Aug 11, 2015 City Council on 2015-08-11 3:00 PM
August 11, 2015 City Council
Full Transcript
Good afternoon. I wanted to convene this Tuesday, August 11
, 2015 Denton City Council meeting.
This is the second Tuesday work session. And we'll now, we
do have a quorum. We'll move
through our agenda items. Agenda item 1A is receive report,
hold discussion, provide direction
regarding current city of Denton facilities and how to
proceed with planning for future
needs. Thank you, Mayor. Now this item is only agenda
because we've had several discussions,
council and staff about some of our facility needs we met
at one time over in City Hall
West. Some of our particular issues have to do with
planning and some of the staffing
in that building. And we've gotten some direction from
council to continue to look at options.
So I'm going to ask Brian Langley to present the
information that we have today that has
been provided to you in your packets and hopefully open
that discussion for more discussion.
We also have in the closed session some additional
information on specific site that we've talked
about before if the council were to provide us with
direction to move forward with some
space for some of the needs that we have. So that
discussion will take place in closed
session. Now just as a matter of point also we are maybe
being optimistic that this agenda
will be relatively short for you today and so we've not
planned dinner for you tonight
but I assume we could get through before 6 o'clock if you
'll just say yes to everything
that we've presented to you. Or no. No, get you there just
as fast. That'll work too.
So with that I'm going to ask if you don't have any
questions ask Brian if he'd talk
through his presentation. Okay thank you George, Mayor and
Council, good afternoon. As George
mentioned I did want to spend some time with you talking
about City Hall facilities and
George gave us a great segue into this slide. So just to
recap for you back on June 30th
we did have a tour of the City Hall West facility. I think
the consensus of the council that
time was pretty clear that facility in your eyes and in our
eyes too was inadequate. It's
inadequate for the current operations that we have there
and it's inadequate for what
we need in the future. So as a result of that council asked
us to come back with some options
and so today looking at those options we really wanted to
give a bigger picture more holistic
view of what's out there in terms of facilities and we
wanted to tell you about some of our
key facilities, describe some of the key issues that we
have at each of those locations and
finally provide you with a recommendation on how to proceed
and we're going to give
you both short term and long term recommendations on how to
proceed. I think there are some
things we can do short term to kind of get things going and
then there's some long term
things that we'll need to look at as well. But regardless
of the direction that we take
one of the things I did want to try to emphasize to the
council is that all of these have costs.
Short term recommendations, long term recommendations and
regardless of whether we decide to build
a new facility or not there will be substantial costs in
the future for growth of the city
and really the question in our mind is how best to manage
that cost, how best to get
the best return on our investment. Some of these things
that we'll be talking about as
George mentioned is potentially leasing space for the
planning and development department.
If we do want to have that group relocated to a different
facility there's costs involved
in that and we'll need to talk about that. There's also
been some items for City Hall
West that we call deferred maintenance items. These are
things that we have held off on
making substantial repairs to that facility because there's
been a lot of discussion about
City Hall West in terms of what's the future of that
building, is it going to be sold or
repurposed and we needed to get some direction on that
before we really made some of these
high capital investment expenditures. Most of that's roof
ing, HVAC improvements, those
are very high cost items. We may have to look at acquiring
or building other facilities
and those are as you know very expensive items. Long and
short of this is because of all these
items and the substantial costs is we're recommending a
very careful and deliberate approach to
look at these and come back with a recommendation that
meets all of these objectives. Some of
the items that I'll have in the presentation today is one
of the things I thought would
be helpful is to briefly describe some of the cost and
footprint requirements of recent
City Hall administration buildings that have been built
around the state just to give you
an idea of if we're looking at building a City Hall what
are we really talking about
in terms of cost, what are some of the principal areas that
are housed in these buildings,
what's the square footage that some other communities have
built that are similar to
us. I want to review some current issues with our city
facilities as I mentioned to you
and there's a number of those that we need to talk about.
Then we're going to provide
you with a staff version of a facility vision and then
provide you with a key overview of
some design and construction elements that we think are
appropriate and again this is
meant to be a discussion to see what the council's reaction
is to that and if you have a different
vision of what we're looking at. Now it all comes down to
some kind of financial capacity
and options too so we'll look at that with you and talk
about what are our options of
how we could build such a facility and how it might work
and then finally give you the
recommendation. So here are the facilities I wanted to
mention to you. Some of you may
be familiar with some of these but not all. The first one
that we wanted to show you is
Sugarland Texas is down in the Houston Texas area. They
built a new City Hall in 2005 so
about 10 years ago. The population of Sugarland is about 87
,000 so close to Denton but smaller.
$17.8 million was the cost of that facility, 82,000 square
feet and about $218 a square
foot 10 years ago. These are some of the departments that
are listed here that are housed in this
building. I think you're going to see some of these kind of
common types of departments
throughout the various facilities that I'll show you.
Planning is there, economic development,
development services, the city council chambers, the work
session rooms for council discussions,
those kinds of rooms are pretty common in all the City Hall
s that you'll see. Brian,
real quick question. Yes sir. As we go move forward on
these different buildings, when
we look at population, is that the population at the time
it was built or is this the population
that's current? This is the most current population that we
have. Okay. Great Vine, just down
to the south of us, population 48,520. This was built in
1996 so about 20 years ago almost.
$12.5 million, only 37,000 square feet and a much higher
cost per square foot, $337 per
square foot. I don't know what issues were involved with
that facility. There may have
been some specific site plan issues that caused the cost to
be higher than the sugar land
facility that we looked at. But again, if you're looking at
some of the operations that
are housed there, economic development, city manager's
office, planning, permitting, development
services, engineering, kinds of similar things that we've
been talking about with our structure.
Louisville, I think everybody's familiar with this facility
. Population's about 99,000 there.
This was built in 2003. It's kind of hard to believe that
was that long ago, but about
12 years ago that facility was built. They did build a 68,
000 square foot facility and
one of the points I wanted to reference to you is that they
have a basement part of that
facility which is 16,000 square feet and they're in the
process of renovating that or actually
finishing that space out to add more space. So the 68,000
feet that they constructed back
in 2003 are already running out of that space there. The
cost per square foot there was
$211 per square foot. Again, same kind of departments. You
see some variations of these
as you look through the facilities, but a lot of
similarities as you go. Grand Prairie
built a public safety building. This is off of Highway 161.
Some of you may have seen
this traveling around the Metroplex. They have a much
larger population than we do,
182,000. This was built in 2010. The cost was $53 million
for that facility. That works
out to about $353 per square foot on 150,000 square feet.
Again, I don't know all the site
issues that may have been involved with that building, but
just to kind of give you a reference
point of these are very sizable investments, something that
's going to be around for some
time in each of these communities. This, however, is just
for police and fire administration,
so a little bit different than the other city halls. Frisco
population estimate is 145,000
and that's certainly different than what it was in 2006
when this was built. $29.7 million
was the cost of that facility, 150,000 square feet.
Something more in line, I think we've
seen with the other facilities, about $198 per square foot,
300 employees there. They're
also looking at having to, part of this facility is library
, about half of it is library. Facilities
are looking at building a library now so they can move
those folks out and add more space
for their city facilities that they need. South Lake is
another city hall that was constructed
in the area in 2001. Much smaller city, 27,000 in
population. The cost was 18.5 million.
Square footage, about 76,000. The cost per square foot is $
243 per square foot. So just
kind of giving you a flavor of, they're all kind of in that
ballpark that you're looking
at. I think everyone's familiar with the Denton County
Administration Building. They're
this was built just a few years ago, 2012. $16 million was
the cost of that facility.
66,000 square feet, $241 per square foot. And then you can
see some of the different
services here. This is not so much an administration office
building, it's more of a service type
facility, but hopefully gives you an idea of what kind of
costs that we're looking at
for these. It's a very substantial investment, very costly.
Any questions on that before
I move? Yes, Kevin. What I don't see is cost per employee
in that building. So example,
Grapevine, beautiful building. There are only 62 employees
working in that building. And
you compare to Grand Prairie, 400 people. Frisco, 300
people. So for me it's about does
the cost justify efficiency in city government? So that I
think is a cost parameter that I
certainly would like to see because I think it will help
balance out the rest of the figures
that were seen for each city. We can certainly look at that
. I think for each of these buildings
to they probably have other facilities in their city that
for the Grapevine example,
I don't know this to be true, but that could be their
primary meeting space. So maybe the
council chambers and some of the work session rooms and
those kind of meeting spaces, they
may be the predominant spaces there and it's not meant to
be so much of a city office building
is more of a meeting space. But we can look at that and try
to get down to some of those
metrics is that's a good point. Each of these are very
different on if you look at on a
per employee cost. Okay, I'm going to keep going. I wanted
to try to give you some updates
on some of the current issues with City Hall facilities and
we're unique because we have
three City Hall building. So it's not just City Hall West
and one that we looked at in
June but all of the ones that we have. I think it's
important to look at those kind of together
and try to understand that whole picture. So I want to
start first with with City Hall.
This building that we're in today. This was constructed in
1968. Its last major renovation
was in 1999. It's a 35,000 square foot facility. It
primarily houses as you know, the city
manager's office, economic development, finance, legal
utility administration. It's all also
has the City Council chambers, this room, the City Council
work session room. So it
has a lot of different meeting rooms as well. The finance
conference room, the meeting room
downstairs, lots of different activity takes place during
this this building during the
week. Brian? Yes, sir. I'm sorry. On the other City Hall,
as you said, how many employees
are housed in those particular facilities? Do you know with
those departments in here
about how many employees that equate? I think we've got
that somewhere. I don't know if
we have it handy. We can present it later on. I don't know
if we have it handy but we
can certainly get it for you. Yeah, we can look at that and
maybe come back to that presentation.
So some of the challenges that we see with this building,
and you're going to see some
of these across all of our buildings, but this is a little
bit unique for this one.
It's the main location for public meetings. So our council
chambers and other meeting
rooms are, in our view, offer inadequate space for a lot of
the meetings that we have. And
it's frequent that we've had we've had some very hot topic
issues over the past year or
two with the City Council and so you've had some very large
meetings but just on a routine
basis the council chambers is at capacity or near at
capacity. We have work session
meetings where we don't have enough room for the staff and
members of the public to be
there. We've had to simulcast meetings from the council
chambers into this room, into
the room downstairs. One large public hearing that we had,
we actually had to do that also
to the Civic Center. I think that's the unusual case but
there's been many times where we've
had to take some additional steps just to get everybody
here and have an appropriate
professional meeting. There are space limitations in this
building. It's currently at or near
capacity for city offices so there's no room for additional
growth really in any meaningful
way of additional city staff. As we grow as a city we know
that will happen going forward.
We've got to have a place where those folks can office and
they can work in a professional
environment. There are parking limitations here in this
building so anytime any of you've
come to a large public meeting or event here it's very
difficult to find public parking.
There's only 116 spaces I believe for this facility so that
's difficult. There are flood
plain restrictions for this building. Expanding this
building, parts of the building are in
the flood plain. This something we would always
characterize as we're ADA compliant but we're
not ADA friendly so if you think about this building as an
example there's really not
one key entrance here. There's lots of ways to get into the
building. It's not clear what's
the main entrance. There are handicap accessible entrances
here in the front in this courtyard
area but a lot of our folks come down this hallway on the
side over here. They're looking
to come up and if they are disabled persons they can't get
up the stairs. They have to
come back around and go back in. Likewise for the council
chambers itself you're able to
get in but it's not friendly, ADA friendly. The last point
is something I think we've
also spent some time talking to you about. There's a high
cost to operate and renovate
this building due to some of the architectural, the valid
architectural concerns that folks
have about this building and the significance of it. So
that's something that anytime we're
looking at a major renovation or doing something different
how you handle that in the appropriate
way is something that we have to manage through. And this
building will be eligible to be designated
as a historic structure in 2018. So just three years.
Thank you. Is this building very efficient with its
utilities or what's your opinion?
Well we've made some we've made a lot of adjustments to try
to to make it more efficient. The windows
here that you see we had a project about three three years
three to four years ago where
we replaced all those that's made it better. There are
areas around the doorways which
are frankly not efficient. You can see some of the gaps
there. The doorways are very beautiful.
They're hand carved doorways. They look great but they're
they're not the most energy efficient
in some cases. We've tried to make improvements though
where we could to keep the integrity
of the structure intact. The hallways there's a lot of hall
ways which look very nice add
to the architecture of the building but may not be the best
use of space for having to
heat and cool the entire facility without really having
that be usable space so much.
Okay I'm gonna keep going. Okay City Hall West so this is
the structure we went to in
June with you. It was constructed in 1927. Almost a 90 year
old facility. The last major
renovation was done in 2001. 24,700 square feet primarily
houses planning and development
as you know and as a as a side note one of the things that
we pointed out to you from
the discussion the other day as you went wondered through
the various hallways and corridors
and staircases and so forth is about half of the building
is not really usable for operations
so the 24,000 square feet is a little bit misleading
because a lot of that can't really
be used for offices that's there. So challenges include the
building is not designed for current
operations and it does not properly align workspaces to
enhance productivity. I think
you've seen that firsthand where some folks are put in that
building and how we're trying
to have them operate. There's also space limitations there
in the proposed budget for next year
we're looking at adding several positions related to
planning and development. There's
a concern about where do those folks go? How are we going
to make that work? So there's
really no additional growth for currently what we have on
the books for next year as
not to mention what we would have in the next five, ten,
fifteen years in that area. We
also think customer service for the public is impaired due
to the layout of this building
and the absence of other key departments. So if you're here
to get a building inspection
or an CO and get your utilities turned on you have to go to
that facility then you have
to go over to City Hall East where you may not know where
that is and tend to your customer
service issues. If there's some problem that you didn't get
addressed then you've got to
go back over to building inspections and get that handled.
That's again one of the ways
that we think one facility would improve our customer
service just by the access to those
core services. When you say one facility what do you mean?
