Feb 16, 2016 City Council on 2016-02-16 12:00 PM

12 o'clock. I was a little tardy so apologize for that. We do have a quorum. Our first item on the agenda is to go into a closed meeting . We will deliberate regarding personnel matters under Texas Government Code section 551.074. Is that called? Good afternoon. It is 1 15 and we will now open the public portion of our City Council meeting for Tuesday, February the 16th, 2016. This is the Denton City Council and we do have a quorum. So we'll go on to agenda item one which is citizen comments on consent agenda items and we have one and it's Sam Alexander. If you'll come up and state your name and address and speaking to the mic your time will begin. I'm not sure how much time how much time are these is it three or four? Three. Okay thank you. Hi my name is Samuel Alexander. Hello at 3219 McReynolds Road, Sanger, Texas. I would like to give you a little history about the house on 1224 North Bonny Brake. This house was owned by a lady named Linda Roth. Linda is a senior citizen that was taking care of her 90 year old mother and was using this house on Bonny Brake that her father had built for a rental income to support her and her mother. I approached Linda along with others on Bonny Brake and informed them that I felt they were due money for an easement because of the new transmission lines that had been put on their property. Hence the Bonny Brake lawsuit was filed against the city. After two years the city finally decided to settle. All the parties to the suit except Linda Roth were to get varying amounts for their eas ements. DME said that they had to take Linda Roth's house because it was too close to the power lines. Even though other properties were even closer to the lines than Linda's, I went to Linda and told her what the city had said. She was extremely angry. She had no intention of selling her house. I felt horrible for trying to get her money for an easement and now the city decides to take her home. I did everything I could to stop the taking but DME told us that if she didn't sell they would do eminent domain and take it. The point was brought up that she we brought the point up that she could remove the garage and it would be okay then. DME would not allow that. Sell or eminent domain was their choice. The city made an offer of $111,000 at the time the property was on the tax roll for about $96,000 but since she had to sue to get the money for supposed easement and had to pay attorney fees of 33% we were finally able to negotiate the sale price of $137, 500. The attorney lowered his fee and after taxes were paid Linda Roth received approximately $117,000 for this property. This was a woman had no intention of selling her home and was very angry. I would expect her still to be angry. Now you are selling, supposedly selling, this house to Mr. Rebus. Here are the numbers for this disaster. This house was bought for a price of $137,500. The council in September authorized $142,000 to remodel this house. It was valued at only $96,000 for the entire property. In January the 5th there was another $58,175 authorized for emergency repairs. So the total cost for this house was $337,675 for a house that was only valued at $96,000. And supposedly you're in the process of selling or giving whichever it is to Mr. Rebus for $175,698. That's a loss of $161,977. Is that my three minutes? Yes I'm sorry. Yes thank you. Thank you. Thank you Mr. Alexander. All right we'll move on to our next agenda item which is request for clarification. Council Member Johnson. Thank you Mayor. I have a few here. The first one is item L on the the noise ordinance exception for the 35 Denton Music Festival. Here's my clarification. It's not specific to the noise ordinance. I don't recall whether we have seen or heard a request as it relates to the how the street 's going to be closed, if it's going to be closed, and how much is going to be closed. So I just want to make sure whether we need to address it as a if this is the last item we're going to see on the festival or not. But after last year we talked about the impact to those businesses along Hickory with the fences blocking the entire street including the sidewalks so there was no public pedestrian access to get to those businesses. And part of the conversation was we need to before we do that again think about how we make sure the public who's not attending the music festival has access to those businesses. So I don't know if it needs to get addressed here or there just needs to be another item. But if this is the only thing we're going to see as far as approvals on the festival I want to make sure we have a chance to address that. So yeah. Amy I don't know whether you have an answer to that question or not. My suggestion might be that we ask the council to approve this and let us get back with to you with some information about how the street closures would be and how that would be managed by the police department and street workers. Okay I'm good with that. The next one is the next item M. My question is this relates to the design services for the new fire station four and what I'm wanting to know is what is the total estimated project cost? Does anybody know that number? Let me yeah. Oh Keely. Yes. May want to recuse yourself from this discussion. Right yeah I wanted to to request that item M on consent be pulled for an individual vote and I have no direct or indirect conflict however to avoid any sense of impropriety I'm going to recuse myself from the vote so do I need to leave while you discuss this? And mayor I'd like to ask I guess if I understand your question chief Hedges might be is the I'm sorry Dean Hartley your question is regarding the total project cost. My question is what's the total project cost? I received a question from a citizen asking total project cost because typically design services are kind of commonly a certain percentage of an overall project cost roughly four hundred thousand dollars for design so I think I can get my question answered if I knew what the total project cost was estimated to be. And if I could Dean Hartley is our facilities manager. Dean thank you. Estimated project cost for that is looking like it's 4.2 to around 4.5 million for that project. Okay then I'm good there and the last one is item Z the very last one I would just like to pull that you know the mayor a couple weeks ago I think brought it to us proactively he felt like it would be a good idea for us to consider making a statement on this and so given that because I think it was a great idea on the mayor's part I think we ought to pull that and have a public discussion about it if everybody agrees. Okay everybody okay with that? That's all I have. Yes Kathleen. I would like to start seeing more bids on the backup. Now the city calls it evaluation and ranking sheet so we do have bids evaluation and ranking sheets on consent agenda items B and O. However we don't have any bids on items M and an X so I would request our city manager in the future to ask staff to include in the backups these evaluation and ranking sheets so that when we vote to approve these contracts we can actually see what the bids were that came into the city in order to have more information so just let's see more bids please. On item P as in Peter this is the city is giving it's releasing a public drainage easement and this is property that sits behind the Catholic Church over on Crawford Road so I have two questions one does vacating this easement impact the drainage or adversely affect the Catholic Church at all? I have to ask Paul Williamson if he's here if he could if he could address that question. Okay question one thanks . On the agenda tonight that the abandonment of the drainage easements what happens is when you've got a multi-phased development like the ones out there in the country lakes what'll happen is is you'll come in with and you'll plat out a couple of lots like in this case there was the tract for the church and it required some off-site drainage to get to the main channel and so that's what these original easements were there for is to provide for this overland flow that was generated off of that lot. Well in the meantime you know years and years later they want to build some more lots and build more phases of the subdivision so what happens is they they design and they they handle that drainage through the development of the subdivision in a more organized fashion and that's what's happening here you you will get rid of these kind of broader easements and but there'll be smaller easements and also specific easements on the plat that'll address the the requirements for drainage and so we actually you know we don't really have a temporary drainage easement we don't know how what that length of time you can see these are kind of dated they're they're pretty old we don't know when the ph asing's are going to happen it could be 20 years from now but we need to get the land rights in place when the development occurs whatever development it is and then we'll visit it later if we need to rearrange it or but anytime we get rid of a drainage easement we make sure that the drainage is taken care of for everybody. Second question it's not any wetland preserve area? No. Okay that was second question thank you and then lastly i just want to agree with Councilman Johnson on item c so we can have a discussion on that. Thanks. Thank you Councilmember Lawson. Councilmember Br iggs. I would also like to request if we can pull E and F in regards to that the house and have an explanation in regular session on how this process works and I've had some some emails and questions about it and so I think that a presentation on the sale of Mr. Revis house and the regular session would be good for yes Madam City Manager uh City Attorney. Thank you Mr. Mayor. I will have a substitute very very minor with regard to agenda item 4E and we do have this posted for a closed session so I will point that out when we go to close session on it. Yes. So I'm guessing because of Councilmember Briggs recusal that we'll have to pull that item for individual consideration also. So let let me make sure I understand which ones we're pulling we're pulling E F M and Madam City Attorney which one did you say? He said E as well and and Z okay okay any other questions for clarification I just have a clarification. Mr. City Manager or City Attorney on the the items that Councilmember Wozni had referenced as to having bids they're they're labeled as professional service agreements so help is there a is there a distinction or I mean were there bids or are those ones that are not subject to I just don't know. Let me ask Chuck Springer he could address that because I'm not familiar with what the items are okay without looking close more closely so they're perfect. Under state law professional service agreements we can't do formal bids the only selection process you can go through is called an RFQ which is a request for qualifications but you can't do dollar bids for professional services there's restrictions on that these the departments kind of selected the individuals or firms that they wanted to do the work with and then you can negotiate with that firm in terms of the price but you can't do like goods or services or other types of bids you can't do a bid or an RFP you can only do an RFQ for professional services. Go ahead yes so is there a way for Council to look at the request for qualifications? My question is we're approving large sums of money and so for me it's just due diligence to do some homework on how firms were selected why were they selected because we are just rubber stamping basically on a consent agenda boom it's okay well I'd sure like to see just a little more backup so don't know how that works but I'd sure like to see it. Okay and on a good deal of the professional services they're selected it's not through an RFQ process so with the engineering firms and the legal firms a lot of times they're selected based on the knowledge they have with those type of projects for example the fire project if you remember we selected that architect and they're doing all three of those in order to have some economies of scale I think in that item there was about a 20% discount on their fee because they're designing the stations in a similar fashion. Do what? Oh okay okay Councilmember Johnson. If I maybe just to build on that so I'm always going to work off the assumption that because any given department has a certain budget they have to work in they're going to negotiate the best deal that they can. I'm assuming they they have the ability that if they request someone based on their qualifications and then they go to try to negotiate the contract or the agreement if at any point they decide while they are qualified I don't think that this is a fair price staff certainly would have the ability then to say I'm going to now stop my negotiation even though I've said this is the one I 'm going to negotiate with I can stop I can choose someone else and begin those negotiations right? That's correct. Does anything preclude us from negotiating with two qualified firms at one time to determine who can give us the better agreement? Are we getting in a weird spot on the state law? If I could Frank may want to speak to that but I think that could create some problems. Here's why I'm bringing it up because I want to one of the things we certainly talked about at our retreat is we're going to you know you hire best people and you trust them to go do their job. I want to make sure that we from an oversight standpoint know what parameters staff has to work within as it relates to state law so that we're not asking you for something that you can't do and again I'm just going to work off the assumption that if I've got a department and I've got a total budget I'm going to negotiate the best deal I can and still get the quality of work but these are pretty large sums so just want to make sure I understand what ability we have to stop with one start with another or negotiate with more than one how that works. Yeah I think the negotiating with more than one at the same time is not allowed under state law what you can do is negotiate with one and if you can't come to an agreement you can go to another and negotiate but you can't under the professional services act you can't kind of pit them against one another in terms of pricing you can negotiate with one and if you're not pleased with the services they can provide the price the amount of time it's going to take those type of issues you can go and negotiate but you kind of have to leave that one and go to the second one so you give up that first firm and go to your second selection so to speak. So I'm making my I'm asking my questions and making my statements not because I don't believe that the staff they're going to get every last thing they can out of their budget I'm sure I just want to make sure I understand from a state law standpoint and that's for just just for professional services got it thank you. Okay just did you have a question? Well I was just going to suggest as a way to help us understand this the difference between requests for proposals requests for qualifications perhaps a two page summary of how that works and why we see what we see or whether we can see something else would be helpful for us to make sense of this. Well and I guess to help clarify for me because I know Council Member Wozni asked about the request for qualifications that if we do solicit a request for qualifications that are we able to see the the packages that they turn in but with these specific agenda items and I might have misheard you so correct me if I'm wrong I thought you said these were requests for professional service in other words there's a difference between a request for qualification that you can send out and have multiple parties respond to you but is there a is there something under state law where if you have a request for personal service that you can just choose someone and is that what we've done on these individual items so there weren't any requests for qualifications sent out. It's not a it's not a requirement you go through a competitive process for professional services the only option if you want to do that is a request for qualification that excludes any pricing amount but is strictly based on qualifications. Yeah Mr. Payne. Yes. We don't we don't do that indiscriminately you know if we 've got a large budget project we work with purchasing to put out an RFQ it's more typical we do sometimes advertise for professional services for qualifications based selection more often than not we will identify half a dozen to a dozen firms and and uh solicit qualification statements from them pertinent to the to the project and then rank them based on their response and in the case the one that i brought forward through chuck uh it was demonstrated qualifications of the consultant personal knowledge professional knowledge of staff and uh feedback received from the railroad over who they wanted to work with so okay okay yes so i guess to bring closure to it if it's a request for professional services then i could send our city manager a request on monday to say for tuesday's council meeting could we have an explanation from staff regarding and and give and give the items so that we can again shine a little light on who was picked and why okay yep okay good any other clarifications uh of agenda items yes oh yes you had a couple i'm sorry yes point out that you have two public hearings on tonight's agenda items 6d and 6e both of which we've had requests to postpone until march the first agenda so uh my recommendation is that you open those two public hearings and then postpone them to march the first date but not hold the public hearings tonight okay 6d and 6e all right we can do that thank you any other questions for clarification yes mayor on on those two items for public hearings if we open them and if there are people that had come to speak to those tonight would we would we simply be asking them to come back on march the first thing i think that's right and amy correct me if i'm wrong i think one of them has been re-advertised for march the first at least so she might have a better idea of talking if we have anybody coming both of them have been been re-advertised for march first and if if you wish we can prepare a presentation and be prepared to have the members of the public speak or perhaps you can just indicate at the opening of the meeting that we're going to wait and hear it at the at the following meeting we will the the the reason that the first one is being postponed item d is to make sure that all uh all of the property owners within all of the districts are fully aware that the public hearing is taking place and to give them enough time to be here for it so that that's the intent on item d and item e the applicant has asked that it be postponed and if someone would remind me so that i can make this announcement at the beginning of the meeting so that's my sitting out there they're not sitting through the whole meeting uh so i may forget so out of my cages yes council member for clarification so is there since we're postponing is there a reason to open the public hearing tonight even they're going to be heard well i think down at the i'll let the city attorney answer i think since they've been re-advertised you might not be required to do that but i think it's the safe thing to do since these dates have tonight has been advertised as a public hearing date i concur with our earth 12 city manager so so mark this down so if people are if people are here to speak if they speak tonight then they could come back and speak again on march 1st or if you if if it's a continuation of the already open public hearing would they be speaking twice on the same item well on a public hearing we would we would typically take the testimony within the confines of the public hearing and the individuals would speak one time so it's all one public hearing we would typically only allow one testimony one time on the item i just so if that's the case then might be good for you too mayor to clarify if you if you're already here and you want to be heard you can be heard tonight you don't have to then come back and speak again on the first because if you speak tonight you won't be able to yes that way they they won't have to make two trips if they don't want to well but then that raises the question of if they're going to stay to speak is staff going to have a presentation because really if we don't have a presentation before council then so my hope is that when i announce that we will not it would be probably postponing it that people go okay we 'll come back especially if they know we'll be here till we're done my hope as well yeah i'm not asking for a presentation my hope would be we point is we don't really want to hear everybody twice right well they won't they can't speak twice right yeah yeah i'll clarify that and then if somebody for whatever reason wants to stay and be heard then that's okay all right yep all right thank you anything any other clarifications for this agenda this has been totally shot with holes in it so uh well we'll be good all right we're going to go on then to our agenda item three which our work session reports agenda item three a receive a report hold a discussion regarding a resolution of the city council of denton texas to accept the denton enterprise airport 2015 master plan for airport development thank you mayor and i'm going to ask mr quentin hicks who is our airport director of aviation to at least open the discussion and begin this work session item thank you quentin thank you mayor watts members of the council i want to give you just a very brief history of this development of the master plan and then introduce dave schomburg airport operations manager to share more detail about the final product with you this uh this master plan was first approved as a texas department of aviation or texas department of transportation aviation division grant to the city uh approved by the city council in december of 2011 in march of 2012 tex.aviation selected kimley horn and associates as the consultant to assist the airport and updating our 2003 master plan they began accumulating data in 2012 toward this effort but we acknowledged upfront with them that this was going to be especially challenging since at the time they were developing an airport master plan for development we were aggressively moving forward with development of public infrastructure as well as private development on the airport this caused during the period of time they were developing the plan several changes in scope to include items that we needed to accommodate things like the development of the west side runway so as they began accumulating data in 2012 continued on through 2013 they actually completed the basic document in 2014 but there was still some additional scope items added so in june of 2015 the airport employed dave schomburg as our operations manager and he worked very closely with kimley horn and associates to get the document in its to its final form and get it presented to the city late in 2015 and now it's being it has been brought forward through the vetting process with the council airport committee it was discussed with him in detail they recommended that it be presented to the council for consideration and approval it was also prevented presented to the economic development partnership board they took action advising the staff to take it on to the city council with a recommendation for approval we we have had it on the airport board agenda three times and in the past three meetings we failed to get a quorum for that body to review it but we have reviewed it with the chairman and of course the airport board over those years it was being developed we're involved along the way also so we're bringing it forward in in this workshop to share it with the full council and then with the staff's recommendation that based on the vetting that that has taken place today through the cac and the economic development partnership board that it be considered for approval so with that i would like to go ahead again and introduce dave schomburg airport operations manager and he'll share with you some detail about what's in the actual master plan for development thank you one one sort of housekeeping note oh no you're good quinn we've talked about in the retreat that sometimes on presentations if we wanted to let them you know move through the presentation then ask questions at the end so we have a pretty lengthy at least closed session agenda so i'd like to sort of enact that and just if we didn't hold her unless it's so burning that you 've just got to ask it not a big deal but if we can just hold the questions till the end so i have my first question just kidding you that was it are you limited on questions no no sorry not limited all right uh let me back that good bansin here uh as quinn said uh we finally gotten to the full production of the master plan after many many months of uh of working through approval processes with text-out aviation and faa and uh my general uh assessment of it is it's a very exciting time for denton enterprise airport is and subsequently with the the city of denton uh when we started the master plan back in 2012 uh the the general purpose was to document all master plan elements recommend recommended by the faa and text-out aviation we wanted to produce reasonable feasible airport development alternatives and to evaluate the projected growth and capacity issues at the airport where any master plan starts is with the existing airport facilities this is uh google imagery from 2012 when we first uh when we first started off on the master plan and trying to assess what what capacity the airport had and what demand it had and can we does our capacity allow us to accept that that growing demand it's important to note that we didn't just sit static while we waited for the master plan to fully develop we continued to develop the airport and a few items that that we uh that we added uh there was a sky lane entrance off of airport road that was added uh some internal infrastructure we've added uh hta aviation has developed a nearly 10 000 square foot hanger that's where care flight is housed the city's taken on uh development of 27 unit t hangers and box hangers that we can use for improved property leases we've started construction on another 10 000 square foot hanger private party development we have continued interest in this area right here which is just east of the the airport terminal and recently we've had some real interest in another private party development for some some area on the airport that's not typically very market able because it's it doesn't have direct access on the taxiways or taxi lanes to get out to the runways but it it's a new property that we can lease there and that's very exciting on our forecasting back in 2012 we had around 375 based aircraft at the airport our total annual operations about 169 000 and our peak month operations were 17 100 as of 2015 we're still right around that 169 000 mark on our total annual operations our based aircraft we're probably getting close to 400 uh the peak month operations though august of 2015 we actually hit 18 000 operations if you don 't i should have gone over that if you don't know that operations we count every takeoff or landing of an aircraft at the airport so our peak month operations we're really getting up there and we're bumping up against what our what our total capacity is these other pal's the planning activity levels one two three and four we focus more on the the the numbers associated with those pal's as opposed to the actual calendar year for our planning purposes and with that for uh i'll go over this real briefly but the yellow line right here is our fa recommended capacity planning threshold that's when we hit 60 of our capacity that's when we the fa recommends that we start planning for additional infrastructure our the blue box is where we actually are in in terms of operations once we hit 80 80 capacity that's when we need to start implementing those capacity enhancements to to increase our capacity the addition of a west parallel runway moves those lines up obviously it increases our capacity at the airport to about 250 000 operations so it gives us some breathing room there how's all this going to happen our our airport is actually on the text out aviation capital improvement plan and this is taken right from text out aviation's website for 2014-15 they've they've put us in their plan for detailed design engineering now they had a set back in some funding but we've already started on some detailed design engineering 2015-16 land acquisition that's we we do need to acquire a little bit of land to the north and to the south of where the runway would go for runway protection zone and i'll show that in the next slide 2016-17 is when we would hopefully be entering into turning dirt and constructing a west parallel runway 2017-18 north taxiway an existing runway repair our existing runway that we have does need some repairs to it and it's difficult to make that happen with only having one runway 2018-19 we have some nav aids that need to relocate and some engineering for 19 and 20 where we do a realignment of our taxiway bravo and our connecting taxiway approaches total funding about over 17 million dollars in proposed engineers proposed cost and with text dot share that that brings the the airport's portion to about 3 .1 million and the last slide i think depicts all this information best that the yellow is the planning activity level one that i've discussed the west runway is this this main yellow it's a 5 000 foot runway 100 feet wide the area that of land acquisition is actually north and south and that's like i said for runway protection zone we need to realign taxiway bravo it'll give us some additional ramp space and we'll need to update some some taxiway connectors that don't meet current faa standards for design and the the additional yellow is some some parking apron space and a lot of that over on the west side is going to be hopefully stimulating west development private party investment at the airport and the way the airport makes their money is off of fuel commissions and ground lease and so with the west runway development plus some additional ground access that opens up over 100 acres of of land to develop and and do it what the airport's supposed to do to serve as an economic gateway for the airport and we need or for the city and we need to make sure that the airport stays self-sustaining so we stay off the general fund and and support our our own direct costs so with that uh it's a lot of information i know you guys have a busy agenda but any questions can you go to the previous slide please yes um on the city share the city city match of that has has funding been identified already uh to be able to take care of that or is that still a question that needs to be addressed for the portion that the city's yeah the 3.1 uh it we haven't taken that through uh approval through the council or anything but we do have that in our reserves from the airport and the airport funds okay thank you and that just to point out i mean that's a significant share on tex dot's back absolutely with a small amount for the city thanks and i want to recognize quentin hicks our airport manager because if you look at those numbers for improvements 17 million 14 million coming from text dot and i remember when we spoke a year ago and you were um trying to marshal those funds and he's been successful cities all over the state of texas are fighting for those funds so for us to be able to be successful that 14 million out of the 17 million and it goes to all of his staff so thank you and just appreciate that hard work because when you're dealing with the state and you're fighting over money um it's just great when you can bring some of that home and quentin hicks has done that so thank you thank you thank you councilmember hawkins thank you mayor if you don't have this information now that's okay but if we get a little later but a dollar amount for all these planes that are based here would be good to know i mean that go down to our tax base there for the the ad valorem taxes okay yeah i don't have that information right now i just find that to be so impressive that you can just build a hanger and they park them there and you get the property taxes there and then too i was looking up a little bit about the care flight being based there and they are a 501c3 just a little curious about how that lease works out with them are there any special you know hta details in that lease yeah uh hta aviation actually leases that and then care flight is a a tenant of hta so exactly how that sublease works i don't know that immediately but we get our lease revenue from hta aviation okay thank you got a couple of questions i know we talked about this in ed p board meeting if you'll go back to the slide i guess it's the slide after that yeah right there because this is great i mean that west side because we're full yeah we're falling the side we really have no more capacity and and with our gas revenue being down um we're going to need to be able to muster as much opportunity for revenue generation as we can but as we talked about an edp board meeting the access to the west side is very limited i mean you know that i guess is the proposed loop 388 which who knows when that's going to be here now col ranch depending on when they come and whatever agreements are made with service road development and construction i get that that's a big variable but as far as in the works hard in the works where's the access that will give us that will get us to the west side that will allow this to develop the way that we need it to for this enterprise fund to be able to you know stay in the black yeah uh really our our backup plan in pal2 is tom cole road could be extended out that'll that will get us out to jim crystal but that's still basic farm to market road the the two lane road for for the airport we need to have the west runway but just nearly as much so we need loop 288 to come in the airport or the city via the airport actually owns this property in this area right here so we have that available as far as some additional right of way but really to to truly market the west side of the airport we need that that ground access and i i don't know exactly where that stands and that's my concern or my my challenge is because that's really an unknown i mean that's like saying phase two of i-35 yeah that could be five years 10 years who knows when we've talked about the north loop for a long time it's closer than it was but you got to have an ending yeah goal as well so i really would challenge us to figure out a backup plan because if we're going to spend even though it's highly leveraged and i don't say we shouldn't three million dollars to get this ready but there's nowhere to get there it doesn't seem like we're being very efficient with that so that's not a criticism of the plan it's it's really it's time for us to begin to identify and i think quentin you'd mentioned an edp board that there was some kind of mobility plan or update in 2010 that identified i think it was airport road it was airport road but i'm talking about getting to the west side so i think we need to really begin to think about staff bringing back some suggestions because that's going to require funding and because this pa what do you call this pa1 or what what's the pl1 this the yellow is pal1 the planning activity level and