performance and development through the year. Provides ways to document performance throughout the year. The good and the bad. This will make it more efficient and effective to document personnel issues. Or to praise and recognize our employees for a job well done. Which is highly, highly important. Okay. So recommend timeline. So this year we've appointed executive champion. We already mentioned that. We've also formed an advisory committee. This can keep this going. One of the benefits to having this cross functional, cross mental process is that allows some of us that serve on the lean committee to also serve on the performance management committee. So we can actually apply those five whys to performance management. And that's one of the benefits of this committee that we're going to have. Right now we're maintaining the current performance model because we have to evaluate where we're going from before we change it. Next year we're going to implement performance management system. Refine the performance management processes. And eliminate the excess admin work. Which will continue to allow us to have compliance on those performance appraisals. On a timely manner which will definitely affect the employees. We'll give direction and support for the managers so they know where they're going. Once again as Ethan mentioned, some of us work at night. I'll be on duty until 6 a.m. tomorrow morning guys. No lie. But it would be great for me to have some training material at 4 a.m. if I get a second and I can spend 30 minutes updating myself on how to better manage my employees. And with this software that we're looking at purchasing that will allow us to do that. And then we're going to implement that learning management system that I just talked about. To recap, we discussed how we got started. We analyzed the gap and what we're offering. And we've come up with some recommendations. You guys have been very gracious to listen to all of us for a few hours. I'll welcome some questions right now. Thank you, Mayor. Great, great work. Great presentation. Thank you guys for that. In thinking about the previous presentations that Brian gave on the various programs. And then this made me wonder whether or not there's ways that you guys might think about incorporating the innovation program into these evaluations. You know, that every time you're talking with an employee to make an opportunity to say what can we change to get better. Obviously would make for a more positive conversation. Correct. Even if you're having to deliver some difficult news. But they might have some great ideas and they just need somebody to sit down with them and ask them. No, you're exactly right. You know, and getting the employees focused on the future. Just like we mentioned the golden egg. Getting them focused on not only what they're doing today for the city of Denton. But what they're going to do for the city of Denton in 20 years as an employee. You know, so as we ask them, so hey, if I was to give you, you know, some money, what would you do to improve the department right now? Throw that as a question into the evaluation process. And they get excited. Oh, wow. You value my opinion. I appreciate that. And so that's one of the things that we're going to be looking at implementing consistent, you know, across the organization. We've got it now in pockets of the organization. We've got some great managers doing exactly what you're talking about. But we need to make that accessible for 1400 employees. Great. Yeah. Yes, ma'am. I like that I hear an emphasis on communication. I think that is in all aspects of life very important. And I just have a question on the reviews. Do the managers get reviews as well? Yes, ma'am. And are those on a timely manner? Sometimes yes and sometimes no. Because I mean, you know, it kind of goes up. It's hard for, you know, my supervisor to say to me that I need to get my employees, you know, reviews done on time when he's not even given me my evaluation on time. And so it definitely puts me as a middle manager in a predicament. And so we do get evaluated and one of the things, you know, that we're going to look at is, you know, making sure there 's compliance. You know, my supervisor won't get his raise, you know, until he's made sure that my reviews are done on time. It's a group. It's a team. It's a team, you know, and it's a relationship. We mentioned it last year that this whole process is a relationship and we know how relationships go. They start and end with communication and having conversations and things like that. And so I'm glad you mentioned that relationship because that's what we're all about here. Awesome. Okay. Yeah. I think Joey and then Greg. Go ahead. Okay. Thank you, Mayor. On slide 10. Excuse me. I feel like you were talking about performance management coaches and kind of just add on to Keely. Just really having communication involved there. I love when there could be somebody who comes by and checks in with you and how are you doing on this project? Something that I always worry about is that we're just overwhelming people on the city, you know, as when they're trying to get something done. Another thing is piled on their desk and they just start feeling very overwhelmed. And I feel like if we were to have performance management coaches, maybe that could that would stop a little bit. You know, let somebody actually finish their project, feel a little calm, like they can get something done and then on to the next. So I just, yeah, great job on this. I appreciate that. Thank you. We're definitely going to implement that for sure. Sure. Thank you. You know, I really like what we're doing. I think that this is going to help the overall organization . I think we do need to spend some more time on some of the whys that these have not been -- that this has been an issue, that