If we we're going to get to this
but one of the things we're going to recommend is a City
Hall facility, a new City Hall facility
to house key departments which would improve customer
service. You're talking about the
long-term solution not the short-term. That's correct. It's
a long-term issue. You know
having engineering in a separate part some parts of
development review engineering as
I understand are over in City Hall West but there are other
parts that are over in another
building the service center. Having those all in one area
would probably aid in that
discussion. Sorry. Yes ma'am. When you own a home your
decision is do you stay where
you are and renovate or do you sell it and move on to a
different spot. Has it ever been
explored to use this facility and pop it up which would add
additional office space which
seems to be one of the most important issues. ADA
compliance we could modify what we have
in terms of stairs and access and solve that problem. My
question has that been talked
about in terms and what was the discussion result? For this
City Hall facility yes it
has been looked at in fact when it was originally designed
there was a thought that it could
have a second floor on top of it. I believe that adds about
15,000 square feet if we did
that so we don't feel like that's enough to really meet a
long term solution for the
city. There's also the issues involved still with parking
how you make that work and how
you make that a lot some of the square footage I understand
would be staircases and those
kinds of things for access for emergency access and so
forth. We own the property across the
street correct? Two acres yes. Couldn't that be additional
parking? It could. I've got
some recommendations related to that property a little bit
later in the presentation that
certainly could be yes. I think what we're trying to look
at here and this is again all
good discussion we're trying to look at what do we need
over the next 20, 30 years what
are the needs for the city and what's the best investment
to do that and so that's all
part of that discussion. So going back to City Hall West
there are difficulties with
the split levels again you're looking at that building how
it's been put together and renovated
over the different years. It is an operational issue to
heat and cool that efficiently. There
are parking limitations over in that building I know no one
's surprised to hear that there
are some issues. Same thing ADA compliant not ADA friendly
there's a way to get access
to that building for persons with disabilities on the back
area of that there's a button
I believe that you have to check in on to get access we did
have an incident where someone
wasn't able to get access for a period of time just because
someone had stepped away
from their office and it's hard for those people to get in
so again those are things
that potentially could be solved with resources that we
look at putting into the building
but what's the return on that investment long term is kind
of the question. Again high cost
to operate and renovate due to the same architectural
integrity concerns the facade of that building
I know is very important to the community and we've looked
at not wanting to change
that so how do you amend that building or how do you
increase that building's footprint
if you can't change that and it is designated as a historic
building. Okay City Hall East
which is over off of Hickory Street and Industrial this
building was originally constructed in
1946 it was a manufacturing facility originally it was
expanded in 1964 it's the largest of
the facilities that we have it's 153,000 square feet and it
houses several different areas
lots of different pieces of the organization police the
jail public safety training facility
or the training center which is recently added two years
ago two or so two years ago or so
municipal court our customer service operation where you go
to pay your utility bills the
people that manage the call center there human resources
technology services our parks administration
operations all there so a lot of different folks in that
building so some of the challenges
for this one are it separates our key functions from other
city departments and again back
to our concept of it impairs customer service if you've got
different pieces of the organization
in different parts of our complexes it's hard to know where
you need to go for different
things I can't tell you how many times people come to this
facility looking to pay their
water bill or their or their utility bill and we have to
tell them to go to City Hall
East where is City Hall East and how do you find that and
where to go it happens on a
daily basis at this building parking limitations is also an
issue there we're next to the downtown
transit center they have a lot of activity there we've got
the public safety training
center which has been constructed all of the city
departments that are there as well as
customers who come in to take care of their business at
that facility at times if you've
been over there at certain times of the day or a lot of
times of the day it's hard to
find a spot it's hard to find a place that's convenient the
railroad and exposition parking
lots need substantial redesign and construction whether or
not we do anything with a city
hall at some point in the future these lots need to be
looked at the railroad lot has
really just needs to be reconstructed it's got some slopes
to it which are dangerous
at certain times with certain weather needs to be looked at
there is some expansion possible
I think there's about 15 to 16 thousand square feet that's
still available for that facility
but it's really only meaningful for the police department
and courts where it's positioned
in the building and those facilities will need to grow over
time same same issue it's
ADA compliant but not necessarily ADA friendly so some of
this some of the issues are the
same across all these organis facilities that we have when
did we when did the city purchase
that building do you recall do you know mark when do we
purchase city hall east 91 91
it was given to us it sounds like it was donated correct
okay for business for me okay and
the expansion for the police training facility refreshment
was that 20,000 what how much
was it I don't know this way yeah about 20 20,000 okay
chief that was done two years
ago is that right okay okay thank you okay another building
and it's probably a little
bit lesser known but it's still an important facility for
you to know about is the service
center this is over off of texas street next to the rail
line it was originally constructed
in 1978 it was last renovated in 2006 it's 69,000 square
feet it houses engineering real
estate operations water wastewater and purchasing group it
also houses the park street water
wastewater operations our communications group in the
warehouse we store a lot of materials
that are being used for different projects around the city
it's also the location for
our public utilities board meetings and we have those twice
monthly there we had a large
public hearing there just this past Monday yesterday I
should say it seems like it was
longer than that yesterday it separates some of the
challenges that are there is it separates
key functions from some of the other city departments that
we've talked about again
the recurring theme here is we think because of all these
different operations in different
buildings that it impairs customer service and most notably
engineering is separated
from planning and development with this structure we have
an engineering group over in the service
center and a planning and development group in another
facility there's poor accessibility
in our in our view for the public and there are parking
limitations so again for this
public hearing that I was referencing before parking is
already limited there and you pull
into a facility like that and there are backhoes and large
pieces of equipment and and heavy
industrial looking pieces of equipment you're not really
sure where to park we're safe and
it's it's difficult for the public to know where that is
and to find a spot for that
we did look at some space limitations here we're looking at
capacity we wanted it's part
of the budget process for next year site plan study was
requested it was not recommended
but to be funded but it was requested in the budget and the
expansion of the location really
doesn't seem compatible with the surrounding neighborhood a
lot of the other buildings
that we have are in the downtown area they're more in an
office type or development this
is in a neighborhood and the question would be is if we
wanted to really meaningfully
expand that building how would that work in a neighborhood
finally the purchasing function
is another key administrative function and it's all over
there at that facility separated
from all of the other functions that we have in the city
couple questions on this and so
I may be I may mistaken as far as what I'm recalling but if
I recall correctly on the
bond program wasn't there a request or somewhere that we're
going to build a new space for
is it signal lights or transportation the transportation
facility is that at this site
it's close to it it's it's a separate facility trying to
remember the direction I think it's
east east of me okay is this the one where we're also
saying the five million dollar
reconfiguration of Rue Dell Street yep so different but
that would not change this facility
it just realigns to make that a lot better on my point
being is that if we're saying
that this you're right what we're doing is we're sort of
adding city facilities next
to this we're sort of augmenting it but if we're saying
that this facility is something
that we need to do something different with and that's part
of the proposal long term
is how do we combine and all this I mean we're slated to
spend six or seven million dollars
over there so I mean how does that you don't have to answer
it now but I just raised that
question of how does that work in to these longer term
plans and I think that's going
to be the challenge is this has come along sort of after
this the major budget process
that we that y'all have gone through for this year and we
're going to talk about cost later
on but with these new things coming in I mean if I would
have known that or the public would
have known maybe that in five or seven years they're going
to be asked to look at another
major city facility that will do a lot of combining which
is more efficient including
some of this but then we're spending that kind of money in
that same facility I just
raise that yeah I think it's a good point the what we're
planning to do for the transportation
facility is make that a separate facility to house all
those operations and then eventually
connect that through fiber optics to all of the signals
around the city so they can control
the traffic patterns better so I don't think that change we
're not what we're talking about
we're not change that use this facility though I think with
a plan that we'll show you in
a moment for the long term plan of what we'd want to do for
building a new city hall it
could take some of the operations out of the service center
facility and allow other operations
to grow into that over time so you don't have to change it.
Good answer.
I hope that makes sense.
Thank you.
Okay so let me just kind of summarize all the issues for
the various facilities the
four facilities that I talked about they are aging
structures no doubt about it's 281,000
square feet in those four structures that I mentioned to
you here's the approximate
age of the buildings city halls 50 years old city hall East
70 years old city hall West
90 years old and the service center is 40 years old so long
term we're going to have
to look at how we're going to deal with those facilities
they are these buildings require
substantial ongoing maintenance expenses they're expensive
and difficult to renovate depending
on the facility that you're talking about as I mentioned to
you throughout this presentation
you know our view is that customer service for citizens is
impaired by the lack of one
key facility the limited and or inefficient office space
that we have in some of these
and the decentralized service model what I mean by that is
lots of different pieces and
lots of different areas of the city not in one key area
that are related.
And I remember looking at the presentation back of I don't
recall do you have slides
that address so let's say hypothetically we get some kind
of direction to do something
different because what we still do with I mean this is a
big building it's obviously
put a lot of money into it's still very functional in the
sense of you know still house people
it'll still so do we have or is that for a different
discussion?
I think I have some information a little bit later I mean
basically the point is going
to be that some of these existing facilities that we have
we look at how we want to repurpose
them maybe some of them do we want to sell maybe City Hall
West is one of those candidates
do we want to sell do we want to lease that facility but
retain the integrity of the building
those are the conversations that we can certainly have I
think this building is certainly one
I think that would we want to continue to try to operate in
some way the question is
how much do we want to operate here?
It used to be a lot different.
So the demands for the public meeting space do strain these
facilities and we've seen
this over the years with various different meetings the
council chambers itself this
room the council work session room our municipal courts
also have issues from time to time
where they can't get enough of the seats in there for all
the folks that they need for
court and other meeting spaces in this building every week
there's lots of different meetings
in the different meeting rooms that we have and sometimes
it's difficult to find enough
space.
Parking at all facilities is limited and the current
facilities really don't have an adequate
room to expand as the city goes.
I was gonna wait till the end.
I didn't see anything that addressed the Civic Center or
there wasn't anything in here as
part of that and what that so is there a particular reason
for that or?
Well you mean of doing something different with the Civic
Center?
Well I mean that is a city facility that's a certain age
that has been a certain function
has a certain amount of parking spaces has a footprint and
I mean if we're looking at
all primarily major city facilities I was just curious why
that one sort of has been
taken out of the mix.
Well I was really looking at primarily the office type
structures but we can there's
about 35 or so maybe more than 35 different structures that
we own throughout the city
and we can come back with something more comprehensive but
we're trying to focus on just the office
related and the service related.
I see that more as a community amenity type building but we
can look at it however the
city wants.
Okay last point on this slide so due to the all the
concerns that I've talked about I
mean the point I'm trying to get to here is rather than
looking at just one facility we
think we need to come back and look at this holistically
again I think there's some short
term things that we can do and then some long term things
but all of these things need to
be looked at with one lens of how we want to manage it hol
istically.
So I want to transition now if there's no additional
questions on that into what staff
has as a vision for a facility and then try to give you
some ideas of some key design
and construction elements.
So as I mentioned earlier to you we are proposing that we
look at building a new City Hall facility.
Number one on this list this was in our mind it would
enhance customer service to the public
and promote a positive image for the community.
If we do this in downtown which is what we would propose
this is also equally important
that this would be a catalyst for more pedestrian oriented
high quality and professional employment
focused development in the downtown area.
So this is not just about city offices it's not just about
having something that looks
really nice it's about trying to serve as a catalyst and
really kick start some additional
development.
We've already got a lot of great development going on in
the downtown but it's trying to
get it even more so.
We also want to look at developing additional parking
options for the downtown area so one
of those options could be in concert with this building
constructing a parking garage
and as we've talked about at the staff level what we've
looked at is this parking garage
could be used by for city business during the day but on
weekends and after hours this
could be a free parking garage to the downtown area which I
think accomplishes another goal
that we've had for all of our discussions about parking in
downtown.
Where you put this to maximize that is really important
maybe it's not a parking garage
maybe it's additional surface lots we could talk about how
to do that but just as a concept
we think we try to try to have this facility do lots of
things for us meet all of our facility
needs but also meet some of the parking needs and the
development needs in the downtown
area.
We also want to connect the existing Denton campus the city
of Denton campus and we consider
this the Civic Center this building the library facility
over here Quaker Town Park we consider
that our part of our campus connect that to the rest of
downtown so that means connecting
I'm sorry sir.
Oh no I'm sorry yes she just had a question I didn't mean
to interrupt you go ahead.
I was just on that note isn't that already connecting this
side to downtown isn't that
already in the plan?
That's something that we want to do yes of trying to look
at how we do that it could
be a simple crosswalk it could be looking at even something
bigger than that closing
McKinney Street in certain areas they're trying to make
this a very pedestrian oriented area
there's things that we could do that could be very dramatic
to affect how this area I
think the concern I've heard is this area feels cut off
from the rest of downtown how
do you make it more inclusive so that's there's lots of
things we could look at some are more
expensive than others.
I think leadership didn't have a slide on that.
To connect to some of the parking and so forth here correct
.
So that really was one of the points I wanted to make and
improve the entryway into Quaker
Town Park so this building right over here next to us it's
owned by the county if we
acquired that building and demolish that building because
frankly we don't think that's something
that would really be able to be used for offices but if you
were able to demolish that building
and improve the Quaker Town Park entryway over here and
connect to a city hall facility
if it was across the street that could be great for the
park be great for the facilities
over here and improve this whole area.
And one of the other concepts of the staff level that we've
we've talked about is looking
at some type of in conjunction with this facility the
parking garage all the improvements that
we would make is some type of outdoor public gathering and
or performance area and so I
don't know exactly what this might look like I mean there's
a lot of steps to kind of go
through a visioning process with the council and the
community about this but it could
be some type of plaza area out in front of the city hall
some water features it could
be something that's kind of a park area during the day but
in the evenings there could be
performances there lots of different ways to kind of manage
that but making that part
of the downtown experience part of the city hall experience
part of the parking options
trying to combine all those elements together to get
something that's really impactful and
meaningful for the downtown area that's kind of the vision
for all these things coming
together and I think that's consistent with some of the
things that we've talked to the
council about over the last few years in our strategic
planning retreats and so forth trying
to take all those things and meld them together.