what what time is that a five- year plan or what like i said it's it's based off of uh our these numbers right here the base aircraft as the total annual operations grow that's when we need to start implementing the additional planning activity level so getting into i mean that we put numbers into 2017 and 2022 for pl1 and 2 right but i mean it'll it'll be based off of how much our base aircraft have grown how many total annual operations we have and and really unless we have more room for people to expand those are really going to plateau yes and and and so we're sort of the chicken and the egg i mean we want to grow on the west side but before we can grow we need to have operations that are growing but before we have operations growing we need to get development on the west side going so i really just challenge staff to to look at a way that we can get some access go ahead and then we 'll yeah i'd like staff to think outside the box and get creative and let's see how we can solve this problem it's also a security safety issue to have one more safety valve for exit out of that airport in the event of something that happens whether it's a fire or some kind of security event so it goes beyond just opening up for economic it's a it's a safety issue so let's let's be creative let's look at it's what we're here for to solve problems so let's instead of chicken or the egg let's just make a both hatch and let's figure that out my question is more about the airport board when i saw this i looked for recommendation and noticed that there wasn't one there and so mr hicks said that there was some issues with a quorum and is it do we need to address that what do we need to do about that and my other question is are the major tenants on board have they been shown this i mean like the tenants of the airport are they are they part of that board i'm just trying to figure out the the tenants we do not have any tenants on the on the airport advisory board no the to address first the advisory board we we had our regularly scheduled meeting just before the cac meeting and i think some health issues came up that they weren't able to make it to the first meeting we scheduled the follow-up meeting the following week but we were unable to get a quorum for that and then just last week we had our monthly regularly scheduled meeting and once again no quorum a bit of it is some health issues and then a bit of it is they're much like yourselves they have other jobs outside of their their public service and they they weren't able to produce a quorum again so we might need to re-look at some of those the council airport board did meet extensively and go over all of this and i personally know one of the airport advisory members and he has been fighting major health issues so it's just yeah one of those things that when when that health knocks at your door you know it's tough but i do know that it was vetted through the council airport board board and then to to address the the tenants when we started this process back in 2012 we did have the the stakeholders involved in those preliminary meetings the the master plan in its entirety is available on our website it's a 400 plus page document you you've each received the executive summary and it is available to to to the whole public even though it hasn't been approved through the through the council yet any other questions on this agenda item yes councilmember johnson you know what might be helpful is so i'm sitting here looking at the map and what might be helpful in mobility we've talked extensively about fm 1515 airport road and and john has updated us you know been working really hard with the county and with text dot to get funding to improve airport road well having a secondary access point if because if we can land that and get a commitment from text dot to do the project we definitely need to have a secondary access point we will have western boulevard but if airport roads under construction where it tees into it that doesn't really help the airport so um i don't know what maybe howard can address but but i think it would be hoover us to put a plan together sooner rather than later not just about the west side access but secondary access for all of our existing airport tenants and visitors because when airport roads under construction it's going to be difficult over there with the amount of traffic that's already on it with other tenants other users manufacturing and distribution etc so i don't know if it needs to recommendation from mobility probably not we're all here but i would say put a priority on whether or not there's the possibility of using bond funds recently if that would be considered reconstruction potentially of mosh branch to the north of the airport they're providing an access down that side or meaning the challenge is going to be where's the funding coming from right so i think we need to give some direction as to priority of that versus other potentially other road projects that might be in our current plan for those bond funds just a thought um it i want to address i just want to comment on that but i want to see if there's any other questions on the actual master plan any other questions on the plan councilmember johnson i think that's a good idea and councilmember wasney so i guess staff if you could put together at least for a foundational document maybe a informal staff report with the help of mobility committee of where we are in 1515 what is the status of the funds and then begin to prioritize this secondary entrance for both public safety and for when 1515 gets reconstructed and then we'll have at least a foundation to start from to look at what our options may be any other questions on this agenda item fantastic great thank you agenda item 3b receive report hold discussion to give staff direction regarding the establishment of a teen council to provide a teen perspective on programming and community issues related to the parks and recreation department thank you mayor i'm gonna ask kathy shaper who is our youth team services manager i guess in the parks department if she would present this item and okay kathy thank you and if we could hold the questions till the end if that's if that's okay well i just want to talk to you briefly about the denting council and us creating that through the den parks and recreation because we really want to bring youth first here in this in the city of den and we had a den team council at one point and it was first established with adults for youth in den and it was supported by city staff members and so the goal was to have a 30 board member with seven people as executive team and in 2000 den parks recreation had assumed the responsibility of the dent ing council and i was directly over that group at that time we did a variety of different activities we had gone out to the vintage and done bingo nights we hosted a huge team leadership conference with over 300 different groups coming we implemented numerous events like battle of bands we had a disco inferno they also we had a brave combo come out and we did a silent auction in order to raise money for our skate park that we have we also implemented a student rights awareness day that we had over 500 students come to that so the students from all over so when i started denting council now something that i did a couple years ago was met with like 200 of the youth between it was middle school and high school and so i met with kids from den high school from geier high school from str ickland middle school mcmath middle school and just talked about what they wanted to see we were really focused on a teen center at that time but when i had mentioned doing a teen council all of the youth were extremely excited about being involved in their city and teens really wanted a voice and that's something that um they talked about a lot but there 's also a huge gap in services for teens in the city i don't know if you ever looked our play guide but we do have a lot of activities that are for you know youth and then for adults and seniors but there's that age group of about 12 to 17 that we don't have a lot that we offer we might offer we offer a teen camp and we offer some one- day trips we don't do a lot for that age group but some of our um the mission goals and purpose would to have um a voice for the the youth to become more leaders in the community and that they came up with this when i worked with them was empower and line inspire other teens that's what they wanted to do and they really wanted to be involved in their city in what is going on in the city so what we want to do is create additional teen programs and that was really helpful when we had the teen council because they were able to advertise it at their high school middle school and so they would put up posters and they would get it announced um on without will now be social media but back then it was the tvs and that and also do community service projects and we will be submitting for a teen center a supplemental budget item for that and have them be a huge part of that and then do fundraising for the different events and of course address issues that are important for the teens and provide feedback on parks and recreation related issues and i i think we would like to host a team leadership summit again it was very well received and i think it would be something very exciting to do here in denton when we're looking at team recruitment and commitment we're looking at students between between ages of 13 to 17 eighth through 11th grade must be a city of den resident and it would operate september through may that was something that we had operated it year-round in the summer but the students were so busy and we had such difficulty getting them there in the summer that they came up with that they're like we want to do it during the school year not in the summer but i think it would be a requirement that we do offer activities in the summer and they'd have to attend at least one of those and then we were looking at meeting on tuesdays and the requirement would be meet once a month that they'd have to attend and each council member would appoint up to three members and other members would be appointed by the city staff and we were looking for up to 25 members with an executive team that would be elected from the youth themselves and the recruitment would take a place only once a year that's pretty much what we were looking at and so what we want is for to get some feedback from you all to kind of see what direction you'd like us to go because we'd like to bring this back as a consent item in march for approval of teen council because we would like to start recruiting teen council members councilor any questions sure i love this idea i think that this is uh when i was this age i had some adults push me into these kinds of programs that i maybe thought that i didn't belong to and it was a great way just to learn leadership and feel like you could be a part of a group when you thought that maybe it wasn't for you i really like if we were able to do this for them to champion that skate park idea i think that that could be a cool thing kind of like how leadership dentin will pick something right so uh i was curious it said uh some of the requirements must be entering grades eighth through eleventh and so that's excluding seniors for some reason right now because if we if we recruit people right now we then they'll be seniors if we recruit seniors then they 're gonna you know be gone so that's where right now it would change after we get established but i wanted a couple years of leadership sure um and and that's where i thought well let's get this going and not allow anybody who is a senior because i'd like to actually have that senior role for two years so um because after doing the teen council and if you have a lot of um upper classmen you just you lose that and then it's like a lot of the younger ones don't know what to do so yeah i love this idea so i'm excited about this right i too am very excited we've met before on this um so there are also many cities surrounding that have youth advisor councils currently um my question is i didn't see in your presentation um most of those do advise the city council on teen related issues and would that be something that this council the teen council could do as well yeah what we were thinking is if if there was issues that you wanted for them to look at we could get that you know have them discuss feedback so and we'd have to figure out that channel of where that would go but then we would discuss it with the teen council and then give you guys feedback regarding that and i noticed you said the meetings would be on tuesday and that happens to be when our meetings are so maybe would there be a chance to come in to our meetings and sit in and see what we do yeah i think that would definitely something i think that'd be exciting for the teens to be you know to see how this works and how government works thank you for working on this go ahead that's my road or boring for the um this is great you know my first year in council i did a youth council and i learned two things on that and one was it needs a staff liaison to make it sustainable i mean it was just me kind of running it every other week and trying to find the place and you know it's a lot it's a lot of work as you know from from doing this in the past so i think this is great this is a way to kind of make this sustainable and i appreciate your enthusiasm to do it the other thing i learned though is that when i put out the word for it a couple times throughout that year to get people to come in a lot of great kids but they fit a typical mold they were typically already kind of active they were involved they're middle class they're white and so it was hard to kind of reach in and find kind of diverse representation from folks that i wouldn't even know where to go to so as you're thinking about that recruitment have that on your mind in terms of i know i talked about this once with dr wilson with detonis d and we were bantering around this concept of a youth council and he even suggested get with us from the school perspective because they could say we've got a group of teens that are looked at they're the wayward joey councils uh joey joey uh hawkins from when he was 16 and he'd be able to say this would be a great kid not involved in anything we want to get them plugged in so we have a great partnership with our school district so i just one suggestion is they might be a great way to kind of hand pick at least this first crop of students no definitely and we definitely want a diverse board so we'll be looking at all aspects of getting out the applications and is this tied into uh i know every time we go to nlc national league of cities there's always this kind of parallel youth council track um and kids are invited to that and they go to sessions and stuff like that is the is the idea that this might be tied into some national entity by which they can kind of get additional uh resources or whatnot definitely because i think it's um we had sent an email about it there is a leadership conference and actually i took my group back the second year was held um in 2002 and i took like the executive council with me and it was a team leadership with all other cities that came and it was really beneficial to those teens and they came back and they were fired up and that's when we got the brain combo and the silent auction and did all kinds of events so it was definitely networking with other cities that have councils that are very active um that's very exciting for them so if you want to get that them involved in those so given the size of emerson's massive budget already i'm going to assume that just kidding he's got the look so i i didn't see a request in here for any kind of funding is that already in place or you've already got what you need to do this or yeah right now for just to get it started and we do have we had raised and i've kept the funds in there at the denny park foundation um there's about six thousand dollars of funds that we have that the priority council raised and so i've been keeping that in there because i knew at some point we get this restarted so we would have a little bit of fun to get started for different programming and then eventually we're hoping that we can get some other team programming through you know our rec fund budget well i think for those of us that have done things with teens in the past through churches or whatever i think you find if you kind of do it halfway they don't really show up right but if it's awesome then they tell their friends and so i would just throw out you know if you're going to do it if we're going to do it let's make it great right and if there's you know if if dream the dream right right and so if we're really going to try because part of the issue when i talked to my now 20 year old today but two years ago i asked her whole your friends all your 18 year old friends how many of them vote and it was one percent and she was one of them so she i think there was two of all the people she talked to and what they said was my vote doesn't matter so part of engaging them i think is and understand the process and being in leadership role too is to understand how it all works but also that they can make an impact and make a difference so this to me would be an investment that we're making too in the teens as they're coming out of high school to realize well if you want to make a difference you got to put yourself out there but you also have to vote and so i would just throw out not necessarily just looking at how you did it in the past but if there's things you would do differently and that requires a little bit of money i mean we throw around large sums of money around here for i'm sure there's an architect or an engineering firm that would throw 10 grand your way for this so i'm just throwing that out there no definitely definitely learned from the past like when we first started teen council we had some not so great events and we learned from that and then really kind of modified that and realized realistically what could we do and what kind of events we put on and so we we end up having some really big great events so i'm glad you're bringing it back thanks any other questions all right thank you very much thank you we'll move on to agenda item 3c receive a report and hold a discussion regarding the recall petition against kevin rhodan council member for district one thank you mayor jane richardson who is our assistant city secretary if she would present this item for your consideration and or discussion thank you mayor and council members the denton city secretary received a petition for the recall of district one council member kevin rodin on january 26th the petition did not meet the requirements of section 403 of the charter which details the information required in the affidavit of circulator there were pages that did not have the stated number of signatures in the affidavit those pages were not in compliance with the charter requirement the petition did not comply with section 413 of the charter which details the number of qualified voters needed to sign the petition the city secretary was able to certify only 19 of the necessary 132 signatures the city secretary has determined the petition insufficient and all parties have been notified thank you any questions seeing none thank you we'll go on to agenda item d which is receive report hold discussion give staff direction on the dent renewable plan utility activities and activities related to the future power supply plans to meet cities denton's growth and needs up mr city manager before you get started i want to thank dme for replacing the pole on bernard street i was out there on saturday driving around and got stuck with the roadblock and sunday actually i think it's saturday or sunday and you know we talked about that that pole that was sort of leaning and and so that uh i think that's either wrapped up or or it's been completed so really do want to thank you for that i appreciate that may or may i add something too even in southridge dme was so quick to fix all the street lights in my neighborhood too so just wanted to add that too and that is part of the utility activities and yes infrastructure yes that's right she's not even listening go ahead yes i'm sorry george that's fine thank you mayor i want to make a very brief presentation to you and uh regarding the dme the dent renewable plan and this is in pursuit of your direction that we and your decision that we hire a consultant to give a third party examination or look at what has been on the council's table now for several months and again my presentation is going to be very brief because on over the weekend i provided to you a memorandum that outlined a proposed scope of work that is a recommendation that i'm making to you as a proposed scope it is and what i'm going to present to you here is just simply a brief outline of that with the intention of trying to to just initiate discussion among the council members to determine this is another step forward in our dent renewable plan so it again it represents my recommendation of what should be included in the scope of work and some discussion about the selection of the consultant which will need to be made after we have determined what the scope of work is going to be for the study that you've now asked be done i will say as we get into this that this scope as i've outlined it here is not going to address and would not address every issue that's been brought forward to the city council over the last several months but it will i think open the door and allow a consultant who's qualified to do a study to both examine the dme proposal that's before you and it will allow them to expand that as necessary to determine what other issues could or should be addressed and whether or not dme in the development of their proposal covered those issues and examined those issues as closely as perhaps we would all like to see that they're done so with that i'm going to talk a little bit about again what's in the memorandum that you have in front of you in more detail but there are essentially two options that i considered as we were trying to put together and follow through with your direction the first option that's listed on the board on the screen here is and is the option and the recommendation that i'm making to you that we engage a professional services contract that would address the scope of work that i'm going to get into in just a minute the estimate is that that would take probably at somewhere between 60 and 90 days to complete again based upon the scope of work that i'll outline and that that would be that there would be an estimated cost of that of between 50 and 100 000 dollars another option that we could engage again for council's discussion here is to do a broader examination or look for a consultant to do the study perhaps a request to make issue requests for qualifications or requests for proposals and depending upon the ultimate scope of work that the council decides on i would estimate that the time to complete that study would be expanded from less than 90 days to at least six months to 10 months and again depending upon the scope of work and what you want us to address in this study the cost could be significantly more so what is the scope of work that's presented in the memor andum that i've given to you over the weekend and again this packet that i handed out to you has a hard copy of the memorandum and of these slides in the back of it because i didn't it wasn't in the packet that was delivered to you last thursday so i've handed you a hard copy of it but essentially the scope of work in very brief form would be first of all a review of the of the renewable dentin plan as it's been on your table now for several months but it would also allow a qualified consultant to look at the options that were considered by dme over a period of time and actually dentin municipal electric has been examining those kinds of issues and how could they meet the challenge of the council to increase our renewable portfolio for a long time you could go back to 2008 2009 and look at issues that they 've addressed or that they've examined or that they've responded to to folks who have come to us asking if they if we were interested in expanding our renewables so there's a lot of history to that but it would allow the consultant to at least review the options that dme has already looked at and to determine what in the ultimately what alternatives or what modifications to the dme plan that's in before you might be made or considered by the city council and then finally once they have done that work to make a report back to the city council and and show you what their conclusions are let's talk about again the the credentials that i've outlined in the memorandum to you and we've had a lot of suggestions for what the consultant how qualified that person should be that firm should be and i am in the process right now of trying to to assimilate information about firms or individuals who are qualified to do this kind of work again depending on on the work scope of work that you determine but here are some essential elements that in my opinion and my recommendation need to be included as we consider who the consultant is one is their knowledge experience and availability in the areas of urquhart the fact of the matter is we operate a public utility in the urquhart system and in the nodal market and i think it would be we would be remiss if we don't have somebody doing this analysis who's very familiar with that system and that market we would need somebody who's looking at electric generation technologies not limited to fossil fuels but including storage and which would mean battery storage compressed air pumped hydro and liquef ied air and what we need is somebody who has at least exposure and some expertise in those areas so that they can measure the dent renewable plan against those other technologies that are available that you've been hearing a lot about in the last few months we need somebody who's able to look at and talk about and report back to us about integrating utility scale renewable energy into the portfolio that we have for energy production and the ability to vote and this is an important one the ability to devote resources necessary to deliver this analysis in a period of 60 to 90 days again based upon the scope of work that i've outlined to you here and that's and why is that important and clearly the most important thing that we're considering in my opinion is what we're able to do with our carbon footprint how are we able to improve our renewable portfolio but cost is also an element that needs to be considered and we have pointed out to you denton municipal electric has pointed out to you over the last few months about the cost savings that we can generate and would recognize the sooner we can get a a plan of some kind that increases our renewable portfolio in place and those costs are pretty significant so if we can get this study done in a shorter rather than a longer period of time the more we will benefit from that in the long run the other side of that is if the council makes a decision that you want to go through an rfp process and that takes some more time if you want to expand the scope of the study to include studies that might include even more consultants and more time that somewhat exacerbates the problem if you will of getting to the point that we can start recognizing those savings so these are basic credentials that i've outlined in the memorandum to you that i think we need to have in a consultant and you've seen the more detail in that memorandum and i'm going to just leave it at that at this point and ask you if you have any particular questions of me but i think hopefully what we'll have is discussion among the council members as to whether or not this scope achieves what you had intended a couple of weeks ago when you asked us to do that. Council Member Briggs. Before we start our conversation i'm just curious on the timing and cost option one and option two did you talk to anyone to receive these numbers and timing i'm just curious how that came about. No these are these are estimates that are based upon other studies that we've had done they are estimates at this point and until i know what the scope of work is i can't really negotiate or talk about a contract with somebody and get a firm amount these are estimates on my part at this point again the second option option two and the 300 to 500 thousand dollar cost is simply a range out there of what i think it would be if in fact we decided to do hire other consultants that would do health risk assessments or things that are not particularly included in this analysis as i've outlined it to you so they're estimates until we can talk to a consultant. So it is possible that an RFQ RFP could take less in cost. Absolutely it's possible. Yes. Council Member Johnson. George you said until you understand the scope of work so i'm curious it seemed to me like when we talked about this before Council Member Hawkins i don't know if it was a motion or however it went down but said i would i'd be more comfortable and i'd have to go back and see the the discussion there but it seemed like it was there was a lot of discussion it seemed to me like it was pretty well defined which was we want to hire a consultant to look at our plan say is there anything we missed in terms of other technologies that we didn't consider so look at everything we considered did we miss anything go through our math all of our projections futures markets all that stuff is our math correct did we miscalculate something i kind of i thought where we left it was this was look this is a lot of money so we're going to just hire another expert to review our work and check our homework and make sure that we didn't miss anything and that our our math was right and and then tell us if we didn't miss something well no you shouldn't build this you need to go buy that or you need to build this instead of that i didn't i thought the scope of work was pretty well defined and maybe i'm maybe i'm remembering it wrong let me give you my impression and again that's what this scope of work is built upon and joey you have provided to me some a list of questions that you'd like to be sure or ask and i have some of my own that would be added but until we work out in a contract with a consultant we can identify a lot more than i've got on the screen here but i think all of those questions would be answered in the process of looking at what dme has been examining for the last several years to conclude the the dental renewable plan as a recommendation to you clearly it's going to be weighing what's in that plan against these other options it's not it wouldn't i don't perceive this as a look at only the dentin renewable plan but it's clearly got to be the i guess the benchmark for what we're asking the consultant to use is this addressing all of these other issues that have been raised adequately to make a decision that we want to go into a program that's going to result in half a billion dollar savings over the next 20 years yeah well i think what you just said is what i'm trying to say i really thought that was the conversation i mean i'm simplifying by saying hire an expert to go through the whole plan and say is there a technology we didn't consider that we should if we should build something else or buy something else tell us did we miss something in a projection i'm just saying to me that scope because i think what we said was you know we're not looking for a start over again but go through everything and tell us if there's something we missed i agree with that and we'll just add to that that i think in the course of doing that if a consultant determined you missed this then it might tell us we need to go back and look at some no doubt but absolutely agree okay i'm gonna who wants to ask quick because i'm gonna queue them up council member wasny council member hawkins okay i appreciate you sending out an email to all the council members as well asking what is your understanding of the scope of work so we did have an opportunity to all weigh in and contact george with our summary of what so i think you did a good job because this is a starting point to move forward because it's time to move forward on this so when i read your scope i said good my question which will come in the second part of the meeting is how do we select that consultant but that's the process and that's part two so part one for me i'm satisfied with your scope because we're not specialists in the field the consultants are and they are going to come forward and who knows what will be there but you've got to start someplace and i think this is a place to start again my question is going to be in the process of how do we select the consultant and that's a discussion that we need to have correct council member hawkins well i too was comfortable with the the scope of work but i do remember after that meeting i thought we had talked more about when you hire a consultant just in general terms they'll give you some general answers and that's why i came up with a list of very specific questions that i wanted answered in that just to make sure that and half of them do have to do they do have with the renewable plan and the other half i just want to make sure that we are making sure that we looked at all the other technologies and the timing of it and does the does the math really add up so i was that's why i came up with my 10 questions that i wanted to make sure we didn't hire a consultant and then they give our presentation and they walk out the door and i'm like what just happened i just that's why i did included these questions here and it was very helpful and i appreciate it okay anybody else council member a couple of questions just for clarification from my council members who've spoken uh fellow council members uh starting with you joey is there can we have access to that list of questions i should i don 't know what what your name is very besmirched in there so yeah you can 't have it oh i'll even i could read them now real kind of quickly or well it sounds like we want to i have a copy of them there like it sounds like we need to we want to end this discussion with some clarity as to how we're moving forward so and i emailed it to the sorry i'm gonna add this no please go ahead i emailed it to the mayor uh howard and george and i should have emailed it to everybody it was just kind of last night you know i woke up in the middle night thinking of question now it wasn't like that but i should have emailed it to everybody wasn't trying to hide it or anything but i'll i'll email it to you right now okay well i guess as a matter of what we're supposed to decide i mean we're probably gonna have to talk about those questions and decide whether or not we want those included as a scope my question for you council member wasney is is uh you just use this term this is a starting point and i didn't know if that was loaded with something else on the back end or when you say this is just a starting point is that the assumption that we get the report of this consultant and then we move forward to either vote on the renewable dentin resolution or enact what other recommendations come out or were you envisioning that future studies are going to be asked for or whatnot you so read into me i just wanted i just wanted to clarify no scope of work is number one scope of work comes first that's what i meant that for us too because we've been talking about this