Oct 13, 2015 City Council on 2015-10-13 2:00 PM

[SIDE CONVERSATION] [SIDE CONVERSATION] Good afternoon. This is Tuesday, October the 13th, 2015. And this is a-- we do have a quorum. This is a meeting of the Denton City Council, and this is our second Tuesday work session here at 215 East McKinney Street in Denton. We'll go through our agenda items, which is agenda item number one is 1A, receive a report and hold discussion, provide staff direction relating to a proposal to design and develop a community event center on city of Denton property located at 121 Exposition Street. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. We do have a number of items-- more items on a second Tuesday agenda than we normally have . But Mr. Gregory has assured me we'd be through by 5 o'clock . With that, I'd like to call-- The manager calling me out. [INAUDIBLE] I'd like to call on Mr. Mark Nelson to present his first item. Thank you, George. Mayor, members of council, I appreciate the opportunity to come before you this evening-- or this afternoon, I should say-- and get this loaded up. We'll just have a short presentation this afternoon. As you know, staff has been before you over the last six to nine months talking about some opportunities to create some public space in the downtown area to work with the Denton community market, as well as provide some community or green space for community events center. So with this, what I wanted to do is just walk through quickly and provide a general overview , and then talk a little bit about where we are in process with the design component as it relates to some of the funding that council provided as part of this year's budget. So again, project overview, some cost estimates associated with it that we've developed. Go back through and look at the site review on the particular location, which is 121 Exposition Street, just southeast of the police department. And then where we are with the planning and design efforts. So again, location-- as I mentioned, a location in downtown area, not only for a Denton community market opportunity, but also for other community events. As you know, we have multiple events in our community. And this particular site could host events in the downtown area as well as for southeast Denton neighborhood. We're also looking to enhance the existing two acre site to provide some additional or enhanced parking in the downtown area. We've got roughly about 75 to 80 parking spots at the location marked. But it is a former industrial site. So there's a foundation in there, some uneven pavement. And I'll walk through some photos to show you what we're talking about there. So again, desired enhancements that were brought forward to us from the Denton community market initially. And then some of the things that we've kind of molded and kneaded together a little bit to create this community event center. So a green space of a minimum of about one acre, again, the site is roughly two acres. We'd like to have some access to electric, access to water, shade structures, and trees. So there's not a lot of shade at that particular location. As anybody knows, in Texas, it's nice to have a little bit of shade from mid-spring through mid-fall. Lighting to enhance, maybe do some nighttime activities as well as enhance the safety and security for that parking lot that serves not only employees at City Hall East, but also for folks who may be utilizing that for overflow parking for Denton County Transportation Authority. And then removal of some fencing around the area. We've got some chain link fencing. I'd like to potentially remove that and add some enhancement fencing around that. And in the future, maybe look to enhance it with a covered stage and pavilion area, as well as maybe some outdoor restrooms. Right now, there's no restrooms there and available, public restrooms that is. Summary of concept cost estimates. You've seen this previously as part of the budget backup. But what staff essentially did was worked with the Denton Community Market with some of their desired requests and elements of a public open space and identified these cost estimates and came up with a number in the neighborhood of 651,000. As part of the budget, 658,000. As we were seeing this move forward, we went ahead up here. And rather than incur the impact fee of 9,500, we went ahead and reinstalled the meter there. So that saved us about 9,500. So you'll see a little bit of difference in terms of the 658 and the 651. We also added some additional sidewalk ramp access to the area. So 253,000 as part of this 200-- Wait a second. Sorry. Mark, just on that, so what are you saying? The old water meter, you just replaced it at that time, and then you don't have to be charged that way now? Right. There was, as I understand, the impact fees for water are going to increase later this fall. And so we went ahead. Once the budget was approved, we went ahead and utilized some of the funds that we had to reinstall the water meter. Couple of questions on that. So apparently there was a house or something there in the past that had-- or something. There was a water service. Industrial site, yes, sir. And so the meter-- do we know how long the meter had been removed? I would say-- How long it's been gone? I don't have it off the top of my head, but I know we purchased the property back in the '08 time frame. So it could have been the '08, '09 time frame when that was removed. So when you say that the impact fees were-- I'm also saying this to understand the policy of impact fees. So what you're saying is if the policy-- the impact fees were scheduled to go up in December, I guess, or sometime. Correct. But yet, even if they'd gone up, could we not have still gone back in and reinstalled that meter and would not have been charged those additional fees? Because that's really-- there was a meter there. And I think it's a 10-year period. And if it's there for 10 years-- so is that-- I think, Mark, what you're saying is we paid the current fee to get the water installed. As opposed to the new fee that would be coming up. Oh, you're not talking-- you're talking about an install fee, not an impact fee. Right. OK, I misunderstood. I apologize. I thought you were talking about an impact fee. You're saying a meter install fee. Well, there was an install fee of roughly $2,500, which we went ahead and paid for. But we went ahead and moved that forward to go ahead and avoid the impact fee of $9,500. And I guess that's my question is, why would we have had an impact fee if we were simply putting back a meter that had already been there and it was only about seven or eight years? I don't know that I have an answer for that at this point. Sure. Yes, sir. The existing metering on that site that's under redevelopment is vested right. And so whatever the size of that meter would have been credited. So the only impact fee implication in a redevelopment would be as if they expanded the use and needed a bigger meter. So we put in the same size meter that we took out, which was what? I don't know that we-- I don't know that I have that information. I just know we-- It's probably nominal for an event center because you don't necessarily have a huge plumbing load. But that's just a guess. About 3/4. OK. I just wanted to make sure I understood how that works. All right. Sorry. You bet. Thank you. So and then again, we had $405,000 identified for removal of existing non-permeable surface and reconstruction of the parking lot to allow for a minimum of 80 parking spots, which would be in the neighborhood of about 80 parking spots, which would maintain the current marked space at the location. So this is the site. Again, this is the east side of City Hall East, the police department. And this is exposition, sites known as 121 Exposition. And then this is Hickory Street here on the north side. Again, roughly a two-acre location with about an 80 by 90 green space here and some deteriorated pavement here, as well as a foundation from an old structure located here in the middle. This is essentially an overlay of a previous parking lot and community event center for Denton Community Market that we just overlaid on the location to give you a sense of size and what that might look like. This was showing a pavilion area, as well as a stage, other restroom and wash area, and then the additional parking and some green space in between. This is just a different orientation of it, north, south, versus an east, west. Mark, on the slide where you showed the cost of the concrete removal, so that includes pulling up that slab foundation for that, which is much different than just pulling up a four or six inch bar. There's some footings and stuff. Are you on the slide of the layout? You said in the past about that green space on the east side. Is all of that simply owned by the-- is that part of the easement for drainage? Or is there some privately held land? It is privately held. Austin Baker, which is the industrial site here, owns that property there from our property line to and through the drainage area. That shows that area a little bit better. So this is just a number of-- One more question. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. On that point, I know in some earlier conversations, there was a discussion of reaching out to them to see if they were interested in donating it or selling it for a nominal fee. We've initiated conversation on that. I'm going to hit on that in just a moment. So we took some photos of how the site is currently being used. Again, this is basically from the corner of Exposition and Hickory on the northwest. This is from the southwest corner. You can see where some construction activity has come through here. This is for some storm drainage as part of the redevelop ment or the development of the rail yard back to the west of this location. This shows another view of that drainage pipe through that area. This is the current green space there on the northeast side . Again, showing you a little bit of the use with both city vehicles parked here and then folks that may either be utilizing the spot for access to DCTA A train, city employees to City Hall East, or folks that may be attending a training seminar at the police fire training facility there at the east end of City Hall East. This shows that foundation, some unlevel area through there where the foundation came through. And we believe as part of any type of redevelopment of that area that we would like to remove that and create a nicer pavement area and obviously much safer than having some trip hazards or drop off areas. So at this point in time, I'd like to get some feedback from council on the formal design process. But we would need to finalize a lease negotiation with Denton Community Market for the use of that on a weekly basis if they choose to utilize that location. I think they're interested in doing that, whether we would be able to get the site up and running before next year's market. I'm certain on that. If that's not the case, I think they have indicated-- and we've got some representatives from the community market here-- but they've indicated a desire maybe to do a soft opening and do some night markets at the location and ease into that before-- or as we bring that online. So some of the construction elements, looking at doing some design activities here in house, demo and reconstruction of the parking lot would be required. Again, utilities, bringing utilities into the internal portion of the site, adding sidewalks. We've got a sidewalk extension that we would need to bring to the location. Again, we talked a little bit about lighting and the cost estimates, adding some shade structures, and working with our parks department to create some green space and do some landscaping in the area. So Council Member Oden, you'd ask about access to that Austin Baker property. We have reached out to the broker for the property and have initiated some conversations about how we might be able to work either a lease agreement with that or some other type of access arrangement to provide access down to that additional green space. So with that, I'd be happy to take any questions that you might have. I know there have been some questions about where we are in the design process and some direction to staff. Yes, Council Member Gosselin. Mark, you said that the community market would like to do some night markets. And I think you said kind of ease into it as we transition into this. What do you mean by that exactly? So not during the construction, but-- No, sir. No, sir. So if we started this process, the chances are-- or if we started the construction on this, chances are we may not have it ready when they start their market season first to mid-part of April. And so if that's the case, they would like to, as they transition, start doing some night marketing to create some-- create a buzz for the particular location and transition maybe mid-year, mid-summer into that location. Now, is that because they'd be under a lease obligation at their current location? So not to-- I'm trying to understand. I guess here's where I'm coming from. So if we're going to go make this investment, obviously there needs to be some sort of a lease agreement in place and some logic behind the investment. So that's what I'm trying to understand. So once it's complete, you're saying that they wouldn't be in a full lease situation? Right. I understand that they have to initiate or have a lease in place with the county for the use of their current location, because this particular location would not or most likely will not be ready prior to the start of their season, which is mid-April. I've misspoken. OK. And so I think what their interest was is, as they kind of move through that towards the summer then, would be to utilize that for night market operation as well and then eventually move the whole market to that particular location. You say, Mark, in addition to what they would be doing where they are now? I believe so, yes, sir. So have there been any conversations, Mark, specifically about what lease terms would look like, terms of annual rate? We've initiated that. We don't have a solid, finite number on that at this point. Well, just my bread on the water here is, obviously, there are certainly other uses for this site. But I think the conversation started because of the community market, and that's probably our primary focus at this time. So before we went and spent any money on it, my opinion would be that we need to have a lease agreement finalized in terms of what those terms will look like. It doesn't mean it has to be signed yet. Right. So that we can know, here's what the income looks like as it relates to the expense. And obviously, I'm not saying that there has to be a return on investment that's very specific, because this is a little bit different. One of the things we've looked at is operational costs, to recover the operational costs associated with their pro rata share of the use of that space. Well, yeah, so I guess where I stand is I don't think we should spend $1 until we know what that could look like. Meaning, because you don't want to get too far down the road and not-- we spend a bunch of taxpayers' money on design and preliminary work, and then to find out that the rental income that we were expecting to get is 10 times what they think they could pay. Or you know what I mean? It just seems prudent to go ahead and get all that worked out before we start doing construction. OK. Mayor Pro Tem. Thank you. Another question, since it's not going to be exclusively used by the community market, have you talked with-- and we've had discussions about other possible users for events. I think we've talked specifically about some of the music festival things. Have you spoken with anybody that does any of those events to hear what their needs might be? No, sir, I'm not specifically. I know Julie Glover in our economic development office has been putting some feelers out with the downtown folks. And I know that the community market folks have also engaged the Southeast Denton neighborhood to see what they have opportunities. Well, I think it would be handy to have feedback, of course , from the neighborhood. But whoever is doing 35 Denton or I think they changed the name of Geezer Palooza, I loved that name. But to hear the kinds of things, if they were to have an event in that location, what they would need. Now is the time to get that information as we're talking about the design elements. Very good. Yes, sir. There was a conversation, I think Council Member Gregory suggested this at the outset after the budget was finalized , of perhaps getting together some sort of a committee to be meeting with the city staff. Maybe the Council Member too is on it, meet with the community market. Because in addition to design, there was conversations of sustainability goals in connection to the market. Some business and