Good question so when I when I read this list about city
hall vision and you say a new building
a new city hall facility okay I get that here's a building
then it talks about a parking garage
pedestrian friendly but then when you get down into
connecting existing city of Denton
campuses to downtown when you get into purchasing the
building next door knocking it down it's
it seems like is this predicated upon a specific general
geographic location of where this
new new city hall would be because if it's somewhere else
over in this vicinity then
some of these things necessarily won't be met by that so
are we talking this general
vicinity that our thought is is to try to leverage the
space that we already own across
the street but it could be anywhere and if it was if it was
in a different location sure
some of these elements might change but our division is is
that it would be connected
okay so this general area right certainly if council and
the community decided we don't
want it over here we wanted another part of down we don't
even want it in downtown at
all you know there's there's that's a different different
animal okay all right thank you
good question okay so moving ahead so after a preliminary
review of looking at our operations
and I do want to stress this is preliminary this is us
trying to put together something
that we think kind of has a basic framework to it going
forward here are the things that
we would propose to include in a new city hall planning and
development engineering
again we've talked about the connection there what we want
to try to do with that the city
manager's office the mayor and council offices currently
there's only one office for the
council one office for the mayor looking at how we might
augment that to make that better
maybe a conference room some additional spaces for the
bigger office for the mayor yes definitely
a bigger office for the mayor I'll make sure we get that
customer service is also it's
a key department that we have they are running out of they
're out of space in that facility
as we grow in the city how we how are we going to make that
work the finance department city
council chambers we're looking at upsizing the city council
chambers you know somewhere
in the range of having 250 or so type seats for the council
chambers maybe more we need
to look at that a little bit the work session room itself
also will need to be larger to
accommodate larger public meetings and we've got to think
about not in Denton as a large
city now it's 125,000 but what do we need when we're a city
of 200,000 in just a few
years what's that need to look like and and try to think
about that long term is that you
see the age of the facilities that we have when we build
something we're going to have
it for a long long long time and so it's got to serve that
need for a long time human resources
economic development parks administration community
improvement services transportation
illegal those are all kinds of the things initial blush of
kind of looking at all of
our services things that we would want to do based on our
calculations roughly 125 to 150,000
square feet would be necessary for to be reassigned to that
building we'd also need to think about
going forward again when we're a city of 200,000 or 250,000
years in the future how are we going
to accommodate that growth do you want to have unfinished
floors that are constructed so that
you can grow into that do we want to add space next to the
city hall so that you can construct
a new building 10 20 years in the future how we want to
plan for that growth so that all of this
is kind of master planned out with our our facilities going
forward so those are the kinds
of things that that we've been talking about so so in in
this when we so when we talk about these
facilities that we're we're discussing that are we're sort
of outgrowing and and are aging which
is this one city hall east and city hall west they are not
considered any in any way to be part of
that potential expansion you're saying any expansion that
the sort of the the vision is the
the the idea is any expansion would occur within that one
particular facility it could be
i think what we're looking at for those particular
departments to keep them contiguous in that
building that we'd want to have that expansion there doesn
't mean that other facilities couldn't
have expansions for other departments i think we will need
that for the other operations but
at some point we don't want to look at five or ten or
fifteen years after we built this facility and
realize hey well guess what we're going to have to move
half of planning out to another building
because that's what we're trying to avoid so trying to
think about those core operations
and keeping them contiguous and together could be at some
point you can't do that and you'd have to
move some of that but from a planning perspective in the
foreseeable future we want to look at it
that way does that answer your question mayor absolutely
okay so some of the key design and
construction elements cost stuff is very expensive assuming
125 000 square feet at 280 dollars a
square foot a new facility is about 35 million dollars
these are big ticket items again why we
want to have a very deliberate and careful approach to how
we look at them because these are
significant investments 150 000 square feet 42 million 200
000 56 very large numbers
land acquisition for five acres roughly two and a half
million dollars for downtown area that's a
rough guess but probably pretty close based on what we we
recently purchased some land for
we do as i mentioned to you we already own two acres of
land across the street so we could
leverage that already if if that was the location that the
council and the community wanted if it's
something different that's a whole different look that we
would have just to do some pre-design work
on this and what do we mean by pre-design kind of looking
at some site plan options renderings of
the building how many parking spaces that you need those
kinds of things it's probably about
a hundred thousand dollars depending on the level of detail
that you need the actual design fees for
a structure like this probably seven to ten percent of the
costs are going to be designed so you
multiply that out on the 35 million dollar facility you're
looking at two and a half million to three
and a half million dollars just for the design something
you have to do to build it obviously
but they're very expensive cost okay you haven't stopped me
yet so i'm gonna keep going
and once falling out of her chair yeah so that's good maybe
it's a little bit kind of going back to
the mayor's question if you could go back one or two slides
where you list the departments this one
okay so that uh that encompasses everyone who's in this
building correct plus plus everyone in
city hall west yes and some in city hall east and some in
the service center and some in the
service center so as we're talking about a new building it
does your recommendation also say
that we're keeping city hall east but vacating these two i
mean does your recommendation get
that specific on what not what do these buildings become
but at least these are vacated completely
i think that's a great question at this point we're looking
at vacating city hall west and
repurposing that building either through the sale of the
building leasing the building or doing
something totally different with it city hall east on the
other hand would still have municipal
court the jail the police facility the training facility so
we look at repurposing that into more
of a justice center long term so the growth of those
operations long term would then be housed
there there are some departments like technology services
perhaps they could go ahead and stay
in city hall east and they are frankly going to need some
expansion space there too so some of
that you're probably going to have some room for expansion
in those facilities but trying to
repurpose them around a central theme that makes sense so
we think city hall east is a justice
center makes a lot of sense we've already invested a lot of
money in for those operations and we
could use it city hall west is a little bit different what
about this building this building
is a good question i think you could have some
administration offices here you could have we own
some other buildings in the city and you could look at
trying to push some of those operations
here you could try to push some functions here the greater
denton arts council building that we own
over here off of bell avenue would that be would this be a
better location for some of those
operations could that be transit oriented development those
are questions that we can
begin start thinking about with the community of what would
be the future use of this building and
what's the best way to do it we haven't figured all that
out obviously these are just really more
concept at this point and i think what i'm looking for
today is to get some consensus that we're
heading in the right direction and i have a few specific
recommendations for you to go go through
with but if we're heading in that right direction then we
can start working through all those details
there's a lot of detail work to do to talk about where we
want to be i hope that answers your
question that's me i think council member briggs you have a
question oh i was just doesn't the city
have another a newer building over on across from the old
animal shelter over in the area
the facilities management building we do have that it's
currently has a few offices that are vacant
there but we typically use that when we're renovating other
structures we move we temporarily
relocate folks over there to use those offices until they
need to go back to the current location
building it wasn't a new building but it was an old
building that we bought and refurbished
and that one's fine that one's great yeah that one's that
building is working well we have our
facility crews that run out of that building okay sorry i
think this conversation was triggered
from our meeting at the planning department when we
realized sitting in that basement
that planning did not have enough space over there to work
efficiently i that was just
so apparent with that meeting so when i left that meeting
it was uh planning needs help right now
and what can we do to find help for planning right now just
personally i mean i'd love to build
everything new and nice and big and grand we're almost a
billion dollar budget right now we've
just struggled through a budget meeting wondering how we're
going to find enough money to work on
our streets so to jump off the cliff and say wow let's go
let's go build big and new i think it's
something we want to think about but gosh i sure don't want
to go spend one or two million dollars
on consultants or design fees or i sure want to get our
citizens of denton involved as well
because this is their money this isn't our money this is
our citizen money and while we talk about
oh let's do this downtown maybe they don't want us downtown
so that's just my initial blush um i want
to be very cognizant of what planning needs right now
because everything comes through planning
for this city do i recognize that we have some issues and
shortfalls in some of our buildings
i do when i get that my question is how are we going to pay
for it i think that's a good segue
into my next slide financial options and recommendations
and i think i'll address
many of your points in the next few slides um councilmember
wisening so what are the options
these are obviously very expensive and how do we want to
look at paying for these um there are bond
program options that we have uh so but with the current tax
rate that we have in the bond program
that was approved by the voters in 2014 we don't have the
we don't have the capacity to issue any
additional debt to build a new city hall facility the next
expected bond program is in 2020 and
that's assuming no tax rate increase however we could
advance that by one to two years if the
full three cent tax increase that was recommended by the
bond committee uh was was levied so right
now we've been talking to you in the budget that we would
have an increase this year an increase
next year related to the bond program the total increase
would be 1.4 cents that's assuming that
we're going to sell the debt over a six-year period if you
decided that we wanted to advance
that because we want to get to this date quicker and we
want to sell it over a four-year period
we could do that but you're going to have to have a higher
tax rate increase than one more closely
to the three cents that we've been talking about with the
public and the bond committee
it's one option additional bonds could be sold if if you
have a tax rate increase for something
like this so for every penny of an increase 11 to 13
million dollars in bonds could be sold over a
20-year period alternatively you could delay the sale of
the 2012 and the 2004 bond packages and
say instead of those being sold over a six-year period we
're going to sell them over a 10-year
period those are options again just trying to paint some
pictures maybe not pretty pictures
but pictures and i'm getting there stay with me i'm getting
to the to the recommendation so
some other options so it's not just bonds there are other
ways that we can finance some of this
stuff we could utilize the downtown tax increment reinvest
ment zone for some or all the costs so
we've talked about the parking garage that's a great
example of we could debt fund that out of
the turrs we could use that to help augment this facility
to look at how we could finance that so
in addition to the normal bond program that we have we
could sell repurpose or lease existing
buildings to help offset some of the construction costs and
again the devil's in the details there
about what we're willing to do and what's acceptable to us
as a community but that's one of those
options we could look at depending on how we used how we
built a performance space potentially we
could use hot funds for that if it was built in concert
with a new city hall no pun no pun intended
a performance center built in concert with the city hall
but we could we could do that
i still have it right but that's a possibility we could use
parkland dedication trust funds to
improve the quaker town park area with this building next
door if that's the area that we
decided to do and another final option is we could consider
exploring some regional
transportation resources to improve mckinney street don't
know what that might look like but
working with the regional transportation council are there
ways that we can make this more
pedestrian oriented are there ways that we can improve
mobility in this area are there some
regional funds that could help us with that all these
things together we're looking at options for
how to make it work brian on that top one i've never heard
turrs bonds before is that just backed
by the balance that's in that turrs so it won't be backed
by the residents they would be they would
be general obligation bonds and they would be backed by the
turrs revenues coming in so there's
about 270 000 or so on an annual i'm looking around make
sure it's about 270 or so annually
that's going in to that uh fund on an annual basis and so
that would be the debt service that
would service the debt but if it's a general obligation
bond it still has to be voted on by
the people at turrs bond um no i i think this could be
issued by the council or it could or
it could be something that we would take the voters okay i
think if we're looking one of the
recommendations i'm going to have talking about the citizen
engagement piece of this is we are
recommending that we take this to a vote right for the
bonds uh that'd be issued for the public
and that probably would make sense to probably do it all at
one time okay
anyone else oh sorry you're the mayor right now oh yeah
unfortunately you guys
okay so recommendations let's talk what we what are we
recommending that we do on a short-term
basis so going back to the point earlier on um what we're
proposing for planning and developments
we're looking at finding a location that we can lease on a
short-term basis and i say short-term
basis that's a five to seven year commitment is kind of
what we're looking at in order for us to
have time to work through these issues and then build a
facility that can work here's a rough
estimate of what that cost might be 350 000 on an annual
basis would be needed at least
a facility of 24 000 square feet rough numbers that is not
i want to be clear that's not in the
budget for next year that's proposed so if that's something
that we want to do that's something we'll
have to find the resources to make that happen it does save
us though about a million dollars in
deferred costs needed for city hall west so if we decided
that we wanted to go ahead and move that
operation out of city hall west and and no longer house
that these operations there then we wouldn't
need to make about a million dollars of investments there
so like i said at the beginning all these
things have cost it's just a question of where do we think
is the best return on our investment
why couldn't we rent city hall west which means we keep it
close to the city's heart i mean it's part
of part of our dentin but lease it generate income that
would help offset the cost of that 350 000
lease cost for planning yes okay do we have an idea cost
per square foot on going right downtown
right now take that cost per square foot of lease space
times the square footage of city hall
i'd like to see some cost estimates on leasing that out
with the caveat that we would have some
control over whoever leases it we we have some control over
what improvements they make to the
building so it doesn't damage the historical nature of the
building yeah this is the the 1458 per
square foot that i've listed here that's our best guess on
the market rate in the downtown area i
don't think city hall west would probably command that at
least in the condition that it's in with
some of the renovation so we can certainly look a bit more
detailed but that's kind of our best
guess of what that market rate is great a couple things to
think about um number one yes that's
actually i think a great option other than the reason city
hall west doesn't work for our needs
probably makes it not work for other office needs either
because it's just really not designed for
that but i think one thing for us to think about or
remember is maintaining control over a structure
what it looks like um what it's used for you can accomplish
all kinds of things with deed restrictions
so you know there was some conversation a few years ago
about selling city hall west and the
old fire station for some kind of a redevelopment project
and a lot of there was a lot of stuff in
the paper and people concerned about well you can't sell it
because it's got all that history and
architecture and all that you can you can do anything you
want to do pretty much in a deed
restriction so for example you could say i'm going to sell
this property but i'm going to put a deed
restriction on it says the roof must always be clay tile
and a red color you can't change the
windows you can't change the brick you can't change the
front door you can accomplish all those things
so one thing i think we should explore is well i would just
tell you leasing city hall west will
be a challenge in terms of getting any sort of a return
because all the issues were that million
bucks that we need to spend to make it functional in terms
of hvac and roof you're going to have to
spend that for anybody meaning you know for a tenant to be
able to function in it right now
it would be an office tenant but it's really not conducive
for an office use because of all the
different levels and stuff so i think that that one thing
for us to keep in mind is if if maintaining
the historical integrity and look of a building is what is
our most important concern it doesn't mean
we have to continue to own it i'm not saying we don't
continue to own city hall west but i think
that's the conclusion that most people would jump to for
obvious reasons that if i sell it to somebody
it can't control what it looks like or what it gets used
for and that's not the case you can
control that with with by other means specifically with
deed restrictions
i don't think we're going to be able to get a whole lot of
rent would be my professional opinion on
on that space as it sits today without spending a lot of
money on it i don't think we want to
go spend a lot of money on it to be able to lease it so
just something to think about
i'm sorry what you do with this slide no sir no go ahead i
'll just want comments for them
i think we mentioned the lease term five to ten years
somewhere is kind of what we're looking at
and that goes into the long-term recommendations that i'll