for four or five months so now we're down to scope of work we've agreed to hire a consultant this is step one so we have to agree on scope and then we agree on the methodology on how to pick so that's all i was referring it to anybody yes well just to add i i assume that everybody was going to be bringing some more specific questions to the table so anyway i just wanted to throw that in there sure well well i mean and i appreciate that so i want to make sure when we're talking about your scope of work proposal that's what's what we've got attached it says scope of work the consultants shall perform the following in a professional manner however the process as we choose them this is still the scope of work okay that's correct because i really believe that i don't think it's really any different than what you sort of summarized from the meeting and also these questions joey that you have i think they're going to get answered yeah they're they're going to get answered i mean whether it's five years you know what what happens in five years i know that was one of your questions and these kind of things so i think that as they look at this comprehensively because our goal is renewable by a certain time within certain time frames so they have time frames to work with and to do the analysis so i i'm okay with the scope of work because i think it will cover from from the the technical aspect of the renewable plan the questions that have been raised as far as outside of the environmental questions the questions of are there other technologies out there that would be more economical that would provide the same rate decrease provide same reliability and provide us the opportunity to increase renewals and if there's not then what's what's the way to get there so i i feel comfortable with that yes and this this may be in in your scope but i want to say these specific words to make sure that not only are we reviewing the renewable plan but also going to look at other alternatives to meet the need for the on-peak power that we've identified the need for that might have been in your scope but the specific words may not be there so that is something that i'm really interested in from this consultant and that might be a different time but i just want to make sure that that was part of that so let me on his bullet point if i could his second bullet point under scope it says review other options considered by dme to serve load with an increasingly renewable portfolio now for me and this is just for me but i know that the words are important so we may be able to in court to me serving denton's load would be part of that examination of are there some other alternatives i mean i know what's been thrown out there is demand side management on the solar on buildings and those kind of things i would think that that would be part of that analysis because i think that's pretty common now today but but so if you need something different if you need to serve the load uh including but i'm limited to alternative peak demand technologies or processes i mean yeah i think but so whatever well this is the first consultant i've ever hired in my life and so i'm not really sure no that's not a criticism at all i'm just trying to make sure you feel comfortable you have to be sure you know so i think clearly if i could keely the intent is to cover all of those things again i can't put all that up on the slide but the intent is to look at when i've said alternatives that's what i mean not just alternatives to what the cook start plants are that dme has proposed but even other options that might be a mix it might be everything doesn't get done overnight and so what is looking at what our load growth is going to be and our the estimates of population growth or whatever needs to be taken into consideration that we have somebody looking at the mix and did dme consider that when they put together this plan just need confirmation thank you okay thank you any other questions on part one of this meeting oh yes may i give you a wrong signal that i'm gathering from what the council has said that that we're uh that the majority of the council is in for option one rather than option two to do the the 60 to 90 days rather than the extended uh period of study no we're not there yet oh okay yeah sorry yeah i think it's the scope of the work and now the process yeah so scope of work whether we do option one or option two the scope of work is going to be the same uh yes council member to follow up on his question as i understood the options option two was a larger scope of work which is why it took more time it took going out for a bid and it took the larger amount of money so i i don't i don't think you got a proper answer to your question or at least how i thought you presented the two options which was if you're looking for the limited scope of work as defined by your recommendation that is option one uh now whether or not there's a question of how you pick the consultant that's that's maybe that's another technical uh side question but as i understood if i could go determine the options if i could that just picking the consultant and what process we go through to do that could in fact extend the time it might not extend extend the cost or the scope of work but it certainly could extend the time so select the method of selecting is the is the distinguishing question here yeah you could have the same scope of work correct for option one or two option two you solicit various proposals from people that take time option one is you just sort of make that decision send it to council for a recommendation then council votes it up and down okay okay so i just want to make sure if we're clear on at least the scope of work i'm could i just see a thumbs up or something just so i can i'm not taking a vote i just want to see a consensus i have one more question yes um that scope of work completely leaves out any environmental studies or aspects that would have to be something separate that that we would discuss because i remember at one time we talked about dr john doing an air modeling study and that didn't ever happen so i would like to revisit that later on separate from this sure yes i'm good yes well i i think that's important to think about comprehensively so if the suggestion is we're okay with this scope of work but later there's going to be a suggestion to go to another consultant at another point reopen the conversation and maybe we want a third consultant because we want another thing studied i think we got to put all that on the table now because i think we're clarifying the scope of what we want studied as a result of renewable dent and so if you're wanting to suggest we get those environmental studies as part of the scope to me that's not a subsequent question because in my mind we're putting an end to the consultancy discussion once we decide this well i guess i guess there is environmental um slides in the d in the renewable plan so i guess if those slides are going to be reviewed as part of the scope then i'm okay with that it if that's because environmental part of it is part of the plan and if that's going to be reviewed then i guess that's covered councilman walton and also if they come forward with any alternative plans the air impact and air quality and and all of that is going to be part of what they come forward with so that's where a consultant comes in because they know more than we do so it's my assumption that as they study the whole thing they're also going to be looking at what are the impacts of because that's part of the discussion so i'm comfortable with the scope of work yeah councilman rodent well i i think we need clarity on this because i'm not sure that the type of person you hire that's looking at the finances of what's been proposed and whether or not it meets this particular requirements to get us to where we need to go considering the council goals is going to be the same person that has the expert qualifications to do air quality studies and a number of the other environmental concerns that we heard which i think the majority of council said they're comfortable with that aspect of it so to me that's included in the scope of work again we're going back to it sounds like that's an expansion from the scope not a not not a uh included so i just want to i just want to clarify sure i understand absolutely but we're not hiring a bookkeeper to come in and just study the finances i mean it's it's a look at the dme plan what um alternatives there are out there and to kind of stack those up to be able to come back to council and say you've done it right or you haven't here's how we tweak it but if they're looking at all the other technologies part of that discussion is also going to be this will have a bigger impact on air quality than this one then this one then this one then this one so it's it's i i do think when they come back i think we're going to be surprised at their expertise and that they when they present all of this that that's going to be a part of it i don't think we're going to have to go and hire a bunch more consultants and spend a whole lot more money on specifics i think this is going to be part of the presentation that we receive and i'm comfortable with that councilmember johnson yeah i was just i was going to say i think that if you get into i'm real comfortable with the scope and and i get real comfortable in terms of credentials because on the credentials knowledge of their cotton nodal market electric generation technologies including utility scale energy storage integrating utility scale renewable energy into a portfolio and has the ability to develop the resources so if they have all those credentials and capabilities then they certainly should have the ability to articulate environmental impacts of whatever alternative technologies they might recommend they should have the ability to say based on the renewable dent and plan here's the stated environmental impacts that you have stated that's either correct or we disagree and here's why we disagree or if they say we're going to recommend a alternative technology we think there's a better way to achieve your 70 percent renewables and keep your rates low and and reliable then they should be able to articulate to you what the environmental impacts are of some alternative technology that they recommend so i i'm not going to be comfortable with saying and then we want to hire an environmental consultant to study their study because i mean what we're saying here is i think we've got the information that we want studied and if the person has these credentials all that should get covered they're either going to agree with our analysis so they're going to disagree and if they do they should be able to support why they disagree and what the impacts are i think so i wouldn't advocate for anything other than we've got the scope i think it's all in there okay i'll try this one more time and obviously this isn't a vote it's just trying to give staff some direction and to as we move through this sort of two-step process of this decision one is scope of work second is the process of selection as far as scope of work based upon the discussions that we've heard here today it seems like the council has a consensus i don't know if it's a unanimous consensus but it seems like there's a consensus of the scope of work so if there's a if if someone's really detrimentally opposed to it or vigorously opposed please just let me know so we can make sure that there is a consensus okay i'm just scanning the room my eyes aren't stopping on you mr road council member yes i don't want to go back over and state all the things that i stated last time but i don't think it's necessary okay yeah so uh so i i don't want my silence to suggest that that i think that that i appreciate that but but i would say that of the options i would prefer option one which is a more concise time frame because what we know is the delays that happen are going to likely increase the cost to the ratepayers because of what we see in the the the financial market of interest rates going up so the longer that we delay the more it's going to cost the ratepayers and the more impact that 's going to have on every citizen in town okay all right thank you thank you for that clarification okay so we seem to have the scope of work with some uh dissent on that um so now the timing and cost option one option two let me just sort of because these are very different there's a very big difference in cost and a very big difference in time frame but what i heard was that if the scope of work is the same for either option one or option two and it seems like that's what we've decided as far as a consensus that the primary difference in the timing is the rfq i don't even know if the i don't know if rfp process it's more for rfq which does not include cost correct rfq does not include cost that seems to be the prime factor for the increased time potentially so if some if you could if someone could give us just a background of for a professional services contract just real briefly thumbnail sketch of how that goes and then for an rfq process what i don't even know specifically what that entails well let me take a shot yes and you had a previous discussion and that's correct springer was up here talking to you about an rfp and rfq but essentially at least from my perspective if the city if we choose a professional services contract and what i'm in the process of doing now is trying to identify both i mean a number of different firms and or boutique firms or individuals who would have the credentials that i've outlined in the report that we could then begin to select based upon the scope of work who has the knowledge and the skills and the background to do the study and under a professional services contract we might pick one of those if i were doing that i would pick one of those and sit down and talk to them about what they would charge to do it how long are they available can they start immediately is it going to be 30 days before they can start and try to negotiate an agreement now clearly what i could do is pick one or two and send those qualifications to the city council and you all could weigh in on that and then and or interview those candidate firms or individuals understanding that each one of those steps takes time and so if we did that there was a way to involve the council in it to a more or less degree depending on what you want if we go through the rfq process i think we need to draft an rfq it needs to go out to a mailing list of individuals that we think would be qualified it needs to identify the scope of work and pretty well define what that's going to be and then as we get those rfqs back go through an evaluation process and pick one or two of those that we would then sit down and negotiate with but i think the time itself of drafting an rfq and sending it out and giving firms 30 days to prepare a response to that or whatever it's just it's a time issue and it's how quickly do you want to get this back on board and in front of you and make a determination on whether to proceed with the renewable dentin plan or proceed with that plan as modified or amended at the recommendation of a consultant or scrap it all together and move on to something else but it's a time issue with the rfq if the scope of work is identical then you might get a pretty broad spectrum of what the cost would be and depending on their availability how much time it takes to do the study okay councilor why well i'd sure like council involved but i think half a million dollars is sure a big chunk of change so there's a huge cost difference here huge time difference i'd be okay with the professional services route option one if if the city manager could bring back the you know at least two different companies so that we could take a look at their qualifications and kind of be involved with that portion of it understanding that option one is going to save time and that it's also going to save you know a huge sum of money but i think council really should be involved in that that step all right one cotton if i could i think one of the things we could do is i we could go through that process and identify one or two or three send you those qualifications with a recommendation understanding that depending on how we're able to negotiate the contract if it's for instance turns out to be that that scope of work requires with the most qualified person to achieve everything we're trying to do over a hundred thousand dollars then i've got to get it back on the council's agenda and get formal action from you that's another time constraint if it's under a hundred thousand dollars we wouldn't have to do that but i would have your input into that so we could approach it by doing trying to identify professional services folks and let me give you some credentials or resumes something that you could then give me some feedback either formally or informally and then i could proceed to negotiate a contract with that person and either bring it back to council or not depending on the cost i think that fifty thousand dollars is unrealistic for for the scope of work i'm concerned about that from from 125 000 seems to be more realistic and i or you know and that's not anywhere in the middle like for me i think i would prefer to have a hand in the process as i recall councilman rodin asking me would you get behind this and my answer was if i was involved in the process if we were able to choose as a council and agree on the scope which we've done on the consultant which i hope we can and in the communications with the consultant that that is something i think that i would like to be a part of i don't know if that legally is something we could do with the professional services contract or not i might defer to an ita but i think if we had two professional services i mean two two firms two individuals that would we would enter into as a professional services contract without doing the formal rfq process might defer maybe interviewing those folks into as might get us in a problem but i'd defer to the city attorney by state law professional services are exempt from the competitive bid or rfp process so by law you do not have to use a competitive process in order to acquire your professional services that does not mean that you cannot use an rfq process which which certainly can be done i would add that i believe that could go through the manager to to to go through that rfq process or if there is a desire for the council to participate i think that information could be shared with and input received from the council i don't think there's anything inappropriate about getting the council involved in that process i don't see that too often but i don't think it's inappropriate i just want clarification on something because you used rfq in a couple of different ways or not it's a couple different i want to understand the way you used it you said that the rfq process could go through the city managers now when i see an rfq slash rfp process to me that's one that is statutorily prescribed and this is what you do but what you 're saying is it's sort of like a pseudo rfq process where the manager is acting as the person to vet the the companies and then so i just want to make sure when you say rfq demand are you talking about the same rfq that's up here on option two or what right when you when you look at state law there are two competitive processes identified in state law and that's the bid process and then the request for proposal process those are both designated as competitive bidding or proposal type processes by which we acquire goods or services for governmental entities the rfq process is sort of an in more informal type of process whereby the manager or or the council could take a look at the qualifications of a professional to make a determination what professional is desired to be used for a particular kind of work so it's it's a little bit less formal than the statutorily required competitive processes set forth in state law but just if i could to clarify what she said i think the rfq might be something that i would use just to glean information about who even if it was not something council was involved in i guess my concern is generally if i'm doing an rfq i want it to be through some kind of a formal process where i get it out to a number of people and have a set period of time for them to respond rather than me picking them out and examining whether they 've got the qualifications or not well well i'm okay with the option one given that if you present a couple however many we think two two or three where you've identified the the the people uh and then you forward them to us however we make that selection whether it be through a formal action or i'm not sure how that would go but uh i'm okay with that um because i think it does give council the opportunity to weigh in on it and to look at them and to have some some discussion about that i don't want to cut you off oh no i'm through yeah so i'm i'm i'll be honest with you guys not that i'm ever not honest but honestly i'm now getting really uncomfortable because what's happening is honestly what i feared would happen what i heard joey say that day was i'm completely confident in the plan i'm confident in our experts i would just be more comfortable if we had somebody to check our homework real quick 30 days 60 days check our work make sure we didn't miss anything now what i'm hearing is okay i'm okay with the scope of work because i think the scope of work still captures that now we're saying some of us are saying we want to we want to be part of the selection i'm okay with approving if you want us to i mean we set on our retreat right we have to trust our people to do their jobs so to me if we can't trust you to pick a consultant that's going to go vet the plan you know but i'm okay with us all weighing in and giving your opinion or and you say here's three everybody tell me which one you like the best and whichever one has the most i like the best votes that's who we use i don't care but but what what i feared because now council member briggs i think you said you want us to have the ability to communicate directly with the consultant i'm really uncomfortable with that we've got a scope of work you're going to define the scope of work we're going to pick one they're going to check our homework and we're going to come back and if in this if they say you got the right plan then we're going to get cracking the what i'm hearing and maybe not by design but it seems to be an attempt to modify that process a bit so i 'm real comfortable with what i think we got consensus on that day i'm not comfortable with because now we're here 90 days our goal i think in the beginning was 30 to 60 days because if somebody honestly is they're going to analyze your work and go through if they're if they have these qualifications they can fly through this the math they can fly through the technologies that we reviewed they're going to know what's out there that we missed and i honestly agreed to this because i thought it's 30 60 days 100 000 bucks it's a lot of money we're going to go spend sure so i'll just tell you where i stand i stand where i did before i don't think it's necessary but i'm good with doing it but i'm uncomfortable with any creep of something different from we 're going to pick in the consultant they're going to go analyze their plan they're going to come back and tell us you're either right or here's a modification you should do so that's that's where i am any other comments so we've got councilmember hawkins sure i'm very comfortable with george finding some options for us bring them to council and we pick then after that it goes back to the consultant and they bring something back to us and that's why i wanted us all to bring specific questions that we if we were okay with it i understand if you weren't i wasn't expecting to bring any questions to the table so i'm not i don't need any new new information maybe unless it's based on like just i think one of the questions i asked i said if we were to wait to do a plan in five years would they be new technologies that would exist are we on the like the timing of something right now where we should wait something like that where it directly answered that question that's what i was hoping that would come out of this but i feel very comfortable if george brings some firms to the you know these are the three most qualified that i found you guys pick one and go from there and you're right i wanted them to go over our work is this a good plan or not i don't want to start from scratch i don't want to go 10 months and spend half a million dollars i wanted to to spend 60 days or whatever costs around 100 grand and see if it was a good plan or not that's what i wanted to do i don't know if it's possible but that's i just wanted to clarify if i could mayor that my recommendation to you was that once you tell me what the scope is and i think i'm hearing what that is that i would make a recommendation to you on a consultant i could easily make a recommendation on here are three and here's the one i would recommend to you for these reasons i could do that but my recommendation to you was let's keep this moving and get to the point that you all can make a decision tell me what the scope is and i will pick a qualified consultant to do that i can clearly take a different route and say here are two or three here's the one i recommend and why and that might cause a little bit more of a delay but i can do it either way but my recommendation was that once you decide the scope i'd make a recommendation yeah i'm really comfortable with the two or three coming forward to council and you're welcome to weigh in and say this is my recommendation but i as a council member i would really i would really like to weigh in and read the qualifications of the companies that are coming forward because ultimately there really aren't you know it's not like we're dealing with multiple car dealerships all over the country this is a hybrid business it's going to be a hybrid consultant that that comes through so i look forward to seeing those two or three and get cracking and get get moving and get this person hired council member i want to address two things the time in the in the full cost of this the time is you know we're in that silly season where i've been on council for five years now and nothing gets done in the spring because we all get kind of tenuous about elections and we don't want to make decisions and so one one of the things i was hoping we could do is get to the point where we could actually make a decision in the spring about a big topic and not have to put it off to after the election so as i look at the timing i'm guessing that's impossible i mean if the quickest you could get us back to where we're looking at qualifications of these folks and we're getting this approved via a council action is my guess mid-march i mean we don't have a count uh i guess we have a council meeting on the first do we yes yes march 1st so and then you count 90 days from there we're may end of may beginning of june we'll probably ask for some public hearings for this i mean so we're looking at july august maybe close to a full year after this has been launched so my question is when we look at the full cost of this and that's not really reflected in that and i want to just get that mentioned clearly so that we can all understand the full cost of this because there is that additional what are we concerned about in terms of interest savings in terms of locking in renewable contracts what is that per day uh cost that dami has quoted this is only talking about the potential cost to hire the consultant i get what the other costs clearly are if we had the plants up and running tomorrow i mean the projections that we've made are and got renewable contracts under our belt we could be saving 36 000 a day once we get that done that you extrapolate that out once we get the plants started we would be potentially saving half a billion dollars over 20 years so what happens is every day that we delay making a decision to go that i can start bringing property acquisitions to you and equipment for every day it delays us getting the implementation in those renewable contracts under our belt we have lost that 36 000 a day in addition to that we've already probably suffered since we started talking about this project knowing the kind of equipment that's been recommended to you to put these plants into operation the cost of those has probably gone up five to seven million dollars just because of the exchange rate in euro so we know that that those costs are going up and they 're going to continue to rise as none of that's included in these dollars those are the big dollars in fact that's helpful i think we need that big perspective i mean we've got at least we've got at least three of us on council who are saying i don't need this but we're willing to go along with the consensus of council because there's a felt need for it my guess is seeing some chatter on social media after this went out that the the most adamant folks asking for this in the community have already rejected this outright so i guess i 'll go back to the question i asked last time we had this is why are we doing this and who are we doing it for if we seem to have some comfort on council people saying i'm fine with it but i'm willing to go along with this we see the full cost we see the time delays we see people now rejecting it we see people calling for city-wide votes now why are we doing this council member wiseman because it's our due diligence to do this councilman roten it's going to determine the energy future for denton for the next 20 to 30 years it's a lot of money i brought up the idea of a consultant two and a half months ago had council grabbed it at that point we would have a consultant report in our hands right now today so i appreciate the four votes on this council that said let's do our due diligence it's now in the city manager's hands because that's as estimated time 90 days let's see what george comes back with in terms of he knows this is a priority he knows that time is of the essence so let's see who they are how fast they can work and what they can come back with us with time and of course it's our hope that they can they can do it in a more timely manner but to suggest that it's going to take us a year to make a decision that is certainly not my intent at all time is time is money and everybody knows i'm always looking at the bottom line so you know it's in the city manager's hands now and so let's let him get to work councilmember johnson so i guess this is more of a question but what i thought we said was george could find two to three whoever he felt were all qualified with a with a recommendation here's who i would pick email us all those we could all email him back our individual feedback i'm fine with who you've chosen or i really don't like that one i really like this one to me i don't know that we need to say now we're going to go put that on a future agenda to choose the consultant and delay a month to pick the consultant i mean i guess what i'm saying you you because if we do it formally if we say if we say well there has to be a council vote to pick one of the three qualified consultants well sure that's two weeks three weeks however long it takes to then get back on another agenda when there's a meeting i would be really comfortable with an email that says here 's two or three just what you said we send you an individual feedback and you go pick one and go to work provided that it's less than a hundred grand you have the authority to sign that right yes but but i mean we could also say couldn't council say if it's less than 150 000 go or i don't know how that works yeah yes i'm sorry i have a question about open meetings regarding this whole situation um i'm a little bit concerned about about um what i'm hearing let me address uh greg's i think question first if if the amount of the contract uh is less than 100 000 the authority would reside with the city manager anything over 100 000 is going to have to come back to the city council for action to approve that contract so if it if it hits 100 000 it will be back on a council agenda notwithstanding whatever other process we might look at with regard to the mayor pro tem's comment on the open meetings issue that they will need to be the walking of a fine line um i think the staff could send an individual information to individual council members you cannot collaborate you cannot deliberate with regard to where you might go with that consultant you could provide individual information back to the city manager but that would require some care on the other hand if you wanted to deliberate about that we can put that on a future agenda so but the mayor pro tem i think he has a point some care is warranted here mayor if i if i could just i think we may i may want to ask the city attorney to check because i'm not sure that given this is a dme issue and some of the expanded authority it could be that if the amount goes over 100 000 with dme project of this type that i'd have the authority up to 250 000 so i'd have to check you might you might be right on that this is a dme issue so i think the the uh there is an escalator amount above it is 250 so so so clarify what i guess the point i'm trying to make is if the city manager sent each of us an individual email that said here's everybody i looked at and this is the one i've chosen if you have heartburn over that for some reason let me know as long as we don't talk to each other about it i'm just sitting here thinking about 36 000 a day we're talking about somebody checking our homework and i don't want to delay this process any longer than we have to so right the the rule is a qu orum of the council may not deliberate over an item relating to city business deliberation could be in writing it could be by phone so that that would be the issue is the deliber ation of a quorum of the council over over a city item now if you just provide an answer back directly to the city manager i don't think you are deliber ating as a quorum you're providing individual information back to the manager right and i could make a recommendation and in the absence of hearing back from the majority of the council i could either proceed or put it on hold well i'm only bringing it up because of the two things council member wasney said i'd love to have two or three to look at and give my feedback council member rodin clearly articulated you know the longer this drags out the more costly it is so that's that's the only reason i brought it up yeah and there's obviously nothing that we can't if if once we get those to really make it clean is we can always call a special meeting for 30 minutes or an hour if we have a quorum and if everybody's giving feedback i mean i think that would be a very very razor thin line to walk and i i would be cautious very cautious on that because i think we have some options to make that a more clean process um you know kevin i i really appreciate your comments and and i do understand your frustration i guess when i when i've looked at this plan and council member wasney you're right i mean you asked for this a couple months ago and i remember having a discussion with somebody i think and saying well if we had done it then we'd be right where we are where we're hoping to be in three months so i get that but i can only share with you council member wrote that i understand the 36 000 a day and that's a that's a number i mean that's it that's a when you 30 days