Jul 28, 2015 City Council on 2015-07-28 1:00 PM

All right, we're coming to order for the council meeting on July 28th, 2015. Determined that a quorum is present. We have six of our members here. Our mayor is not here. He will be arriving later, so it's amateur hour as far as chairing the meeting. That's out of order. Stop it now. He had also asked he would like to participate in some of the discussions on the workshop session, so he had asked us to go out of order. So if it's okay with the members, I 'd like to start with item D, then do item B, and then based on what's going on, we'll probably go ahead and then do items A and C. He was hoping to be here for that. I'm not sure that he will be able to make it, but if that's okay with everybody, we can do that. Is that all right? So then, Mr. Manager, how about item D? Hold the discussion and provide staff direction with regard to possible amendments to the City Council rules and procedures, and I see our city attorney moving in . I don't get to do this very often, but I like to call on our city attorney. Thank you, Melita. Thank you, Mr. Manager. I'm not sure if the exhibits here are part of Anita's presentation or not. Are you doing a PowerPoint? Yes, sir. Maybe. I can find it. We need somebody a little bit of the digital generation to come and help the attorney. George, would you go help Anita? Council rules or procedure, but I don't see it. Did you have it on the flash drive? No, Tony called and said it was loaded. It's not loaded. Do you want me to go get her? Yeah, go get her to do a flash drive and I'll go ahead and start. Good afternoon, Mr. Mayor Pro Tem and members of the council. Thank you for the opportunity to visit with you a little more this afternoon with regard to the City Council rules of procedure. We have a little bit of an issue with the PowerPoint, but someone is going to retrieve it and we'll have it here in just a moment, so I think we'll go ahead and begin this afternoon and we should have that here in just a moment. By way of background, we had a lengthy discussion regarding this topic on April the 21st of this year and unfortunately your city attorney slept many times since that date and I had to go back and watch the presentation two times to try to make sure that I got your requested changes embedded into your ordinance, so hopefully we have accomplished that and we'll meet the objectives of the various council members that exert your rules of procedure. We spent on August the 21st almost two hours talking about your rules and if you'll recall at that point in time I explained to you the changes that I had made with your rules, so very briefly for the benefit of our new council members I would like to refresh your memory for those of you who heard this presentation before and to explain briefly to the new council members the things that we have changed in your rules. I did edit your rules for clarity when I went through I found that we had changed the rules several times and they had become a little bit confused I thought, a little j umbled and so without deleting the substantive provisions I tried to reorganize them a little bit and clarify some of the sections again without changing their content so I gave you a red line on that the last time we talked and hopefully we have achieved that clarity objective. I did reorganize two of your sections in your rules relating to your types of meetings and also relating to the reports from the members of the public. No sir I actually have a hard copy up here so I'm doing okay and I'll know as soon as that PowerPoint arrives then we'll go ahead and load it up. You know we all have PowerPoints in the back up so if you want to just start through it we can follow. Very good. So what I was trying to do is bring your rules in line with your practices and in that respect I found that you did not have your luncheon meetings included in your rules so I included that for you and I also found that the various time limits that were embedded in your rules of procedure were in some instances duplicative and so I tried to clarify that particular section for you as well. Additionally I found that some of the citations that had been carried forward through the years were erroneous so I checked all of those and I updated the cit ations and corrected any erroneous references to statutes and cases and that sort of thing. We did add a prohibition on distributing political material in the council chambers. Now that provision would not have application outside the council chambers but we would not allow the distribution of political material inside the council chambers in the interest of not disrupting your meetings. At the request of a number of you, at least those who are technologically proficient, we did add a provision on video conferencing and you will now find that in your rules. We worked through this particular issue with the manager staff and I think that we have landed on a procedure that's workable. We do have a takeaway kit for council members if they decide that they want to video conference in during a period of time when they are absent from a city council meeting and we have a established some rules and brought them into your procedure for purposes of facilitating the use of the video conferencing materials. So you'll see that also embedded in your new council rules at section 3.6 . Yeah, Joey. Thank you. With regards to the video confer encing, were we just kind of following TML's lead on that one or are we trying to more be ahead of the curve? What we have done is interestingly the Texas legislature passed two statutes regarding video conferencing and they were not completely reconciled with one another. A handful of cities are allowing video confer encing pursuant to that state law. We have taken a conservative approach complying with both of those state statutes in adding our particular provision. So really it's state law that enables you to do this and so what we did is take those provisions and put them in your council rules. So that's what we've done there . Other questions? There was an error in your rules concerning recessed meetings. It provided that you could continue a council meeting, you could recess a council meeting and then reopen the council meeting at your next regularly scheduled meeting. That does not comply with law and with attorney general opinions that have been published on this topic. To the contrary what we must do is if there's a desire to recess a meeting you have to pick that meeting up the next business day and so I've made that correction in your rules. Recall that... Excuse me, on that one, is that what happens when our meeting goes past midnight? Yes sir, we had that discussion at this last meeting when we talked about this there was quite a bit of discussion. Some of it I think coming from these late-night meetings and that was in fact a topic of discussion at some length at the last meeting. So hopefully that's a provision we can use in the future. With regard to the public hearings, you know recall about a year ago we had some discussion informally about our public hearings and how we might facilitate our public hearings and so we circulated some information to the council members and tried it for a while. It seemed to work pretty well so we've actually embedded those provisions you'll see them at section 6.4 in your rules and I think if we will adhere to those procedures we've outlined it will facilitate our getting these public hearings to run much more smoothly. Question from Mr. Roden. Furthermore we clarified the 3/4 voting requirement. It was a citation that was not correct in that section. I 've corrected that now and we did pull out some information that Mayor Pro Tem Gregory was asking us to pull out with regard to the 3/4 voting requirement and that was that that will constitute six of seven because if there is a conflict then that voting requirement is reconstituted to reflect the fact that all of the council members does not include the one who enjoys the conflict or suffers the conflict. Thank you Mayor Pro Tem. Going back to the last provision there in C I guess it's 361 C it states council members wishing to participate in a meeting by video conference shall provide notice to the city manager not less than seven days prior to the meeting and the agenda committee will consider such requests. That seems to leave open the possibility that the agenda committee could deny such a request and I guess is there any guidance it doesn't seem to be in the policy given to what would constitute a legitimate denial. You know and the reason I ask is right now I think we have a cordial relationship I like the folks on the agenda committee but one can imagine a scenario in which that could become quite political and somebody who's wishing to get into a vote could be denied the ability to do it simply on the basis of someone not wanting their vote if all that lies in the agenda committees. Is that based on something is there something is there a reason why that procedure is there? Yes sir I can tell you the background on that particular provision first of all as to the notice the seven-day notice there was a desire on the part of staff to be able to provide the equipment to the member who might be traveling and also to at least initially conduct some training for those council members who might not be familiar with the equipment and also then to familiarize them with the rules that relate to video conferencing because they're a little bit different a little specific. So that was the reason for the seven-day notice period to give the staff an opportunity to make sure all of those things did in fact occur. With regard to the discretion given to the agenda committee the thinking on a part of the staff there was that if there were a number of council members who might be traveling it might not be an efficient way to conduct business even though the statute would appear in the rules now would appear to allow it. So for example the rules even now do allow there to be a less than a quorum present in the city of Denton. There could be a four members of the council who were traveling. This provision would give to the agenda committee the discretion to kind of make a determination how to handle those kinds of situations. It was really certainly on the part of the staff not an attempt to in any way limit the ability for the video conferencing provision to be used but rather to give a little bit of discretion to the agenda committee with regard to how many members might in fact use it and as to whether or not that would be a good meeting to use the video conferencing procedure. And I agree with both the spirit of the tim eliness the need to train the need to get equipment enhanced. I totally agree with that. Totally agree with the spirit of giving somebody that ability to weigh in on whether or not this makes sense given all the circumstances. Unfortunately the way it's written I think it just opens the door for again I think we 've had a very cordial relationship with our council. I think we've got to we've got to write this in such a way that we can assume that that may not be the case just to avoid any misinterpretation. If there's a way to write this that spirit into it that at least somebody some future city attorney looking at this saying what did they mean by this I think that would be helpful. I'll be glad to take a crack at that if that's a pleasure of council we can either modify it a little bit or if the council is agreeable we could even strike that language about the agenda committee reviewing it we can certainly do either one. Mr. Chotson. Thank You Mayor Pro Tem. I was reading this too and I was sitting here thinking it seems to me like we should just make it very definite so whatever the right number of days the cutoff is prior to the meeting whether it's four days or seven days or whatever that is I think it should just be that if a council member intends to participate by video conference. Now having said that I think there needs to be some sort of need for that meaning that they will not be in the city of Denton or something because I can also see somebody who gets a little bit jaded with what's going on a council and decides they're gonna do all the rest of the meetings during their term from their living room. So I think it you know the absence the problem what I'm getting at is here we have some absence rules that we follow. Yes we do. So if video confer encing is allowed I could see where somebody could decide they're just gonna do all their meetings from their home so I think whether it's the city attorney determines whether the video conferencing need is legitimate whether they're you know if they're not going to be in the city or whatever I'd like to throw out that that we might consider rewriting it just to state if a council member not ifies and the video conference need is approved X number of days prior to the meeting then they shall be granted that opportunity. I would take the agenda committee out of it I think because you're asking for conflict that you probably have to solve or somebody would but I also think we should we should limit the number of times that a member is allowed to participate via video conference. Let me think about that a little bit I hesitate to give the city attorney the authority on those kinds of issues I think it's the council's rules they probably need to be enforced ultimately by the council but I can certainly think about that and we can loosen that language up a little bit to ensure that it doesn't have a punitive type effect on any council members. Ms. Wiseman. I 'd rather err on this side of caution however I can see an example of somebody who breaks a leg and isn't allowed out of bed for three weeks so you know there are so many what-ifs I think it's a great tool for council but let's really give it some thought before we so tighten the noose that something comes up where somebody you know maybe indent but can't physically get right here so. So what I'm what I'm hearing so far is that we might want to do a little more work on that particular rule and part of it might be that that video conferencing is available if a member is unable to attend due to travel or to help kinds of issues and we might even as we think about it there might be some other reasons why the it would seem to me that if we leave a component in it it might be that if if the for example the agenda committee this past week was looking at our matrix and if we have one more member that's going to be going to San Antonio for TML we probably need to cancel that meeting altogether so if we saw that three or four members were going to be out of town or we're going to need to be participating by video conference it may be determined that that's just not a reasonable way to have a meeting and that the meeting would be canceled I would think in my mind that that would be where the agenda committee would be involved but I would want it to be specified as such so that we we don't we enjoy a good relationship there are some city councils in this county that don't and and and there's nothing to say that that couldn't happen to us at some point so that we would we could guard against that and I think that the that the what ifs that we're thinking about are probably important anybody else want to jump in on this yeah well just a thought to you know attendance is the biggest thing if you have a council member who regularly is at meetings like in a few weeks here I'm gonna be in Mexico and I hope that everybody doesn't expect that I'm going to be at this meeting via video conference because now it's available so I just wanted to throw that out there just we don't want to see you speed up I I don't I don't think anybody does Greg so I'd agree with that but I did just want to throw that out there just because this is available does not mean that you have to be at every meeting either here or via video conference so anyway I do have a question since you bring up how does it how does it work is it appropriate to ask that question now how a video conference works I mean can you be heard but not seen I can answer some of those but as you can see because my powerpoint was problematic before I started I'm probably not the very best person to answer the question but I can tell you that the rules do provide that there's got to be continuous visual and auditory receptions both ways so our current plan is to have a television screen at the place of the council member and it will be you can actually see the person's face and you can hear them and sometimes that's a pretty good reception and sometimes it sounds a little bit like they're underwater but hopefully that's gonna work out pretty well I think currently we only have one traveling packet is that right Allison yeah I think that's right it's relevant to the rest of this discussion because at least my understanding at the time we got the equipment Allison concurrently we really only have one kit for so there probably couldn't be more than one doing this at a time that doesn't mean the law wouldn't allow us to but we're not equipped to do more than one so it that may have some bearing on the whole issue of whether or not the agenda committee would need because it may very well be you'd want to have the rules written the way they are except strike that part about the agenda committee unless the city manager denied that for some reason having been given this number of days notice and those note that notice period is in there because we need to have be prepared to set it up and be prepared to get the equipment to you and get it set up so it may not be and that's correct George we currently have one sort of a go-kit for a council member that would want to check that out and participate and that has an iPad that you would check out that has the soft Skype software on it it's already preloaded there's one button that you would push it has a Bluetooth headset in in your audio is connected into our AV system in the chamber so I need to mention you'll have a television at a place so it would be Dalton if you were the council member your face coming in that television and then you when you spoke your voice would come through the sound system like it does now as if you were speaking but she's saying there's a television sitting up there on your place at the council chamber so the audience can see you as yours speaking and then you're the council member that is remote has audio that is everyone else and the speaker except for themselves so it's a little bit different than watching it if you are watching it at home you're kind of plugged into our system okay so the television set is here not because my question was do we take that iPad and use an HDMI cable into it but that's not the case it's only the iPad so when you talk about kit it's the actual iPad and a Skype format okay got it that's it's the iPad it's a headset there's detailed instructions for how to log in and part of the reason that we wrote into the rules that the agenda committee would be involved is because you can imagine from the chair of the meetings perspective that calling upon someone who's here virtually and can't hit request to speak or the voting it adds a complication to running the meeting and so it does place an extra kind of burden on the chair of the meeting to make sure that they 're recognized we have one kit now with the idea that we would get our toes wet and kind of walk before we run but we certainly could add more over time if that's something that's successful for us. Ms. Briggs. So in a regular regular session there would be the same thing in your place in council chambers? That's a great question right now the technology is only set up to work in the council chambers so you wouldn't be participating in a work session discussion with that technology just because it's not really conducive to having a discussion with you on Skype when you're in Aruba or wherever you might be okay so it would only be for a regular session item and it is dependent on your Wi-Fi connection so if you're out in the wilderness and there's no Wi-Fi it'd be really hard to accommodate that okay thank you. Thank you Alison and I think as a result of that explanation it's sort of by default controls the speedo type of attire as well so that works out pretty well. The city attorney should notice that I did not reference that form of clothing it was other folks. Duly noted and moving on okay at the last meeting we did request that the City Council give some consideration to the length of time for comment for citizens and we had a lengthy discussion concerning how long we wanted to extend the citizen comment periods and so this is a modification a little bit of the slide that I showed you the last time the council determined to leave the time limits on the reports from members of the public at four minutes on the consent or regular agenda items at three minutes and then we made some fairly substantial changes on public hearings previously the minutes for citizens to speak was three council determined at the last meeting to change it to four and that's now reflected in your ordinance before you additionally there was discussion concerning the amount of time given to applicants in zone cases and we determined to increase that from five minutes to ten minutes and to give a increase the total amount of time from 15 to 20 minutes and that's also reflected in your ordinance. Finally then and this was partly the idea of the city manager and some of the other council members as it concerns groups or organizations of it used to read ten we've determined that we would reduce that number to four and allow someone an organization represented by four members who are present in the council chambers and it would stand to be recognized a total of ten minutes for that representative to speak. Ms. Wasley. If we all take a look at its number six six point four and if you it's pages nine and ten on the proposed ordinance redlined and I like the idea that we have two alternatives that people can either sign up by Wednesday prior but they can also come in and do the open mic because as a citizen I was often caught between a rock and a hard space because the agenda didn't come out until Friday in those days but you had to sign up by Wednesday well you weren't sure quite what was going to be on the agenda and if it was on the agenda what specifically but your hands were tied because you had to sign up by Wednesday so that was a real hang up for me as a private citizen so now the agendas come out on Thursday so it's still problematic for people to sign up on a Wednesday so I really like that people can come in and speak what I don't like is that we 're limiting that to two speakers because you could have an on fire agenda and now you're limiting to what to two speakers so I know it's all about time but for me it's all about the people we represent and allowing them to come in spur the moment based on agenda or something that's happened over the weekend that's also hugely important that they are on fire to talk to the council about and you may have what happens if we have five or six people show up and they want to speak we're going to tell the first two you're in and the other four you're out we stay late for all kinds of reasons and I really think this forum for our citizens is just critical I felt frozen out often so I think this is an important change to allow the open mic but I also think limiting it to two people is a little presumptuous on part of council and so what we need to get our brains around is I agree in limiting the number but I think two is too few a question for you if it you realize that the open microphone would would not be necessary for somebody if they wanted to speak to a particular agenda item so if they wanted to speak at a public hearing they don't they could either sign up for a blue card and speak on that item or they don't even have to sign up on the blue card or if it's for an item for individual consideration they could use a blue card and speak to that item that night then if it's an item on the consent agenda we have two places on the agenda that they could speak to that I just want to make sure that you had caught those in there yeah I saw that and I I think thank you for that but I come back to and I just call it flash points that happen in the course of the city where a citizen is and it could be that something is not on the agenda sure you know but I come back to just events and you can go across the board in terms of what those events can be that that bring a citizen or citizens to council because of something that has happened either Friday Saturday Sunday Monday and they're on fire to talk to council about it so what your recommendation is is on page 10 of the red line version more than two more than two what number would you recommend I think half a dozen is is a good six to two just sounds really small okay mr. Rodin I appreciate you bringing that up I agree and I think that's and Anita I don 't know that we specified to is that kind of a staff go at it trying to find something no sir you all specify we did I looked at it twice yes sir I believe you you watch the watch the tape yeah I agree and I think there needs to be limits otherwise you could there could be a citizen filibuster I mean they could really make sure you weren't able to accomplish anything that night if they wanted to which might be a fun event but probably not in line with the order we're trying to seek so yeah I'm comfortable as well with beefing that up I don't think we're going to see that every time the other model maybe to look at which I think we talked about last time was how the Denton school board does it because they haven't opened my period I think they limit the limit they have a time limit and they limit the number do you know what that is I don't remember does it did anyone look at that I think I think that's how we arrived at the two was we were somebody was talking about how the school board does it if I remember it's been a long time since I did this but that's how we arrived at five that's that that's what I recall the discussion being and the number is if I could ask a question to go along with this if it if it were a situation where there was there were to be a flashpoint an event that happened that created a lot of community stir and there were a lot of people that wanted to have a place to speak on it and and there were two people that got here first but it was clear that there were a number of others is there a way according to our rules where they a motion to suspend the rules and to allow additional people simply there at the meeting that evening yes there is definitely a provision to suspend the rules would you explain how that would work right it would be a motion actually made by a member of the City Council and seconded it passed the rules but would be suspended for the purpose stated which in this instance would be to allow additional speakers at the open microphone section of the council and actually I see in practice the council many times the chair will just ask the members and indicated ask if there's any objection and if no objection is heard then the chair will allow the the action to go forward just a comment that I'm all about I love the idea of the open mic but then we need to think through what's likely to happen meaning if there's no requirement to sign up if there's no requirement to state the topic you want to talk about if it's simply an open mic I'm gonna feel very confident in saying I believe that those positions will be filled every single week because there's no requirement to get put on the agenda there's no requirement to state what you're going to talk about or whatever so whatever amount of time it is and I don't care we're here forever anyway but whatever amount of time it is I think we need to plan that we're going to sit there we're going to listen to people talk about whatever it is they want to talk about for that full amount of time because we have a variety of folks in the city that they have their agenda and they want their time in front of the microphone so if it's five people in five minutes that's 25 minutes that we're gonna sit and listen to people talk and in many cases it could certainly be something productive and in many cases I think it's going to be us being told how stupid we are so we just need to know that there's a block of time and whatever that block of time is then we're gonna spend it which is totally cool with me but if there's nothing they have to do to get that time or to have their name on the agenda or state a topic or anything else you know that's that's what it's going to be in my opinion so I'm cool with five or four or six or two or whatever the number is but it's it'll be interesting to see because I think it's going to be a lot less of what you're talking about in terms of hey here's something really productive and let me come and talk about it I would hope it would be but I doubt that but I do think what you said Dalton is if there was some event that happened that you know there's a lot of people show up to want to talk about it then we certainly would have the opportunity to suspend the rules and say there's a lot of people that are passionate about this topic let's suspend it and let them all talk those are my thoughts just to make sure I got this right each one of those speakers is allowed four minutes that's correct so we'd be adding possibly 16 more minutes to the meeting would be three to the sign up and and two on the open mic so it would be five potentially five speakers at four minutes each is what you're looking at okay and you're proposing going to six just more than two just more than two maybe compromise at four but I think to go on the record as a city council and say we're only gonna do two I don't I don't want to sign my name just something like that I don't have a problem adding a couple more speakers and just kind of as a trial and see how it goes before and if it ends up being just this variety show thing maybe we need to address it again but I don't I don't mind adding a couple more speakers so before you speak again did you want to say anything on this I'm all for the open mic and in fork that that's a good number for me I was going to speak to something else about the time and a different number so if you would hold on to that mr. Rode thank you and I did look up the the rules for the Denton Independent School Board just for so we know and there might be wisdom in just making it consistent just because people are used to that in one body that they might be going to a 15 minute they have two of them wanted to be anyone at the end they have a 15 minute time period is set aside to allow citizens to address the board on any subject five speakers will be chosen on a first come first serve basis with the exception of students who will always be allowed to speak first that's kind of a nice provision no action may be taken in response but the board may consider future action so again I think so they have five limited to 15 minutes total you know if we're doing a four minute thing maybe a four with a maybe we don't even have to have a time because they have a four minute that'll limit it anyways up to 16 minutes but to address yours I yeah we might get some interesting comments I would never want to create our our citizen engagement policies on the basis of the least common denominator I think I think we could probably pursue this might be a good topic for the Council Committee on Citizen Engagement how to sell this as a way to and what a unique opportunity to get in front of the council all the council at once to pitch your great idea for Denton that you know maybe through email or trying to catch us one individually is kind of difficult but we could probably incur I could think of people who've asked me questions that this would be a great avenue to steer them to to say great take it you've got four minutes get a PowerPoint together that's your pitch you know it's kind of like what's that shark shark tank or something like that but I think there's a way we can we can encourage the positive we're gonna get negative of course that's what we're what happens from time to time but this could be a this could be a real productive part of our meeting hi I've heard for it seems to be a number that we keep landing on is for something that we're comfortable with for with if we need to suspend and add we can but at least we have we have four which is to me better than two sure you know I miss rodent says something when I first got on the council our rules about citizen comments were very much designed for the least common denominator they were they had been reworked so that all citizen reports were done at the very end of the meeting which sometimes meant two in the morning and it meant that sometimes we had people in their 60s and 70s 80s that were waiting until two in the morning to make out their citizens report and it was embarrassing and and when we when we looked at it it was because there were some a few people that had abused it and had used that time in prime time to either wax in elegantly on a regular basis with their with their complaints or to actually make pitches and sell their product or sell their business and stuff like that so we tried to adjust it to have some at the beginning and some at the end so that frequent flyers as we called it people that wanted to come regularly would get a chance at the start and then they would have to wait six months before they had a chance to start again so so we tried to adjust it but it was really still working towards the least common denominator we have a lot of people that sign up way ahead of time and don't show up but they've reserved a place just in case so I'm not sure that we're going to have frequently abuse but but it looks like for with the opportunity to suspend the rules as we all have everywhere sounds like something that we're all comfortable with okay very well I will change that to four speakers rather than two and just a point of clarification if I might with regard to this particular point I thought I heard councilmember Rodin indicate that open mic was at TISD was at the beginning of the meeting and the end of the meeting please be advised I have written the open mic period in your council rules to only begin be at the beginning of the meeting not at the end so want to make sure that I'm going in the right direction there looks like everybody's okay with that right now this bridge you had something else I wanted to speak on page 11 D number one I like that we're extending the time people can speak from three to four I wish it was five because I've had a lot of people say they just don't feel like they can get everything they need to out and I understand that we you know our regular people we have lives we need to to go on but we do have this thing for recess now where we can the meeting goes too late we can pick up the next day but in regards to this item it says that however if numerous speakers desire to comment council may limit the speakers back to three minutes my comment on this is that if there's a lot of speakers that means there's a great issue it means it's a sensitive topic and that a lot of people have things to say about it I'm not so sure that limiting their time back to three minutes is a good idea mr. member of Tim just by way of background on that particular point and I realized that a couple of the members were not on the council at that point in time but the discussion is it concerned that point had to do with concern about efficiency of the meeting and time and that sort of thing so it was a specific request of the council back in April that we dropped that particular provision in allowing council to determine on the spot that three minutes would be appropriate as they're looking at the agenda considering how duplicative the comments might be and that sort of thing so that was the discussion and certainly stand ready to address it however mr. Rodman I think your point is well taken and it sounds like this is giving us some ability to kind of make that change as we see necessary and I think the discussion was I mean think back to July 15 2014 you were out there and had to wait a long time to speak if you imagine how many speakers were there that night 114 at a minute to each of those that's another so that's another hour and a half plus hour 45 so the issue is two full when you get a lot of folks it's not simply a matter of our time because I think we're kind of stuck there and we're having to make decisions that's what we do when you have a lot of people it's also the time of the people who've come to speak and so you can imagine a situation where you 'd want to say in order to give everyone a chance to come up and do it in a timely manner they might have kids at home they might be 80th on the list we want to make sure to to to move that along and also I think if you look at that night there were probably to be candid a handful of folks who could have said something substantive substantively for another minute that they didn 't already say in two minutes without in and so I think the three minutes as we look at it it generally is enough time for the person to get theirs there 's stuff talked about so I think that's what we talked about we're trying to balance a number of things including the people who come who want to participate and if there's a lot of people we want to give them the time to do that how is that since this I of course wasn't here during during all this how is that proposed like is it proposed beforehand is it proposed halfway through like do some people get to come speak four minutes and then the people that are watching are limited to three I'll try that process what I've probably seen in the past is we as we go and come into the meeting sometimes we know there's going to be a lot of speakers when we have overflowing to other rooms when we already have a stack of 50 blue cards 40 of whom are indicating an interest in speaking so you have a you have a good sense ahead of time and it could be that when that item comes up the the chair of the meeting would would ask do we want to go with the three-minute rule or the four-minute rule and it would be the the council's determination at that time you know my experience on it also is that for a lot of the time when we have a number of people that speak on the same topic who share the same position after the fourth or fifth person there's very little new information people tend to end up repeating what they what other people have already said some people are very thoughtful about it and they get up and say everything I wanted to say has been said I just want to emphasize these two points they're done in a minute because they're respectful not only of our time but as Mr. Roden said the time of the other people who are in line waiting to speak so I I found my experience is because of the repetition it's it's it's good it's good for those folks to to try to be as concise as possible hit what they're going to hit make the points that they're going to make and I've seen very few times when they couldn't do it in the three minutes I think they're gonna have more than enough time in four minutes to do it but but and as a few times when we've had someone who has come up with some really unusual and different notions that are out of the box when their time runs out the mayor had said you know it's clear that they've got more that we 're all interested in hearing with the council's permission can we extend her time a minute or his time a minute and that happens so I'm comfortable with the times as they are mr. Hawkins and then ms. Wasney I was just gonna add to that anytime if we do have a lot of repetition and then there's a speaker that comes up you kind of just said this and they bring something new a council member will definitely ask a question in a way where they get to speak more to that point and I found you know on my going on my second term here that that happens a lot actually so anyway that's why I'm okay with the four minutes so he's wasn't and I want the citizens to know too there's a provision in here it's number E on page 12 you want to take a look at that if there's a group that gets together then they can have ten minutes and so on red hot issues you are gonna have groups whether they're an official organization or whether they're just a group and they can designate a speaker now that speaker can run with it for ten minutes and I think that's a tremendous provision because people in these groups know each other they have because a lot of speakers get up and they say the same thing over and over and over again and it would be nice for those groups to be able to and it's a different colored card that you fill out and hand to the city secretary and then council asks that that whole group stand so that council knows who that speaker is representing and they get ten minutes so I think that's really an avenue and a format for speakers to get up because boy if you can't see it in ten minutes you shouldn't be up there so I think that's that's a really sound alternative what we're talking about here is is trying to make sure that citizens get heard but to do so in an efficient way for the sake of the entire meeting and all of the business that has to be done and for the sake of the other speakers that want to speak go ahead councilman rodent mentioned that DISD allows the students to speak and did you say first is it I actually had a few emails from parents saying that there are certain topics that their kids would like to discuss is there any way that we could make it allow kids to go first so then they could move on with their evening and go home I don't know if that's possible but I as a parent of a child who does like to speak to council I think that's a good idea well three hands up mr. Roden is wise knee mr. Hawkins you know that's it's interesting to me it's just a matter of how do you how do you figure out who and they were referring to I think they 're open mic policy in that that I was reading but it stands it makes sense in all issues right if you've got kids they're wanting to speak I'm certainly comfortable with it seems a logistical question of how they recognize themselves on a card as a kid or how we define kid and but but but the thought of giving kids preference and time I think is not only good for them and their parents but also kind of showing that we're really interested in what they have to say and I'd recommend to parents do that Wednesday sign up so that then you're guaranteed a slot so that if you just come and you're part of that half dozen that doesn't quite get doesn't quite make the cut then you've brought your child to council they're not allowed to speak but if you do that Wednesday sign up you're you're in and you just come down you fill out your form you give it to our city secretary you are in the system now as a speaker and so I think that guarantees them a slot I don't I wouldn't want to put an age preference on any speaker it's whoever gets there and is there early enough to be part of that half a dozen but to really guarantee a spot and again I'm talking to all of our moms and dads who are watching this film that you know we have that Wednesday sign up so that you know that following Tuesday you're on the agenda mr. Hawkins yeah I think that this is a good idea you know we're always trying to encourage our youth and younger people to get involved earlier I know your son has to and he always does a great job speaking so I don't know logistically how we're gonna do that maybe we can't do that today but maybe in the future I think that's a good idea so I just okay you ready to move on yes sir kudos to our two freshmen council members you've obviously been digging in and reading these rules good job okay so I think I'm seeing that there's not really a consensus to change direction with this particular issue am I reading that pretty much correctly and if we want to come back we can all right very good all right we've already talked about this particular slide and open mic in the prior registration process this slide relates to the consent agenda and how we receive public comments concerning the consent agenda at our discussion at the last meeting I think the consensus was to leave the public comments at the first of the work session however it was also the consensus of council to add a provision that citizens can contact the city's secretary about the item and indicate they would like to speak to that particular item and request that it be moved to individual consideration I think is a matter of practice that probably happens anyway if a citizen wants to speak to an item they send an email to a council member who in turn then asked that the item be pulled so they could be considered individually that was your consensus at the last meeting that you wanted a little bit of language in your ordinance and I have dropped that in so if that's acceptable as I've drafted it where is that it's going to be on comments now it's the comment on consent agenda which is yeah it's the top of page 11 and that would not prohibit if a citizen contacted a council member the council member could still go ahead and pull it for individual consideration or forward an email on to the city secretary indicating that that's what would need to be done yes so then that take council members out of the loop if somebody approaches us first exactly okay Miss Wasney can we clarify for the public how they come and speak in front of a work session because there is an overwhelming assumption with the public that they are not allowed to speak ever at a work session clarifying the rule somewhat that they can speak at a work session are you asking for the rules to be heard to do some more work on it to clarify that or just to right now no no just for because we're talking about rules of procedure today and I know that the citizens who are interested in this are watching and so to just outline just in 30 seconds I think the only way to do that is they can fill out a blue card and they're available outside there if they want to ask a question or speak about an item on the consent agenda so that's their their spot at that spot now the other item is if there is an item on a work session and we know that there is a group here representing for example the Convention and Visitors Bureau that the council can invite them if they've indicated an interest either to the mayor or to council members who passed that on is there another way well it's it's a there is a provision that indicates that during a work session typically we do not receive citizen comments however with the consensus of council to allow such then they might allow citizens to come forward and make some comments regarding the issue at hand so that gets your question I'm not not quite and I'll just cite personal experience because I've been in the audience behind me many many times watching work session where it's budget or it's a discussion on other issues that are just really important and as a citizen you're just chomping at the bit to be able to have two minutes the latest was the fire and ambulance task force that I led last fall and I had to sit back here and kind of listen to the whole discussion but that was you know part of my real activity and task force last fall but in that work session you know I just sat there with my hands on my lap because I really wanted to you know express some comments to council and so since we're into the rules and procedures is there a better way so that you said you know council could recognize a citizen who's in the audience but my point is what does a citizen have to do do you wave your hand you know do you fill out a blue card ahead of time because if it's not consent agenda but it's just a work session discussion and the reality is that so much work of this council takes place in this room under work session and so there are times when citizens are here another great example would be the over 65 tax exemption that Elma Walker and I worked on and we sat back here countless times but we led that organization but we couldn 't speak to a work session so let's come back to how how does a citizen get attention of council that they would they would like to speak for 30 seconds it I guess if there's not according to the current rules the question I would have for you is in those two particular examples you know on the senior tax exemption and the the fire activity you know the increased public safety at Robeson Ranch it seems like y'all were quite successful without speaking so did you want to be more successful thank you it was hard work both times and great handshake to our fire chief back here who brought all that together but no and in answer it was it made our work harder because it meant we had to make appointments and actually talk to individual council members where if you're all right here you know in in 30 seconds or a minute we could speak so I think it's something our council maybe we won't decide today but I think it's really important to allow and we're going into budget there are a lot of citizens who are real watchdogs on this budget who would like to ask a very pointed question about something specific in the budget and the way we have our discussions and work session you're you're kind of muzzled as a citizen back here so I would like the council to really kind of give that a little thought not that it dominates or takes up a lot of time but I think it really will help us do our job better if we have an avenue to allow a citizen to make a comment or ask a pointed question manager you wanted to chime in well I just just chime in a little bit work sessions generally have been considered I'm just here but in other cities I'm with as a place where the City Council can receive information and in effect do work session items solicit and get information from the staff that they've asked for those items aren't generally posted and are not allowed the council isn't taking any kind of action on them but it is a venue a place for the City Council to debate and discuss among themselves information that they've asked for clearly those items are posted and clearly I think the council can invite participants if I mean the intent I think has been the items are posted if you felt very strongly that it's a work session item that you wanted to address in the work session of the council that you could bring that up to a council member you could let us know that and if the council invited you to do that and wanted to then they could do that it's not that you're excluded from it but there's a process where you really have to be invited by the council otherwise it just opens the door for a lot of discussion in an environment that's intended for the City Council to get down to nuts and bolts and talk among themselves so it's just a thought of the invitation is the way mr. Oden I think again I think that's a really interesting and great suggestion how we do it would be would be the trick and I'd like to since it sounds like you're willing to kind of give this some time to workshop so to speak you know this might be a good topic for the council and citizen engagement to think through because I agree budgets a good example by the time we get something out for public comment we talked about it for months in this sort of session in which there isn't a formal mechanism for public to have public comment on that until we've pretty much already finalized it and at that point it's it is hard if someone says something that you didn't think of before for us to change in a lot of those issues I think back when we were gosh endless conversations on food trucks oftentimes there's food truck operators behind here just wanting to say something obvious that neither the staff member nor the council is considering that would have just said oh that clears it up why don't we do that the trick will be doing it in such a way that allows us to be efficient in and having that conversation dig into the weeds on stuff and not have to treat so I think you're on to something and perhaps there's a mechanism if we give it more time that you want we can find so if you're if you 're willing to let us workshop a bit you're on that committee and I think that would be a good opportunity to talk about it I'm on that committee so