show you in just a moment of kind of
what we're proposing and how to how to do that we've
already talked about potential repurposing
of city hall leasing perhaps of how we do that selling it
with deed restriction those are options
that we can talk about another time the old central fire
station is another facility which is close to
that do we want to sell that facility do we want to rep
urpose it how do we want to do that
but i think again all these things are kind of interrelated
in our view of looking at this
comprehensively and bringing back a package that makes
sense over time for all of them and then
we've talked about the denton county building but we would
pursue if if the vision is to build this
across the mckinney street as we've talked about is to
pursue the purchase of this building next door
yeah a couple of observations on this particular slide as i
look through this and a couple questions
first so the primary reason for a lot the long-term goal at
least from staff's perspective is
to bring together departments that are that are not
together to write a little bit better synergy
this particular one is saying we don't have enough room for
the planning development department which
is a lot of it's a lot of divisions it's inspections it's i
think health card i mean there's a lot of
different when i think of planning and development i think
of what manal does that that group but
it's more than that there's a lot of things underneath that
and so a couple of things that
i would be very it would have to take a lot of convincing
to get me to spend 350 thousand dollars
a year for a five or ten year lease to save a million
dollars and i understand that there that
the structure of that is i mean you'd almost have to gut it
literally keep the shell take everything
out and just redesign it which i don't advocate for that so
my thought is in the in the short
because i certainly would be opposed to moving everybody
out and leaving that space vacant
and paying 350 thousand dollars a year in lease payments i
mean there's got to be a way that i
mean that would be that i look at it in the reverse let's
look at it in the reverse we're
paying 350 thousand dollars for a group to be somewhere but
we have a building sitting vacant
that some of those people or most of those people are maybe
certain groups of those people so i
guess when i hear this i hear this all or nothing kind of
approach like we got to move them all
because they're all sort of interrelated and they all sort
of work together and i guess i'm
not been convinced that that's really the final solution i
mean i've heard that's the situation
but i would be concerned with spending that kind of money
over that kind of lease term
and leaving that building vacant just like i would be vac
ating city hall west just like i would be
vacating this particular building because they still i've
always said i'd like to see government
operate more as a business and and but in this respect it's
sort of it's the same but it's not
the same if we can have some people there as we're
determining this long-term solution i'm just trying
to get that 350 thousand dollar cost down because five
years is what is that 1.75 million 1.75 and
10 is 3.5 million it's a lot um i'm not saying that it's
not worthy to look at at some iteration
but it just seems like we're on an all or nothing kind of
approach instead of exploring and there
may not be anything in between i just haven't heard too
many options of the in between well i
i apologize if i if i presented it as all or nothing i
think what we're trying to do is is is
hopefully outline a vision of where we want to go and i
think if the direction is we want to look at
trying to find a lease but at the same time we want you to
try to find what would we be doing with
city hall west and central fire station the old central
fire station to offset some of those costs
and come up with a better financial plan we can certainly
do that and come back i think the
direction though that we're looking for is that something
you want to do is that something you
want to do we can certainly come back and run the numbers
look at those and come back with a plan
that accomplishes that and offsets as much of that as we
can i don't think we can offset all that
350 000 a year but maybe we can offset some but i guess
that's my question is the direction you're
looking for this all or nothing approach moving all of
planning out and and leaving city hall
either to be repurposed or or is there some other interim
so i just need to understand if i say this
is my direction that i understand what you're seeking as
direction okay maybe i misunderstood
your question yes i think the direction and the
recommendation is to move the entire planning and
development group out and the reason is to keep them all
together and to have a space that allows
them to absorb some of the new positions and i think we
have maybe i'm trying to remember 10
positions i believe it is that's going to be coming as part
of this budget and the next budget
over into planning and development adding them up there's a
lot we've got to have room for those
folks to make sure and we got to have them in an
environment that's conducive to them doing the job
that we're asking them to do so that's kind of that's the
recommendation from staff just to get
them into one area there's so many contingencies involved
in this plan because it's holistic it's
comprehensive and there are certain piece pieces of this
that i think are absolutely crucial that we
decide what our direction is before we can give them more
comprehensive direction and one of those
is our tolerance level of divesting ourselves as a city of
some of these buildings if that's not is
that an option that would mean city hall west that would
mean things like perhaps you had mentioned
the center for visual arts yes as a potential option which
is a valuable building in a valuable
location there to be able to put some of those on the table
to say what are we willing to do because
if we are willing to sell that opens up a lot of options i
think for us and some revenue and solve
some of these problems and so part of me thinks that's a
pretty ripe discussion we all know it was
controversial last time and different people had different
opinions but at some point i think we're
gonna have to cross that bridge we're not going to be able
to go very much further down this track of
giving you more direction so i don't know when we have that
conversation but it needs to take place
yeah it's almost like you want you want to break the
conversation now it's hard to have a holistic
conversation but also get it's hard to stay out of the
details right because all the details matter
i would just say in terms of the short term what i want us
to remember is the conversation we were
at watching how planning and development and building
inspections and fire inspections and
how all those people function or don't function in the
space that they're in so to me saying well
let's i'm not saying this is what you're saying but i'm
just kind of thinking through what the
potential options would be and say well now now let's go
take 20 of those 60 people and put them
in another building one of the things that we continue to
hear about and talk about is inefficiency
and lack of customer service so to me i think we have to
say well we absolutely need to address
those and we and we have the growth that's going to put
additional positions in there so can you
imagine trying to put 10 more people in that building no
can't put one more person but then
you go well who do i take out what departments do i take
out where can i put them well there's no
space here and there's no space to say so then you start
looking around and then you you're back to
the inefficiency issue so i think the way to look at is to
say okay if we need to do this then how
do we fund it how do we fund it well you could say i'm
going to sell the the old fire station
in city hall west what do we think that that's worth if we
sell them what's the downside can we
still have the parking we want over there if we sold it you
know i think we have to go through a
step process but if we don't start with we need to do this
i mean we all agreed we need to do we need
to get planning and development all the people in that
building in a functioning space wherever
that is whatever that is george mentioned the adjacency
issues how important is that so i don't
think you can ever get to your answer if you don't go
through a stepped process that starts with
i need to do this for sure so if this then what are my
options and if i take that option then what
are those options because if you look at the amount of
money you know you look at you go man
350 grand that's a lot of money you also have to look at
what does it cost us if we don't do it
in terms of just the impact of time about the all or
nothing you're talking about this particular
approach well i'm saying i'm just saying an all or nothing
sounds like you're saying they all have to
stay there or we have to lease that exact whatever we've
got to move them all somewhere right that's
that's what i mean right so so i think i think moving
people out of city facilities and continuing
to own the facilities that are vacant makes zero sense at
all i don't think that would make any
sense at all so i think kevin is on it which is what i mean
in your business you would never do
that you don't need a building you sell it and i think we
need to operate we need to look at this
like we would in the business so to me i think we have to
start with do we need to move them yes
and then and then how do we fund it because there's
probably a lot of different options for that
that's my opinion well i was just gonna say i think this is
all incredibly good conversation that
helps identify and frame the issues that we've been
debating and discussing for a long time but
some of what we're talking about here i think will become a
little bit more clear as we talk about
some specific space options and what it'll do for us when
we get into closed session just
so we don't make a decision before you hear the whole story
so i think it's a mistake to break up
the planning department um it's a mistake and i know when
we when you say planning see that's
what i'm saying is so make sure i understand what i'm
hearing so inspection what all's what's all
under planning we have any any visit i'll have her come up
and yeah and go let me let me let me
rephrase moving everyone in city hall west right to a new
location yes i don't want to cut that in
half and leave a few people there and then move a few
people someplace else city hall west either
stays open or city hall west is closed you know for me that
's the question and that's the option
on the table it was evident when we met there that we we've
got to get the city hall west people out
and moved where they can work efficiently because
everything in this city comes through planning
everything large small in between and everybody that you
talk to knows we have a lot of problems
and a lot of those problems it's just flat out lack of
space for our people over there we have
a huge employee attrition or we did last year we lost 17
employees i think just that the location
of that building i'm sure was was part of that it was a
miserable place to come and work every day
so planners are in demand across the country i don't care
what city what county what state
planners are in demand so we need them we need good
planners we need an efficient planning
department that means closing city hall west so a question
is and we come back to if you own a
business you look at your asset list so that's what i would
like to see from the financial land
and i don't need all 35 buildings because i don't think we
're really looking at that scope i think
initially it's going to be an asset list of immediate
concerns which are city hall west
and the adjacent fire department because that's all one big
you know chunk of land in terms of
do we do we sell it and if we do sell it what deed
restrictions i would like to hear that cost
and then i i'd also like to hear at a later work session
what kind of deed restrictions we could
place on it not to kill the sale but to give the city just
a little bit of control over maintaining
the historical aspects of those buildings but it's all
about money in and money out i know the bond
committee said oh let's raise taxes you know what they're
not elected and they're not accountable
to the citizens of this city i am and what i'm hearing is
that our taxes are high enough right
now so i'm not ready to pull the trigger and raise taxes to
to build bigger and newer and nicer
my issue today right now is how do we help planning do a
better job which means give
these people the space they need in the space they deserve
and and i i hear what you're saying
i don't necessarily have the same opinion i don't think
because i think when we when
when you're talking about planners you're talking about
people who sit and do plan review
and the planning department is made up of many many
different departments i believe if that's
correct the planning department itself is made up of the
planning division which are the planners
that you're referring to it's made up of building
inspections which includes plans examiners
and inspectors building inspectors and health inspectors
and it also houses gas well administration
now in addition to that when you look at development review
as an activity in the city
some other departments that play key roles in that are
engineering and fire specifically and we have
engineers development review engineers and fire inspectors
and a fire plans examiner if you will
all housed in city hall west as well and those all function
as a core part of our team and we have
worked hard over the last few years to get fire inspections
and to get development review engineering
inside that building so that we can become more efficient
and be working better as a team and cut
out some of those inefficiencies that happen from everybody
being separated today we have 59 people
that are housed at city hall west it includes everybody
that i just described if you take the
new fte's that are currently being contemplated in the
upcoming budget for those core functions
that's an additional up to 13 fte's and today in city hall
west we have offices as small as 72
square feet and so we've pretty much chopped that building
up just about as tiny as we can get it
and we are going to have an immediate need for more space
in the in the coming months so my
question to you is so what you're saying is everyone that's
there all right they all need
to go to the same place because they all work in or they're
inextricably linked that those functions
are i'm not saying you can bifurcate them but they're
engineering and planners and fire inspectors i
get that so i guess if that's the case if that's the case
then help me understand before this
recommendation can or before these recommendations have
come to us the budget recommendation which
has been formulated over many months and is presented to us
last week had the planning
department adding 15 new people or 10 new people or however
many you said so where what was the
plan where were you going to put them if somehow this doesn
't come to fruition well the the request
for those fte's has been at the direction and from my
understanding of the city council where you've
said tell me what you need in terms of resources to deliver
the business friendly product that
we're looking to offer to our citizens and so first we
looked at staffing and secondly we're
looking at facilities and i do i want you all to be aware
that i have a presentation prepared in
closed session that does address a lot of these questions
in further detail and so i would hope
that you would have allow me an opportunity to bring that
to you before making a recommendation
and and and i agree about because kathleen on the when you
talk about it's the people's money
you're absolutely right and it's been coming upon us to
make sure that we use that in the wisest way
that's reflective of community values and to me to spend
350 000 on leasing space for five or
ten years especially if we don't know where we're going
long term like let's say we decide we can't
afford to do a a combined city hall well i'm i can tell you
right now then we have to make a decision
now we've got 350 000 dollars of spending now do we buy it
and i'll i'll just say on on the surface
i will be very hesitant i think city hall west is an
integral part of denton's history and i
know we can sell it and put deed restriction on it like
that that thing has been almost every
department in the city has been touched by that building
and my goal for that building if anything
would be to somehow restore to something that was like it
was many years ago and to provide it an
actual opportunity for the community so to me i don't
really see selling it and taking those proceeds
because we're going to take a beating on it if the problems
exist for selling it i mean leasing it
with the the and then you pile deed restrictions on top of
that you will provide all these kind
of restrictions your price is going to be so nominal i'd
say i'd rather own it for that price
and do something else with it so the only thing i'm trying
to figure out is to make sure that this
is the only option in order to meet those needs to maximize
the taxpayers you know return on what they
pay for the city and i need to understand that we can't say
well you know this department really
yeah we'd like for them to be here but they don't have to
be here we can we can do they don't meet
but once a week or once ever two or three weeks and and we
could turn it into we could have
additional meeting space i'm just simply saying for three
which especially again is not budgeted
this 350 000 is not in the budget and i'm going to be very
i mean if this comes out of anything
for me if it's in the budget we'll have to look at the
supplemental package i mean to try to come
up with 350 000 right now you think i mean and we're
talking about decreasing taxes we're talking
about we've talked about do we want to have a tax decrease
this is about a half cent tax increase if
i'm not close to it is that not 350 000 it's the equivalent
of the equivalent of what's what's a
what's a penny 800 000 850 000 so about about a yeah about
a third a little more than a third
there is the 959 000 that we talked about with council i
know chuck's going to go through that
in a moment that's an option there's options for there's
ways to look at that there's a lot
of different ways to look at it but going back and look at
the supplemental packages it sounds like
there's a lot yeah i was looking i haven't been looking
over at this side of the room i'm sorry
is that okay yeah sorry go ahead well first i wanted to say
i'm glad to hear you say that
about the city homeless because i think i think holding it
in the city is is a good is a good
option and a good thing to do but also my question was has
have we been approached by a developer
that wants to buy that and the fire station because that
seems to be like a package deal all of a
sudden like talked about so i didn't know if that was
already if we've been approached and we know
what would amy address that if we've had interest in both
facilities but that would be a conversation
that would be more appropriate in closed session if you
want more specific details on that
okay okay but we do we there's absolutely interest in both
okay thank you i'm just worried that we're
sending mixed signals to planning i feel like we we tell
them we uh we're gonna shake things up we're
gonna move things around you know we want your some uh
supplemental package here um you need this
position but then we maybe aren't willing to do that we
want to change the cultures dentin's coming
we got to get co's open and then when it comes down to like
moving them and you know they need a new
locker room get them a new locker room like we got to start
we have to spend some money sometime i'm
just we're talking about a lot of different things and you
know you it's hard to nail down like the
plan and i want to make sure that we're just really
consistent about our vision of dentin tons of
businesses are coming here wanting to get open small
businesses it's a nightmare to get a permit
still because you just don't know where to go which paper
do i fill out i'm just building a fence
i mean i'm just talking from personal experience i want to
make sure that
i know it sounds like a lot of money to spend but this to
me is more just an investment we're just
we just want uh things to start running more efficiently
and properly and we're we keep telling
you know we'll go to our retreat and say we got to change
the culture and we are we have momentum
then starting to change and i want our that to continue so
i just want us to make sure we're
thinking about that i don't know what to do about city hall