in a month that's what is that million bucks or something like that over a million dollars but i also know that those are numbers that can really conjure up this kind of uh haste or or exped iency um and we are talking about a plan that's 20 or 30 years that's 200 me and i've looked at real estate deals if i went back on my real estate deals and i think you can attest to that thinking if i would have done this here i would have made x money or if i would have done this here i could it's it is what it is when it is and that's what i feel we have to go on so i don't want it to be delayed any further than it has to and i really think we can get it done faster than that i think it a lot of it's going to depend on us if we're really committed to it if we get our feedback back i think george will work in an earnest to get this done i know dm he wants to get it done and i hear what you're saying about the social media chatter and people are going to but i will tell you and i've listened and i will listen to those people doesn't mean i agree with them it doesn't mean in the end but in the end i'm the one that presses the button i'm the one that has to vote on this and so when it comes down to that point then i will make my decision based upon all this work that i've put into this and just now we've got somebody who's going to give us some additional feedback so yes people can call for votes yes they can call for these things and if i after looking at it think okay but in the end i have to be the one to make the decision based upon all the input so um it's going to be what it is on that end it just is and i wouldn't want to make a decision solely because that's out there i can we have stuff swirl ing around us all the time we have to somehow still make decisions in the midst of this so i'm probably as frustrated as you are about this we're seeing this play out at the national level about when decisions are made who gets to make them what happens if you delay the impact of that so this is this is one of those tough decisions you know we thought well we never have to deal with something like this at this level but it's the same principle just in reverse you know we want to get it done sooner because of it may turn out different than what we might think so i'm certainly understand your sentiment and in no way is my decision to move forward with at least the process that i'm going to summarize i think has the council's consensus indifference or opposition to you or or mayor pro tem about this um and i i just want to say that i respect your your difference in that regard and and certainly take it into consideration okay so to summarize we've decided on the scope of work and my understanding we've decided on that and it seems like the process for has veered to option one the only caveat being instead of you recommending one that you might present two or three with you making a recommendation then we will come back and i'm hoping we can find a way to vote on this formally and if we need to call a special meeting i don't mind doing that to to expedite the time and in your conversations with these companies i mean one of the priorities is of course they have to meet all those expertise and qualification but one of them is can they get it done in a timely manner and it be effective and it be uh you know authentic and reliable so is that the understanding of council at least those who are moving in that direction is that okay i'm seeing heads i'm seeing at least forehead shaking so um we're all got a little bobble head look right now i'm trying to make sure i understand which direction it's going that's what i understand okay so i think you have your your marching orders all right all right one oh yes i'm sorry yes go ahead yes yes which is i think it's i think the timing is important microphone i think the timing is important so in terms of the part of the qualifications do you have the resources to start this within a week of when i tell you you've been awarded the contract meaning right yes we're saying somebody's checking our work and i i just don't want it to get drug on and if somebody could has the resources to complete it in 30 days because they've got 30 people that they can put on the project right now because they're just rolling off of one but it's going to cost a little bit more i would certainly want to know that i don't think the amount of money is nearly as important as the qualifications the capability to get on it quickly and how fast they can get it done all right i agree with it i mean you're looking if it's we use the 36 000 a day if it's going to cost us three or four days to get it done in 30 days instead of 60 days well you're certainly a net effect yep okay all right thank you just a personal note of appreciation this is i don't need to tell you this is probably one of the biggest policy decisions that the council will make it's going to be a legacy kind of a project it's complicated i recognize that and appreciate it and we're trying to hit down the direction that the council wants us to so in advance i appreciate any time you're willing to give to this as we move ahead in making this selection so thank you for your time okay thank you thank you george okay i believe oh is there any more discussion on agenda item d it's sort of a broad posting just want to give anybody an opportunity any last word okay all right thank you i have a last word mayor yes i just i just think it's important to note that we are at 40 percent renewables and cities all over the country are trying to get to 20 yes and we spend so much time violently agreeing sometimes and sometimes arguing over you know how we back up our 70 percent when i think the majority of people if you went out and talked to them around the country if you said could you would you be happy if you were at 40 and you could keep your rates low they would love to get there right we always want to dent and everybody wants to pattern us after austin we're kicking their tail in this category they're trying to get to 20 something so let's celebrate the fact that we're at 40 we're kind of leading the charge and that's a positive thing well i think i mailed uh i think i sent kevin you a link on the states the 50 states and their goals we've already exceeded probably a majority of them at least uh so no i and and you know that might be a nice informal staff report just a summary of you know if it's somewhere you can find it is the summary of the state goals for renewables and um just so that we can understand and just a survey of you know some selected cities on what they're doing because i think you're i think we can miss that that we are doing very well very well yes council member rodent you know and maybe to add to that report next gen climate which is one of the leading national uh kind of lobbyists for clean energy uh just put out uh an attempt to get city leaders and national leaders to sign on to a pledge to do to come up with a plan by 2030 to go 50 percent renewables 50 by 2030 our plan is 70 percent by 2019 less than five years uh they've got uh two of the leading contenders for presidential and i won't tell you which party they are you can guess signing on to that plan but this is in the national news as well and so i think it further adds to the fact that we're leading the charge thank you thank you council member rodent all right this ends our uh open session we will take a 10 minute break let's go back take a 13 minute break we'll come back at 20 till four or yeah so good evening wanted to welcome everybody to this meeting of the denton city council on this day february the 16th 2016 at 647 i apologize we apologize for being a little bit late and we're going to stand and pledge leaders to the us and texas flag but before we do that we're going to recognize the denton girl scouts representing service units 409 and 416 who are going to lead us in the pledges so if y'all would like to come down and stand right up here out in front and lead us in our pledge to the united states and to the texas flag i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all honor the texas flag i pledge allegiance to the texas one state under god one and invisible thank you all very much thank you i've got a couple of proclamations that i'll come down and read then we have a presentation i believe okay our first one is uh denton citizen poster who's come on up good evening how are y'all fantastic if you'd like lauren just introduce yourself and then we'll give everybody a chance to introduce themselves and tell us a little bit about your what we're doing tonight i'm lauren barker i'm the program manager for keep denton beautiful my name is glenn herrington been a resident in denton city and denton county for about 35 years my name is katherine willcox i am um a new citizen forester and on the board of directors for keep denton beautiful and manager of painted flower farm i'm heywood morgan i'm the urban forester for the city of denton and also a new board member for the keep denton beautiful i'm cindy hegel i have been a resident for 14 years of dent on i'm a master gardener and now a citizen forester i'm joshua bova i am the new community forester intern at keep them beautiful and i'm a unt student in geography so tell us about a little bit about denton citizen forester the denton citizen foresters are a group of volunteers that complete a training over the course of six months in community forestry topics so they learn anything from tree biology tree identification onto how to properly plant a tree how to properly mulch a tree and we just try to give them the full gamut of information this is probably the second time only that this course has been offered in denton and so we're really excited to honor our graduating class there's they couldn't all be here this evening there's actually 20 of them that completed the course this starting in the fall of 2015 and so we're just really happy to have some of the individuals here that dedicated the time they're they 're great group of individuals that we hope will be volunteering with us for our tree programs for many years to come thank you you know i remember walking by i believe when y'all were in there doing your training and i was looking up there seeing what all is being presented i thought i want to know this information because there's some really great information about trees and just how to take care of them and so forth so thank you all very much for spending your time to do that to to help our tree community here in town so thank you and so i want to it's my honor to read this proclamation it's a proclamation by the mayor of the city of denton greetings whereas the denton forester training is a volunteer training program offered offered through a partnership between cross timbers urban forestry council keep denton beautiful and the city of denton and whereas in 2006 the cross timbers urban forestry council held the first citizen forester classes and volunteer program in fort worth texas and whereas this program was made possible in denton through the newly introduced denton tree initiative campaign a partnership with dent keep didn't beautiful to engage dentin residents businesses and neighborhoods in the planting of 12 000 new trees over the next three years that's a lot of trees whereas the citizen forester program trains participants in basic urban forestry through classroom and field instruction delivered by urban forestry professionals and whereas citizen foresters are committed volunteers who contribute their time and services to the community and whereas citizen foresters are trained to assist with a variety of volunteer projects including helping with tree inventories pruning trees participating in tree planting and tree giveaway programs and now therefore i chris watts mayor of the city of denton texas do hereby recognize the fall 2015 graduating class of denton citizen forester trainees and applaud their commitment to the ongoing care of our community's trees and for the betterment of our community thank you all very much so here are the people that are going to be planting those 12 000 trees not no you can all help plant those 12 000 trees if you go to denton tree initiative.com you can learn how you can help us to reach our goal of 12 000 new trees in denton over the next three years fantastic thank you thank you all very much thank you we have bulla harris day who's here to tell us a little bit about bulla harris day hello tell us your name tell us about bulla harris my name is elise clements and bulla harris was a woman of many firsts she was the first woman's physical education teacher at unt she was one of the first professors that started datq and she's done many things in her lifetime and datq has many years ago has made the state for bulla harris day to make sure she's appreciated and because of all the stuff she did and there's even a i even made a historical marker for her in quaker town park so and y'all want to introduce yourselves my name is natalia mercier i'm from troop 4705 i'm caitlin dollar from troop 3792 i am nixie easley o'ne ill from troop 4705 let me read this proclamation for bulla harris day proclamation by the mayor of the city of denton texas whereas bulla harris was hired in 1914 by president william h bruce to be the first woman's physical education teacher at the north texas state normal college now the university of north texas she retired in 1960 after teaching for 46 years whereas in 1917 she started the first girl scout troop in denton texas and in 1922 she became the commissioner of the denton girl scout council in 1967 she was awarded her 50 year pin and was made a lifetime member whereas in 1925 bulla harris started the green jackets organization which is still in existence at the university of north texas and whereas in 1936 miss harris along with 12 other professionals started the denton county teachers federal credit union currently now dacu and whereas she was a charter member of the texas association of health physical education and recreation an organizer of the texas woman's athletic association and where she helped organize the north texas chapter of delta phi delta sci kappa the woman's professional physical education fraternity and whereas after retiring from the university of north tex as she was a charter member of the flow memorial hospital auxiliary where she volunteered over 6 500 hours as a pink lady 6 500 hours and whereas on october 25th 2015 miss harris received a tex as historical commission undertold story marker that is located in the city of denton quaker town park where the girl scout little house once stood now therefore i chris watts mayor of the city of dent on texas do hereby and declare and proclaim february 27th 2016 as the third annual bulla harris day in the city of denton and urge all citizens to recognize and honor the many contributions of bulla harris and thank you for bringing that to us again thank you very much [Applause] okay the next item we have is recognition from the north te xas central college of governments public works come on down introduce yourself and just tell us a little bit about what this is about absolutely my name is edith marvin i'm the director of environment and development at the north central texas council of governments we're here to recognize the city of denton as an integrated storm water management regional community so we want to present this plaque to you thank you it says city of denton is recognized as a silver ice swim regional community city of denton has applied the principles and has exceeded the requirements set forth in the integrated storm water management program which achieves water quality protection stream bank protection and flood mitigation so congratulations on that our ice swim program was developed over 10 years ago through the collaboration of 60 to 70 communities at the north central texas council governments with the help of a few consultants in the region and i wanted to recognize a few of your staff members that have contributed to i want them to come down as you do the effort to bring this forward um ken banks david hunter thank you for bringing the sign and i failed to mention that's the other thing we brought to you was a entryway sign it's similar to a tree city usa sign that recognizes your community as an ice swim community so ken banks david hunter debor viara ps aurora and earl esco bar all helped bring this effort forward for your community so i told him to come thank you for that yes um through low impact development techniques which is what ice swim is mostly about it works on a site by site case for development in your community so it the the principles provide a cumulative effect through all those developments to help improve the quality of life for your businesses and your residents through improved water quality and also reduce flooding so congratulations on that effort thank you thank you uh dr banks i'd like for you to just i will tell you dr banks and his staff but i will tell you he is he's the man who has really helped us in in probably achieving this designation and just with our environmental issues overall so i wanted to give you an opportunity to say a couple words if you don't mind completely unprepared to do this i'll have to wing it um one i appreciate all the uh things that you've said it um it's really an effort of staff debor viara gets a lot of credit for putting together this application this is the first uh to my knowledge city that has actually been designated under this program and so that uh that was a real milestone for for us david has continued to work on these issues day in day out uh between david and debor they've got this uh well taken care of and i we're very fortunate as a city to to have them both uh ps and uh earl as well helped a lot with writing some of the criteria into the drainage design criteria manual and that helped us to gain some of the points necessary to get to the silver level so just a great opportunity a great program and really glad to be a part of it so this is the first city with this designation is that correct didn't is or that's correct we we have um 14 what we call founding participants that have joined over the years but then we we did some research to find out what what were some of the obstacles for communities and joining and so we've kind of reformatted the process and we 've been out visiting all over the region talking with city managers and their staff about the program and the value of it trying to create some of that consistency and you are the first community that has joined under the new kind of format for it so thank you thank you very much thank you let's give ourselves a hand dr banks would you like to take possession of the signs and all this i i'm not sure what to do with them uh you got him you got him okay you get all right thank you thank you very much thank you you bet well they do a great job in looking after our environment and after our environment thank you very much okay the next one will be national fcc la week come on down and introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about fcc la week i am charles brown i am a family consumer science teacher up at denton high school and i'm also the fcc la advisor um my name is daniela and i'm an officer my name is bethany nobles and i'm an officer i'm cindy mullally i'm the president i'm jessica durie and i'm the treasurer uh for this last week was national fcc la week and one of the things that we did up at denton high school is we were collecting items for the denton county mhmr connections program and the connection program what they do if you don't know they help transition uh the homeless residents into group homes so they can start contributing back to the community and so we just collected a few items during that but along with that the these group of students they've this year have kind of taken the homeless population under their wing we've also made snack bags for our daily bread uh we are collecting blankets and doing blanket drives and another thing that we're doing is on the 28th of february we are partnering with university in north texas there's a student organization called leaders in family education or life they are collecting baby food items and baby food up at the cupboard and on university at croger they're allowing us to be up there on the 28th so come on by and and donate some items fantastic thank you thank you very much what a worthy worthy cause that's a great program uh the connections program well this is a proclamation by the mayor of the city of denton whereas family career and community leaders of america the national non-profit family focused student organization for family and consumer science students through grade 12 helps youth youth assume their roles in society through family and consumer science education in areas of personal growth family life voc ational preparation college readiness leadership and community involvement and whereas the organization extends classroom learning through chapter projects that develop leadership and initiative and helps young men and women learn how to plan make decisions and carry out and evaluate programs of action as they work with other youth and adults in their school and community and whereas family and career community leaders in america offers members an opportunity to work together for common purposes for the improvement of themselves their families and their communities whereas the week of february 7th through 13 2016 has been designated national fcc la week for the theme empower now therefore i chris watts mayor of the city of denton texas hereby proclaim the week beginning february the 7th as national f cc la week in the city of denton and urge all citizens to acquaint themselves with the activities and values of family career community leaders of america to show interest in it to give help and encouragement to the young men and women who are working to achieve knowledge and experience that will help prepare them for future responsibilities as active and concerned adult members of society and that week has passed and we are honoring you this week because this is our council meeting so thank you all very much for what you do and and working with the homeless and and helping because i know it's also giving you some you guys some great gifts and and teaching you a lot so thank you so much for watching thank you surfer the denton city council has adopted rules of procedure including a code of conduct which applies to citizens as well as council members these rules were enacted to promote an orderly process and to preserve decor um here is a brief review of the rules that apply to citizens reports citizens will have four minutes to give a report there will be an electronic beep when time has expired if the remarks are not concluded the city council will be able to provide the report the remarks are not concluded by that time the citizen will be asked to stop speaking if the citizen does not cease and a second request is made the mayor will request to have the citizen removed from the council chambers citizens are asked to not approach the dais if a citizen has papers or other materials to hand out to the council please let the city secretary know and she will have a staff member distribute the materials to the council as ruled that council members may listen to citizens speak and may ask questions of citizens for clarification of the issue council members will not engage citizens in discussion of a topic because to do so could potentially be a violation of the open meetings act when speaking to the council citizens are to direct all remarks and questions to the council as a whole and not to any individual member please refrain from making abusive personal impertinent profane or slanderous remarks anyone who violates this rule will immediately be removed from the council chambers citizens adherence to these rules will help make an effective presentation and will preserve the order and decorum of our proceedings copies of the rules of procedure are available from the city secretary before we get into that just want to make an announcement agenda items d and e oh i'm sorry public hearing i'm sorry six d and e we will most we will open the public hearing but most likely postpone it until march the first so if you are here for item six d or e you're certainly welcome to stay through the meeting and give your your public comments but yet we will be most likely postponing this we will be postponing it until march 1st so i just wanted to let you know that ahead of time so if you are here and you don 't wish to sit through it that you are going to have an opportunity to speak on march 1st okay so we'll go to agenda item three presentation from members of the public we've already heard the reviewed the procedures for addressing the city council so we'll move on to agenda item 31 which is bc groves regarding red light cameras is bc here if so just go ahead and state your name and address and your time will begin here my name is bc groves and then i live at two zero one eight bowling green street denton seven six two zero one and i've been there five years and i love it i love denton and that's why i'm here tonight not long ago i had an experience that really upset me and i thought well i've got to do something and this is not right i had seen the signs about red light cameras but didn't have anything to do with me i you know i ignored it but then in january i got a letter with a fine for me for running a red light when i finally looked at it i discovered i hadn't run the red light at all i had changed lanes and so i decided i had to come here and talk to you about it right off the bat in case i run out of time i'm going to ask you for an election to ban red light cameras for several reasons 16 states have already banned them 34 cities have banned them a couple of cities did want to keep them that was out of 37 but there are reasons first of all when i called and inquired about the ticket i discovered i would have to go in front of a judge if i didn't think i needed it and that's when i discovered there was a video i didn't pay any attention to this when i got i was just upset so i went online and looked and i thought this is wrong so i'm going court i want a copy of this now the first thing you do when you go in as a defense lawyer yourself you want a copy of the evidence but i couldn't have a copy that was only for the court and for the cop so right there was a number one problem and i decided that was when i had to come that means i was not going to get due process not for the usual reasons that you think about but no due process because i didn't have a copy of the evidence the second thing was it wasn't really reliable depending entirely on that video to charge me and call it a civil not a criminal crime something is wrong with the terminology there if it was wrong it was wrong and it really doesn't relate to leaving your garbage can out on the street too long that's another sort of crime also in the state of maine when the senator there introduced a measure to ban the red light cameras he made a point of showing that the civil rights were violated because the car owner was charged with it as it states in our eight pages of text in our city charter instead of the driver now this is making one person responsible for the behavior of another it has nothing to do with privacy when you don't take a picture of the person's face who's driving the car you're going to be blaming another person so who's going to serve the time so to speak so i have a concern that we have red flex corporation which is an australian company running our red light program they we had 35 000 tickets passed out last year i just want to get that in there real quick not not long ago talking i talked to the officer four times and last time i talked with him he said well the feds set the regulation of those lights because in some cases in this city the yellow lights are way too short and all of them need to be increased at least a second seven minutes seconds seven seconds is that my bell it is okay well then here's my bottom line sure the election to ban this and whatever it takes to get that on the books i'll help you okay any questions thank you very much thank you thank you we have a council's indulgence uh oh we got a question um there is a gentleman who's presenting in seven one agenda item seven one on the citizen report mr jones and he was wondering if wondering if he could go ahead and go at the beginning with council's indulgence instead of wait until the end i'm okay with that and i see that everybody else is too so uh we'll then call mr jones regarding complaints against the building inspector and police department if you'll come down and state your name and address your time will begin thank you my name is William Jones i was 25 100 foot with drive trailer seven didn't texas seven six two or five uh i got the i got some papers here again like it uh i got a legal a legal evicted twice at a trailer park the same one i had some people going in there uh trashing everything and washing the driver clothes everything was story and i had a proper manager told the guy owns the trailer park told him to do it scotty did and all digits tore it down and they had a problem at either they're supposed to have a permit to tear it down they didn 't have one didn't have one for july and august they just wanted another legal to toy it down and i got the papers right there for washing drives you see it how much it's going to cost to get them would you mind maybe turning that around yeah turning it so we can there you go thank you no you're fine thank you very much you see how much it's going to cost for washing drivers okay and that's about it okay and i got the citation tickets from the police i got the citation tickets right in there you want to see them if you'd like to show them to us you're certainly welcome to put them up there on the the display yes sir right i think this and that's the citation tickets right there okay and we do have a couple questions go ahead uh mayor pro tem gregory could you tell us the address of the property that you're talking about that was demolished 2500 ford worth drive trailer number seven 2500 fort worth drive and then what trailer seven trailer 27 27 thank you sir council member riggs hi howdy um we have talked before a little on the phone um i'm not i'm just want to clarify why you're here and what it is you would like for the council to do what you're asking for and help with i think it's get it over here just get a new place to live okay that's about it okay so someone has torn down your home and you have no place to live all right okay all right thank you any other questions okay and i just want to make sure i've got the address right 2500 ford worth drive trailer number 27 seven okay seven oh seven i'm sorry i'm sorry i apologize trailer seven my mistake okay thank you very much any other questions no thank you bye bye okay we've reached our portion of agenda item 3c which is additional citizens reports this section of the agenda permits any person not registered for a citizen report to make comments regarding public business on items not listed on the agenda this is limited to four speakers per meeting with each speaker allowed a maximum of four minutes so we have some cards we have four four cards we have four cards uh first uh speaker will be ron is it ciphert ciphert come on up and state your name and address and your time will begin hi there my name is ron i say ciphert some people say c iphert uh you said it right i'm at 1400 morin drive um so i wanted to talk a little bit about the dm eep and the rdp plan and just to follow up on the discussion this afternoon that i listened to um it was very encouraging i appreciate you all taking the time to discuss it more thoroughly and i appreciate the um the memo from the the city manager it seemed to include a lot of feedback from both council and from the community so that was nice to see um i wanted to zero in a little bit on a couple things that i heard um i do as far as the scope of the work and uh what that may or may not entail um i do agree with a lot of things that were were said about uh checking over the rdp plan the kind of doing the homework checking the projections for sure especially as they relate to gas prices i know um that's a difficult field and folks that have been working in the oil and gas market in texas for years may be inclined to look backwards and coming up with these projections more so than the unpredictable future and the post peak scenario that we are with most of our gas plays and the export market that's taking off in the border and the valley region um but i want to focus on the well we 're the second and third items under the the scope which have to do with kind of reviewing the history and the other options of the rdp plan i think that's really the the thrust of what i would love to see a consultant be doing to review um those things that are not expressly the rdp plan like when dme presented all these graphs and they have a a hundred percent renewable a 70 percent renewable without the gas plants they didn't do an 83 percent but or i think they did in some those items i think were never fully fleshed out to the satisfaction of a lot of members of the community including myself and i would love to see a consultant meaningfully unpack what a road map to get to a hundred percent renewable that is actually effectively competitive with the rdp plan i think dme is experts and i do expect that a lot of their numbers and figures and projections about the plan are accurate however i don't think they took as much time expanding on the competitive options as they did the plan itself and i think there's a lot of room for a consultant to to investigate there in places that dme has not i also heard during the work session uh talk of uh proposing specific questions to consultants that could be answered i think that's a fantastic idea not only from council members but it'd be great if residents of the community could participate then as well if there was some project to open up the collection of questions from the community and then condensing them in and reducing redundancies not in like a way that a consultant would absolutely have to answer but with hopes of answering as many of these questions as possible at least they could reference what the community cares most about in this project i think that could be a meaningful addition from residents um and also just the the closing sentiments of the work session i want to comment on as well i do agree that it is remarkable that denton that 40 percent renewable is pushing forward to 70 with this ambitious plan and that we do already stand apart nationally for our commitments to renewables but it really uh we are one of the few cities that has the possibility of doing what is exactly expected us of us to fulfill our commitments to future generations to not destroy this planet and i don't want to drop the ball when we're almost there and recommit to fossil fuels when it's not necessary we can absolutely have a hundred percent renewable city without spending any more money on new fossil fuel infrastructure it is possible that way exists and with the help of a consultant i think we can get there and flesh it out thank you thank you any questions seeing none just uh also a point of clarification and that's not a problem with these four cards if it's on the same topic but this was an agenda item that we spoke about so i'll just have to get some clarification from the city attorney after this meeting obviously so i'm just not sure if it's if it's something