entrepreneurship goals connected to our economic development efforts that we wanted to have connected into it. So I don't know if that's been put in place yet or there's been any formalization of that. But talking about next steps and even moving along with lease agreements, design dates, and things like that, that group seems pretty-- if and when that comes together, seems pretty tailor-made to walk through some of these things. So is there any update to that? Do we know? Has there been any movement? Hopefully. [INTERPOSING VOICES] No, yes, not. OK. The price is right. There has not been any movement on that yet. But there's certainly still an intent to go that direction. Great. Thanks. Councilmember Wozniak. Because we changed this from Denton community market to truly an event venue, so I agree with Councilman Gregory that our music community needs to be consulted before we launch with a pavilion and stage because there are electrical needs, are different than other people. And I would hate to crash through design something that we think looks nice, only to find out it's not practical. And I really see this as a real center for the city in terms of community events. And of course, music is synonymous with Denton. So to your point, yes, bringing in the different parts of the community to work with engineering and work with planning, that as we look at the design, that we actually have a wish list and also a need list in terms of what this pavilion and stage is going to look like. And then I think we need to get a cost estimate on that and actually reach out to our business community here in Denton and see if we can't get some corporate sponsors to help pay for this pavilion and stage. If they would like to put a name on it and call it the such and such stage, we see that all over the country right now with a business private government partnership. And somebody gets to put their name on something because they've helped pay for it. So I see to really make this the way we want it, it's going to cost a lot of money. So that's my challenge is to reach out and let's bring our businesses on board. Whether they want to sponsor part of it, put their name on part of it, I just see this as an amazing location for our city. Great, I think the point's well taken. And as we move the design process forward, and certainly with the stage and pavilion, it would be in a later development stage. So kind of do a basic primary initially, but then reserve the opportunity for those type of utility needs that you outlined. And then certainly work with other folks in terms of sponsorship for sure. Along those lines, do we have at this time in our policies or in our ordinances anything regarding naming opportunities, sponsoring naming opportunities? We do have a naming policy that we worked on a couple, three years ago. And we can bring that forward and take another look at it and see if it appears to fit the situation. I'm a little bit rusty on it, but we can certainly look at it and see what application-- I'm thinking-- my memory is really rusty on it-- that it was more simply a naming policy and not a policy where something might carry a name for five years. Most of those contracts for sponsorships have a term limit, and they also have some out clauses, especially if-- I'm just recalling vividly a few years ago in the city of Houston, an event center was named after Enron. And after a while, nobody wanted that name attached with the city building. And I think as we explore that, which I think is a great idea, but I think that we're going to need to be very thoughtful about doing it in such a way that we protect the reputation of the city in the process. That's where legal comes in, so thank you for that. No, and I'm a little rusty on it as well, but it does seem to me that we addressed a number of those issues as we were developing the policy for different levels of sponsorship and/or naming. So let's just get the policy out, take a look at it, and we can provide that to the council as well. Mark, could you return back to the cost slide? Sorry, I-- [CLEARS THROAT] --keep going back to that. [LAUGHTER] So based upon some of our discussion during the budget process on unrelated items in the budget, is it my understanding that any of these particular contracts, if they're let out to an outside firm that they're not done in-house, that if they're over $100, 000, it comes back for council approval? Is that correct? If they're contracts for construction-- Well, yeah, like it says, to remove the concrete is $200, 000. So if somebody actually submitted that bid, it would have to come back to council for approval. Is that correct? On this one, it may not necessarily, simply because we already have a contract, but we have a contract in place for concrete, with a concrete contractor that is able to do the removal and replacement of said pavement. Is that Floyd Smith? Yes, sir. OK. And so then in that contract that we have with them, do they spell out specifically how much it is per square yard or square foot for removal? Correct. And so if-- OK, I guess does it have-- I mean, it doesn't have to come back to council. But if council wanted to be able to take a look at that, there's always that opportunity. Is that correct? But I just want to make sure on some of these things, I mean, when I look at that, that seems like a lot of money , I mean, to remove. But I know there's a lot involved in removing. And the footing-- I thought it was a whole slab that the building was sitting on, the old industrial building. But you're saying it's just footings, those little footings that you showed. Is that right, or is there an actual slab with a subgrade beam? Well, I guess-- right. And my point is that this particular foundation here is a little more industrious than-- Yeah, it's a slab on grade. Correct. Yeah. And that's my only thought is just to be able to take a look at that if it's-- because that's just-- I mean-- And again, I remind you that we're utilizing this for currently for training center overflow parking for DCTA as well as overflow parking for City Hall East. So there's not just a single use there. There's some multiple uses out there. Oh, no. I understand that. No. It's not about it being associated to the use. It's just being able to look at the costs if they're going to be at that level to-- Understood. OK. Yeah, just put an eyeball on it. Yes, Councilmember. One other thing on the cost. I was looking at the slide about-- the part about lighting. And did we-- when we're doing that, when we're figuring that, is that a ballpark figure? Is that-- do we think that we're going to need 8, 1,500-watt lights on four poles, that that's going to really cover that? Have we talked to an engineer that's going to-- that says that that really covers the area? I don't have-- I did not get an illumination engineer on that. But we had to work to our facilities management group, who worked with our electric department to take a look at lighting needs, understanding how we wanted to utilize the-- The reason I'm asking is because I noticed Wednesday a week ago, I was going out to the Williams Square parking lot after dark. And it was-- there was not enough light where my car was parked for me to be able to see. I have an old-timey car. I actually have to put a key into the door to unlock it. I know. But people of a certain age. And I thought-- There's lots of those in these or blues and the dead. That's right. Yes. And I was looking around, and I was thinking, this parking lot is dark. And I'll bet it's dark enough that it's uncomfortable for some folks to use late at night. And I was just thinking-- I was studying what the price was in case we needed to upgrade the lighting in that particular lot. But I was just wondering if there's some kinds of standards that we have for so many-- Candle watt. Candle watt, or something like that. So not now, but maybe as a follow up, a little informal staff report on that. Right. I've got that email. I apologize. I was out of town. But we'll respond to you on that one. OK. We'll go over here. Yes. So are the next steps getting that committee together, and then trying to put the timeline together, and then really stick with that timeline? Correct. OK. So that's the kind of-- OK. A couple things. Porta Potty's-- you guys been getting any of these emails about the Portland Lou? Yeah. I don't know anything about that. And I'm sure Mr. Emerson would very much have a problem with that particular type of bathroom. But it seems to be a new concept of urban bathrooms. I looked at their website a little bit. I don't know anything about it. But I thought about this site when I was looking at that, as it doesn't seem to be as investment intensive as some of the things we're looking at at the park. On that point, this is not considered parkland, correct? This wouldn't be a park. We're not dedicating this as a park. So there's no-- I'm thinking about additional investment that might go in around that area, inevitably, or in the near future. Nothing in terms of park dedication fees, the way that policy is set up legally, would allow any of that money to be transferred to something like this, or any other tools that would allow for contributions to public facilities, even if it's not a park as it relates to new development in an area, where there's kind of a common space or something. You're correct. Park dedication fees cannot be used for this because it's not parkland. However, because of the location in our community, it might qualify for CDBG funding for certain projects, depending on what those projects are. We've used CDBG funds in the past for infrastructure, whether it related to drainage, sidewalks, things of that nature. Now, if you're looking at any specific amenities like the gazebo or the stage, something to that effect, I'd have to go back and visit with Barbara Ross and see if those funds are used for that way. I'll tell you in the past, though, the city has resisted using our CDBG funds in certain ways because we've gotten pushback from our congressmen, as it stands right now, with some of the use of our funds. Not us, the city, but some other cities have used those funds in the past. So we have been very conservative in the way we've used our CDBG funds. So we've been OK as far as that goes. So does the city have a single grant writer? Or is grant writing kind of subject to various departments who find grants that are related to their particular area? Right, we do not have one overarching grant writer. We have individuals within certain departments that are very good at writing grants for, specifically, the projects and programs that affect that. Which department would this fall on? I mean, I had a meeting with Southeast Denton neighborhood out here at that site. We met at the train station and brought in Greater Denton Arts Council. We brought in folks from the rail yard. We brought in folks from Community Market to just really talk about the synergy of what's all going on kind of in that area and the possibilities and what people are concerned with. I mean, it was a really good community conversation. But as you think of all the possibilities with this in drawing in a neighborhood, fresh access to food, entrepreneurship, some of the things we've been talking about, to me it just screams. And with all the partners coming on board with it, it just screams grant opportunity. So I don't want us to miss out on that. And so again, as we're thinking about that committee, I want to make sure the city has somebody who is a grant writer type person at the table. Because I bet you there are dollars, dollars, dollars out there for something like this that would love to see a community project like this happen. I don't know. It looks like Amy might want to chime in on that. I think there's an opportunity there for long range planning and neighborhood planning and economic development work hand in hand to create a small area plan that's consistent with our Denton Plan 2030, but also incorporates a lot of that economic development effort into it. And both of those would fall in my department. So-- Couple of questions. On-- and this is just sort of on the lighting, and this is more of a-- again, another cost question. And Howard may be able to answer this. Because the city of Denton-- DME has a program where if you want a security light out at your property, they'll either put it on an existing pole , if they can, or they'll install a new pole, I think. First of all, do we know what the wattage of those typically are, those that-- and I'll get to my more major point after I-- because I'm going to try to compare apples to apples. Howard's like, oh gosh, I know where he's going with this. I'm sorry. I really don't know what the wattage is. I think it's-- I mean, because it's pretty-- well, the only-- my point being that-- because I know I've done that program, and it's-- I mean, it's a very good-- it's very economical, and it's a very good value for the service. It's like $15 a month or something like that, where you can have a security light. The city maintains it. The bulb goes out the city. So when we talk about installing four poles with-- or eight poles with lights at $75,000, is the primary cost of that because of running the electrical lines to-- I'm just trying to understand-- because when I'm looking at what I pay to have a pole put in with a flood light, and I pay monthly, and if I sell it, it's gone. I mean, unless somebody else renews it. I mean, that's-- I mean, $15 a year is, I think-- what is that? $175? Who's good at the 15 times 12? Something like that, about $170 a year or something. So what's the primary cost driver of those poles? It's going to depend on what they're-- are they putting that conduit under concrete? Is it an open field? Is it going to be all overhead? There's going to be a variety of different things affecting cost. Do we know what that figure is based on? I really don't. But if you want information on that, we can get-- Yeah, just sort of-- yeah, that'd be good. And then on the large trees, I see it's utilizing City of Denton Tree Fund. But I don't see on their water-- are these going to be irrigated? Is there going to be irrigation run to them? And so what-- is that included also from-- does the Tree Fund pay for irrigation as well, or is irrigation included in the water figure up there? It'd be included in the water figure as well. OK, so the seven water spigots, that's the-- part of that's the irrigation for the trees? A portion of it, yes, sir. OK, all right. All right. Great. Any other questions? Was that the-- was the presentation-- was that your-- OK, so direction. Direction, it sounds like somebody repeated over about the committee. I've heard committee. OK. I've also heard no funding be spent until we finalize or get to a more finalized point in the lease agreement. Reaching out to the music community as well, Southeast Denton community in terms of design requests, looking at sponsorship opportunities as well as the naming policy, as well as providing some feedback on the lighting, cost on lighting components. And I think somebody had mentioned-- I think it might have been Kevin about if we're making additional investments, did I miss something? Is that the grant writing? If we're making additional investments, how do we-- because this is already $658,000. And what I heard you say is a stage isn't even included in that. Correct. OK. So obviously, if it's going to be a music venue, there's going to need to be a stage included in that somewhere. So yes. And that's where the sponsorship from our business community hopefully will click in. And where we go to them was specific design, specific cost, so that we're not just nebulous in what we're asking for that our needs are very specific. And I have full faith and confidence in our business community that we're going to get some help with this. I know on the existing music festivals that we have in the downtown area, they're all importing their stages in. It's pretty standard to do that because they have specific lighting rings they have to do. And it could be that from their perspective, the stage is less important. Yes. Obviously, electrical access would be something. OK. That's a good point. But I think on that point, I think it's probably time-- I mean, I'm hearing increasing frustration in some quarters as relates to the increased amount of downtown festivals that close off streets, that restrict parking, that keep people from accessing businesses unless you've got a wristband. It makes it hard to come down during those things. And that was a policy decision. And I think that was made at the outset of when 35 Denton came to town in a very different situation. Now we've got at least one large outdoor venue, another one coming on the line, that might arguably take the need off of kind of closing down the public space. So I think connected to this whole conversation of new event space, what