west i'm torn i don't know we we fix it
up and then what do we do with it after that or you know i
know we're just talking but is it a
music hall is it you know even when i first got on council
i said well maybe it's a museum and
then even kevin pulled me aside he's like you sure you want
a museum and i was like i don't
want another museum you know i i don't know so i'm you know
i'm not putting we're just just thinking
i'm torn what to do with that building i love that building
and you see the christmas lights on the
old postcards and i wasn't around back then i don't want
you know that means that building
means a lot to a lot of people here so maybe just as a
question and maybe this a good segue into the
next topic what all is kind of involved with this city-wide
space study will some of these things be
answered in that study i still have a couple of slides left
is that one of them that's one of them
i just go ahead and work on recommendations but let me go
let me go with greg and then kathleen
and did you yeah okay well you know i i just want to say to
build on what joey said you know
you can't say you got to do more with less it doesn't jive
right it doesn't work and so
when we say you know with all due respect mayor and we say
i can't see supporting spending
three hundred fifty thousand dollars a year in rent okay
well what's the solution we don't own
anything where we can go put them i didn't say i can't see
doing that i said i can't see doing it
without understanding what the understanding is and so and
so and so the the what we do know right
now is we got a problem with city hall west right so we set
in the room where all of our perspective
new customers to the city big manufacturers big employers
that's the room where they have their
first experience with us right going through a drc or a pre
-application meeting or whatever it is
so first of all what you know what are you willing to spend
on your brand but then secondly how do we
recruit the best in class staff people and walk them into a
place and say here's your new digs i
know it looks like a closet but mr engineer this is where
you work now so i mean i think we kind of
have to put our money where our mouth is and i don't think
it's a good idea for us to dismiss
something out of hand before we understand how we could pay
for it right so because i i'll just tell
you this my stance on city hall west it probably makes
sense to keep it because it's such a weird
jacked up building with all these different levels and
concrete and all it's not unless somebody
really really loves it and is going to do something with it
that everybody would just stand up and
clap for you're not going to get a lot for it because it's
weird weird weird it's been
renovated so many times it's hard to do anything with it i
also think we we don't need to just
stand on the desk and say we're not selling it unless we
say what we're going to do with it
because sitting vacant that building will degrade and fall
apart so fast you see it over and over
so just like this comment we need to have a plan for what
we're going to do with it and we need to
be willing to fund it or you'd be better off selling it to
somebody who would take care of it
and and let it live right because all the jumping up and
down about the fire station up by unt well
we sold it to somebody that did nothing with it but if we
would have done nothing with it the same
tree would have grown right up through the middle of it so
just because you say i want to keep it
you got to be willing to fund it sure and preserve it
otherwise you'd be better off selling it to the
to respect the history of it but you know i just feel like
we can't we we keep talking over and
over about culture about customer service about customer
experience about getting people through
the permit process getting people co's all the things that
we've been talking about for the last
year we've identified one of the major issues and i think
we owe it to ourselves to say well hold on
let's don't get scared of the number because maybe that's
not the number we don't even know
where the number came from but whatever it is let's don't
get scared of the number and then say
hey y'all figure out how to do more with less because we
know that that's not going to get you
the answer that you want so sometimes we gotta we gotta
face it so again i emphasize that we have a
billion dollar budget we're just starting to get into it we
're looking at 350 000 that isn't in
this current budget i want to remind everybody this budget
is not concrete this is a fluid budget
that's what this council was elected to do and that's make
good decisions tough decisions
so we get into this billion dollar budget and let's just
let's just do some line item study
and see if we can't find some money to help pay for this in
response to you chris in terms of a
five to ten year lease but what if that makes the most
sense to solve the problem as we grow
and as we look towards a 2020 or 2025 plan for something
big i know that we are paying some
pretty major debt off to uh you know pay for the the dme
debt that's going to be behind us
at some point in time so i'm willing to risk a five to ten
year lease to create an efficient
planning department because we are right on the edge of of
everything planning in this city
and we we have to have that space and i think we owe it to
our planning department to do everything
we can and that includes an interim plan while we plan for
possibly something bigger but i say let's
find that money and and and i don't disagree with that i
don't disagree with any of the
sentiments that have been shared locker room and you know
city hall west and i really don't all i'm
simply saying is i will say that i don't know if i fully
will agree to that somehow that the location
is going to solve all the issues that we have thought we've
identified with and when we let's
make sure we understand the planning planning when we talk
about planning typically we're talking
about the drc the development review process the planning
of these projects all right when when i
hear the word planning so if y'all are meaning something
else please be sure and sort of help
under help me understand that when you talk about planning
i'm thinking of the planning process that
we've said we have difficulty with will location help yes
but i don't if that's really the sense
if that's one of the major reasons we're going to do this
is that because we need to it's going to
change the culture it's going to improve permitting time it
's going to improve the process it's going
to because i don't think we if we if we're just worried
about people coming and meeting in denton
and having a brand we can find a place to do that for less
money than that but what you're saying is
we just if they're coming to the planning department this
is where the meetings take place
then let's figure out a way we can do it and make an
impression so if we're saying that the location
is going to be one of the major developments or solutions
to the problems that we think we're
trying to address i want to make sure we have some matrixes
then that are in place to help help
determine that because i trust that those people over there
and planning are doing their very best
whether they're sitting in the closet whether they're
sitting that doesn't mean that they
wouldn't like other offices absolutely absolutely i totally
agree with that but i really i if we're
going to move them because we need to move them because we
're outgrowing it so be it absolutely
have no problem with that but i don't want us to justify it
on something that to me as far as the
location means that it's going to solve our problems or
most of our problems how many times
have we seen sports facilities who build new new arenas
that doesn't necessarily improve their
winning stats so i i just want to i just want to say that i
can be convinced of this and i'm not
that far off i think you guys have been hearing that i'm
sort of resistant to this i'm just simply
saying i want to make sure i have enough information to
commit because if we don't have a long-term
plan kathleen to move all these people somewhere else and i
'm going to say we got to figure out
how to make that lease short term and instead of renting we
need to find something that we can
purchase even if it's what we're because that that would be
silly i mean there's no way i'm going to
rent if i can buy if i know that i have that need but that
's the concern for me is we're saying this
is the short-term need but a five and ten year lease is not
what i would consider a short-term
solution that i mean when you're talking about a five or
ten year lease that's a long-term solution
so if the direction is to build the new city hall and then
we may give that direction but then you
also it's going to go before the bond committee which then
is voted on by the voters and then we
don't know whether they're going to prove it or not so i'm
just simply saying yeah 350 and you're
right this is if we've got a budget coming up we can find a
way to fund that as a real estate owner
i just have a great aversion to leasing when you know you
're going to own something and hold it
for a long period of time especially when we've got
buildings that are 50 and 60 years old 90 years
old that that's my only thought about this is to make sure
so yes this conversation is bringing up
the information and soliciting the information from you
guys from staff that helps say this is why we
need to do this not just because we went over there and sat
in a meeting and saw somebody sitting in a
little room okay that's fine but i think we owe it to make
sure we understand fully the rationale
and the fiscal implications and how this fits into a long-
term plan that's my only objection to this
how does this fit into a long-term plan and i have no
problem if it's an integral part of a long
because five or ten year lease is not a short-term solution
to the issue it's it's a it's an interim
stamp but it's by no means short-term yes and in answer to
your question the matrix for me is very
simple they have outgrown that building yes period yeah so
it's an immediate need and we owe it to
them to address that immediate need okay yes joey i was
going to similar comment i think planning is
doing a great job and i agree with pretty much everything
you said but it seemed like the
conversation kind of got somewhere over in the ditch there
yeah just in principle that's what
sure i was trying to say sure i agree that's a big number
are you saying i'm in the ditch yes oh yes
yes yes yes kevin yeah i agree this needs to be part of a
comprehensive strategy and going
the price tag is huge and part of the reason is the this is
you floated this to us ever since i've
been on council and i don't know how long before that it's
so easy to kick the can down the road
on this because politically speaking you go out to the
public and say do you want roads to new
parts i mean people aren't coming to me saying we need a
new city hall and they never will i mean
it'll be something that we'll just have to take leadership
on and saying while i understand that
this doesn't feel like it's going to serve you as a citizen
it actually does because of the
efficiencies you're able to create because of the space you
're able to create the customer service
needs but no one sees that firsthand so at some point i
think we're going to have to bite the
bullet and make some difficult decisions that are going to
have difficult financial consequences as
a result on a lot of things and this is one of them so i'm
in favor of continuing to look at
this subject but i kind of feel like this immediate
discussion has been placed out of
context a bit because in your recommendation you don't you
're not really understanding this
planning issue as a standalone issue but more part of a
comprehensive strategy is that correct
i mean while there is a problem to be solved there your
recommendation doesn't include let's
just kind of fix this planning department issue no i think
i think it's bigger than that i think
even if you move if the decision of the council was to we
're going to move planning and development
and buy a new facility just for that department or we're
going to move them to a place that we
lease it doesn't solve all the issues and that's that's
what we're trying to talk about is some of
the adjacencies with the other departments the other areas
that need to be connected to them
that that's what we need to have some kind of resolution to
long term well i was just i don't
want to say that when brian started this presentation i
understand there's so many moving parts here part
of it is a short-term solution to the plan immediate
problem Kathleen that you talk about
the planning department we know we've got a problem we need
to resolve it i understand the mayor's
concern that we have a long-term plan if we're going to do
something that we need to know
what our general direction is that takes longer to get to
the answer that is going to take longer
to get the the answer for than solving the short-term
solution for just the planning department
we've got to pull the trigger on something if we're going
to solve either one of those problems
and so what brian's trying to present is a short-term
solution for the planning issue
and a longer-term problem to try to analyze all of these
issues together well
i completely disagree with your notation that people
shouldn't lease things because i think
leasing is a wonderful thing a big proponent of it but on a
serious note though
yeah don't wax over that yeah but on a serious note i mean
so why do you why do you lease something
when i'm not exactly sure what my long-term need is so i
don't want to go i mean it's kind of funny
i recall although i wasn't in the conversation i kind of uh
get a feel for how it went with the
conversation about a year ago or so maybe we should buy
this it may not fit our long-term need but if
we can use it for a while and then we can sell it if we don
't need it i think the conclusion was
that's not a bad idea we shouldn't be in the real estate
investment business as a city so
you know i think what what we've identified here is okay we
got to do something for planning
is what how does it fit into the long-term goal long-term
plan well long-term we want to build
something that will house them we don't have that today we
don't know where that's going to be what
it's going to be but they need to function so how does it
fit in the long term we need to go get
them in a place they can function and maybe you know there
's all kinds of ways to structure your
deal right so maybe you do a five-year lease or a seven-
year lease but i got the option to terminate
it after the third year or maybe i have an option to buy it
or you know so all those things can be
made a part of i don't want to lose i just don't want to
lose the sight of the fact that
the this planning and development department which is a lot
more than just the planning as we heard
it is a problem for them to function today and there's more
people coming and there's more
customers coming to use their services so i don't know that
everything has to be perfectly connected
but i think you can certainly anytime you're doing a deal a
lease deal you can structure it to fit
what your needs are right so it could be i want an option
to buy it i want an option to terminate
when i'm ready or whatever those are what i don't want to
do is for us to not do what we need to do
so that those departments can function well because we're
worried about eating the entire elephant
because we're not going to have a fully baked long-term
plan in a month does that make sense
absolutely absolutely don't disagree with that okay thanks
okay i'm going to leave this slide
so the lease term of five to ten years that we talked about
in the short term that's directly
connected to the long-term plan which is on the next slide
at least the long-term recommendation
that we have so we've talked about this the plan is to work
on a city hall plan to be funded the
next bond program i want to be clear too the reason it
would be the next bond program is because we're
not proposing a tax rate increase associated with this what
i was trying to give you earlier some of
those options if you wanted to do it earlier if you wanted
to try to advance that there are tax rate
impacts associated with that or delay of projects that have
already been approved so i just want to
be clear about that we'd also propose that we utilize some
type of community task force
to examine options and develop recommendations to be
considered by the voters in 2020
not sure exactly what the structure of that would be but
some kind of community interested folks who
could help us with the planning of this helping us look at
the vision of what we want what are the
things that are important for us and then that would likely
form the basis of the bond committee
that you would then appoint at some point or a council
would appoint and for the next bond
program 2020 now we start that process typically about a
year before the vote actually occurs so
you're talking about by the end of 2019 understanding what
's going to be presented as a recommendation
for a bond committee to take a look at you have to have
some details for them to understand
this is a priority for us this is why we want you to look
at it here's some basics so that's kind of
the plan is how you bring it forward so due to the size of
this investment again you're talking
about millions of dollars there are all kinds of issues
that we've already talked about at length
here of different facilities how we want to connect
different buildings what we want to do for downtown
we're proposing that we complete a city hall facility needs
assessment so council member
hawkins this is to your point earlier is we really feel
like we need some help working through these
there's a complicated issues of how you look at all these
different pieces and to make sure that
the dollars that we spend the taxpayer dollars that we
spend are spent in the most effective
and efficient way that's really what we're trying to get
here so we would utilize an internal
steering committee this is part this is funded in the
budget or has been recommended to be funded
in the budget we would utilize an internal steering
committee of staff key staff around the city or
facilities areas and some of the key departments that we've
been talking about to determine what
are the appropriate department appropriate departments to
be included in this new facility
again i've given you a preliminary sketch of what we think
makes sense but there's some more detail
work that needs to be done of what are all the all the
pieces that need to be there we need to validate
what are our current and future needs again these are rough
sketches that we've given you of 125,000
square feet even it's not going to be like that it's got to
be a more detailed analysis to figure
out exactly what you need and why we need to know what our
parking requirements are for a facility
like this and the downtown area if we're looking at just
the facility itself how many departments
you have how many citizens are going to be attending those
meetings what do you need just
for the facility well what do you need for the downtown
area too how much do we want to augment
that by we got to figure out that and we need to know with
precision why we need it because they're
going to be very expensive options and we need to have some
initial site planning options where
would you locate a facility like this how big is the
footprint how many acres do you need for this
would that require a parking garage would it require
surface lots do you have that in the
downtown area how would that work we need help with that so
that work will assist us with identifying
some elements which we which we can then include in a
preliminary design remember that's the
hundred thousand dollar piece i talked about some sketches
some site plans some drawings of what
the facility might look like that's the information that
you then take back to the bond committee and
then to the voters themselves to authorize but you have to
have that information to go forward
once the preliminary design work is done you can get some
basic cost information schematics
to kind of start looking at that the design itself i'm
sorry yes so that would be staff
and the 100 000 is already in the budget i just the 100 000
isn't in the budget no ma'am that that
the 200 000 we've included for the needs assessment for the
facility needs assessment that is in the
proposed budget for next year the 100 000 for preliminary
design and i'll get to the next slide
in a moment talking about next steps kind of the sequencing
of these things that's in a future year
well 100 000 is already one third of the way through the
first lease payment for our planning
department so i would be in favor of keeping it in-house