we've already talked about if it's still eligible but that's not a problem i'm just i'm just letting you guys know so everybody's going to be able to come up just wanted to but just to clarify you're saying so if something was discussed in the work session it may not be eligible for this four minutes of discussion well that's how it's posted but that's why i said i want to i want to make sure that i have clarification on that just you bet uh jodie ismert state your name and address your time will begin jodie ismert i get it wrong every time i'm sorry jodie that's okay um i'd like to talk about our current ethics ordinance i'd also like to talk about what type of town we see ourselves to be and we'd like to be in the future but first i have a story i'd like to share i'm a mother and a citizen who firmly believes in the democratic process and all it entails with all of the tools we have at our disposal i also like to be engaged in the city politics and in city-led decisions because i'm an active citizen who cares about denton and the future of our town three sundays ago on january 24th i chose to assist district one citizens in our democratic right to petition our government it was an effort to recall a sitting council member it was a beautiful sunday afternoon and my child my six-year-old daughter wanted to join me because she loves learning about democracy and is proud of our engaged community and proud to live in a free country and she's very interested in civics i have instilled these values in her since a very early age and if you drove by my home you would often see the american flag waving from our front porch now while we were walking in the neighborhood petitioning together i didn't know it at the time but while we were walking door to door speaking with our neighbors about the petition the city councilman that the petition named got word from one of his twitter followers that we were petitioning in his district and the reason for the petition shortly thereafter this councilman drove his van found us slow to a creep in his van a few feet from my daughter rolled down his window yelled at us that non-district one citizens were petitioning in his district and now he has our photos and drove off this is an aggressive act and i felt threatened by his aggressive behavior and upset by the fact that he had taken photos of my six-year-old child who does this who creeps up on a mother and her child in a van and takes photos of her and her child and her friend who slows down their van to a halt rolls down their window to yell at two women and a child and takes photos of them for the purpose of intimidation he angled his phone to take photos at my child and snapped pictures of her who does this this is the behavior of a creeper he then took these photos and posted them to his facebook page with the intent to further harass and use online intimidation against us he bragged that he had cropped my daughter's image out of the photo he posted but he didn't completely crop her out you could still see her head he reasonably could have cro pped her entire image out but he chose not to and even though it's just her head and forehead i can tell it's my daughter he continued to write intimidating threats like and i quote when you live outside of our council district and you launch a campaign to remove a sitting council member you aren't signing yourself up for a game of patty cake who does this do reasonable city officials behave in this manner against citizens enacting their democratic rights do city officials threaten follow photograph intimidate and harass citizens for using their democratic rights the fact that he has taken photographs of my child and posted them to social media for long enough to have them spread across the internet no one no one should take photos of my child without my permission and post them to the internet and especially not a sitting city council member no city leader should ever harass intimidate the citizens and tell them that they don't have the right to use their democratic rights to petition the government and tell them to stop no leader should intimidate any citizen for engaging in democracy no one now i know our current ethics ordinance states that the city council people should be held to a higher standard something should be done about this something should be done about this council member who did this i also want to say and i will wrap it up that i fully support a stronger ethics ordinance that the same city councilman has openly stated he's against i want to live in a town that is friendly and more respectful to its citizens i want to have council people who respect all citizens regardless thank you we have a question yes uh council member wasney or comment i just want to say i'm sorry because as a council we are a body but as a mother i'm sorry and i'm the one who proposed the ethics ordinance because i do believe we need tougher standards and question also did you file a police report i did i filed a harassment charge so i just want to let our citizens know that democracy is a free society and that people are encouraged to participate and while i was not the offender in this case i am a part of this council and so on behalf of kathleen wasney i just want to say i'm sorry you had to go through this thank you very much k athleen council member johnson thank you mayor jodie i appreciate you being willing to come up and talk i certainly wish that council member rodin was here tonight i got your email that you sent to all of us that morning and as his friend outside of this i think friends should be willing to challenge each other so i called him and i will just say and i wish he was here because i think he would want the opportunity to tell his side of the story i think he's a great dad he's got little kids of his own and i don't think he would the guy that i know i don't think would ever intentionally do anything to harm or offend a child i think he's he told me his children were in the van with him so you know just i would just say anybody can make a mistake i wasn't there i don't know what happened i just wish he was here his daughter broke her arm during our work session and he jumped up and left of course so i wish he was here to defend himself but i i the guy that i know would certainly never intend to do that so if if that were if those were the events i will apologize on his behalf because i certainly don't think that he would ever intentionally do that and you know i would just encourage anybody who's here or watching i think it would only be fair to contact him personally and say you know for his sake to say you you tell me your your side of the story and i think he certainly if he offended you in some way i'm sure he would apologize thank you and you didn't ask a question i'm just trying to give you a hint but i really the thing is is that he did this he's a sitting council member and he did this and i i understand he's your friend and i didn't name him out i was not going to call him out but this is the action of a creeper a creeper does this and i i'm glad that you called him i want to say thank you for calling him because that means a lot to me that you actually took the time to do that you saw this is wrong but when i approached him for an apology he said that he didn't think he did anything unethical or aggressive and refused to apologize so i you know the actions are a state that anybody can go to his personal facebook page and see what happened and i i would like for him to apologize to me i think what he did was wrong fair enough thank you so my question is do you believe that everything you read on social media is accurate that's completely irrelevant i get to ask a question you wanted me to ask one last one so thank you for your guidance on the procedure thank you thank you council member riggs you're toggling on and off so i'm just going to give you an opportunity if you'd like to ask a question well i i just wanted to ask you you said your daughter was with you that day and i'm sure you had to explain to her something was happening or going on even after the fact but i i would like for you to invite her here to come and see a council meeting and and see that you know democracy does work and there are there are people up here that that do care about our citizens and we'll make the best decisions and so for her to maybe witness a positive experience i would like to personally invite her to come thank you very much okay all right thank you thank you our next speaker is jenn ifer lane please come down state your name and address and your time will begin the whole time jody was talking my name is jennifer lane and i live at 1526 willow wood the whole time i was concentrating for her not to lose it but here i am i was present at that time and i would describe what happened as taunting and it was rather intimidating because when people are petitioning a neighborhood they are knocking on the door doors generally speaking of people they don't know so it is a little bit of an act of bravery right out right off the bat to communicate with one's neighbors and is usually i'd say 99.99 percent of the time rewarding however there is that moment uh before you know as you knock and as you talk to strangers before that rewarding feeling occurs i didn't like to see jody and her daughter feel the need to immediately leave i didn't like any of that i didn't like seeing this particular council member's wife cringing in the passenger seat out of embarrassment i didn't see any children in the car if they were in the back seat i didn't see them there i wanted to also let you know that in the course of in the course of the petitioning we acquired 240 signatures of residents living in district one 144 of them were confirmed using denton voter lookup and there were approximately 12 from other districts who had moved to district one rather recently and are still registered in their previous district and that leaves something like 80 or so who live in the district either as renters or homeowners um but whose registrations may have lapsed for one reason or another um i wanted to read you also something about this you weren 't dreaming and you didn't hear a nasty rumor city council member kevin rodin did in fact approach block walking activists in denton a few weeks ago in his car he spoke to them and took photographs of two activists as they gathered names for a petition to recall rodin from his place one council seat rodin then posted the photos on his facebook page and referred to the petitioners as outsiders because they don't live in his district one of the activists jody ismerd made a police report alleging rodin was harassing the petitioners sometime later um i gave my report and the experience that i had was as follows the police i felt at the time got the memo as the as the cliche goes we were told how we should vote that is to say in regular elections not by recall and that the city manager is the council's boss so that's where complaints should be taken and if one is sued for libel is it is hard for the defendant not to quote lose everything one owns that particular statement was backpedaled quickly once um it was suggested that perhaps a citizen citizen could be the one taking that action the um fact that we were kept waiting for a long time was not particularly comfortable either and the officer mentioned not living in denton and that local politics don't have much effect on his life we were told we couldn't get a copy of the report until such and such a time and that the narrative would be unavailable to us entirely altogether it was not a particularly enlightening experience in terms of living in a democracy it was interesting to me tonight that as i'm about to give this report that i was hearing from a citizen about the traffic lights that was the first thing i brought to this council in 2010 was the length of the traffic lights i brought it because i'd been hit by a car because i couldn't make it through the intersection without the green light turning red before i was across and that when i sought to deal with this uh i was followed by the officer to the hospital and given a ticket when i came out of x-ray when i sought to overturn this ticket i was told that one could receive this kind of hearing once a month on a thursday and that if two postponements occurred that that was it if i were singing out of town or something like that that was it done so it's been surprising to me to watch the sorts of things that i watched the things that citizens bring forward be so profoundly unaddressed and the feeling of a greater and greater separation from the city council in terms of being able to be an activist and be able to live here jennifer that was your bell if you could yeah up your comment inside please okay yeah any questions thank you yeah thank you our last speaker is deborah armatar if you state your name and address your time will begin deborah armatar 2003 misty woodland in denton i wanted to also talk about the uh renewable denton um consultant memo uh and but since you had mentioned no no no okay that's okay that's what i thought absolutely okay thank you um let's see thank you um to all of you uh for discussing this issue taking it so seriously um i was not i was uh teaching all day so i i didn't get to see the work session um but i look forward to watching it i'm glad that you record those um i sent all of you an email i understand if you didn't have time to read it you've all been busy meeting but i thought i would just hit a few points in that email because i made a number of points um i wanted to hit a couple of those points that i think are the most uh important um number one the question uh the one question that concerns me a great deal is the question of who is going to choose this consultant and recommend the consultant i had been under the impression until i saw this this memo um that that was circulated that it would be council who would be choosing uh the consultant and then the council would tell uh the um uh a city manager this is the consultant we want and that the city manager would go and do the the bidding of the council um i got the impression from the memo at least the draft i i saw that um it was going to be the city manager who was going to choose so i just wanted to express my concern about that that didn't feel um um particularly democratic to me since um the since um all of you or the council are the ones who are elected by the citizens and are accountable to citizens and the call for a consultant was something that came from the citizens but i i do i don't want to sound like i'm just complaining even though that i am using my limited time here to you know make my um to uh to make my complaints i also want to thank you once again for um heeding the citizens call uh for a consultant another concern of mine uh is that didn't seem to me to be addressed in that memo is the issue of rates dme's race rates and uh the the financing um of this plan um i'm i'm concerned about the way that dme calculates its rates uh and the way that they that um the burden uh is placed on the majority of citizens um citizens seem to pay a higher rate so that the bigger polluters pay uh pay less um and uh that concerns me and it seems to me that this is something that should be calculated the dme's rate structure the logic behind it um the numbers behind it should be should be calculated into um any kind of plan um uh that developed by a consultant let's see i did have one more point uh to make but i i made it in a letter and now that my seconds are ticking away i i just wanted to acknowledge um what uh jodie ismird and jennifer lean were just talking about and to just acknowledge their bravery and in coming forward um and uh to say um i i wasn't there um i'm was not involved in the recall but after i heard of this incident from them um i i was so upset about it that it almost made me wish that that i that i had been um and uh anyway i just wanted to thank them for their bravery and to let them know and anybody know who's listening that uh the best way to deal with this situation is always kind is always to um go public with it um if if you remain silent um then the bully has hit his or her way so that is all we have a couple questions kathleen uh council member wasney so you were unable to watch the film from this afternoon is that correct yes yeah because you were teaching all day but yeah so the um for clarification purposes what was agreed upon is that staff would come forward with two or three consultant suggestions and that council would have input on the selection of consultants okay okay staff will so okay that's okay staff will um limit the pool and council will make the final decision is based based upon scope of work which was um very broad so that lots of things could be included okay so it's um uh listed but not limited to and so but just uh council is going to be involved okay thank you thanks for letting me know council member briggs i was going to ask the same question um since you didn't get to here i was going to let you know that we will have some some choice in the in the consultant but i would like for you to go back and look at the credentials because that consultant that we do all agree on will have to um have all of that the list of those credentials and i think that's pretty important and these are the credentials that were listed in that memo that were circulated so does that still stand the credentials yes okay so that was not changed okay okay well there were a number of anyway you know two um a number of um concerns that i had about those credentials and had i watched the video i would have focused more on that but i'm glad to hear there was this one change i don't know if other changes are possible in those credentials um any other questions thank you okay thank you very much very much you bet all right we'll move on to the consent agenda well council member hawkins first thank you mayor i move approval of consent agendas items a through z but we're going to be pulling e f m and z for individual consideration e f m and z okay mayor protem second we have a motion and a second to approve the consent agenda items a through z save items e f m and z which will be uh taken under items for individual consideration let's vote on the board please motion carries unanimously six zero we will now take the pulled uh consent agenda items in order for individual consideration let's see did we want to uh call e and f together i'm going to go ahead and call agenda items e and f together because they're they're related and we'll have a staff presentation and then we'll vote up but we'll vote on those separately uh agenda item e is consider approval of a resolution excuse me of the city of denton city of denton texas stating the conditions and circumstances for the sale of 1224 north bonnie bray street and agenda item f is considered option of an ordinance of the city of denton approving the sale of 1224 north bonnie bray street denton denton county thank you mayor i'm going to ask brian vascom from dent municipal electric if he would address these two items and then i'll be prepared to respond to any other questions that council may have thank you brian thank you jorge thank you council for the opportunity to give you a little more information on 1224 bonnie bray i'd like to give you some background on this project and how we came to the the position of transferring ownership of this particular property so in 2014 december of 2014 the city council made a decision regarding the site selected for the hickory substation so this is a map from from back in in 2014 where we looked at different options for that hickory substation you can see there's a number of different colors in that purple option which is the one that city council ultimately approved was chosen because it had the fewest number of residents it had the lowest cost it was close to the existing substation and it after getting the community involved that was the site that was chosen soon after that site was chosen i was contacted by a mr joe revis and he lived there on bon nie bray street in the property where that hickory substation would be relocated and when he contacted me he said he said i've lived here for about two years and he said i like this home a lot i'd rather not move and also i'm disabled he had cerebral palsy and said i'd like to stay here where i am well of course building the substation there means that he was not able to stay there and so we were we were we were certainly worried as we heard that because we understood we're going to have to make sure that he gets another place to live that's that's suitable for him and so we began working with him to find that there's just a map that shows the location of 108 north bonnie bray where he mr evis currently lives so while while we knew we had a challenge in front of us we knew there were some tools that could help us solve that challenge and anyone who's displaced because of one of our projects is eligible for relocation benefits so this is based on federal local and state law and those relocation benefits for anyone include 42 months of rent and differential so that means for about three and a half years the new place that you live if it's more expensive than the old place that you live but we're uh but had to move away from if there's a difference in expense then we'll cover that for 42 months i will also cover moving expenses and the place that you move will have to be decent safe and san itary and for mr evis this included lowered countertops widened doorways roll in shower and other various accommodations that would make sure this was ada compatible and so this was this was going to be a challenge for a couple of reasons one of those being if we moved him to a new place and then that place would need to be retrofitted to be ada compatible and then we'd also have to pay for it to be put back in the condition that it was originally found so there would be a cost to that but also we'd need to find someone who's willing to make those repairs and we thought you know there's an additional concern here which is that we can move him into a new location it could be retrofitted to be acceptable for him but even then we can't be sure that he'll be able to stay in that location if if the lease runs out then he could be disloc ated again and without those relocation benefits so that was a concern for us i've put a quote up here from the federal law that says that the agency and that's the dme in this in this situation shall go above and beyond the typical requirements in order to accommodate any anyone who's displaced because of of one of our projects so we knew that not only did we have to fulfill the the basics of of his relocation benefit but we if necessary we need to go above and beyond well in fact that's exactly the position we found ourselves in as we through our relocation expert reached out to various land owners and asked what their willingness was to to renovate a home to be acceptable for mr rivas we were having a great deal of trouble finding someone who would be able to do that and there was one bit of serendipity which is that we we came into possession of 1224 bonnie bray before this hickory street hickory substation project started we came into possession of 1224 bonnie bray street and that was through a transmission line project and so since we owned that property we were able to show it to mr rivas who said he liked it very much and would love to relocate there and so that gave us the ability to um to divest ourselves of that property also to find a new location for mr rivas and rather than renting a 700 square foot house he would be able to own outright a house that was about 1900 square foot so um here's just a few of the numbers of some of the costs associated with this so the cost to acquire 1224 bonnie bray for us was 137 thousand dollars and 500 dollars so uh the entire amount of that was filed for what's called transmission cost of service and so we were able to file those with urquhart and be reimbursed for those expenses now to put mr rivas in that house we had to make all the renov ations that i discussed earlier and also just do typical renov ations to the house there was foundation work that needed to be done plumbing work that needed to be done electrical work that needed to be done and of course we wanted to make sure that it was it was all done properly we wanted him to not encounter problems as he moved in to this new house and so those costs are 175,698 dollars and eight cents and that is the sale price for um for for this particular property so in other words mr rivas will use his relocation benefits to pay us that 175,698 thousand dollars and so the net cost to the end of the city of denton is zero for this for this entire project uh here's just a photo of that house of 1224 bonnie bray built in 1975 and square footage over 1900 square feet so mr rivas from our discussions with him is certainly looking forward to relocating to this property and this just shows a map the map on the bottom on the south is that 108 bonnie bray and the dot towards the top towards the north is that 1224 bonnie bray so those are the two properties you can see they're fairly close together and that was very important to mr rivas and for his mobility what questions do you have mayor pro tem so the the house had to have a garage removed and did we do any of the modifications that would be necessary in order for mr rivas to occupy the house safely with the conditions that that he needed in order to live there yes sir so the answer is yes on both of those questions so this is currently a transmission line runs in front of this house and it's energized at 69 kv and so there's a certain easement that we need for that and the garage could have stayed for that easement but we know that in the future at some point we're going to reenergize that at 138 kv and when we do that it'll need a wider easement well since we know that's coming we went ahead and took off the part of the garage that would have encroached on that easement and so that it's not worried we 'll have to do later on and then certainly we did the the work that you're talking about there's a roll in shower there's widened doorways and all the things to make it accommodate mr rivas thank you council member was ning so question on the 137 000 coming from urcot what are the legal parameters that's around that and how does all of that work and how how do we know that we are going to receive the 137 000 that's very good question and it has to do with this concept of transmission cost of service and i i think phil williams might be best to answer that question so uh in previous council meetings we talked about uh filing transmission cost of service with public utility commission of texas in that we periodically as we progress through our transmission projects substations and transmission lines we periodically file all our costs with public utility commission of texas and they charge those costs back to all the users of the transmission system across our cot so we are on both sides of transaction we charge in what our cost is and then all the different loads in our cot pay that cost back to us in our transmission rates so in the 175 000 that was coming from the gentleman placed in the home is 137 000 of that included in that figure no it's not that's in addition to and so the 137 will be recovered when we file for the cost for the bonding for widening the bonnie bray line easement the 175 000 will be paid for as we file the hickory substation project so my question because we displace a lot of people when we build substations and transmission lines what did the home rent for initially i i'm just going to guess 600 maybe a month are you talking about the the home on the hickory subst ation site the home that uh he lost this is nicky costanza our real estate assistant good evening um joe revis had assistance some some different assistance programs that he was qualified for due to his disabilities but the uh so the the total cost of what he rented a property that property for was 550 dollars a month but some of that was supplemented to him so even if we added a hundred dollars a month and made it 650 a month if you take that by 42 months that's 27 000 in relocation i 'm just having a problem getting from the relocation of 27 000 to the 175 that and i know this is a feel good case and i get that we just had a gentleman here that came earlier whose home just was torn down so i'm very sorry for all of our citizens who are displaced for one reason or another i'm just a numbers person so i'm trying to connect the dots and figure out the math sure if he was in an apartment and if he was in an apartment that he was being paid relocation times 42 months times 650 that's still 27 000 dollars so i'm having trouble getting from the 27 000 to the 175 so in a typical circumstance you would do exactly the math as you did it in this situation joe qualifies for what is called last resort housing and what that means is that you are required by federal law to find a place that is comparable to him for him to live in to accommodate all of his disabilities and so there is no cap on that if if his disabilities would require that he have a lap pool in his backyard as a displacy he's entitled to those rights so what well this is doing what we're doing here is i hate to say not over and above but it is over and above as regulated by law so you're you you when we went out to look for a place for joe to live in he we we have a list of requirements that were we were required to do in order to displace him and those requirements and so what what you would have to do is if we would have had to have found a place that he could rent we would have had to allow find a landlord that would allow us to retrofit that home to meet his needs and then we would have had to have paid the cost to retrofit those that home we would have had to then escrow money into an account to retrofit to put the house back to its original condition when that lease was over in addition to playing the supplement for his his moving costs his his differential of rent payment if you will and so there that was the first attempt that was made joe looked for other housing he looked for somewhere else to rent that we could renovate for him as required by law there was not anything available at that point we came into a position of being at a last resort and so by that our options could have been to acquire another property to renovate to meet his needs or to use the property that the city already owned yeah like i said it's a it's a feel-good case you know on behalf of this citizen i just know that a lot of money was spent too a lot of money was spent yes but necessary to meet his needs councilmember hawkins well and just a comment not really even a question just to add to this he went from being a renter to owning his own home and he in this home was an updated ada compliant home and i know being displaced moving is awful but this is you guys went over and beyond in this circumstance to try to figure this one out and i just really applaud you for doing that so thank you thank you and that is part of also part of the relocation act and display c is allowed to apply their relocation benefits to the purchase of a property and that 's what joe elected to do but all that being said sometimes people are not able to qualify for a loan just because they have the down payment so that's why i think this was still a a great story that he owns his own home absolutely yes thank you councilmember riggs okay so i just had a few questions and and i'm all for a feel good story and i'm glad that this gentleman is going to have a home but there's a few questions and that i still want answered about it and i'm just curious how many years did you say that he lived in the current house that that we he told me that he'd lived there for two years too so he had lived in denton somewhere else before then did the landlord retrofit the house that he was living in he worked with his current landlord to retrofit that house that's right okay okay so my one of my issues and we kind of discussed this earlier was that um for him to have a house the house was taken or from someone else who happens to live in my district and so i have i have kind of a bigger issue with a problem um with this so but that's all thank you may have put in thank you mayor but we're all members people up here all of us are and so when we're talking about the 27 000 then what we're talking about in terms of that extra money to get to that 175 000 what we're talking about is the cost of ramps to make the house accessible to mr rivas we're talking about cabinetry being moved to a level where he can actually operate in the house both in the kitchen and in the bathrooms we're talking about door widths wide enough because many houses have doors that are not wide enough for a wheelchair a standard wheelchair to get through my understanding is he's in a wheelchair most of the time yes sir that's right okay and then the cost of redoing a bathroom so that there's a roll-in shower and then the cost would also be all of those same costs to put the house in that condition we would have to provide that same amount of money to put the house back into the condition the rental property back into the condition that it was before so that's those are the numbers the the factors that account for that difference in the numbers that we're talking about is that correct yes sir that that accounts for quite a bit of it i want to say and i don't have the exact number but i want to say it was around 62 000 that we estimated that it would cost to to retrofit a house and then to bring it back to its current condition and as nicky had stated that was our estimated cost but there but we were unable to find anyone who was willing to do that work and so we were still in the position of on the one hand needing to get our project done building the hickory street substation and also finding him a place to live we couldn't simply say here's our number because some of the landlords weren't interested property management folks weren't interested in doing that and then the acquisition of the house at 1224 bonnie bray did we go through condemnation to to acquire that house or did was was that settled before we had to go to uh the the condemnation process uh galen gilm will correct me but i understand that we didn't go through any condemnation process for them so so an agreement was made between the seller and and the city as a buyer yes sir okay thank you council member johnson yeah so the i was going to ask a similar question maybe a little different on 1224 bonnie bray i think we heard from a singer from citizen from singer in our work session today that kind of going through a lot of the math and the how do we come to own the house at 1224 why did we buy the house at 1224 bonnie bray not meaning i know we bought it sure why did we buy it sure so the the quick answer and again i'll let galen gilm fill in more if if you like to but um we uh we have a transmission line that runs north and south on bonnie bray and that's currently run at 69 kv and so there's a certain width of easement that's required for that i think it's 37 and a half feet uh easement for that as we anticipate uh reenergizing that line at 138 kv we know that we'll need a bigger easement for that so we need more space for that and in our easement we can't have any structures underneath our easement so as we look forward to that happening we understand that that we'll need more easement and so that easement will whenever we reenergize that line at a higher voltage would cut