we're seeing with new tons of new businesses down Hickory Street, some of the stress that that's creating, just perhaps at some point a policy conversation relating to downtown festivals so that we can make good decisions moving forward. So would you want to either get some volunteers for committee or assign it to, for example, the Committee on the Environment since we are already dealing with sustainability and local food production? So it sort of ties into the community market. It doesn't matter to me. But if we're going to do that, we ought to probably move on that now. Yeah, I think, at least from what I understood, were some of the charges that committee would seek. Has some environmental components, but then some of them are business components. So I'd probably think it'd be probably helpful if it was an ad hoc. It's going to cover a lot of issues. So I think you were the one that spearheaded that. So how would you like to proceed? Just let's see. We need what? A total of three members, council members or what? Right, you would need probably three council members if that's going to be the desire of the council on the ad hoc. If you like, we could do a little resolution creating the committee and assigning it certain duties. And perhaps I could work a little bit with the Mayor Pro Tim and come up with some language. And we could put that back in front of the council if that's your pleasure. OK, and then get the membership at that time or get it now? Thank you. Do we have an adequate posting to do that? Let me bring it back to you, and we can do it at the time that we bring it back to the council. All right. Thank you. You did pretty good. Good. Or something I was going to-- well, in relation to the downtown closing, I mean, I think because I think you're right. I think it's right for a policy discussion on that. Because if we're creating this as a-- we can help direct events to there to say, hey, this is what-- based upon the policies that we make. So I think that conversation is good, is right in the very near future. So I appreciate you bringing that up, Council Member Rood. Any other questions, comments? Fantastic. Thank you. Thank you, Mark. Thank you. All right, we'll go on to agenda item 1B, receive report from staff on prioritization of our favorite topic, street reconstruction projects. Thank you, Mayor. Senator Tim Fisher has volunteered to present this item for your consideration. Why is his arm tied behind his back? Well, it's not a good time to talk about roasted marshm allows, right? Oh, yeah. That's right. Our favorite topic, street maintenance. My presentation overview, I want to kind of go over how long we've had the pavement management system in the three comprehensive street condition surveys that we've done. We're currently working on one right now. Kind of go back a few bond collections back to how we use that system. And then I'll do an overview of how we prioritized in the 2005, 2012, and '14 bond programs. And then I'll also kind of wrap up and talk about how we use that same pavement management system and some of the same tools on how we structure and prioritize things within our own end budget. Go the right direction here. Basically, the first pavement condition survey that we did dates back to 2003. Six years later, we did one in 2009. And we're currently under contract and finishing up one for '15. So those are about six year intervals. Those were the first time the city went out and basically did comprehensive surveys to look at what our street conditions were. And then also helped populate and utilize our cartograph pavement view and pavement view plus software programs that keep track of our work order systems and keep a modeled condition of the deterioration of the roads over time. And then the pavement management systems come in and kind of update that to help calibrate that and keep the data fresh, if you will. Basically, in the 2003 and 2009 studies, basically street conditions were declining rapidly. That was tied to funding concerns and issues. The average OCI in '03 was 69. And in 2009, it had slipped to 63. And then probably another overriding summary of it was we had a very atypical distribution. We were a growing community. So we had lots of new streets. And we had a lot of old streets that weren't being adequately funded and being kept up. And so we had a lot of good streets and a lot of bad streets, which is not a typical distribution. So those were kind of some of the high points of those earlier studies. This is kind of an example of this. This is actually the preliminary results that came out of our 2015 study. But you can see the blue line is kind of the typical distribution. And what we had was quite a large number of streets in very new condition, which were reflective of our growth and some of our capital programs. And then we had kind of a growing backlog of streets that were getting beyond the point of routine maintenance and were working their way towards having to be reconstructed and replaced. This is a part of the tools that we use in the pavement management system. We have calibration curves for all of the street sections. And the OCI follows this idealized curve. There will be data points that surround that, because everything doesn't follow this idealized assumption. But in certain OCI ranges, those are the windows of time to do certain types of preventative maintenance, mostly up in this area. And then this section down here is where you really cannot do overlays or preventative maintenance. Your road has really slipped through its life cycle and is in a state of decay. And so it ends up being part of your backlog. And we have a fairly large backlog. And that's one of the reasons why we've had some bond programs to try to accelerate funding in that area. So that says if we use the recommended pavement maintenance activity-- so if we take care of our roads to keep them fair, they're going to last about 25 years. In this case, it's more about 30 to 35. And again, there's different curves for different streets, because we get into a lot of variables. You know, it's a residential street that has thinner pavement, isn't an arterial that has heavier pavement. The traffic loadings are different. The truck loadings are different. But this is a generalized curve here. What we are seeing as it relates to that is we've done the calibration of our models and stretched some of our data. Some of our earlier assumptions on the life of our streets may have been a little bit conservative. And some of the streets are holding up a little bit better. In some cases, we see the reverse, that some of the streets aren't performing as well. Why do we do pavement management? Well, basically, you want to try to do your preventative maintenance on your good streets. This gets into the issue of funding best first, trying to keep your preventative maintenance systems funded versus letting everything deteriorate and then spending on quite a bit more money once a street has gone through its lifecycle and is not repairable. The initial thought process and logic when you're doing streets is, well, you fix your worst streets. Obviously, you need to go fix your worst streets. Well, financially, that may not always be the best strategy . So what pavement management does is try to allow you to monitor and track that, but also to try to develop financial strategies to manage things on lower cost. So the idea of preventative maintenance is that you do overlays and surface treatments and keep the level of that street up high, and you're using less expensive treatments to extend the life. Now, there are some finite limits on how many times you can do that and how long you can do that. But this is the basic principles. I want to kind of go over the past bond programs related specifically to street reconstruction funding, because we've got a fair amount of recent investment that we're working on right now related to working on backlog and accumulated backlog through the bond program. So the last three bond programs we had, in '05, we had 9.6 allocated for street reconstruction. In 2012, we had 20 million. And that was kind of a unique program, because that was a streets reconstruction only bond program. So we knew the funding level going in, and it wasn't part of a bigger bond package where the allocation for street reconstruction was somewhat unknown going in from a staff standpoint. And then more recently, we had the $98 million bond package that we had 24 million in for street reconstruction. Yes, Council Member Hawkins. During those three bond programs, have we, like in the previous two, have we spent all of that money? 9.6 we more or less have. The 2012 were probably about 18% to 20% through that program. And we're less than that under the 2014, because we only received the funding from the 2014 this spring. And that extra money, I know it's not a lot. Does that sit in an account, or do we just sell more bonds kind of as we go? Or was that a one-time bond sale? Those were structured by year, and that was part of what was communicated to the voters when it went out. And so the only issues that you would have had would have been implementation and whether we stayed on budget or stayed on schedule. OK. OK. Can I add to that real quick? I just want to make an additional note about that. The 2005 bond program was anticipated to be a five-year bond program. With the recession that occurred in 2000, 2008, we delayed selling some of the bonds. I don't know how much of the 9.6 million. But of the 2005 program that was somewhat delayed, the 2012 was a five-year bond program. So there's a portion of that, Council Member Hawkins, that hasn't even been sold yet. Just like for the 2014, the 2014 is a six-year bond program . So we've only sold two pieces of it. And I've got some slides that cover that, too. Sorry. That's fine. So the process, basically, that the bond program goes through-- and I'll go through this briefly-- the City Council appoints a citizen advisory committee. Staff initially proposes a street reconstruction capital improvement plan. And we submit that to the citizen advisory committee. In the case of the 2005 and the 2014, we don't know exactly what that committee is going to allocate towards street reconstruction. So we don't really have a finite budget to develop a plan from. Unlike the 2012 bond program, where we knew it was all street reconstruction, and it was 20 million. So there's some differences in how staff has to try to submit that plan. Now, the other steps in that process-- Tim, real quick question. Sure. And this is all good background information. I guess at some point, we are going to be talking about council direction on prioritizing streets. Is that-- because I know it's-- Yep. OK. All right, I just didn't-- OK. I'm just giving background on how this process works and how we go about doing our prioritization. Thank you. So then, basically, the citizen advisory committee reviews, modifies, and approves the proposed CIP plan. Then they submit that to the Planning and Zoning Commission , which reviews and approves the proposed plan. And then it goes to council for approval. And then it goes to the voters for approval. So assuming that the bond package has been gone through that process and been approved by the voters, then the city council appoints a bond oversight committee to advise the city council during the implementation stage. For the most part, that usually involves when there's deviations and non-implementation of the proposed plan. An example of what could drive that would be the cost estimates may have assumed a certain inflationary environment. And the inflationary environment was radically different. We had a little bit of that type of problem in the '05 bond program because asphalt prices really skyrocketed during that period. But for the most part, the citizen advisory committee is an advisory to council over the implementation of the plan. And if deviations are made from the plan, then staff makes those recommendations to the advisory committee. The advisory committee then makes that recommendation to council. And then the council makes that decision. But for the most part, implementation should follow the plan in the budget. I kind of want to go over-- We've got a question. Yeah, we've got a question. On the point of how-- so the committee meets prior to the bond election. And I know you do a ton of education with those folks. You mentioned you were on it. And I've talked to other folks who actually went on field trips, driving down roads-- Mobile meetings. --and trying to kind of assess what that priority is. And I know after 2012-- and I haven't broken this down after the 2014, but I did it because some folks in my council district were asking specifically, was the breakdown and how it kind of played out throughout the city. And it was pretty squarely 25, 25, 25, 25 in terms of the four council districts. So I don't know how that played out. That's just coincidental because I know they all have kind of different geographies and different ages of the town. Is there an intent as part of that process to try and spread the love, so to speak, intentionally? And I've got a slide a little farther in my presentation that addresses that. So there is a component of what we're trying to do that factors that in. The caveat to that is the need for street improvements is not precisely uniformly distributed by council district. So that's the trade-off issue. I guess I just raise that in preparation because I think when we're talking about priority is-- it seems like already in the process we're importing something other than just simply OCI ratings. Yeah, and I'll go into that in my presentation. Wait for comment to that. If you will, let me kind of plow through this a little bit. And that may help answer some of your questions. So back in the '05 program, keep in mind we'd just done the survey in '03 and gotten the study final ized in '04. We didn't really have as much experience with it. We had a piece of a bond program. It wasn't a real big piece. And it was an unknown piece. So that was the environment that that was created in. And so what we mostly did in the '05 bond program was we kind of went down the pathway. Well, we're going to bond fund backlog. And we're going to start looking at our lowest OCI scores. So we put a fair amount of emphasis on just the OCI score. We considered distributing the projects across the city so that there would be some uniform distribution and some public acceptability of that. And then we also tried to avoid this short little segment projects or some things like that. But that was about the extent of the process that we went through back in '05. Staff had limited experience with the payment management system. And we had a limited and somewhat unknown level of funding available. Conversely, by the 2012 bond program, staff had a lot more experience with the payment management system. Our second payment management survey and report was much more detailed, particularly in the report side of it. There was a lot more data analysis. And if you compare the two studies side by side, they're substantially different. And the second study was much more robust. We had a known level of funding. And the advisory committee's focus was specifically not on how much of the bond program should be allocated towards that, but how should it be structured for that program. And then also, we had learned a few things from our experiences from the '05 program. And that was that in some cases, when we just look at OCI, we don't look at other factors. And one of the more important factors that's out there is what's underneath the pavement and the utility infrastructure beneath it. The utility infrastructure ages. And it ages at a different time frame than your street pavements. And we have different systems that are evolving in those areas to try to prioritize those replacements. But what was happening with just looking at OCI, it was starting to drive utility decisions that, well, do we fix these utilities even though we hadn't planned because the street's being paved? And so we kind of broadened our thought process a little bit and started trying to incorporate in these other prioritization systems into that. And so then instead of one thing driving another, we were trying to factor in other factors there in the decision making. And so we developed this CIP screener tool. And I'll go into that in a little bit more detail. But that was used very heavily in the 12 program. And it was used very heavily in the prioritization of projects that ultimately got approved by that bond committee and by the voters. The CIP screener is in an Excel format. But most of our software systems for the water utility, the wastewater utility, and the street system are more GIS in a database format. And they have GIS links, which geographic information systems basically ties databases to geographic components. And