staff work and not bring in consultants
and consultant fees to have staff do that initial
preliminary footprint that can come back to council
and we chew on that before we step out of the box and spend
one or two hundred thousand dollars on
outside help
let me make sure i understand so brian first of all to make
sure i understand that you are talking
about the same thing so we you've talked about the site
study that was in the but but this
this last bullet point is that the one that talks about the
the site the the last one once
preliminary design elements are you saying that that
hundred thousand dollars it was in your
previous slide was for i'm going to say was that for like
an architect or somebody to draw up some
preliminary kind of elevations actual sort of construction
drawings if you will very
not detailed but rudimentary as far as like some of like
what we saw on the convention center
i think is sort of similar to something that's correct all
of these kind of build on themselves
so the needs assessment is trying to validate what do you
need to have in the facility what
square footages do you need what's kind of some basic site
planning options we need some help in
identifying what that is we've budgeted 200,000 for that
purpose and again i know that's a lot
of money it's it's a it is a lot but in the context of the
entire project it's we're trying
to make sure that we we spend the right dollars to make
sure we get the right return on that
investment the next piece of that after you do the needs
assessment and you know what you need
then the preliminary design would be completed after that
to figure out here's what it might
look like here's what how you would have things configured
and that would be used to help us spur
the discussion with the bond committee and and the voters
themselves yeah she she but do you know
but do you have a follow-up to sort of uh okay go ahead i
just want to go on the record that
i think at this early stage i would like to see staff work
on the needs assessment first
before we draw pictures which for me is just way
preliminary and i know we had drawings for
the convention center that that didn't happen so you know
for me it's needs assessment let's hear
department by department what are you going to need on a
five ten fifteen twenty year buildout
projected in in terms of where do you see your department
growing so we get a square foot need
department by department before we jump off the cliff again
one or two hundred thousand dollars
pays for almost the first lease payment to get planning
moved it's about efficient use of cost
of of dollars right now councilmember breaks well my
comment was again about the convention center
and you brought it up we did invest and spend a lot of
money on the project that didn't ever
come to fruition so i just want to kind of look at our past
and and try to prevent that from
happening again if the if we spend all this money and then
the public isn't for it how much have we
have we invested and wasted so just kind of wanted to make
that note okay i'm on a power
ahead last slide power oh i'm sorry hold on joey's got
something i'm torn on that because my only thing
is we just had all the departments give us these supplement
als and they're requesting new fte's
so they got their new fte's to do what they need to do
better and to anticipate what's going to
happen this year and then we're saying oh and by the way do
a study that would externally cost 200
grand which sounds like four full-time positions that's my
only i'm torn am i get are you torn
about the the the budget item of 200 what are you torn i
guess i'm not understanding what you're
asking everybody to on top of their work also do the study
of something that we're confused about
what they actually need because we need to study for space
wise is that what you're asking am i
i don't want to spend two hundred thousand dollars on a
consultant to tell me how much space we need
in the city of denton every department head who plans on
being here for a while is going to be
able to say here's my projected growth over the next five
ten fifteen years we have four assistant
city managers who can help with this project because they
oversee those different sectors of
the city let's use in-house resources i don't want to i
just am going on the record i don't want to
spend consult money on this right now what if in order to
do that do we need more employees to do
that or is that something that well i think the the
question is do we have the right disciplines
here to know how to do that effectively we can certainly
take a look at how we might be able to
do it i just want to make sure that what we spend the
dollars on or what we really need and that's
if there's a different way to do that we can certainly get
with our facilities group and try
to come back with a suggestion of that but the idea is is
to make sure we've really validate what we
need so that when we spend if the the intent is to build a
city hall if we spend 25 to 35 million
dollars that that we get there and it meets what we need
that we don't have to come back 10 years
later and realize that wasn't the right facility it is so
important for us to be responsible with
their money but i just want it maybe this is the most
efficient way to get us to what we need i'm
just saying that i agree we do a lot of studies around here
that cost a lot of money but i so
councilman rhodes yeah i mean it's difficult it's easy to
pile up on consultants in city
government i've done it myself um and what i've learned uh
throughout the four years here sometimes
sometimes consultants save you money uh as a city because
you have folks who either aren't properly
equipped uh to do it or it takes folks from doing their
regular job and there's a cost to that
and that could easily go up well above 200 000 and then we
're actually going backwards on that so i
mean this is something where i'm not an expert in space
studies i i could probably tell you
something within my sphere of work how much space i need
but to be able to do that in a large
organization how you put all the pieces together probably
involves an expert um so i'm comfortable
with that and and given the large scale of investment we're
talking about at the end of
the day some of those price tags 200 000 is is is a pretty
small uh investment to make to get us to
the point of even saying where do we need to go and if so
what are our options so i'm comfortable
with it well kevin just made my point if we look at this at
these costs he's outlining relative to
the total potential cost of the project in the end it's
probably a very good investment to do that
and not try to use people who aren't equipped to do it and
you know i can imagine the police chief
and the fire chief and the plane director all getting
together but they're going to be looking
at their interest maybe having somebody who does that as a
profession can look at those in relation
to each other more objectively and more professionally then
if i may offer compromise that we include this
in all of our budget discussions as we look at money in and
money out money in and money out
instead of deciding today yes you're authorized to to go
spend this this amount of money because
this is very preliminary right now that in terms of all of
this let's put it into the context of
our budget discussions because in those budget discussions
we'll see what's there what's a
priority and where that money needs to be spent yeah and i
will say i do appreciate the city manager
on his this estimate for this space study was considerably
higher so i appreciate that you
that there's at least an attempt to make it i don't want to
say seem more reasonable because
reasonableness is just simply an eye to be holders except
for the texas legislature
i'm sorry i couldn't i couldn't resist that um no so so i
do you're taking me out of the category of
yes absolutely yes absolutely absolutely so i do i do
appreciate that i do i do appreciate that yes
yeah yeah yeah yeah okay yeah and to that point this first
sub bullet point i've listed here is
we wanted to utilize an internal steering committee of
these key stakeholders to help us keep the cost
down as much as we could but at the same time try to
utilize that expertise okay moment you've all
wanted to work who said we weren't gonna need lunch who
said we weren't gonna need dinner i told you
last last slide that i had here and again this is just some
timing elements to this of you're
talking about the short term and long term they're talking
about years of how this would work out
so if you agree with these recommendations or we want i
know we'll probably have some additional
conversations about this in the future but this is kind of
the planning level steps that we were
proposed so in fall of this year we'd start that city hall
facility needs assessment that we've
been talking about we'd start that process we'd look at
trying to um lease begin and lease of a
new space for planning and development sometime in spring
or summer of 2016 summer of 2016 also
we would begin you know work with that internal steering
committee and community task force to finalize the vision
of the city hall and again that's something that we need to
have more conversation about just a concept at this point
but
how do we bring some other stakeholders into that process
and make sure that we're all thinking about it the same way
we would try to complete the preliminary design again this
is building upon the needs assessment
that we would have done but complete the preliminary design
in spring of 2017 and in fall of 2019
begin the the actual deliberation process with the bond
advisory committee if that's the direction of
the council we would then have a bond election in 2020 nove
mber 2020 it sounds like a long time off
but it'll be here before you know it begin the design this
is the actual designs the the two and
a half to three and a half million dollars that you'd have
to spend all this has to be kind of
sequenced out begin designing the city hall facility and
then begin construction of 2022
now the construction i understand is somewhere between 18
and 24 months depending on kind of
what kind of facility if it goes properly maybe it's 24 to
36 months i don't know but i don't really
know exactly how long these would be and so that's why when
i said the short term for the lease is
five to ten years if we're wanting to move these folks out
and get a short-term fix it's really
several years before we'd be open and operational again
without a tax rate increase is what we've
we've looked at proposing so that's my presentation i know
there's a lot of discussion on this and i
hope i've given you a lot of information we we do
appreciate the discussion i know there's a lot of
different points of view here and we're trying to see where
we need to go here on this issue one
comment do you have you all been able to or i think it
would be helpful for me at least because part
of the reason for doing this is a couple reasons one is
branding i think in some sense it's trying
to you know we've got some old facilities and how do we
want this to reflect sort of the continuing
brand that we want to project but also a major factor in
this is efficiency and to me efficiency
when it comes to this operation can doesn't necessarily
always but it can be synonymous
with you know what kind of financial impact has there been
any analysis of if we had these
departments in more close proximity to each other and the
communication capabilities and and the the
you know sort of on-the-fly meeting capabilities or driving
to and back that has there been some
kind of analysis of what we're spending time wise number
one in some and with these kind of
bifurcated facilities and what kind of financial impact it
may have and if not if there's a way to
do that just sort of basically it'd be interesting to see
and that i would hope to think that if we
did have somebody that did a space study that there's
probably some kind of formula out there
that that provides some kind of financial component because
i'm sure corporations do this all the time
you know they consolidate facilities they do these types of
things and surely they've done some type
of financial analysis as well on on that as far as what it
might save them in either productivity or
or employee time and the like the answer is no we haven't
done anything like that but certainly
we can look at doing that and bringing something back as
part of this process to see how we could
estimate it yeah i think that's a good idea yes i'm sorry i
think what you'd also want to include is
operational expense so your maintenance costs on 50-year-
old buildings and your utility expense
is dramatically different dramatic as compared to a newer
building so i think you'd want to make
sure you included that and then and then i also think what
would be beneficial is your usable
square feet so you got total square footage of this of the
buildings but your actual what's
usable for your people so as you think about 20 years from
now i had to go through this in another
life and kathleen i think the the way to do this and i
think where the compromising number came
from which is your people are involved but they've got a
professional who's leading them through the
process and they're providing the data and the professional
is putting all that data together in
a way that they can give it back and help them make some
decisions on deciding what what exactly
do we need so your usable square footage that you have
today and then and then looking at it as
kathleen said per employee because there's metric there's
kind of good information out there in the
world about how many square feet per employee do you need
in this sort of a work environment
to maximize productivity and all these other things so i'm
sure that whoever we hire
hopefully would do all those things but i'll bet you'll be
shocked at what your maintenance
and operational costs are of these old buildings for the
amount of electricity and
electricity we use and the repair expenses
any other questions comments yes council member rodin a
couple times it's been mentioned that we
have a closed session item on this and so my suggestion
would be that we forego making any
recommendations prior to having that i don't know if it's
more efficient to break now and have that
and come back and have more discussion and give direction
in public or if we just kind of go to
the next work session item and i mean it sounds like at
some point we probably should reconvene
publicly and give direction so i leave it to anyone else's
suggestion and that and i guess
and that's the question is because if we don't give
direction now then we will need to be in
open session would we not to be able to do that or i would
prefer that
even if we could do it in closed session well i guess a
question for our city manager i think
this is an ongoing issue on the budget for consideration so
it would be a proper topic of
discussion of discussion in association with the budget and
upcoming budget meeting so depending on
how you want to proceed today that's still a possibility i
think it might be a good idea to
go ahead while this is discussions all fresh on our mind to
go into the closed session discussion
and have that and then when we come out and talk about
budget you as anita was saying you could
continue to give us some direction on how to proceed and
whether to follow this
and maybe do that before we get into the actual budget
discussion so it would be proper to give
direction on this particular agenda item even though it
would be in the budget posting because
this this is related to the budget posting right this is
related to the budget i think there's
specifically some recommendations made by the city manager
with regard to some cost and some
numbers associated with this topic so i would say then it
probably would be efficient to go ahead
and move into closed session to discuss this item and when
we come back then we can
welcome back we will now reconvene our open session of this
tuesday august 11 2015
denton city council second tuesday work session agenda item
1b which is receive a report and hold
discussion give staff direction regarding the 2015-16
proposed budget capital improvement program
and five-year financial forecast thank you mayor blase
chuck springer director of finance if he'd
open this discussion and in this item i don't have any
formal new presentation i'm here to facilitate
council if you need me to pull up some items from prior
presentation i've got that on a thumb drive
and we've also got one other item just to begin the public
hearing process that's on the regular
agenda today so i'll open it up we did have a lot of
questions on the sixth we're going to try to
get as many answers as we can by the 18th and then follow
up after that so the item on the 18th
attached to that agenda item will have follow-up answers to
the questions from the sixth
but i'll open it up for council how you want to handle
their discussions do you have a question
can i did i in the interest of i think what we signaled at
the end of our last open session
and before going in the closed session that we were going
to provide some sort of direction on
that last conversation in public and as we've been advised
we can do so in the context of this budget
discussion precisely because it has budget implications to
it so i just throw that out as
maybe this is a good time to just kick it off with that so
it kind of ties it off so i would like to
suggest that we direct the staff to look into possible le
asing options to be able to take care
of the staff from city hall west and to come back to city
council with some contractual options
that we can explore that further all right that's uh is
that the direction that the rest of my
colleagues agree with i see it yes all right good deal all
right so that's the direction on
on that particular component of the budget any questions
for chuck i have a couple but any
question yes i i brought this up at the end of a meeting
and that was we had that discussion
with the chamber about our contract relating to the cvb and
my suggestion was maybe we have a
similar conversation about the economic development portion
of that and because that has budget
implications i didn't know if the timing of that was was
able to get some sort of presentation to
us in the context of our talks so that we could kind of
have a fuller conversation at the council
level about that well we are having discussions about that
you asked for that and we're talking
about bringing back i'm either asking me we do have i guess
a contract that we need to renew on
an annual basis with the chamber but i don't know that that
couldn't be accommodated between now the
time you adopt the budget or immediately following that but
amy any comments that you'd like to make
sure we um in addition to a budget implication we have an
annual contract with the chamber that
renews on october 1 of each year and so um in fact in in
the within this month the economic
development partnership board will be contemplating the
renewal of that contract and making a
recommendation to the city council and that we can
certainly put together a work session to discuss
the the contract the history of the partnership and
anything else that that you wish during this
during these budget discussions and we it might be that
that discussion takes a little bit of time
and if so we might go ahead and pursue the contract renewal
with an understanding that
we would come back within x amount of time and 30 days 60
days 90 days with further discussion
about that and i believe the way the contract is written
would give us some flexibility with that
well and if it didn't i think we could adjust the contract
so that it did allow us to accommodate
that discussion down the road if that's the consensus
council would be bringing it back
thanks any other yes just kind of over the budget we can
sure ask anything right now probably more
for chuck than any thank you though i just had somebody
approach me this past week and i think
they were a little confused the general fund budget was
developed on that six percent growth
and it actually came in at 8.54 so there was an additional
959 000 and where their confusion was
was that already in the budget and i was even i needed a
little bit of clarity on that and so
it was actually in the budget but where the confusion was
is well then how are you spending
that and i think that that's what we were trying to decide
ultimately maybe you could go a little
into that please do you want me to pull up my presentation
go into three options or just summarize
just summarize okay yeah in terms of that what we had to do
is put it somewhere as a placeholder
so we included it the proposed tax rate included those
revenues so we just put it as an expense in
non-departmental just the full amount and then i kind of
went over the three options were were to