into the house there on 1224 bonnie bray so it was a not imminent domain but a proactive we know this is going to happen or i mean i i wasn't on council at the time but i seem to remember there was a lawsuit happening with a bunch of people that lived up to down my rate. That's right so they approached us on that and do you want to tell the story? I'm Galen Gillum and uh work for DME the party that owned that home sued the city along with some other parties along that line uh about the case about the line being built to a 138 kv standard although it wasn't energized at 138 kv. So they sued us and then we settled by buying their home? Yes sir that was the suit and uh instead of uh making modifications to the home or whatever we just made an offer to buy the home outright and they accepted the offer after a bit of a negotiation. Got it okay thank you. Councilmember Roden. My question was just answered in the last two questions. Okay thank you. Councilmember Briggs. The modification is that the garage removal is that what you're talking about when you say modification? Yes ma'am that was that was the modification we made to the home it's not a total removal of the garage it winds up being several feet like kind of like a storage space but it still has a door that leads to the driveway so you're going through a door and then you're going through another door in the house that was the modification. Okay um so my other question is about taxes and insurance on the home um with the gentleman Mr. Revis will he since he is will he be able to afford that? Has that do we know how much that's going to cost? Larry Kallst with the city attorney's office. I was able to secure an attorney in Louisville who is a board certified real estate attorney by the name of Ruth Brock who's represented him in this transaction and they have went over all of it including his financial obligations pay taxes and insurance and he'll also get the benefit of having you know being handicapped his property taxes will be significantly less and it'll be his homestead as well but he's fully aware of those obligations and based on his condition of what he receives he'll be able to go he'll be able to make those payments as well and she went over the utilities with him so we've been over all of that with him ahead of this. Did he pay for the lawyer? Did he pay for her? No she did a pro bono on my request. Awesome thank you. Any other questions? All right uh that concludes agenda items E and F but we'll we've got some motions and seconders so we're going to take these one at a time so uh consent agenda item E which is now item for individual consideration. Mayor Pro Tem Gregory. Thank you Mayor. I move approval of item 4E. Council Member Johnson. Oh and with the with the substitute resolution as presented by our council at the workshop today. All right Council Member Johnson. Second. We have a motion and second for agenda item 4E. Let's vote on the board please. Agenda item uh we'll go oh we have uh it passes six to one. Agenda item 4F. Mayor Pro Tem. Move approval of 4F. Council Member Hawkins. I second. Let's vote on the board please for agenda item 4F. Carries 6-1. We'll now move on to agenda item M which is a consent agenda item M and that is I'll read the caption consider adoption of a city uh adoption of the ordinance of the city council of Denton authorizing city managers to execute professional services agreement for architectural design services in support of design of the new city of Denton fire station number four. And uh wanted to announce it Council Member Briggs is rec using herself and so uh do we have a staff presentation on this or was it pulled simply for for that opportunity. We do not have a staff presentation if there are questions we're certainly prepared to answer them but Ms. Briggs wanted to recuse herself and that's the reason it was pulled. Okay. Mayor Pro Tem. Thank you Mayor. I move approval of item 4. Yeah. Council Member Johnson. Second. We have a motion and a second. Let's vote on the board please. Motion carries 6-0. We'll go on to agenda item 4Z which is consider approval of a resolution of the city of Denton Texas authorizing the mayor to sign a letter of protest pursuant to 43 CFR section 31 2 0.1-3 regarding the proposed auction by the Bureau of Land Management. We do we have a presentation Mr. Manager just go to cards. Mr. Mayor you can either way you can go to the cards first or we can I can ask Mr. Dr. Banks if he would like to make a brief discussion of this to set the stage for that at your discretion. What's council I tell you what Council Member Johnson you had a request to speak. No I was just going to say that I asked to pull this because you said a couple weeks ago long before other cities had took action on this that you wanted to get out and state a position on behalf of the city that we didn't agree with this and so I just wanted to say you know I wanted to be pulled because you took action on this long before there was anything in the news or anything else and I wanted that to be discussed out in the open. Well I appreciate that. And so I don't need a staff presentation what we can do is we've got citizen comments so we'll hear the citizen comments and then if staff has any staff excuse me council has any comments or questions then we'll do that. Our first person to speak will be Jodi Ismert. If you'll come down and take your name and address and your time will begin. Jodi Ismert 819 Anna Street and I'm not quite clear whether or not you said that you've already sent a letter or not but I just wanted to recommend just because Highland Village has already done it and Lewisville has already sent a letter of protest and I was hoping that Denton could follow suit especially since we are the town that banned fracking. I realize it's not on the books anymore but it would be wonderful if Denton came together and sent a letter together our council in protest with the city. Okay Mayor Pro Tem. Mayor it might be appropriate then for the staff to at least explain in the briefest sense that this is a resolution authorizing you to sign the letter on behalf of the city. So we need that much of an information I think for the for the citizens so that they understand what we're doing. So do you need any more information than what you just enumerated? I don't know I think I think the city manager might be able to state it more clearly. Okay. Excuse me I think I'm going to defer to the city's attorney . Let her make a comment on that and I think you stated the issue. Certainly there is an item the council is about to consider and it is a resolution which would authorize the mayor to sign the letter that we have attached to this resolution and it is a letter of protest to the Bureau of Land Management with regard to the proposed leasing of the Lake Lewisville parcel. It does incorporate by reference the protests that we are aware have been filed by the city of Dallas the city of Highland village. I do understand from some of the council members that another city has in fact acted between the time we drafted this and tonight and perhaps another city is considering this tonight. So we are recommending that the council enact this resolution and allow the mayor to sign this letter and the council will indulge us. I will go ahead and add the actions of those other cities to the letter before we have the mayor sign it in the morning. This protest must be filed by midnight on Thursday so we are going to have to move quickly in the morning with the mayor's signature and make sure that we get this properly filed with the Bureau of Land Management so we've got a very very short period of time to accomplish this work. I'm leaving on a plane at 11 tonight and going to Hawaii so I won't be here. We'll get you to sign it tonight . Okay any questions for Jody? Is that is that helpful for you as far as just what we're doing and that's perfect that's exactly what I was hoping would happen okay all right thank you thank you. The next speaker is Michael Hennan please come down state your name and address and your time will begin. Michael Hennan, 724 Thomas Street here in Denton. I believe I signed a card indicating I did not wish to speak but that I you did it's a white card I messed up I'm sorry but why you're here if you want to share you're more than welcome. Yes but that I agree with the protest letter I think that it's a terrible idea to allow drilling and perhaps fracking and perhaps the attendant types of hydraulic injection and disruption that go around a body of water that supplies our drinking water and that we've seen recent items in the news about possible instability at the dam at Lewisville Lake and to the extent that any kind of drilling could impact that area I think would be perilous to people certainly downstream from the dam and certainly also for our drinking water supply. All right thank you I apologize for that Michael. Just wanted to get your input on it. The next speaker is Ron Seifert you'll come down state your name and address your time will begin. Ron Seifert, 1400 Moran Drive and this will be quick I just didn't know why this was pulled I just want to speak in favor of it signing but looks like that's going to happen but as an interesting add an antidote I don't know if you all know how these sales get started but it's industry driven industry just proposes to the BLM where they want leases and then BLM opens them and it's up to the people to intervene and say no actually we don't want that. So this wasn't the BLM on its own volition optioning off our water it was industry asking for those leases and BLM then does this and although it's called a protest this is just the regular process for y'all to intervene so it's a great idea I'm glad you all are doing it and shout out to anyone who lives in deep east Texas we're in the same auction 36,000 acres of our state forests are being auctioned off for fracking so if there's anyone in Nacogdoches region that you all know let them know they should also send letters too thank you. Thank you. Next speaker is Jennifer Lang please come down state your name and address your time will begin. Thank you Jennifer Lane 1526 Willowood Street this is a wonderful measure that you're taking I'm thrilled to see it. The issues surrounding Lewisville Lake in addition to the drinking water the dam as you know and as you've covered in your resolution I'm sure has been very much damaged and we saw all of that just last fall during all those heavy rains last last year and there was almost a panic about a crack in the dam that needs millions of dollars worth of repair might be worth finding out or as part of this process maybe there could be an offshoot that would examine that crack as to or those cracks as to whether they are frack quake related or something like this. I don't really have much to say about this since you guys have already decided to pass the resolution I'd love to see what it says and if there's anything missing. It's been pointed out that these letters that we've all been sent sending individually need to personalize it as much as possible so I guess that would be the same for Denton to talk very specifically in the resolution and in the protest why not what you know what Lewisville Lake is to us in the surrounding forests and so forth what we really do there aside not just from the drinking water which is clearly the most important thing but also the recreational area what people really are doing there and I hope we have a good groundswell of protest for that. Thank you. Any questions? Thank you. Thank you. Seeing no more cards Council Member Rodin. Thank you Mayor. I move approval of agenda item 4z. Council Member Wasney I 'm going to recognize the second then calling you. Yep Council Member Johnson. I'll second. All right Council Member Wasney. Well I did meet with our Congressman Michael Burgess yesterday and it involves two federal agencies. It's the Army Corps of Engineers because of the dam and we spoke at length about that but it's also the Bureau of Land Management and the leases. Drinking water is in the news these days. You can't read the news without understanding how critical I went through a post hurricane event in Florida where there were people in my county didn't have water for three weeks so their lives came to a screeching halt. So for all the states west of the Mississippi water is critical and we are no different. So the cities to date that have signed are the cities who receive water. City of Dallas, City of Highland Village, Flower Mound, Lewisville and tonight it'll be Denton but our drinking water is critical. Picture your life without it. It's just important and the dam is critical. Talk to everybody who is down river from that dam if we had a problem but Michael Burgess was contacting those two federal agencies on our behalf. Any other questions? We have a motion and a second. Let's vote on the board please. Motion carries 7-0. That completes our consent agenda. We'll move on to agenda item five which is items for individual consideration. Agenda item five a is consider adoption of ordinance of the city of Denton Texas to consider am ending permitted uses in sub chapter 35.5 of the Denton Development Code to replace semi-public halls, clubs and lodges with assembly halls, clubs and lod ges and the zoning uses in sub chapter 5. Thank you mayor. I'd like to ask Amy Bissett our director of development services to present this ordinance consideration for your discussion. Thank you mayor and city council members. What you're considering tonight is a change to the Denton Development Code regarding a specific and definition related to a use. We have discussed this before. We considered it on December 15th and at that time you gave some direction to us to go back and make some changes to our proposed definition and so we're here to bring this back to you tonight. Essentially what we're proposing is that we change semi-public halls, clubs and lodges to assembly halls, clubs and lodges as a zoning use in the DDC and to revise the definition for the use as well . The reason that we are making this proposal, it is staff initiated and it comes as a result of inquiries over the last several months for developers who are interested in a use that we have no definition for in the DDC today. Specifically we've had some inquiries for a farm with a wedding venue, a winery with a wedding venue, a quinceañera venue, a variety of things and they're all good uses that we'd like to find a way to accommodate in the appropriate land use categories but today there is no definition of that use in the Denton Development Code. So what we're proposing is to change the word semi-public hall to assembly hall and assembly hall is would be a use that's very similar in definition to the use that we do have in the DDC. It can include private events such as weddings, meeting and banquets and it usually includes food and catering, sometimes some live or recorded entertainment and alcohol sales for on- site consumption. So as we looked at the demand for being able to put a use like this somewhere in Denton, we analyzed the existing uses in the code and determined that the definition for semi-public halls, clubs and lodges matched most closely a structure facility owned or operated for special educational recreational purposes. However the part that didn't apply to most of these uses was the second part of that definition which is not primarily for profit or to render a service that is customarily carried on for gain. So as we looked at that use and a way to amend it to accommodate these specific requests, we proposed changing semi-public to assembly and propose eliminating the second half of that definition to make it a little more broad. So the proposed revised use of definition are assembly halls, clubs and lodges a structure facility owned or operated for special educational or recreational purposes. We are proposing for the most part that the use be allowed in the same zoning categories that it's allowed today but I do want to talk about a couple of changes to that based on the feedback that we received from you in December. Today semi-public halls, clubs and lodges are not allowed in RD5 zoning but are allowed in RC and we would propose the same. The primary difference that I want to discuss tonight is the when the use is allowed in residential zoning districts the current use the way it's written in the DDC today it is written or it is allowed in all residential zoning districts although your neighborhood residential zoning districts it's only allowed with a specific use permit. So in other words it has to come before the city council for you to determine that it's compatible with the surrounding land uses in order for it to be allowed to move forward and you can place conditions on it such as limitations of size and things of that nature. However what we what we heard from you all and heard from the public in December was that you preferred to see this use not allowed in your denser residential zoning districts period whether that is with an SUP or without an SUP. So our proposal tonight is that it would be allowed with an SUP and NR1 and NR2 but not allowed at all in the more dense zoning districts of NR3 NR4 and NR6. A specific use permit is would be necessary for NR1 and NR2 and in that case it is not a use that's automatically permitted by right but it had it may be permitted within a zoning district if it meets certain conditions meets approval criteria and you have conditions placed on it that make it compatible with the surrounding land uses. NR2 is we have about 7,700 acres of NR2 zoning in the city of Denton. I want to point out the exhibit that shows where those are primarily located. 2,600 of those acres are undeveloped or agriculture today which those are filled in in green. You can see that the NR2 zoning category this was a this was a category that was used when we rezoned a city initiated rezoning that was really to have a rural place holder there. So these are the outlying areas in Denton that are mostly appropriate for uses like this more rural and less developed and again I want to remind you that it would still be considered on a case-by-case basis by a specific use permit only. We propose no changes to our downtown urban core areas that is the current use is permitted here and we propose the same and the same in our community mixed use zoning districts and our regional mixed use zoning districts, employment centers and our industrial centers. The Planning and Zoning Commission does recommend approval of this and staff recommends approval as well and I'm happy to answer any questions that you have. We do have a couple questions let me get my screen refreshed. Councilmember Rodin. Thank you Mayor. Amy could you go back to the slide it was one of the first zoning district slides where you talked about RD5 and RC. I'm still trying to try and be consistent with what we're doing where you're trying to kind of say what this isn't permitted in the high density area but it's permitted in the lower density area so we allow it for NR1 NR2. RD5 in my mind as I've been to these sorts of wedding venues around the country that seems to be the ideal location you 've got swaths of land there's some picture x landscape maybe a mountain or something which we don't have in town. Why are we recommending not approving it in that category just to be consistent with what we're doing across the board? Well I think that and that's primarily why is when we originally came before you with this proposal to to change the definition of the use we weren't proposing any changes in and the where what zoning districts it was allowed in and what what we heard was the concern over the denser and neighborhood residential zoning districts and maybe we had the discussion about RD5 and we missed that and if that's the case then you could certainly give direction to be allowed in RD5. It doesn't give you from a planning perspective any heartburn to allow it in that category. Okay my other question might be more appropriate as a legal question so feel free to chime in if you'd like it but it goes back to my and I appreciate kind of the layer of protection that SUP provides. I still have a little bit of concern as to how I've grown to understand when a council can deny a request for an SUP. Understand that they have to qualify that with certain reasons. I guess my specific question is this if the planning department comes and they recommend approval for SUP and the city council chooses to deny it for whatever reason we decide and we state that as part of our motion versus a scenario in which the planning department recommends denial and we choose to follow that lead and deny the SUP from a legal perspective are we on safer ground in the latter case than the former case? Let me answer it by telling you how we look at the specific use process. When we look at these issues I wouldn't from a legal perspective I wouldn't say it exactly like I'm seeing this I would say it more to the effect of as you consider a specific use permit the use is allowed under conditions and the council as they look at those conditions would be able to deny the specific use permit if the council determined that there were no conditions under which the use could proceed in other words you couldn't mitigate against the impact by the conditions that you would attach in those circumstances. That is helpful and maybe part of the problem is that my rearing and SUP thinking came about through gas well permit projects and that's a difficult learning grounds there sure no I appreciate that thank you. Mayor Pro Tem. Well and since we've slept once or twice since we've had this discussion before I recall in our discussion before that that we said that uh it's likely that an application might not meet the SUP requirements uh for some of the neighborhood some of the zoning areas because it would require a certain amount of parking and our zoning might not allow that much parking because we require so much of the property to be permeable so it's not paved it's not hard surface. If you'd go back though to the slides um never nr1 nr2 that that's nr1 means one house per acre right? nr2 means two houses per acre so then if you'd go back to the slide before that it would seem to me that that either allowing it under rd5 what is rc? um rural commercial. Thank you. Rural commercial I could see where it's permitted but um I would I would feel comfortable uh just amending this to to to put an SUP condition under rd5 because it seems more consistent with what we had with what we discussed before in terms of uh not wanting these kinds of venues in a in a really tight neighborhood but but in a more rural setting especially I'm thinking about some of the areas that we've recently annexed or we may be annexing in in the near future where these kinds of venues actually are located so I would be more comfortable with either putting permitted under rd5 or an SUP under that and I would be curious to hear what other council members say as we get close to a vote. Council member Hawkins. Thank you Mayor. Amy um I I appreciate you guys trying to clean this up and I'm I understand how it's been difficult to try to figure out where these places go and I think in the beginning of your presentation you said farms or ranches right and that that totally makes sense to me going you know to an assembly hall in a place like that if there's a neighborhood that is nr2 I'm just trying to walk understand this all the way because I don't know if I'm all the way comfortable yet they were applied to become an assembly hall in an nr2 neighborhood. I know that they would have to get an SUP and then our I know Dalton just brought it up a little bit what kind of parking would have to happen like what I'm trying to adjust before I get all the way comfortable with this with them being able to sell alcohol and be a business and disrupt a neighborhood kind of what regulations would we we have a minimum and maximum parking requirement based on the type of use and the square footage of the use and we would calculate the required parking based on the the size of the venue and the number of the people that the venue would hold and the square footage of the venue so for example in nr2 if you wanted to mitigate traffic nuisance which would be one of the things that you would want to mitigate you could put a limitation on the size of the venue and or the number of the occupant load in a way that would keep that that traffic down to a place that would be manageable for the neighborhood did that answer your question kind of I'm this still just makes me a little nervous I know I know what we are trying to do to accomplish this but what makes me nervous is all of a sudden there's an nr2 neighborhood and you know it's this nice neighborhoods people have saved up all their lives a retirement home and all that and then a home down the street all of a sudden has turned into an assembly hall and there's cars parked up and down the road and they get an sup and that's what i'm trying to figure out in my mind how does that happen well in order for you to allow an sup or approve an sup we would have to be able to demonstrate that the applicant was sufficiently mitig ating for any nuisance the traffic being one of those so we would have to demonstrate that the traffic is low enough that it's not a nuisance to the neighborhood and if we couldn't demonstrate that then or if the applicant wouldn't accommodate that then we would not support an sup and when an applicant is applying for an sup notices go out and if a certain number of notices return back and they're not in favor a super majority vote that's correct 40 percent that's correct i'm sorry what is it 40 percent 40 20 percent 20 okay all right i think that's it for now but thank you councilmember wassing so i'm trying to understand where and why this has come forward and you said recent this recent proposal is to accommodate functions in non-commercial areas and i think that may be one of the linchpins in terms of trying to figure out because right now you know if you're going to serve alcohol and play loud music chances are you're you're in a commercial area where things are expected i'm just squeamish about the before and the after i don't want to open a pandora's box and wish we hadn't allowed any changes to what we already have so i'm i'm just not i'm not sold either i think i heard a couple of different questions in there and the first one is what's precipitating this it is it is our role as development services to look at the uses within the ddc on a regular basis and when we're consistently seeing a trend for something that is wanting to locate in denton and we have no definition for it we have no ability to facilitate it if we'd like to have that use in denton specifically i think that you know a farmer a winery in a rural area with a wedding venue is a place making kind of venue that we would like to have in denton when it's in the appropriate location and but today we have no definition for that use and therefore we can say nothing but no and so we look at that from a staff perspective and say okay this is a desirable use under the right circumstances for our community how do we define it and how do we put limitations on it so that it is only in those right circumstances and i hear what you're saying about non-commercial areas i think that the example that a couple of things that we've looked at one of them being the clubhouse at ropes and ranch and a desire to have a a gathering place for your community that is appropriate in size and scale for the community but it would be one of those it would be considered on a case by case basis whether it was appropriate for the location and only in more rural zoning designations in fact ropes and wouldn't even qualify does that answer or help address the question councilmember johnson thank you mayor um so having just helped a goddaughter get married off i learned a lot about this business one of them is it's the number one business to get into in this country right now is the number one demand out there trying to find the venue where you can do a wedding reception on a saturday afternoon or evening is impossible she got married in denton her reception was in carolton because there we couldn't find anything and they're incredibly expensive they're super nice facilities and they must pay a lot of taxes and sales tax because it's unbelievable how much you pay to have a reception for 100 people what struck me was because we tried everything oakmont country club denton country club that's really what the clubhouse at a country club is right but you got houses right next to it but there's gotta i just want to make sure that we're doing the things that mitigate it because the the most used one for if you're getting married in denton right is milestone well right now they're booked like when we were trying to book it which was about nine months ago they're booked on saturdays for over a year and the next closest one was up in obri which was a beautiful place but you end up on a gravel road before you get to it which is not what you want 150 people driving to so i'm i'm big time in favor of us getting more of these in our city because i think there's demand for it they're very nice facilities and they're and they're you know very well kept i don't recall being the one where the music was playing outside but so a couple questions because it strikes me as it's really the same thing if you're oakmont country club or denton country club well denton doesn't have houses right next to it most country clubs do we would never allow them to use on street parking to account for their parking requirement right it's a private development that's correct so that concern would be eliminated i'm guessing a noise ordinance would apply in whatever the zoning is right that's correct so if they're in nr1 or nr2 whatever the noise ordinance is for that residential neighborhood yes would apply yes right and then lastly while we did go to one that was a converted office building which was in the office area most of these people want things that have as you said nice views and so on so to me i would anticipate if if these are going to land anywhere in an nr1 or nr2 it's going to have to be something that's like on the outskirts where they've got some land and open space and that's correct and that's where most of the nr1 and nr2 is located but we we would be able to require them in the sup to mitigate any bright lights any sound any they'd have to do all their parking on their own property that is correct they'd have to meet the landscape requirements so if you're going to build a big parking lot to meet the landscape requirement in an nr2 or nr1 zone you got to have a lot of extra green space right that's correct okay i'm good then thank you councilmember hawkins greg just asked the same question thank you i'm good okay you bet we do have some cards too wishing to speak any other questions for staff thank you thank you jennifer lane i think i saw her leave she did not ask any support for opposition so i'll just read her name jennifer lane 1526 willow wood street deborah armantar i saw you trying to sneak out i was just asking a question about when the comments came at this part um thank you at deborah armantar 2003 misty wood lane um and i i just wanted to express just kind of generally um my my feelings about this this category of issue as it comes up again and again before council and uh and i just wanted to express um my my concern about the ways in which these um hypothetical uh businesses from outside um are given so much consideration uh disproportionately in regards to our local businesses that we already have here and most of all our our residents um i wish that there was a i know this is not the time to make changes in this area um i wish that there was a better notification system um i i personally went around to these some of these semi these rural areas um and to personally notify people about the gas plants it was so easy i just printed off some flyers and knocked on doors um and people were so grateful uh and you know it it really wasn't that much work um just me and a few other people i wish there were more people being notified that these kinds of changes were being considered um i think you know those of you who are asking the questions about the about residents um and you know i i just want to say my feelings about the um special use permits and planning and zoning in this city um i i love denton and i know you all love denton and that's why you're all doing what you do um and we have to be careful because the denton that we love could turn into something different um before we know it uh you know it will happen gradually but it might be one day we turn around and and see that um we've spent too much time welcoming new things to denton instead of expanding and growing the wonderful things that we already have um and you know i think that one of the most wonderful things we already have in addition to our local businesses um is our our our residences our communities the places where our children play um and these these these things are really precious and uh that's all okay thank you thanks uh jodie ismert please come down state your name and address your time will begin jodie ismert 819 anna street and um i just want to say i don't even understand why this is being considered at all to be honest um it's it just seems like a crazy type of change that we would do to our city i can understand rule very rural but nr2 actually includes district four which essentially you know includes neighborhoods people you know who live in neighborhoods people move to residential neighborhoods because they want a sense of peace they want some quiet they don't want to live by bars or wedding halls all receiving traffic all day from people having weddings they don't want this i don't want this i i want to live in my home and have a certain level of peace and quiet at when i am in my home with my daughter teaching her whatever else playing in the yard i don't want to have to worry about extra traffic coming down the street while she's playing ball up front i this is crazy to me i mean i don't understand why this is even on the table and i can understand wanting you know wedding halls and things of that nature in town but we have got to come back to the drawing board and figure out a better way to do this there are ways to consider individual individual companies who want to come in and create a wedding hall you've got to to consider those individually you can't just disrupt an entire neighborhood of people who specifically move there so that they could live in a uniform residential neighborhood if people wanted to live by assembly halls they would have moved to the city i mean that's if they want to live by bars if they want to live by wedding halls if they want to live by the noise they're going to move into the city directly in next to restaurants next to the noise they're not moving into sub the suburbs which that is part of the zoning that's impacted by ecter by montecito those homes sit on montecito they sit on three acres of land and that is definitely an nr2 i an sup is not sufficient people should not have to worry about receiving a mailer that they may or may not read and then have an assembly hall down the road from them i i really i highly highly recommend that you guys go back to the drawing board figure out a different way to zone this figure out what you can do because this is this is truly unacceptable that's all i have a question councilmember hawkins yeah i share some of those same concerns like when you said