basically, the common denominator between those systems was the street segments. So we have a common data system for the utility system that looks at a manhole to manhole run or an intersection to intersection on a water line run. And those generally line up with the street segments. So what we had was some staff that could query those databases, download these spreadsheets, and start bringing that information together so that staff could use that as a screening tool in decision making on prioritization. And so some of the data that we brought in from the street system was the street segments, the OCI scores, the street classification, pavement types, some of those things. Water main data, we brought in age, material size, main break data, frequencies, that kind of information. And then on wastewater, they had age, material size, close circuit TV inspections, and an asset management program they had been working on called SCRAPS. So again, you've got these three separate systems out there . Before there was much street funding, water lines were prioritized on break frequency. And if we had a high frequency, we went out and replaced that line. And because that often was in an old street that had utility repairs to it because of the main breaks, well then the street program then followed that project. Because after the street was in bad shape and then torn up for utility work, it was even in worse shape to expect it to be erode. And so they would take utility patch money and follow that. So there was a period of time where the street program followed the water department. Well back in '05, it reversed itself. The water department had to follow the street program a little bit. So by '12, we were trying to look at, well, let's try to get this stuff together and factor it in. Other things that we did add into this didn't necessarily come out of the preventative maintenance programs in those areas. They included things like drainage. Do we have some known drainage projects? A good example of that was Henkel. Everybody knew Henkel was in bad shape. Everybody wanted us to pave Henkel. But we knew we had a major storm drainage project that wasn't funded. And so it wasn't until the 2014 bond program came that we got funding for that storm drainage project. And then we brought the funding in for the repair of Henkel . We also looked at council districts. We wanted to be aware that we needed to have sensitivity to the public about distributing these roads geographically across the city, keeping in mind that one of our council districts, council district four, on average, has proportionally newer streets because of the growth patterns in the city. So some of the highest percentage of poor streets that we have are more in district one, two, and three. Bike lanes, basically we brought the bike lane data in so that we could budget for signage and striping. But we did not budget for reconfiguration of the roads. If the bike lane master plan was conceiving a different road configuration in the future, then we really didn't have funding under the maintenance program to do that. But we wanted to identify if there was a bike lane on a given road. And we were going to be doing the paving work on that. We wanted to make sure we budgeted for the striping and marking on that. And when you say a different configuration, do you mean where the-- Road width changes. The road width changes. Right. Because there are some configurations that do change. Because in many of our streets, we have enough width. We just simply need to have the engineers go in and agree to, instead of maybe 15 and 14 or 15 and 13 foot lanes to go down to 10 or 11 foot lanes and have the space for the bike lane. You're not saying that that's reconfiguration. No. What we're talking about is something that would make us move the curves. And we're trying to salvage on average and budget for about half of the curb replacement. And there'll be some streets with more and some with less. But that's how we budget. But not only do you have issues associated with salvage of the curb and gutter investments, you've got issues with right of way and design and other factors that can change the scope dramatically from a cost and engineering standpoint. And since we were trying to spread our dollars as much as we could. So that's how we handled that. But the point is we wanted to consider other factors other than OCI and put them into our screening tool. Prioritization considerations. We made a generalized assumption. Your average citizen and even staff can tell a 13 from an 18 from a 7 to a 23. We have a lot of granularity in our OCI numbers. But they're really-- they're more of a broader range of this is a bad street. And it needs to be replaced. And so we went in and bracketed OCI 0 to 15, 15 to 30, and 30 to 40. And we generally prioritized and gave a higher ranking to the 0 to 15 group. Part of the reason we stretched up to 30 to 40 is in some of our bond package, we have identified water or sewer CIPs. And within a five-year life with about two points drop every year, your 40 is going to probably be a 30. And after the utility work is done, it's going to be far worse than that. And so we wanted to be able to capture some of the poorer condition streets where utility work was already embedded in our five-year CIP. So when we had water and wastewater utilities identified in the five-year CIP and they met that 40 or less criteria, we gave pretty high priority to that. Conversely, if the condition of the utilities under that pavement were somewhat suspect just because of age or some condition, but they weren't really in the five-year CIP prioritization yet, we didn't give very good priority to that. Because on average, we could only fund with this $20 million one in five segments. And so the logic was, is well, let's go ahead and put the money where we've got known utility problems or we have no utility problems. And maybe out of the 80% we can't fund, some of those need to be streets in bad shape. But the utilities are not really that strong. So a good example of where there would be no utilities or utilities wouldn't be a concern would be a subdivision built maybe in the late '70s or early '80s where the street had reached the end of its lifecycle. But the utilities were really not an issue. And so those became utility clear type projects that made some sense. If we went back to, well, we're going to do just the low O CI and we're not going to look at anything else, well, then we could basically be driving some investment decisions of pavements over bad utilities and we weren't really funded for those utilities. So how would you deal with that? Some other things that we looked at was fragmented streets, city council districts, and then the bike lane master plan. So those were things that were embedded in our CIP screening tool that we introduced prior to the 2012 bond program. And those were some of the logic that we used in priorit ization. The idea was to try to pick roads that created less conflicts and other expenses in other areas. So basically, the 2012 was a streets only package. It had the $20 million funding over five years at $4 million a year. And it covered bond years of 2013, fiscal years, bond years , I guess, 2013 to 2017. And so we're not quite halfway through that. We're about 20% plus through the funding side of things. And we're probably about 18%, 19% through the implementation side of that. So most of the investment that we're planning for has not been made yet. It funded 208 street segments. So Tim, help me understand the logic behind-- so if we've got bond years, '13 through '17, it's the end of '15 now. Well, we sell bonds in the spring. And our fiscal year starts at the October 1. And the calendar year starts in January. So we've got three versions of years, if you will, because we don't get the money until the spring, which is halfway through the fiscal year. OK, so we sold bonds in the spring of '13. Fiscal year started in October of '13. So '13, '14, '15. So I'm just thinking, here we are in October of '15. I would think we should be roughly 50% through. Yeah, we're not. So I'm just wanting to understand why that is. Were there costs of asphalt? No, no, it has to do with some other factors. Some of it gets into when we got started and got the money to work with. Some of it got into we had to make sure that if there were coordinated utility work, that they were done in advance of the payment. We also brought Atmos Gas into this thing, because as soon as we paved Jago and put the first bike lane stripings on it, then they announced how they wanted to replace all the gas lines under there. So we had to kind of broaden our utility coordination to include them. And so those are some steps in the process that have slowed us down a little bit. But I can show you a slide a little farther that shows you what we've done, and I can summarize some of that. So will your slide answer the question? So here's my question. So I was one of those citizens on the committee. And part of what you want to see as a voter or a taxpayer is results of your money, some action taken. We've completed 70 out of the 208 segments. We have seven other in progress. Right, but what I heard you say is we're 19% through-- That's probably more the expense side of it than it is the segment side of it. We're a little bit under budget. And there's some reasons for that. OK, so I'm sorry. Earlier you said 20% through and 19%. I thought you said 20% through on the funding side and 19% through on the completion, something like that, right? We had a pretty wet spring this year too. So we had some weather complications that affected us as well. So my question is we're 19% through with the work. You said we-- We have expended somewhere in the neighborhood of about $7 million. $7 million of the $20 million. We don't have all the $20 million because we have two more $4 million sales that would generate that. Well, I know. I'm just saying of the total 20. So I feel like I'm in a who's on first segment here. I'm sorry. So I guess all I'm getting at is the-- We're doing the best we can to try to keep up with the schedule and the demand. But we've had some weather complications and we've had some utility coordination. And I don't think it would be beneficial for us to go out and pave that in advance of the utility coordination. OK, so what we have is we-- and we didn't know that going into this. Well, in an idealized world, you schedule something, you implement right on budget and right on schedule. We don't live in an idealized world. OK. We've got two fairly major projects going out to bid. One you just recently awarded, and that was close to $1.8 million for Bonnie Bray. We should go out to spring in bid, and you probably should see a award for Eagle that'll be close to $2 million. So some of that kicking the bigger projects to external contractors may help us on the cash flow and the tracking on the budget. But we still have to get all the utility work, for instance , done on Eagle Drive before we can let that contract. So here's just a suggestion for staff. Just might be helpful. So I'm thinking about it as when I was a citizen on the committee and we're hearing presentations and here's what's necessary , here's what's needed. And we're talking about specific segments, but I think we were well educated that the bond money isn't tied to specific segments. We don't have to do these specific ones that we've shown you. This is what we're thinking, just like the drainage. Same thing. So I think what would be helpful is, from a citizen standpoint, I just speak for myself is, if I voted in a $20 million bond and it was to be done over five years for street reconstruction over a five year period, I think some sort of a-- just an update to the citizens. Because I can tell you what I hear a lot of is, man, we sure have voted in a lot of bond money on streets, but I don't really see any results. I've got a slide that'll show you that. Exactly. Just before we get onto the slide. So here's what I would like to see. Just an idea for staff would be some sort of an update. Because a lot of times there's great logic behind why it's prudent to not spend the money yet. You mentioned earlier asphalt spiked in price. And sometimes raw materials, there's a shortage. And so you don't really want to go out and buy them because you're paying a higher price. But some sort of an update that the citizens can see, which is, hey, I approved $20 million to be spent over five years. I can go to the city website and see a blurb on every bond that's passed and where it stands. We've sold x amount of this $20 million this year, this year, this year. Here's what the results were of that. If we're lagging behind, if we've only completed 20%, well, we should have completed 50%. Here's the logic behind why that is. I think those sort of things would help to build trust and confidence amongst the citizens that when we vote to give you money, that you're-- nobody's questioning whether we're good stewards of the money. I don't think. Certainly I'm not. But when I see we're 50% through, but we're 19% complete-- again, so-- I think that my categorization is not as dramatic as your-- I'm just repeating what you said. So I don't want to debate with you. But I'm just saying some sort of a communication like that where the citizens could go and get an update, and it's just factually based. Here's where we are. Here's why we're here. And in that way, there's no question in their mind as to where the fine money gets spent now, just a thought. I think that's a great idea. Thanks, Kathy. Because you're not talking to the taxpayers, and we are. And so that's what we're hearing. So I'd like to talk about arterials and collectors. OK. They're important to the people who live here, the people who work here, the people who visit here, the businesses that are already doing businesses here, and the businesses that are considering doing business here . So for me, the arterials and the collector streets are absolutely number one in terms of priority. But I see that 35% of the segments were arterials and collectors. And 50% of the money. So I know that our purpose today is to try to give some direction on how are we going to prioritize getting our streets fixed. And I just want to really stand on that, because that list of people and businesses, that just has to be number one in terms of arterials and collectors. And what are we going to get fixed? I know categorizing broken streets and just looking at a computer is fine. But I'm just talking about real life, real people out there , and how they come and go out of our city. And that's my priority number one. Well, I think staff would agree with you on that, to be honest with you. But there is a factor that we deal with as well. And that is the people's feedback that we get is the roads they use, they want fixed. And the road in front of their house happens to be one of them. And so we get that feedback. So what we're attempting to do is balance that. And we're trying to balance that in an environment where we have finite funding. So again, I'm not trying to get defensive. I'm just trying to explain what's happened, where we are, and how we made those decisions. OK? Yes, ma'am. And I'm saying that the priority really needs to be arterials and collectors. Yeah, and I don't disagree. Yes, Council Member-- oh, sorry. He was-- Please. He always frees about me. I wanted to add to what Greg was saying. That's kind of earlier why I was asking just, how much of the money of those previous bond programs have we sold-- have we spent? And just when we ask people to vote on bond programs in the future, I think it's good if they were to understand , I voted for this. And this is how it was spent. And this is how it helped our streets out. And sometimes it feels a little confusing and kind of the joke even, you know, go to Rotary, you know, what's the next bond program? You know, and they're being just lighthearted. But it would be good to understand that. And Tim, you're doing great, man. I'm just the messenger right now. So-- Well, that's OK. Greg is really dramatic. I agree with you. The thing I would like to mention is we did spend all the '05 bond money. And that's good to know. I didn't know that. It's a component we had related to Bonnie Bray and the funds were put into the Bonnie Bray repairs. We have another question, Council Member Wood. On that concept of a bond tracker, you might recall in that Bloomberg citizen pitch, one of their ideas was kind of a CIP tracker to do just that. And all this data, that's relatively easy to visualize. But I will say, I think as we move forward in that Bloomberg open data project, I think that's a felt need, I think, that's already been talked about. How do you visualize that stuff? But it's not only important to visualize so that you trust your government that they're doing what you voted for. But there's also an