I'm happy to help kind of brainstorm it and I welcome citizen input because you know who you are you're here at a lot of work sessions listening and watching and paying attention we have a lot of switched on citizens who want to participate and we are best when we are the sum of our citizens our council and our staff so I think it really behooves us to have some kind of mechanism because so much work goes on right here at this work session by the time it gets out to council it's so thank you we'll put it on a future work session and I'd ask that everybody noodle it a little bit and think and talk talk to your constituents well and just to add to that that's I feel like a lot of times people don't like the 7-0 vote that goes on up there and there has been so much work that has gone on in work sessions so I think that that's a great point I wanted to kind of just reiterate that we've seen something in work session possibly three to four times by the time it gets up there and just wanted to add that to the conversation here mr. Johnson did you want to say well thank you so the trick obviously is this this the seven of us guilty as charged are hard to keep in order so the I think the idea is awesome because it's we always talk about we want more input we want you know that most of the email we get is not hey here's a really positive idea you know we don't get a lot of those at least I don't so the trick is going to be to to figure out how because what I don't think works is while we're right here in the middle of work session on this topic we got hands raising over here and all of a sudden we're calling on these people because that now it's out of control and I don't think we've got a limited amount of time we've got to be productive so thinking about how the agenda is published so folks can see what's on our work session agenda what I was thinking about is you know we've got the open mic concept where people can show up and talk about anything they want you know having people be able to speak to a work session topic at the beginning of the work session I think is healthy what I don't think is healthy if once that's happened unless a council member wants to invite somebody to speak on a given topic I don't think it would be productive to have citizens involved involved in the work session and have the opportunity to speak raise hands ask questions because now it's a it's a town hall meeting so that's the trick right so free all the free all to figure out on on the citizen engagement just to figure out how to make it give them the opportunity to have all the input they want on the topic but once that's happened we've got to get to the work session and get the work done so it's gonna be tricky now now here are the council rules when when there's a topic going on everybody gets a chance to speak before somebody gets to speak a second time time so these breaks you haven't spoken on this particular issue do you want to have anything to say I am all for citizen engagement so whatever we can do to encourage citizens to come and speak to us I'm on board with well I'm gonna comment and then you can have a second round I've got to say I I'm working at not being defensive because I've been pushing for citizen engagement and trying to make this as open as possible but I I feel defensive when you use the word muzzle because I think that by if we limit the amount of time that a citizen or that we give ourselves to speak we're not muzz led we're just limited I think if we limit the variety of venues that a citizen has to offer they're not muzzled they just have the same kind of limits that we all have because we all we take turns you know and and we know that we have a bunch of other items that we have to deal with today so so I just I 've got to express I'm a little bothered by that because I don't think that limiting somebody's opportunities is necessarily muzzling them and keeping them from speaking I think it's just it's just trying to manage the difficulties of covering the amount of business that we have to cover and balancing that with with the importance of hearing from our citizens in a variety of ways and some folks don't want to get up and speak they're uncomfortable with doing that they're much more comfortable with sending an email or sending a letter to everyone and and and a lot of times it's those letters or those personal contacts not even with all the council members but just a couple that end up getting the topic brought up and discussed anyway it's just a different way of getting the information out there and considered you wanted to say something yeah just to wrap it up because I know we've got a full calendar so we 'll take a look at it everybody give it some serious thought and as a group we'll figure out the best way to take this and I appreciate being able to bring that up today how many moments do you have on your presentation just have a couple of minutes left okay let's could we try to let her finish her couple of slides and then if we have anything else all right very good and on that topic just recapping it looks like the desire is to leave the item as is drafted and ask the citizens committee to take a look at balancing the interests of a representative government and the efficiency of their meetings along with allowing citizen comment so thank you for that and your April 21st 2015 meeting you further ask me to clarify what we mean by consensus direction that is given in your work session meetings and I have crafted some language toward that end and you will find that in the ordinance before you furthermore you ask that I clarify what constitutes a three-fourths vote requirement in instances such as zone cases that come forward with a negative recommendation from a planning and zoning Commission I've done that as well there at the end of your ordinance and so hopefully you're good with the drafts there if not I stand ready to hear your comments and make whatever adjustments we need to finally the city staff has added one provision to your rules it became apparent to us that the city's boards and commissions were using a different procedure from what our city secretary uses in creating our minutes and we felt that it would be more efficient for the city and perhaps create a little more consistency if we pulled those in into compliance and so now according to your ordinance the boards and commissions would follow the same procedures as the city secretary uses for your meetings so I've added that also in your ordinance and that's all I have I'll be glad to stand for any questions at this time council member breaks back on the consent agenda the pulling out of the item for the public at the conference this weekend I learned that that was something that is done like other places is it that we always allowed it it just wasn't in our ordinance or is it something that we're just now adopting you know this that has been in our ordinance at least since I've been here and it works in this fashion for members of the public who might be watching this if there's an item on the consent agenda your rules provide that an individual can come forward during work session follow blue card and make comments on that consent agenda item at the first of this meeting at the first of the work session and make those concerns known to the City Council additionally as we've seen in the past sometimes citizens send emails to council and they will pull that item off the agenda and ask that it fall to the items for individual consideration on the agenda and then finally we've had added another provision now in your rules that I have just drafted that would allow a citizen to contact the city secretary and ask that an item come off the consent agenda and that would be relayed then to the City Council and that item then could be pulled and considered as an item of individual consideration so that's how the citizen comment works on our consent agenda that's great thank you any other questions okay in that respect then I will have an item on your agenda for next week I'm going to tweak a little bit to other questions I'm sorry I have one other question it was way back in the beginning about our work sessions and our lunch meetings did I read correctly that the red line in there would allow us to vote on things in those meetings without being or was that did I know it would allow you to provide consensus that's what that's for okay it's not a vote good okay but it's a consensus direction language so that would apply at your luncheon meetings and in your work session meetings thank you now let's declare victory and close this item we're closed I'll bring the ordinance back to you next week with those two little changes you asked for thank you very much then to try to comply with the mayor's request to be involved in item a and C could we with your indulgence may we do item B work session item B that all right the receiver report receive an update hold the discussion and provide staff direction on the road impact fee implementation thank you mayor and I'd like to ask PS Aurora if he would present this item for your consideration okay , okay. Okay, good afternoon. Good afternoon. We had multiple presentations on this agenda item before we have some more council members so I'll try I brought at least one item one topic in there that will give you an idea of what impact fees are and it compares that to what we currently do as part of the development code DDC so I'll give you an idea of where we are you know trying to go with the impact fees there as you move forward I also have these handouts the service areas are not part of the discussion so I don't have that slide in there but at least you can take a look at what those are and there's another hard copy which is 11 by 17 I combined a lot of information in there as I go forward it'll be easy for you to reference that okay so far we have covered in the several items that relate to implementation of the impact fees in March we brought the mobility plan to you we had taken it to the mobility committee and then we brought this mobility plan that was recommended by the council hasn't gone through the public hearing process yet it still has to do that I am working with the planning and zone commission right now on that it has to go through a public hearing at the PNZ and then subsequently to the city council we brought the calculations for the CIP and the land use back in April that the council was comfortable with it still has to go through the capital improvement advisory committee which really comprises the PNG so they will be looking at the land use and CIP they have not done that yet and then the maximum fee calculation I brought that in May and you will see some of that and as I go forward today so I will show you what those numbers were at least and land use and CIP just for our new council members when the impact fees are calculated to do that the state law requires that city do a land use projection for the next 10 years so how the land will be used in the city in the next 10 years based on the land use what traffic will be generated so based on that traffic generation what are the new roads that we need to build or we need to add capacity so when we need to add capacity to a road then it creates a project which is the capital improvement plan CIP so that 10-year C IP is a component for the road impact that provides the cost because when we have a CIP project there are dollars to be spent so those dollars and the traffic generated by the development community that is building those single-family homes or apartments or commercial projects that is distributed to those entities to pay for the road improvements or pay for those CIP projects and I 'll go through that a little bit more okay today what we're going to do is we'll look at the Ryan Road as an example which is more of a microcosm of you know how we where we are right now and what impact free comparison would do and then we will look at the ordinance and policy discussions as we go forward so in Ryan Road what we looked at was what is the currently already developed property out there existing developments and then we looked at there are several projects that are in in various stages of planning or approval at this time so we looked at those we knew how many homes will be constructed as part of that or there's a Walmart going in with commercial property so we looked at that we had that information to do calculations and then we compared that with if we had $2,000 single-family equivalent impact fee so that if there's one home constructed that home during the building permit time will be paying $2,000 as a road impact fee because there is traffic generated and that traffic generation I will show you later on you know the cost is pretty substantial but this is at 20% of that cost of the maximum fee and $2,500 is about 25% of the maximum calculated fee $3,000 similarly is 30% of that cost so this slide shows you here is Ryan Road as you can see right here runs into 2181 the elementary school is right here the ones in yellow are already developed properties and the numbers show the number of homes in each of those developments so it's like eight is eight homes in that particular development and so on 147 homes the blue shows the ones which are currently going through the platting process at this time they're in various stages they're in preliminary plant or they're in final plant so we know what is being proposed as part of the project so there are 260 homes being proposed here next to the school another hundred and fourteen homes hundred and fifty eight homes in Teasley trails and then another section here that'll be commercial but we don 't have any data on it so I didn't bring that and here's the Walmart that being proposed right here okay so yes sir yes yes just so I understand the numbers so the 76 on the Walmart site that number is the single-family home equivalent of trips per day yeah that's right no but we did the calculations based on the square footage so we will show you that so that would be 76 trips per day no no the trips they are not the trips if one home generates close to ten trips in a day so if there are 76 homes that is 760 trips in a day it's about 9.7 around it to 10 so it'd be well I'm just trying to understand it so there's 147 homes for each of these that's shown that's the number of homes right mm-hmm right so the 76 on the commercial property is the is the single- family home equivalent yeah that's you know we but we did the cap I'll show you the calculation in a minute okay all right so what we did here this is this is a line road and in this one if it is a green color there is no development at this time or nothing is proposed at this time if it is yellow on the north side the property was developed and if it is red then north and south this is being proposed and has already developed and if you see this color right here then only on the south side the south side is developed right here so the school is here and then this is proposed right here so since we are doing the calculations we assume that it is going to be developed and yellow is where you have a north side developed and nothing on the south side okay yes I found this to be interesting but I didn't I don't understand why it was why it was in the backup what is this showing all it is showing is that you know we wanted to take this data and provide to show you some calculations with debt which which are based on the DEM development code I'm going to use the term DDC which are based on DDC which allows calculation of traffic generation from these projects and a proportionality calculation so we use a computer model that looks at the traffic generation and it determines what is the proportion ate percentage of that project to develop this road here how much of that road they need to pay what is their proportionate share okay maybe you're about to explain this but let's say that that one that you just had the arrow on right there so that's north side developed let's say that that was also south side developed how would that change the equation and I'll show you that in a minute you'll show the next slide right here you know if we will be looking at say this one right here right now the next slide which is this one right road estates and this is proposed project Ryan Meadows is it is a proposed project had this when this product came in if we had our current DDC at that time the way we would calculate and I'll show you the percentage in the in the next slides down the road had their percentage been hundred percent that they have to do hundred percent of the road work this is a secondary arter ial secondary arterial would have required a hundred ten foot right away which means that on their side if this is the center line of the road they have to dedicate fifty five foot right away total so total so they will dedicate some of that because some of that is in the road already whatever the remaining in the 55 they'll dedicate that right away they would then have a 12 foot median on their side 28 foot pavement and a five foot sidewalk construction that will be their cost at their nickel to do this project right here if the proportionality showed that they had to pay hundred percent of the cost it's not necessarily going to show that and we will show you that data because the number of homes in dry road is very small so their proportionality is very small also Ryan Meadows same way you know they got a much larger frontage right here compared to this right here they do the 12 foot median 28 foot pavement and five foot sidewalk on their side and then this is a 55 foot right away that is needed so whatever they need to dedicate right over there they would dedicate the right away there is no money exchanged with them they have to dedicate the right away them now in this case what is happening is I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm not trying to slow you down but I want to make sure I understand the slide because this is really important so when you say the orange line is South side developed only right your previous slide all these different color segments so there Southside is developed only how are we deter so right across the street from the school there's a brand new home that fronts the street right there fronts Ryan Road so there's how are we determining determining developed meaning when I look at that I would say either north nor south is anything going to happen where somebody is going to be improving the road the school doesn't have to do it and their brand new single-family homes fron ting Ryan they don't have to do it so help me understand or you just saying that there is a significant or more dense development on the south side or because I'm trying to understand you can see you know and this is proposed so we are saying that this is going to get developed here there's a single-family home and so this property currently is not going through a higher density at this time when you say Southside developed you're saying that there's going to be yeah there's a proposed project right here well I know but are they gonna have so they're gonna have to pave all the way down on the front of the school's property as well no that's where I'm confused that is where this is all they would be doing school is already developed so this is already developed but that doesn't mean that the road got done as you know the road is still a two-lane road there's nothing got done there so okay let me see if I can frame my question better the orange means the south side is developed meaning there's nothing left to do there no no what I'm trying to show you no no no no no no I'm not talking about the street okay talking about the development right there's a school built there there's homes built there there's something already built therefore those people aren't going to have to do street improvements so my question for you I just want to make sure I'm understanding it so you're saying across from the school the north side that you're not considering that developed not at this time because there's nothing in the coming to us you could I could change the color and make it it really won't make any difference in the calculations I'm going to show you we were using an example as example to show what DDC would have done it is not reflecting what is actually that got done in the before 2002 or back in the 60s and 70s and 80s okay so this isn't relating to how you're calculating what the contribution would be to an impact fee yeah current DDC how it applies okay all right if I could add a question because what I was I think that there's some concern about the definition of what you mean by developed because I was thinking that when you were meaning developed okay DISD was given the property by mrs. Ryan to develop the elementary school it's developed that's the way it's going to be but I also thought I was guessing that when you said developed while the road hasn't been significantly changed the city got the right-of-way on the south side you don't there's not been building done significant building dying except for a turn light on it yes but but that it was developed in the sense that the full right-of-way has been turned over to the city is that what you mean when you say developed or well when I said developed that you know there's already this property already got the school right here there this is already development right here okay that 's all I'm saying all right but what I'm applying right now is the current D DC to show you what did he see would have done had these projects been coming in based on the current DDC okay what happened in the 60s 70s prior to adopting the proportionality model which was in 2009 actually we adopted the proportionality model so currently we have you do use it so the current DDC uses the proportionality model and that's what I'm applying and comparing that to the road impact fee that we will look at and how do how the dollars compare okay I think we're ready did I lose everybody or are we together I think we're all on the same page now okay very good okay so this is what we would have done and what this code really does right now is that then you would have a road which is two-lane had they been required to build this they will have to put a transition back in into this current road they have to put a transition back in here they will have to put a transition and they will have to put a transition on this side so that's what the structure of the road would have been applying the current DDC had this project come in based on the current court because you can't just build a road like this when you have two lanes right here you have to build a transition back so that people can drive on the road that is actually built there let's look at the next one it's sort of like there's an example of that a real-life example of that just to the east on Robinson Road yes where there are those transitions were part of it so this is looking at Richmond and you can see Teasley trails is proposed right now so these the trails and I'll show you the calculations for three details the based on the number of homes what their required dedication would be so same thing 12 foot median 28 foot pavement and 5 foot sidewalk same thing for Ridgemont if you look at the calculations and this is where I gave you you know the hard copy which shows the 11 by 17 those numbers that you see there they reflect the numbers on this table with the number eight homes there which is on the right next to Country Club Road there there are only eight homes in that development the their calculated proportion ality is ten and a half percent so their contribution would have been thirty eight thousand seven hundred fifty six dollars it is not hundred percent there's only eight homes so their contribution would have been thirty eight thousand seven fifty six if you divide this thirty eight seven fifty six with the eight homes per home cost would be 48 hundred and forty five dollars are we good with that so far this is this is based on the impact fee and this is based on the current D DC this is what they would pay to pay that's what they would spend for home to do the paving we would require yes yeah actually they would not only do the paving because only ten and a half percent they will give us the money and the city will hold the money and when the city has a project there they will use that money to build that road this money cannot be used anywhere else on Ryan Road but right on that spot on that address okay I'm I'm confused obviously sure so but we don't do it that way right we require them to build we require the developer to build the section of the road we don't take the money and hold it and build it later we do hold money if the proportionality comes in less than hundred percent so they are not required to build the whole road then we take the money and then we hold it the ordinance allows the city to hold the money for ten years if you don't use the money within ten years the money has to go back to the developer okay so so in the Lennar development that's to the east where they have built that section of the road in front of their neighborhood so do we give them the option you can pay us or you can build it yourself sometime if the city has a project within the next three year window as a CIP then then city would take the money and apply to the CIP project if there's no project identified most times if their proportionality is 100% city would require them to go ahead and build the road and build their transitions back into the existing road on both sides if their proportion ality of a hundred percent I'm not following I guess I think that's what's confusing is what you're saying is when they're required to build the road rather than pay us the money as if the proportionality analysis suggests that they that comes out at a hundred percent that their generation of traffic or whatever would require a hundred percent of that investment so they've just got to go ahead and build the road yes that's less than a hundred percent they've got the option to just pay less money and give it to us in cash that's right and we hold it for up to ten years that's and if we don't build that section of the road then they're eligible to get the money back yes sir and what what's going on right now is you're giving us an example of how our current rules are looking on Ryan Road and and and and how the proposal of the impact fee would would change the way the current thing operates yes in a way that would that would allow for less piecemeal type of construction that's exactly mr. Hawkins well and the only reason I'm trying to understand is I want to know if we're gonna do the new proposed way I want to understand this all the way that I'm not trying to slow you down I know but so a single-family unit cost is that is that forty eight hundred dollar mark and I'm trying to figure out when the end user pays for that or the developer says I'm gonna and if I'm not understanding this right please help me you know just explain it but let's say the developers building 100 homes so does he come to the city with a four hundred thousand eight hundred whatever the math yeah sorry hundred and forty three hundred forty three homes okay there Greg you know I can show you the proportionality model if you'd like to see it well I'm just trying to understand is how yeah hold on so ahead and finish here so then that so then that the developer set sells the homes and let's say the city did not use the money in that ten years that money goes back to the developer or the person who bought the house no to the developer to the developer because they are the ones who put the money up right okay to get the building permits to build the homes okay does that happen very often or yeah we have to turn money okay mr. road one again I think he's compared compare I think what we all got to see is he's comparing the old system to the system we're looking at and the one of benefits of the new system is that pot of money can now be applied to the entire impact region so we can really have more funding to get some projects out the door versus of waiting for this road to be widened that may not be widened in the next ten years so the idea is it's gonna be more certainty for everyone across the board hopefully in the development community in terms of what they're going to be charged and then they can see their dollars be put to work somewhere in the region versus sitting for a long time yeah because once we adopt the impact fees there'll be projects that have to be done the model that you all looked at it showed us what roads are under capacity at this time so those are on priority to be done and the money count you know actually that we collect within a particular service area ABC or D or E then it can be spent in that area it doesn't have it's not tied to that particular address the way it is at this time because we have about two and a half million dollars sitting right now that unless we do a project on that street including that address that paid for it we cannot use that money okay how I had yes sir move forward yes okay am I okay yes sir no I have my hair hurts right now but forward here 's what I'm trying to understand I don't want to hold us up okay but what I was operating under because Ryan Road this is all this discussion about Ryan Road I start this pot up and I'm trying to understand it because I live on it and it's a nightmare and all my neighbors ask me why is this all why do we have to do this to go down the street my understanding was if somebody builds a project we don't have the ability to collect the money from here's what I was told if it's Ron Rhodes the perfect example so somebody's going to build a subdivision on Ryan Road the question I asked was why can't we just collect the money from them their proportionate share of the reconstruction of what they would have to build under our current code why can't we just collect that money once we have enough money we could put some more money with it and build the road one time what I was told was we don't have a mechanism for that I said we do it for for sidewalks and the answer I got was we've talked to legal and we don't have a mechanism for doing that what I'm hearing now is we in fact do we have the mechanism but we require it so if you're a hundred percent proportionate share this number whatever number four is 147 homes yeah they have no choice but to build it we're making them build it yeah mostly what is happening if it is hundred percent if the city's not gonna do the project within 10-year window there's uncertainty then the intent is to go ahead and have the money spent so that at least you have a portion of the road built even though you may be jig-jagging in that area just to you know be able to use the road so that's that's where that hundred percent comes in okay that's good information that's not answering my concern okay so the answer I got was we cannot collect money from a private developer for a street reconstruction or new or street improvements and hold that money until such time we're ready to build the road so this development down the street where they were required to build it which it doesn't have a number on here but it's the new one that's right next to number the 94 which is number 9 here the Lenn ar project where the street improvements are done the 114 hundred fourteen yeah okay so they were required to build the street I'm guessing because they had a hundred percent proportionate share and see that right here hundred percent so the specific question I have is if they're a hundred percent proportionate share they are required to build it there's no option for us to collect the money there's a logic behind that as to why the staff says because if they in the ten-year window if the city did not come out with a project by ordinance that money has to go back so if there's uncertainty that city will not have a project staff else on the side of caution to say okay let's go ahead and get that portion booked and if it's 15 years down the road they'll be a project that is that part is done okay so for the record this that 's troubling that answer is troubling because the specific answer I got was we've talked to legal and we do not have a mechanism to do that so what I'm hearing you say is somebody in our engineering department looked at Ryan Road and said I'm not sure we're gonna have to widen or reconstruct Ryan Road in the next ten years so we're gonna go ahead and require this person to build their section which is very different from we don't have a mechanism to do that therefore we cannot do that no the mechanism is there you know we have we maintain a spreadsheet yeah that shows by address the dollars collected and for what purpose right we do have a spreadsheet there's about two and a half million dollars sitting in there that hopefully will get spent so yeah I completely understand your answer okay my frustration is that I was given an incorrect answer and what you have now is of was that recently yeah okay I can so so so my concern is Ryan Road is a dangerous road today to drive on we may get more dangerous by requiring somebody to build a section over here and you got knobbies in the road right so you're driving and now you have to make a jog to the right and you better jog back left because there's a house coming up in front of you if you don't jog back yes and we're requiring that to happen not because we don't have an option but because we're choosing for fear of not being able to collect the money or use the money in time we 're choosing that and we can get away from that if we move in the direction of the impact I hear you but we could get away from it in our current system too we've just chosen not to so that's that's frustrating if the council wants to move in that direction where you know the only money we collected and not do the project that's a direction council can well again I'm not looking for a debate if you if you if we can't visualize riding road being needing to be improved over ten years that's a question but secondly just this is new information and this is different than the answer we got before because now what we have is a Ryan road that jogs like this so I'm not I'm not against the impact fee but this is very interesting information that is not agreeing with with the previous answers so thank you but that is the ordinance yes that's the current ordinance right now so so what we have here for you is you know if we have applied the DDC as it currently stands and all of the existing projects that you see that got constructed over last 20 30 40 50 years they were under the current DDC this is what they would have been paying as part of the development there this is what per home cost would have been had they paid through the current DDC process now what we have done here on this side is the calculated maximum impact fee for a single-family home is roughly a little over ten thousand dollars so we if we do it 80% reduction on that then it is two thousand dollars roughly so then we would have collected for eight home sixteen thousand versus what they might have paid under the current DDC of thirty eight thousand seven fifty six and at twenty five hundred dollars it is twenty thousand and for three thousand it is twenty four thousand dollars and I will point out to you that these numbers worked out you know it 's forty one eighty one forty eight hundred dollars a lot of them are forty eight hundred this one is thirty seven thirty six it is not consistent it it it is dependent on how much frontage you have if you've got a small frontage and got bunch of forms on the back of it you are paying a lot less money that you can see in the next slide right here this one the 260 homes is that is in your handout this is right next to the school there their cost is seventeen hundred and fifty six dollars per home because they got a lot of homes with a small frontage and if that's all they got to do in the front of their property that is their cost seventeen hundred fifty six dollars the other property at twenty seven hundred dollars whereas the last one is at forty four hundred seventy nine dollars none of that actually makes it for a even-handed application to all the developers out there Mr. changes it changes from project to project so this current model it sounds like the evaluation is more based on frontage than trips yes it does apply the trips it does but it looks at the frontage because that 's all the DDC would allow the staff to charge for and the one that we're looking at it seems like it's more heavily weighted towards trips in the region yes it looks at the entire service area and in the hand in the handout you have that shows the five service areas that we okay have been established so it will look at the total area there and how the trips are generated I know how it's using the rules I think I'm getting some clarity now so thank you okay yeah sorry for the rant so so on everything that's less than a hundred in our current model yes sir they're just paying us some number of money right we're just collecting so how much is that is that the three million is not correct but so what have we so we have collected the money on all these other things that have been built the eight unit or no sir there is no money collected on those a lot of these are done long time back so honored it this is an exercise to show you had they been under our current DDC that this is what they would have paid this is a reality this is a hypothetical what would have happened had these developments occurred with the current code yes that's right and this current code that we're operating under was what year 2002 and we apply started doing the proportionality since 2009 because the state mandated that you know proportionality is a way to determine the impact that is what it does it is a rough proportionality model impact fees do the same they do it create a rough proportionality so you pay either way right I'm gonna pay under the current code and you would pay under the impact fee also so I guess what I'm getting at so we have a do we have a size threshold because some of this stuff was built after 2009 the smaller stuff I'm trying to understand how we so there's no money that's been collected we've only if it was a hundred percent of the of the proportionality they had to build it if it was less than a hundred percent of the proportionality they didn't have to build it and we didn't collect any money well if it came after 2009 what we were doing what you run the proportionality model and if they were going to dedicate the right away so there is a value on the right away we will look at the decad values per square foot and if the dedicated certain amount of right away you look at what is that cost because they are dedicating that to the city that's a cost because there's a property the purchase right so if that value was less than this value right here then we would collect the difference if it matched up to that then they just dedicated the right away and and that's all they had to do mr. Rode this is helpful and I guess to clarify you're wanting kind of direction from us moving forward are we heading in the right direction and ultimately we're gonna need to have to pick a percentage right absolutely in terms of what we feel comfortable with and on that point this is a helpful exercise and I just have a question as I look at even the 70% reduction so the least amount across the board on this page it's every in every case it's significant in some cases very significant but in all cases it's less than what they pay under the rough proportionality yes sir in the next page there's at least a couple three maybe all of them in the 70% range at least where it's the reverse where we're actually getting more under this option so as we're thinking through the percentage which is going to be a kind of a quick key policy discussion is this an anomaly to this road because of what it's like in terms of how that factors out and as we're doing other comparisons and we don't want you to spend time doing this all across the city but we I want some basis to understand what makes the most sense because if I was just looking at that first page I would say of course 70% or more or less we don't understand that across the city I was also surprised to look at these numbers and it's the same model yeah that was used for this property or this property or this property right here and so it we run the numbers through that we give the how many feet of frontage they have what is the development how many homes or in this case how many square feet of development is there actually it was 76,000 square feet I'm sorry Greg that number that you saw 76 was not a number of homes it is 76, 000 square feet okay so I was getting confused myself when I was looking at that how to remember everything. Ms. Bosney. Oh wait a minute. So what I want to actually impress on you really take away from this would be that we have a process that meets the state requirement you can do the proportionality that's what the state wants we do it but we are confined by the code that we have where we are limited to use of the money only on that frontage right also the way it is calculated is based on the frontage so it comes up with different numbers different dollars as you can see anywhere from $1,700 to $4,800 for a single- family home so that is not making it an even-handed trade for all the development with the impact fee side whatever number we choose to go with it will be a fair level playing field for every development that comes in so that that is what they have to pay and doesn't matter you know what they're on the Ryan Road where they are on the Ryan Road if they had to develop 500 homes and they got only 100 foot of frontage then mean that their impact fee will go down or their proportionality will go down to $500 they still got to pay what the impact they're actually creating on the road and so it's it's exceedingly more clear to a developer coming in what their costs are going to be associated with impact fees that is versus though because there's not as much of the calculation that they they're not going to have much certainty going into it so I guess my question is though is again I'm just thinking about this because at some point we're going to land on a number and at least in this example the vast majority of them seem to come well under what we would have charged under the current system yes how do we charge for all that so does it is that leading the staff toward a recommendation I don't even know if you have one leading towards the 70% to make sure we're covering the cost of needed infrastructure I do want to point out to you that when you actually apply the impact fee process for commercial in the commercial this was just one project so it's kind of hard to say that this is the norm we've already had a look at some more but this $5 a square foot cost is coming at 358,000 to 19 whereas if you apply the factor for the commercial here we are anywhere from 516,000 to $774,000 so that's something to look at as to where the city would want to go or the council would want to go in applying the commercial impact fee okay we really want to allow some reduction or do we want to just have some other way to manage it question from Ms. Wasney I want to thank you for working on this matrix because this was a lot of work and I think it really is helping explain two things have we seen what other North Texas cities do and have we kind of compiled who is doing it our current system and who has moved to the impact fee in terms of applying it to an entire region and question number one yeah I have a slide later on that will show you a lot of cities as to which cities are actually using the road impact fees and how much they're charging on a single family home because I know when you're a developer it's like any other business you want your hard costs before you decide on coming to D anton or a different city or a different city or a different city and so I appreciate you having that and then we have that comparison so that that will guide you which direction you want to go any questions over here let 's say there are two developers one has a chunk of land that has a lot of frontage on it and it has a hundred homes and one has a little bit of frontage but it has a hundred homes this is a way of they are gonna have the same number of trip charges although this one has probably more costs for that that frontage but there's a way to kind of even out the costs the money does not expire if it's not because it's going to be used in the region pretty much right away very true and then it's the road is not piecemeal together we can have more of an overall plan that way absolutely and that's kind of that's the understanding of it okay that's good I'm gonna ask you to explain it all to me from now on but nutshell essentially that's what it is miss Briggs this might not be a question for you but is this the kind of thing that a developer can come in and ask not to do like as an incentive to to develop is this like a tool that they can use or is this going to be something that is mandated for for all new development yeah road impact fees or impact was in general are very common developers are fully aware of it all around the country okay most states have road impact fees for various things and road impact fees are one of them we just don't have it in the city right now right you well earlier you said in summary so I thought you were done but I'm looking and now I got the presentation to finally load so if you're going to cover this just tell me we're not limited to five zones or a particular size of a zone well we are because all our calculations have been done 90% of the work that consultant had to do is already done we those other Jones we established based on and they have to meet the state law requirements of maximum diagonal distance of about six miles maximum maximum diagonal right one zone so we could have fewer sir we're not limited to five the question I'm asking is what if we wanted to have ten it you can have more Jones and I have one slide where it shows you like the TIF area downtown TIF area is a possible source where we can have a little different impact fee you want to incentivize people coming in there so I'll show you show you that simple question could we have ten we can have smaller service areas yes and the reason I asked the question is I'm just looking at this Ryan Road example I mean if you think about we're talking about this road but if if you looked at the the impact fee model here the money from Ryan Road could get spent at the merger of the 235 on the north side of town that they're both in the same zone so you know you would look at those as two very significantly different areas so that's that's why I'm asking the question these are pretty big zones yes so if you you could have a whole lot of development activity going on in the southern part of a zone yet we're choosing to spend the money in the northern part of the zone now you would think if you had a bunch of development going on you wouldn't but I'm just thinking about how we how we manage that yeah well you know right now what we have as part of this process we developed the transcat model which is giving us what is the level of service on each and every road in the city right so we know what is the existing traffic what we did the traffic counts right and then we ran the model for the built out condition so we know level of service currently and then as you go continue to have more traffic what is going to do to that road so as part of the bond sales that will happen continue to happen that will be a roadmap that's a good term to use here that'll be a roadmap that will allow the engineering department to look at the model and say okay these are the roads where we have a worst conditions because of the traffic that we got out there and every five years we have to read on the model so we have to go out and do the traffic counts that's a state law so we're doing traffic counts on every road no we actually we did it enough that it allowed us to then create the model not not on every street but we had 110 different locations in the city right so using that then we extrapolate and come out with the traffic generation on other streets so every five years then we have to update the model that is a state law we can do it earlier but no more than five years so then we had to go and do the traffic counts we have to update the model at that time and that tells us what roads are really needing to be updated or we have to add capacity to those roads there so that is a more precise way to you know have the future construction established and have the bonds established so the reason for the five zones is because of the time and the studies that have to be done or is there another reason why why we've just chosen five zones there are various things you look at and there are physical boundaries there is trains from railroads there is interstate all those were looked at as part of the demarcation for the five service areas and then the state law requirement of not exceeding six miles maximum distance within that service area not exceeding six miles so there is some statutory yes limitations because one of the things I was thinking is as I was looking at for example zones C and D on the handout that you gave us is that it would seem that those areas inside the loop would would be have a lot more in common than the areas outside the loop but you cannot necessarily do all of that outside the loop because of the six mile limitation yeah but you know if the money any money that we collect will needs to be used where it is most needed and that needs to come from the model needs to come from the bond committee from the council as these projects are developed okay all right any other questions then plow on all right so this is just a compilation of all the dollars once on existing as well as in process so these are the dollars that you would collect based on two thousand twenty five hundred or three thousand square per SFE option there so you see that at three thousand per SFE option you are pretty close to what we currently have at this time in the city at least on Ryan Road so in summary then the exercise that we went to existing residential developments didn't really pay anything on that because they were already developed prior to the proportionality in place so we don't really have hardly any money there they would have paid more under a proportionality than under proposed impact fee option because if we collect two thousand or twenty five hundred that's less than forty eight hundred dollars that's what the calculation showed except for one which was seventeen hundred something it is based on the frontage resulting in uneven fees for each development and if we have the impact fees then all these developments can pull the money towards the Ryan Road and you can have a nice project out there which is what you are saying okay so then we're going to move forward now that we understand hopefully what we have currently and if you go to impact fees then what are the benefits moving in that direction yes sir yes sir I know you met with some developers I think you had said once or twice yes sir and were there any concerns from any developers that if they were building a development that their money would be used for roads kind of further away and they would kind of be forgotten about or not ever not really but they looked at they're all familiar with impact fees okay so that wasn't really their concern in fact they felt that the way currently we collect the money is rather inefficient way to use it for road construction because sitting there and don't have a project but you can actually pull the money and use it in the most logical place in that service area so overall it enhances the transportation ability or capability of the city so that was not an issue therefore thanks PS okay so we will look at some policy issues as we go forward the process once we you know go through the CIAC capital improvement advisory committee we show the land use and the CIP to them as well as the calculations for road impact fees our CIC in this case is the planning and joining Commission the city by ordinance adopted the planning and joining Commission to be the capital improvement advisory committee