spend it for a recurring expense like increased street
maintenance or something that would continue
on for a one-time type of expense a capital expenditure or
to reduce the tax rate if you
reduce the tax rate it would actually lower the revenues
that are proposed in in the budget to
offset that 959 so it's just kind of basically plugged in
there so it can show up in terms of
non-departmental but it's it's set for the council to
determine what to do with that potential funding
either on the expenditure side or on the revenue side
thanks jack does that help yeah that does
help okay and this is anything on the budget sure yes we
have a three percent staff pay raise across
the board and correct me if i'm wrong we had three percent
three percent and now this year it's three
percent i understand that staff um races were frozen during
the recession so i understand the
three in the three um i'm questioning another three which
would take us almost up to 10 percent
in three years time since the rate of inflation is 1.7
percent um i'd like to see the difference
in the budget between 1.7 percent in staff increase versus
the three percent across the board
and i'm wondering is there an option to allow for merit pay
raises up to three so that um you know
there are people in your office who work really hard and
maybe they deserve a pay raise and there
are other people who maybe don't work quite as hard and
maybe they're there because everybody
gets a review so um i would like to some direction on tying
those reviews to the three percent
versus just an across the board three percent and let me
clarify the compensation package is not an
across the board let me break it into two areas for non-p
ublic safety non-police and fire it's a
merit-based increase so it's an average three percent merit
-based increase so it is merit-based
it's merit-based for all those employees it's based on
their review and it's anywhere from
zero to four percent we budget it as an average three
percent merit increase the public was under
the assumption that it was an across the board three
percent okay no and and all three the last
three years it's been a merit-based compensation program
has it been across the board for sworn
personnel and police and fire they're under the meet and
confer agreements so we look at their
group of survey cities and it's the compensation is set at
105 percent of those average the average
of those survey cities so their increases will be based on
that it will be the same for all the
personnel but for example you know police officers it may
be 2.4 percent where sergeants it may be a
little bit different but what we're estimating is their
compensation package overall based on the
meet and confer is also right about that three percent
level or very close to it i'm i'm not
questioning police fire okay this is this is um outside of
those meet and confer agreements but
could i see the difference in the 1.7 which is the
inflation rate and the three percent
if that's possible just in in in raw numbers yeah we can do
that a couple questions to clarify are
you just talking about those people subject to merit so are
you excluding the police and fire
correct excluding excluding police and fire we can get that
number yeah i'd just like to see that
that number thank you and let me also mention for all the
other non-general fund personnel and the
utilities and and the other funds they're also on the merit
-based system so it's their compensation
package would be the same as what's adopted for the general
fund employees whatever's decided by
council but they're also on a merit-based system so they
get a review and then the average compensation
is about a three percent merit but they have that range for
all the other non-general fund employees
so i wanted to clarify that council member yeah i have a
question the resolution coming up for the
adopting the tax rate of 0.6938 per 100 is that the the tax
rate increase that
the public voted on yeah what's proposed in the budget last
year's tax rate was 0.68975
so the increase in that's proposed is 0.663 that's related
to debt service so that relates directly
to the first issuance of the 2014 bond election and that
was when the public voted on it and we
had estimated in the documents we sent out and with the
bond committee that the implementation
of that would be a three cent tax increase over the six-
year program right now we're estimating
about one and a half cents for the full implementation of
that program over the same
time period the six-year program so it's less than yes and
and i'll get into this when we go into this
item that we're looking at the notice but that just sets a
proposed tax rate so that kind of
sets up a maximum for the advertisement you can't go above
what you advertise but you can go below
so it doesn't yeah the city council still sets the tax rate
this is just putting the notice out
there what's going to be considered okay thank you yes ke
vin um couple a couple more questions
one relates to we had a lot of discussion with leadership
denton on downtown parking and so i
want to get a sense of what can be abstracted out of this
budget if anything that that helps us pursue
additional parking options on understanding a lot of those
were kind of creative ideas
so that can be given in a report but one of those that we
discussed that they suggested was a way to
kind of cross um and uh mckinney street to connect to these
two large public parking spaces
in the evening do we know if there's been a any movement on
that and b if there's funding identified
in this particular budget for that i'll let mark talk on
the movement and i'll try to touch on the
budgetary part thanks yes sir there um we've had some
discussions with engineering we've
seen some a couple preliminary cuts at at a design that
would create a mid-block crossing that would
include um essentially a six foot wide safe harbor
pedestrian safe harbor um but we not we're not at
a point yet to bring it back for final uh permitting
process what's can you give a sense of what where
it is in the process or what you're waiting on or or well i
understand uh engineering was uh
continuing to tweak that and that is something that we
could bring back to mobility committee or
that would be great back in terms of a uh informal staff
report but there's no so there's no
just to clarify there's no funding identified because no
prices have been set yet so there's
nothing there's nothing included in this budget not at this
point okay i mean i would just
if there's a way to me that's probably a small investment
to open up two very large parking
lots that are hard to access at night and it and it helps
us just kind of move that needle in the
right direction so if there's a way to get some estimate
that we can at least consider as part of
this budget discussion uh i think that would be helpful yes
yes greg well so we just had mobility
committee today and i and i often wonder if we talked
earlier about do you have to eat the whole
elephant at a time i mean i would just like to throw out is
there a simple short-term solution
which is we're going to put on either side of the street
some big lights that light up one section
of the street really brightly at night and paint a cross
walk i mean i don't know meaning i understand
that from an engineering standpoint you think about long-
term solutions and i don't pretend
to understand all the implications of whether you do that
but i would just like to throw out
rather than thinking we have to find the total engineered
long-term solution especially given
that we've been talking about long-term facility needs and
some of these things you know do we do
we do something versus waiting for the long-term solution
and say let's put if you light up one
part really brightly and paint a crosswalk in it does that
do it do drivers slow down because they
see the bright lights and just throwing it out there is
maybe we can do something inexpensive to
to get those parking lots opened up to people now just an
idea
i think the biggest concern or the with this in terms of
establishing that crosswalk is getting a
a requisite safe harbor in the middle because the traffic
there's quite a volume of traffic in both
directions and so trying to push that existing neck down of
the of of mckinney was the concern so we'd
like to get the six foot wide in the middle to allow for
folks to cross two lanes and allow for
traffic to pass into the next but i think there's a couple
of i've seen two versions out there
in terms of options but to get it quickly i'll work with
engineering to see where we can expedite
that we'll let you be the first one to cross during that
during that night yes councilmember
riggs i think what he's saying is that there's people
crossing right now is there anything that
we can do just to make it safer in the meantime for for the
people that are crossing to keep crossing
that right i would defer that to our traffic engineer okay
um i know that i can i can cross
quickly and easily as a here the question is there a safe
easy short-term solution that'll get
what you're trying to achieve accomplished sooner than
engineering a capital project and getting it
built so we'll take a look at that yes well one last thing
and this is just to add to the report
we discussed this in mobility committee as well as you guys
might have seen the little d bike
parking facilities that were kind of put in it was actually
part of a neighborhood empowerment grant
a couple years back or a year ago i guess now and we've
identified spots and a certain number of
needed ones i think that was around 80 or something like
that but that the funding there's a funding
gap from what we can fund in available funds to what we
actually need so to be able to put what
that funding gap is if we were to say hey we've got places
identified we've got these ready to go
we can get these all put together at once what is that
funding what's that number to be able to place
all of those in the next fiscal year all right i think i
think we're working on great working
with both parks and engineering to drill into that number
and hopefully we can get that within
pretty short order thanks i've got a couple questions this
refers back to council member
wasney's question about the three percent in the merit it's
a merit i believe so i guess my question
becomes uh you don't have to answer this today but if it
could be part of that april the 18th
sort of question and answer kind of you know report uh
maybe august august i mean what am i
man i can't i don't know if it's next year's budget process
starting you know yeah geez i'm
i'm hangry um so i i'd like to see um what we've budgeted
maybe over the last two years preceding
for that and did we allocate all that or was there in other
words we say it's merit but does it all
get allocated or was there some left over because i know
one time we had a report and somebody maybe
can refresh my memory that on what was happening i think it
was maybe even a leap report or something
where it talked about that a lot of people quite a few
weren't getting reviews on a regular basis
and that that was one of the things that was the cultural
issue was that the performance reviews
so my question is okay if these are merit based upon
reviews but people aren't receiving their reviews
then how do you determine what that amount is and so that
doesn't have to be answered now but just
maybe just some some clarification on how that whole merit
review sort of works together that
if somehow there is a review that hasn't occurred for 15 or
18 months or gosh i've talked to people
who've maybe only had one review in the you know some years
that just an understanding of how
more accurately are we giving reviews on time and if we're
not how does a merit increase relate to
the lack of review i guess we can give you some okay and i
noticed i think i got an email where i
understand that in our at our adoption center there were
two new positions that were being filled i
think maybe this month and i know that they were i think
mid-budget allocations where are those in
the budget moving forward i mean we have to allocate for
them in that department i didn't see
in the in the proposed budget fiscal budget where are those
allocated for as we're moving forward
yeah those would be within the police department in the
animal control division okay so were they
part of the supplemental package i didn't see them in the
supplemental package they were just built in
they were built in there were two positions in animal
control and the two building inspectors
were mid-year we kind of mentioned that on a slide and i
think george had mentioned it before that
george had approved those kind of mid-year so we built
those in for 15 16 as as full-time approved
positions so once they were approved in the current year
and we got those in the budget then they show
up as part of next year's base budget ongoing and they're
not supplemental programs the next year
so when we move that when we carry that forward like we
have in our budget document or you know
we've got our proposed our approved budget for the last
fiscal year then estimated budget what
you're saying is if you looked in that particular budget
item for estimated for 2014 to 15 it would
show an increase because the estimate is it's going to be
more than what we originally budgeted for
yeah but realize we're just kind of in the in the midst of
hiring those positions now so in terms of
true dollars out of 14 15 there's not many true dollars
associated with those positions because
once george approved them then we have to go through the
hiring process so there's
you wouldn't see a full year impact in 14 15 you just see a
small amount in terms of when we
estimated those positions were going to come on board well
i guess does so that doesn't require
budget amendment or anything like that for the last for the
2014 no and actually depending and
i don't know how exactly the numbers worked out but those
approvals and the cost of those may be
made up with savings in that same department so the actual
budget number might not have increased
gotcha okay good fact it still could be lower than was the
original budget okay and been accommodated
within that money fantastic okay great uh and chuck if you
could and i looked for it it wasn't in our
our uh a powerpoint presentation it might have been in hard
backup which i didn't see but you
had a couple of slides which you don't need to show them
but if maybe you could just send a copy
of them to me and if the other council i just need to be
reminded of you said you have a summary of
the three options for that additional council and also i
think you had a slide that were one-time
expenses like the ambulance was one and you had several on
there that that accumulated a certain
amount of money if you could just forward those on i just
need to see refresh my memory what those
were okay i can attach those i guess or they're they're in
the presentation for the sixth would
you like me just to point out which slides they are are
they in the are they in our electronic
i didn't well i didn't i didn't attach it to the sick or
today but it was attached to the
six yeah if you could just tell me because i pulled up it's
like 110 slides and i was running
through them i couldn't so if you just tell me which slides
they are that 110 it wasn't brian's
presentation well no well it's 110 pages when i look when i
put the budget on the budget the
actual budget so there's a separate attachment yeah if you
could if you could do that that'd be
fine um it was 110 pages there's 110 slides the other thing
is um i still was trying to understand
what it if if i could just get a summary and brian you can
send this and i could probably look back
and pass budgets but so the gen the the fund balance
increased from what we projected when
we approved the budget last year to this year what are we
saying is going to be the increase and i'd
just like to get a summary of what that fund what the fund
balance was like two or three years ago
and what it is now just to get an idea of if it's grown if
it's shrunk and and things such as that
maybe even the last five years that'd be fine uh let's see
what else and i'd mention to the city
manager and check you're going to have it for the the uh
august the 18th not april uh when i was
looking at i'll just give my my colleague sort of a sort of
a brief synopsis the the economic
development incentive 380 agreements are within the
economic development budget in other words
those expenses are in that budget and i was just asking if
there's a way we can have a a line item
in the budget either line item or a different category that
somebody was looking at the budget
okay these are what we're spending on our economic
development 380 agreements because to find them
they're sort of intertwined within the economic development
budget i just that to me those those
sort of departments are more for here's your revenue here's
what your expenses are and and
i don't know if i would consider 380 agreements either the
revenue or the expenses associated
there of necessarily part of the department but that's just
something that i was thinking
18th we've got that at least yes we'll break it out yeah i
just wanted to give them sort of a
preview of that for accounting purposes we have to count it
as an expense okay no right i'm just
saying it something that can be more easily identified um
that's all i have for for now at
least uh as we keep perusing through this and moving down
the line yes council member johnson
yes yes yes yeah yeah yeah i don't know if he's getting me
asking a bunch of questions or not but
i'm gonna take that as a dig over here but no no he's in
the ditch again i just want to make sure
send them directly oh yes yes yes and i'll try to put them
in a response to the full council yes
cast member brief yes we did receive an informal staff
report on the damage to quaker town park
from the jazz fest and all the rain and everything and i
was wondering is that amount in our budget
to fund that or is that something different or
in relation to the the numbers that we're giving to the
informal staff report that's being absorbed
within the current year's budget for the parks and
recreation department we were just letting you know
what that cost was because you had asked for that we wanted
you to be aware of it but we've gone
ahead and moved forward and actually i don't know if you've
been aware of there's actually been heavy
equipment out at uh quaker town park because they're out
there now cutting the new grades and
trying to do the repair in preparation for the blues
festival i'll be coming up here i think next
month so so the the costs for that are being paid out of
the current year's budget taken out of parks
and recreation okay okay thank you so i guess that's
similar to what we talked about on the animal
adoption center that somehow if there's savings that that
might be absorbed but if there's
additional monies that are required then that's somehow
paid for out of the fund balance or
something like that i mean is it are you talking about the
additional personnel you know the parks
and the parks and rec uh repairs to the quaker i mean i
mean they have money budgeted for repairs
and improvements during the year within their operating
funds and i think what they probably
did is once they knew that damage was there they held on to
those funds in order to be able to
spend it on that versus other programs so it's really just
kind of a prioritization where are
we going to spend our maintenance dollars and i think their
prioritization was we know we're
going to need to take care of this so let's hold on to
those funds for this project or a certain
amount based on what they had and probably my guess is they
probably had to put off some other
things to be able to do that but they just felt it was a
higher priority to get it taken care of
great all right any other questions for this agenda item
all right i believe that concludes
our work session for this special call meeting so uh we
will now convene uh in an open meeting
do i need to give the time or date or we just do are we are
we convening out there we staying in
here no we're staying okay yes this one yeah okay yeah we
're just going to convene into the
regular portion of the meeting we have two agenda items we
're actually three but the second the
third one's concluding items items for individual
consideration items 1a is considered approval of a
resolution of the city of denton uh placing a proposal on
the september 15 2015 city council
public meeting agenda to adopt a 2015 tax rate that will
exceed the lower of the rollback rate
or the effective tax rate mayor and council on this item
under state law we're required to hold
two public hearings on the tax rate if we exceed as it
stated the lower of the effective or rollback
rate the effective rate is 0.656271 the proposed rate is 0.