informative thing. I mean, how many people just have questions about the state of their road and where it is in queue so you can kind of search your particular street? Because I agree. I mean, as a district council member, as you are as well, and when you go to those neighborhood meetings, the most important street is that neighborhood street that looks neglected. And it's got potholes, and kids are falling into it, and stuff like that. Politically, and just kind of who our citizens are, I mean, that's a varied conversation. But I will say, I mean, one of my concerns-- and I'm an advocate of having this conversation and say, should we look at certain prioritizations? Because there are certain key golden brick roads, so to speak, in our community that are important. My one caution is that I know that in the lead up to each of these bond programs, we publish lists of streets. In the aftermath of these bond programs, we publish lists of streets with a particular date on them. So every neighborhood I go to in my district asks about that all the time. How do we push up my street? We're in 2017. How do we get pushed up to 2013? So my fear is here are two things that we've gone out selling the community on a particular list of streets, in some case informing them about a particular plan that everyone knows is kind of malleable because of just situations, is being too aggressive with reprioritization of streets at a point where I'm going to go back into those neighborhoods. You guys go back into your neighborhoods, it's like, what? Street got taken off that list? Or it got pushed back another five years? Those are important factors as well, because those are folks who stood with us as I went and said, this is important to vote for, and afterwards said, here's what you voted for and here's what you're going to get. I think there's a lot of considerations we need to take in. So part of me thinks, as we're having this conversation about reprioritization, is thinking about future policy is how we look at these in the future, but to be very light-footed on how we look at the past programs. And there might be some reason to change some of things, but let's be cognizant. There's a lot of promises, I think, that were made. That's part of why I went through that process, because there was a lot of vetting process that we had to go through to get these things approved. And there was discussion and debate about how detailed of information should we put out there. Speaking only from the standpoint of staff, we didn't really want to pinpoint every segment and every year it was going to be done, because from an implementation standpoint, we knew we would not be able to deliver, because we had utility coordination realities that we had to do, and we had to bring in other departments and other budgets and other things to preserve and protect the city's investment. But this is the balance that we run into in a public process, of public defendability and public disclosure. And to that statement that Mr. Roden made, I think we have opportunities as we accelerate our O&M budget to look at what we do in the future. What I'm attempting to do is tell you what we've done in the past and what we've done leading up to this point, and the things that we did, some of the thoughts that we had, and some of the tools that we used. - Council member, do you have a question? - I don't want you to be defensive. And I know that it's a tough situation. And we know it because we experience it too. Because here's what my experience is with our residents and our businesses and roads. We want our roads repaired, and we're mad when they're not. And then we're mad when they're being repaired because it's very inconvenient. And then we're frustrated about having to pay for those repairs. So it's a real tough situation because we don't want to really pay for it. We don't want the inconvenience of them being repaired, but we want those nice, smooth roads. And that puts everybody in sort of a no-win situation. I think the notion, though, of being as accurate as we can with those timelines and anticipation of years, it's better to promise three years, if you hope that you could get it done in two, than to promise three, knowing that it's really gonna take four or five, because then it just creates more frustration. But I think that the overall notion of a report card like we have in our quarterly financial report on how we're doing, a report card like we have with our sustainability plan on how we're doing on those goals, I think something like that to let those folks know. And if that means also a revised list with dates that we think that we can really accomplish, recognizing that we do have rain periods from time to time and recognizing the coordination with utilities, I think that that's going to help in the long run in terms of us being in a good position for the next round of bonds that we'll need to do. - A couple additional comments. One of the big negatives that we get is we build a road and then we tear it up to do utility work. So taps by developers, main breaks, sewer chokes, we have to dig through the street and do that. What we're working real hard to do is prevent scenarios where we pave a road and then come in and tear it up with utilities. And so that requires this coordination and then that coordination is umbrellaed out to Atmos. And I have to give Atmos a lot of credit 'cause they've really worked with us. And again, I'd like to get through this presentation before we go too far in the discussion 'cause I think it'll help you a little bit if I can get through the presentation. - Well, and I agree, but Council Member Hickaway. Okay, yeah, let's go ahead and just breeze through this, rest of the presentation, then we'll have our questions. - So we've got 70 segments done in the 2012 program. We've got seven in progress where we feel a little behind schedule, but I don't think it's a significant schedule issue at this point. And our tracks are tracking below budget. Now we put an inflation factor of 7.5% to all our cost estimates, so we're on the front end of the implementation, so we would reasonably expect to be tracking under budget. But right now we don't necessarily see factors that say we can't implement this program and we can't do it on budget, at least at this point. This was the 2012 bond package. I know the scale on this is not real great, but this is a kind of tool that if we wanna utilize this for public communication, I've got one a little bit later that combines the two and shows you what we've done that potentially can work. And this is in an Adobe format, so it has layers that you can access, so it's a pretty good tool that almost everybody has Adobe Reader. Any rate, on the 2014 bond program, that was a larger bond program. It was distributed over six years. Going in, we didn't really know how much the bond program was gonna be, and we didn't really know how much was gonna be allocated to the street reconstruction piece. But where we landed was 24 million for street reconstruction. It raised the funding level beginning in year 2015 to six million, which we just received those funds this spring. This particular program funded 195 street segments. That was about 28% of the unfunded street segments. So the question that was raised by the bond committee, well, what is 24 million by? And that plus the 20 million, in essence, covered 28% of the remaining backlog that we had. So we were making a bigger dent in the backlog and working towards that, but we obviously have to get through that program to be able to see the benefits of that . 56% of the segments were arterials and collectors, which represented about two thirds of the funds. So we were attempting to do that. Now, as far as needs go, the arterials weren't necessarily sticking out as poorly maintained as much as the collectors. So a lot of the collector streets, and good examples of that would be Mockingbird, Hinkle, Scripture. People can relay that those are bad streets and those are collector level streets. We've completed four of the segments out of that program, and the Lillian Miller, which is a pretty major project, about 1.8 million has been awarded, but it hasn't mobilized yet for construction. And then Eagle Drives under design and should be bid probably shortly after the first of the year, and the council should see a bid award on that coming up probably the early part of the first of the year. So that'll jumpstart some of the money side of the bond utilization. This basically shows that bond program. You can see Mockingbird, Hickory, Hinkle, some of the larger Lillian Miller. You're seeing some of the bigger streets being rolled into the prioritization. We're getting some momentum in the funding levels and we're able to bring in some of those bigger projects. And this is an example of something, it looks kind of noisy and it is, but it shows the two bond programs, it shows what's been done and what's currently in process. And so that's your $44 million program of which we're probably not that far through of the process . A lot of the bonds haven't been sold yet. So that's another reality factor that we deal with. The voters remember, well I voted for this back in November '14 while it hadn't done. And while it was distributed over six years it hadn't even received the money for a lot of the help. - Council Member Briggs? Oh, I thought you had a question there. - But you know if-- - Well I thought you were finished, I'm sorry, go ahead. - But if the instruction and direction is is that you want some type of tool on the website, my suggestion would be something like this. We can also, we've got tracking tools that we're gonna be using for the Citizen Bond Committee and we've also provided them to the council in some of the Friday rating files. 'Cause this question comes up and is gonna continue to come up. And so we've got those tools set up to provide that level of communication and hopefully this is the type of communication that's meaningful for not only you but for the citizens. This basically shows history. We discussed this briefly back in the presentation on the 28th of July the summer. But this is the portion of the total budget that's coming in our O&M budget that goes to the OCI type improvements and isn't going to things like pothole repair and guard rail repair and some of the non-preventative maintenance components that are in the model to maintain the pavements. And you can see that the street funding level had variations mainly when CEOs and GOs were in flux. We had the BCTA local ELAP program that gave us some temporary funding. But then it wasn't really until this window here is when we started seeing the bond money coming in. So even though we remember these bond programs as being out there and as approved, this is the total net funding that we have right now. But the other important thing, and it's important to all the parties here, is that we've ramped up the overall budget and the O&M side of things. So we're starting to get some new tools. Now the strategy that we're trying to use is we're trying to use the bond money for the backlog and we're trying to use the O&M money for the preventative maintenance. We don't have to do that, but it probably makes sense financially for us to do that. 'Cause the more we can prevent these streets from being in the reconstruct mode, and the more we can try to fund this with operating revenues rather than debt funded, the lower our costs are gonna be in the long run and the better investments that we're making. So that's kind of a lead in to, well how do we use the same pavement management system to prioritize that one? - How many more slides do you have, Kim? - This is about it. - Okay, all right, go ahead. - I think one more slide. So basically our O&M budget is about 60/40 split between OCI and non-OCI activities. And then the OCI funds are then distributed as available and kind of somewhat proportional to the asphalt streets preventative maintenance program and the concrete streets preventative maintenance program. There's nothing restricting us from using these funds for reconstruction work other than policy perhaps. Certainly some of the streets that you drive around and see look like new streets, but they've actually been preventative maintenance upgraded . Some of them are micro seals with base failure repairs underneath them. Concrete streets right now aren't getting a large part of our funding because they're not a large part of our need right now, but they're gonna be a growing part of our need. There's some preventative maintenance things that you see over on Carroll and over along Bell that involve panel replacements. We've done some slab jacking in some of the newer subdivisions where we had some failed streets. So basically we go through kind of the same process. We use the pavement management system to screen candidates. We load that into our CIP screening tool to kind of look at other coordination issues. Some of the less expensive treatments that we do have less emphasis and concern about utility coordination than the more expensive ones. So overlays we tend to try to be a little bit more focused on 'cause the level of investment's greater. And certainly we don't wanna make a moderately expensive investment on a road and then have a utility project four years later turned on. We develop our work plans. We coordinate with our department heads and then up schedule projects are communicated in monthly utility coordination meetings. And more recently, those have included Atmos Gas. And so Atmos Gas has been very good about getting their service lines lowered and modernized. Usually we have service line conflicts when we go into pavements, particularly the deeper we go if we have to do a reconstruction or we usually have issues with shallow gas lines underneath them. And so coordination of that is important. And then basically when we have conflicts, then we try to handle those basically through scheduling and scheduling delays. So that's kind of the process that we've evolved to. And if you looked at how we did things 10 years ago, that didn't exist. The utility coordination didn't exist. The monthly coordination meetings didn't exist. The comparing of the databases. Databases didn't even exist 12 years ago. We didn't have a pavement management system. So I appreciate your patience. - Okay, yeah, we got a couple. So that's the last slide? - Yes, sir. - Okay, so we're gonna, I'm sure you had a question you wanted to hold till the end of the presentation. - Just on transparency and to your point, I have seen traveling, some cities have signs on the side of the road that this street was created with this so-and-so bond and this bond is used for this. Have we ever tried that in our city? Just, you know, yeah? - There's one out there talking about that project. I tend to see them when they do it. - After reconstruction or? - After completion? - Well, if it's a contracted out project, there are standard specs require them to identify the contractor and the title of the project. When we mobilize an internal project for a varying range of activity from reconstruction down to preventative maintenance, we put out door hangers and do those types of communications. We don't do specific promotional advertising or communication related to the bond program that I'm aware of. We could, but I'm not aware. Our primary focus when we move into neighborhoods is let them know we're gonna be there, what we're gonna do, how long we're gonna be there, and how it affects them. - I just had a couple more questions. In our backup, our Friday backup, we get construction projects like itemization. Is that available to the public? Is there a spot where they can find this? - Is that in a reading file? - Yeah. - I think we have a road closure location on the website, but it's kind of multipurpose. I think it has development activities, CIP activities, and then staff type activities. - Jeff, I'm gonna put that in the great old kitchen. - Yeah, I think it'd be a great idea to give that list to the newspaper and let them actually put it in the paper so that people can see road construction and the list that Keely's talking about, because it's a fascinating list for just me as a citizen, and I know I think that would really be helpful. Put it on the web, put it on our website. Just food for thought on how do we get that information out there. And happy to hear you're talking to the utilities. I'm a little appalled that the history of our road maintenance did not include that in the past. And so we just keep doing it better, but even as a citizen, you can't dig and work it on anything until you find out who the utilities are and what's happening in the area. So I just know that's a huge part of planning for these roads, that to talk to these different utilities and know what they're gonna do when so that we're not being redundant and spending our money and our time. So thanks. - Thank