it we have to do public hearings in the council so any developer or anybody else can come in and have comments in the public hearing we have to advertise it I have to put all the documents in public places that they can actually go and see those documents there'll be here in the service center in some other places so wherever they have access they can go and see the documents okay the ordinance majority of the ordinance that we write it has to meet the chapter 395 requirements so that is the majority of the ordinance there are some lee ways that the cities get which are policies decisions that the state allows and some of those is how much what is the collection amount well how much do you want to collect and I will show you the calculator amount and how much we collect is something that the council has to decide the incentives what incentives we want to provide incentives to a industrial facility that is coming in or a large business that is coming in that we want to give them some incentives then we can reduce the road impact we as incentive for them credits if they are going to donate the right-of-way to the city there's a cost so we can give them credit for the right-of-way that they have to donate they are going to donate to the city or if they build the road then there's a credit because they are building the road and it is part of the system facility or identified projects in the city then we give them a credit for it also and if a project is coming in a greenfield area we don't have anything out there then I will talk about rough proportionality as a last slide and we can try and explain that also mr. Hawkins will be an example of an incentive I have a slide I'll show you that thank you sorry okay when does a developer pay the impact fee is it by phase one of my concerns is that when developers come that they are financially strong enough to see a development through and so whether it's a commercial impact fee or a residential impact fee when are they required and are they is this something that they're required to put a bond up to make sure it's covered explain that to me no the way most cities work and we also work here is that the road impact fee will be determined at the time they do the platting so when they do the final plat we will determine what is the total dollar amount or per single-family home etc or what is a commercial project what is that impact free amount they don't pay at the plotting time when they pull the building permit so when they go to the planning department and to the building permit department and they get a building permit for say a single family home and they're gonna do 200 homes and they gave to about 10 different builders so that builder when they with that builder comes in to pull a building permit they pay the actual impact fee at that time if it's a commercial property whoever is a builder they will pay the impact fee at that time okay all right so as we move forward so excuse me so in the case like that what actually happens is the impact fee the road impact fee that's going to be rolled into the price that the buyer of the home yes sir ends up spending okay and the builders know when they are buying that particular lot to build a home they are aware what is the impact we they have to pay if they are not they got a business pretty soon okay so this is something we went in a little more detail for the council members who came in on board miss was knee and miss keely here I want to show you these numbers for single- family the calculations and as you will see you know right here this slide show that actually this hard copy shows the five service areas and these areas ABC a D&E that reflect what I have in this hard copy right here and our consultant Kim Lehorn did the calculations based on the land use what is the maximum road impact fee for each service area and you can see they are running in the ten thousand dollars or more range with one service area little over eight thousand dollars for apartments it's roughly 62 percent of a single-family that's so that's you see for a single-family for one apartment that is the maximum that the city can collect if we apply the maximum we're gonna say okay we're going to charge the hundred percent of the calculated this is what they will be collecting for a three thousand square foot restaurant the maximum amount can be collected is hundred and fourteen thousand in area a eighty four thousand in area B and so on if it is a ten thousand square foot office these are the numbers and on a fifty thousand square foot retail these are all based on how much traffic they generate okay we have a couple of questions okay my I live in service area D is this just for new development new construction only so established neighborhoods people who live in their homes and have been using the roads for years aren't going to be responsible for not at all okay I just wanted to make sure it is only to collect money it's to look at the impact fees are impact of new development that is coming into town that's what I so then what is their proportionate share for the impact they create on the city road and that's as a new I do you have a question in this maybe I may be confusing what's being proposed with what's happening now but I'm picturing the situation what we were talking about where the fee the road impact fee gets paid or the proportionality fee gets paid when the building permit is pulled so the builder builds a home they sell it to the Jones family the Jones family pays the builder so now the builder has gotten the money for the for the road impact fee and if that road didn't get built in ten years why are we giving the money back to the to the builder or to the developer it's the Jones family that paid it yeah eventually you know it's the person who buys the property that they are the end user the cost is essentially on them then why why did that why don't they get the money back I mean it would be it would be advantageous then for the for the developer or the builder for the city not to build it because they've already collected their money once and now they're gonna collect it twice that ain't right that's that 's how the ordinance is right now pardon me that is how the ordinance says that we have okay but you're proposing that we change it so that we don't do that anymore but what impact fees then we collect the money you will not run into the situation where we don't use the money in fact we'll always have the need for more money that's never gonna change so we'll always use up all the funds in fact if the city sells bonds those bonds will be for more than what the collected amount will be so we'll always continue to use hundred percent of money collected mayor pro-tem yes I think maybe a different way to think about it is the developer pays their fee they then do something with the property maybe they build a home maybe they don't build a home maybe they put cows on it because the market went south and interest rates went up to 10% and nobody's buying homes I think the only way you can look at this is whoever pays you the money is who you have to pay the money back to because just because the builder sold a home doesn't mean they made money when they sold the home they might have sold the home on a $20,000 loss to get out of it because they carried it for a year so I don't think there's any other way you could do it but pay the money back to the person that paid it to you because we don't know what happened afterwards I think just to defend the poor sure the poor developer who may have lost a half a million dollars I'm glad I'm glad the poor developers getting defended and it's a and it's helpful by the way don't call them ask me to call on you anymore our illustrious mayor is back he is now in charge no you can know well what I miss no go ahead yes which points up the benefit of the new impact fee because whether they sell their house at a loss or not isn't the city's problem those people are still on our roads every single day so to put money in a road pot that we can use in different parts of the city depending on where we need to fix that road or put in a new road you know I see that as a real positive fork in the road for the city of Denton to adopt this new plan I like forks in the road road pot and that goes with pot holes and pots of money so what you are seeing right now is the maximum amount that can be collected I'll show you here what actually cities collect so this is a small sample this is Fort Worth their maximum calculated impact fee if they were to collect that is fourteen thousand five hundred fourteen dollars they choose to collect a little over twenty percent we rounded that to twenty it's a little over twenty percent they are collecting three thousand for a single-family home in Fort Worth for road impact fee if we look at floor mound their maximum calculated they have a lot of textile roads so they don't build those so they have fewer roads out there so their maximum calculated fee is fifty three hundred and twenty one dollars they chose to collect fifty eight percent of that that amounts to three thousand ninety seven dollars for a single family home McKinney is collecting thirty eight percent of the nine almost ten thousand dollars at thirty eight hundred dollars and Frisco is collecting sixty percent of their maximum calculated at thirty six hundred and seventy nine dollars Denton calculated is ten thousand one thirty two average that's the average for all the service areas and it is to be decided that's the exercise that we're going through okay so this is the slide I promise I'll show you this shows you all the cities but I shouldn't say all but we as many as we could fit in the slide here from Sunnyvale all the way to Collierville and there is this is two thousand dollar impact fee for a single-family home four thousand six thousand and so on so you can see Fort Worth right here at three thousand dollars and we bracketed two thousand to three thousand to show that this seems to be the sweet spot in the middle right here there are people who are on the lower side and people who are on the higher side but this is kind of the middle ground right here in the middle right here this is at twenty five twenty five hundred dollars right here at twenty five percent will be at twenty five hundred the blue shows a dentin this is at fifty percent and this is the maximum calculated at little over ten thousand dollars. I just wanted to kind of make is it is it fair to say that we haven't done this because I see some people have done it a really long ago it's because we're just now being hit with all the sudden growth is that that why this is coming up specifically now. Well city chose not to do it until now and as we continue to do the development review process and we see the issues with implementing what we have right some of the short comings we got with it so the constraints we got with it so then we felt that we needed to bring it to the council's attention. Okay and then we got the approval from the council we got the funding to pay the consultant to do all the calculations it is pretty substantial very substantial amount of calculation has to be done to get to where we are right now. Do you know how much the consultant was. It was about two hundred and if I get the number right in the two hundred and seventy six thousand dollar range for the road impact calculation. Thank you. So do all of these cities follow the impact fee based on a service area model that we're talking about. So in other words Denton is really behind the curve and behind the time and not implementing the impact fee service area model. Yeah that's one way to look at it. Okay I just wanted to put that on the table. So I bracketed this on purpose so you can show you where the you know good happy spot might be right here for the council to look at in this area. We are not too high they're not too low in this area. It doesn't pay to be too low because if the real cost of doing that road is over ten thousand dollars for home more discount we give more money has to come from the current rate payers. Somebody has to pay for it. Councilmember Hawkins. And so this is showing we've collected twenty five percent which is right in the blue which is the same as the seventy five percent reduction which was showed on page eight. That is correct. Okay. Having this light bulb moment right now PS it's great. Okay move forward. So how to determine the collection rate. What rate should the single family be? That's a question that needs to be answered. So non-residential get a discount. Just to give an example for what does discount blanket for commercial property. So if it is non-residential they give a discount period. Should the fee be consistent consistent across the city. I would say yes because we are not going to adopt the maximum fee. So if we are lower than we can have the same fee around the city. That way it's a lot less headache in actually managing that for our building permit department. But then they say okay it's the same for single family home whatever we adopt three thousand four thousand it's the same number because we are not charging ten thousand. So we can have the same fee. Should there be incentives provided in defined areas. So we picked one area and the council can direct us to look at something else. So this is a this is one where we looked at based on the reduction eighty percent reduction seventy five percent reduction and seventy percent reduction. So we are charging only thirty percent or twenty percent or twenty five percent of the maximum calculator. Single family you can see we already looked at that and we beat it to death. Apartments this is what it will be. A three thousand square foot restaurant. Twenty thousand eight seventy eight compared to if I bring it back to you. Compared to hundred and fourteen thousand eighty four thousand or hundred fourteen thousand. You would be looking at twenty thousand eight seventy eight or thirty one thousand because there's a great deal of reduction. We are giving them here. Same thing. Yes. Is there a is there anything that would stop us from having a set fee for certain uses across the board in the city. I'm asking the question. So a three thousand square foot restaurant would it almost be like we're we are in centing a restaurant to go in a certain part of town. Versus another part of town. Whereas that the amount of business that they would do may not be any different. I'm just curious if there's a way to fix the impact fee based on use type. It is because we will have a table that table based on the square footage. How many thousand square feet or two thousand square feet or three thousand square feet. It would calculate the impact before you based on the type. So we could say yes because maybe for for multi family and we want to see more of it happen in the area or less of it happen in an area. But then there may be certain uses where we really don't want to control or incent or disincent where they go restaurants certain types of retail or whatever. Right. We could fix the rate for that use type regardless of what zone they were in. Are you saying that it doesn't matter what size it is. Right. If you're going to use a two thousand square foot restaurant or ten thousand square foot restaurant you're saying use the same. I'm just asking the question is that a possibility within the legal realm of this or does it have to be a certain discount in that whole zone has the same discount. It can be in the zone we can discount it in a whole zone. That that should be. Jeff what is what is your assessment of that. You want to chime in. I'm going to ask Jeff come back. Yes please. Thank you. Jeff is the project manager with Kimley Horn and he has done numerous studies and all around the state. I completely understand your question. You're saying that you want to charge the same restaurant no matter where it is in the city. Yeah. Yeah. Basically each service area acts kind of like its own city. So you make a determination each service area what to charge. And if you just say hey I want to make it the same across the city which is what PS is kind of showing here you can do that. If you want to change the rates in different service areas you can do that as well. There's flexibility. No I think the question is based on use type. Let me restate it. There's 44 different uses that we have in the study. So there's about three or four for restaurants. One's a fast food restaurant. One's a sit down restaurant. One's a more fine dining restaurant. The idea is to tie it back to the trips. So fast food with the drive through probably will pay more because there's a lot more trips per square foot than a fine dining. Yeah I guess the question I was asking was simply maybe I just didn't understand the answer was if we just said take your example here a 3000 square foot restaurant. Regardless of what zone they go in we would want them to pay the same impact fee. Yes you can do that. We can do that. Yes. Thank you. So long as that square foot is the same. If it is 3000 square foot restaurant currently what we are proposing to you is that use the same impact fee in every service area. And we can do that because our maximum that we can calculate is much higher. Right? So if you're not going to the maximum which is different for each service area and we are so far down from there we can use the same number for every service area. Okay. Great. Any other questions? Yes. Any other questions? Thank you, Mary. Yes sir. Yeah I think your questions are smart because as we think about we have limited tools to accomplish what we want to accomplish in terms of incentivizing certain development in certain places and what not. We talk about infill development a lot. The zones as they are currently created it's unclear how you encourage that with you playing around with different percentages. I don't know what that means in terms of adding new zones but this is worth us really pondering because I wouldn't want to think it too much because there's probably other factors at play. But it's worth seeing if we can't get ahead with some of other goals that we have. So I don't know how we foster that discussion but it might take some digging into the weeds. And while it sounds good one size fits all over the whole city back to Kevin's point that this would become a tool if we use different zones and we're undetermined now as to exactly what those zones will be. That it is an accelerator or a break in different parts of the city on what type of development we would like to kind of bring or keep the hold on. So I think that's a real topic to explore and put some brain power behind because you've brought that up several times. How do we and it's hard and to be fair to businesses but to be fair to city planners on how we want to encourage certain things to come in certain parts of the city. I think that makes a lot of sense. So that's why I asked the question earlier about the number of zones. For example we talk about downtown maybe you want to have a smaller zone over a downtown because we really really want to encourage redevelopment and therefore lower impact fees there because we want to encourage it versus another certain area. The slippery slope is you also want to let free markets happen. So what the reason that's the question I use the restaurant there may be a certain use type where we say we want that to be fixed. We don't really want them to have an advantage. You get what I'm saying. So we may not really want a certain type of development in the downtown. Therefore if we decide in downtown we really want to provide a serious incentive for this but there's certain use types that we don't want there. So that certain use type would pay a fixed rate no matter where they went in the city. So they don't get an advantage in the area where we want growth. That's why I was asking the question about sizes and about flexibility on charging certain use types so that it even becomes more of a tool so that it's not only not one size fits all. But if you want to put a certain use type in an area that we really are focused on you're still going to pay if that makes sense. So. Don't think you're here. I'd like pursuing this even more and not for today but you know for a note for a future visit because as I was thinking about that I was thinking about areas where we have fairly large residential areas fairly large zones without a single grocery store. And you know it might be something where you might want to make it easier. But so I'd like to know if there are cities that have done what we're talking about doing and then I would be curious to know if if if that would really make a difference. I mean you know what a grocer really choose this area as opposed to that area simply because they were getting this kind of a discount. I'm not sure if it would work because I think that they probably have so many other factors that come into their determination of a location but I would I'd like to explore it some more. Normally if you take a look at it these little percentage reduction that you may provide. Don't know if really makes that much difference to a large grocery store. Right. That's going to do tens of millions of dollars of business in a year in a given location if they know that the market is there for them that this will be a driving factor that they're going to discount the road impact fee. So then they choose to go right in that location. So I wouldn't want to pursue it too much if it if it wasn't going to if it really wasn't going to do what we'd hope to do so if we could just get a little bit of information back before we spend too much time on it but if it if it if it does make a difference in for sure I'd like to pursue it. I'm just kind of thinking about that I'm trying to figure out how the end user ends up paying less is it just by a lower rent eventually unless it's the actual grocery store that owned the property to. Is that what you're saying. Yeah well I'm not just. Yeah I'm just asking I'm asking those questions as we think through how we can make this the best possible tool to encourage or discourage. Sure. Certain types if we want more of something in the area or less of something that's all. In general we have to be one handed to meet the state law. It does give us some flexibility in certain areas of the council wants to encourage certain type of development. We have to write that in in the ordinance as such. Right. So two things let's take a look at some other North Texas cities and have they use this as a tool and what is their success rate. And I think just to call to their planning departments because these are the people who do it every day and just kind of a quick. Hey does this work does it not work. You know I'd like to hear an example would be to try to stop example building apartments out in the middle of nowhere that if you have it more expensive to build those apartments out in the middle of nowhere because we've used this as a push pull in terms of encouraging or discouraging . So we have actually a partial solution that in the last slide I will show you as to how we can discourage that or in general trying to have a leapfrog development way out there where we don't have the public facilities and somebody is able to buy a cheaper property and want to develop. But there's a cost to it and there's a higher cost to that property. So I'm going to move forward here and this one shows you something that Fort Worth is doing where you have the 80 percent reduction on a 3000 square foot restaurant. But then they discounted by 25 percent additional. So then if you were in Fort Worth and your calculated fee was twenty thousand eight seventy eight they really will pay fifteen thousand six fifty eight because they want. And this is this blanket they don't they have not taken sides in any particular service area. No matter what service area and this is your discount period. Then matter what kind of commercial activity you got. I've got a question because I know we're talking a lot about using this or can we use this have other cities use this as a tool to direct certain types of development or growth in certain areas of the city. And depending on what that answer is for this because this is an impact fee and we have two other impact fees. We have a wastewater and a water water impact fee. And I believe we had a work session. My concern is I think we had a status report or something we were asking about the how do we do that flex. How do we have that flexibility with impact fees. Number one can we waive the impact fee which I'd always thought that we could. But then there was a question about whether we could. And there was I think I think that's what the status was about. We're discounted and and and I'm open for some creativity but I really want to make sure that as a policymaker I'm not trying to have too much control on the marketplace because what you might think is way far out there may not be what somebody else. So I just want to make sure that as as policymakers I mean I think the market I trust the market in some respect. If we have infill and things we want to do that that we have particular hurdles that we have we can't that are cost prohibitive. But I want to see what we can do and the creativity but also don't want to try to micro manage it too much in that sense. If we need to look at the zones if we need to look at you know these kind of things. But plus we would really want to make sure we don't run af oul of some kind of either fair housing or equity kind of principle that says you know let's try to be as fair as possible to because what I may like as a development somebody else may not and vice versa. So I certainly want to explore the creative aspects and if this is a way that it sounds it looks like from the chart that what's happened at least your example over time is that seems like commercial has borne a disproportionately large amount to some degree in general circumstances of their exact what they call exactions exactions whereas residential. Not so much but this is this level of the playing field and gets you guys where you need to be on funding and planning and things like that. Okay and I guess on the apartments that's per unit is that right. That's a per unit that's per unit just like on the single family it's per unit. Okay. It's about 62 percent of the single family. You had to keep in mind that when we do look at the commercial is all tied to the how much traffic the general. So if they're generating 100 trips versus 10 trips for the home you can see the impact is going to be greater. So the charge is greater. You know what I find interesting about that is we're basing this on trips but it seems like if we took all the uses in the city they all we could come up with a total number of quote unquote potential trips but like trips go into a restaurant. Those are people coming from single family or coming from an apartment. And so it's like the trip is being used sort of as the foundation for the charge but it's really they're all over the town. So it's just it's an interesting concept. But those are discounted as part of the calculation. Okay. Their discounts are already built into that. Okay. All right. Like if it's a gas station you have people driving by they 're going to stop by there. Right. So that that trip you know as part of the statistical analysis that is done and I showed you two volumes about that. Right. Each one that's already built into that. Okay. Thank you. Okay. So incentives by location. That's what council is looking for. Now I have one area we picked which is the TIF area and then economic development incentive. One thing I want to point out you know in water waste water when they were put in place back in 98 the council was very very deliberate in saying that we will not discount the impact fees. But if you want to incentivize somebody we'll put some money as part of the economic development package which will pay the impact fee so that the impact fees are then still being collected. That need to go to build the projects that need to be done whether it's the road whether it's water or wastewater doesn't matter. But the money being set aside to pay for those impact fees. I think we had a question. Councilmember Briggs. I recall seeing somewhere that the impact fees need to be re-examined every five years. Is that is that correct. Yes. Is that what is being done with the wastewater and things like that. We actually had our impact fee up there in 2008 and in 2013 . And this would be done as well with these impacts. What how does that normally go. Is it do you look at it to say do we still need these or do we and do you increase them at that time or do you deke. I mean how do you. Yeah actually every time you had to go through the full calculation every time. So they can go up or down. Every time we do. But the cost for construction keep going up. I say construction costs don't go down. Okay so. Okay. So then it accounts for the cost at that time. That's why it gives you a flexibility in being able to collect monies which are more realistic. Okay. So there's a TIF boundary. You know we are all familiar with it. It's the downtown area. Parkway Prairie right here. This is Kettle. So this is one area which the council is already incentiv izing through the TIF collection district here. This will be one area that one can look at that this is a defined area that is a requirement. We have to have a very defined area to provide incentive meeting the statute requirements for impact fees. So this is a clearly defined area with this boundary part of city ordinance. It also happens to be in one service area only which is service area E. So it's all embedded within that service area. So it's a lot easier to manage the TIF area that way. How much discount we do on there. If you want us to take a look at. We can take a stab at it. What. Well I have to be truthful. I don't know if I would be in favor of a special incentive for the TIF area. I think it's I think it's pretty incentivized right now with the TIF and I think we use we've got one hundred thousand dollars that are at least for now anyway that are that are able to incentivize I think downtown businesses through the collection of the beverage tax. Is that what it is. Is that we've got some economic grant that's available in the downtown area that's funded through. Is it the mixed beverage tax. So not to say that that's not important but I think it's pretty well incentivized and it's doing very well. So that's again the market to me is and that's just my own opinion. I mean there's six other people here at the table so that's just that's my own thought on that. Yes. Yeah. I think I agree with you on the TIF comments. I mean I think again as we think about info which we probably want to think about larger than the TIF boundary. To that question I mean I get totally understand what you 're saying about the free market and we're not saying people can't go someplace we're saying certain places going to cost more and it might cost more because it actually costs us more. Take the apartment question someone's going to build an apartment on outskirts of town market it to students and then come to us and DCT and say hey we need a bus line out here. It's going to cost somebody some money and take services out from somewhere else which is a reason why in our we had a lot of discussion on what sort of growth scenario we want to have as a city as part of our comp plan. My question simply is and I had this question before we had the new comp plan which was what's the point of the comp plan if we have no tools by which to get to the goals that we're asking for. So it's not just my personal preference that says we shouldn't be putting this out here. It's the community said this is kind of how we want our town to grow. We want to de-incentivize sprawl, incentivize infill and start kind of growing in a way that's more cost effective for the infrastructure of the town. I don't know there may be more tools than this. This just strikes me as a tool in a very sparse toolbox of a city. Sure. And you know if somebody decides I do want to put that apartment or whatever it is I'm just throwing that out as an example out there. That's fine go for it. It just costs more. Or maybe it makes sense to say it costs more in the middle. I don't know. But I just think we need tools because otherwise we have a comp plan and then it's free market determines where everything goes and then it's like how are we accomplishing the goal of what we're trying to do putting things where. Well and I guess Kevin and maybe I need to revisit the comp plan because I know that there was an emphasis on certain parts of the town where it's more urban style development and that's sort of the core. But I don't think that it said that we want to discourage sort of more traditional neighborhood development. So I don't disagree that we certainly want to make sure that we follow the plan. But I will tell you I think probably the biggest tool we have in doing that is our policy making ability with zoning with you know as you piece with those kind of things because we had plans before that you know we wanted higher end homes or lower density homes. That was policy at one point. But we still rezone things to be four and six units per acre which typically attracted a certain type of development. So I don't disagree with you. We certainly need to follow the plan. But I think that plan was had some other nuances besides we just want to sort of go vertical instead of horizontal. The sprawl is and if we're going to talk about that it costs more to go somewhere out totally get that. I just would like to see some data on OK if you put if you 're going to if you're going to put the water in the sewer lines in and you're going out here this land and you're paying for it. So we're saying that the the police officers or the fire departments or the truck you know the solid waste trucks. I just would like to see some of that supporting data that would say OK because that's our assumption. But if we don't know what it is on that point I will say at all the meetings for the comp plan they had these how many gross scenarios were there for possible and they had all that data associated with it. I mean arguably it looked like it was trying to drive towards a certain because it was demonstrating infrastructure costs road costs water costs all these things cost more in this sort of scenario. Sure. And so this is why we're kind of going towards this. Sure. So I think we have that data data because I think that was available to the public when we were describing right. But I agree. But that that is important. Yep yep. OK. Yes. You know the I find what you've all been saying about the tip interesting. I was thinking about it from a whole different perspective in that in a lot of cases anything that's developed in the tip. If we establish that as a separate service area. How are you going to we can't do much to increase road capacity in that area to begin with. And and so that that makes me ask questions from that regard. It also makes me ask questions if if we had something that came in that did significantly increase traffic in that area. Would we even want it because of the the interest in making that area less car centric and more pedestrian and active transportation friendly. So I'm going to have to really think that through as to what it why we would want to incentivize or or what I would want to insist in that area. Councilmember Rodin we did look at some of those areas that are in the compound. Those areas are not defined. They're like blobs on a map. They're not defined right now. They're not defined by description. So we cannot put them as part of the incentive package here for you. So they'll have to be what to be done by the planning department to actually define very discrete boundaries. And that's the only way then they can be made part of the road impact. I do want to caution that we still want to look at what is the percentage we are really collecting and what is the cost to do the project. The real cost is over ten thousand dollars for a single family home. We are talking about two thousand to three thousand. They're already discounting it a whole bunch. So somebody is going to have to pay the money down the road to build that road. That's that sounds good. So somebody has to pay the money for it. It's going to the rate birds. So this is an extraordinary investment discount if some industry or a large business came in that were going to invest between 10 to 20 million dollars. This one is something similar to what FlowerMound is doing. This is the incentive package you are looking at. This is something we looked at FlowerMound. The other one was Fort Worth. So they do something similar to what I'm showing you right here. So if you go 21 to 49 million dollars, this is a scale that will be 26 percent to 49 percent and then maximum 50 percent reduction in impact. If it is 50 million or over. Would that be in addition to any other economic development incentive tools that we have? Is that is that what the thought is on that? We have to look at as part of the ordinance package as to where the council want to go with that. OK. Is there a maximum collection that the city can can have like in the chapter code? Like can collect the maximum collectible amount that this is based from? Yes, we did the calculations and the calculation showed for each area. What is the maximum amount that can be collected? So that is the maximum collectible impact fee. And for a single family home, it was generally in the ten thousand dollar range. Ten thousand. But we are looking at two thousand to three thousand. So we're already discounting it by eighty seventy to eighty percent. OK. Credits. If somebody's dead, I already went through that. If somebody's going to dedicate right away, we will look at the D CAD property value and then give them a credit for that. If they are going to build a road, same thing. What's the methodology? Create agreement between city and the developer and creating dollars for eligible roadway costs also. So they better do the road, which is part of the system facility. And I use that term discriminately. We will define the roads that are part of the system facility. Those are the projects to be done. So if they do one of those, then they get a credit for it. P.S. one question. I'm sure you covered this earlier before I arrived. But on this right of way dedication, like currently, if you go to develop and somehow it changes or it always seems to change the road status, you've got to dedicate potentially some form of right of way, depending on the current street configuration and what it will then be reclassified as. So this impact fee, if it gets adopted, means that that's not necessarily the rule anymore. Is that correct? Yeah. What would happen is that the impact fee, say, say nothing is on that property and somebody is going to put something. Yes. Say office building or a small apartment complex. So it was greenfield, even though it may be in an area where a lot of it is already developed. So we will come out with the what is the maximum, not the maximum, but what is the impact fee that that property has to pay. So we look at, OK, what is the road condition here? Do we have the right of way? Do we need the right of way? If we need the right of way, then how much of right of way, how many square feet do we need? What's the value per square foot? So say the impact fee to be collected is, say, five thousand dollars and the right of way value is one thousand . So then we say, OK, you dedicate the right of way by the plot, then we will give you one thousand dollar credit. So you'll pay only four thousand dollars in road impact. OK. And I think that's I think that's a good process. My only curiosity and observation is that here we're saying we'll automatically use D CAD values. But if, let's say, the property owner at their expense were to obtain an appraisal, a third party appraisal, I think D CAD is certainly one potential indication of value. But D CAD doesn't always necessarily reflect what it may be . So is that is would staff be open to if not that we, the city, are going to spend any additional money on trying to determine that value, but to provide some avenue where the property owner through some credible third party credentialed appraiser could say, well, and I know that that would open it up to potentially a more timely process and costly process from a negotiation perspective. But I would want to I guess I would want if we're going to say we're going to take it and we're going to assign some value to it to give you a credit. I would like that value to be as close to true market values. That's just me. That's my observation about about this particular rule. And I don't see a problem with that. We can put both and we can have the D CAD and they can give them the money. Usually when you do the appraisals, it's not really just one. You have to have at least two appraisals, separate and your independent appraisals. Well, and if they want to spring for that, if they want to, we're not going to pay for that cost. Yes. Let's say a developer is halfway through a large project. We implement this. Do they then based on permits that come in transition to the new impact fee immediately? No, the state law requires grandfathering what is already going through the process. It's already gone through the final plan before this was implemented. Then they would not have to pay the impact. They will be working off of the current DDC code and whatever exactions are based on that is what they will be doing. OK. OK. I need to finish it. This is the rep proportionality I was talking about where if somebody went into a green field outside, no roads around there, and they really need the road because they're going to put 500 homes out there. Right. So in that case, what we would do as part of the ordinance and which is what Fort Worth is also doing, and some of the other cities are also doing, is that we would, if they do any construction of any system facility, that is acquired credit that they will get is based on the maximum calculated impact fee. Not the reduced amount 20 or 30 percent or 40 percent, whatever we adopt, but it is a maximum calculated. So it is $10,000 per home. Then that is what we will apply as a calculated maximum fee and they will get credit based on that, not on this $2,000 or $25,000 or $3,000. So that way they have to spend the money when they're out there putting something where there'll be a lot of impact on the city finances. OK. I'm not sure I understand that, but I'll get with you offline on that. Yeah. Oh, yes. So if somebody was putting in a big neighborhood like you 're talking about and there was no city street or road leading to it, they built the entire road, they built the road to get to it, you're saying we'll give them a credit. Yes, sir. What is the credit against? Because if there's no money that they're giving to us, so would there be a scenario where we actually give them cash? No. I mean, if they need the road, they're going to build the road. But say they have to build a road out there and there's a certain amount of cost, $100,000, just pick a number. What we would apply in this case, the impact fee that would be charged in that case is the maximum calculated. So it is $10,000 per home or $10,100 or whatever, depending on what area they're in. In one area it is a little over $8,000. Right? So-- I understand that. I'm saying what are we giving them a credit against? Because if you're giving them a credit, one would assume that if they're going to-- if the impact fee is $10,000 times 500 homes. Yeah, $500,000. Yeah. And they build the road. The city does not pay them the money, no. But if they were to come in at $400,000, you see? So we give them credit for $400,000 because they built the facility. They don't owe any impact fee. But if the cost was $600,000 and they really need the road to serve their property, they need to build the road. City are not going to pay $100,000 to build that road there . OK. I guess then-- so it seems like we have two different scenarios. Let's take single family, for instance. We have a single family road impact fee. It's discounted. You're going to build a house on a lot that's already there , road's already there. This is the $2,500. Yeah. So when someone comes in and is going to build the big development, the one you described, 500 homes, and they build all the roads, and the main thoroughfare coming to it , what is the-- and I'm not saying we should use the discounted rate, but I 'm saying what is the rationale for using the full maximum fee for the service area? Help me understand that. Mainly because it's so far out there that city doesn't have any roads. And the roads, which I call them, and that would be the road and system facility. So if there is a collector's street, which is off-site to them, not interior, but anything that is off-site to them, or a secondary arterial that has to be built. So-- And they build it. They build part of it. And I say they build it full two lanes, at least, that will convey their traffic that is needed to be conveyed. Right? So at least how they build the two lanes. And that is not in our projects in any way. That is, even though it is a system facility, because there is no level of service issue for us, because there was nothing out there to begin with, we don't have any funds here marked to build that road. You are the one causing that impact, creating that impact on an area where we have no facilities at this time period. OK, well, you're talking about services? You're talking about where we've had no services costs out there, because there's nothing there. I commend. But this isn't about recouping for services. This is about recouping for road-- I'm just talking about the road. I'm just talking about the road. OK, so you mean services as far as patching the road, rep aving the road. But I thought impact fees were capacity related. It's only capacity. We cannot pay for any work that Tim is going to show you. That is all rehab, road work. Impact fees don't pay for that. OK. I'll get with you on that, because I need to understand that a little bit more, because somehow something doesn't make sense to me. Anything that is OCI-related work, which is existing street , if we are not adding additional lane, or we are not putting additional turn lane, or we are not improving the intersection, or we're putting a signal out there that actually improve the traffic flow and add capacity, we cannot pay for that through the impact fees. Right. Impact fees only pay for adding capacity, period. So are you saying that-- let's say in that zone-- I think maybe this is what I'm hearing. This may be the rationale. Maybe I'm just trying to make it up in my head. That because 500 homes were built there now, they're going to put, let's say, average four people per home, 2,000 more cars in that service zone that wasn't there before. And that's the impact that we're trying to recapture the capacity fee for. In other words, is that sort of what I'm thinking? Is that they're bringing more capacity into that zone, so therefore they need to pay that share, and we're just saying it's the maximum fee for the service area. Well, in reality, what this is doing is it's creating a dis incentive for somebody to go and build something in a cheap land, and expect the city to pay for all the waterline extension, sewer extension, road improvements. Well, I don't think-- But usually, they do that if they need wastewater and water . They have to do that. Yeah, OK. So-- But there is a lot of-- I'll talk with you about it. I mean, when you say it's a disincentive, now we're using this as a-- I just need to-- yeah, I'll talk with you about that. That's not a problem. This is a leapfrog development going out in this way out there in the county, or shouldn't say in the county, but even in the city. Way out there where we don't have any facilities out there. Maybe a single road where you have to give people right away to cross you. Road is all in very bad shape, but then they really need a collector street, which is four lanes, and that is what is needed for them. City is not going to go and put that road for them. So this will help us pay through the ordinance, or actually have the developer pay for it through the ordinance. OK, all right. That's what it is going to do. We'll talk about that later. Thank you. Appreciate that. OK. And all this is going to show you the rough schedule. Today is-- we had the 28th today. So even if we stay current on everything and we keep moving forward, it'll be December or end of November where we really have the implementation of the road impact fee. It just takes that long. Councilmember Johnson. I think there's a lot of good ideas shared here today. And I think it sounds to me like there's a lot of-- I mean, this, to me, bears a separate work session of its own. I think about in our retreat where we just-- we picked a topic and we really, really dove deep into that topic. And we weren't constantly watching the clock trying to figure out how we're going to get the rest of stuff done today. Because we got one bite at this apple to get it right the first time. And I think there's a lot of really good ideas shared about how we can use this tool. And Kevin, the fact that we have a limited toolbox. So to me, if I look at this schedule, I don't know that we really get that done unless we schedule a separate session just to focus on this. This is something that I showed you. Every time I come, I've been moving it further back here. So if this council wants a work session or a retreat type session where we're not looking at the clock, we're at your disposal. So you'll plug it in. And then the schedule will change based on that. Well, I would concur with that sentiment. I mean, this is obviously an important potential tool. I would like to make sure that I understand all the nuances . Because one thing we know is that as development costs go up, then sometimes they have unintended consequences that we're not quite aware of. So this is going to be around for a long time if it gets approved, just like the wastewater in the water. So it's certainly worth really making sure that we have a clear understanding of it and that we flush it out enough to where we feel very confident that it's not going to have some to minimize the unintended consequences. There's still going to be some, but we can minimize them. So I'm open to that. As a part of that, not only us to work on it, but once we decide we believe this is right, I think it needs to be modeled. So I think we need to take it out to folks that are doing a lot of different kind of projects in the city, single family, multi-family, retail, get them to go provide it to them and say, based on this project, that project, what is your feedback? Because what we don't want to do is here in this vacuum, create something that incents people to go focus on projects in other cities, right? I mean, ideally, we'd want it to incent them to do projects in our city. >> And we have to keep in mind that there is a cost toll using DDC. There's a cost there, right? So it is just replacing that cost. It is not a new cost. >> Correct. >> Okay. >> Yes. >> The feedback I've got is kind of anytime you hear impact fee, people kind of are not for it. At least me personally, that's what I've got. And really understanding what we are doing right now, which is still, I don't feel like I'm all the way there. But I feel like I'm starting to understand what you're proposing. It just makes a lot more sense. Having, rather than just worrying about your little chunk and piecemealing a road together, but having it into the five different areas and the money not expiring, that just makes a lot of sense to me. So I definitely want to understand what we're doing right now all the way. It's still just confusing to me, and I'd like to just vet that a little more. But to the public, we definitely need to make sure that they understand too, impact fee is kind of, it's at least when I'm at Rotary or other places, it needs to be explained exactly what we're doing right now and what we're proposing. >> And based on your direction, we can go to some of the groups. We can go to the development community and show them a presentation if that's the direction