montecito i mean that's all my district and even in i live in southridge and on my street there are very few vacant lots but there's a vacant lot and so i was wondering as soon as we pass this you know is there an assembly hall that can be built there but amy maybe i don't know how this would work here but a little bit later i want to get it addressed you know could an assembly hall go on montecito could it one go in southridge i from what i'm understanding with parking restrictions and that sort of thing it could not so we'll try to clear that up here in a in a second current parking restrictions but anything that changes unintended consequences if somebody doesn't know about this particular item and then they change parking restrictions for something completely different and then all of a sudden you have people coming in and changing the dynamic of the entire town right and neighborhoods okay okay any other questions councilmember hawkins okay seeing no further questions thank you you bet next speaker will be lucas hall if you'll come down and state your name and address please my name is lucas hall 815 crest oak place in denton okay can we all agree that this is essentially about allowing commercial uses in residential zones okay because that's exactly what it is now at a just a basic sense of transparency and fairness if we're going to allow a lot to be primarily or exclusively commercial use that lot should be zoned commercial if we're going to keep a lot zoned residential and then allow it to be commercial use but from the outside say someone looking around the zoning map online on the city website for instance it will remain nr2 or nr1 but then surprise there's a commercial development there i think that there's something innately deceptive about that frankly a commercial use a primarily commercial use on attractive land that is zoned residential that doesn't that doesn't mesh with common common sense okay um this there's a an aspect here and and i do appreciate by the way that staff went back to the drawing board crossed out the denser nr3 4 6 i appreciate that in fact uh i i'm not personally affected by this i i live in an nr3 area in my whole neighborhood is like that but i'm here to object on behalf of my my neighbors south on the southern part of town who don 't realize that this is being considered i strongly urge you to reject this proposal as currently written specifically because of the option the scp option in nr1 and nr2 i think those should have ends under them and i i would ask you to challenge the staff to go back to the drawing board and consider the the toolbox available to them i don't know if it's possible to grant a variance in a in a residential lot that would allow this type of use but i do know there is an option available rezoning and um i can't say i fully researched it but just to cut off the response that that would be an example of spot zoning i think the prevailing case it's a texas supreme court case city of far v tippet and in that the court upheld an ordinance uh by that uh by which a large rural tract that wasn't that was kind of there was residential on one side but mostly rural around it uh it upheld a rezoning by the city on the basis that it was not spot zoning for a multi for a variety of reasons but commercial use it needs to be it needs to be a commercial uh zoned or else we're not there's not a common sense of notice to anyone who might be interested uh in that regard thank you thank you don hammes jr dan i'm sorry dan hammes jr i'm sorry dan hammen jr 2002 west hickory street um this is a major change to the dentin development code and um it's really a shame that there's so few people coming out to speak about it tonight but it's difficult to get people riled up about zoning i have a character in a book who couldn't galvanize his neighborhood um in a zoning dispute and he realizes the truth finally and says it repeatedly throughout the book zoning bores the blank out of people okay we understand that but this is really an important matter before you today allowing a for-profit business to operate in in our and one and in our two areas is an encroachment into our neighborhoods that should not even be considered anywhere close to appropriate councilman johnson um during the december 15th council meeting you were on the right track i believe by asking that all in our areas be considered non-permitted use areas if this ordinance was going to pass um your instinct i believe was right at that time um councilman gregory at the same meeting you said that you've been driving down lakeview boulevard and thought what a nice place to have a wedding what i'm thinking after that as you drive down the street is but i don't think their neighbors will be too happy about this um what about the parking what about the noise by the way those are some of the same concerns you've heard for years from residents close to the wildwood end um here's what i don't understand this all seems to be taking place due to one person who wanted to make their west denton nr2 property into a wedding venue that's what was stated by staff during an october 21st planning and zoning meeting um evidently two more businesses have caught wind of the this potential change and so i'm a little concerned about how many others are going to start jumping in here since it started with one um i believe it's a fallacy that the sup is a failsafe process that will inhibit any real dangers to our neighborhoods the sup process has been deeply followed for years and i've spent too many hours fighting lousy staff recommended sup's my neighborhood had to fight for a year to have a frater nity house moved from across the street from my house with planning staff approval the fraternity thought the sup process was merely a formality and moved on in and planning staff stayed aligned through the entire process with the fraternity that was eight years ago and some staff members still remain who thought the fraternity would be just fine in our neighborhood neighborhoods should not be put in a position to defend our turf against these staff approved encroachments as homeowners as taxpayers we rely on you to protect the integrity of our neighborhoods to protect the majority instead of the one that's now grown to three who want to make their property a profit center question councilmember johnson oh okay i'm sorry okay thank you thank you dan jennifer lane you you had yeah you you weren't here when i called the car so i wanted to give you an opportunity come down state your name and address your time will begin thank you jennifer lane 1526 willowwood i'll be quick um i think that this should be publicized and discussed broadly throughout the city before any action is taking you know we have 120 000 citizens here at least and we and you know the vast majority don't even know that this is being discussed so i would take the time to you know i believe that a suggestion was made that agenda items uh you know sort of a redacted version of the agenda appear in the sunday paper things like this we need to move in this direction in my opinion to get more people involved and more people talking these things over with all of you and deciding how it should be done that's it thanks okay any questions thank you all right i have no more cards uh there were some questions councilmember johnson so i just i want to make sure i may have another question for amy but i was looking at our the allowable uses in nr1 and nr2 well actually all of our in our zonings and i'm i'm kind of struck by but don't know me about these venues is that in order to park them in order to have any amount of green space just i think i'm getting some was there a car turned in um it's it's up here okay there's a car go ahead i'm sorry i think we just had we missed a speaker well you can i can i can wait okay somebody wants to speak there i saw you i saw you take it after come on you bet state your name you bet come on i might have just missed it i apologize for that sir are you i'm don long i'm with the merck and leisure okay mr long your card says agenda item 6a which is a public hearing and we are on agenda item 5a are we are we on the right one i may not may not be okay yeah the one you're looking for is the shady oaks expansion of electric power distribution okay we haven't gotten to that yet so it'll be coming up you bet you bet i'm sorry you bet no problem no problem we'll be sure and call you thank you sir i'm sorry councilmember johnson go ahead that's okay um so what i was thinking about on these venues is your your your high use is typically going to be on a on a friday night or a saturday night at least that was our experience so i started thinking about okay nr1 and nr2 where are they what are they what developments do we have that have one lot or two lots per acre where there is land that would make sense for one of these i don't think there 's much and then i started looking at the zoning the things that are allowed in nr1 and nr2 with sup's adult or child daycares so we've been there with a lot of daycares that have i mean easily 100 150 kids in them so you've got every morning every evening monday through friday lots of cars in and out elementary schools obviously we want our schools to be you know in our neighborhoods but again when you when i think about traffic there's a lot of traffic every morning every afternoon as i think about where these things make sense i tend to get comfortable with the sup provided that that the the noise ordinance is in place and i think we've heard that it is the parking requirement well you're going to have to have gosh you're going to have to have for one of these things to make sense i'm guessing you got to have 100 150 parking spaces so at least you know the the ones that we visited maybe 100 parking spaces so then to meet the green space requirement i think you're talking about tracks of land that are probably five six seven i don't know eight acres so for me i can get comfortable provided that the sup requirement has enough teeth in it to where setbacks from any existing residential use are great enough light mitigation the noise ordinance is in place so you don't have an issue with outdoor music but but struck me on these is you're really talking about a very small portion of the week where where it would likely be in use if it's a wedding venue and that's really what i'm thinking about on these so to me i can get comfortable with the nr1 and nr2 after seeing the map of where we have it so the example of monacea though well that's that's my neighborhood where there's no place but you've got the methodist church right at the end of the street button up against the neighborhood we have a lot of cars in and out a lot of traffic in and out on the weekend but it seems to work fine i think my issue would be if if it could go on a smaller tract and allowed outdoor music that was disruptive i would have a problem with that i don't think i have a problem as long as we've got you know enough teeth in the sup um to to make sure that any residential structure that's close to it is is protected in terms of noise which again i go back to country club club houses very similar kind of setup but there shouldn't be any allowance for parking reductions or variances for less parking or use of city or any on street parking and i think as long as we covered all that in the sup i could get comfortable with it council member rodin i do have a question for amy a couple questions i guess one question has to be and again i'm trying to think about our discussion last time and some of the suggestions which some of them were on the the fly so they weren't great i bet that we're trying to get at a concept one one option i guess would have been to just create a new commercial land use category and so that you could have kept this semi public concept of the non-profits that are permitted in nr1 and nr2 currently correct and then just created a separate line for for-profit public halls or assemblies and things like that is that something you all considered i mean it might be a clean way to in my mind it's a clean way to not allow this particular use in nr1 and nr2 but allowed in these other categories that we seem to be there seems to be more comfort with with you just create a whole new category had that been considered and why is why is that not a good idea well we did consider that and that we heard that as one of the ideas that was floated out i think that the the challenge for us is having clear definitions that don't create ambiguity and if you have two uses that are essentially identical in every way except one is non-profit and one is for-profit that that's not real clean in terms of of the code amendment itself and so what we looked at was you know what we heard your concerns to be and the the challenge that we have today is that that use is allowed today with an sup in all of those neighborhood zoning districts so making this change to where it's not allowed at all in nr3 nr4 or nr6 is actually more restrictive than right the use as it is today totally get that and i i guess it leads to my second question and um because i think mr holt brought up an interesting and i think a good point as it relates to notice to somebody checking out zoning categories in the neighborhood i don't i don't get that if somebody has applied for an sup to allow a use that that gets tagged on any city map or anything that i would look at publicly um does it that you're aware of and i think i think the hang up a little bit is that commercial distinction and i get it it's a difficult distinction but non-profit versus profit could very well signify a more intense use of something like this which is why i'm trying to figure out a way to get it out of nr1 and nr2 unless um because if you have a church if you have an assembly hall of some other sorts um my guess is there's a sign outside i don't know if there's a sign outside in this case at least if i'm driving through the neighborhood or something maybe there is you might want to advertise so that's my concern i guess i'll leave it up to my council colleagues to chime in as to how they think the best way to go forward is council member hawkins thank you mayor i was kind of thinking the same thing kevin uh the the thing that keeps getting me hung up is the for profit part of this even when i know a day care is for profit but it feels different it shuts down early it's not operating in that 2 a.m something like that an elementary school a church that's very different and can can you just walk me through why this would not be allowed in in my neighborhood in southridge if somebody were to apply for this an assembly hall in southridge why wouldn't it be allowed well i think southridge is fairly well developed at this point in time and so any available land in order for it to accommodate all of the requirements that we would have for them it would have to be a very small facility to start with just to be able to get all the parking spaces and the square footage of the facility on there the physical constraints of the land would mean that you're not talking about a significantly sized facility that would generate a lot of traffic if you had one that was trying to go into the neighborhood they would have to prove that they were not creating a traffic nuisance or a noise nuisance or a light nuisance so if you had 200 cars driving down southridge on a daily basis that would create a challenge for the neighborhood that would be a condition not met for a specific use permit how about a street like carmel or up around that neighborhood carmel or monocito the the the certainly there's more space there so a venue of a larger size could apply to go there and potentially accommodate all the cars in terms of parking they would have to also mitigate for the traffic coming down the street though and any issues that meant that may cause in terms of mobility and and things of that nature so it would still be one of those where they would have to prove that they were not creating an issue with the neighborhood so what does that what does that mean i'm not trying to grill you here i just don't sure so let's say that i mean the lots you know four or five acres something like that so something can fit on there the parking's right and they so they say they're going to have 150 guests what's the next step what would they say you can't drive that many cars down the road that's a traffic jam or there's a traffic study we would you know our engineering department would look at traffic flow turn lanes stop lights what wouldn't we need to do to actually be able to accommodate that amount of traffic compared to what the traffic count is on that street today and if it creates a burden then they would have to show that they mitigate that burden somehow okay all right thanks Amy councilmember Briggs so i i have not heard a compelling argument tonight to vote to change the code here we have citizens that have expressed uncomfortableness with the sqp process and so i think it is councils um it is our it is our right we need to protect our neighborhoods we need to start doing that thank you mayor pro tem thank you so a couple more questions um because i'm trying to see how this applies and i i just went to the woman's club website the woman's club is a really nice looking building it looks like a home it could probably fit into a forest ridge or to a south ridge or to montecito but they say in there that uh that that will accommodate 125 guests they have weddings there they have other kinds of events there 125 guests so if we were going to put that if somebody whether it's an outside person uh business or some local person who wants to start a business and by the way there are a lot of wedding venues uh around town not in town but around town north of town towards between here and aubrey that are put in by local folks so let's say they wanted to put in uh in a in our one a building almost exactly like the woman's club building it will accommodate 125 people probably they wouldn't do that because it wouldn't pay but if they were going to do just 125 people how many parking spots would that trigger you it would depend on the square footage of the building and the number of seats essentially if it was a seated it seats 125 seats 125 so one to four one to four one to four so you'd be you would need 30 parking spaces approximately so 30 parking spaces and 30 parking spaces uh there's it's over 100 square feet per parking space i believe uh if there's another staff person that wants to get up and help me walk through this it really it would depend on their specific application the part the parking requirement calculation is based on a number of things but for simplicity purposes we could say that it'd be approximately 30 to 35 spaces under your scenario 35 spaces so um all right that's that's giving me an idea because i i doubt well i suspect that there is enough parking uh for the woman's club building because they they kind of share parking with the the amily faller branch of the library at night so so it doesn't overlap very much but then then if it was an uh an sup for a neighborhood residential one or neighborhood residential two then the the coverage of that lot by the building and by the parking that's required would have to be less than 50 percent of the total coverage of the property or what are our rules for that i'm going to have to ask for some staff help on that miss julie wyatt's going to come up here and join me good evening you've been you've been here all day just waiting for just to answer a question okay um the maximum lot coverage for for nr1 and nr2 is 30 percent and that includes building and any impervious area so any drive aisles sidewalks parking area be 30 percent so all right it never worked it would never work so they would it would be very unlikely unless it was an exceedingly large lot in an nr1 or an nr2 that it would ever fit and that they would ever even qualify for an sup that's correct and that's why in the exhibit that shows the nr2 zoning areas in in our city we highlighted the ones in green that are and it's not displayed right now i'm sorry and that are actually undeveloped today where there would be a real opportunity for somebody to have a venue there council member johnson well so i've been sitting over here doing some math and and thinking about thinking about well i happen to be in in the real estate business so i'm just sitting here thinking about okay how much land would they really have to buy and what are they really going to spend on a facility like this right so just say you're going to build a 10,000 foot facility which is awfully small for a wedding reception venue but let's just say 10,000 feet um you'd have to have a minimum of three acres i mean bare bare minimum that's assuming a very small parking load and that's assuming a 30 coverage right which would mean everything will lay out perfectly so then i start thinking about okay because because we my challenge is i get i get caught up in my emotion about neighborhoods i live in a neighborhood i want to protect my neighborhood i want to protect all neighborhoods right so i'm thinking about jo ey's because somebody build one of these on carmel in my mind i go would they right somebody's going to go spend three million bucks four million bucks to go build one of these things well you're not going to stick it on an interior street inside a neighborhood because nobody will ever see you and who's going to come right like come have your wedding reception right in the middle of this neighborhood with a bunch of houses so let's start looking at where's our nr1 and nr4 i mean nr1 and nr2 which would be the only places you get an sup these are a lot of green space so to me it's i feel like we 're getting caught up thinking about a neighborhood or our neighborhood i'm thinking about where would one of these go and it seems to me like where we're talking about nr1 and n r2 but where they're going to go is not in the middle of a neighborhood it's going to be it may be on the side of a neighborhood right but you got to have good access for people to get in and out if you're going to have 200 people coming in and out on a saturday afternoon they're not people aren't going to rent your space if they 've got to drive down a narrow street inside a neighborhood so i'm just sitting here wondering if if kind of back to kevin 's comment i don't think non-profit or for-profit does it because we have non-profit lodges today that sell alcohol that play music elks lodge american legion you know they sell alcohol they're non-profit so i don't think that distinction does it to me i think it's all about is this a combat compatible use based on the specific piece of property they want to put it on i don't know how else you do it without an sup to me i mean but but if you look at we've got nr1 and r2 and rd5 that's all of our rural land that's zoned basically so i don't know what other zoning classes you put it in i just think the when we talk about neighborhoods we tend to think of ours which are very dense and i don't i don't know in r1 or in r2 that feels dense council member wasney i think it just comes down to we're asking for commercial functions in non-commercial areas and based on all of the discussion that council has had tonight i think this needs to go back to a work session for a more in-depth discussion to try to figure out councilman roten had a solid idea about maybe a new commercial classification but i think it's it's clear as mud right now and i i just think we need more time i think we need more discussion dentin is growing dentin is changing and we just need to be really careful about what we change what we add what we subtract and just because one or two or three people have come to dentin to say i want well sometimes it's okay to say no wait and so for me that would be my position tonight to say do these people know we're still trying to figure it out and let this council make a decision but make a really good decision after more discussion i'm gonna go ahead and speak because yeah it must be late because i'm getting frustrated we've been talking about this for an awful long time and i think we started repeating ourselves um i'm okay i'm i'm it's a challenge for me to take it as it's as it's written um because i do agree that i think that these are these are for-profit their commercial uses and yes we do have we have do have halls churches we've got american legion but american legion is out there on spencer road there's nothing around it um the ones that are existing now i think are the non-profit type churches and so forth i could be okay with this if um if we just took it out of nr1 and r2 altogether i mean this this is an incremental approach we've got people coming in if they want to do this they can go out and find a place to do it that meets that zone that meets people uh it's it's not in a neighborhood they're not going to want a neighborhood because it's going to need to be three acres i would probably also uh create a different definition so that what we already have on the books semi-private semi -public halls clubs and lodges which are allowed in the ones that we have that are non-profit use and then you could just simply call it something else uh you're wanting to put in i forgot what we're substit uting something halls what's the first word assembly assembly halls um and whether you want to do clubs or lodges and then just whatever that definition is is just put it in the r the rd5 i believe the rc and then all those other commercial uses i don't quite frankly i don't want to go back and deal with this again we've been talking about this for two i mean three or four hours and i'm sorry i'm just i'm going to take a break after this too because i'm about to ready to bang my head against the dais but that's what i would be okay with is obviously i think we could separate it out we could create another definition for what we're trying to achieve which is a for-profit whatever you want to call it a public assembly we could leave off clubs and lodges or if you want to put the i understand about the ambiguity so you'd need to really make it tight just put it in the ones that you have but in any of the residential ones we just leave it out for now because there is a rezoning capability if somebody finds it on the edge then they can come in and council gets a chance to look at it planning and zoning gets a chance to look at it you got two public hearings and the and and so that's a good incremental approach with with a problem that's not so pressing so that that's what i would recommend is something along those lines which i think we could do here tonight it's simply a matter of changing the zoning classification changing the definition for the one leaving the one the same for the non-profit leaving everything the status quo as it is adding just another little verbiage of a definition and then just putting it in all the the uses that you defined except for the residential that's what i really feel ornery i should make a motion madam city attorney but i won't because she will scold me so that those are my thoughts on this so anyway council member hawkins amen i wish you would have said that an hour ago well well i want to give everybody a chance to speak uh mayor pro tem you are uh motioned as a mover yeah well i'm going to float this out and see what happens i'm going to move approval of the recommendation uh with the following modifications uh nr1 no nr2 no not permitted and rd5 uh permitted with an sup that's my motion council member rodin just to clarify the motion it doesn't include some of the recommendations of creating a new zoning or a new uh classification as was flo ated just to correct you're doing it as proposed with just taking it out of nr1 taking out of nr2 and putting it in rd uh rd5 yeah okay i second that i probably won't be supporting that the only reason is is because i think when we've changed the definition then that means that some of the things that are currently uh the definition of that we currently have that are located in nr1 nr2 nr3 you now have a legal non- conforming use that pops up and so if i'm correct in that um is that is that correct madam city attorney that if we let's say we have a church currently right now that's in an nr1 or nr2 and we change the definition that the church would still be that assembly hall the church is going to say it's not okay okay all right okay it's not all right i'll have to think about it uh it's late but we have a motion to second council member rodin you have another request to speak or it was it was on here okay council member hawkins i just want to be clear before we vote here okay um what you just stated mayor i thought that was well said and i was kind of willing to vote on that and what mayor pro tem just uh is that the was that the same thing no it was not the same thing no were you attempting to do the same thing say the same thing i i thought that was pretty close to the same thing let no no that was the question you asked council member rodin yeah i said there would be two definitions one that's currently the way it is and the second there'd be a new one which is just assembly halls which would be in the zoning classifications that you just stated in other words everything stays the same status quo with as it is now with semi-public halls and all that staying in all the classifications they're in we would just create another definition says assembly halls that are whatever the rest of that definition was and they would be in the zoning classifications that you just stated well yeah that was my intent um and that probably uh is too messy to try to do from the dais um so um let me let me withdraw my motion and just ask staff to to to prepare a different if if everybody else is comfortable with that same kind of a notion of what you'd said uh just just prepared the uh the ordinance to indicate that we're going to have assembly halls and they're going to be allowed where they were we've been talking about and they're not going to be allowed in any of the residential they're going to be allowed in in rd5 and in all those other areas they would be allowed in rd5 with an sup and then all the other areas as indicated so maybe we just need to ask for for a postponement until um until there's a good spot on the council meeting because it's probably going to take another hour uh council member hawkins you have a question to speak well if that were the case could we just put this on consent or something or do we got to do this again sure how are we okay well and if somebody wants to pull it they there's a motion oh i'm sorry council member rodent well i will point out before making my motion the what you recommended actually dalton is actually more protective of neighborhoods so anyone who's concerned about that just removing this out of permitted use in nr one and nr two actually means you can't have any sort of these sorts of things proper non-profit in those categories and so if if that's what our concern is your original motion uh actually captures that and more um because if the mayor's suggestion was leave status quo status quo which means all these non- profit assembly halls can maintain across the board and then our three and our four and our five all these sorts of categories so yours was much more limited with so i guess it depends on the thing i still think probably the wiser approach because is to pursue a new classification because there might be unintended consequences because you're right not churches but there are going to be non-conforming uses as a result of that my question for city secretary given what's been city it is attorney given that what has been proposed is it your suggestion that you'd rather not write this on the dais and that you'd prefer there to be another week of of draft manship councilman councilman i i always hesitate to write things on the fly because um there it is the law of unintended consequences and i like to think about it i like to be careful in the drafting and make sure we know exactly where we're going um before we get something on the books that that does have sure consequences we hadn't anticipated i appreciate that and i think i think the direction seems relatively clear as to what we're trying to get out now how that's solved may be another issue but good luck i'm going to make a motion to postpone to the next council meeting that we have a regular session at council member johnson i'm just going to say that that whatever we do if we're creating a new zoning class a new a new category and we're going to determine what zoning classifications it goes into the selection of the the naming of that so i just started thinking about assembly halls okay well if somebody wanted to try to now get around we've been talking about wedding venues a for-profit assembly hall well it's a it's a bar that everybody has a membership and you're a part of our club right so we need to really think about if we're going to do something new that now the definition of what that is and what it's not has to be really really clear um for the sup conversation earlier right in other words you got to dial that in but i think we got to dial in the definition and then i just want to state in respect of staff's time all this work is going to be for what will ultimately be potentially what's their demand for of these and then maybe two or three so let's don't make it a master's thesis project if we can help it i think we already have okay uh mayor pro tem second uh council member rodens motion we have a motion and a second to postpone i believe it was that to the was the next regular council meeting next may march first okay all right next regular council meeting okay let's vote too soon sorry i'll just say uh how do i postp one to not a date certain to an event to invent certain when when the staff feels comfortable bringing it back to us okay so we have a revised motion do we have a revised second all right the uh motion on the board is to a event certain so let's uh vote on the board motion carries seven zero let's uh take a 10 minute break it is 9 30 we'll be back at 9 40 okay our rear we are reconvening uh this council density council meeting february the 16th 2016 at 9 42 p.m. and we'll go on to agenda item 5b consider nominations appointments to the city boards and commissions traffic safety commission madam city secretary well council member greg roden and council member johnson both have nominations okay uh council member rodin my nomination didn't make it in the backup so just to state the name publicly it's professor dan kretka from twu okay and do we have council member johnson's nomination in the back up his nomination is carron devine okay all right council member hawkins i move approval of item 5b mayor protem second we have a motion and a second for the traffic safety commission is that right yes is that the only commission we had okay uh let's vote on the board okay almost said yes we uh motion carries six zero now we move on to public hearings agenda item 6a which is hold a public hearing consider approval of a resolution i don't know why i cannot say that word tonight i'm going to try that again hold a public hearing and consider approval of a resolution regarding the proposed site for construction expansion and use of an electric power transmission distribution substation and um mr city manager i will go ahead and open the public hearing all right and i'd like to ask mr brent heath if he would come forward from dme and present this public hearing thank you brent thank you mr campbell wake up this computer here mayor council good evening this is the site selection