you, Mayor. Tim, so one of the things you were talking about earlier in terms of just kind of the outside of the weather, one of the big challenges was coordination with utilities and utility conflicts, I guess. You talked about sewer lines and water lines. - Well, that can fall into a couple of categories. Category one is as if it was specifically tied to a utility CIP, the utility CIP has to be implemented in advance of the utility or of the road work, and then the road work needs to be coordinated, followed fairly quickly, because once we tear up roads, people lose patience with how quickly we get back in to repave them. So that can be one component, or another component would be, for example, some of our projects, more particularly in the 2014 bond package, were not fully vetted for that type of coordination. Part of that was we didn't know whether it was a five million cell or a 20 million cell or a 50 million cell. First Street reconstruction. The other component was is we didn't have as much time to prepare for our plans on that. And so many projects, a good example was there was a public need and desire and an expressed concern about Hicker Street, and we all know Hicker Street is a rough road, but there are some utility conditions up there that haven't been fully vetted. And so that project, we have to get the utility decisions on what needs to be replaced, and then get plans, and then get those done in advance of that paving job. - Right, so my question is, the utilities you're talking about are mainly water and sewer lines, in terms of old-- - Mainly, mainly, yes sir. - 'Cause I think that if something's old and it needs to be replaced, we wouldn't have that situation with Verizon or, I guess what we're getting at is-- - There are some occasions where Verizon might have a fiber optic duct bank or some major infrastructure, but for as a general rule, you're correct that the primary issue is water and wastewater. If you were to replace all of the utilities underneath your $44 million road investment, you might need to spend 80 million of utility money that's not in the budget, and you'd have to raise rates in utilities to pay for that. So that's kind of a high level overview of what we're trying to deal with. Utility investment under the pavement sometimes could be one and a half to two times the pavement cost above it. - Yeah, so my question is, given that those are city-owned utilities, I guess what I heard you talking about was part of the reason for the delay was utility conflicts and coordination of when things are gonna get repaired, and given that it's all one big happy family here, part of the reason that I was wanting this session, what Council Member Rhoade and I were visiting one day just about, we got an update and we got the map. And when you look at that map, it looks like a bunch of little bitty segments kinda spread out all over. And in my neighborhood, we've got a brand new street surface with bike lanes and signs and all that, and then there's a cross street and then right across the street, it's like the moon. So I go, in my simple mind, I go, why would we replace this one little segment and do bike lanes when at the each end of that segment, we have no, it doesn't connect to anything, and we have a street right across street, it looks like the moon, right? So I go, why would we spend that money yet unless we could do the entire street and have those bike lanes connect to something, right? So what sparked the conversation about prioritization was, it seems to me like certainly OCI, right? 'Cause if I'm a street guy, I just wanna fix the streets that are broken. But I think there's a bigger picture here that I certainly like for us to discuss, which is there are certain streets that many, many of our visitors drive on. Many, many of our university parents drive on that are, they're making a decision to put their kid in this town and spend money in this town. Many of the people that we're recruiting as businesses when we drive them from our city hall to go to dinner somewhere or out by the airport to look the streets that we're going down. So my comments are, I understand OCI, and I understand, I'm not so sure I agree with the spread of that over all four districts evenly. I don't know where that fits into the priority. So I understand the comment about there's utility conflicts that we couldn't anticipate or control, but given that we're all one family, I would just think that some coordination of that. And I get it, we didn't have money for water and sewer until the 2014 bond for drainage. But we have that now. So the question in my mind was, okay, so I'm glad to see Hickory Street on here now that that's part of the 2014, but when? So there's certain high profile streets that get a lot of traffic. Montecito Drive in my neighborhood is not one of them, yet that got done. Now maybe there's a good reason for that with that bike lane on it, and I just don't understand that . - Well, again, we get lots of feedback from a lot of direction. And as you can imagine, when you get feedback from the public, it's not always in agreement. Sometimes it's in conflict. And so-- - Which is great. That's great, so I'm glad you brought that up. So the question is, I guess, for us is, because I wanna ask one more question before I lose the floor, but the question for us is, is it, are we then saying, look, the bond passed, staff has the money, and then staff will just make the decision on which streets get replaced, or do we wanna have some kind of feed? I don't wanna get into every street segment, but I think there's just certain high priority things that I would like for us to at least be able to give some input on. So two questions. One, you mentioned that the bond money was tied exactly to the segments defined. You said when we did the bond, we said there's gonna be X number of segments, and then we went back and we gave them-- - There was a list provided. - We gave them a list of segments. - And a map. - So I'm confused by that, because I've also been told that when we sell bonds, whether it be for drainage or for streets, even though in the Citizens Advisory Committee, we talk about specific segments, or we talk about specific areas or drainage projects, that we're not tied specifically to those projects to spend that money. - It would depend on the level of detail embedded in the bond language that was put out to the voters. That becomes the legal test. Then there is a political test, and that is what level of information did you communicate out there? And if you choose to deviate from that, you might have the legal authority to do that, but there may be individuals in neighborhoods that said my street was slated here, who changed it? - Well, I wanna know the answer to that, because specifically in the 2014 on drainage, drainage projects was on the committee, and it was we're gonna get downtown from Carroll Boulevard going south and east out of the floodplain and make those properties. But then I was later told, well, it's probably only gonna get us to Elm Street now that we've costed it out. So I'm saying, I just need to understand, when I answer somebody's question, is it specifically tied to what you told us, or is it just these are the kind of projects we're thinking, but once we get the money, we can determine exactly what it is. - Hold on a second. I wanna get those questions answered. We could, okay, so I want legal to weigh in on the legal side as far as the bond language, and then Chuck, I think you had some comment, or somebody had a comment about is that the policy, you may be able to answer that question, Madam City Attorney. - Typically when we look at a bond issue, certainly we'll work with bond counsel, but most municipal lawyers are gonna look at this from the perspective of you want to allow some flexibility with regard to these projects, and so your language is going to be general rather than specific. So the propositions that are placed before the public will relate more nearly to street repair in general, rather than to specific segments. And I believe it's fair to say virtually all cities in Texas are going to generally put forth their bond proposition language with generality and non-specificity, so that there is flexibility allowed there now. That certainly does not indicate that the counsel could not then later say we want to move in this direction, but as far as allowing latitude, most cities are gonna look at it from the perspective of that's the better approach to these kinds of things, Denton being no exception. I suspect Chuck maybe is wanting to talk to this language, or perhaps Brian as well. - Well, I would agree with that, and that's the way the bond propositions themselves that were voted on by the voters were more generalized kind of statements. I think that's probably Council Member Johnson what you're referring to. There was a bond booklet that we also developed, and it had street segments, but we were very clear in that bond booklet to say this is a representation of the projects that are planned at this time, but there could be potential mitigating factors which would have us have to make some adjustments, but the monies that are approved by proposition have to remain in that proposition. So if it was a street segment-- - So the project segments help you determine the dollar amount to put on the ballot in the first place, even though it may not. - Right, but if a different street segment needed to be done, I think if this is where the council's going that you wanted to do a different street segment, you could do that. That is the basic answer. I hope that clears up. - Well, so here's the reason I asked the questions. It comes back to trust, and so I'm talking about drainage only because that's one that kind of jumps out at me, because being on the committee who worked on it, so you go if we can get this much money, then that project can get done. So then we get that amount of money, but then that project can't get done. So it makes people go, well, okay, so what went up? Right, so did shovels and people and drainage pipe and did everything go up that much? Did we miss it on the projection? Or did everybody think, man, if we show that, that we're gonna get downtown from the two big bookends out of the floodplain, that's gonna be impactful, and then we don't do that, what credibility? I have a feeling that we could lose credibility with the citizens, right? So that's why I was asking when you said, we published something that said here's the segments and here's the dates. Well, obviously, if we go do that and somebody has an expectation and then we change, well, they don't really know what the mechanism is, the mitigating factors are, the things that change. All they know is you told me my street was gonna get replaced, I voted yes, and then it didn't happen. - If the street department had the only decision on that, we would have said $24 million worth of miscellaneous street reconstruction. That would have given maximum flexibility. There was a concern about cutting a check that big with that level of specificity. And so the level of specificity is the other side of this and that's when you communicate and publish to the public, these are the streets that this bond program represents and these are the dates. There is a certain expectation of our department and to some degree of future council members, 'cause this may be a situation where the council that approved the bond is not necessarily the council that is here today. I mean, those things can change. So there are trade-offs between how much level of information do you provide. It is, I know that we don't put that in the bond because we don't wanna have a legal problem with what we communicate. - Let me interject here. And this is a good policy discussion I think we need to have at a different level because this is, it's not necessarily off topic, but it goes into a little bit more detail about what are our specific policies needed to be on future bond programs, which I think is a very worthy work session. I think we need to do that. I know you had a question. I really want us to hone in on because this presentation has been going on for almost a couple of hours. It's good conversation, but we're really talking about prioritization moving forward. So we need to really make sure that when this work session is over, that staff has direction, whether it's a different direction or how, or do we need to have another meeting discussing about street prioritization? Let me, let me. - Did you get your question? - Yeah, did you get your question answered? - So can I make a recommendation? - Sure. - Here's my recommendation. So when I look at the impact that Hickory Street between the square and Bell as a complete street has had, I think it's astounding. You can go down there on a Tuesday night, there's people everywhere. So my recommendation is that we need to hone in on those heavily traveled, high impact visibility streets and let's go do some completions, right? So Hickory from the square to whatever, pick it, where you lose fillings out of your teeth driving down it. And if that means water, wastewater, and utilities have to re-prioritize so that that can happen sooner, then that's what I would like to see us do. I'd like to see us pick a few that are heavily traveled by citizens from all over the city, whether it be in the downtown area and do one complete. - Well, I-- - So that's a recommendation versus the way we've been looking at it. - Okay, let me get the council questions answered and so we can, 'cause we're trying to give direction and we could talk, yes. Okay, Council Member Wallace. - Two things. It's not just bond money fixing the streets. We had a real big high ticket number on there coming out of our budget and if you wanna go back to that, the list of monies. So, yeah, you've got your bond, but come on down and take a look at-- - You're looking at this column right here. - So we're spending a lot of money on roads. It's not just bond money on roads. So I wanted to make that point clear. So on policy and procedure moving forward and staff direction, I agree with Greg, but I would challenge staff to take a look at arterials collectors, come up with a priority list and bring it back to this council because it is this council that decides where these monies ultimately will go. And yes, we have a bond, yes, the citizens voted on that bond, but it is still this council's obligation and responsibility to make the good decisions that help this city run smoothly. And I come back to arterials and collectors on all of those different topics on the people who live here, work here, visit here, businesses that do business here and businesses who are thinking about coming here. We have an obligation to all of those different categories of people and that comes down to arterials and collector streets. - Can I ask for some clarification? - Sure. - So it seemed like one of the slides that we had showed that in the 2014 bond package, that about two thirds of the money. - 66% of the money. - 56% of the segments, but it says 66% of the money. - Yeah, because they're more expensive streets. - So my question to you is, is that accomplishing what you're hoping to accomplish in terms of the priority in terms of the spending? I think that maybe you're talking about two things. Number one is the spending and number two, the timing of getting them done. - Well, part of it is the issue out there and Greg hit the nail on the head when he said residential neighborhood. It went from here to here and then it stopped. So my question is, where's the planning on that? And we've seen it all over. So for me, it's policy and procedure and I know we're looking at percentages of segments and percentages of money in terms of prioritizing those. That's my challenge to staff, come up with a list of the next, for example, 12 months of construction or 24 months of construction so that this council can weigh in with some of these arterials and collector streets. - I wanna get further clarification on Greg's question about change-ups to the bond and this is legal and I know that we had the citizen bond committee that initiated this list. Then after that, we voted in or appointed a citizen committee that their very charge is to look at any changes to that list as I understand it. Now I don't know to what degree a change triggers their required oversight as a bond committee and is it a change to just something that was in the ballot language or is it a change to something that was on the corresponding list that helped to sell the bond program? - Well, I'm not sure if that was-- - I think, Brian, I don't know if-- - Okay, that's fine. Go ahead. - I was itching to go over here. The oversight committee has been charged with just monitoring the implementation of the bond program, looking at all the projects that we talked about and developed in that bond booklet that I was mentioning to