we're going. >> That'd be a good thing. >> I'm sorry, yes. >> I just have one more question about the refund. I know that you said it's not going to be an issue because the money's going to be spent on roads because we need that . But I did see that there is interest if we do have to pay that back. How do we determine that rate? Is that- >> The interest that, when you say interest, which the bonds that we sell, the interest on the bonds, those can only be spent on the projects. >> No, that interest money, if we sell the bond and the money is sitting there in the bank, we are getting some interest on it while we are ready to do the project, that money gets spent on the project. Is that the interest we are talking about? >> Well, I was reading in the code, the chapter code, and it was talking about refunds if the project wasn't done within ten years. And that when we do pay that money back, it does incur interest. >> Right, okay, that's in the current process. >> Okay. >> Right. >> That's when you go to impact fees, since we'll be able to spend all the money, then any interest we earn- >> We will spend it all, so we wouldn't be responsible for that. Okay, that was just my concern. >> Okay. >> Okay. >> Okay, so is it council's direction to maybe have something more specific work session to really delve into this? And then either simultaneously or before or after, try to do some means testing on some projects, even to see, hey, this is what you paid in proportion, under our current system. If this had been in place, this is what you, to try to just get some real life, as you've done, continue some real life examples, is that sort of the direction? I got two people over here I'm paying attention to. >> I would just say- >> I'm teasing you, I'm kidding. >> I would just say, Mayor, rather than us say, here's what they would have spent. >> Yeah. >> Once we decide what we think the right number is, then provide that information to folks that we know build different things. And let them tell us, right? In other words, we often say, here's what they would have spent, unless we're looking at their real budget, we don't know that. So I would just like to have some of those folks come back to us and say, yeah, this works. Or maybe if you tweak it this way. Or man, this really hurts this certain kind of development. >> Okay. >> You know? >> All right? >> Is that all right? Everybody okay with this? Let's go ahead and take about a five or ten minute break. We'll come back at 425. Okay, we're back in session at 427. I believe we had, as far as, we were going to take up agenda item A. Was that okay with the council? Yes, yes. I'm just concerned that we have enough time for agenda item C. >> And that is the, is that the open session? Is that the open session for Gaswells? >> Yes. >> Okay. Time as far as before the 630 meeting? >> Correct. >> Okay. Madam City Attorney, do you want to comment? >> And also, I do think it would be prudent to do the closed session on Gaswells before we do this open session work session. >> How long do we think this presentation? >> I can go through, if we hold questions, I can go through probably in about 20 to 30 minutes. >> Okay. What is council's pleasure? >> Okay. >> Let's do what? >> It seems to me that this is going to be important to have this information prior to budget discussions. >> Okay. >> So I think it would be important to hear that, at least the presentation right now. >> All right. So you're saying either hold questions till the end or we might have to come back and revisit it in a little bit more in depth to provide some time before our 630 meeting for the important issue of the Gaswell ordinance. So are you okay with that plan? >> Okay. >> All right, fantastic. So we're holding our questions until you get to the presentation. >> Thank you. >> All right. >> I'll turn our mics off. >> You've had a lengthy discussion on how we fund maybe a few hundred million worth of road expansions to support growth. And what I'm going to talk to you today is how do we maintain the $380 million investment we have in pavement. And with that, I'll move forward. I want to talk a little bit about our pavement management system, its history, and the comprehensive surveys that we 've done. I want to touch base on past funding and some of the improvements that we've had with funding on that. I'll do a quick overview of the 2008 and 2015 citizen survey as it relates to citizen satisfaction with our roads and our road maintenance program. And I'll do an overview of the 2012-2014 bond program. And then I'm going to turn it over to Stephen Smith with I MS. He'll give you an update on our current ongoing 2015 survey . We have the preliminary results for that. We'll be finishing up in a couple months. And then we'll present the final report probably in October or November. And then I'll conclude with basically some recommendations from staff. You had the agenda. You didn't have the presentation that was put out in the Friday reading file. So you've had access to that through that. Basically, we did our first pavement survey in 2003. That was done by a firm called Ares. We updated that six years later with a study in 2009. And then we're currently working on one for 2015. IMS has been the provider of those services the last two times. We use Cartograph Work Order and pavement management software. There's a couple of modules there. One tracks costs and conditions. The other one gives us a modeling capability to look at budgetary funds and what that would do to the system over time. Back in 2003, in 2009, the summary was that we were underfunding street maintenance and we were in a state of decline. And that has led to some progress with regards to funding. And I'll go over that in a little bit. Our overall condition index, which is a rating system, 0 to 100 for each street segment. On average was 69, but we had a very atypical distribution. We had a community rapidly growing, had lots of new streets . And those were being offset by a whole lot of backlog of failed streets. As far as funding history, this is a 12 year history. The funding portion of the street program that went into O CI improvements, which is not the entire street budget, there's components of the street that doesn't really contribute to that. There's some details of that in your backup. But good examples of that are pothole repairs and base failures and sidewalk work and other things that the street department does out of their operating and maintenance budget that doesn't really extend the life of the asset. And so we had some CO and GEO funding. We had our budget. You can see that we've had a ramp up, particularly in the last several years on the budget side of things. We've also had a more aggressive influx of funds coming from the bond program. And so those have brought our total expenditures in recent years up closer to some of our funding estimates what we need. We still have an unfunded gap there, but we're making progress. The downside of that is that we are doing that a little bit with a dependency on debt. And at some point we'd like to see a transition to that to be a sustainable O&M budget. And that's kind of part of our recommendation section. Net as far as reinvestment in the streets over a 12 year period, it's about 68 million. But it's definitely loaded in these last four years. Citizen surveys are a way to look at what the citizens think of the job that we're doing. Back in 2008, the street maintenance program was lowest rated of all of the divisions and departments. So the citizens didn't feel that we were doing a good job of keeping up with it. Recent survey by 15 says even less think we're doing a good job of it. So we still have some work to do, but that's the input from citizens through the survey. Because of that, we got into two bond programs. In 2012, that was a $20 million street only bond program. We're two years into that five year program. It funds bond years 13 through 17. It funded 208 street segments. At that time, that was about 20% of the streets that had an OCI of 40 or less. We used slightly higher OCI in that target in part because we had some utility projects that were on the books. And if the street was nearing failure and you had utility work, we wanted to have some funding. So that's why we picked 40 versus 30. So far, we've done 59 of those street segments. We got 14 under construction. I would summarize that we're a little behind schedule and we're under budget. We'd expect to be under budget because we put an average inflation rate out there over the five year period and we 're on the frontiers. So we kind of want to be under budget. This is the street segments, the 208 street segments that were in the 2012 bond program. It's kind of hard to see here, but the green ones are the 59 that were completed. Highland Street is a pretty major project that we completed over in the university. Montecito is another example. We've got various street segments out there. Basically, in 2014, we had a larger city bond program. Street reconstruction was only a portion of that. It was about a quarter of that $98 million bond proposal funded $24 million. That would raise our levels to $6 million per year beginning in 2015. So we've just received that $6 million bond fund, but we haven't really implemented it yet. That funded another 195 street segments. That represented about 28% of the unfunded backlog that we were identifying, about 40 or less. So we're taking a bite on that backlog through this, but we haven't necessarily eliminated it. And this is the street segments associated with that 2014 bond program. What I'm going to ask next is Stephen's going to come up here and go over his presentation. And since he has some animations, I'm going to click over to his presentation. Excuse me. Maybe I was there. Okay. Yeah. Stephen, if you'd come up and he's going to summarize where we are on the study as far as our preliminary findings. And then when he's done, then I'm going to wrap up and kind of talk about our recommendations. >> This is my second time talking to the city of Denton. So I made it to you last time, so I thank you for that. I can honestly say I enjoy coming here. And last time I was here, I delivered some pretty startling news. We were kind of, as Tim mentioned, going down. Rather steep downward trajectory. So I'm going to view today as happy happy because I'm not saying we're totally out of the clear yet. But we're certainly not doing that anymore. We're kind of bottoming out and going to start looking forward to pulling up. You've got a good crew here. Tim and his department are quite enjoyable to work with. >> Hit the screen on the bottom of the icon so we can do the presentation. Presentation's coming. >> All right. >> Right there. Yeah, technology and me don't get along too well. Tim, you're lying to me. I can push buttons all day long. This ain't working. Here we go. Scale of investment. I would like to let council know what you own. Give you an idea of what you have to manage. You own about $385 million worth of roads. Probably one of your single largest, certainly your most visible asset. One of the ones that you had a lot of discussions about, investment and development. This is one that really helps govern that, helps bring it forward. Average cost per mile. You're up there. $843,000 per mile of road. So it is a big ticket item. So Tim's department is charged with taking care of a very large, expensive, visible asset. Tim? >> Page down, page down. >> Page down, page down. Okay, there we go. We already talked about all that. Early good news. OCI's about a 63. When I was here a few years ago, your OCI was also a 63. So when I say we've kind of hit the brakes on our downward trajectory, we're holding steady. That kind of puts you in the good rating. I think we can do better. What concerns me is the backlog. I can mention that, that is the streets that are beyond surface repair. That's the ones that cost a lot of money to fix. They're the ones that you have to go out and dig up, start anew. You're at about 14%. I'd like to see you down around 12%. That's kind of puts you in the manageable department. It's kind of like your credit card. You're up over your limit right now. We've got to focus on getting that down. So we've got our OCI under control. Got to get our backlog under control. Got to improve the streets. Overall, about a solid B. I'd like to see Denton up there at a solid A or an A plus. Concept of pavement management. Kind of why are we here? Why does the city care about it? How do we go about doing it? The main reason we care about it is because it is good financial and good engineering practice. What I want to bring to you is kind of a balanced approach. I don't want to dictate to the city what they should be doing. That's council's job. So I would like to get, through Tim's department, get a better understanding of your objectives, your policies, what budgets. Merge that with some firm understanding of your roadway condition. That's what we've done. And then we start setting priorities, forecasting, and start meeting some of those objectives. With that balanced approach, long term, we'll start taking care of your roads. Why do it? Quite simply, roads deteriorate on a fairly predictable path. In the past, and many cities still think about it, it's best to let them fall and then rebuild them. That's probably the worst, most expensive way of doing it, and provides the least level of satisfaction for your rate pay ers. Your roads end up looking really bad for a really long period of time, and it's just not fun. So our concept is to start in early. Right now Denton would fall right about in here. We want to back you up this deterioration curve and kind of get you right into this little sweet spot here. So that we start making lighter weight investments now, so that we delay and defer those big long term heavy ones. It's good financial practice. Does it always work? No. Are you ready for it today? No, but I think we can be. We've certainly made great strides in the last six years. Realistically, what we want to do is kind of get your city up here following this perpetual life cycle where we keep the largest majority of your streets in good or very good condition, high satisfaction among your users, lower costs. Defer and push out all those nasty reconstructions for as long as possible. It's good for the community, it's good for Denton. Realistically, this is just a set of tools that are going to assist the city in maintaining their roadway network. There's a whole bunch of other reasons before to do it, like Gatsby Statement 34, and all this other good stuff. But realistically, the idea is to put you on a path of the greatest cost benefit per dollar invested. Understand the pavement condition index. Here's a pavement deterioration curve. All streets start at a perfect 100, and they deteriorate over time. Denton's right in this area right here. We're kind of in the fair to good range. We want to make sure that you're up in here and not letting all your streets deteriorate until full reconstruction. If you think about it, would you rather have someone come and put a lightweight surface treatment in front of your road and disrupt you for a day or rebuild your road, bother you for a month? I'm for the lighter weight stuff. It's just good practice. Benefits. Benefits are maximized when funding is as close to the steady state rate as possible. That gives you the highest cost benefit. Right now you're getting there. We still got a bit of ways to go. Steady state is when you've got your OCI balanced and your backlog under control. So we got a bit of work to go on that. Realistically, you're at a 63. We'd like to get you up to about a 65. Get that backlog down to about 12%. That's critical. Top down and bottom up support. Bottom up is coming from folks like Keith doing a good job out there rebuilding roads. He was kind enough to take me on a tour of a few of your roads. I'm impressed with some of the work he's been doing. High quality stuff. Top down. That's why I'm here today talking to you folks. Both of those have to be in balance. Citizens' concerns have to come into play. Tim talked about rate payer satisfaction. If you don't have their support behind it, there's never going to be enough money to accomplish this. It has to be kind of a paradigm shift in people's attitudes . Not all roads need to be repaired. We need to bring in some lighter weight technologies, lighter weight surface treatments. So we need to get people to accept the principles of not every street is going to be paved. Some will get a slurry treatment. Some will get a little microsurfacing. But the quality of the roads over time will increase. The news is you have a solid foundation to start this process from. You're not below a 60, which really caused my eyebrows to go up. We have something here to work with. That's a picture of the van. How many of you saw it rolling around town? Did anybody see it? I have such nice door decals on the side of it too. Really, we focus on the surface condition of the road. Hotholes, alligator cracking, distortions, all the stuff that make roads ugly and unpleasant. We'll merge that with what we call roughness. Roughness not as in the level of comfort you travel down the road is, but more think of roughness as the amount of deterioration a road has experienced. We combine those two numbers together to form an overall condition index or an OCI. That's the number Tim was throwing around. It's a 0 to 100 score. Anything below a 30 is really bad. Anything above an 85 is really good. Roads that are 0 to 30, this is a pretty good example. I hope nobody lives on Industrial Street there, that'd be embarrassing. Basically, they're past the point of surface based restoration. You could put all the overlays on top of it, it's not going to do any good. You won't get your money's worth out of it. You got to go in there and dig it out. I've seen a lot of cities try and cover that up. It just doesn't work. In the long run, you pay much more. Basically, this is when your car has had its day, the engine's shot, and you're just still trying to change the oil. You got to bite it, fix the road right the first time, get it done. These, unfortunately, are also a very high priority for deferral. And when Tim was mentioning earlier the bond projects, that 's when I want to make sure that council has their say in developing the priorities, who gets deferred, who gets done now. Realistically, this is an exercise of picking who gets the fuzzy end of the lollipop. Seriously complaints can often drive when a road gets reconstructed. Once it's bad, it can stay bad for a long period of time, so other factors will come into play. We're also going to start looking at things like width, vertical alignment, ADA compliance. A port of marginal streets, these are the ones that offer the greatest benefit, fixing them now. We'll go in, put a thick overlay or a grinding inlay, or if it's concrete, we'll bust out some of the panels and replace them. But what we want to do is prevent that really steep slide to a full reconstruction. Get in here, get in a little earlier, fix these roads before they need a total rebuild. So these are more localized failures, or localized busted out concrete. They're tired, they've had a good run, let's invest in them at about half the cost, or less than half the cost of a total reconstruct. Here's where Denton is right now. These roads are down here, they're starting to show their age, they're cracked, they're a little rough. Or if they're concrete, they kind of got a few breakouts in them. These are the ones in the fair category. These ones have a bit of life left in them. It would be ideal if we had the funding to fix them now. But I would make the suggestion we let these deteriorate a little bit, do something heavier to them. Overall, get you on a plan moving forward. The good roads. These are the ones I like. This is where I want Denton to be. This is where I want your average condition to be. Here's a nice road. It's got a few cracks in it. Folks did some good crack sealing on it. I love to see crack sealing. If it's ever a decision whether crack sealing should be cut or not, the answer is no. Crack seal your roads. It's just like sunscreen, wear sunscreen. So what I'd like to see is Denton move towards a program where you bring forward a lot of crack sealing campaigns, a lot of lightweight surface treatment campaigns, a lot of thin overlay or grinding inlay campaigns. In other words, raise the average condition of all your streets to where we can start doing this lighter weight treatment and extend their life tremendously. Good cost benefit out of these ones. Very good roads. Quilt there. Sweep them, crack seal them, pothole repair them. It'd be nice if you could be up around in 75. For every 100 cities we do surveys for, I meet one or two that are up in this range. Put you in perspective, Beverly Hills. They're in the low 80s. Carlsbad, California is in the high 70s. Federal Way, Washington. They're about the best cities I work with. Their conditions are different than yours. For you to get up there, I'd love to see it. Take a lot of effort. Probably not going to happen today. Very good roads. Oh, it would be nice if all the roads looked like that. Nice brand new pavement. It'd be challenged to get that high, but I'm certain we can work towards it. Where you are right now. Keith talked about an atypical distribution. Denton is an atypical distribution. You've got this older core with this new donut of newer streets. You've also got big disparity between your concrete and asphalt roads. The blue line is what I would more traditionally expect of a city. Denton is the red towers. What gives me a bit of pause are these guys right here. Even though our OCI is at a 63, which isn't a bad, it's a respectable number, we're kind of like the fellas sitting on the beach. It's a beautiful sunny day out. We're enjoying the nice weather, but there's a tsunami 10 miles offshore. That's Denton. We need to address this big bulge right here of this massive streets that are in poor to very poor condition that are coming at us. Those are the ones that are going to really bite us because they're so expensive to rebuild. These guys over here, I'm not too worried about. These are good numbers. They're lightweight to do. This tower right here, the street's rated above 90. That's very good. I like to see that. Overall, your average is about a 63, but it's a real odd ball distribution of new and old, concrete and asphalt. That 63 is a bit artificial. We're going to have to start breaking that down over time and find out where our problems really are. If I changed it from hard numbers, zero to 10, to good, fair, poor type numbers, this gives me a totally different look. This is what I'm worried about right here. This is your backlog. These are the streets that pretty well need total rebuilding. 14% of the network, or I said 12% is where you want to be. That's kind of a major concern. That number snowballs very fast. When I was here in 2009, the number was slightly higher. You brought it down a bit. You're going in the right direction. We just need to strengthen that and move it forward a bit more. At the other end of the scale, street's rate is excellent. Should be 15% minimum. You're pushing 25%. That shows that reinvestment you've made since 2009. A very positive thing. When I said happy, happy, this is one of the things I'm quite pleased with, that there has been an investment. What I worry most about is that snowball. That's what causes me a bit of pause. We need to get a handle on that. Recommended long-term goals. This is one of the things that I believe that council firmly needs, the information and understanding of the roadway network, so they can provide direction to Tim and his team as to what your goal should be. My recommended long-term goals and policies should be for Denton to adopt a position that keeps your backlog below 12% of the roadway network. You're at 14. It seems like a small number, 12 to 14. There's a real big ticket attached to that. Those roads are real expensive to fix. I would also like to see a slight bump up in OCI up to about a 65. You hit those two goals. The third one of having the number of streets rate is excellent will be met just automatically. Those two goals, OCI of 65 or better, backlog below 12%. Keep that for a long period of time and Denton will be in great shape. Comparison to 2010. Here's what I showed you before. The blue towers is where we were in 2010. The red is where we are today. You can see we've punched a bit of a hole right there. We brought it down a bit. Excellent. We're still doing okay here and we're certainly doing okay at the very good, but it's these infill guys, these streets waiting to fail. That's Tim's challenge over the next 10 years. That is a huge challenge. I'm not even going to try and undersell it or give you a sweet story on that. There's a big ticket attached to that. But you are moving in the right direction. But we still need to understand your concrete roads are in good shape. Your asphalt roads, they need a lot of love. Your downtown core needs a lot of love. Your peripheral streets that are approaching 10, 12 years old, they're going to start coming due for some work as well. So we've got all these different priorities that we need to balance. One area of bright news. This is good stuff. This is one I'm happy to show you. This is kind of one of those engineering diagrams and I am an engineer and I guess I should apologize for that. But this is one thing that Denton is doing right. So we should thank Keith for this. If I plotted your overall condition score down here on the X axis, down at the bottom, and how strong each road is. Normally I get a huge cloud right here. These are new streets that were built too light. Denton doesn't have that problem. You've been addressing your standards and improving them and doing things right. It's a big ticket item to do now, but in 20, 30, 40 years, council is going to sit there and say they got it right. They did something good for us. These are all your older roads. They are the ones that are failing. So if we set them up right now, we'll get good life out of them. That is one of the biggest changes I've seen in Denton in six years. And that one, quite proud of that one. The folks over at Streets have done it well. And results, there's what you look like today. Older streets, newer streets. This is like a traffic signal. Green is good. You don't want to live on the red. Orange is okay. Yellow is a little bit better. We want to get more green. So your average is 63, but you can see it's an unequitable distribution across the city. We need to do better. We need to hit those targets. A bit of methodology. Funding isn't zero, but it's not unlimited. That's a reality that council has to address. I made the assumption you place a value on your roadway network. I'm hoping you do. I'm going to suggest that we put most of our emphasis on the arterial roadways, then the collectors, then the locals. The reason is common good. More people drive arterials in a day than on a local. They're more expensive. They're the roads that allows commerce to flourish. If they're in good shape, Denton's in good shape. So we've crafted a plan, or are crafting a plan that puts the emphasis on your arterial roadway network. Hopefully, over time, it'll be the best out of the three. Our goal is to identify an annual budget that will at minimal maintain your OCI at a 63. I would like to possibly examine the effects of your current funding levels and what happens with any shortfalls. We'll set our goals up really high. If we don't meet them, we're going to have to look at those shortfalls. Basically, I wanted to prevent any more deterioration. We've kind of arrested it. I don't want to see it going back down. I want to see it get the trajectory going up. We're going to bring in, or we're going to reinforce, because we've been doing it for the last few years, a priority-based system. It's not worst first. And the reason why I'm saying this is I'm not the guy who gets the phone calls. I'm the guy who flies in from far away and makes these presentations. The mayor's going to get all the phone calls. Why is my street so lousy, and you're out there working on his street with a lightweight surface treatment? You got it wrong. You guys are silly. No, they did it right. And you have to be prepared for those calls, and you have to have the answers. Tim's team needs to give you that information that it is good economic and good engineering practice. There's going to be some people that get the fuzzy end of the lollipop. It's not me to make those decisions. I'll help you. But that's going to come from you folks. Some funding estimates, based on $385 million asset, which is a big ticket item, you need minimum $9.5 million. That's a bare bones minimum. That isn't going to be near enough. I can tell you that's not going to help your ADA compliance . That's not going to help your curb lines. That's not going to be enough for any maintenance. That gives you a floor. That would be the absolute minimum. You're still going to have a declining OCI at that score, but that gives us a good estimate. Just based on your current numbers, you need about $12.5 million to stay where you are. If I refine that a little bit more, it's actually closer to about $12 million minimum to achieve the goals of a 65. Keep the backlog under control. The number of streets rate is excellent, up there above 15 %, or maintain it well above 15%. That's the reality. If I had to pick a number, it's going to be over $12 million. Each year, Denton has to invest in their roadway network. So $11 million to $12 million, that's what we're going to be recommending. I'm thinking the $12 million is the closer number. For the long term, if you gave Tim's team the $12 million, he'd be able to keep that OCI current at about a 63. It would actually rise very slightly, but to be safe, we'll say a 63. Any underfunding, you can see that we're just going to start falling. If we fund it at about an $8 million a year level, we fall below that magical number of 60, which puts you in a world of hurt for OCI. That's when the phone calls of unsatisfied rate pairs are going to start pouring in. There's just something about that number, OCI of 60. We just got to stay above it. If you pay more money, we'll get a much higher OCI. But I'll stick with the $12 million. If we target a nice 65 over about 10 years, it costs about $14 million a year. If you did nothing, within 10 years, you'd be down around about a 56. Unfortunately, these monies don't include any growth. They're all based on your current population. So in five years from now, you can't tell me, Steve, you said $12 million, it didn't work out. Well, inflation and growth kind of chewed at that, so you always got to include that. You're bringing on more rural roads. We got to include those. Level of service increases, this does nothing for your capacity issues. Those last discussions, they did. I'm only talking about taking care of the black and gray stuff out on the roads right now. This money doesn't include ADA compliance, not much for sidewalk rehabs. So this is really focusing on the roads. Cities always like to compare themselves to other cities. I don't know why, but they always do. So these are a bunch of agencies we've worked on in the last couple years. You are agency D, the secret agency D. You have about 450 miles, PCI is 63, backlog 14%, steady state budget, I lowballed it here, 11 million. If I divided my mileage by my budget, I come up with a steady state amount of about $16,000 per mile, right? Margin is about $14,000. Denton is a little higher because you're a little further down the power curve in terms of condition. We got to get you up higher and over time that number will settle itself out. You can see some of these other agencies here with the higher OCI scores, their rate per mile is lower. They're on that perpetual life cycle curve. They've got it. They've put themselves in a position where they can extend their pavement life through early treatment, lighter weight stuff, save money in the long run. It does work. You get up here to agency LB, though our name anonymous, but Long Beach is in a real world to hurt. Their costs are just astronomical. They let their backlog grow. It's right now at about 21%. Their PCI is at a 60, OCI I should say. Their cost per mile is astronomical just because of the amount of streets they have to rebuild. For them to dig that out of the hole, they've got to have a big meeting, find the money. You folks aren't there and I really don't want to see you go in that direction. I want Denton to go this way, not that way, but you can see the decisions you make today are going to have very long term impacts to your quality of life, roadway condition, budgets. Case of success. It's pretty simple. Control the backlog. Mission critical. Cloth the bonds. Fix the bad roads. Rehab the better roads. Always strive for the highest OCI possible. Strive for excellence. Settle for mediocrity. If we set a target of 70, I won't believe you, but it's a great target. But if we set, say, a goal of 65, let's target 65 in five to 10 years. I'm thinking that's realistic and achievable and something we can do. Fund it appropriately. As long as roads are on the general fund, this is going to be a battle for councils. You're competing against fire and water or fire and police. It's a tough fight. But it's up to you folks to fund them appropriately. I'm not saying how. I'm just begging you to do it. Trust the people, the process and the team. I'm really pleased with the progress that I've seen in the last six years. We do those. We'll reap the benefits. And there will be lots of them. As Denton grows, you'll see a much higher level of satisfaction and a higher tip. [INAUDIBLE] Scroll through real quick. [INAUDIBLE] I'm just having to get to my tail end of the presentation. All right. These are our recommendations. And they're in your backup. But we're recommending that we continue to do periodic surveys. Surveys are how we've been managing our system for about 12 years. They've also been how we've tried to educate the public and the council with regards to where our pavement management system is, what its funding needs are. We want to continue to support our cartograph model in that system, which is our current program. Funding right now, the current plan and recommendation is to continue the transition, a utility franchise fee, to shift over and kind of be ear marked for that purpose. That's one funding strategy. That's the one right now that we're currently working on. We've talked about the targets of between 65 and 70 and the backlog of 12. We are pointing out that our street program is not all OCI improvements. So there's approximately 40% more, 30 a third. Some kind of depends on a lot of factors there. But there's some additional funding necessary. We would like to see us transition away from debt right now because we have a big backlog. We're depending on debt. We can't do that indefinitely. So hopefully we can use borrowed money at a low interest rate now as a tool to try to manage some of that backlog. But what we'd like to do is transition a sustainable funding system so we don't have to pay interest on our deferred maintenance, if you will. So Steve mentioned this quite a bit, but as we can strive to get our OCI up and reduce our construction backlog, we'll actually see the benefits of lower costs and better quality roads. What that ties into is right now because we've had such a deferred maintenance and backlog, we're spending so much money trying to deal with that. So we've had a disproportionate portion of our budget bond funded to deal with that backlog. And what we'd like to do is manage that system more cost effectively with less debt. The concepts of worst first pretty much means let your roads deteriorate and deal with them expensively as backlog. The best first is basically preserve your roads, extend them, and leverage improved economics. And I'm done. It seemed like from those slides two things that I took away from it in terms of funding. It looks like, and if I'm wrong, please tell me, that $12 million a year for OCI in our budget keeps us steady. Correct. But it's going to take about $14 million a year in order to start seeing an increase in the overall OCI. And that's coming out of our model. So we put funds in there as what ifs and so that little curve that he showed was actually based on a five-year goal. So funding over five years, you'd need $14 million. Yes. Okay. So the proposed budget for this coming year shows that we have about $12 million in OCI funds. So we're at the steady part. We're at the steady mark. Is that correct? We have a total budget of around $12 million, but a portion of that is not OCI. Oh, so we're not even at $12 million. No. The total budget would be, Tim, is probably around $20 million to $22 million, everything including OCI. Yes. We still have a funding gap in our opinion. To maintain, we've got the funding gap to maintain the current OCI. We have a gap to even maintain the current. And how big is that gap? Brian, do you remember the numbers? Tim may have it. It's somewhere in that range of $6 to $8 million. That was the recommendation from Tim is if we wanted to try to get there over the next eight years, that would be that $730,000 in addition to what we're already putting in there, and that's in addition to the growth and franchise fees that we would need to get to that level. All right. That's my question. Yeah, but right now our OCI funding is about $6.1 million out of the 10. Okay. I think I know the answer to this, but the state entities that are in the city here, you know, the universities, they all pay utility franchise fees, correct? And that goes into that street fund program? As utility rate payers, yes. As utility rate payers. Something you hear a lot is, you know, the universities use our roads, but they are tax exempt, so I just wanted to clear that up, that they actually do help pay for this. So, okay. Yes? So, are we, is there a set number of an age of a road where it's in the mix? So in other words, does a brand new road that was built two years ago get measured as a part of our OCI rating? Yes. So as new roads get added in our cartograph system, we put that in as an asset and we rate that initial score. So we don't have time for me to sidetrack us, but just a thought. I'm not so sure, and I'm not in the road management business, but I'm not so sure that the average number should be what we're focused on. To me. In other words, to say we need to be a 63 or a 65 or whatever, because of all the new streets that are being built as a part of growth and new development, we could end up being falsely happy, happy, happy, right? We get the slick end of the lollipop instead of the fuzzy end or whatever you said. So I'm just wondering if we wouldn't look and say, let's don't focus on the average, let's focus on the percent of our roads or the segments of our roads that are below 40. Yeah. To some degree, that's the focus on the backlog or the stuff that will soon be backlogged. Yeah, I mean, because I think we're going to end up with a false positive. Correct. Correct. That's part of the atypical distribution that we're dealing with. Right. So the question is this, do we even need to focus on that or do we just need to focus on specific roads or specific areas of town where we know the roads are old? The backlog is identified by street segment. Correct. Correct. I'm just talking about as we go forward, there's a lot of talk about trying to hit. We were a 63 going down. We're now a 63. Let's try to be a 65. It's just a thought that. Those are good overall recommendations, but there is a difficulty with a one single number because it represents the distribution. Right. Right. Okay. Thanks. What did this study cost? The base study was around 200,000. So if you distribute that over six years, the annual cost is not necessarily large in relationship to the investments that we're making. There were some additional scope items added to that for sidewalk inventory and some parking lot surveys on the facilities and some condition of airport roads, and those were funded by the various departments that wanted that information. So total cost? It's probably about 270 based on all the components. And that was cumulative since 2009? No. Since the last study? That was the 2015 study. When we first started out in 2003, we spent 300,000. Consultant at that time was recommending we do them every two to three years. Our budget was so small, we didn't see the value of that much money in studies when we were struggling to pave roads. So we've stretched them out over six years, so we have less frequency, but if you stretch them out, let's say, over ten years, then you tend to not really monitor what's happening. You're doing everything on your model and trusting your model. Part of what we're doing is calibrating our model by getting extra data points over time because the deterioration of our roads initially were based on assumptions and guesses. As we get data over time, then we actually calibrate what the real deterioration curves are. That's why some of your costs have come down a little bit. As each study gets done, the numbers have actually come down a little bit. So with the survey, I know every citizen I talk to, they're complaining about the roads. So where you say it wasn't a priority as a council person, it's a priority for the citizens that I represent. And I do want to point out that the company is based in Arizona, Illinois, and Canada, and not Texas. And I would ask maybe in the future we find a Texas company that could do the same infrastructure analysis. I just think $300,000 is an awful lot of money. And I also want to point out that the city of Denton ignored road improvements for years. So we're playing catch up now. And we're in the spot that we're in because we didn't spend the money. And so I think our people need to hear that. And while we'd love to write a check for 25 mil a year if we could, you know, it's all about money in and money out and finding those priorities in the budget. >> I just wanted to see, are we going to be able to come back to this at some point in the future? Because I do have questions about streets. I didn't know this was going to come back. >> We are in the middle of the study. We haven't finished. The request was to brief the council on the preliminary results ahead of budget, which we've done. We plan on coming back probably in October and November with the completed study. And we'll present those final findings in the final report at that time. >> And take questions? >> Well, yeah. >> Okay, good. >> Awesome. >> Councilmember Rood. >> I'll hold off. >> It's telling we're having this same conversation at the same time that Congress is looking at the Highway Trust Fund and how to fund highways. And this is a problem at all levels. And part of the problem is it's in this political process by which there's so many other needs. And I think what I'd like to see at some point is as we're talking about, we get very, I think, impressed by our $12 million fee not always recognizing how much of that is on the back of these bond packages. But that's not sustainable, as you mentioned, going long term. Or maybe it is. We're just going to have to decide that we're going to have to keep putting more in those together. I kind of feel like we need some sort of a ten year forecast that we're making decisions now on how we're getting this problem solved. And what that's going to take in terms of us making difficult decisions. That's what we're all fighting at at Congress. Make a difficult decision because we're not going to fix our infrastructure problems unless we do that. We're yelling at the state. Make the tough decisions to fix your road infrastructure problems. And then every year we kind of make, I think we're making progress. But I think to get this fixed, we're going to have to make some tough budgetary decisions. I almost want to look at what's that ten year plan? What would that mean every year to do that? And can we get something put in place that starts at maybe next year's council will undo that maybe. But for us to at least kind of have a better plan moving forward so we can go to our citizens and say that's the plan. On that point, because the citizen satisfaction level is so low on this as you've cited with two different surveys, it 's unclear to me. That raising two more points in our OCI gets their perception up. Which makes me think it's interesting your Long Beach comments. I have a, my mother-in-law lives in Long Beach. And my impression every year I go there is, wow, these roads are great. How do they do that? And I think it's because I'm on certain roads as a visitor. And they keep those roads, PCH, all the roads leading to P CH, everything looks clean, striped, new, a new. And so obviously, I didn't have the same perception as what 's the reality on the ground there. Which makes me think that there is also a strategy to thinking about that. I think we're very careful to make sure all these roads are separated by council districts every time it goes through. And we have a nice, but you don't see the progress in any large sense. Now I don't know what we'd want to do to do that, but it strikes me, everything leading into your downtown core and surrounding your universities ought to be the most pristine ever, perhaps. That's a policy question. But sometimes citizens, same thing with bike lanes, same thing with sidewalks. We're doing so much piecemeal, we can never say, look at what we did. So that's a discussion I think we need to have. And then thirdly, and I'll stop. I think given that it's such citizen concern, I'm always a bit confused at how hard it is for citizens to find this information out. Given a list of what has been approved in an easily sort able, searchable way. Is MyStreet on the list from 2012, 2014, yes or no? What is MyStreet's condition index? We have all that data. That's a simple computer program to write. I think that would be a nice overture to our citizens who said this is important to put that in a nice searchable way . When is MyStreet getting fixed? Those maps would be nice. >> Just a suggestion that I think we can have some. >> Well that's that open, yes. I'm going to let you all fight it out. >> Go ahead, Bill. >> Well I just ask a question to start. I think you make some great points in putting the PowerPoint online. See, the PowerPoint that we got, the card copy, we didn't get it in. So where there were slides, pictures on top of pictures. Couldn't see the graphs. Couldn't see the whole thing. So I would like to get another copy with the individual pages so I could see the graph and the data behind that. I think Mr. Roden's exactly right about making some hard decisions. I think they address part one of your concerns when they talked about prioritizing and putting more effort into arterials and then collectors and then neighborhood streets. Because those arterials and those collectors are driven on by everybody. And if you have to rumble a little bit in your neighborhood and then get out on a better street. But if you're driving a short while on your neighborhood street and it's real smooth and then you get out on the big road where you're going a little bit faster and you're rumbling all around. It's just, and more people are driving on those streets. So we don't get a lot of credit for that neighborhood street that gets fixed except for those few people that are driving on it in that neighborhood. I think that the hard decision is we've got to look at in every budget cycle how we deal when we come up with any overages when we have money that comes in above what our estimates are. For revenues and look at that as a rare opportunity that we may not always get to jump ahead at getting these problems fixed. I know that that's hard because there's lots of people competing for those monies, including people who'd say I'd like to have a reduction in my taxes. But when you look at what our citizens keep saying in terms of the roads, I don't think we have any choice but to invest and put more investment into the infrastructure. So just real quick, we're heading into the budget cycle. I just want to piggyback on what you said because we do have to make tough decisions. And I think what we've seen, what we've heard for a long time was that it doesn't make sense to replace a certain street because the sewer line or water line underneath it has to be replaced. And we've got now budget money from the last bond election to do some of those things. But I really would like for us to spend some time talking about the most impactful streets as it relates to visitors and those sort of things. And the second question I have is what does one of those v ans cost? Steven? It's $150,000. So we should buy one. I'll sell you one. I mean, I'm just saying if we're going to spend $200,000 to $300,000 every five years, maybe we should buy a van. Biggest issue there will be the training of the technician staff and doing that on an occasional basis every five years. Thanks. Go ahead. Just quickly, in the backup, you know, it said the financial goals for the street division are to be the third place funding priority for the city. And I just, if somebody can help me, I think last year was the street funding about 11% of the overall general fund budget? It's about nine. It was about nine percent? And about six years ago it was five. And what was, do you know what Parks was by any chance? They were about four. Twelve. Twelve, okay. It was twelve. What'd you say? Twelve? Parks was about twelve. Yeah. I mean, that's where the tough decision is. I mean, we have great parks here. But maybe that's what we gotta look at. I mean, I'm not saying that that's exactly what I want to do, but that's ultimately the decision it sounds like. I mean. Just a couple of comments. I am one of those that does want to advocate at some point for a potential tax decrease because I think we have enough . We had 11% increase last year. We got over 8% this year. And I don't know if it's necessarily relegated just to over ages. I think that is about that tough decision making. So I guess this was helpful to me in that I thought the OCI was something that was gauging the underbase based upon some type of penetration. But it seems like it's primarily a surface sort of evaluation based upon what's happened with the road and things such as that. And I think also we need to look. We do hear a lot about the citizens saying that the streets are bad. But let's look at the facts. The facts is it went from 34% to now down to 21%. At the same time, our street improvement went up. So I think it's a really good idea and a good observation that when you drive down Eagle Drive, which everybody drives down all the time, and I don't think that's a text out road. It is horrible. So I think it's a worthy endeavor to figure out which one of those are important. And also, I know we've had this discussion before about on the text out roads, which are primarily, I believe, locust. And is Eagle a text out road as well? >> A short section of Eagle is- >> I mean Elm Street, I'm sorry, Elm and Locust. >> Elm and Locust, you've got Dallas Drive is another, probably- >> So I mean, I'd be honest with you. When I looked at the chart, I mean, I am really proud of what the last five or six or seven councils have done. Because we have done more to improve the street funding in a time when there was a recessionary pressure. But when you look back over from 2003 to 2007, I calculated that the street funding budget went up only $1.2 million. And if you look historically at those assessed value increases, they almost averaged 8 to 9%. So even though we're behind, I think our heart is in the right place. And I think those tough decisions are coming. And we've made tough decisions, quite frankly, over the last few years about prioritizing the street funding. So, and I guess my question comes in, when we hear this figure, $12 million a year for OCI, I guess it's OCI related. >> It's for extending the asset. >> Yes. That includes street maintenance, that includes the maintenance of those streets, either through overlay or seal or crack