there's been the gap. Here's some speculations on my part. Sometimes it's because supervisors have so many other jobs that are requiring and demanding time that's part of their performance that they can't get around to doing the superv ising because they have a lot of other things that they have to get out. Sometimes it's because they haven't really been very well trained. They were a rock star at being a front line person and now because they're a rock star they've become a supervisor, but nobody trained them in how to supervise. So they may not know how to coach. They may not know how to, as Mr. Roden said, you know, check in and see what can we do to facilitate you guys doing your job better. And then I think this is probably the hardest. They've not been trained in how to correct folks when they 're just not doing their job right. Because we have some folks that don't do their job right for one reason or another. That's the most uncomfortable thing. And the other thing that I'm speculating is that from time to time you have supervisors that are just unwilling to do that part of the job. It is unpleasant and it's uncomfortable to have to sit down with somebody who you might have worked with and who's your friend and whom you have to say, you're not cutting it right now. And if they had better training, we might be able to help them become more willing to do that so that those conferences are not primarily about firing somebody, but they're primarily about helping somebody to get back on the track to being successful at doing the job that they're doing. You're exactly right. And to your point, some of the greatest players in sports turn out to be lousy coaches for that reason, you know. And so HR has done a great job of providing some in-house training. This software will allow us to do that, you know, training 24/7, which is key for those of us that work at night. And then with the, you know, the PM coaches and the mentor network, we're really focusing on providing that training in multiple different ways for our supervisors, really digging in and saying this is an important issue for the city of Denton. You know, we're going to give you instead of one tool to work on how to develop your employees, we're going to give you 12 tools, you know, along those lines. And so I appreciate that. That's exactly why we're doing this. Thanks, Mayor. I don't know if I have enough time to give all the compliments I want to give. Megan, when you said culture, you had me. Hello. And, you know, I was sitting here listening to all you guys , looking at the roles that each of you have. You're incredibly busy in your what you've got to do right now today in the roles that you all have. Yet it's so obvious to me that you guys are passionate about this, willing to stay on and mentor and all that stuff. So, but what I heard throughout this thing is all the marks of good leadership. I mean, you're being vulnerable, you're encouraging people to be vulnerable, which is hard to do, especially, you know, having been in this role for only a year and interacting with a lot of city employees in my normal life and just asking questions. What's been troubling is to hear that people historically haven't felt comfortable in being vulnerable or making a suggestion for fear that, you know, that they're going to get hung on the public square by the council. And that, you know, shame on us for however long that happened or whoever, because you can't get better that way. And the fact that that maybe some of that has existed and that you guys have approached this the way you have, I think is just awesome. I would highly recommend that Sergeant Dooley negotiate the compensation deal, because I'm scared. Do what I can, sir. But all the stuff that you're talking about, that you guys are talking about here, it's you need the software, right? But it's not about the software, it's about the people using the software. And, you know, to be willing to say 50% of our, you guys are all managers, to say 50% aren't receiving their performance review on time was a big risk, right? But it's so right, because I happened to have a chance to meet with Chris Lansy, head of building inspections the other day. And he's the manager, but he had 14 properties to inspect that day. So really, I mean, so you guys, through this process, need to feel empowered to manage up, too, right? To be willing to say, well, to your boss, well, you got to tell me which one of these am I to do, because they both can't happen today. And feel empowered to do that, whether you're in this room or in their office with them alone, because that's the only way we're going to get better. And I just love so much about everything that you guys said , because it was so, what we've heard over the years is, well, any topic that involved culture or attitude, what we 've heard in many cases, well, tell me exactly who did what when. Well, that's not the point. The point isn't to search that person out and hit them in the head. It's to ask the whys and figure out what's happening there. When you've got a supervisor that has to do 14 inspections, so he's in, now he's in a quandary the moment he wakes up today. Am I going to do, am I going to make sure these people get their COs, or am I going to make sure that my people get led, and I can't do both. So what happens to a lot of people? They just quit. All right, well, you've invested money in training them, and then they quit and leave. I would just say whatever we need to do to make this happen , we need to make it happen, you know, budget-wise, because there's not a more, in my opinion, not a more important thing that we can spend money on is this right here. So I really appreciate you guys very much for stepping out and being vulnerable and asking the tough questions. Well, we appreciate those compliments. And we would not be