69638 so we're above the effective rate
we're below the rollback rate the rollback rate's a little
over 72 cents this item also calls a
public hearing on the budget which is required by state law
and the city's charter so the
public hearing on the budget will be on september 1st the
public hearings on the tax rate will be on
august 18th and september 1st there's a couple notices
attached here that go in the newspaper
they also go on the city's website they go on dtv and we'll
also issue a press release and kind
of attach those notices and let the public know of when the
public hearings on the tax rate and
the budget will be and do you know if those notifications
or on our website are these things
these other additional publications that we put out because
i think it's it's it's we want to make
it really clear that number one this is mandated by state
law and that this is the maximum if we
pass this resolution i guess today or whenever we do it
that that's the maximum rate that that will
be levied doesn't mean that that is the rate that it could
be lower but it will not be higher is that
okay i just want to make sure that because i think people
will see that and think we've already
adopted a tax rate and we haven't even really talked about
it very much so okay i'll appreciate
the language of the notices is set by state law and oh okay
so and changes every couple of years
okay so we don't have any we don't have any option there's
no flexibility the notice is what the
notice is you know we've clarified that and we'll continue
to clarify it to the to the watching
public all right anything yes council member hawkins this
is just a resolution right now we
don't need a motion on this one we do i move approval of
item 1a chair has a motion uh we have
a second yes council member we have a motion and a second
to adopt a resolution pursuant to agenda
item 1a all in favor please signify by raising your right
hand
okay uh the the uh resolution passes unanimously she's
trying to throw me off there raising both
hands um all right we'll go on to agenda item 1b which is
considered option of an ordinance
authorizing city manager to execute an interlocal agreement
with the denton county texas under
section 791.01 the state of texas government code to author
ize denton county to install the downtown
square camera system yes sir good evening so uh what this
interlocal agreement will do it's going
to enable us to install four cameras right at the downtown
square at each of the corners currently
where we have our wi-fi access so we're actually going to
leverage the same technology we're using
to provide free downtown wi-fi to connect those cameras
onto our camera system and then what we'll
do we'll extend the camera system to our 911 dispatch
center and also provide that same
connectivity to the denton county sheriffs so it's a
collaborative effort to provide uh the public
health and safety and provide better service to our
residents any other any any questions for
staff i've got a couple but any questions yes council
member rodent so i i got the impression
what can you talk about the budget implications if any i
mean who's i have getting used for you who's
paying for the cameras who's paying for installation so as
far as the pain for the cameras that i think
denton county already had some in stock but they're going
to be providing the cameras and then we're
going to be providing the network connectivity and
electrical to it it's going to be using the same
infrastructure we're using already so as far from the city
standpoint there's not really an additional
cost to that so does it impact the bandwidth of the wi-fi
for the public to use no because the way
the cameras are set up they're going to be uh they're going
to have a cable connected to the camera so
it's physically connected yes and and i guess the elephant
in the room i mean is this all kind of
a result of the vandalism on the courthouse actually is
that what motivated or was this
conversation going on prior to that this was actually a
conversation we actually initially
proposed back in march of 2013 because we knew the
capabilities of the wi-fi in long term we actually
proposed that as part of two different phases so this would
have been the second phase of that but
it's just pointing at the courthouse it's pointing away
from the courthouse i can actually show you
a couple of pictures okay let's see if i can kind of give
you more of a visual i like pictures so
so here you can kind of see where it's uh pointing so each
of the corners
you kind of see the instance for one camera on how it's
pointing towards the street
and as far as uh visibility you know it depends how you set
it up but you can potentially see
license plates or get facial recognition so is that kevin
up there so is this a traffic i mean
it's point it looks like it's cat what what's being
protected by the video it's just pointing at
general traffic i don't think it's there to identify you
know if someone's putting you know
things in their car or anything like that it's more for the
general safety and the good thing
with this you can depends how you set it up you can have it
set up to move simultaneous every 30
seconds i'm going to change my view it really depends on
how it's set it up motion okay it
can be set that way too council member bricks so why are
they going i mean i i'm really not for
more cameras i mean is it like a red light thing is it a
traffic thing why is it because when i
first heard camera i thought you know protection for the
square but this just seems kind of like
just there to be there so it's it's going to be faced
towards uh trying to prevent
potentially vandalism in the buildings or if you see a lot
of high density areas let's say
you know dispatch notices hey there's a big group coming in
and they're protesting you know can
potentially get them to react a little quicker or hey there
's something else going on there you know
quicker response it depends on the need you know and as far
as the city of denton we have around
350 cameras so it'd be in addition to some of our public
facilities like we have it aimed towards
parking spots we use it at our solid waste to make sure no
one digs in into the waste you know we have
it in the libraries and all types of different facilities
council member was i have a quick story
to tell and then i do have a request yes my daughter lives
in charlottesville virginia in this past year
a woman was abducted in downtown charlottesville which is
the walking street
because of the cameras on that walking street at 1 30 in
the morning they ended up with facial
recognition of who was the last person with this young
college student he left charlottesville and
was caught in galveston texas and who knows where he was
headed but because of that facial recognition
they caught him through dna testing now they have
associated him as a serial killer in the state of
virginia and other states with young women who met horrible
fates without that camera on the walking
street in charlottesville virginia he would still be on the
loose so it's a balance between public
safety and personal privacy i vote for public safety our
police chief is here i would like him
to weigh in on that topic just generally about the cameras
the value of the cameras yeah um
yeah the surveillance cameras especially in very populated
areas like downtown
going to be very beneficial for a number of reasons um just
as you described there's there's a lot of
potential for solving or preventing crime um you know it's
not going to be used as a general
monitoring of the public in terms of identifying people
just you know spying on them or anything
actually i mean we don't have the time or the reason to do
that but it would only be used to go
back and and see if a crime had committed we could go back
and play back video see if there was anything
captured on it that could be identified to use as a lead in
solving some kind of an offense
member what's that okay council member johnson thank you
mayor that's a very extreme example
and so i'm all for it in fact i'm not doing anything wrong
i don't care about anybody watching me but
on a more daily practical you know we have as the property
owners downtown have a huge
challenge with vandalism you know there's folks who
consider themselves public artists who like
to climb up on buildings and paint things on buildings and
um just generally damage things
which is probably never going to change um but in terms of
a deterrent to that you know these cameras
especially if they can move back and forth and i'll tell
you from a safety issue at the texas
building we got lucky and somebody happened to look up
because they heard sound and there was
people that had climbed up on top of the building and they
were throwing beer bottles
trying to land them on top of the opera house and you think
about somebody walking down on the street
below gets hit with one of those you know that could kill
somebody um we luckily our fantastic
police force was able to catch them just because of the way
they had gotten up there and anyway long
story but if you had these sort of cameras on those corners
and and you know vandals you know
kids just looking to make trouble it doesn't take long
before a few of them get caught and maybe that
gets deterred so i mean property damage um the we've had
people get on top of buildings and
vandalize the ac units on top of the buildings spray paint
all over ac units and those sort of
things so just that general practical you know if they know
that there might be captured on camera
walking into the door of a building or walking up on the
back entrance of a building and that part
of it went away i think that would go a long way too so i i
totally understand the balance of personal
privacy but to me if i'm walking on a public street i'm
really not in my personal private area
anyway so i'm totally good with it yes joey thank you mayor
i would agree with that greg i own a
business on the square and vandalism is an issue and i
think that this will definitely curb that
and eventually probably stop it i also think about events
like holiday lighting on the square where
there are thousands of people showing up and i want to keep
the square family friendly while
letting certain businesses in the free market you know do
its thing on the square so i i have
no problem with this if you're not doing anything wrong i
don't mind anybody recording my family or
me on the square so yes councilmember are these like really
big cameras and do they make a lot
of noise i guess my my thing is um i just don't want people
visiting the square to see these big
giant cameras following them around like you know we have a
big issue with crime and vandalism and
like that's our um the first impression you know like we
have to and we can get you pictures with
it it's probably going to be closer to like what you're
seeing there but it's going to have like a
dome on top of it i don't think i have pictures here just
to show you the different views that
we can potentially get but it's in the street it's not can
will it go like in front of the
businesses as well we can have it face wherever it needs to
it's a 360 view it'll be a 360 view
so it'll turn yes and we can have it turn every 30 seconds
if you like just so it's it's rotating
around okay uh you know my one comment is i mean you know i
don't have an issue with this i guess
if we're going to have them i want to make sure that we can
use them because i know that the
the shot that was used to try to identify what happened at
the uh monument there on the square
i'm not making comment about the issue of that but it
really it was very difficult to see because
of its placement in the light and and so i guess if we're
going to do it and we want to use it
effectively to make sure that we actually because typically
these will come into play at night i
mean during the day you got a lot of other people so it's
at night so to ensure that we have adequate
lighting number one better lighting reduces crime uh and
that if you have to use them and there's
better lighting at least you can see what you're looking at
so i just want to make sure that placing
them we also make sure that the other tangential services
and and assets that we have there
maximize their efficiency absolutely sir and you can see
right here this is what it looks like at
no at night this is assimilation of course it would be
dependent on where the streets light
are at and what they're pointing to so we would definitely
take that in consideration okay all right
great so the one over here the further picture this one yes
that's at day daytime so and that's
at night so you can see what's going on at night if there
were the vandalism or the facial recognition
you're not going to get that this is assuming there's that
absolute no no light at that area
so as we're mounting them of course we're going to test to
see you know what does it look like
during the day what does it look like at night and if it's
not you know how do we ensure adequate
lighting for that area where's the extra lighting going to
go and come from so that would be part of
you know this is uh we actually use a program to kind of
simulate what it looks like we would
actually have to have our guys and DME kind of mounted on
the poles to really get a true of what
this looks like any other questions comments all right we
have uh that's our agenda oh i'm sorry
did you have a question yes it is an action item yes yes
council member rodent i move approval
b of agenda item one b we have a motion and a second for
agenda approval of agenda item one b
all in favor signify by raising your right hand all the
signal all opposed signal by like sign
all right resolution or i'm sorry ordinance passes let me
do my math five to one
and that brings us to our concluding items new business yes
kath uh council member wasme
i actually have four things the first one i would ask legal
to pursue the creation of an
ethics ordinance using the san antonio ordinance as a model
to coordinate with the ethics committee
on this council which is councilman briggs councilman rodin
and councilman wasney
i'd like to also then revisit our impact fee map that we
looked at those five different zones
and i've spent a lot of time doing some research and
talking to planning and i'd like to uh bring
them back here to examine um how some of those zones could
be changed so that each zone meets
in downtown and kind of becomes a pie shape rather than
just separate separate zones and to confirm
are we limited to five can we have more than five and uh
just take take the time that we need to
really because i think the strength of that program or the
failure is going to be on how those zones
are um designed also on the impact fees to see if
specifically if council has the legal power to
either increase or decrease the impact fees for specific
projects in an attempt to either
encourage or discourage development in a certain area
because we've had that conversation several
times how can we either encourage development or discourage
development in a certain area and how
legally can we go about achieving that goal and our impact
fees a legal tool to get to that goal
and then number four um i'd like to ask council to revisit
the rules of procedure for city council
regarding a citizen's ability to speak at council work
sessions we touched on it but we never came
to a solution or an agreement so if staff could give us
some direction on what the procedure is
if legal could give us some direction on how we bring that
up and revisit to try to give
structure to a change if there is indeed a change on having
citizens have more of an open voice at
work session and kind of explore that further because we
kind of ran out of time okay good
all right that's my quick announcement this uh saturday 10
to 1 is the annual southeast dentin
back-to-school fair at the mlk center so anyone family kids
in need of back-to-school supplies
can come out uh give what they need so it's one of a number
of events that'll be coming up soon so
if you need that come on out council member and i have a
question i saw that frisco city council
voted last night and i was just curious do we need to do do
we need to vote in the state law that
makes truancy a civil rather than a criminal offense are we
going to do that for the city of
denton or is that since the state passed that do we need to
do that or talk about it or discuss it
or see okay so you're like wanting either an informal staff
report a work session or something
that addresses that issue right yes okay great yeah and no
go ahead can i just go back to the
the previous vote for a second i don't know if that's
allowed or not i just wanted to my vote
the reason i voted or no okay all right i'll just make a
statement later thank you
i've just got a couple items we touched on this i think in
our in our work session as it relates
to the street impact fees i don't know that we ever really
requested any specific work session
or action item but um i'd like for us as a council to have
a discussion on um priority placing
priority on street replacements so i don't know if we ever
requested to actually have a work session
but yeah as we as we looked we talked about it mobility
today but you know the the it's kind of
been peanut buttered out over the whole city and we might
want to as a council decide that we want
to place more of a priority on certain high impact streets
and then the the second thing is i'd like
for us to at least have a policy discussion on um council
member briggs brought up for example the
the damage that was done to quaker town park at jazz fest
um and that kind of just that expense
just falls on parks and nothing was in the budget for that
and so i'd like for us to have a policy
discussion about you know if if you're renting or signing
an agreement with an event to use a city
facility and then you have a mitigating issue happen like
torrential downpour to be able to
have a conversation with them of okay because they're
trying to decide whether they go forward or
don't go forward then i don't think it's really right for
the the the city to necessarily have
to bear whatever brunt is caused by the event going on so
for example you know to have someone
from park sitting with whoever's making the decision to
carry on with the event okay we're
estimating this is the type of damage that's going to be
done it's probably going to cost
somewhere in this neighborhood to repair it all if you want
to go forward you need to know you're
probably going to be responsible for an expense of this or
this right because otherwise we have to
start building into our fees assuming those and so it could
be a policy where you're just saying hey
if you want to go forward or not right we may decide as a
city no we're not going to do that
we'll just bear the brunt of whatever it is but you could
have you know that was like 30 something
thousand dollars you can have a hundred thousand dollars
worth of damage who knows to something so
i think it's a good policy discussion to have you know
along that line under new business
i will echo that sentiment and austin you know had to make
some tough decisions on some of those
things because some of the festivals were really messing up
some of their parks so any other
concluding items everybody's just itching to get out of
here man i could just oh man they're just
wanting to hurry up watts okay well we'll stand adjourned
at uh 658 p.m.