you to make sure those are ongoing, what the status is. Gives us an ability to have another group, the bond committee, a representation of the bond committee to go back to to say if we can't complete them because the details on the ground have changed, the cost elements have changed and we don't have enough money to do all those projects or some element of it is not there and we can't complete it. We can go to them and ask for a recommendation to bring to the council of what changes would be there. They're really meant to be for major changes is the way we've typically tried to look at that. Not every single detail, but major changes. So for example, if you decided you didn't wanna do some, or the oversight committee didn't wanna do or staff felt there was not a reason to do some major project in the street sections that we had, and we would be able to go back through that committee, get some citizen input and then bring that back to the council. I hope that makes sense. It's another element for us to have a touch with the citizens of how they're looking at these projects. - Well, reconstruction is, reconstruction's only done from bond money, correct? - No. We will only use bond money for reconstruction is a better way to work that. We have the flexibility if we choose to, to use our on-end budget for reconstruction. The only reason that I would exercise some level of concern about that gets into putting all your funding on worst first as opposed to mating and sustaining. And so we have total flexibility administratively and through the direction of council, if they wish to go that route on our own end budget. My suggestion for whatever it's worth is, is that we should implement the bond programs as we presented them and proposed them. And if there's a reprioritization from a strategy standpoint, which I don't disagree with at all. I mean, when pavement management issues first came up and we didn't have enough funding, one strategy was put it all in your arterials. That's what gets used the most. Unfortunately, we get the feedback from the citizens. The road in front of my house is bad, why don't you fix it? And that's the road I drive on at least three or four times a day. And that's an important road to me. And I realized that the traffic loads are less. And so, I think we're perfectly fine from a staff standpoint to get policy direction on how we take limited resources and prioritize them. The only word of caution I would give you is, is that the residential perspective is, is why aren't you fixing my roads? And I would like to say that we have been trying to implement that in our prioritization. You're seeing more and more money in our bond programs going to the arterials. Now, it's not gonna fix everything. Now, again, we can certainly do some things with how are we handling our own infants. - Just to follow up with that, and you know what I like about the current system, and again, when I go to neighborhood meetings, and it's the most interesting question to folks is streets. It's nice to be able to have something objective to show them to say, here is the reasoning that the committee chose these certain things. Let's look at OCI, let's look at the path of wastewater below there. What I worry about, and again, I'm an advocate, we've talked about the concept this came about in part too because of the bicycle plan of wanting to find some major wins. And we're talking about the connection between the university and downtown and how that required a street reconstruction and we could get a nice pathway between those two things. So how do we do something that everyone feels like something's been accomplished? Having said that, my concern about just throwing this all up and having a new council discussion is it takes us away from that objectivity to the point of it could get very political very quickly. So so-and-so business gets in one of our ears and decides I need that for the sake of my business, and whoever has the best argument at the table makes that or whoever gets the loudest, or which I'm guessing is why the city chose to go to, depending on OCI ratings, looking at all these other sorts of things, to try and prioritize that. Because if everything gets thrown up and we now have kind of complete oversight over this street needs done next or this is the most important thing because I've made a great argument for this particular one, my suspicion is that can get very political in a hurry and who ends up losing in those discussions. Is the folks who don't have the political voice. So not that any of us would do that or angle for that, but that's the reality I think if all of this, because that's a lot of money and a lot of projects. So that's my just caution as we move forward. Tim, on the website here, I have the construction projects pulled up. And so just so I'm clear, how this list was made is based on a number of things. Can you just go over those things like OCI? How is this list compiled here? Well, let me make sure I understand what list we're talking about. Are we talking about the street closure list on the website ? Are you talking about the bond listings that are on the website? It says construction projects starting October 5th through October 11th. That's our construction notice that includes a variety of construction activities that could close the road. An example of that is I'm a developer and I have to do offsite utilities and I have to close this road to do that. Well, this came from Streets and it said, you want to see the street construction, click here. I'm on the wrong part? Well, there can be a variety of street constructions. The development activity generates street construction. So that will be included on that. So that is intended not for the bond reconstruction program . That is intended to let citizens know if you're driving around, this road may be closed for construction. And it can include a CIP project in water and wastewater. It's a convenience issue. It's an attempt to create convenience to the public, not necessarily measure the CIP. No, it's basically to-- if you want to know why this road's closed, you can go to the website and find out, oh, it's been communicated that this road was closed. So there's a laundry list of reasons that a road would be closed is what I'm trying to communicate. And a subset of that is the bond program. If somebody wants to see if their road's being fixed, is there a way for them to look on our website and see that ? The best thing that we would-- Let me answer that. Do you mean fixed in the sense of pursuant to the bond program? Or are you talking about in general for anything? Just in general. For anything. OK. All right. If I'm not wording that correctly, I apologize. [INTERPOSING VOICES] Basically, that's for road closures. So if we're going to close a road for an activity, that could be an overlay project. That could be a CIP-funded reconstruction project. That could be a developer-funded perimeter street paving. There's a laundry list of reasons a road gets closed. Well, some of the neighborhood meetings that I've been to recently, I think it's not necessarily that they want their road fixed now. They just want to know what's the plan? When is my road going to be fixed? Because I think people in general are patient, and they see a ton of activity going on out there. So I just think they kind of want to know, how does that all work? When's my road next? We have a draft plan, and we have a draft schedule, and that's on our website. And that's under the bond program link. So it's not under the road closure link. It's under the bond program. And I think there are-- last I understood, we actually had the bond program had an icon you could leak into. That had the draft plan that had all these street segments on them and had a draft schedule over that five-year period. And Tim, I don't want you to feel defensive, but I'm somebody on council who hopefully knows something a little bit more than a resident because we eat this. But maybe that needs to be simplified, where we know how to point them or something like that. Council Member Riggs. OK, yes. I just want to emphasize that we have bond money, bond roads. We also have budget money for roads. Because we are lumping everything under bond, we have a tremendous dollar amount in our budget for roads. And so it has to be two different discussions. OK, so let's-- yes, we're going to wrap this up. We're going to wrap up with a direction or something, because-- yes. I have one more question, probably for Brian. So what determines the pace at which we sell bonds? Show my ignorance here. The constraint that we had was what type of tax rate we wanted to maintain. For the 2012 program, it was maintain the existing tax rate . And then for the 2014, we were trying to look at no more than a $0.03 tax increase at the time we were looking at that. So that was the constraint. So if we have better values, we can sell it faster. If they can get the projects done, I mean, that's something we have to make sure of from a coordination standpoint that they can actually move forward on the projects faster. OK, thanks. I hope that answers the question. Yep, thanks. OK, and I ask for this at some point. But this goes towards the prioritization. We had a-- we authorized-- the city council authorized a new crew for-- I believe it was sewer-- for wastewater. Right, for the millings. That's more of the-- but yeah, to lay sewer lines, because we were falling behind, and that's what was keeping us from moving forward on some of our street reconstruction. So I don't even know if I'm asking a question other than, what kind of linear feet were we laying before we had that extra crew? And how much linear feet are we laying after that crew? Right, and I went back and researched what we brought to council, and what we were-- the primary justification for the new crew in wastewater was the EPA administrative order. The lion's share of that work that that crew was doing was primarily focused on the EPA administrative order. One of the values-- Well, I don't remember that, Howard. I mean, honestly-- I can bring you back the actual presentation that council-- OK. I took a look at that. Just give me a link on that, because I do remember part of it was we were running behind-- The answer is that crew, the new crew, we justified that on 8,500 linear feet of sewer line reconstruction a year. OK. That's what the primary basis of the justification for the wastewater crew. The added value of that crew is that it would help us get to street reconstruction projects quicker . And so how do we monitor that that's occurring? I can show you how we're monitoring the wastewater side of it. Now, you have to realize that we don't have that crew in place yet. Council approved the vehicles early on in last year's budget so that we get those vehicles in here before the first of the year. We've just started the interviewing process for the actual addition of the crew members. OK. So this posting says, receive a report from staff on prioritization and street reconstruction project. Well, the poster doesn't say to give a direction. Can we give direction? I'm assuming. Sure. OK. So we've had one recommendation on Hickory Street, I believe it was. It was to identify complete street projects that we could go and do that are high visibility, high impact, so that not only can citizens see results. But because I don't think you get much impact if you've got a street that, say, has five blocks on it, and you replace two blocks. They don't really remember the cushy ride on the two blocks . They remember the bumpy ride on the other three. So I'm saying to identify-- and Hickory would be a great one, in my opinion, just because it's so heavily traveled and so many of our visitors are on it. And there may be a reason why not. What section of Hickory? Because Hickory right now, between Bonnie, Barry, and Carol, is on the 2014 program. So is there another site? Are you talking farther east or through the square? It's in the 2014 program, but do we know when it's going to happen? We're probably a few years out, because we've got to get the utility projects identified, get them implemented, and then follow it with the street program. We have some utility issues under that pavement that we have to address first. I guess that's the point I was trying to make, is if we said today, that is a number one priority, we want to see that street redone as fast as possible, what would happen differently? We'd have to reprioritize some of our water and wastewater projects and accelerate that as an emphasis. And there could be issues with regards to implementation capacity and what got bumped. But I don't know what those are. I'm just saying that's the potential. Yes? Well, that's why we're having the meeting today, is to talk about those priorities. So I'm with Greg in bringing forth streets like Hickory. And I come back to arterial collectors that are main streets in this city. And if we need to bump them to the top of the list, then a few years out doesn't cut it for me. I want to hear that it's a priority and that we actually have a date certain on when we're going to get this fixed. And I also agree with Greg that it's our city, our water. So it's all a discussion in-house, city of Denton. Let's figure out how to do it and get it done. Our citizens expect no less. And well, and I agree with that. But I also want to know that basically we've heard that to do that, it's about three or four years, I want to see the analysis of if we move it to a different priority, what is getting-- because it may bump something that we think is just as important. So we need to make sure that we have that analysis of what's it going to bump, what's it going to cost, because it's already in the bond program. We just may want it done sooner, but need to understand what the ramifications or the unintended consequence, if any, of that. So I agree. And to be clear, I'm not here championing-- I would champion Hickory Street. What I'm just talking about is streets like Hickory, those major streets that get traveled a lot that are in really, really bad shape. Because I can tell you the average Joe citizen, if I look at some of the ones we've already redone, I would say that really wasn't that bad. Why have we done that one? Well, unless you really understand OCI and all the different stuff, you wouldn't know that, right? So part of this is showing the average Joe citizen that we're doing something with the money that may not otherwise be visible to them. Well, I can assure you staff is working very hard to try to implement the program. And the only thing I would like to communicate, there's a lot of complexity to that other than just well-paid the road. Well, and I think, though, Tim-- and I sure hope that you haven't understood this conversation as a criticism of what staff is doing, because I have not heard that. I mean, it's been posted to give some thoughts and feedback on the bond program, because I think you guys are doing it. But this sums it up for me, because it frustrates me when I sit down with someone watching the baseball game yesterday, and they say, man, when is Denton going to fix its streets? And I said, what do you mean? What street are you talking about? And he said, Hickory Street. And what's frustrating to me is it's-- and I said, we've committed $40 million or more, $50. I mean, that's in the bond plus another $10 million a year. And I'm not saying we want to prioritize based upon optics and just people's perception. And I don't think that's what Council Member Wosney's saying. I don't think that's what Council Member-- I think we're just simply saying, hey, let's look at the facts. If this is a street or a list of streets that are saying, hey, here's some of the ones that are on there. This is when they're scheduled. Some of them are high visibility, high traffic for visitors. What would be the consequence or the impact of that? So it's not about criticizing how the bond package has been implemented. So I hope that you nor anyone else on staff takes that away from this discussion. It's more of, is there a different way of not throwing it up, as Council Member Rodin says, and throwing it in the trash can? But is there some tweaking, some modification we can do to really try to assist in this flexibility? I mean, I know people are going to complain about the streets in front of them. But I know you guys aren't deciding your street priority by who's picking up the phone calling you, saying, when are you going to fix my street? And you're going to somehow slip it in somewhere else. I know. But you guys have to get those calls, and we get those calls. So I think it would be good to have a list. I mean, Hickory, for instance, that'd be a great sort of beta test. If we move it up, what's the impact? We have a draft schedule, and that's the same schedule. We go through that list, and we pretty much try to implement according to that