seal or anything like that. Does that also include the ones that you need to reconstruct? >> Yes. >> Okay, well, it's going to take us, I mean, if we got a 14% back, I guess I just want us to look at this realistically from the standpoint, yes, we don't want to do debt funding. But we're way behind based upon a lot of different reasons. But, and so I think in some sense, we've made that commitment through our bond funding. Because when you start talking about needing $12 to $15 million a year, which I really question whether that's going to be adequate enough to when you have to start reconstruction streets. Because streets are expensive, I know you maintain them. And then we also have to look at, we've got concrete and asphalt. All right, and I know that discussion has happened periodically over the years. So, what's going to be the best bang for the buck with the most useful life? But actually, I'm encouraged. I know that there's a sort of a tsunami coming, but we've got at least some bond funding in place that has been approved by the voters. To try to handle that as it comes ashore. And we've just got to figure out how we over the long term convert that, as we're trying to do on a lot of different fronts, from debt financing to a lot of different aspects of our assets. So, this was a good presentation. I certainly think it does warrant another work session where we have less time constraints. Because this is obviously important. It's as important as what we're fixing to talk about here next. But it's a good overview for the budget process, coming into the budget process. I do have one question though. When, of course, we probably reconstruct streets either with a third party contractor or with our own city crews. Is that correct? Or do we do primarily city crews? >> Well, the city crews is complemented by five contracts. So we don't have an asphalt lay down machine. We don't have an asphalt plant. So we have a contract with Jago to provide that. We don't have a milling machine, so we hire Dustroll to do the milling. So when the city works as the contractor and then hires out pieces, then we do some in kind things that come out of our O&M budget. We'll pull the curb and gutter, we'll hire Floyd Smith as a concrete contractor. So it's not, most of our projects are done through that mechanism. We have one big project that we're going out to bids on here and we'll have a bid opening and we'll go through the council for Lillian Miller. And what is that, Keith? $1.6 million, $2 million project? >> So I'm assuming that when we are the contractors and we 're sort of contracting for the street, we do some of the work other people. So if there was a third party contractor who did it all, we obviously inspect their work and things such as that. >> You would have other costs and you would have higher costs. So by complementing us managing these outside contracts that we have and providing in kind, we lower your install cost. >> My question is when we're the contractors, we're still going through the same inspection regimen that a third party contractor would be subject to, is that correct? I mean, are we inspecting it ourselves or are we hiring independent people to inspect or? >> [INAUDIBLE] >> Okay, okay, all right, fantastic. Okay, any other questions on this? Obviously, probably the work session, the subsequent work session probably sooner than later as it fits in with everything else. Any other questions? All right, I think our dinner's ready and are we gonna go into closed session? Is that where we're heading now? Okay, I will go ahead and then call us into closed session. >> Good evening, I wanted to welcome you to this special called Denton City Council meeting on July the 28th, 2015. It is now 713, I apologize for us being tardy, we were in closed session. And since this is a special call meeting, we do not have the pledges tonight, but I did want to recognize Troop 164. Boy Scout Troop there in the back that is sponsored by the Denton Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints. And they're here for their citizenship and communication badges. So thank you all for, thank you very much for being here. Thank you. >> Okay. All right, so we only have one agenda item for this evening and it's a public hearing, so I'll read the caption. It's agenda item 1A, which is a public hearing, hold a public hearing and consider adoption of an ordinance amending sub chapters 5, 16, and 22 of the Denton Development Code relating to gas well drilling, production definitions and procedures. Mr. City Manager. >> Thank you, Mayor. I'm going to ask Darren Groth, our gas well administrator, if he would present this item to start the council's discussion on this public hearing. Thank you, Darren. >> Thank you, Mr. Manager, for the introduction. Mayor, members of the council, I do have a presentation here from staff's perspective. I'm the gas well administrator. So Darren Groth will be giving you quite a bit of background here. I did this similar presentation with the Planning and Z oning Commission. It's quite long, so if you'll bear with me a moment, we'll walk through it. But it'll give you some background and some history and explain why we're here this evening. So this slide will give you the outline. I'll give you that background, some of the legal framework. Talk about the implementation of this ordinance from a zoning standpoint and the gas well standards. And then show you what the P and Z recommendations were in addition to what you have as the backup. And then I can stand for any questions. So to get started, we have been working on amending ordin ances for quite some time. Based off of some lessons we've learned over the years of regulating these sites and doing the inspections and drafting and evaluating which ordinances we have. We've learned a lot of lessons. So we had a stand still agreement. We adopted some moratoria and we've gone through some rev isions. What we've learned during this process is that setbacks are really the leading concern for all parties. So what we're proposing is to implement some ways that we can minimize the impacts between mineral and surface developments. And we've done that by identifying existing sites and differentiating them from new sites. And while we've been going through this process with this body and the Planning and Zoning Commission, new concern kind of arose in the form of House Bill 40. So I'll explain a little bit about what that is as well in a little bit. But to give you the background, again, this is a process that started in December. We had a joint public hearing, you probably remember that, but for the audience's sake, a lot of these meetings they may not remember or may not have attended. But after that joint public hearing, the Planning and Z oning Commission held three public meetings. They voted four three to recommend a denial of the initial proposal. The council also had eight separate meetings. So this has been going on for a while. Again, during those deliberations though, the Texas legislature introduced and adopted statewide regulations that impact municipal regulatory oversight. And that came in the form of House Bill 40. As a result, on June 16th, when city council remanded this case back to the Planning and Zoning Commission, the charge was to write new amendments that met the initial objectives and still brought us within the framework of House Bill 40. On July 22nd, the Planning and Zoning Commission recommended with a seven to zero vote to approve this case as amended. And I'll get to what those amendments were in a little bit. So the legal framework for what we're proposing starts with House Bill 40. Again, this was signed by Governor Abbott on May 18th, 2015 , so still fairly recent. What it does is identify that the authority of a municipality or other political subdivision to regulate an oil and gas operation is expressly preempted. There is an exception though, and that's unless the activity falls under narrowly drawn exceptions and that regulation meets a four part test. That four part test is shown on this slide. First, test to regulate only above ground activity related to an oil and gas operation is commercially reasonable. And that is a term that will come up a few times, so we'll highlight that as number two of the four parts. But also does not effectively prohibit an oil and gas operation conducted by a reasonably prudent operator and is not otherwise preempted by state or federal law. And so that term commercially reasonable, that standard favors the operators. On this slide you can see why that is. I exerted the definition of commercially reasonable. It's pretty long. I won't bore you by reading it, but it is something that would allow a reasonably prudent operator to fully exploit their minerals. There is a condition that an ordinance is considered prima facie, so on its face it may be commercially reasonable if the ordinance has been in effect for at least five years. And has allowed the oil and gas operations to continue during that period. So just being in effect isn't the same as actually having operations under that. Darren, if I could, if you could go back to that, and just the last slide, where it's that condition too. And I just would like, Madam City Attorney, if you would just sort of briefly give us some background on what exactly this is saying and maybe what it's not saying as far as there's been some discussion about grandfathered and things. So I just want to be able to communicate to the public and understanding from a legal perspective of what at least that's saying on its face. Right. I'll be glad to, Mr. Mayor. This particular provision is set forth as our gas well administrator has indicated in House Bill 40. It does state that it is a prima facie finding if the ordinance has been in play for at least a period of five years. That is a showing on its face that it is reasonable. However, what it is not is an irrebuttable presumption of reasonableness. So therefore what that means is that the ordinance, although in some cities it may have been in play for five years, whether or not it is in fact commercially reasonable is something that would ultimately be determined by a court of law. And the prima facie showing could in fact be overcome by other evidence and by a ruling. So it is in no way dispositive. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate that. Thank you, Madam City Attorney, because a lot of those words I can't use. So I appreciate your interjection to give a better explanation of this. But to build off of what she just said, I will notice on this slide that the City of Fort Worth, because of that condition of five years, they received a lot of favorable consideration by the Texas legislature. So their ordinance may qualify for that presumption of commercial reasonableness. Again, it is one of those four parts. Under that assumption, even though it won't apply for our five-year standard, we used a lot of the Fort Worth ordinance as a model when feasible. Their permitting process and their review process is different than the city, the way that we function, so it's not something we could just lift and place in our ordinance, but it was used as a model in a lot of instances . But this slide probably summarizes House Bill 40 the best. I think on the left you can see all of those items under House Bill 40 taking the language from the bill itself that say, these oil and gas operational activities are preempted from municipal control, and that's exploration, development, production, processing, and the list goes on and on. A lot of things conducted at that site or even the transportation of oil and gas, again, is preempted, so that 's something that may occur off the site. But the items that are identified in House Bill 40 that above ground that the city can regulate are the fire emergency response, traffic, lights, noise, imposing notice , and then a reasonable setback requirement. That's the last one. So I have two slides here to give some examples. Under what is preempted, you can see that you would have an ordinance that may have language identifying that only light, sand, fracture technology could be used. Fracturing is a below ground completion activity, so that is one of the preempted items. And then you could have language stating that all well cas ings shall be cut and removed to a depth of at least 10 feet . We have that in our current ordinance, Fort Worth has similar language, there's only three feet, but that is below ground plugging activity. So again, it meets this list of what's preempted. So with that in mind, we have kind of an aggressive timeline to make these changes. We already presented at Planning Zoning Commission, and they had their vote on July 22nd. Tonight we're opening the public hearing. And if it's not adopted this evening, we're asking that it be approved or adopted or some change made by August 4th because there's a two week publication notice for this type of ordinance. And we have a moratorium that expires on August 18th. So action by the 4th would be required to meet that if we get it approved and don't extend the moratorium. Next couple of slides, we'll talk about the implementation of this ordinance from a zoning standard. The zoning framework was used as a way to break up what is currently all contained within our Denton Development Code, Section 3522, and put the setbacks and permit procedures and relief measures in subchapter 355. That's our current zoning ordinance under Denton Development Code. So DDC Chapter 5 makes more sense for a lot of those regulations. The site standards will remain in 22, but we'll have a differentiation of those standards between existing sites and new sites. And again, I'll walk you through how we're going to do that in a little bit. But for MPC and PD regulations, those are master plan communities or plan developments. Those regulations will be in accordance with the approved plan. We had a question Council Member Rodin apologized. No, that's right. I wanted to jump back on this discussion of commercially reasonable very briefly and get another legal thought on this. And that is, as you listed, just for sake, could you go back to that list that you listed of what the city could regulate that wasn't expressly preempted that they called out those six things? Madam Attorney, is it your understanding that this commercially reasonably reasonable clause that's in this legislation, does that even touch those six areas? I mean, could an operator come and say, yes, the city has the right to regulate one, two, three, four, five, and six of these things, but we still have that trump card in which we could claim? I think that's going to be, I think that's the issue as people see six, and that's going to be the big discussion tonight. It looks like, oh, the city has a ton of authority on that. Can you help us understand how that commercially reasonable clause potentially colors all of those? Sure. House Bill 40 does not give municipalities carte blanche authority to regulate any of these items in this category on the right, any of those six items that are listed. To the contrary, all of those items that are specifically called out in House Bill 40 must be regulated in a manner which is commercially reasonable under House Bill 40. So even these six items that we see on the screen here, I don't think it was the intent of the legislature to allow cities to do just any kind of regulation. I think there's still the overarching and overshadowing requirement that even those six categories be regulated in a commercially reasonable fashion. Yeah, good discussion there. Let me get back here. I think we're on the setbacks, so if not, we'll take off here, but if we are, I'm in the right spot. So setbacks, just defining that, is the distance between the drilling and production site and protected uses or residential subdivision flats. So we have different types of setbacks. You'll see me use these terms. There's a drilling production site setback. You'll see reverse setbacks, and then you'll see minimum setbacks. So minimums are achieved either by a variance or a waiver, but site, reverse, minimum, you'll see those appear again in the next couple of slides. So what we did is applying those setbacks, there's a new site setback based on zoning district categories. So if you're applying for a brand new location, there's some zoning criteria. That will also be differentiated between new and existing sites. So the new site criteria on zoning districts will be different if it's an existing site, even in the same district. But what that will do is give us uniform treatment for the existing sites across the zoning district categories. So this slide will break down at least how we've classified them by residential, commercial, industrial, talking about the zoning districts. This is a pretty cluttered slide, but it identifies at least all of the different zoning districts by that major classification. So you can see residential, you can see commercial or industrial, what does that mean? Breaking down each specific zoning district in these slides , you'll see rural as RD5 and going through the list. So this is a slide maybe best used for reference. I won't go through all of them, but at least it will be part of the presentation so we can clarify what they are. So using that, this slide was presented to the Planning Z oning Commission last week. And what staff had proposed in the ordinance presented to them was that in residential districts, those identified in Denton Development Code 35.5.1 through 4, as you saw in that previous slide, the site distance would be 1,000 feet, minimum 500 feet, reverse 500 feet. So for commercial, that would be a different distance, 600, 500, 500, and in industrial, 300, 300, 300. Those distances as proposed would be measured from the edge of the gas well development site plan. There's a requirement that every new well get a site plan. That would set a boundary by meets and bounds description, and we would use that boundary to measure. In those master plan communities and plan development districts, there are approved regulations for setbacks already identified, and this proposal would keep that. We have a comment from City Attorney. Just key for those who are viewing this presentation, these site setbacks are for new sites, new pad sites, not existing pad sites. New sites. That's correct. That's a good clarification. So anything new. That's a brand new location. A well doesn't exist now, and this is new. We'll show what the existing sites would be in the next couple slides. But again, this is what staff had proposed to the Planning and Zoning Commission. During their deliberation, they came to a different number on a lot of instances. So you can see for residential districts, a new site would have 750 foot. Site setback 500, 225, and the reverse. So 225 was the reverse across the board. Commercial 500, 350. So a lot of those numbers are different. You can see between the two slides just changing that. The concept was the same, that the setbacks would be measured from the Gaswell Development Site Plan Boundary. It's just those specific distances they proposed to amend a lot of them. So on the next slide, you can see the existing sites. As a Madame City Attorney pointed out, the difference between the last two slides was for new. This is for existing. So if there's a well on the ground and a development site already exists, the setback, as proposed by staff, would be 600 feet to add a new well at that location. You could get a minimum down to 250 feet, but the reverse setback would be 500. And that reverse, again, is where you can build next to the existing drilling and production site. So in this instance, again, the setbacks would either be measured from that Gaswell Development Site Plan Boundary, if one had to be established, or from the construction edge, which would identify the existing conditions on the ground. Yes, sir. We have a question. Thank you, Mayor. Would you explain what might happen for an existing site setback to be decreased from the 600 feet to the 250 feet? Now, I understand this is just staff proposed and that there's a different recommendation from planning and zoning , but there's still those two different categories. So what would take place in order for that reduction to happen? That's a good question, and just for the sake of pointing out there are differences. I advanced a slide, and you can see this is what P&Z proposed. Okay. But there is still a site setback and a minimum. So the ability to reduce that distance would require the operator to either obtain property owner waivers, essentially, saying that the owners within that distance would consent to a reduced setback. If you cannot get 100% of those waivers obtained, there's an opportunity to go to the zoning board of adjustment. This is a zoning ordinance, so appeals to zoning ordinance conditions would go to ZBA, and ZBA would have an opportunity to reduce that setback through a variance procedure. In some instances, at least as we proposed, there would be a staff, kind of an initiative for operators to give up sites. If you have two single well pad sites near each other, and they're on the same lease, the opportunity to grant a reduced setback could be administratively approved if one of the two would be limited for future drilling. So there's three options to reduce that setback. Okay. Mayor, if I may follow up, and I don't know if this is for Darren or for our city attorney, but when, let's say it doesn't get approval from all of the property owners, and it has to go before the zoning board of adjustment, are there any guidelines set forth in the proposed ordinance giving the zoning board of adjustment any criteria to use as they make their determination? That's one question, and the other question is, do they have it within their power to say, we're going to grant a smaller setback than 500 feet, but we're not going to go to 225, we're not going to go any less than, let's say, 300 feet. So can they do a different level than what's requested, and do we give them any criteria by which they should make that decision? I believe there's some criteria proffered in this ordinance , but just as a standing rule, the zoning board of adjustment in different sections of our debt and development code, they have specific criteria for hearing any variance. So anything that is varied by the zoning board of adjustment, there's specific criteria. I don't know those off the top of my head. I've only presented one case before the ZBA, but if the attorney could help me or if she knew, there are existing conditions, kind of limits placed on what the zoning board of adjustment can approve, and those specific criteria would have to be addressed by any ZBA public hearing, and if you do hope to have those. There are specific criteria set forth otherwise in the DDC, which unfortunately I didn't bring to the dais tonight, but they are set forth in code, and in response to the question as to whether or not the ZBA could grant a lesser setback, the answer is yes. They can exercise their discretion, hear evidence, hear presentations from the public and concerns, and then exercise their discretion with regard to an appropriate decision. So they could either grant it, they could give a smaller setback, or they could deny the whole request? That's correct. Yeah, that minimum isn't -- if you have 500 foot as a requirement and you're asking for variance by the zoning board of adjustment, they don't have to grant it at 225 feet. It could be 300 as presented. That's at least the plan that we would have in this ordinance, and again, the criteria is laid out elsewhere in the DDC. Mayor, just as we're considering this, it would be helpful if between now and our next meeting, if we could get an informal staff report that kind of gives us -- reminds us what those criteria would be for the zoning board of adjustment to make a variance. Okay. Councilmember Riggs. And is this a situation where the developer doesn't have to apply for the variance? They can automatically get to the minimum? Is that correct? Well, I had advanced slides, and I guess the discussion -- it's really a policy discussion for you all, but I think the opportunity, first of all, for me to use you all, I'm not from Texas, so thank you for the latitude on that. But we had proposed as staff that there would be different criteria for development closed. The planning and zoning recommendation, though, took that out, so their recommendation was to not have development reduction, so again, I don't want to say what the proposals end up being, but at least staff had recommended some reduction, and I know the deliberation by planning and zoning commission said what would be the criteria for a surface developer moving next to a well. We have a current 250-foot reverse setback, and there's no criteria. That's just granted. So I think their deliberation kind of highlighted that there may not be a need for that, and so their recommendation took that out. All right. And just to highlight, this slide, again, is the planning and zoning commission proposed. The numbers are a little bit different. I'll go back. It's been a while, but we had 600, 250, and 500 as the presentation to P&Z. Their discussion set it at 500, 225, and although the official motion kept the reverse setback at 500 feet, it appears that may have just been an error because a lot of their discussion alluded to the fact they wanted the reverse setback to be 225 feet. So I put 225 in here, but note that caveat that if you recommended as P&Z approved, their motion did keep that reverse setback at 500 feet. But again, the setback would be measured from the gas well development site plan boundary or the edge of construction from that existing site. So that's not necessarily just the appurtenances or the equipment or even the well. Every one of these sites is typically leveled. You have some fill and some rock brought to the location, and that construction, the edge of construction is where that measurement would be taken. Mayor, I just wanted to weigh in on that last slide and also indicate that all my notes indicate that the planning and zoning commission did intend this reverse setback to be 225. And we felt like the council could address this at the council level, and we did not need to go back to the P&Z on this, but I think it's clear that's what they intended. Okay. Thank you. Yeah, that's my notes as well, so I try to highlight it. But this slide I think might address some of the questions. I know we have the staff report coming next week, but the setback reduction procedures, they would apply to a site setback in order to reduce the distance down to the minimum . So it doesn't give the criteria, but at least explains the process. So again, property owner waivers is the first step. That's a 100% requirement, at least as proposed, that you would have to get the consent from all of the property owners. Again, there's some room for deliberation. Is it all property owners or just the property owners or the protected uses? We're proposing just the protected use property owners. The next step would be the Board of Adjustment variance. So if you don't get to the 100% and you go to ZBA, there's a variance procedure. We'll outline that in that staff report for next week. But then the administrative variance under limited circumstances, and that again is only if the operator has a couple of sites on the same lease and is willing to restrict new development on at least one of those. There's an opportunity to get some leeway on the site that they are proposing for development. In the event the setback is reduced, though, enhanced performance standards would apply. We have a question. Go ahead. I'm sorry. Now, on the administrative variance, you explained in your mind what would -- what the circumstance would be, that the operator has two wells in close proximity. They might give up one of those drilling sites and then load up the other one. Yes. Is that specified in the ordinance or is that just an understanding according to the discussion? No, it is spelled out in the ordinance. There's strict criteria any time you're doing an administrative variance as to what can be varied. Thank you very much. Next slide here. I'll talk about the permitting process. The sequence as proposed would have a gas well development site plan required and then you would jump to a gas well permit. That single stage requirement that we have currently is going to at least be recommended to stay. And I make that distinction only because our last set of proposed changes had a two-part process for each. First you had to get an initial gas well development site plan and then the final and then you got a gas well drilling permit and then a gas well completion permit. So this would keep the single stage for each but we would still have a requirement that you file a final site plan that gives us the as built. And what that does is identify what should be developed in the site plan and what was actually constructed in that as built document. And that would just be part of the permitting process. It would be a stipulation, not necessarily another procedural or stage to get a second part of the permit. So that gas well development site plan would authorize the operator to obtain the permits for multiple wells on the site. The gas well development site plan may be needed for existing sites but once it's approved then every well would just come in for an individual permit. And the site conditions would not be reviewed again, set backs and anything related to the site authorized under the gas well development site plan. Quick question. Yes, sir. Maybe this is for my colleagues. Do you all want to hold our discussion as far as specific terms in the ordinance until after the public hearing and maybe on a subsequent day? I mean I just had, is that sort of the plan here? Okay. All right. Thank you. I just had a couple questions that I will hold. Okay. I will stand for questions at the end but continuing then with the presentation the next part of the permitting process will identify that the drilling production site, at least as proposed, would be limited to two acres unless the need for a larger site is proved up. There's again criteria for how to prove that but similar to Fort Worth and similar to our current ordinance we would set a maximum size of five acres. So that's our current proposal. We're recommending to at least keep that. The expiration dates again they would still apply. So whatever the expiration for the drilling production site there's still an expiration to it which would require you to advance towards completing the terms of what was approved. Once it's approved you can add multiple wells and if you continue to do so that gas well development site plan would stay open. So the next couple of slides we'll talk about the implementation from the gas well standards perspective. The environmental and operational standards, again a lot of those may fall under what we saw in House Bill 40 as far as what they're addressing but they're still in our ordinance. What the reference would be then is just compliance with federal and state regulations are required for everything you see on this list. There's seven separate items. What the state or federal rules we would have those in our ordinance, they stay, but again the provisions aren't city specific and wouldn't comply with any different regulations . So the next couple of slides we'll talk about what's going to remain in DDC section 3522. First being the site layout and design, development operations and equipment, fire safety emergency response, nuisance prevention, mitigation and enhanced mitigation were applicable. So as I mentioned the breakdown that's all staying in 3522. The enhanced performance standards in 22 though would apply any time that setback distance is reduced below the site distance. That site setback I mentioned a couple slides ago, one of the three. If you reduce that there are three categories of enhanced performance requirements then, noise mitigation, fencing and screening and production monitoring. So those three would be required. Noise, there might be additional stipulations in your noise management plan. It hopefully would address the current setback and if anything was developed we would look for that enhanced mitigation plan to be enforced then if the setback distance were reduced. Fencing and screening, there would be additional screening requirements based on that reduced setback and then the production monitoring would give the opportunity to go to the location and inspect each site to make sure that the production equipment is functioning correctly. So the next two slides we'll talk about P and Z's recommendations. Again a lot of text here, but I think I can summarize it by at least explaining that P and Z did recommend approval last week. There were some amendments to help instead of explaining what all of those amendments are we gave as your backup two exhibits. The first one is a red line version that reflects P and Z's policy recommendations regarding setbacks and variances along with city staff's non-policy recommended changes. A lot of times we just try to clean up some language and make sure it was consistent. So that's included in exhibit one. Exhibit two, it's a clean version that reflects city staff 's policy recommendations regarding setbacks and variances along with the city staff non-policy recommended changes. So those two exhibits you'll have one as a red line hopefully it clarifies what was recommended by P and Z. In addition to those setback considerations on P and Z they also recommended to amend section 35.5.10.6 and what that does is remove the procedure for the operator waivers as we talked about earlier that's one of their recommendations. They also wanted to remove the enhanced standards for surface developers. So if the development moved closer that would not be a requirement. So in addition to those recommendations there was a commissioner that also wanted some things noted just for consideration by the city council to ensure that they were, I guess you guys were aware of their deliberations. Is there an opportunity to explore a variance process if they set the hard number at 225 feet and it had to be at 220 is there a way to get there? That was the question put out there and then also are there other fencing options, berms or landscaping that could be required as alternatives. You mentioned concrete wall I'm thinking he assumes like our masonry wall. So is there an alternative? Those are two questions he left on the table again just for your deliberation. That ends my presentation. I can stand for any questions that you may have or do have as you already alluded to. Well, no, my questions were specifically towards the ordinance as it was written and so I think I'm just going to hold those to hear the public hearing. Okay. Any council member Roden. I'm going to ask a couple clarifying questions because I want to make sure everyone understands the ordinance before we get into the discussion of it. And one is I think we've been talking about setbacks for years and years that I think it's some folks are coming new to the conversation and don't know what's gone before in terms of that. That means from a protected use and that what counts as a protected use hasn't changed in this from what we said in 2013. But what we said in 2013 was quite beefed up from what was before. Do you have those there that you're able to rattle off just for the sake of folks? Well, I do have a list of what we define as a protected use if that's what you're asking. I don't have what changed though. No, no. Nothing's changed in terms of the definition. I just want to make sure everyone's aware when we're talking about new sites and then there's a thousand foot setback, the question is from what? And just to be clear of what all counts in that protected use category. Good point. Yeah, and as I said, I don't have 2010, but from 2013 we're not proposing any changes. So we say a protected use is any dwelling, which is typically a residential structure, those types of buildings . Church, public park, public library, hospital, pre-kinderg arten, kindergarten, elementary, middle or high school, public pool, public transit center, senior center, public recreation center, hotel or motel. That completes our list of what a protected use is. So all of those items are. Good. Thanks for saying that. That's helpful. So the other thing I guess I think would be helpful to point out is, especially as we're talking about reverse set backs, the council for the last couple of years has kind of in an iterative process been kind of scratching our heads about how do we figure that out and provide adequate notification. That again, previous ordinances didn't have on the books in terms of if I'm building to a certain amount that we want to make sure that if people are selling lots out of there or selling homes out of those home buyers, both from sign age and from notification in the selling process have some knowledge of what is around them. Can you highlight some of that? Because that is a new part of this ordinance that wasn't in 2013. To me that has to go hand in hand with the reverse setback question. That's a good point. It's not in the presentation, but thanks for the opportunity to address that. What we did in several sections to address the notice is created new requirements in sub chapter 35167 that specifically say that a gas well notification disclosure for platting is required. There's a note to be placed on the plat. There shall be a depiction on the plat that shows the lot survey and identifies the location of the drilling and production site in relation to the lot. There's a provision included in the declaration of restricted covenants that advises lot purchasers of the existence of producing wells on the drilling and production sites. There's a notice that advises lot purchasers of those exist ences. And then there's drilling and production site access can't be taken from residential streets. So those things are in one of the sections. That's all new. In addition to that, we did lift some specific language from the city of Fort Worth that will apply to notice requirements when the applications are filed. So when a gas well development site plan came in previously there was just an application process in the city process that now anytime that application is filed the impacted area there's a notice that goes around to the homeowner. It goes to the homeowners around that site. There's also a notification kind of enhancement for any operations at the location. Some of it will include signage. There's a requirement to identify on the site itself that the site is home to an existing gas well and it may be reworked. That will be located on the fence surrounding the site. So those signage requirements, the specific notification to the property owners surrounding the site, those are new. And some came from Fort Worth. And then starting the process we also have notification requirements going back as early as the plat requirement for residential homebuyer. Thank you for highlighting that. Councilmember Hawkins. Thank you Mayor. Darren in your P&Z presentation there was a part where you had showed kind of the feet and what that equivalent what the equivalent was to acres. Are you going to show that possibly later or could you? This one. Could you discuss that now please? I sure can. And there was a specific commissioner that had asked for a diagram. What we did and again I'll have to caveat this. I don't know how we did it. We have a pretty good GIS guy who was able to do it. So this is actually referenced out. It's scaled. That pink site in the middle or purple, it's a two acre pad site. So by dimension his request was 225 foot buffer, 500 foot buffer, 750 foot buffer and 1,000 foot buffer. If you can pick up the colors you can see those radiating out from that two acre pad site. So what we found though is that the two acre pad site would obviously take up two acres. And when you had a 225 foot buffer around that, it equated to an additional 11.75 acres. So a total of 13.75 acres contained within that buffer distance. And as you increase that from 225 to 500 to 750, it went up to at 1,000 feet. The buffer itself encompassed 101.17 acres. So a total of 103.17 acres within that buffer distance. So this diagram, the two acres was what we were proposing as the gas well development pad site size. That's why we used this number. This was very helpful just when we're tossing out numbers, you know, what it actually means to people who own land who can't develop it, how that much that takes away. And then to Mayor, if we had specific questions on specific situations, if there's a reverse setback and there's a second well, do you want to discuss those kinds of things later or are you wanting to do that now? That's up to my colleagues. I mean, if you want to ask it, just go ahead and ask it. I mean, we've got the whole board's lit up, so we have a lot of people who want to speak. So we're on. Sure. Well, okay. Let's say we have a reverse setback. So the developer is going to the well. Correct. So that is, let's say, let's just use P&Z's recommendation at 225. And then that gas well operator wants to put in a second well. What happens then? What is the setback distance? It would be defined by the boundary. From an existing well, the operator, in the absence of a gas well development site plan being approved, could measure from the edge of construction. So that pad site, for lack of a better term, I try not to use it because we don't define pad site, but colloquially we just call it a pad site. That pad is what is out there today. And what exists is some dimensioned rocked area that the tanks and the wells and the separators, all of that is contained within. So if a development came in and wanted to locate in a proximity next to an existing site, we would ask them to identify the dimensions of that rocked area and then put a buffer distance at the 225 foot distance. If that rocked area would allow the operator to add additional wells without changing the boundary, what they could do is come in and get a gas well development site plan approved for that same limit. And under the proposal of Planning and Zoning Commission's 225 foot distance for existing sites, the operator would have the opportunity then to get that gas well development site plan approved at the minimum distance and add additional wells. If, however, that site needed to be expanded, they may not meet that distance. So the 225 foot distance from an existing one acre site may not meet it if they needed two acres as an example. If, however, the gas well operator got that site approved through a gas well development site plan, it would set the boundary at the two acre site, even if one acre exists. It would still allow the gas well operator to put in additional wells because they would meet the setback when they got the site plan approved. But in that example, instead of measuring from the edge of the construction, we would actually have a meets and bounds , a legal description to set where that boundary is measured from. So if they want to put in a second well, they have to then tell us where their boundaries are. That's correct. And then second, on the performance based, where are lights in this ordinance? It said noise, fencing and screening, production monitoring , and then lights. The lights, there's a lot of standards in our existing 3522 -2. Not a lot of those are changing. You can't have light trespass off location. You have to put up walls and screen them. Lights have to be directional. There are some safety requirements, so we know, especially at night, if the operation is 24/7, there will be lights. But currently we require those to be screened and shielded. That's not being changed. So I didn't really highlight it here, but it's in 3522-2. There's also some reflective signage requirements that's being included so that the signage could also be visible at night through some reflective ability. The sign will be illuminated, not illuminated, but light reflecting. Thanks, Darren. Okay. Mayor Pro Tem Gregory. Thank you, Mayor. A couple of different questions. There is a section in the back about watershed protection, and there are several references to items such as floodway or flood fringe. I looked in that section, and I could not find a definition . I went back to the definitions section. I could not find a definition there. I'm concerned about that. Is there a definition somewhere in here that I have missed of what those terms mean? No, there isn't. We can add that if it's, you know, determined that it's not a common term. I think this was written, you know, from our environmental services director and those specialists. That's a common term to them. Well, I understand, but it might not be to a gas well operator. We had a developer here last week who was talking about a 100-year floodplain, FEMA 100-year floodplain, and the city 's 100-year floodplain, which is actually from FEMA. But it's the built-out 100-year floodplain. So people even in the industry get those things confused, and I think we would be better off to have definitions for those. I think that's a good recommendation. There's another item, and I may have trouble locating it now, that talks about fencing around an open pit. That surprised me because I didn't think that open pits were allowed. There are existing pits that aren't being proposed to be eliminated with this ordinance. What we're not allowing is open loop system, so a new drilling production site wouldn't contain a pit, but there are existing pits that are being used today. A lot of those are water pits that -- This just refers to current pits that were there before we prohibited their use in the future. Correct. Thank you. On the noise mitigation plan, my memory is we had originally some very general rules about noise mitigation, and then we got very specific. Even to the point of requiring very specific tools to measure those, and it was so specific that it rendered our noise mitigation rules virtually unenforceable. Then we went to basically the same kind of noise mitigation or noise nuisance rules that we have for everyone else because they would be more enforceable. Now it appears that we are going back to more very specific rules. My concern is the enforceability of those. I'm not sure if it would be best to ask this question in open session or to get a legal opinion in closed session, but is there anything that you want to address in open session, and then maybe our attorney can address more of this in closed? I won't say there's anything I want to address in open session, but I think you're absolutely right, at least on the history. We had pretty prescriptive requirements like these and then did take action to change to what state law is and kind of uniform. So the rationale and the reasoning I will defer to Madam City Attorney for that. Either now or in closed session, I need an explanation for why we are changing course again because I am quite concerned about the enforceability, especially with all of the setbacks that are proposed that are closer than they were before. I think I'll choose both open session and closed session if that's acceptable. This ordinance does nothing to impact the state law provision, which still exists in state law. So the provision that we previously had and we had dropped into this ordinance was really a parroting of state law. It's not in the ordinance now, but that doesn't mean that it went away. So it still exists in state law. It is still a tool that can be used because a municipality could actually draw on the state law as far as moving forward. This is more specific. And so we've heard a lot of complaints. We've been in a lot of different places on this sound nu isance issue. But I will say for right now that that provision that we looked at earlier relating to the state law is still in state law. Okay. Anyone? Was that? That was such a bright answer that we had a power surge. Thank you for that. I was thinking it was just me. We may want to pursue that more in closed session. There's a provision in here about a different type of sign to go on the drilling site. I'm having trouble finding the sections. Tab A. It's 35.22.2.B3. This is a gas well drilling and production site. This site may be the subject of further drilling and production and/or hydraulic fracturing. And we specified the size of the sign, minimum to maximum size. There are over 270 wells right now. Would they all -- and a few less production sites. If this ordinance goes into effect with this wording on signage, would all of those production sites have to add this new wording to their signs? I think that would be a discussion to see if it's an enforceable requirement now, proactively, or if it may be something that would be required if the operator applied for a gas well development site plan. But we do have 153 sites in the city of Denton. So that would be a question I would ask as far as how we can enforce that. I would defer to the policy direction and the legal counsel for guidance on that. >> Mayor Pro Tem, we have about 34 cards. And I want to go ahead -- if the speakers who are currently signed up, if they are quick questions, if not, I want to go ahead and try to get the public speaking, open the public hearing and then we can address all of these afterwards. So councilmember Wasney. >> Just for the public, and don't lose this in the fine print. It doesn't talk about master plan communities or plan developments that have already been approved. A whole huge swath, we're talking almost 8,000 acres in southwest Denton. This doesn't apply to coal ranch, hunter ranch, Robeson Ranch. So again, almost 8,000 acres. So while we talk about development and new development, existing, new, because they were grandfathered in when they were approved by city council, either in 2001, 2006 or 2008 , all of that falls under a whole different set of rules and regulations. And it's all grandfathered in. I need everybody to understand that because it's such a very large part of southwest Denton. >> Thank you. Councilmember Briggs. >> I don't really have a question. I just wanted to share what I learned earlier that I didn't particularly know, and that if you look up here, the red dot in the middle is the wellhead, but that doesn't necessarily mean that in the center is where the explosives are going to be. They can be all the way out down to the very corner. And so when you're looking at that setback, the safety is, for me, from where the explosive is, not necessarily from where the center point is. That is something that I learned earlier and I just wanted to share. When you're looking at that, that doesn't necessarily mean that's where the danger is in the center. >> Thank you. Councilmember Johnson. >> Thank you, Mayor. This was really helpful that you did. There was another aerial map that showed all the existing wells and the setbacks around it. I think that would be helpful to show just what we're up against in terms of the impact of whatever decision we make in terms of reverse setbacks to our remaining developable land in the city. So I thought as prior to the public comments, if folks could see that, because I think we talk about terms like 500 feet or 250 feet or 1,000 feet, those distances don't seem like a lot until you put them around a 2, 3, 4-acre pad site and look at the amount of land. If you don't know what 100 acres looks like, you need to go find something that's 100 acres and look at how big it is because it's massive. So I thought that was a great visual that really painted a picture for what we're up against. Thank you. >> Thank you. Before I open the public hearing, I just want to ask the public's indulgence and just help and cooperation as speakers come up. Our time limit is three minutes. And then in the past, there's been opportunity to show sort of either clapping or all that, I think so we can move through this efficiently, if maybe we could refrain from that, that would be greatly appreciated. So I will now open the public hearing. The first speaker we have is Sharon Wilson. If you will come and state your name and address and your time will begin. >> Hi there. Sharon Wilson, 101 North Greenville Avenue, Allen, Texas. And it was six years ago last month, the first time I came and stood in this room to speak about fracking. And most of you all weren't here. So I think that gives me a little seniority here. The permanent people's tribunal is an internationally recognized tribunal that was established after the Vietnam War crimes tribunal. The PPT will examine whether some countries have breached human rights by allowing fracking. The human rights norms at issue may include the right to life, security of person and bodily integrity, the right to health, the right to a healthy environment, rights to enjoy your property in peace. And there are others. The primary duty of a municipal government is the protection of health and safety of its population. A strong setback is the best way to protect health and safety from oil and gas development. I supported the city in repealing the ban because many legal advisors in Texas and nationally said pursuing that legal battle was bad strategy. Thanks to Dish Texas, legal advisors say we might have a good strategy supporting a 1,000 foot setback. And we have evidence that this setback is commercially reasonable under the safe harbor terms of HB 40. It's not guaranteed. I get that. But this is what we're dealing with. And, you know, most everything is going to eventually be settled with litigation. I urge you to be brave. The operator in Dish, Devon Energy, was praised by our legislators in Austin as an example of a reasonable and pr udent operator, which meets another HB 40 test. They were not prohibited in their operations in Dish. Please stick with a 1,000 foot setback. Don't grant var iances. Devon's representative said last week in the planning and zoning hearing that Devon believes forward and reverse set backs should match. I agree. Having separate setbacks does not meet the logic sniff test . This also puts cities at greater risk for industry to push back for short setbacks across the board based on reverse setbacks. Look, I lost $80,000 in property on my farm when they fr acked all around me. I know how it feels to lose money because you can't do what you want to with your property. But under basic human rights, I did not see the right to maximize your property, to develop your property and maximize profit at the expense of your neighbors. I believe another that that the cities should protect health and safety and the morals of its populace. And it's simply immoral to profit from the harm of another. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker is Adam Brighill. Come down, state your name and address. Your time will begin. Adam Brighill. Okay, we'll put him. There he is. All right. Oh, I do. I'm sorry. You're right. I apologize. I will do that. So I'll do that starting right now. The next speaker will be Christy Wood. Thank you, Adam, for that reminder. I appreciate that. That's good. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. Adam Brighill, 1315 Dartmouth Place in Denton. I'm the president of the Denton Drilling Awareness Group. We're convening today just as studies are starting to catch up with fracking. You know, it's a technology that sort of outstripped the science and now the science is catching up and showing a lot of dangers and externalities. And so I think it's just kind of a bad situation that just when we want to make, have flexibility in our rules to make them more robust, we're sitting here in a situation where our hands are tied like they never were before. That being said, though, I think the guiding principle should be to make the strongest possible rules under the framework in place now with HB 40. And I realize that there's significant ambiguity involved with that, that that entails risk assessments of all sorts. And that it requires the cunning of policymaking, which I think you're engaged in now. And I want to trust also that you've looked at other cities and not just Fort Worth as a potential models, of course, knowing you can't just cut and paste things. So I just wanted to make two recommendations and ask one question. I'm grateful to Councilmember Wasney for raising the master plan communities. You know, back in 2013, vested rights was the kind of gorilla in the room that nobody talked about and it came back to haunt us. I wonder if these master plan communities aren't also that now realizing that this doesn't apply. So the question is why, you know, why doesn't this apply? You mentioned a little bit, but I'd like to hear a larger discussion about that. Recommendations have to do with distance and disclosure. I'd second the point that Sharon made that we should stick with the 1000 foot setback for the reason she noted. Also, it's what staff recommended as far as I understand. That's probably the biggest one that I'd like to get across . Variance is also I think that if they have to be applied and I understand there might be reasons why. If they have to be applied, I think that if there's people in protected uses around the area, they have to be afforded the chance to consent to that. There shouldn't be some sort of bureaucratic work around to that. But it's even trickier as Tara Lynn pointed out to me. People in protected uses might be consenting for somebody else who's going to move in there the next day or the year later. And so it raises really tough, I think, questions about why you would grant a variance at all. The disclosure issue I think is really important and maybe under discussed. The presumption I think of a different reverse setback distance is that people are being adequately informed. And I don't think this ordinance adequately informs people. So who should be informed I think is residents and not just lot owners. And how they should be informed I think is something like a brochure you get when you have lead paint in your house or something like that. Something obvious very early in the process that you just can't miss. That I think would count as adequate disclosure. And I guess that those are our main recommendations at this point knowing that others will raise other issues. Thanks. >> Thank you. The next speaker is Christy Wood and on deck will be A.C. Adam. If you'll state your name and address, your time will begin . >> My name is Christy Wood. I'm a resident of the 1020 Coyote Street here in Denton, Texas. Good evening. This is my first time to speak at a public hearing. Though I have attended two other previous public hearings concerning fracking within the city limits of Denton. What has prompted an otherwise silent lurker to move out of her comfort zone and trust me I am way out of my comfort zone right here. But to come up to the podium tonight. It's a desire to help my beautiful and dynamic city of Dent on to do the best that it can to both comply with the law and to best protect its citizens and our environment. I read about the proposed changes to the development code in the Denton record chronicle. So what I'm hearing tonight is new. I am concerned that the planning and zoning commission's recommendations are too weak to effectively protect Denton citizens. A setback of 750 feet and a reverse setback of only 225 feet is less than best practices in my opinion. Our neighboring city of Dish I think has a very good set back. I think we should consider it. I urge you to follow best established practices and to consider that. Also I've been made aware that the planning and zoning commission recommends allowing waivers and variance being granted by the PNC board of adjustments. If Denton is to have an excellent gas and oil well ordinance all companies whose operations in oil and gas exploration and production must follow the same set of rules. No exceptions. Lest we lose what little ability remains to regulate an industry at the local level. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Councilmember Riggs. I have a question. I just wanted to thank you for coming out and speaking to us and I hope that you do it again sometime. Thank you for being engaged. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you. Appreciate it. Up is AC Adam and then on deck will be Dalton Allen. Get this up a little higher. Good evening. My name is AC Adam. I live at 1806 and over lane in Corinth, Texas. I'm here tonight to number one, commend the planning and zoning commission and Darren grow for their hard work in this very, very difficult situation to try and conform with HB 40 and try and make it fair and equitable for everyone. And I think they've done a tremendous job in doing that. I represent as a realtor people who buy and sell real estate within the city of Denton and of course around the Metroplex. And particularly it's interesting that in the planning and zoning commission meeting last week they selected a piece of property to use as a primary example of what they're trying to achieve and what the situation is with private property owners who have developable property. That particular piece of property was described as 75 acre tract is the pain one and two well site at the corner of interstate 35 and Windsor Drive. That property was subsequently divided into a 31 acre parcel that fronts the interstate and also is on Windsor happens to be a two well lease site. The southern most well, which is like 80 feet from Windsor Drive is only 70 or 80 feet from a home. Well actually two or three homes in that residential subdivision behind it. It's also about 80 feet from this 31 acre property that I represent. We have a contract sale on that property that we believe will tremendously benefit the city in terms of growth development tax base and everything else and I think it's representative of many other pieces of property in the city of Denton owned by people who should have the right to to sell or to develop their properties without. Infringement from well operators who happen to be nearby. Now we realize that we're not going to get an 80 foot variance, but we believe that for the purposes of progress and development in this city that the 225 foot setback requirements that they have for existing well sites. Never mind what happens with new ones. That looks to be fair as well. I would like to say that I'm in favor of it as long as the property line delineations are clearly stated and that it doesn't take property away from a property owner. So that when it is planted that they don't lose property. Thank you very much for your time. We have a question. Councilmember Dawkins. Thank you. I see the wells are on the adjacent property. That's correct. They're not on the property in question. They're on the adjacent property to the east of the property in question. It's an irregular shaped property on the original plat. On the adjusted plat, the 31 acres is perfectly rectangular . So when it comes down to Windsor Drive from the north to the south, it narrows down. So there's a very narrow space there. There's no wall. There are no lights. As a matter of fact, that well I think is inactive. It hasn't been productive for some time. And that's a specific instance though. I realize you can't take one particular property that has a certain circumstance and apply to all of them. But my point is that we need this flexibility. Sure. We need the flexibility for people to be able to develop their property. Well, and I was glad that this example came up at PNZ. That's a tough pill to swallow when you're not even the one doing it. Right. So anyway, I appreciate you coming back here. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you. Thank you. Dalton Allen. And then on deck will be Calvin Tillman. Good evening. My name is Dalton Allen. I live at 111 Lexington Lane here in Denton. And I, like Mr. Adams, do appreciate the city PNZ for all that they've done to try to get to the right answer with this problem. One of the things that I believe I saw in researching this was that the Roroh Commission thinks that a 100 foot set back is sufficient in these situations. I'm not saying I agree with that. What I'm saying is that there's a huge difference in people 's thoughts about what's right and what's wrong. If we take a look at what has happened with the excitement that is created from a fire in a situation with a well or anywhere close to a well, an example would be headlines that said massive gas well explosion near Granbury. Raging fireball visible 30 miles away. Didn't have anything to do with the well. It was a 36 inch pipeline that was ruptured. But you see what happens as these things occur. I spent a couple of hours looking online trying to see what kind of degradation was occurred from the wells, from situations that had happened where water and air was actually tested and monitored over a period of time. And I couldn't find significant issue there. 225 foot seems reasonable. It's almost the length of a football field. That, I mean, just to put it in perspective, that's quite a ways down the road as far as reverse setbacks are concerned . I'm quite capable as an individual if I want to build a house or if I want to buy a house that's existing in a location to determine whether I want to be there or whether I don't if a well is close by. Safety is a key issue. And I'm glad you're making the decision and not me. But to overdo this severely impacts people that as Mr. Adams was talking about, there's a well next door but it's made this other property completely worthless. It cannot be developed at all. That happens the longer these setbacks are, the more that occurs. There has to be a midline, a safety issue, obviously. But I encourage the council, as I believe you are doing, to truly look at both sides of this issue and come to the place. I believe that PNZ did a great job. We listened to all the discussion. They went through a good process. And we do support. I do support as well as many others that 225-foot setback. Thank you. We have a question. Councilmember Briggs. Yes, ma'am. Lexington Lane, is that where you live? Are there wells near your neighborhood on Lexington Lane? I'm sorry. I couldn't hear you. What? Lexington Lane, is that where you live? Are there any wells around your home over there in that area? My home? No, they're not. No. Okay. So that's in another home that I have, but not here. Not where you live, into your residence. Okay. And next, I just had a question for you. Have you sold or listed a home that has been closed to a well? Do you have any -- do buyers -- In the past, not recently, since all of this has begun, but the answer is yes, I have. And we have -- that property has been sold. And honestly, we always did discuss the location of wells in that process. Right. But families are quite capable of making those decisions themselves, whether they wish to live there or not, whether it affects the price or whether it doesn't, is an individual market issue. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Calvin Tillman, on deck is Mike Chiefs. Thank you. My name is Calvin Tillman. I live at 1001 Jerry Street in Aubrey, Texas. I'm the former mayor of a little town called Dish, Texas, which is located just southwest of Denton. However, in 2011, I moved to Aubrey, which is just northeast of Denton, where I currently serve as the deputy mayor pro tem. During the planning and zoning meeting last week, my ears were burning, so I thought maybe I could perhaps add to this discussion. In 2006, the town of Dish adopted ordinance 0601A, which regulated oil and gas development within the corporate limits of the town. This ordinance established a setback of 1,000 feet from homes and other dwellings meant for human occupancy. Over the next several years, this ordinance would be changed several times. However, the setback was never modified and therefore has always and still does remain at 1,000 feet. In 2008, Devon Energy submitted applications to drill three wells. These applications were approved on June 18, 2008. These wells were SH Griffin, 20H, 21H, and 23H, and they were all drilled on an existing site in the town of Dish. There was one variance that was approved for these wells. Dish ordinance 0601A required a 50% masonry screening fence and forbid the use of prefabricated panels. However, the town of Dish allowed Devon to install prefab ricated masonry screening that were solid, eight foot tall. This was the only variance requested for these wells after Devon's original fencing proposal was rejected by the board of commissioners. This variance was conveyed to Devon in a letter signed by me dated August 24, 2008. There was a home within the 1,000 foot radius of these wells. However, they were not located within the corporate limits of the town and therefore could not be enforced for ordinance 0601A. Therefore under the House Bill 40 rationale, it would appear that the Dish ordinance 0601A would be considered commercially reasonable. In 2010, Dish again revised ordinance 0601A. However, again, there was no revision to the 1,000 foot set back requirement. Since Devon was the only developer in the town, we provided them the opportunity to comment on the proposed changes. Devon representatives were concerned about the requirements to perform baseline air testing and also the screening and fencing requirements. Those were the only concerns that they expressed. They did not express concern over the 1,000 foot setback. At the time of the adoption of the ordinance in Dish, the reverse setbacks were not standard in anybody's ordinance, so the ordinance did not address those. I would happily provide supporting documentation on all of this if you would like it. I hope this helps in making your decision. Be courageous, my friends. Councilmember Rodin. Thank you, Mayor, and thank you for coming here since Dish has been brought up on a number of occasions in just this last week. A couple of clarifications. Your setback of 1,000 feet was measured from what at the production site? From the wellhead. What was the measurement point at the production site? Did you say from the well? From the wellhead. Oh, from the wellhead. Thank you. You mentioned a variance procedure. What could you reduce that setback to according to the Dish ordinance? We didn't have a minimum or maximum. So it could be gone down to 100 feet, I guess, hypoth etically? Yeah. There wasn't a minimum setback that I can recall. Now, this has been several years ago, but I don't recall there being a minimum that we could reduce it down to. I don't think that anybody who knows me or knows anything about Dish would ever believe that a variance in that manner would be issued. Right. I think we're just trying to ascertain this commercially. Reasonable standard and citing Dish as a standard, we're trying to understand the ordinance. Sure. The first setback you mentioned there, it was not standard, so the Dish ordinance doesn't call out any... Doesn't address reverse setbacks at all. So in a typical fashion, if a developer was wanting to develop up to a well, that would just be governed by fire code, I guess. Yes. There wasn't anything in the ordinance that outlined that. However, the pad side, this one in question, was a pretty significant size pad side. I'm not sure the exact acreage. It was well over two acres though, probably three to four acres. So even if you built right up to the line, there would still be a pretty significant setback from the well side. Thank you very much. Council Member Johnson. Thank you, Mayor. Mr. Tillman, I appreciate you coming. And I think because Dish has been brought up, we've received several emails from folks about Dish, trying to understand the ordinance is helpful, trying to frame how we would compare. So what's the total land area of Dish, Texas, the city limits, how big is it? It is a whopping two square miles. Yeah, I have 1.6, so a little different than our 55,000 population. At current state would probably be three, 350, something like that. Yeah, okay. So 1.6 square miles and 300 people. Yeah, it's well... We're probably well over two square miles at this point. Okay. I would say probably closer to three square miles. Not that that makes a difference. Okay. Boom and now. Yeah. So then how many wells are in the city limits, would you say? Within that two square miles, how many wells you think are in there? I believe there was about 18 inside of the corporate limits . It's been a while since I've... How many sites would those 18 be on, or is that the number of sites? I unfortunately couldn't give you an exact number. I can get the exact number for you. I would happily get those to you. Assuming there's one well per site, there'd be 18 total. Yeah, there wouldn't be that many sites though, because on this particular pad site there was four. On another site there was two. So average in two, we're talking about nine sites. Yeah, probably nine, 12, something like that. Okay. Thank you. Council Member Briggs. I just wanted to say thank you for coming. I appreciate you being here, especially after the P&Z and how David responded to the line of questioning there. So your confirmation was good. Thank you. Thanks. Council Member Wasney. And I think just clarification for the people who are watching, and thank you for coming, 'cause I watched the P&Z meeting and the references to DISH were repeated. So it was good for you to come and clarify it. And I think the references that they had, and again, this is for our citizens, were looking for commercially reasonable, which means something that's been on the books for five years. And DISH was 2008. 2006 is when we originally adopted it. So at 1,000 feet, that was the reference coming from P&Z that we heard that it fell under the presumption of commercially reasonable because y'all had had 1,000 feet for over five years. For 10 years, and we've had development under that ordinance as well. So I just wanted to kind of make that clear for our people. Council Member Hawkins. Thank you, Mayor. Thanks for coming up, Mr. Tolman. Thank you. Do you recall if a lot of the landowners also owned the mineral rights in your town when you were mayor, or is that tough to guess? No, there was probably about 10 to 15 percent of the property was owned or the minerals were owned by people who lived in DISH. There was, of course, even in our small two acres, there were several hundred mineral owners. Okay. So thank you. Mayor Pro Tem Gregory. Thanks. An attempted humor. It's 830. We've been at this for an hour and a half. Is there any truth to the rumor that Aubrey is now going to maybe change its name to Direct TV? There's no. There's no truth to that rumor. All right. I'm glad I got at least one laugh from a Dalton. Yes, Council Member Briggs. You mentioned that there was development that did happen on top of your 1,000 foot setback. Did you have any issues with taking claims? No. No. Okay. Thank you. I do have one question. Did that setback apply not just to the wellhead but to the production equipment as well, tanks and everything, or was it just from the wellhead? The measurement was from the wellhead, I believe. So the ancillary equipment, tank batteries and all that, could they be closer than 1,000 feet under your ordinance at that time? In theory, I suppose that they possibly could. In this particular instance, they're not. The tanks actually face a parallel road. Okay. All right. All right. Thank you very much for coming. Appreciate it. Thank you. Okay. Michael Chives is up. State your name and address and your time will begin. On deck is Jody Ismart. I'm sorry if I mispronounced that. I'm sorry, Mr. Chief. Go ahead. All right. Mike Chives, 900 Jeffrey Drive. I'm in District 2. I was asked to do a little bit of a study in regards to this because it seemed like we sort of got in this fight with this 80,000 pound gorilla. It was the state. And we threw one punch and then we got beat up pretty bad. And it looks like we're retreating very in a serious way here. And so I looked for, I mean, there are really only two places in the entire United States that really has high density of these wells. That's up in the Ohio, Pennsylvania area and whatever. And the vast majority is in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas. So I looked for incident, you know, certain places where there were problems. I found one in Ohio. What they said was that fire, if we just look at it from a fire standpoint, if we're talking about public safety, we look at it from just the fire aspect, the fire department will not get close enough. They won't get within 900 feet of a gas fire, right, when they're trying to put this thing out. That's what I found that was there. So to have, I mean, so it's inevitable with all of these wells that are on here, at some point in time, we're going to have a fire. It's going to happen, right? And so having things that are really, really close does not make sense to me. It makes sense to not have a 75-acre plot and go from the wellhead. That makes sense in order to do that. But I think that if we're going to reduce this thing down to less than what we could actually, the fire department would even deal with, I mean, I think we need to think about that. There's some unintended consequences. Like, for example, nowhere in here, it assumes every one of these wells are vertical wells. It doesn't assume that any of them are slanted wells. There's a slant process that can happen with the operator. And you can work with the operator if we're not fighting with them. We can work with them where, you know what, they go down and then it goes across. And it can be 1,000 feet. It can be 2,000 feet, 3,000 feet to get to wherever they need to get gas-wise. But we're assuming that everything's vertical. There's no horizontal drilling and there's no slant well drilling in any of this. And so I think we need to think outside the box a little bit and go, if we're going to go within that 900 feet, then we need to think about what are some out-of-the-box ways that we could go protect whatever those zones are. For example, there are some cases where inside chemical plants, they have the same kind of problem, where if a fire starts and it needs to spread or whatever, they put up certain kinds of walls in those chemical plants to protect other things. We're not thinking about any of that type of stuff. And I think that the operators would be willing to think outside the box if we would collaborate with them instead of really kind of being an us versus them scenario. And so I think that's an approach I haven't seen in relationship to this yet. And so that's. Thank you. We have a question. Council Member Johnson. I appreciate you coming out tonight. Just to let you know and for all the public to know, there 's been a lot of work going on in collaboration with the operators as we face this new. There's been a lot of meetings and a lot of could you live with this, could you live with that. And a lot of getting to understand really what this, for me , I had a lot to learn. And so I've really worked hard to try to understand exactly what these operations are. So as it relates to the vertical versus horizontal, we're absolutely, I mean, that's what they're doing now is horizontal drilling and even the angle drilling. But are you aware at what depth that happens? It's deep. It's very, very deep. So in terms of the impact to a protected use or any use on the surface at what point this goes underneath, it's. It's so deep it doesn't matter. Correct. Yeah. I just wanted to make sure you're aware of that. That's what I'm talking about. If they started in the center of it, they started in the center of the plat or over to the edge where it's not as close, they can still get to all the gas and everything they need to and still be that far apart from the wellhead where the gas is, where the explosion would happen can be far enough if we're putting it in two acres, because we can spread it across. Right. Okay. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chief. Jody, and I'm going to probably mispronounce that again, so you'll have to correct me when I, is I smart or is smart? But anyway, and on deck will be Jerry Yenson. I apologize. Oh, it's okay. Jody is smart. No worries. Thank you. 819 Anna Street. So I just wanted to state in advance first off that I also am in favor of 1,000 foot setbacks for both forward and reverse as well. I think that that, I don't necessarily think that's reasonable, but under the circumstances with HB40, I think it's our best shot. But I do want to say, and I want to bring some scientific studies into play here, just two of them actually, because there are many studies that have been conducted where results point to a significant public health risk. Oil and gas wells are spewing dangerous cancer causing chemicals into the air and into our water according to these studies. A study on contamination of air conducted by David Carp enter of Albany State University of New York was published in the Journal of Environmental Health, and I quote from David Carpenter directly, "Cancer has a long latency, so you're not seeing an elevation in cancer in these communities. But 10, 15 years from now, elevation in cancer is almost certain to happen." So I'd like for us to go ahead and let that absorb for a second. When this does happen, in 10 to 15 years from now, maybe less, and the fracking companies have long since left Denton, or maybe some of them will still be fracking, I wonder if we'll look back on this day and wish that we had made bra ver setbacks. David Carpenter's study was limited to air, but UT Ar lington recently released a study that confirmed chemicals that are linked to fracking operations that have contaminated our North Texas water. With higher concentrations of contamination, the closer you get to fracking wells. This is science. So this is not guessing, it's not Fox News, it's not two sides of the story. These are actual studies that have been conducted. David Carpenter's study showed that one to two kilometers away was unsafe. But we are looking at placing wells much, much closer at a fraction of what David Carpenter's study would recommend. This study found unsafe concentrations of carcinogens from fracking as great as 2,591 feet, so away from fracking operations. Denton needs to fight for ourselves, our citizens, our community, and our children. A 1,000 foot setback isn't enough, and a 225 reverse set back is a cancer trap for anyone uninformed enough to move into a newly developed home within these distances. Denton doesn't even have vapor control regulations, emissions regulations, or regulations for storage evaporation units. I think that we need to discuss these as well. I think that they need to be placed on the books. This vote isn't about deciding what environment we want, it is about deciding what environment we want to live in. At the very minimum, we should have a 1,000 foot setback, and that's what I wanted to say. Thank you. Sure. Thank you. Thanks. Jerry Yenson, and then on deck will be Ron Seifert. May I have the overhead, please? Overhead, please. Just state your name and address, and your time will begin. Can we pan out just a little bit, please? That should be enough. My name is Gerald Yenson, Landmark Surveyors, 4238 I-35 North. I'd also like to commend Darren Grove, P&Z, and City Council for the task that you've had to try to balance between reasonable production and surface owners' rights. Of course, my issue has been reverse setbacks, and I think you all have done a very good job if you pass 225 foot reverse setback. This is a case on Windsor Drive where there's a 10-acre tract of land. This is an existing gas well pad. If we can come 225 feet off of that, this little Spanish- speaking Iglesia La Hermosa church can be built. If that setback were 500 feet, this property would be rendered worthless. This is kind of a typical example. The only thing that I want to point out that could become a problem is you have language here that says, "For a proposed subdivision plant with unde veloped lots to be occupied by protected uses, the reverse setback should be measured from any undeveloped residential lot boundary." By that definition, if this were a 10-acre tract that somebody wanted to build a single residence on, the lot boundary itself would have to follow that setback, which the city doesn't allow. You don't allow us to plot part of what somebody owns. We're required to plot the whole property. Even if you were allowed to do that, let's say a developer sells this lot and plots it and sells it for somebody to build a house on, then somebody's got to own a little piece of unused land. My proposal would be that the language would read, "For a proposed subdivision plant with undeveloped lots to be occupied by protected uses, the reverse setback should be measured from the closest boundary designated for the approved gas well development site plan, or if no gas well development site plan has been approved for the site, from the closest boundary of the existing drilling and production site and shall so be depicted on the plat." In other words, the plat would actually contain the entire property, but there would be some sort of a dashed line out here that would say, "This is the reverse setback to an existing gas well," so that somebody's put on notice, "You can buy this lot. You can build on it, but you can't build in that particular area." So I'm very concerned that that language could be construed to cause some problems just for development of residential properties. Thank you. Thank you. Ron Seifert and on deck will be Alita Thomas, Paul Johnson. My name's Ron Seifert. I'm at 1400 Moran Drive. Okay, so gosh, there's so many things. I also appreciate the time that the staff spent on all this , but to me it seemed that the recommendations don't necessarily represent the democratic will of the voters who already agree that the only way to keep Denton safe from fracking is to ban fracking, right? So it just is common sense that if we can't have a ban, we want as close to a ban as we can get through a regulatory process. We want the strongest regulations possible. And just a couple weeks ago when we last talked about repe aling the vans, so many of you all came up here and said that you also agree that you want a ban and your hands are tied and you have to repeal it, and I believed you. And so now I think it's -- we're missing the point if we're talking about these slashing the regulations we already had, we should be talking about how we can get the strongest regulations possible and be willing to put ourselves out there and fight for them. So yeah, so that being said, I feel like we've already had compelling evidence that a thousand foot setback can be fought for. Flower Mountain is going to fight for their 1500 foot set back, and I think it would be a strategic ally for you all to match Flower Mountain set backs and align yourselves with them in a courtroom. And remember, their representatives voted against HB40, so even at the legislative level, you have allies there. This is a strategic position for Denton to be. This is going to be litigated, and you all need to be thinking about allies in that fight. Industry is going to sue Denton, and we should stand up and fight for what we believe for and for our convictions. Okay, so that being said, yeah, setbacks, I think 1500, but at least a thousand. There should be no minimums. That's just ridiculous. Why have a setback if it can be reduced? No minimums, thousand foot, 1500 foot setback, period. Variances, we don't need variances. I don't know why we have variances. If for some reason we have to have variances and I don't know about it, it's absolutely absurd that the BZA is responsible for it. We're not accountable to the public. If we're going to have variances, publicly elected officials like you all need to address them in a public forum because we all agree these things affect the entire city's health and safety. So if you want to grant variances, I say that a new process needs to be in place where you all do it. City council in front of us and you all can be held accountable for your decisions and can be done publicly, not people that are appointed that aren't directly accountable to us at the ballot box. Pits, we should just ban pits, retroactively. No storage pits, no evaporation pits. We should do that. Flower Mound does it. There's precedent for it there as well. Theirs is almost five years old. It's four and a half years old. Public notice, yeah, I echo what some folks said earlier. I think Adam said it. It should be residents, not just land owners that have to give their consent to fracking nearby if there is going to be a variance process, which I don't think there should be. Public notice to the entire city. Every fracking event, the entire city should be notified, not just the neighbors, the entire city wide. Vapor control units, if we can't have them, which is ridiculous, obviously emissions is as much a surface issue as anything, but if we absolutely can't, we need to mandate fence line monitors so that at least the state and federal regulations that do exist can be enforced. Every operator should have a fence line air monitoring system in place and we can hold them accountable to at least the federal state standards and find the hell out of them for every day that they're emitting too much, even if we can't write our own standards. Thank you. Question. Council Member Briggs. Not really a question, but just a comment. You did mention other ordinances and there are other cities with ordinances that are not amending theirs currently. There are power in numbers. If we all have ordinances that are similar, it does rid of that patchwork quilt that was discussed, the whole reason why HB 40 was implemented. So good point there. Right. And just keep in mind industry's hypocrisy on that note, right? Industry wants to say that they can challenge ordinances case by case because what's commercially reasonable here might not be there, but they're also saying , oh, we don't want this patchwork crap. So they want it both ways. It's ridiculous. We should make what's best for us. Thank you. We've got -- please, I appreciate it. No public demonstrations. Thank you. I'd appreciate your respect in that regard. Thank you. Alita Thames. Okay. Thank you. I would appreciate some decorum and respect for the council and for those here in the galley. Thank you very much. And then we've got on deck Theron Palmer. Thank you for your public service and I want you to know that I say this with love in my heart. My name is Alita Thames and I live at 1700 Willowood Street in the vibrant Denia neighborhood. I came to Denton in 1978 when I was 18 years old to study English and history at North Texas. Literature and history continue to shape my life. When I read the amendments that the city of Denton planning and zoning commission had proposed for gas well ordinances, Neville Chamberlain came to mind. Appeasement. Avoid confrontation at all costs. The citizens of Denton spoke loudly and clearly in November 2014. No hydraulic fracturing in our city limits. Then came the vindictive lawsuits and finally HB 40. The city's response? Appeasement. Avoid confrontation at all costs. And now we want to further water down our regulations on gas well drilling? Appeasement. We know HB 40 is an unjust law written by the oil and gas bullies and rubber stamped by legislators that are bought and owned by the industry. Pure greed and corruption. When is enough enough? What will it take to convince our legislators that hydraulic fracturing has no place in cities? 42,000 gallons of toxic fracking fluids spilled into the streets of neighborhoods. Gas wells exploding into fireballs when struck by lightning . Gas well explosions critically injuring workers. Earthquakes. Poisoned water wells. Polluted air. Noise pollution. 40 semi trucks a day destroying our neighborhood streets. When is enough enough? Please learn from history. Avoid the high price paid by Chamberlain. Do not appease. You have an army of intelligent, determined people who love our unique city and are willing to be soldiers in a critical piece of the struggle against environmental degradation. The world is watching Denton, Texas. Let's dig our trenches and don our gas masks. I urge you to pass the strongest, most stringent regulations possible. Look at our sister cities of Flower Mound, Dallas and South lake who have regulations with teeth. The world is watching Denton, Texas. Through the stick-to-itiveness and scrappiness of Denton ites, we hold the unique position of being able to change the course of the environmental struggle in our state. Let's not squander this opportunity that so many have worked so hard for. Show the state, show the country, show the world that we are not afraid to lead, to stand up for what is right, to stand up for our Denton. Thank you. Thank you. Theron Palmer and we're going to take a break about nine o' clock so we've got a couple of speakers left. Please pronounce Theron Palmer. I'm sorry. I apologize. Thank you. And on deck will be Agatha Bynes. Hello, I'm Theron Palmer. Oh, I'm sorry. Did you have a question for the last speaker? No, just a point of if we could get the speaker who's next to already be down here, ready to go, that would I think be a real smart move and just save a little time. And so if you're next on tap, have them already down here? Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. I'm sorry, sir. May I have my time back, please? Yes. State your name and address, please. I'm sorry. Will I get my time back? Yes. I'm Theron Palmer. I live at 1700 Willowood Street in Council District 4. Last night we had one speaker, our first speaker, I think put it in the broad context of environmental justice and I'd like to also speak out into a broader context by saying that one thing that we haven't heard in public comment at the council is that ours is but one of many local battles being fought against what many people have come to believe is a worldwide headlong dash towards environmental global destruction and a fundamental alteration of human civilization. At this moment our friends down in the Rio Grande Valley are fighting against the construction of one of 23 proposed liquefied natural gas plants that will eventually export 30 billion cubic feet per day to Europe and Asia. Our friends in West Texas are fighting a pipeline that will help boost exports to Mexico to 4.3 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day. Despite the efforts of our friends in East Texas, the industry will get everything it asks for concerning Keystone Pipeline and Canadian oil being shipped through this country for export. The admittedly fragmented American environmental movement plays into the divide and conquer strategy of a monolithic oil and gas industry which simultaneously runs jingoistic commercials touting America number one and that way are once again energy independent. But will this bonanza of gas that will soon be over will be used here in America for Americans? No, it will be shipped overseas to China no less. The industry is rapidly expanding its export infrastructure in order to expand its markets overseas and in order to boost the currently reduced prices , the depressed prices on oil and gas in this country. As this happens, you will not see companies like Vantage Energy coming into Denton claiming that it is only drilling wells to avoid losing money and to fill its contractual obligations. You will see these companies back and forth to drill in every last available parcel of land in Denton and everywhere else on the Barnett Shale and nationwide. As you and what I'm hoping is that you're going to be ready to have a request for a permit on every corner in the city as gas prices rise. Now we've been having a lot of citizens meetings to go through these proposed changes to the ordinances and I have five requests for the Council. One is to maintain the current setbacks, diminishing them by 250 feet essentially gives the oil companies the variances that they'll be asking you for anywhere and they're not going to be happy with what you give them. So stick with the tough one and setback and give them their minimums, make them work for it. Two, I would like a full disclosure by developers to purchases of homes that they do not have a green belt in their backyard that they have an oil and gas production site in their backyard. They are simply lying to people who buy homes. Would you like me to submit the rest of these? If you'll just go ahead and finish those up, wrap them up, that would be great. I would like a one site online source that tells the citizens of Denton when permits are being applied for and exercised and where they are including GIS that will support it so that people can see where in their neighborhoods those follow. Four, I would like increased bonding requirements so that the companies are paying for things like torn up Kindle Avenue which they came through in your district and I think that the taxpayers paid for that. So I would like to see increased bonding requirements so that they pay for their externalities. If they do not cause externalities, there is no commercial impact to them. So this should avoid that clause. And finally, make the P&Z accountable to the public. I've been watching their meetings. I think that they're nothing, I don't like what they do and there's nothing I can do about it. We have a question from Council Member Roden. Thank you for your comments and for your five suggestions. I think our ordinance is hitting at most of those. But I do want to just ask you if you're aware of when you talk about a single website whereby citizens can go and find. Have you seen our gas well inspections page in their GIS system whereby you can put in an address and find all the wells within whatever distance you want to find it? So that's site specific. I would like a listing of all the permits. Got that. Got that too. So I'd suggest maybe just looking at that because I'm real proud of our gas well inspection team for that. I'll look at it and I'll respond to you about any comments I have on that site. Love it. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. I do have a question. You mentioned to maintain the current setbacks. Which ones are you referring to? Are you referring to the current ones that we have in our ordinance which I believe is 1,200 feet and reverse setback is what? 250 or 300? So when you said which ones were you referring to? Basically across the board the PNG was recommending about 250 foot cuts to all the setbacks. So basically that's like giving them a variance before they even ask for it and then they're going to ask for a variance on top of that. So make them work from a higher number. They're going to ask you for a variance anyway. So make them start with a big number and work for it. Instead of giving them all that ground to start with. All right. Okay. Thank you very much. I tell you what, we're going to go ahead and take a break and so up will be Agatha Vines and then on deck would be -- okay, we're going to go ahead and reconvene. We've got a couple of council members still out but we'll go ahead and come back. We're a little bit past our time. Let's see. Let me see where I left off. Is it Agatha Vines is on and then on deck will be Brandon Finley. So if we could have order, we've got a public speaker at the podium who's going to state her name and address and your time will begin. Thank you. My name is Agatha Vines. I live at 1901 Panhandle Street. First I want to be clear that I support a ban on fracking in Denton but we're not debating that right now. So instead I support a minimum of 100 feet of setbacks between fracking sites and residences without any exceptions. What I'd like to talk about today is notification. So I moved here from out of state and I moved here from the northeast. So my introduction to fracking came from a lot of the public outcry and resistance to fracking that was happening in New York State and Pennsylvania. So when I moved to Denton and I was looking for housing, I was looking for a place to rent so I could learn more about the city before I ended up deciding on a place that I would like to buy. And when I was looking for rental housing, I never thought that there might be a possibility that I would end up living within a thousand feet or fewer of a fracking site. I never thought to ask, will I be living near a fracking site? No landlord or rental agent that I spoke to brought up fr acking at all. And so when I think about the city of Denton, a city that has two large universities, a city with a large transient population and a lot of renters , I have a lot of concern about how these people are being informed about the places where they might be living. I know that a lot of students live on campus, but definitely not all of them. And a lot of people come from out of the city and out of the state and might not think to ask about this. And so like Adam, I really want to emphasize the importance of notifying not just homeowners, but also people who are renters about fracking that might be happening where they're looking at living or to get their consent if new fracking sites are about to be developed. Ms. Monroeden, I appreciate you bringing up the website. I think I'm a sort of relatively informed citizen and I didn't know about that. And so I feel like people who are new to the city also are less likely to know about that. So in addition to making this information accessible, we also have to give people ways so that they know they can access it. And then in the few seconds I have left, I also just want to briefly bring up a concern about this phrase that seems sort of ambiguous to me, still commercially reasonable. And the fact that it seems to be the foundation on which we 're determining where fracking is going to happen in Denton. And so it might be defined somewhere, but again, I'm not exactly sure where. And I would hope that there are ways to make this definition more accessible and visible. I'm also not sure how commercial reasonableness is determined and by whom. So again, I'd like more transparency in this process. >> Thank you. >> A couple of questions from the speaker. Mayor Pro Tem Gregory. >> because I have to do this in the form of a question. Are you aware that the reason that the term commercially reasonable is being used is because that's a requirement of House Bill 40? >> Thank you for clarifying that. >> And that there is actually a definition of what they mean by commercially reasonable in House Bill 40. >> It's probably, it was also in the PowerPoint, but you could go to research it there and you would find a little bit more about it. But that's why we're focusing on that. It's one of our requirements. >> Council Member Briggs. >> In your opening, you said you support, I thought you said 100 foot setback. Did you mean- >> 1000, sorry. >> 1000, okay. I just wanted to make sure that I heard you correctly. I don't, okay. I'm a little nervous, I might have missed something. >> All right, thank you. >> Thank you. >> Brandon Finley, and then on deck will be, is it Shula Ar mentor? >> Name's Brandon Finley, I live at 806 Denton Street. 2017 seems like a really long time away right now, but it can't come soon enough, I'm sure, for a lot of us. I like jokes too. Reducing setbacks is also a joke. Down to 750 feet is great. There's a 750 foot crater in Palo Pinto County from a blow out of a well. In Arlington, they had an eighth of a mile where they had to evacuate over 100 homes when they had a blowout there. If you start looking at, we're talking about numbers here and how if you put a two acre square on a board and you start doing setbacks around it, that's a long distance, right? 660 feet is an eighth of a mile and they had over 100 homes in Arlington they had to eliminate, evacuate, same thing. Carn City had a quarter of a mile dead zone blowout when one of theirs, what? A quarter of a mile is 1,320 feet. So 1,000 feet's not really enough either. And we've gone between 1,000, 1,200, now we're talking about 750. None of that's enough to protect anybody. And if you're not going to side with the stronger cities who have stronger ordinances, then how are we going to fight HB 40 at all? I know y'all don't worry about that. But I also want to know why water sources like surface water and drinking wells aren't part of a protected use. Is that something that can be brought up to the zoning board? Anyway, we're telling these oil companies that basically they can drill wherever they want. If they get the paperwork, if they go get a waiver so that they can do shorter setbacks. The reason the setbacks are there are for protection from things like blowouts. And just letting them put it wherever they want is a joke on local control and we're going to be the punch line. So we got all that to look forward to that Arlington and Ir ving and all these other places have to look forward to. So that's all I have to say really, thanks. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay, Sheila, you're up and on deck will be Deborah Arm ator. >> Hi, my name is Sheila Armator and I live on 2003 Misty wood Lane, of course in Texas. And I was asked by a couple of, well, mostly, I was asked by Keely Briggs to attend this meeting. Because I had really good ideas about caring for Denton and what will happen in our future. And well, I made sort of like a diagram. >> Okay. >> If I, God. >> Have the overhead, please. >> And. >> They'll bring it into focus. >> Okay. >> And so I drew like a diagram of. >> There we go. >> Of something that will. >> Well, basically say what has been happening and going on . Or, so let's say you live here, the city. That is point D. The fracking site, I searched this up, I tried to draw it. Trust me, I'm not a good artist. >> So you are. >> But here's the fracking site, which is point A. >> Let's say you live in the city and here's B. Here is, let's say, a house close to the fracking site, like in the area. And let's say you live in the city, right here. Right here. And let's say you want to move here, but you don't know that the fracking site is here. So you could look over the property of the land and say, but anyways, it would not be safe to live here. Because us kids, we usually don't have a say in things like this. So if our parents want to move here, we have to move there with them. We can't stand up and say, no, we don't want to go here. Because the mostly safer option would be here. Living away from where it would be. But, yeah. Kids, we, some of my friends and I care about wildlife and nature and what's happening out there. Outside of man-made structures. And if we keep them safe, then we're also keeping us safe. The water is part of nature, part of our lives. And as long as we keep that safe, then we keep everything else out there safe. We have some people who have some questions for you. But before I recognize them, since I'm the chair, I get to speak first. Thank you so much for the email you sent me about the trees . I do remember getting that. Thank you. Councilmember Briggs. I wanted to thank you for coming and for the email on trees . And I did invite her to come speak because she has a lot of good views. And sometimes the things that kids say are things that we don't think about. And so when you said that, you do have to move where your parents go. And it might not, and sometimes children are more affected by their environment than the adults. And so I appreciate your perspective on that. Thank you for coming. Councilmember Johnson. Thank you, Mayor. Well, we can only ask questions from up here. We're not allowed to make statements. So I'm going to ask you a question. Did you know that you are amazingly cute, bright, and full of courage to come up here and talk to all of us the way that you did? So kudos to you for that. And did you also know that if you and my 7-year-old daughter Caroline got together, that your dad and me would be doing exactly what you told us to do? So stay away from my daughter. I need to have a chance. Thanks for coming. Councilmember Rodin. Is it Shula? Shula. Well, thank you so much. How old are you, if you don't mind I ask? Seven. Seven? Does that put you in what, second grade next year? Third grade. Third grade. Okay, awesome. Well, I wanted to thank you as well. You're very articulate. I love the diagram. And if you don't mind getting that to our city secretary so she can make copies for the rest of us, we'd appreciate that. Thank you for your perspective. You're welcome. Councilmember Hawkins. Thank you, Mayor. If you could get with our city staff and teach them how to properly do diagrams, that would be correct. I finally understand one. Thank you. Thank you very much, Ulyp. Thank you so much for being here. Deborah Armantor is up, and then on deck would be Lee Ram sey. Hi. I'm Deborah Armantor, and I live at 2003 Mistywood Lane here in Denton. I had this crazy dream the other night that the city of Denton was a home rule municipality. And in the dream, there was this thing called the Texas State Constitution that was subordinate only to the U.S. Constitution. And this Texas State Constitution protected our municipality's home rule. I remember those words from the dream, home rule. And it was something -- this home rule was something that couldn't be legally nullified by any law. At least it must have been a dream because in it, I attended a planning and zoning committee meeting in a room just like this one that was filled with representatives from oil and gas and residential developers. Of course, those folks argued for drastic reductions in set backs and reverse setbacks, and that made sense to me since it's not their job, like it is yours, to represent the interest of Denton residents. I realized I was probably dreaming during the discussion part when P&Z board members started railing against the very principle of zoning itself and by talking instead about personal responsibility. And that term came up several times. And you can see and hear it for yourself if you haven't already because there's an actual video of my crazy dream right up there on the City Hall website. We are a mobile society, one P&Z commissioner argued, and government shouldn't have any say on where residences can and cannot be established. I don't have the transcript, so this is an exact quote. This is a paraphrase, but his argument went something like this. If I want to build my house under an avalanche in Colorado, then that's my right and the government shouldn't tell me not to. Again, that's not an exact quote, but he said something about, you know, if I want to live under an avalanche in Colorado. Now, what people with such blatantly anti-zoning views are doing on an appointed advisory committee on zoning in the first place is quite frankly beyond me. Shouldn't the job of an advisory committee on planning and zoning be to zone the dangerous stuff away from our city's children and not to move the dangerous stuff even closer to them than they are currently allowed? I agree with the thousand foot setback rule and matching reverse setback. It only makes sense to me as it does to many others to have matching setbacks and reverse setbacks. And I do appreciate all of the hard work that the planning and zoning committee put into the ordinance, even though I object to the setbacks. And I'd like to -- I see I'm out of time. I'll just say this very quickly. I'd like you to listen when you watch the video. Obviously, it wasn't a dream. This was the reality. To listen to the words of the one P&Z member who expressed in a comment directly addressed to all of you on city council, her dissatisfaction with the decreased setbacks and reverse setback rules attached to an ordinance of which she pretty much otherwise approved. And also listen to the words of the one P&Z member sitting beside her who tried in vain to divide up the ordinance into individual, votable sections. And that didn't work because he was upvoted. Anyway. We have a question. Mayor Pro Tem Gregory. Thanks for your comments. Are you -- the speaker before you lives on Misty Wood. Are you familiar with that? Yes. She's one of my tenants. I own the mineral rights. But we're working at a deal, right? After hearing her speak and you speak, there's a phrase here. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Well, I try. I'm trying to get up to her level. Thank you. Thank you very much. Next up is Lee Ramsey and on deck will be Sandy Maddox. Lee Ramsey, 525 South Loop 288, Denton. Guys, nothing we do here is going to be easy, as you guys know. I've been -- I've watched a lot of these hearings all the way through and nothing we do is easy in this matter because there's a lot of different interests to look out for. Obviously health and safety is a very big interest and concern for everyone. And I think it is for more -- for developers and for gas and mineral people than they think. So I think it -- as I've met with a lot of the gas companies and oil companies and different projects, and the more proactive we are in working with those guys, the more -- the better solutions that can be come up with. And we've dealt with many of these through many different developments. But there's one real important thing that I don't want to forget is the land right guys, the guys who don't own the minerals. And maybe the land had been in their family for years and years and years and they're paying taxes on the surface rights and they're maintaining those surface rights and they're doing all the things they're supposed to do. But a well or a lease was drilled -- was drilled or a lease was signed before that surface right owner got possession of the land. Those guys are now in a real predicament. And I just want to remember what that -- what our setbacks are, whether it's 250 feet or whether it's 1,000 or 1,500, what the impact that has for the guy who's paying the taxes , the surface rights on that. And once you start drawing the circles around that, even if it's an old family farm, I think those guys have as much right to use their surfaces as they want. I think notification is very important. And I don't have the answer for that, but I think there's some really good creative solutions to come up with notification and let people decide if they want to live within the distance of that well or not. I support the setbacks that you guys have come forth, but I believe that notification is very important, educating the customer. And if they choose to live within those regions, then as long as they're notified, they're allowed to do that. But again, I just want to make sure we remember the surface rights guys who, once you draw all these setbacks around their property, it could take them to very minimal. Even if it's on the property adjacent to them, it's basically still taking in part of their property. So that's real important, and I don't think many people have discussed that issue. So I just wanted to bring that up. And thank you guys for your hard work. And I thank everybody for coming out and spending time, whether you're for or against it. It's good to hear from our community. So thank you guys for that. Councilmember Rhoad. Thanks, Lee, for your comments. I'm intrigued by this concept of being able to kind of work together on projects with the oil and gas companies in order to come up with solutions that maybe aren't defined in ordinance somewhere. Yeah. Is there anything that in your experience doing that that you found that can the city do something to help foster those discussions between private developer, private project guy, and the private oil and gas development that helps create some sort of platform to make those discussions better? Because we know the state gives the oil and gas guys a leg up. Any suggestions along those lines? I'll tell you, the discussions I've had with those guys, they're not the big bad wolf. Because as a land surface owner, they control the cards, right? So depending on what that lease says and depending on how it could be a sublease of another lease, you know, so it's fairly complicated. The experience I've had in meeting with the oil and gas companies, they're willing in most cases to be reasonable. I have had very positive luck in meeting with them. And they have nothing -- I have no negotiating tools. They have the rights, but just coming to them with a plan to say this is where the site -- this is where your current site is or this is where your future drill site is and working through some of that up front. I've had real success with that. And it can be done. And, you know, I'm probably not a hero on either side of the fence, but it can be done if the city sets setbacks as long as I recommend what you guys are recommending, what P and Z recommended, I mean, it can be done. But I think proper notification is needed. >> Thank you. >> Councilmember Johnson. >> Thank you, Mayor. Lee, I appreciate you being here. You brought up notification. And it wasn't talked a lot about in Darren's presentation. But when I look at the notification provisions that are in this draft from signage to notification to someone building a home or buying an existing home, it's -- I think it's significantly better. The notion in my mind that someone could, you know, buy a home and not know that there was a gas well, I can totally see that before where there was no notification required and there might have been trees blocking it. I would urge you to go and look at the notification provisions we have now because as I read through them, I would be shocked that anybody could purchase a property or a home and not know exactly where the gas well is in proximity to the property. So I think staff has done a fantastic job on the notification provisions in there, both from the gas well operator side as well as someone building or selling a home . >> Greg, I agree. I've actually read the red line version that just came out. Believe it or not, I'm that boring. I actually read the version. I agree with you. The notifications are there. And I think the city website, it just takes a little bit of research to reach out and say I'm willing to look for this. And some education to our residential realtors, you know, doing some classes through that would be some good within a region if there's oil and gas well, just to help educate and communicate. I think some of those things would be a positive action also, but I agree with you. >> Thanks for coming out. >> Thank you guys very much. >> Couple more questions. Councilmember Briggs. >> I missed what it is exactly that you do. >> We are a developer. >> Oh, you're a developer. And so can you kind of just give me an idea of the talk -- you said that working with the oil and gas isn't very difficult. Can you kind of give me an idea of a compromise that you came up with? >> Sure. We've worked through a few different ones, not just in the city of Den. Some in the counties. And when you look at your pad site sizes and each -- everybody -- the guy from Dish here earlier, you know, the thing that's important to hear from him, he was measuring from the well head and not from the edge of the pad site. So you start looking at those distances. And what we're proposing aren't -- I mean, they're different, but they're not as extremely different as we think. A thousand feet from the well head, if you have a two-acre pad site, that distance is not near as far. I don't know. It depends on if it's a rectangle, a square pad site, you know, how those distance works out. But that's mainly in condensing, you know, figuring out where their wells are drilled on that site, you know, cond ensing them more to one pad site, just as some of the incentives the cities have offered to say, okay, if we allow this, then you'll put more wells on one site, which helps more developed surface land. And that's really what the ultimate goal of a lot of developers are, is let's get some setbacks, but let's get usable land space back. And I think that's one of the biggest things to overcome. Okay. Yeah. For me, earlier, I don't know if you were here when I mentioned it, but the explosive device, the tank batteries aren't necessarily always at the well head in the middle. So for me, when I hear that, you know, 300 feet away from the explosive device is a recommended setback for that safety, I just -- it's hard for me to measure from just the well head on that situation, on those -- I understand. I think the well head is where mainly most of the issues are, but I'm not a gas guy, so I don't know that. Yeah, but I mean, as far as -- but like for the surface development, if we could -- I don't know if this is possible, but is it possible to have a moving setback, like from -- okay. This is something for discussion. Sure. Thank you very much. Councilman -- Mayor Pro Tem Gregory. Thank you, Mayor. Lee, thank you for talking tonight. I want to ask a question from your perspective, because I don't have the same perspective that you do in terms of my background and all, but I feel very comfortable asking you. Now, when you said I'm a developer, you sort of put your head down. You don't need to do that. There are some developers that come to this town that all they're trying to do is extract as much money as they can out, and they don't care much about their neighbors. You're not one of those. You're -- you've shown time and time again that while you 're going to make a profit for yourself and your client, you 're also very concerned about adding value to the whole community, and I appreciate the work you've done. Thank you so much. So here's my question for you. From your perspective as a developer, we have some rules in place, the city does, saying that you cannot build in the 100-year floodplain. And we say it's the floodplain that is the buildout flood plain. There's the current floodplain, but then we -- FEMA also projects the 100-year floodplain for when the watershed is built out. And we restrict construction in that floodplain. Does that seem like a reasonable or an unreasonable thing from your perspective as a developer? Because that can take a lot of a piece of property out of development. That's a very good point. Thanks for bringing that up. You have options with floodplain. As if you look at the lock supply building out on -- we actually move the floodplain through a LOMAR and a CLOMAR process. So when you have options of what you can do within those going through steps, it doesn't necessarily lock you in. It is a long process, an expensive process, but you do have options of mitigating that floodplain, condensing or moving that floodplain, whereas in a gas well plat, you really don 't have any options. And again, it takes a lot of time to get that done because you're working with the federal government, but you can do it through a LOMAR or a CLOMAR. So that's kind of the difference in that. All right. That's helpful. And I'll tell you, you've given me an idea in terms of whatever our setbacks or reverse setbacks end up being. It seems to me that one of the things that we might want to explore as we move ahead -- and it probably doesn't need to be with this ordinance, but it may be some type of an ad valorem tax consideration for that property that is in the setback zone. Thank you. Councilmember Hawkins. Thanks just for showing up tonight, Lee, and I really do appreciate everything you do for Denton. All the stuff that you've built is real quality, and then a lot of people don't know you're super involved with United Way and a lot of different things in Denton. Some of these negotiations that you've had with gas well companies, can you tell me how you were able to kind of work with them? Because I feel like the city has struggled in the past having a relationship like that. Were there incentives in place or is it just developing a relationship? It's all right. It's just with anybody. If I walked in here and I said I hate gas wells or I think we should build right on top of them or, you know, I went in with an attitude of one extreme or the other, I'm not ever going to get anything done. I stand before this council and before PNZ on a normal basis, and I have to move with our platting processes, move with our requirements through the city to get projects done , and I think it's going to take both sides, you know. When I walk away from here, neither side may be happy with me, and I'm okay with that because I think we have to look at what it takes to be able to represent our landowners because these gas well guys and their landowners have been here a long time. But new development is moving further out in the city and gas welling is moving further in. Whether we want to say it or not, it's going to happen. So it's not going to be easy coming up with solutions, but I think it's back to the notification thing. If people make the decisions to do certain things and they 're educated and maybe our realtors help educate that through the cells, maybe some classes through our realtor programs, and some pre-, some planning up front to say, hey , these are issues within the Barnett Shell. I think those kind of things help, but to answer your question directly, working with those guys, I've always went in with an open mind and an open attitude because I never hold the cards negotiating with those guys, with the oil and gas guys. If I go in with a good attitude, say, hey, we're going to put some boundaries, we're going to put some limits on this , they've always worked with me, whether it be cutting over a pipeline. There's certain depths over pipelines that you've got to be . So even if it's working with those kind of things, we redesign our site to make sure we don't cut over a pipeline so it's safe. So those are things that we work through from the development side on a normal basis, and it's not always easy. But if you go in with the right attitude, most of the time we've been able to get it done. Thanks, Lee. Councilman Wozni. So thanks for coming out tonight. And you're the second speaker that has said it was hard to find on our website. So I would direct staff to say, let's try to fine tune a little bit. Well, I don't mean to stop you, but it's not hard to find. I may have not communicated that clearly. If you spend a little time just looking on the website, if you just go to the website, it's not extremely hard to find . I'm sorry. I'd say let's make it easier because one speaker said it was hard. Yes, ma'am. Let's have an icon or a button or something that, boom, you 're not having to do level two, level three, level four. Just have something on that website. So as soon as you come to the city website, there it is. Yes, ma'am. I think that's a great idea. All right. Thank you. Thank you guys so much for coming down. Thank you. All right. Sandy Maddox. And then on deck will be Tara Lynn Hunter. Sandy Maddox. I live at 4008 Vineyard in the Vintage. To address this gentleman's question about disclosure, which in the meadows in the neighborhood next to me, they had a disclosure statement buried in their closing papers. My idea of adequate disclosure is to show a video to the prospective home buyer of the entire fracking process from the beginning with the drilling of the lines through flow back, through equipment leaving, through compressor, lift compressor. That's my idea of adequate disclosure, and it should take place before a contract is made on the house. Because for many people who are on a tight budget, once they're in contract and they get ready to go close on a house, they can't stop. They don't have an alternative other than closing on that house. That would be adequate disclosure. Anything else to me is just covering your butt. I pretty much want to reiterate what Sharon Wilson said. I consider city government's primary responsibility to protect the citizens of the city's health and safety, not to ensure property owners get to develop their property or that mineral owners and gas well operators reap maximum profits or any profits for that matter. The health hazards of fracking have been documented in hundreds or thousands of studies. If you are not aware of them, there is a link on frackfreed enton.com. There's many links out there to those studies. The safety issues of fracking are obvious, and we've had much media coverage about some of those issues with the blowouts, including the blowout in Denton that lasted for 13 hours and spewed thousands of gallons of toxic -- millions, actually -- of gallons of toxic chemicals into our air. In response to what one gentleman said, people who are concerned about the health and safety issues of fracking are not hysterical fanatics. They are people who are informed and have been reading the research. I really am keeping this brief this evening because you all know that I favor a 1,500-foot setback. Dallas and Flower Mound intend to, at this point, keep their 1,500-foot setbacks in place. But on this evening, I would settle for a 1,000-foot set back and a 1,000-foot reverse setback. I don't think there's any excuse for the reverse setback not matching the setback. I hope you'll protect the children of Denton who can't protect themselves, including those children whose parents would unwisely purchase a house 250 feet from a gas well disclosure or no disclosure. It's your governmental and moral responsibility to protect all of our citizens, but especially our children and our weak and vulnerable ill residents. >> All right. Thank you. Tara Lynn Hunter. And then on deck will be Rodney Love. >> Hi. My name is Tara Lynn Hunter. I live at 602 Woodland Street. The first thing I want to talk about is the variance procedures. Only the property owners are asked for permission when approving these variances. Doesn't it make sense to ask all people who live there for permission? The property owners may not even live there, and if we are talking about apartment complexes, rented homes, assisted living facilities, the property owners would be making decisions for other people's health and safety. They would be giving permission for other people's bodies to be exposed to chemicals. That doesn't make any sense to me. To further illustrate how undemocratic this is to me, even if all of the current residents agreed to the variance, they are then making decisions for those who will come after them. I say that we set our standards and we stick to them, and to avoid this very unfair situation, we should not grant variances. The Zoning Board of Adjustments is not accountable to people or to our vote. On disclosure notices, Darren mentioned that property owners will be notified, but we must include all residents. And let's see. I'm a member of the Texas Tenants Union, and through that process I've realized how vulnerable renters are in Texas. Let's not add another hazard to an already very vulnerable population. Right now the burden of education is on us. It's on our teams of volunteers to be vigilant about where is the next place that's going to be fracked, create flyers that are on expense, raise money for baseline water and air test, and then block walk and highlight to those neighborhoods what's about to happen. All of this should be, we need a pamphlet like Adam said, that really discloses exactly what chemicals are in the fr acking process and really bulk up our disclosure. Evacuation plans. When the gas well caught fire in May, people could feel the heat from their backyards. I ran into Jim Engelbrecht in the middle of the night. We both went out there to witness the gas well fire. And it was astonishing that that neighborhood wasn't evac uated. And I know people who are living even closer to wells than that one. We need a very robust evacuation plan that every neighborhood knows about. And let's see, if we're going to live with this industrial activity as HB40 forces us to do, we at least need adequate evacuation plans. The last thing I'll speak to is mandatory vapor recovery units. The council has seen the FLIR videos multiple times documenting the leakage of these wells. Vapor recovery systems should be seen as simply the cost of doing business. I know if you own a business in town or even if you're a resident, you have to pay the city a certain price to pick up your trash. Vapor recovery systems are like the industry just paying for their trash. That's the trash that's going into our lungs against our consent. So those need to be mandated. I have a lot more of it. Those are my main ones. Thanks. Any questions? Thank you. Rodney Love and then on deck will be Brad Shelton. My name is Rodney Love. I live at 700 North Austin. I'd just like to begin by saying that I'm relatively new to the old fracking issue. I've lived in Denton since 2000. I began to become familiar with the situation probably about 2008 when I first began hearing about meetings and this kind of thing. I was curious because my business involved water conservation. I was interested in environmental and human concerns and how they affected us as a community. But I was busy running a business fortunately at that time. I never went to the meetings. All of this is relatively new until the vote came along. I got involved with the vote because so many others had been pushing this forward with the meetings. I got involved. It was a time when we actually could believe that we could make a difference. Then we all know what happened since then. But I've been doing a lot of learning since then. I don't know if you all have noticed how much just in the last couple of months the science has just compounded in support of our efforts to ban fracking. I don't know if you've been watching, but for me it seems like there's just more and more science to back up, reasons to prevent this. One of my greatest evidence of this is the 97.1 talk jocks we were talking about the other day and laughing about how Oklahoma is becoming like the fr acking capital of the world next to California. Just being a little bit not quite serious there, but it's become mainstream. In light of this, in light of the science that becomes more and more compelling, and most of all in light of where we've been within the context of our story, I find this conversation to be unbelievable actually. The fact that we are now discussing going backwards is unbelievable to me. I just want to remember where we were a month ago, where we were kind of under the impression that it was in the best interest of our fight against HB 40 to repeal our ban. In other words, the retreat fight another day thing, right? That's what we were all saying. Every one of us were saying this was a bad law, at least from my understanding, and that the best way to handle it was to repeal so that we could fight another day. Why? Because we were addressing a ban on mineral rights, not surface rights. That's where the real fight was going to happen. Well, guess what? Today is the other day, isn't it? I mean, today is the new day. This is why we retreated so that we can fight, and yet I still think this is evidence that we're still retreating. And to accept that, for you all to accept this proposal is nothing other in my eyes than you continuing to retreat. And I believe this vote will make a statement about where you stand with us as a people on this more than any other vote. In the last two years, this vote tonight will tell me as a citizen whether or not you will honor your decision to move us forward. You all could be aligning with Flower Mountain. You could be aligning. Instead, you pick Fort Worth. That's what we're looking at, the weakest of the regulations, where we talked about a coalition of standing up to fight against HB 40. We're going backwards. And that's just where I stand. And this vote tonight will represent to me as a citizen, every one of you, where you stand more than anything else on this issue, going back to the initial vote to ban it. Thank you. Thank you. Brad Shelton and on deck will be Chad Blalock. Good evening, Mayor, members of the Council. I'm Brad Shel ton, 3000 Carmel Street in Texas. We've had a lot of conversations about rights and uses, pro and con, both sides of the story. And it can continue on for a long time. I mean, everybody has good regulations and every city has a regulation that they feel that's good for their citizens and for their community. What I want to talk to you about is about some land right uses. I've got an exhibit for you. I'll use that as first example. This is a project that has been thought of. You all understand where the project is at. There is a gas well located within the center of the property. It is a vertical well. They are only allowed to drill one well. More fracking, that's how the lease was designed for that property, that was written up. On here, we've got based on our current regulation of 250 foot reverse offset as the first line as indicated here, which we have been working to adhere to that current standard. That's what was in place at the time. So we've done all of our work compared, designed on that. What has come up is we've also done the line at 300 feet because at one point in time there was a conversation, let 's go to 300 feet. So we drew a line at 300 feet, which is representative of the line just right inside here. Now we've got one that's going to 500 feet and 8,000 feet. The red line indicates the 500 foot setback. This property on this side has 47 acres in it. The 500 foot setback at that point in time would take up nearly an additional 23 acres, nearly half the site at that point in time. Somewhat rendering it useless but still somewhat develop able or sellable to another user. The 1,000 foot is in the green, indicated on here. At that point in time it does take up the entire piece of property. At which point in time, you know, we look at it, we've talked to our legal team, we've talked to everybody and I'm sure everybody else has too. That becomes a taking on that part because now the whole track is 82 acres. This particular side divided by a demising area of a creek and a pond area, it renders that site completely undevelop able. The sellers, the landowners, they've been landowners for years, pretty benevolent to the city as well. They will not be able to sell that property if that was to go that way. So the concern is, is at the 225 reverse offset, the deal works because we've been working with a 250 offset at that point in time. And we're worried about reverse offsets because there's not going to be an offset because no new gas well drilling is going to occur within this area at that point in time. So in that, you know, this property here on this particular side, the property is valued at about a million seven on there. So you have to deduct back out of that what the value that we're removing from this landowner being able to sell his property at that point in time. Time's up, but I'm good, Chris. Any questions? Yes, ma'am. Okay, you have a question? Yeah. Okay, sure. Do you have your mic on? Oh, yes. That's not broken, sorry. Can you point to the line that's the 300 feet? It's almost, let me get back here in a second and I'll pull it up. It's just done. It's just right, it's a very light line, I'm sorry, because this is the way it printed out when I got on there. It's a little dotted line that comes right around the edge. There's a 200 and then there's a 250 or 300 rather, right there to that line. And that's what we've been dealing with currently. So it, okay, so it looks like it's the green, the plaque. Just inside there, yes, ma'am. And then the one right after is the 500? Yes, ma'am. And that is measured, currently how we measure is from the gas well pad or in our case there's no pad done. We're taking all this information from the well lease and it's a 200 by 200 description in the lease and Darren and staff around has all tried to help us find that and there's none existence. We're using that as a description to mark from. Okay, so on that, so the well head is kind of in the center , is that what you're saying? Yes, ma'am. And you're measuring from that center? No, we're measuring from the edge of what we determine the pad site to be, yes, ma'am. Okay, so it's from the edge. Yes, because we're trying to stick with what is current. Gotcha. And trying to apply those regulations as much as we possibly can to today's what we're trying to get to. All right, thank you. Council Member Johnson. Thank you, Mayor. So this is one of those instances where you've got an existing well, can't be re-drilled, can't be refracted. There's no site plan filed, so you're working off of a 200 by 200, you said, which is less than one acre. So I'm not really good with all the math. You're a lot better at this than me, I'm sure. If that pad site was three acres and you measured a, and it was a perfect square, say, a three acre square, then, and you measured a 500 foot reverse setback from the edge of that three acre square. So you're, so you're losing, well, it's more than half of the lots of the development. Currently with what we've got on there is 114 just proposed , what we've put together is 114 lots. Within that red circle here, that loses 36 lots. That puts you down to 70-some plus lots on there. So it removes almost a third at that point in time just by that small incremental extension of that. And I know it's hard to put that into numbers, but development costs, say, at $50,000 apiece, if you got 114 lots on there, say you get $6.5 million or so in development cost in total. You lose those 34 and you get down to 76, that goes from $ 50,000 to $73,000 in development cost per lot. At that point in time, it's not feasible because there's no way we can go, and I hadn't put the land cost into the project yet. There's no way you could take, nobody in town, nobody around the area could ever afford a lot at that point in time, which means we couldn't sell a home at that point in time. So we have to spread those costs proportionately. So the question is, in this case, you try to work with the operator, some negotiations, I mean, are they real interested in trying to help you in any way? We have in the past purchased out gas wells that were doing not so well and being able to close them in and cap them. We have initiated talks to do that the same thing with the gas well operator here. They are producing a little bit, not much, but they are notoriously for never selling one until it goes down to complete zero production. So I don't know. There's some number I'm sure that we could throw out there to purchase that and close that well in, which would benefit us, but at what number? At some point there's a diminishing return. We can spend a lot of money buying it, but we can't get enough lots back to capture our -- I appreciate you sharing this with us because, again, we throw around numbers and sometimes then you look at a picture and it really brings it home of what the ram ification of 50 feet here or there could do to somebody's property. So I appreciate you coming out. Sure. Thank you. Mayor Pro Tem Gregory. Thank you. Yes, this is helpful to see an actual proposal, an actual development in what the impact is of the various discussions. So that I'm clear, the paint circle is the 300 foot or is that the 250 foot setback? The faint circle right out there at the very edge is the 300. Okay. And beyond that goes to the 500 feet. And so then the next one is 500. So if I was looking at that and I'm looking at some of those lots, I think the difference between 300 and 500 is 200 feet so that those lots -- About 180 foot deep lots. So that those lots are about 200 feet deep. Yes, sir. All right. So but the well's already there. Correct. So what we're talking about is the reverse setback, the build to setback. And we have discussed everything from some citizens are saying no difference. It's got to be 1,000 either way. Correct. Some folks are saying the staff proposal was 500 and there 's been some discussion about 300 because of some discussion with our fire marshal about the distances. So I'm seeing now 300 you could get -- you could do what you were planning to do. At 500 you would lose 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Looks like maybe about 16. Well, there's 36. It depends on how the ordinance comes out, okay, because in some instances it's been read to the property line and some have been to the habitable residents. Right. So there's a disparity between the two. So if it's to the lot line, it encompasses much more lots. Okay. That's helpful. Understand? So if it's to the residents, the residential structure, it changes that complexity again. So it depends on how that's written up at that point in time. I'm just wanting to ask those questions to clarify. You know, if you could give that to the city secretary so we could get copies of that. Sure. That would be great. Thank you. Councilmember Briggs. Is your client the owner of this property? Are they also the mineral rights owner? Yes, they are. Okay. Thank you. All right. Seeing no more questions. Thank you, Brad. I appreciate it. Thank you. Coming down. Okay. We have Chad Blalock and on deck is Brad Blalock. Chad Blalock? Nope. Ed Sof. And then on deck will be Kelly Barr. Good evening. Ed Sof, 1620 Victoria Drive in Denton. Ms. Wozniak mentioned PDs and MPC districts and I'd like to revisit that for a minute and ask you to revisit it as well. Under number four in section 35, 5, 10, 3, 4A says under this is special procedures for projects in PD and MPC districts. Says the operator and the surface owner of land in a PD or MPC district may present a unified plan that assures the compatibility of surface development and gas well development of the property. And then it goes on to say the plan may establish different drilling and production site and reverse setbacks that vary from those prescribed in section 35, 5, 10, 2. The plan, if approved by the City Council, shall be incorporated into the zoning district regulations. So what we're actually talking about here is a variance. Only this variance isn't going through the zoning board of adjustment, it's going through the City Council. And the question is here, two questions. Number one, does this come with a public hearing? Because there's no mention of a public hearing. And number two, if this can be done with PDs and MPC districts for variances, why can't it also be done with all other variances as well? PDs and MPCs are probably the areas with the greatest density and therefore the greatest concern about danger. So I hope you will revisit that and make it a little more specific and consider the variance idea because right now it is not acceptable. So that was my main concern. One part of it. The other is that in joining with what other people have said, I hope that you will find a way to go back to what staff initially recommended for setbacks and reverse setbacks and which P&Z cut down. Also, I would encourage you to take a stand for all of us and go back to the 1200 foot setback. I don't think -- I don't see any reason why we can't ally ourselves with people, other cities that are also in the same situation. There's strength in numbers and we need to cultivate those sort of relationships. Thank you very much. I have a question. When you say go back to the 1200 foot setback, you're referring to the current ordinance that has the 1200 foot setback. Yes, the current ordinance. The current ordinance also has a reverse setback. So are you saying that those two should be equal or are you saying go back to -- No, I'm saying go back to those numbers. Okay. Yes. All right. Okay. Thank you. Next we have Kelly Barr and then Charles Brown. Okay. Hi, all. I'm just your friendly neighborhood Russian agent here to talk to you again. I'm Kelly Barr. I live now at 1005 West Hickory. So it's clear from the discussion tonight that we are ham strung by HB40, the goal of which was to maximize opportunities for oil and gas development. But it also looks to us, a lot of us, that we've been sold out or maybe sold short by the Planning and Zoning Commission whose goal it seems to be is to maximize opportunities for land developers and for realtors in Denton. So here we are again, reasonable people in an extreme situation. What do we do? I think the question, at least to my mind, is where is the public good in all of this? That seems to me the question that you all are facing right now. So the assumption from some of the speakers here tonight, I think, is that it seems to be that all land ought to be developed in the city of Dent on as though it's our imperative as a city to leave no soil unturned. And this is certainly the motive for developers in doing what they do, and that's all right. But surely this is not the sole motivation for the general population of Denton. Our duty is to be a great and a healthy city and not merely a big or a populous city. And if the city is going to invest hundreds of thousands or many millions of dollars even to help finance economic development projects and attract businesses and people to settle in Denton, then the city has a corresponding responsibility to protect those people and those businesses from clear and present dangers, whether these are dramatic dangers like the multiple explosions that we've had near homes in the past year, most recently in April, or whether that's a more lurking sort of hidden danger like prolonged long-term exposure to air pollution or water pollution. I understand that developers are allowed to express how this ordinance will affect them, and I'm glad that they've come here to say that tonight, but I'm sure they have to realize how insulting this is for those of us who have been fighting for the past five years to deal with the issue of fracking in Denton for them to come up and show the plans that they have for doing exactly what we've been dealing with as a major problem in this city for the last five years, which is building homes right next to existing oil and gas operations. We've heard over the past several years, multiple years, you all have heard how much problems this causes for the people who are living in these places, health problems, quality of life problems, intractable things that they've had to live with and endure. So we've already been down that road. Let's not have to reh ash that old debate. So I want to reiterate here that you, the Council, and we, the citizens, are committed to fighting against fracking in Denton and that we're committed to winning that fight. But I'm also reminded here that the overriding public virtue in a democracy is cooperation and not competition. So there's no question that fracking is dangerous, and there's also no question that a majority of citizens in Denton voted against fracking in the city limits. So my proposal is that we can work together towards this ultimate goal by first passing the strongest ordinance that we can. And I understand that we need to write ordinances that take HB40 into account, but that doesn't mean that we have to kowtow to the bill, specifically when it remains so vague what this commercial reasonable requirement means. Why should we conceive ground before we have to? So I actually have a number of specific proposals for am ending the ordinance. Would it be all right if I? How many do you have? I'll go through the most important ones. Okay, real quickly, because we have a couple questions as well. Okay. So definitely 1,000 foot setback requirements, and I agree that those initial setback requirements should match the reverse requirements. I think that's just patently reasonable. I don't think we should go under 750 for variance. I don't think that makes any sense. I also think that we should prohibit outright storage and evaporation pits, that we should reinstate the enhanced standards for surface developers and the procedures for reducing reverse setbacks, because it doesn't make any sense why those were eliminated in the first place. We need procedures to hold people accountable, because this is something that we've been complaining about for a while and something that we haven't had the leverage to deal with as citizens for the past few years. We need water, soil, and air testing before and after fr acking operations begin. We need electric motors for compressor stations, not diesel motors, and maybe they should have to buy wind power credits from the DME. I think that would be a very good idea. That would certainly help our initiative in moving to more sustainable sources of electricity. We should prohibit -- oh, sorry. I already said that one. We should also expand our inspection capacity. We simply don't have enough gas well inspectors. That's a real problem. We need more capacity in being able to hold developers and operators to the rules that we set. Let me go ahead and let the questions go in. If you could, maybe either make a copy for the city secretary to distributors or send it to us in an email. Sure. We'd love to see those. Yes. I will. Thanks. Councilmember Johnson. Thank you, Mayor. I appreciate you coming out. You're always so articulate and passionate, obviously. Thanks. I want to make sure I understand your recommendation, though. So your recommendation was to go back to our previous or what was our last ordinance, our 2013 ordinance, the setbacks and reverse setbacks on that one? Is that what you said? Well, I think we should make it stronger because that ordinance didn't even take into account all of the things that were recommended even by the first task force that was set out to work on this issue. So I'm just saying, so setbacks and reverse setbacks, what were the numbers that you were -- because you said I think we should go back to those. What -- Well, I think we should go to 1,000 setbacks and reverse setbacks, no less than 750 for a minimum. Okay. If we do a minimum. I am very partial to the recommendations that we should have no variances at all. I just haven't researched that in very much depth. So you want 1,000 on the setback and 1,000 on the reverse? I think so, yeah. So a couple questions for you. Do you own the property where you live? No. Do you own any vacant land anywhere? Do you own property? Nope. Do you live within 1,000 or 1,500 feet of a gas well? I don't. So your -- so my summary from that is you're protecting somebody who is not here. I mean, you're not here speaking on behalf of yourself, right? No. Because you've done a lot of research about this. Yes. This isn't about you is what I'm getting at, right? No. So -- But I know people. Yeah. So here's why I asked the question. All right. Here's why I asked the question of you, because I want to make sure to differentiate, because I don't think the questions about the reverse setbacks or the comments I've heard from people are about cowering to or allowing surface developers to develop every square inch of our land. I think some of the concerns specifically about the reverse setbacks are the rights of the person who owns the property, right? Because that's where -- this is tough. Sure. And so trying to balance -- okay, so if a family owns 100 acres, that picture up there, they may not have a problem. They may not think that this makes you sick. They may not -- you know, they may not think that it's bad, right? But they own that land. And so the question really becomes for us as government is do we have a right to go and tell them they can't use it? So, I mean, I just want to differentiate, because it's really easy to, like, talk about the big bad developer, but we're talking about landowners, not necessarily, you know, the person that is doing this to make a living. It's about somebody that owns something and whether they have a right to do it. So I just want to make sure that, you know, as you're thinking through this, right, you said you have a lot more to study up on. That's what we're struggling with, right? It's not about money. It's not about making sure people can make money. It's about somebody's rights. Well, I don't know if I believed that last part, but I will say that my point here is not to paint developers as the big bad wolf. That's certainly not what I'm suggesting, right, because I live in an apartment complex that was built by someone, and I'm really grateful that they built it, because I really enjoy living there. I also actually love my landlord, which I think is kind of a rarity here. My point is that the tension here seems to be the rights of individual landowners versus the public good, and I think the goal for you as the city council, what you ought to be looking to, the standards that you ought to be looking to in making this policy is the public good. So I mean, someone brought up earlier, actually it was a developer that brought up a couple of speakers ago, that you have this area that's set aside for flood control, and you don't allow people to build in that area for flood control because it's a dangerous area in which to live. Maybe there are some exceptions that are made here and there, and there's a process of negotiation, and okay, great, that's democracy, right? What I'm saying is that gas well development is more analog ous to that than it is to having like an industrial park beside a neighborhood or a factory beside a neighborhood, although those can present clear and present dangers, right? We already acknowledge that there are some land uses that shouldn't be allowed, and we've learned to deal with that over the years. Well, you've done a fantastic job of answering my question. I appreciate it. Thanks. Seeing no more questions, thank you very much. I appreciate that. Thank you very much for coming down. Charles Brown is up, and then Nicole, I'm going to probably mispronounce this. Is it Chakrik? Nicole? It's all right. Good. May I have a view? Who has it? May I? Yeah, just leave it there, and they'll come in on it. Yeah, there you go. I'm Charles Brown, and I live at 2908 Pennsylvania Drive here in Denton, and I'm coming to you today really as an owner and want to address the reverse setbacks only. I'm not into the fracking or the others, but I own a piece of property here outlined in gold. By the way, for those that you'd like to see, this yellow line that goes completely around this, that's about 100 acres. We wanted to know what one acre with a thousand foot set back would hurt or help. That is 100 acres right there. Because, now I'm about 600 feet from a well site, but because I'm within 600 feet of the well site, I found out three weeks ago after visiting with the city, I thought I had my land sold. The city says not only you do not have it sold, you can't even build on it. You cannot build one single structure on this piece of property because it is too close to this well that's across the street and some 600 feet from my property. I've been paying about $30,000 a year property tax on this piece of property. I've had zero income come in from this piece of property. I bought this piece of property in 2003. Not such a great investment after all. I would be very upset if I will never be able to sell this property or build anything on it. A 225 setback would, reverse setback, excuse me, would allow me to then develop this. By the way, a single story assisted living was going to two buildings were going to land. I've lost my contract, but if the city council would make this 225 feet active upon its next meeting, I think I can sell this property. By the way, about five years ago it was rezoned in RMU. I was not told five years ago that it didn't matter what I was on it because I could use it. That by the city, I'm just real, I'm hurt by that. I've done a lot of things. I've just been ignorant. Obviously I shouldn't have been. I guess that's about all. I think you understand my situation. But there are hundreds of people with this problem. It's not just me. If we go to a thousand foot setback, how many are there? 