here, you know, neither of us on this team or the other LEAP team or anybody involved with the innovation program or the lean program without the support of the ACMs and George. You know, honestly, they've shown myself and my, you know, my fellow LEAPers a lot of, you know, attention the last year and development. And I really appreciate them for allowing, you know, putting us in this position that we feel that we can lead up. And we're definitely doing it, and we're going hard at it. So thank you for it. Any other questions or comments? Great presentation. Thank you. You know, this sort of echoes the, you had something? Yes, go ahead. When somebody takes a class, is there a way within the software, and this is kind of a logistics question, so that they're finished, it's logged, and there's a record of that . So when they do go to a performance review that comes up and you have two employees, one hasn't taken any classes, and one has taken eight classes, so that there is that list that says, okay, on this date they completed XYZ, because you can take a horse to the water, you can't make him drink . But a manager who wants to get better is going to take whatever avenue they can find to improve. So I saw you shaking your head, so it sounds like -- Yeah, I agree. Yeah, that's definitely part of that dashboard. You know, I can set out for two employees, you know, a plan for each of them, and then I can monitor their progress throughout the year on a quarterly basis. How many classes have you done? And so as I look at that dashboard, I can see employee A, you're doing great. I really appreciate all the progress you're making. And then employee B, hey, we've got some work to do. You know, we're halfway through the year, and you still have all these classes left. Let's get on it, kind of a thing. And so, yes, there is that capability with that software, and that's real important because, you know, we are very busy. And so it's nice to just have that information readable to us at a moment's notice, if you will. And so, yeah, that's one of the many, many, you know, benefits of the program. Yes, go ahead. Thank you for the candy. You're welcome. It's all there on you. All right. Thank you very much. Great presentation. Appreciate that. Thank you very much. Oh, sorry. Oh, yes, George. Just one comment. I know that every Tuesday we have a lot of work sessions, and all of them are very important topics to this community . But I don't think any of them are more important than not just the projects that you have presented today, but what this group of rock stars is bringing to the organization through the programs that they participated in . And I certainly hope you share the pride that I feel in this group of rock stars that are here today. They're just great, and they've done a good job. Fantastic. Thanks. You'll always be my Mick Jagger, George. All right. Thank you. Next agenda item is new business. Anybody have new business? I've got a couple of just wanted to give anybody an opportunity. I wanted to ask the city manager, there's a couple of things going on that I'd like to at least get a work session on. One is I know the hackathon that's coming up on Saturday. I don't have an issue with that. I just want to talk about and maybe get an update from the subcommittee on what's going on and then talk about policies and procedures of moving forward. What's authorized at the subcommittee level? What's authorized at the council level? And also, there's still the discussion of the ordinance or the lack of the term in the ordinance on the historic registry. I know we got a staff report on that. I want to have a discussion about that, on where it is, where are we, what's the policy. If there's been a policy direction given at some point, what is that, who gave it? You know about the term that was allegedly, I just want to, I hear there's a lot of conversations going on about it, but I want to have a real comprehensive conversation about it just so that I understand what's going on. Any other new business? Yes. More of just a comment. I might do this again on the bigger stage up there, but yesterday at Jupiter House, we had an incident, and I was just so impressed with the Denton Police Department, how they handled it. And I know there's a bunch of headlines going on across our nation with maybe police departments not handling things in the right way. And just as I laid in bed and talked to Amy about it, it couldn't have been handled any better. They're so professional, they're caring, they tried to do everything they possibly could. And I'm just, I just wanted to share that to the community. We get to have this police force that really does protect us and cares about us in Denton. And anyway, just applaud their actions yesterday. So thank you. Appreciate that. Thank you for that. Yes. I'm not really sure how this works, if this is where I bring up new business, but when we were at a downtown meeting, it was proposed or mentioned that no turns on red around the square is something to look at for pedestrian safety. That might be a quick fix, because when you step out and they have a red light, people try to turn at the same time. Is this the right? Yeah. Is this where I'm mentioning that? Okay. We'll take a look at it and get a word of some kind to your schedule of discussion. Okay. Thank you. Any others? Okay. We will now then convene into closed session at 527. We will consider the following items, 527 on Tuesday, June 9, 2015. We will consider the following items, consultation with attorneys under Texas Government Code Section 551.071, deliberations regarding economic development negotiations under Texas Government Code Section 551.087. And we will now, as we get the blinds closed and the room cleared, go into closed session. Food's here, so let's just take 10 minutes, grab our food, and we'll come back.