schedule. What happens is some projects get bumped because of logistic issues with utility coordination . So in general, we're following the plan as best we can. And we're juggling based off of conflicts. Now, reprioritization of that. Staff put Hickory later in that program because we knew there were some challenges for that. If it's the direction of the council, they want us to accelerate that. We can look at that. That's not a problem. I'm just simply saying, even at its earliest, you're probably talking a year and a half to two years to implement it if it was your number one priority day because you've got the time element to design the utilities , get them bid, get them built. But Tim, and that's what we're saying is we want those facts to be able to make a decision on either that or something else. And then, I mean, on this council, everybody's going to have a different opinion. But the discussion is, hey, and this will be a good beta test. And it'll help us understand more the utility coordination side of it. So it's just to help us further understand how this complexity is. And then if there is something that this council wants to do, has a consensus to do something different, then it at least gives us the proper information to be able to make that decision. So another example that I think hits with some of the highlights that I'm hearing is EGLE. We had about four blocks of EGLE identified. And that's about a seven or eight block project now. And it's going to be a blend of O&M funds and bond funds because the expanded utility work is necessitating that we do the whole street. And so to not overtax the bond fund, we're going to pull in O&M funds. And that's already in the design. So we understand that the major roads are major factors in desire for why aren't they fixed. And one real quick question. I've had it written down. I've been trying to-- when Atmos goes and tears up a street to put a new line in, is Atmos financially responsible for repairing the road? Or I mean, I'm assuming they are. They are. But you're kind of touching base on a much bigger topic. OK, well then we'll save that. Pavement restoration and then tied to pavement condition and a higher pavement restoration if the road conditions are better. And I guess you just said something that caught my ear when you said that EGLE Drive has expanded into a larger project. Correct. And instead of dipping into the bond funds, because it already was part of the bond package, we're going into O&M funds. Now I don't know for me personally what that financial level would be where I think that I would like to have some discussion about that. Because if you're talking about taking a million or $2 million out of O&M to cover something that a bond program would naturally do, because we don't-- I'm not so sure that I'm-- I think that should be a discussion that's not just related to staff, I guess is what I'm saying. We'll have an opportunity at the bid award. But if we want to get into those levels of decisions to be brought to the council before they're made, we're going to have some difficulty in staff-- Well, maybe not before they're made. There reaches some point where staff's got to have some delegated authority and trust to make some decisions, and that we need to provide an adequate environment of reporting. But that's an example of a decision that staff made, because it made sense to us that we can't leave the utility work on the edges of EGLE and only fund this much. But do we want to overburden the bond program for that widened project or simply augment it with the O&M funds? It was easier for staff to make that decision, because we implement the O&M funds. OK, well-- It's just an example. I got off topic. But I think we need to have a work session, a comprehensive work session on many of the higher policy issues or questions that we've touched on. If somebody asked me the question, what's the direction that has been given by this council, the only thing I could say is just this example of Hicker Street and the impact and another list of arterials. So I'm going to need some help on-- have my colleagues heard any other direction? What I think I heard is that we understand that there's some low-hanging fruit with some of the neighborhood streets, but that in terms of the community feeling like that we're making a dent, that higher traffic streets like arterials, getting them moved up, getting the utilities moved up, and getting them done sooner rather than later would help in the community feeling like that their bond money is being spent. Because people in my neighborhood, unless they live on Burning Tree, don't know that Burning Tree has been redone. But they will know when some of the-- I mean, people in my neighborhood will probably know when Hickory Street gets redone before they know that Burning Tree got redone, because it's such a bigger street. So I think that that's part of what we're saying. OK. Well, this just reminds me of the conversation we've had in planning where we-- to make planning more efficient, we thought having two buckets. You kind of have the bigger projects, and you have the smaller projects. And I don't know if that's much direction on how to give right now. That's what this feels like to me. Because just last week, I got an email. Somebody felt like they were about to get stuck in the front of their house because of a poth ole. So I still want them to be able to get their street fixed. And I know that there's different funding. But I still want, for the average citizen, after they've passed, voted for a bond or whatever, I think that they forget about that. And they just see all the streets as one. So I don't know if there's a way to show how the street's being paid for, something like that for the street geeks and all of us in the city. But let us take a look at and see if we can improve the communication tool. I think that's really what you're talking about on the bond program as it relates to the street. Let us take a look at that and see if we can improve that on the website and look at other ways that we can communicate the status of our bond program to the general public. But on specific streets, I'm struggling giving direction on which one I pick. I think Dalton had a good-- I think that was a good-- OK. Yes, Councilmember Roe. If there's anything I've learned from being on Regional Transportation Council, it's that for major road projects, four, five, six, even 10 years out, it's not a low expectation. I mean, so I think there's a patience level with these sorts of CIP projects. We just got to understand that if something's funded, it's in the queue, and it's five years out, that's a huge win to have something like that. So some projects we're working on at the regional level, I mean, take 20, 30 years in the planning process because it's just that huge of something. So there is a certain expectation we need to have with these large projects moving forward. Having said that, I would advocate because I think Hickory is a good example. I think Oak is probably another one to look at. I'm not sure where that is in the queue, but I see Hickory on there. They're two different years. Not in the bond program, but it could be in the L&M budget. OK. Eagle, I would just advocate that if we have specific ones, that we throw them out so that as they're looking at this list, because there's a lot of arterials, there's a lot of-- to just put those on the table. So mine would be to look at Hickory, Oak, because those are connecting two major things. The other thing I'd like to look at is-- and again, some of these are going to be tied up with state -- I mean, when we talk about some of these major streets, some of them are state streets and not necessarily in the city control. But the other thing I'd advocate is the connection from TWU to downtown, so looking at sections of Bell, which is atrocious. And I know there's a lot of conversation with TWU about that, but that's one of those highly visible streets for a lot of folks. So if anyone has a street in mind, I think to give direction, it would help them to just call that street out. Who would you like that to go to, Howard? Sorry. Would that go to you? I'm sorry? Who would that recommendation go to? I can take that. And I thought I also heard Eagle. You'd like a better understanding of the Eagle project? Yeah, the Eagle was just a finding mechanism for me. Are we doing this right now? What are we doing? Telling them? Yeah, if you want to do it right now, you can email them. Or you can email Howard. Maybe put a word out to your folks and say, what priority? And we'll get all this to Howard. Well, mine is the McKinney to Ryan. I know that's a text dot, but there's also talk of that coming back to the city. And that would include the movement of utilities. So that would be a priority for utilities for me. Either way, whoever owns the street would be utilities. And Bolivar, probably. Bolivar's on the bond program. I know it's like 2017, I think it was. No, the bond goes up to 2020. So I'll check the bond year, and then I'll check what I think I'm hearing is if it's out three years or more, what can we do to accelerate it? I believe Bolivar's getting queued up here pretty soon, though. But we'll look into that. Thank you. Just a thought. Because here's why I think this communication is so important. So Hickory Street, for example, we see on there, and it says 2014 program. One would look at it and say, well, that must be happening soon. Well, if it's three, four, five years down the road, we might say, hey, let's put a top coat on that thing. Because if it's four years down the road, I mean, it's a problem. It's a big problem. But if we don't know that, right? So we might say, if council conversation, hey, we think this particular street or that particular street is so bad, and we know it doesn't make sense to go reconstruct it because we're waiting on sewer and water underneath it to be designed, hey, what would it cost to do a minimal top layer on it? You might say that's $5 million. And we would say, OK, never mind. But just-- Probably about 20% to 30% of your reconstruct cost for an overlay. And the only concern staff would have is it won't hold up because the road won't hold it up. Right. So I'm just saying, as a part of an open dialogue, I think that kind of information is helpful. As you come back, if you come back on Hickory and you go, we've looked at it to move it up, it's going to be millions of dollars because of the utilities. But here's alternatives to try to make it more passable or whatever. And there may be none, but just a thought. OK. Other direction, I think we have plenty to do. OK. All right. Good deal. All right. Any other comments, concerns? Fantastic. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Tim. Let's go ahead and take about a five or 10 minute break. We'll come back and-- Well, I'll tell you what. Let me go in closer. We're going to close there again. [INAUDIBLE] Oh, we're still in the meeting. OK, we've got a regular session. Oh, good. Then let's take a 10 minute break. Yeah. We'll come in 4.40. Moving into following the completion of the second Tuesday work session, which we just did, the city council will convene in a special called meeting of the city of Denton city council to consider the following items. And it is now 4.40, and we are now convening into that special called meeting. Our first item on the agenda is the consent agenda. Do we-- the chair would entertain either clarifications for pulling a particular consent agenda or a motion on the consent agenda. Mayor Pro Tem. Thank you, Mayor. I move approval of consent agenda items A through D. Council Member Hawkins. I second. We have a motion and a second for agenda items A through D. Let's vote. Everybody in favor signify by raising your right hand. All opposed by like sign. Passes unanimously. Concluding items, agenda item two. Any concluding items? I've got one that I need to pull up right quick on the email. So does anybody else have any that they would like to-- yes, council member. After the big DME announcement, I have had a number of either emails or people just-- they wanted to know how DME's rates, just as it stands right now, compared to maybe some other competitors. And so I got with DME, and we're going to be trying to figure out a way, possibly how to make that public, or just to get that information across to the public. OK. All right. Yes, Council Member Wozni. This is a repetition of what we-- or I brought up last week. But because we were so sparse in terms of boots on the ground here last week, that I needed the city attorney here and city manager here to-- that the Freedom Foundation letter October 20th is scheduled for a closed meeting. City attorney and we-- I am asking that it's closed and then open, so that we can have part of the discussion closed, and then open it up and actually discuss it. Yes, ma'am. Already done. OK. We have a draft agenda. We looked at today, and we do have a closed session, and then a following open work session on it. Correct. Good. And then for planning-- and I know planning, I think, is here. No. No. Well, for-- and that was November 17th. We have the gas well fee coming up for item of individual consideration. And I would recommend some kind of a community meeting prior to that November 17th to talk about what it is, what it entails, so that the public has an opportunity prior to that council meeting to actually ask their questions. Because it's-- I've received a lot of questions from the public on that item. That'd be helpful. Thank you. Well, we can-- let us look at that. I'm not sure if we've got that on there as an action item or as just a work session item, and whether we need to have the discussion on those fees with the council prior to going to a public meeting or not. I mean, it's up to the council. If the council wants us to have some kind of a public meeting on it, we can certainly do that. I guess I'm just not sure in my mind at this point whether that would be premature. But I don't remember, Anita. Do you remember what that's on there? I think it is on the November-- It is on there. It's not for individual consideration. For individual consideration. So I think the council needs to talk about it. I think that we need to talk to the public about it before we ever make a decision. It may be that we then would desire to do a work session item on it rather than individual consideration, perhaps on the 17th, and then work in that meeting as we can. Prior to having an action item on it, have the work session on the 17th, and then with council direction, have a public meeting of some kind prior to putting it back on for action consideration. Sounds good. Thank you. OK. All right. Yes, Council Member Rodin. This kind of came up in our discussion of the new event center site. As I mentioned, there is a meeting with Southeast Dent Neighborhood Association talking about some of the new changes there. And there's some legitimate concerns about, well, where does that sort of new development end as we're kind of on the entry into a pretty established neighborhood at that point. And so wanting to kind of have a good conversation about, what are our tools from a planning perspective to keep some A, unwanted gentrification from happening, but also B, to be able to make sure that our entertainment district or the business area kind of stops at a certain point and the neighborhood begins. So I don't know the best form to do that. I know we've talked about in budget discussions about ramping up small area plans with our planning department, but this seems like a ripe area for that. So just to put that on staff's radar to foster that conversation sooner than later. Thanks. All right. I have one just to announce that I received-- I think it was for immediate release-- but that the Denton Animal Support Foundation, which was formerly the Denton Animal Shelter Foundation, has recently donated $25,000 to the Linda McNatt Adoption Center for various items. And that brings their total to $75,000 so far for this year . So really wanted to just sort of give a shout out for that and thank them for their continued work. They spent a lot of time raising funds for the capital part of that project, and they continue to provide support on an ongoing basis. So I really want to thank them for that. Any other concluding items or however they want to call it under the new legislative directive passed a few years back? All right. Seeing none, we will now then convene the closed session at 447. We will consider the following items-- consultation with attorneys under Texas Government Code Section 551.071, deliberations regarding real property under Texas Government Code Section 551.072. And it's my understanding that the item regarding economic development has been pulled or delayed, so we will not be considering that item. So we won't need to call that under Texas Government Code. All right.