153 well sites in the city of Denton, is that what I was told? 153 well sites. Not more. Times, we were told 100 acres. That's over 15,000 acres and the city of Denton would never be able to develop. Does that make sense? The city has a problem and I'm not threatening anything, but if I'm not allowed to use this, I will join with other people in suing the city. This is not right, what has happened. I appreciate your courtesy and I appreciate being able to talk here tonight. Councilmember Hawkins. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Mr. Brown. Did you speak at PNZ? I did. I thought the chair had recognized to you that there may have been some confusion about this and staff was going to speak to you about some possible confusion. Did anything come of that? If that was said, I don't recall it nor has anybody spoken to me. Okay. They may have talked about it for some reason. But not to my presence that I know of. Okay. All right. Thank you. Councilmember Johnson. Oh, I'm sorry. No, I'm good. Thank you, Mayor. You bet. Councilmember Johnson. Mr. Brown, I appreciate you coming out because this does highlight one of the real issues with this. And so you've got a property that's adjacent to this. Do you receive or did you ever receive any mineral interest income as a result of owning this property from either of those wells? No. So the mineral interest was gone before I purchased the property. Thank you. Okay. Councilmember Rodin. Yeah, I guess it was along the lines of Councilmember Haw kins' question. I mean, are you aware our current reverse setback is 250 feet? Why was I told that -- well -- Well, I guess that's -- 250 feet is correct. I apologize. From the pad site. Correct. The pad site on my property right now that's caused me a problem is outlined by this gray. Everything in gray is a pad site. And the oil and gas company will not rescind and make that just a two-acre site. Gotcha. Okay. So that puts me way outside. Yeah, it's not the reverse setback issue. It's a platting issue. So, yeah, hopefully if you can linger and we can get maybe someone from staff to get us contact information so we can make sure someone works with you on that. I appreciate it. You bet. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Okay, Nicole. And then Michael Hinnan is on deck. Nicole Chokrak, 1223 Highland Park Road. I'll begin with what I want to talk about regarding operation standards. Ron spoke on this before extremely well, so I'll be quick. I want to see mandatory vapor recovery units, no open pits, more gas inspectors, one to nearly 300 gas wells is not enough, baseline water and air testing, and community notification not only to property owners but to tenants as well as the city at large. Speaking on behalf of the setback distance, I'm pushing for a 1,000-foot setback. It should stand in court. It meets the criteria of HB40 as reasonable. I think we should accept nothing less. What I really want to communicate today is the idea of commercially reasonable, which I've spent a good deal of today trying to understand. It's clear how vague commercially reasonable is. I've been trying to further understand it in order to propose suggestions for this ordinance that could bypass unnecessary litigations while simultaneously being community reasonable, which I think is very important. Excuse me. I thought if we could figure out the cost of each well versus the amount produced, we might be able to quantify a profit industry will make and remove problem wells that do not reflect a decent setback of 1,000 feet. I spoke to Dr. Frye early about this, and he explained to me that when gas prices are high, the commercially reasonable is a much lower amount, but if gas prices are low, then commercially reasonable would likely not be something ten able to the industry. This shows us how easily commercially reasonable can change , so why police ourselves? Let industry prove they are commercially reasonable. We need to be able to figure out and estimate the cost of drilling. I believe this could help explain what commercially reasonable might actually mean if all factors are calculated into the equation, including environmental and health damages from all activities and individual facilities, along with long-term effects. In a populated area like Denton, we can expect to see greater damages. Until these questions can be answered, and I believe they can be answered, we need to reconsider the proposed ordinance and at the minimum enforce a 1,000-foot setback and reverse setback and apply the many great suggestions proposed by the people of this community today. Thank you. All right. Thank you very much. Appreciate that. Michael Hinnan, then Chance Wilson. Good evening. Michael Hinnan, 724 Thomas Street in Denton. I do live within 1,000 feet of a gas well site. I want to speak first, though, to the issues of inspection enforcement provisions that are in the ordinance, specifically 35.22.5 and 35.22.8. I think that, as I understand it, 35.22.8 under remedies and enforcements allows the fire marshal and the gas well inspector to make inspections of these well sites. I think that 35.22.5 should be altered so that it also refers to the fire marshal being able to, instead of just the gas well inspector. We should have both of those people in 35.22.5 as well. And also, I would like to see that provision in item B, 35. 22.5B. It refers to periodic inspections. I would like to see the words "and/or random" after the word "periodic." Periodic and/or random inspections so that the well operators don't necessarily know when the fire marshal or the gas well inspector is coming to enforce and inspect these gas well sites so that we don't have a situation where they can prepare in advance to remedy any ordinances, requirements that they may not be following. I'd like to go back also to the issues of setbacks. I agree with the long setbacks. I was in favor of the 1,200 feet also, but certainly I would, under these circumstances, agree to 1,000 foot setback, both for forward setback and for reverse setback. And with regard to members of the council, with all due respect to members of the council, I understand you have certain specific requirements that deal with the issues of conflict of interest. But again, I would respectfully suggest that if there are any members on the council who have a potential conflict of interest as to their own business or private interests in land development or in gas wells, that those council members should recuse themselves and/or abstain from voting. Thank you. -Councilmember Hawkins. -Thank you, Mayor. Thank you for speaking. I'm starting to get to know you here. I don't know how to phrase this as a question, but I own restaurants in town, and the inspections definitely are not announced. I mean, you could, you know, the health department comes in there, and you just got a delivery or you got a bunch of dishes stacked up, your score is probably not going to be as high. And so I just thought that would be expected, that we would just go randomly pick them, but I guess there is a difference in this situation. There's a, they're private property, and you have to be let in and shown things, and I've kind of started to understand why there's a difference, and there needs to be an arrangement to show the inspection . I'm not necessarily saying that it's the best way to go about doing it, but it is different, I think, than other industries. -I agree that it is, Councilman Hawkins. However, I think it's perfectly reasonable for the fire marshal and/or the gas well inspector to call the operator's representative and say, "We want to inspect your gas well today at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. I want somebody over there and have your people there in time to monitor the site to make sure that there's nothing going on there that would be an emergency attempt to remediate any kinds of violations." -Well, when the public hearing aspect of this is over, if we could get staff to address that, that'd be good. How much of a notice they would actually need, that'd be positive. Thank you. -Thank you. -Oh, we've got one more question. Councilmember Briggs. -I just wanted to check with Darren, and calling and scheduling a day, is that reasonable? Is that something that you guys have done or can do? -Sure. I tell you what, can you address that after we close the public? I just want to get through the speakers, yeah. If that's okay, then we'll answer that question. Any other questions? -Thank you, Michael. -All right. Thank you. Thank you, sir. -Chance Wilson, and then on deck is Ed Ireland. -I am Chance Wilson, 1209 County Road, 1304 Bridgeport, Texas. I am the field land supervisor for North Texas for Devon Energy Production Company. Once again, I appreciate the opportunity to speak before the council. Earlier this evening, I understand that staff and the gas well administrator suggested certain revisions to the current proposed gas well ordinance. Devon and city staff discussed many points of clarification , which I hope are included in those changes, and a few of those items that I would like to highlight are the following. Item number one, with respect to the current existing wells , Devon requests and staff agrees that revisions should be made to certain sections and definitions of the ordinance to ensure that Devon may continue its current operations on existing wells and to clarify any ambiguity on what an operator can do within the city to its existing wells. Item number two, the proposed maximum size for existing and newly constructed pad sites is two acres. Devon's particular drilling contractor actually requires pad sites for one well to be just slightly over two acres. And where Devon drills multiple wells from a pad site, that pad site increases incrementally. Also, for those existing sites that Devon plans to submit for approval for the development site plan, Devon believes that the fact that the sites are currently larger than two acres is sufficient evidence to demonstrate a need. If the city truly wants operators to condense their operations, the pad site size must be larger. With all that said, the maximum size of a pad should not be mandated by city ordinance. Whether the size of a pad is reasonable is the burden of the operator to prove in a court of law and not subject to municipal regulation. Item number three, any reverse setback should be equal to the drilling and production setback. Devon can drill and operate safely in close proximity to homes while protecting health safety welfare of Ditton residents. But if the city wants a setback, it should be equal for both parties. To conclude, Devon wants to thank you for your consideration on these proposals and the work that has gone into this issue. While there are additional provisions in the ordinance that Devon sees as problematic, we will continue to demonstrate our willingness to work with the city, mineral owners, surface owners, and commercial and residential developers for many years to come. And with that, I'll be glad to answer any questions. Council Member Roden. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you for your comments. It seems reverse setbacks create strange bedfellows in the city of Denton. On this issue, where you're aligning for asking for equal setbacks both ways, how does that affect your operations one way or the other in terms of the reverse setbacks? Why is that important from an oil and gas development perspective? With the setbacks being equal, the operators and developers would be encouraged to cooperate. If the waiver process was equal, we would then be encouraged to sit down and work things out like one of the developers said. When they're unequal, that's not the case. So, but in terms of just in terms of what you do from your operations, the reverse setback, is it impeding your operations? As proposed, if development encroached on a gas site, it would then prohibit us from drilling new wells because there's not even a waiver process. If you take PNZ's proposal for us to even get down to the reverse setback. So if there was a provision that in the event that there was a reverse setback granted up to whatever, hypothetically 250, 300 feet, whatever that was, but there was a provision that allowed the operator to continue drilling in that, or in other words, their setback changed as a result of that, that would resolve that issue for you? If our setback then became the reverse setback, that would resolve the issue. Okay, thanks. Mayor Pro Tem Gregory. Thank you, Mayor. Mr. Wilson, thanks. Well, you know that we're interested in trying to combine and have more than one well at a site so that we don't have as many gas well sites. So for every additional well that you drill, does that mean an additional tank battery? Or do you not always necessarily have to have a battery per well? That would be dictated basically on the area within the barnette. It's different. So some areas produce more liquids, some areas produce less. So it's really not dependent on the number of wells necessarily? Most of the time each tank will have it, or each well will have a production tank. Okay. Sometimes there's multiple tanks per well, but that would vary. Okay. So then it would be really hard to say a drilling site with five wells needs X amount of acreage because you don't know in the abstract how much liquid is there mixed in with the gas, and you're not going to know how many tanks you're going to need. Is that right? Correct. Is there any average? I don't have any. I'd be glad to get back with you on information about that, but I don't know that off the top of my head. All right. Help me understand a little bit more about your concern about the reverse setbacks and your ability to have some say if there's an application going in for a reverse setback or somebody building too close that makes it difficult for you to do your work. Well, as stated, I mean, we have made a good reputation and will continue to work with the developers on issues, but when a city allows a developer to put a home within 225 as proposed by P&Z, but then the setback you impose on our drilling operation is 500, 750, whatever it may be, we are then prohibited from exploring for minerals off of that pad site by this ordinance. So what's the closest -- how close can folks build to you and you still be able to do your operation? Devin can operate safely within the confines of our pad site. So if we've got a three-acre pad site, we can operate within the confines of that pad site. Okay. Thanks. Councilmember Johnson. Thanks for coming out. There we go. Thanks for coming out. Would you acknowledge that there's a bit of a difference? So now I understand where you're coming from on the equal setbacks, which is simply your concern about not being able to continue to drill on the pad site if the protected use comes to you. I heard you tell Councilmember Rodin if that setback became equal because they came to you, you're okay because you can operate within the confines of your pad site, right? But would you acknowledge, though, there's a bit of a difference in terms of if I choose to buy a home 250 feet from the edge of your pad site, I made that choice. That's a little different than I have the home and the wells coming to me, meaning I didn't really have a say in that matter as a home owner. So I just want to make sure the differentiation between the two scenarios, you think they should be equal just to protect your ability to operate, but it's not equal in terms of that homeowner. If you come to 1,000 feet from the homeowner or the home owner comes 1,000 feet from you, that's the same net effect for that homeowner. It's different. Am I making sense? He made the choice to buy that house there. He didn't make the choice for you to come and drill there. So that's the, I think, what makes it different. So as long as what I hear you saying is, as long as you have the ability to continue to drill on the site, the protected use coming 225 from the edge of your, or whatever the reverse setback is from the edge of your pad site, you're okay with that, as long as you can continue to drill . I agree with your latter statement. Okay. But in your first comment, though, that property owner would have bought in that lot or that house, and they should have been educated enough that they didn't own the minerals. There was an existing oil and gas lease on the property. And so they, in essence, bought it knowing that that was a possibility in the future. Okay. Thanks. Councilmember Hawkins. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Chance. I'm learning a ton about these production sites, but I've got a lot to learn still. So can you talk a little bit more about these production tanks? Can they be located anywhere on a site? Are they easy to move? Or just talk a little bit about that ? They're definitely not easy to move once they're, you know, put in place, for sure. You know, the location can vary, but there are safety requirements, and I'm not sure of those, on turning radiuses for trucks and whatnot that are hauling the liquid off of those. So that's usually why they're on the outer perimeter of the pad, because you've got to use the pad for your trucks to get in and out. And if you put the tanks in the middle, then you've got nowhere for your trucks. Gotcha. Okay. And that pretty much answers it. Thank you. Councilmember Briggs. Speaking of trucks, do you have any idea how much a truck weighs that you guys use? Not off the top of my head, no. Is there any way that you can get that information to us? Absolutely. Okay. Thank you. I have one question, Chance. I know that I had an occasion to sit down with -- oh, name escapes me -- Gilbert. And I think it was you as well. Anyway, one of the questions we were thinking about or that we're having to address is, especially with development coming to the well site, is continued access to that well site. I believe I was shown a development where somehow Devin had a gas well pad site, and literally it was smack dab in the middle of a residential neighborhood with really no way to get in and out of that site, but for going through not arterials or collectors, but really residential roads. So from a reverse setback or encroachment of development perspective, is that something that's important to you as a -- I'm not saying you're going to represent the whole industry , but for your company is that that ingress egress has to be preserved in a way that does not require necessarily your service vehicles and work over operations to traverse truly purely residential neighborhood streets. Is that -- you would rather not do that, is that correct? Absolutely. We would prefer not to traverse the same streets that your kids are playing basketball on and tag in. Absolutely. Okay. All right. Okay. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. I see no more questions. Thank you. Thank you. All right. We have -- Ed Ireland is up, and then on deck is Chris Rossburn. Good evening. Ed Ireland, 777 Taylor Street in Fort Worth, Texas. In thinking back on this, I was on the City of Denton Gas Task Force. I think our first meeting was in 2011. So this process has been going on quite a while. And it was interesting to me to sit here tonight and listen to, I guess, what was just characterized as strange bedfellows. I think that certainly is the case that it seems like practically everyone here tonight that is spoken is calling for equal setbacks. And Chance just did a really good job with that, so I won't totally recreate that argument. But it is important that the setbacks be the same for -- or if not, so that the -- whatever the reverse setback is, that does -- once that's triggered, that becomes the setback for future wells. So that's the only logical way that the operation can continue. So that's an important argument. But let me just hit a couple of other things that I don't think has been mentioned tonight. There are a couple of areas in your ordinance that I think you could really simplify and possibly avoid any future issues about commercially feasible. For example, you have a provision that requires a 30-foot high sound wall. Just -- that's the requirement. But elsewhere, you have pretty detailed requirements about noise levels, as was just mentioned a little while ago. So instead of specifying -- if you have the noise level, instead of specifying what the sound wall will be, let the sound engineer design that. It could be that a 30-foot high wall all the way around is not necessary, and therefore it is not required or would be redundant to have in your ordinance. A similar requirement in there is for masonry walls. A masonry wall may or may not be a logical requirement, especially in a remote area. But also just from an aesthetic standpoint, a masonry wall is not necessarily the best solution. There could be a lot of other ways to screen a site. So I think there are just a few other areas like that that you may want to take a look at just to simplify your ordinance and to avoid any issues in the future about the commercially reasonable aspect. Well, we do have a question, Mayor Pro Tem Gregory. You know, I didn't expect that I would hear anything new after all of the times that we've had people talk, but I've counted up five new thoughts or new ideas about this tonight. And one of the ones I heard just a minute ago, and I wanted to ask you about, a citizen said regarding this definition imposed upon us by the state of commercially reasonable that that definition might be different for people in the industry based on the market price for gas. Is that accurate that commercially reasonable might change that definition or might change based on what you're able to sell it for? I think that's one component, but there can be a lot of components of that calculation, and it's going to vary not only by that, but by municipality. So what might be commercially reasonable in one municipality may be totally different from another. So there's not going to be a statewide standard about commercially reasonable. Explain that, please. Well, for example, if a setback requirement in one city might in a court be deemed to be commercially reasonable, but that same setback could be different in another municipality, or a commercially reasonable setback could be different in another municipality. Simply because of the opinion of the court or because of the -- the entire situation, I mean, everything that will be considered to go into that calculation for that particular area. So I think that's why HB 40 did not specify any kind of a statewide standard because it can vary. Okay. The other -- one of the other things imposed upon us by the state was when they're talking about that, that it's commercially reasonable as determined by a rep utable and prudent operator. Is that an acknowledgment that all operators aren't necessarily prudent and good players? I would defer that answer to the attorneys, to your -- to the attorney. Really, I think that's just -- that's legal terminology that has maybe some precedent in law or in the state -- at the state level. Okay. Good deflection. Thank you. Councilmember Hawkins. Thank you, Mayor. I'm trying to understand what you just said. If it's found that Fort Worth's ordinance is commercially viable, and let's say Denton had the exact same ordinance, are you saying that it could possibly be found that it wouldn't be commercially viable here just because it's in a different place? Well, there again, I would defer to the attorneys on that because -- but that's my understanding is that it's not -- there's not necessarily one standard that would apply in South Texas or in Denton or anywhere else. That it's -- the total circumstance of a situation is going to have to be considered, and that's going to be litigated or adjudicated or whatever the proper term is. I don't know how that makes sense to me. Thank you, though, very much. Councilmember Riggs. My point -- my sentiments exactly. I don't really understand that too much. So you're saying that most of these definitions are more than likely going to have to be determined in a court, and that could mean something different for each city. Is that what I'm hearing? I mean -- Well, that's my understanding. But again, I think that's -- that entire argument is the legal side of it, and I really am not qualified to -- To say it. Okay. And next, I watched the P&Z, and you brought up the fence again. What does that mean to you? Because you've repeated it, and when I heard you speak in P &Z, you were talking about how lovely a wire fence is with, like, weeds and grasses. So, I mean, can you kind of explain to me what that means to you guys? Well, I was bringing that up mainly from the standpoint of referring to what I -- I'll just put in the category of overregulation, that an operator has to come to the city for an SUP anyway. And so when you set up these standards that are hard and fast, you will put in a masonry wall, no matter where the site is located, may not be necessary, may not be commercially reasonable, and it may not just be the best choice from an aesthetic standpoint. So I was just using that as an example of some areas in your proposed ordinance that I think just may be overregulation that just aren't required. So I have a question for you as far as the masonry versus the wire. Do you feel that they're equally safe? Yes, I think so. I mean, the ones I've seen, I mean, you have a fence. Basically, it's a fence that is going to permit someone from just walking onto the property, and I think that's the point of it. Okay. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. Chris Rossburn, and then on deck is Morgan Larson. Good evening, Council. My name is Chris Rossburn, 2113 Em erson Lane here in Denton. I'm a property owner. I'm a taxpayer. I'm a citizen. I'm a business owner. I'm an employer. And I have a vested right, along with hopefully everybody in this room, to get out from under the couple of lawsuits that we're under from the state and the Oil and Gas Association. But I don't want to get out from under those only to get into others. And I think that's a real possibility. We have a 1,000-foot reverse setback. It's going to blow Brad's development out of the water. AC Adam has a 30-acre tract. If you have a 1,000-foot set back there, it's going to blow that tract out of the water. It's going to render both those properties somewhat worthless. So property values in Denton are in the minimal 20 up to 125,000 or so an acre. And you can do the math on that. You take those tracts and reduce those down to minimal value. That's going to take those dollars off the tax rolls. And those property owners are not going to be happy. And they're going to be looking to gather together and file suit that the city is going to have to defend on that. So I'm a proponent for basically what the P&Z proposed the other day. And I was here for the duration of that in the range of 750 -foot and then 2-1/4 to 300-foot reverse setbacks. And let the property owners develop their properties and keep those properties on the tax rolls and not create more suits. Thank you. We have a question. Councilmember Briggs. You mentioned property values going down. I am a homeowner in an existing neighborhood. And if a new well were to be drilled within proximity, I assume that my property values would go down significantly. So I think we're all kind of impacted by this. So I just wanted to -- I don't think that anyone -- we have a lot of people here that are going to be impacted. And I'm honestly tired of people telling me and us that we 're going to be sued. I mean, no one's going to be happy. I mean, not completely. It's not going to be perfect. But we're going to try the best we can. Well, the whole point is commercially reasonably acceptable . And that's a real dilemma is to try and define that. It is. A thousand feet is three football fields. I mean, that's -- you look from here that way, three football fields. That's a lot of land in between here and there. That's a lot of distance. Right. But that's a new well. I mean, if we're talking about currently the things that we 're talking about, that's not -- we're not talking about a reverse setback with that one at the moment. I mean, that's -- that's what we're talking about. Well, there's been proponents here tonight, 1,000, 1,200, 1 ,500 foot reverse setbacks. If we're equal. Yeah. That's three or more football fields. That's just a lot of land that can't be developed. What are we going to do with it? And it's going to be off the tax rolls. Okay. Is there a question for -- I'm good. No. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. All right. Morgan Larson. And then on deck will be Emily Smith. Hi, guys. My name is Morgan Larson. I live at 2210 Westwood. Even though I was a little rowdier early and I'm still row dy, I do appreciate you guys working with us until late into the night. So thank you for doing that. I do stand by my -- if Kelly Barr is still here, am I still -- my Russian comrade over there? I would -- and with Ron and with Adam Bruegel and with Sharon Wilson and Tara Lynn and Nicole and the other wonderful community members that we have here in that I do not -- I want mandatory vapor recovery units. I want no pits, no baseline water. I want baseline water and air testing, community-wide notifications publicly, very publicly, extremely publicly. Everybody should know within the city limits who is doing what where. Let's see. And I agree that the fracking process should be shown to new homeowners completely, 100%. If we're okay with it, then there should be nothing to hide . I also agree -- and this is more of like a conversation because there's some things that I'm a little bit confused on. How many -- how many gas well inspectors do we have in the city? Well, we can answer that during the staff portion. Sure. We just can't. Sure, sure, sure. Right now. Sure, sure. Can we answer that? No, do we wait until the staff? Okay. Well, let's take this down so we can answer them all at once. Sure. My question is how many gas well inspectors do we have currently? Yeah. How many gas well inspectors do we have currently? I'm going to go ahead and I could make an ass of myself, but I'm going to go ahead and assume that the number is very low. And you know what? That's okay for the time being, but why not open that up as an economic opportunity for Denton, right? We need to create more jobs. How about we create jobs around gas well inspectors? Just saying, I'm also a master naturalist for Dallas County . I'm a master gardener for Denton County, and I'm an environmental educator at Lewisville Lake Environmental Learning Area. I'm speaking on my own behalf, but I also want to read to you and to everybody else in the room a quick definition. Ecosystem. Whoops. Sorry. Smart phones are not so smart. Ecosystem. Interacting as a system is a community of living organisms in conjunction with non-living components. Non-living components being air, water, and soil. Okay. So as much as economic development is great, it needs to be talked about how these developments are not sustainable in of themselves. I'm looking at who was the person who spoke to -- basically everybody who's put a map of development here on this. It's not sustainable for our ecosystem, period, to have those in general. Okay? So if gas wells are affecting this development, well, these developments are not sustainable for us in general. We're talking about runoff water. We're talking about the deterioration of our ecosystems. I know I've got to wrap up, but my point is that these aren 't even good for the things that are being built, these gas wells. So as much as -- and as great and appreciative as I am of having homes, I think we need to think differently about how we expand and what we're actually doing to our native ecosystems, which affect us, of course, right? Because you cannot take people out of their environment. We are dependent on this air and this water. So I thank you guys very much for the hard work that you're doing. I very much appreciate it. And please take into consideration the things that I said before. Thank you, Morgan. Thank you. Emily Smith and then Allison Trapp is on deck. Hey, everyone. I'm Emily Smith, 2105 Stella Street, Denton, Texas. A few weeks ago when we were talking about banning fracking , we kept saying the phrase we were between a rock and a hard place. We're not between a rock and a hard place here. We have so many options and we have a whole spectrum of options. I have an illustration here. If I could get it overhead. Yeah, I know. It worked really hard. I think the proposed ordinance falls about there, approximately. Yeah. For a city that voted to ban fracking, I think that we can do a little better than that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We have Allison Trapp and then on deck would be JB Hasler. Hello, my name is Allison Trapp. I live at 3437 Crisoforo, 76207. I was at the P&Z meeting. I spoke. And it's very frustrating to be here again. And I was here last year in July. And I feel like we just are doing the same thing over again . The citizens are speaking and not being heard over corporations. And now it's not just oil and gas. It's real estate development now that's coming out and speaking in force about these reverse setbacks. All this has been going on. And you sold everybody, your advisors, I'm sure, advised you and you bought into this repeal idea that that was the way to go. That was what we were supposed to do. I did not personally buy into that, though a lot of the citizens did. And as city council, all of you did except for Ms. Briggs. And here we are. And I'm beginning to really not trust you. And I think what Michael Hinnon suggested about conflict of interest, about people who have businesses in development and interest in oil and gas, you should recuse yourself. You should not vote on this issue. I think that's really important. And that's something that you've not been asked of much until he brought it up tonight. But it's certainly been on my mind because your actions have not followed the words that you tell us when you're up here and we have these meetings. You're talking, but then your actions aren't for what the citizens want. You're doing the opposite of that. So it makes it all very suspicious. And whether it's people that work for the city or people that are attorneys that are advising you, I think you've been ill-advised or else you have personal interests that continue to make you make these choices that aren't in the best interest of the citizens. We shouldn't have repealed the ban. We should have fought. We shouldn't have a weaker ordinance. It's ridiculous. It's appalling. It's absurd that we're even talking here tonight about a weaker ordinance than we had prior to the ban. It doesn't make sense. The city of Denton is not about commerce. We, I'm a human being, we are not commerce. I'm not a commodity. I'm not just a consumer. I'm a citizen of this community. And you as city council are supposed to make choices in our best interest. And the P&Z appointed people, I believe they have a lot of conflicts of interest too, which I brought up at that meeting that I think need to be addressed. Thank you very much. Thank you. All right. JB is the -- okay. All right. That's the last card wishing to speak. I do have some cards that do not wish to speak that I will read. We've got several of those. And the first one is from JB and Shirley. Is it Hazler? Hazler? Okay. Of 1200 Cowling Road, Sanger. We support the P&Z recommendation as a landowner and we are concerned about the huge number of acres taken out of the property under the development with the setback. Larry Beck, 915 East Sherman Drive, reject the P&Z's recommendation -- he's in opposition. Reject the P&Z's recommendation for setbacks and keep the current distances of 1200 feet. Do not move backwards on this issue. Secure the -- I think it says safest measures for citizens the law allows. Susan Vaughn is in opposition as a former state fine arts manager and city fine arts manager of Houston. I urge consideration of the silent voice, the child whose health and -- I can't really read that. I'm sorry. Future rest in the hands of voters referring -- preferring economic gain over health and safety issues. Todd Ellis, 3437 Chris Soffuro, in opposition. Paula Collins, 1223 Highland Park Road, in opposition. Who's the boss? Residents or the outside -- she's in opposition. Residents or the outside industrial opportunists. We were forced to abandon our voted ban. Now we are crumbling like weak sissies. Strengthen the regulations so no backpedaling. And then we have one last card by Sharon Spies, opposition to 250 foot reverse setback regarding oil and gas well ordinances. She's in opposition to that. And she did provide a statement that I want to make sure that we make copies of and circulate to each council member where she just talks about -- she was unable to be here tonight and she submitted this as her testimony. This is a public hearing. Those are all the cards we have, but this is a public hearing. So anybody wishing to speak, please come down and state your name and address and your time will begin. Anybody wishing to speak? Seeing none, we'll now close the public hearing. Did council want to take a brief break before discussion or convening into closed session or you want to keep moving forward? Take a five minute break? All right. All right. We're going to go ahead and reconvene. It's 1127 p.m. Still July the 28th, 2015. Okay. Councilmember Wasney. I want our citizens to know that we are listening to you and that council is not going to vote tonight that we want to take what you have to say, consider what planning and zoning brought to us, and listen to our legal team. So in that vein, I'd like to make a motion to postpone this ordinance until date certain August 4th, which is one week from tonight. We're under the gun time wise to get this passed because we have to have an ordinance on the books two weeks prior to the expiration of the moratorium so that everybody understands the timing. Councilmember Hopper. Oh, I'm sorry. So I make that motion. Okay. We have a motion. Okay. We Councilman Mayor Pro Tem Gregory. So the motion, as I understand it, is to postpone action until a week from today. Correct. I will second that. All right. We have a motion to second but we also have some requests to speak. So we will go through those if that's the correct procedure and then vote. Okay. Thank you, Mayor. So are we wanting to have a discussion now or are we saying , you know, write down our questions and thoughts and do that prior to the next vote? What are we talking about here? I think, well, I mean, I think that the motion was to postp one at least the action, which obviously a week from now you can have discussion at that particular time as well. And it will be probably an item for individual consideration so the public will still have an opportunity to speak. So it's basically how long do you want to talk about it now or you want to talk about it then? Well, I mean, I know that it's late. We've been at this a while. But maybe it's better to have the discussion prior to the vote this next time. I mean, I have some questions written down. And I don't know should -- anyway, I'll wait on that. So thank you. Okay. Mayor Pro Tem. I'd like our staff to -- before we do this vote, because then we're done. So I would like to get our staff to answer a question regarding the number of Gathwell inspectors that we have at this time and what the kind of load is in terms of how many inspections per day. And if you might also speak to the issue of scheduling inspections or inspections the same day, how that works. Yeah, I'd be glad to. Again, Darren Gross, Gathwell administrator. We have a Gathwell inspections division. There's four positions staffed in that division just through attrition and turnover. We only have two current individuals, myself and one other Gathwell inspector. So we have 153 pad sites in the city. We have 158 pad sites in the ETJ. We inspect each one of those sites at least twice a year. So for every well, there's 508. The inspections in the ETJ aren't quite as onerous just because our rules aren't the same. So as far as scheduling inspections, we do contact the operators and get those annual inspections out of the way. It takes a considerable amount of time for the one inspector to do that. We have two of them required, two annual inspections. Under our annual inspection program, we have two inspections per year for every well. So that takes probably about three or four months to get all that scheduled. And if I may do a follow-up to that, if you generally do two a year, but if you go and you find several problems that you note, might there be a well that has more than two inspections in a year based on problems and wanting to come back to check on mitigating the issues? Absolutely. That is correct. Not only do we do those two inspections under the annual inspection program, we do the follow-ups. We'll note anything. We also have six inspections required with each permit. There's a pre-drilling, a drilling, a fracturing. Every stage gets a new inspection. So in addition to the 508 gas wells that are visited at least twice every year, if there's a new permit, we have six inspections required. And if there's a complaint or a call or a concern, we also visit the location to address the concern. And if there's anything noted during the inspection, we'll schedule a follow-up inspection, giving the operator the opportunity to address any deficiencies that are noted on the site. And then there's a follow-up as well. And then if you comment also on the timeframe in terms of what might be the shortest notice that you would give to -- you call a producer and say, we're going to be out at 3 o' clock this afternoon. We need to have someone there to unlock the gate. That happens. I will say under our annual program, it's oftentimes letting all the operators know at the same time we're starting round one of the 2015 inspections. We just kicked off round two. So that's kind of a blanket notice that says when can we schedule this, will you give us access, and we work out that schedule to know this week will be on, as Devin indicated, they have many wells. It might take us three weeks just to get through the Devin inspections. They may meet us at some locations and they may say go ahead to go on to these other sites. So during that three-week period, the annual inspections may only just focus on Devin. But if there's a complaint while we're working with the De vin inspections as an example at a different location, we could call up that operator and say we just had this complaint. We need to go check it out. And in those instances, they could say go ahead. They could say we'll meet you out there at 3 p.m. So I think it's going to vary depending on what the issue is and the response. But I will say there have been opportunities where we just pick up the phone and say we're headed out to your location and they'll give us the gate code over the phone and say go ahead and do the inspection. So in that scenario, the mail will be 10 or 15 minutes notice. And Mary, I'm going to want to ask a couple of other questions later, but I want to give everybody else a chance to speak. Okay. Councilmember Briggs. Oh. Yeah, go ahead. Yes. Okay. I don't really have any any questions. I just wanted to know is it can we make our statement now? I mean, okay. I just wanted to go on record saying that I do not support a weaker ordinance. I feel like people are watching us. Other cities are looking to us to see what we're going to do. And if we do weaken our ordinance, we actually validate HB 40 by doing that, which is what we were trying to avoid with the repeal. So we give them something or an excuse to go back and they will feel like they have to amend their ordinance to be weaker like ours. So I just kind of wanted to go on record saying that. And that's all. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Councilmember Hawkins. Thank you, Mayor. By waiting a week or postponing this, all development and projects that are going on right now are not going to they 're under the 2012 ordinance. Is that right? So that's not going to slow them down at all. This is for this will be for all exist all development that happens after we pass this. Yeah, that would be correct. One of the things a lot of the developers have asked for is that clarification. So this ordinance would provide that absent any approval and two week publication. We'd be still working under the 2013 ordinance. OK, thanks. Councilmember, Mayor Pro Tem. One, I want to make sure I understand because I was just had a little bird in my ear that we have a motion in a second. And I'm not you're going to be able to ask your questions, but it's my understanding that if we have a motion a second for a motion to postpone that any discussion has to relate to that motion specifically. Is that correct? No, no, I want you to go ahead and answer you ask your question. I didn't know that. So if council is OK with with that, we'll sort of suspend that particular rule and then we'll just I'll just be more aware of that next time. So can we you want us to go ahead and talk? Well, you said you had a couple of questions that you wanted. I guess just a couple of observations based on all of the comments that I heard. And one of them is the I'm not I'll tell you I'm not comfortable with the recommendations regarding setbacks that are that have come to us from planning and zoning. I think that they pulled them back too much. I was much more comfortable with the recommendations that staff presented to planning and zoning. And and so I'm more interested in moving that direction than the direction of PNC. I also really heard very clearly as we heard from our the industry representatives that they put the the tanks, the production tanks. They tend to put those on the edge of the site for the purposes of trucks being able to get to them and having a turning radius. So I think that since those tanks hold flammable liquids or flammable gases that that that that makes me want to be much more aware of the setback in terms of those flash points and explosive situations. To have a reasonable setback from the perimeter of the gas well site at least three hundred feet. So that's my comment. All right. Thank you, Mayor. Councilmember Rhoad. Thank you, Mayor. And just to be brief, but I do appreciate the staff presentation giving us the context of HB 40. And I want everyone to realize that's the context under which the council has to make their decision at this point. When we heard Mr. Ireland come up and gave what seemed to be this very fluid, ambiguous notion of what commercially reasonable meant or what people seem to think it meant and that what it means in one city doesn't necessarily mean it means the same in another city. And I think it's arguable that it even means what happens in one particular part of one part of the city doesn't necessarily mean that's commercially reasonable and another part of that same city. I mean, the industry got everything they wanted with that one clause, it seems. And that is the context. We had much more autonomy pre HB 40 pre frac ban. But the situation we're in now in light of the state legislation that is looming, I think all of us agree and have gone on record at different times thinking that is bad legislation that we need to work on in future legislative sessions to dial that back and get more local control on these particular issues. But the context we're in now, I just encourage everyone to spend time thinking about HB 40 and what the city has to deal with in light of that to get to the next level. So I'm comfortable with having another week of discussion because this is extremely complicated for us to understand for our citizens to understand. I think we need some more work. So I'm going to be in support of this motion. Thank you. All right, we have a motion and a second to postpone this agenda item till August the fourth, which is next week, next Tuesday. So let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries seven zero. We now come to our concluding items, new business for this open session and we're probably going to reconvene in closed session just to take up a couple of matters. Anybody I've got one for concluding item. And so does anybody else have one? There is a suggestion that came through the community for us to have a tabletop discussion, which regarding what kind of procedures we have emergency procedures for some kind of episode or incident like we've had around the gas well. We have some of that in our ordinance, but I think what they were wanting was a little more comprehensive discussion with the school district with fire department with the county to truly really try to make sure that we have a plan, not just that's a plan submitted by the operator, which they're required to do in this ordinance, but that we have a plan. So I really wanted to make that suggestion to maybe look at trying to facilitate that. And it was compared to that when safety clean came into town that they had one of these where everybody got together to formulate the kind of response that would occur if there was some type of incident at safety clean just to make sure that the public was notified. So I'll try to figure out a little bit, give you a little bit more specifics on that. But that was the suggestion. I think that's a good I think that's a good suggestion. Anybody else? Did you have one? I don't know if I can ask my question later. Okay. All right. Any more comments before we adjourn the open session? Yes. I just wanted to comment that I definitely don't think you should recuse yourself from this conversation. All right. Well, on that note, we will adjourn and we will now go into convening closed session in the work session room consultation with attorneys under Texas Governor.