public hearing for one of our large cip projects here in denton it's called the brinker substation we've previously discussed the electrical need for the brinker substation the strategic location of this substation site and the associated new transmission line easements with both the public utilities board and the city council today's site selection public hearing is strictly that to formally accept the substation site for the new sub and also the new transmission line easements the executive summary we all seen this before it applies with our cip projects to comply with our first 715 studies is the city of denton does have a problem the problem is growth in agent infrastructure we as electric utility have a responsibility to respond to that problem we involve the public in this process which we've done on this project we allow citizen feedback we consider all the practical options and we look to move forward with the most sensible and least impact option this is a system map of our transmission system the approved budgeted cip project is shown here in the southeast corner it's labeled as project number 19 over by spencer road east loop 288 by the dme offices one of our engineering consultants power engineers put together this constraints map we had a public here in open house and the portion of this map that i'd like to draw your attention to is in this red clouded area in the top left hand corner the uh orange symbols would be the residential areas the blue would be some flood plains and a creek that flows through through this area this is actually the map that we showed at the open house meeting it showed multiple sites and we solicited citizen input to see which one of these would potentially have the least impact so of all of these three there were three sites shown here two up here and one down here of all these sites we only need to have one of these substation sites i might point out this is a good map to look at this is the american legion down here off of sp encer road i spoke during the break with the gentleman that was here earlier and he saw that nothing that we're doing would impact his his property and so he was satisfied with exchange cards and so he uh he won't be here for this this is an arrow photo that shows how all of the physical layout would work for the new proposed brinker substation at this location the existing transmission lines that run here and the proposed transmission lines and once again as you can see the american legion there's nothing at all in their property here substations come in different shapes and different sizes some of the things that we consider is how many transmission lines go into and out of a substation most substations have one transmission line in and one transmission line out this particular site ultimately would have eight transmission lines in we consider the number of transformers at the substation this ultimately could have up to uh four transformers and one auto transformer this is a survey that teagnaw and perkins one of our engineer and surveyors did for us after having conversations with the one single landowner that owns all this property we looked to see of these options what might work best for them they wanted to move it to the rear of the property and so we surveyed the the substation site here's an aerial photo of the actual site the track looking at being acquired with the black area showing the the fenced in area we also surveyed the transmission line easements that would be needed to get into and out of the substation with additional lines and on the southern border down here to get enough adequate width to accommodate the 138 kv transmission line that's presently there and once again the american legion would be way down here so nothing would be on their property here's an aerial photo showing the same thing so the public involvement steps that we've done september 2013 we met met at the denton regional medical center professional lobby we sent out 610 notices and it did what it was supposed to accomplish this open house let us talk to the land owners there was one land owner in this particular area that owned the majority of all these possible sites in all the transmission line easements and so we have met with them numerous times so based upon the information that we received in the september 2013 open house the multiple land owner meetings the january 25th unanimous six zero recommendation from the public utilities board at a public hearing dme recommends moving forward with the brinker substation site and the transmission line eas ements as shown i'd be happy to answer any questions that you have now or after you've had a chance to hear from the citizens that are here for the public hearing any questions for staff prior to public comments seeing none all right this is a public hearing we've got mr long and filled out a card but he is his question has already been addressed we have a card from lucas hall who doesn't wish to speak uh wait a minute that's a different one sorry is it and we've pulled those anyway okay this is a public hearing anybody wishing to speak please come down state your name and address and your time will begin mr mayor councilman rob rainer 607 south locust suite 101 talking in favor of this proposal i am the uh representing broker for this track roughly 360 total acres we've had a wonderful time talking with dme for the past almost two years brett almost gets my jokes now so i'm very pleased that we 've almost accomplished something one thing that i wanted to bring up besides the location we also talked about the tmpa lines which run parallel with the loop possibly following the same easements running along the north end of shady oaks and then turning south into the substations i just wanted that to be brought forward so that you all would understand that was one of the moving factors for the owners to move to think that the substations would work very well for them so i realize that's not something to be discussed other than i wanted it to be out so that you know that's very important for them and that's what they want to have accomplished as well okay any questions thank you for coming down thank you you bet this is a public hearing anybody else wishing to speak please come down state your name and address anybody else wishing to speak okay we will now close the public hearing councilmember hawkins thank you mayor i move approval of item 6a councilmember johnson second we have a motion to second let 's vote on the board please motion carries seven zero moving on to agenda item 6b hold a public hearing and consider amendments to sub chapter 35.3 procedures sub chapter 35.5 zoning districts limitations at all thank you mayor go ahead no i will now open the public hearing thank you mayor i'd like to ask mr mike bell or one of our senior planners if he would present this item thank you mike thank you mayor members of the council pull the presentation up bear with me one moment just to kind of set this up council has already approved seven sups for substations around the town over the last few years one of the main things we learned about through that process was that the sup was way too late in the game council asked us to kind of improve that process get more impact in the beginning of the process so that was what this came about what this amendment will do is three things first it'll add a new use to the dent development code which would be electric substations and switch stations those are currently classified as basic utilities we're going to pull that out from basic utilities making its own use everything else that's a basic utility a wastewater treatment plant a water tower anything like that would still stay under basic utilities the second thing we'll do is we're going to add specific design standards to sub chapter 24 the development code and those we're going to deal with screening buffering access we'll get into that here in just a minute and the last thing it's going to do is it's going to create a site plan process specific just to these substations and switch station uses so when you take a look at the substations use in the development code it'll be permitted by right in the rural districts the employment center districts and the industrial center districts same as basic utilities are now in the residential the mixed use in the downtown districts will have a new limitation l 43 which will only be substations will only be permitted by right if it's part of a city council approved cip or master plan and if public notification has gone out prior to site selection and by city council so the meeting the public hearing you just held for city count for the site selection of brinker substation we would have noticed that to put 200 and 500 foot notices like an sup if for any reason they cannot meet these criteria these criteria it'll default back to an sup being required and lastly it's going to require the substation to submit a site plan per sub chapter 24 so the boxes and why are kind of what exists now dme develops the options it goes to pub and council for site selection and pb and council again to actual purchase the site we're going to add the two boxes in yellow which would be the notification the signs and able to meeting which typical with an sup before you even select the site and at the very end we'll follow that site plan process the way that kind of sets up in a flow chart is l 43 if you meet your note if you have not made your notification requirements you go back to the sup and then once the sup is approved staff can approve that site plan if you didn't meet the notification you'll go up to the top box which then will ask do you comply with the site design standards the buffering the access screening if you comply with it as we've written staff can approve your site plan if for any reason you have to vary from that then it can go to p and z for their consideration what's important to notice in that is that only dme could take it option take advantage of the option on top any private utilities such as coser would have to automatically go to sup because they can't do the notification and then in sub chapter 24 we've added these five sections one through three are really what's already kind of been the code and been enforced already the two new sections are the design standards and the site plan consideration i won't go through all the requirements that they're outlined in your backup but the major things that are required are 10 foot screening walls driveway locations not be located across from residential be limited to lower classified streets that we have a 20 foot buffer adjacent to anything that's not industrial we're going to require some landscaping to soften the wall require wrought iron gates at entrances and we have some requirements for street trees and tree canopy coverage this is just kind of a graphic to show in the end what the site would look like typically you'd have the 10 foot screening wall around the site with landscape shrubs and small trees to soften the wall there's a 20 foot clearance zone required by federal laws that can't have any climbing aids and then we would have a 20 foot buffer next to a residential commercial use the planning and zoning commission did recommend approval of this ddc amendment 6-0 and i'll stand for any questions council member uh mayor pro tem thank you uh the slide prior to this do you specify the um type of buffer abc we actually created a new buffer kind of a hybrid of them and it's a 20 foot it's 20 foot does it have a landscaping requirement in terms of trees every so many how many it is five evergreen deciduous trees and 30 shrubs per 100 feet somewhere between a type c and a type d where we currently have okay thank you council member roden clarify two things if you can go back towards the beginning of your slideshow very efficient presentation by the way stop stop go or like advance your slide there you go right there so i'm trying to get a sense of this so to wrap my head around it and for folks kind of paying attention to this the problem's been is that we've adopted a specific public involvement plan as it relates to cip projects of dme as it relates to transmission lines substations and things like that in the event of substations in some cases we've gone through a big public process got a lot of people involved the council selected the site and because of the separation in the process that they had to go through through sqp sometimes this would take upwards 10 months in some some cases sometimes it was confusing to the public as to they're coming and so this is greatly welcomed to collapse these so so thank you guys for putting your thoughts into it so in terms of what's new about this and how the melding of the existing process that's been approved by council for dme projects and then what you insert so that will remain the same what you've inserted is that second or that first yellow box i guess in which you will in addition to what they do also go through the notification process as if it's an sqp that's that's correct and i would also say the first box isn't in ordinance it's not in ddc this is actually codifying it and formalizing it up making it okay perfect and then one last clarification it might be on the previous slide sorry to um so on that second main bullet point in residential mixed use downtown districts l43 will apply permitted by right if those next sub bullet points it would it be proper to put an and in there it's not that or that it's both practice this isn't verbatim from what the l43 is in your backup it has and it has to meet all these requirements so i need to know thanks okay any other questions for staff this is a public hearing oh thank you staff appreciate mike thank you this is a public hearing anybody wishing to speak come down and state your name and address your time will begin this is a public hearing anybody wishing to speak seeing none we will now close the public hearing council member hawkins i move approval of item 6b mayor pro tem second we have a motion and a second for item 6b let's vote on the board please motion carries seven zero moving on to agenda item 6c hold a public hearing and consider adoption of an ordinance regarding a change in the zoning classification from an industrial center employment ice district to a regional center commercial downtown district on approximately 2.9 acres we will now open the public hearing thank you mayor we'll ask amy bissett if she would please present this public hearing thank you amy thank you mayor and council members this is a request for a rezoning from an industrial center employment district to a regional center commercial downtown district on approximately 2.9 acres this is located just west of i-35 and just south of west university you can see the outlined parcel here on the screen and this is currently zoned ice it was established in the city-wide rezoning in 2002 for light industrial uses the intent at the time was that the use is most likely to to locate here would be support uses for the icg zoning to the west our industrial park and airport area ice which is what is zoned today does not permit general retail and and it limits the the retail to certain uses and square footages whereas rccd which is the requested zoning permits retail and regional commercial you can see the the proposed zoning map on the right shows that rccd is what is adjacent on the other side of i- 35 but is in somewhat north of i-35 but other than that it's surrounded by ice currently rcc's d zoning districts intend is to promote high density mixed use development with urban character a wide range of commercial and retail uses and it's really utilized as our most intense mixed use zoning district in in the city just to give you an idea of the adjacent uses you can see that razor ranch is immediately adjacent to the east and along the same area you've got a gas station a future vehicle repair some commercial warehouse and storage and some professional office and some light manufacturing that manufacturing that all run along that corridor a variety of commercial uses there and the railroad also runs right behind the the parcel in question and the staff has seen the railroad as a very good buffer or bifurcation of the uses between a regional mixed use area which is what happens naturally along i-35 and then our our industrial park and more manufacturing area to the west our future land use map does does indicate that this is a regional mixed use area in the future and rezoning to rccd is consistent with regional mixed use we we intend as a part of the implementation of the of the comp plan to look at initi ating some city rezoning to be consistent with the future land use plan and we anticipate that while this may this little parcel will get rezoned if you approve it today that ultimately this whole area will be rezoned to the same zoning district per the comp plan and the future land use plan rccd would permit commercial and retail uses without any zoning limitations and has been used to generally to to zone regional areas along i-35 we see it at unicorn lake golden triangle mall razor ranch all up and down the i-35 corridor and like i stated before the rail line is an appropriate divider and buffer to our our industrial district and our the development patterns do suggest that i-35 is going to develop more for commercial and mixed use activity rather than support of industrial uses as was assumed previously criteria to approve the rezoning must conform to the land use element of the dentin plan 2030 and it must facilitate the adequate provision of transportation water sewer parks and other public requirements public notifications were mailed out on january 6th four were sent by certified mail to property owners within 200 feet and five additional were sent by courtesy notices for property owners within 500 feet we received one response in favor to date based on the considerations presented and the requirements of the ddc staff recommends approval as does the planning and zoning commission and i'm happy to take any questions any questions for staff before we take citizens comments seeing none this is a public hearing anybody wishing to speak come on down state your name and address i'm perry thompson 2107 holly creek tyler texas and i'm speaking in favor obviously i'm the architect for the project be happy to answer any questions any questions seeing none thank you this is a public hearing anybody else wish to speak jessica alson don't come down just teasing it's late i'm getting punchy seeing no one else we will now close the public hearing i do have a question for you amy and it was just on one of those slides you were listing off some labels of what was there and one of them said a proposed was it cavenders that is what that is what that's what this is oh okay yeah okay i didn't see it sorry i didn't read it in the back up i'm sorry no you're good uh mayor pro tem you know uh when you were showing the map and you were showing uh those uh businesses that were there it seems to me that there are my recollection is i've driven past here is that there are some other retail businesses here am i am i incorrect about that i think where you see the commercial warehouse and storage pointed there's some that that has some retail components associated with that as well it says strips that are along there that you're saying yeah so the so is that but it it presents an interesting question for me is if that use is following the proper zoning the zoning that that it has if there's a retail use here if these folks are having to ask for a zoning change in order to do this i'm wondering if there are are maybe some other businesses in that area that needs owning changes also or property we'll take a look at that i know i think the that the strip center that you're specifically referring to has more of a warehouse and storage component to it but we'll take a look at the uses so it may be the percentage that's for warehouse and the percentage that's for retail show showroom space thank you any other questions for staff councilmember johnson move approval of item 6c councilmember rodin i just want to welcome our the gentleman from tyler texas to hanging in here tonight and i hope you stay at one of our fine dentin hotels tonight instead of driving home sorry for the lat eness i i i second this well we have a motion and a second let's vote on the board please motion carries seven zero i believe that brings us to agenda item seven which is oh we still got six d oh i thought open oh that's right that's right we're opening this and then we're just gonna okay got you can i do these both at once or do we do them separately are they regarding the same thing no okay never mind all right we'll go on to 6d hold a public hearing consider amending section 35.7.95 etc i will now open the public hearing thank you mayor and as i mentioned in the work session we'd like to ask the council to postpone this item until march the first mayor pro tem i move to be postponed till march 1st councilmember rodin second we have a motion and second for agenda item 6d let's vote on the board motion carries seven zero agenda item six that's the one that was e yes 6e which is hold a public hearing consider adoption of an ordinance regarding menden sub chapter 35.7 the fry street overlay district i will now open the public hearing uh and i do have a card wishing not to speak so i'm going to go ahead and read that card in the record and this was the card was both for his item 6d and e but um it's from lucas hall 815 crest oak place he's in opposition opposed to the development if it goes beyond established standards in the fry street overlay at very least defer until city staff can present a small plan proposal thank you mayor and this is one we also have asked the council to postpone till march the first mayor pro tem thank you mayor move to postpone until march 1 councilmember rodin second we have a motion and second let's vote on the board please passes unanimously moving on to agenda item seven uh we have um indication of two people wishing to speak but i do not one spoke already earlier and i don't believe mr husbeth is here so seeing none we'll move on to agenda item eight which is concluding items anybody have any concluding items councilmember briggs i just want to say that today i heard my hometown twice since of tyler like from the beginning it started at the beginning of the meeting and ended at the end of the meeting there you go which is very strange um so two things one um we heard about the red light cameras and i've heard about yellow lights before you know as a solution i'm just curious if we can have um or if someone can fill me in on the length of our yellow lights if they're consistent across our city and how they compare to other cities just the not the red lights with the yellow lights i'm curious about about that um if that's possible and also um i'm concerned about our city not having any ada compliant apartments or homes like if that is a really big issue we may need to be since we couldn't find anything for a mr rebus if if that's an issue something we're lacking in our city maybe we need to to look into that okay that it okay that's it councilmember rodin uh several things um one is i know some of us have been involved in some discussions with habitat for humanity they've got a pretty large project going in in southeast denton or they're they're floating the concept and in a recent conversation with them i asked them to get back with me on what they've done in other cities in terms of partnerships with cities to help foster those sorts of developments in this case it's i think it's a 40 house plan it's pretty ambitious for the city of denton at least nothing like we've seen before and they came back with a lot of cities in texas who have partnered even to the point of waiving impact fees to helping out with public infrastructure projects as a way to kind of partner on those projects given that we have a lot of housing goals similar to what councilmember priggs was just talking about the mayor's significant initiative on homelessness it seems like this might be right for an interesting partnership so the the the ask for staff is to open up some sort of discussion as to what tools might be available for the city if we're interested in doing that sort of a partnership and we can get you some of the backup material that habitat is provided i know councilmember john son and i had a meeting with them recently secondly you guys heard from twu students last time we met and just by means of follow-up i met with those students and a staff member and we did a perimeter walk around the campus and so that's being followed up with meeting with the our own pedestrian coordinator and getting that stuff through the process hopefully they're going to be meeting with the mobility committee i'm sorry the traffic safety commission to further some of those ideas so they've got some good ideas there sorry it's a long list march second all you guys i'd love to challenge my fellow city council members united way is sponsoring a dr seuss reading day so a lot of the elementary schools in town that morning they're asking community members to take an hour hour and a half of their time to go to one of these elementary schools and read a dr seuss books to kids so i'll send you guys all a link for this where you can sign up but i'll be doing it and would love to see the entire city council and perhaps city staff come out as well city manager along those lines city manager the thought has come up in several kind of community initiatives that i've been involved in as to how we go out and challenge businesses to get their employees to get involved in community service and perhaps do some incentives where they allow them out for lunch one one hour a week or something like that and the thought occurred and was floated by others what could the city do in terms of encouraging that sort of thing as a way of taking the lead so that if we go out to the business community with some ask the city could develop something like that so just i think that's been discussed internally so we'd love to hear back on that at some point finally i 've also signed you guys up for it's the day of being violent told uh keep denton beautiful i think we all got an email on that but i officially filled out a form that commits us on march 19th this is a tradition of the council to go out to the entry in the southeast dentin on the quarter of robertson and bell to do our own little beautifying day so march 19th put on your calendar that morning we'll see you there thank you council member hawkins last year i remember my son royal said i got to pick up trash with the mayor it was cool made his day i was like i'm your dad anyway so all right all right all right okay i know it's late so i got two things um i was hoping to get an informal staff report uh i've been on council now three years and it's come up a few times on neighborhoods that live next to the train tracks and what it takes to get a quiet zone put in place by that intersection how much that costs uh what what what are the steps to make that happen so if we could get an informal staff report on that and then i just i flat out need help from any staff member or anybody lily and miller if you live over by south ridge or district four it is a war zone i mean it 's it's just straight up awful and i'm not calling anybody out it's not anybody's fault but um there was a day last week where there were two accidents t's lee was down to one lane lill ian miller was down to one lane it was bad and i was i drove my uh son to school at sam houston people were angry they were speeding they were driving illegal doing illegal u-turns i mean it was bad bad and um i need when you look at the website for construction projects you look at lily and miller here and it says detour routes and it just says no and i i mean that's i need all hands on deck i need us to try to the next time this happens i feel like and this is my fault too that i dropped the ball we need to have a meeting with south ridge estates and say this is about to happen um we still want you to know that uh you're in a safe neighborhood fire and the ambulance can respond quickly uh the police are going to do be you know do whatever they can to help uh we're going to try to i don't know we're going to go door to door and tell you about the meeting that we're having there's just something it is so bad over there i mean it really it's bad and it's showing that it's not going to end till like middle of july and i guess t's lee did maybe get close to being finished today or tomorrow my understanding was that was finished today but i haven't that's a huge step and i know that that was hard to coordinate all of these things that t's lee was text dot billings the city of denton i i understand all that so all that to say we i want to have a meeting we need to organize a meeting with south ridge and south ridge estates at least and hear all the residents out their concerns and uh just the next time this happens we just need all hands on deck we got we need to get this project done as fast as possible so thank you very much councilmember johnson thank you mayor um i have that one down too and i have an idea that i want would like for somebody to follow up on um it got worse today they actually had uh fist fights today in the street by motorists um a lot of concern amongst the business owners in the retail shopping center we all call the former albertsons because people are cutting through that parking lot and they're going fast and they're busting down barricades and all this my idea is let's look at closing the inferences to lily and miller from those retail centers people going in and out of the retail can access it from the i-35 access road and then enables us to leave those lights green but both sides of lily and miller the retail and the offices on the north side have access all the way throughout to the i-35 service road on both developments so i would like for us to look at the possibility of closing off those access points on lily and miller and keeping those lights green to at least i mean it's going to stack up at the freeway anyway but at least that'll stop everybody from cutting through those retail centers i worry about people getting out of their cars walking into a shop taking their kid to get donuts and some mad guy in a truck comes flying through there so i'd like for us to look at that and then and then given the i don't think anybody would have expected the amount of anger and what's going on already i'd like for us to to contact the contractor which is a local contractor and at least get some feedback on if if we wanted them working 24/7 what does that do to the timeline would they have the manpower etc secondly and just as important i want to say happy birthday to my amazingly talented artist unt student beautiful inside and out hannah happy birthday i have a 20 year old child today holy moly the third thing i have is i would like for us to have an update on a previous discussion we had was to explore the the idea of using modern technology to help building inspections get through these inspections faster you know and i think they've already come up with some ideas of their own but simple things that other cities are doing you know if somebody needs to move a fire extinguisher two feet in order to get their co put a tape measure up against it snap a picture text it to the inspector and he issues your co instead of having to make a whole other trip back there we've got an issue with our inspectors having to do you know 17 inspections a day when they should be doing 10 and it's not going to get any better so i'd love for us to have a follow-up on what have we done what more can we do to help those folks be more efficient and lastly i think we tend to deal with problems here a lot and earlier today on the renewable plan i said hey let's take a minute and celebrate the fact that we're we are envied by most cities by being 40 renewable had something happen in my office yesterday and i just think it really says a lot about our community i had a client sitting in my lobby a homeless man walked in from across the street at the at the uh our daily bread he was in a crisis kind of situation he had to get to the mhmr um outreach i can't remember the name of the facility um that awesome 20 year old i just said happy birthday to was my receptionist in the afternoon i found out about all this later but she said what do you need and he told her and she got on her computer and the client said i know where that is i'm going to be passing right by there in just a minute going to the title company i'll just take you this is a guy who didn't know anybody from anybody in the room it says a lot about our community that people are willing to jump in and say what do you need instead of what are you doing in my office number one and then just have a complete stranger say i know where that is i'll take you that's that is the spirit of denton and i think we spend so much time talking about what is not good and not enough time talking about what is good so for all of you here tonight sir uh we have a great city and and let's take some time to celebrate it when we can thank you mayor uh council member rosney i want to welcome our new historic preservation officer who attended his first council meeting tonight and so welcome to denton welcome to our historic city we are so happy that you're here and whatever we can do to answer questions or help you please reach out we are just thrilled that you're here and look forward to the future so thank you and thanks to planning for making this happen and to our city manager so thank you i just have one i wrote some down and i think i left it in the other room but we'll catch it next time this one is um she doesn't know i 'm going to say this and i didn't know i was going to say it but given the sense of community you know people getting off the community i talked with brenda sweeten who works at the university of north texas and she runs a program for foster children who have you know aged out and their their foster people kids who have aged out but are going to college and she and i talked before the holidays about you know mentoring and you know just something that to give those students somebody who they can run things by because a lot of them some of the very basic knowledge and skills of certain things they just they just need somebody to uh to run some things by so i'm going to look into that and so i i think if the city's looking at trying to find some more active community service that anybody that would want to do that i certainly would want them to contact me because i i'd want to be able to see if we can't give some of those kids some some resources just to help them uh you know make some just probably some pretty basic decisions but also to really try to plan for the future so if she's listening or if somebody's listening that knows her she's probably gonna wonder what what i'm doing but uh that's what that's what my goal is so i just throw that out there if anybody's listening once we get involved just be sure to get in contact me and we'll see we'll see what we can do yep and anything else oh i'm sorry mayor pro tem well i'm the only one that hadn't said anything so i needed to get in there i'm always surprised at how many people say that they are watching us on tv um now we're competing with dale hanson i suspect he has more listeners right now than we do but if folks uh don't have anything to do this weekend the thin line film festival is going to be on okay anything else fantastic we will stand adjourned