Mar 01, 2016 City Council on 2016-03-01 12:00 PM

Good afternoon, everyone. This is a meeting of the Denton City Council on Tuesday, March 1st, 2016. We do have a quorum. It is 1202. I was expecting the music to play. I don't know why. So we will go on to our first agenda item, which is citizen comments on consent agenda items and I believe we have some cards, but is there anything? Mr. C. Mayne, you said you had some cards. No, Mayor, we have four cards to speak on that and following those discussions, Council members can give direction on whether you want to pull that consent agenda item tonight or not. Okay. We just need direction after you pull that and we have staff prepared to address it as well. All right. And Madam City Secretary, I guess, what is it? Is it three minutes? Three minutes. All right. So we'll go through the cards. These look like they're all on the same agenda item. Richard Hines, if you'll come up and state your name and address and your time will begin. Oh, did you all want a different order? Do you mind if I go first? No. We'll give you one minute. Any time. No. And also, if in the presentations, if there's going to be, if you're saying the same thing, just sort of reiterate that, but just want to make sure we get enough information. But yeah, so Sam, you want to go first? Yes, sir. All right. Sam Burke, if you'll state your name and address and your time will begin. Thank you. Sam Burke, 319 West Oak. That's where our office. I'm an attorney and I have been retained by A1 American F ence, Inc. to speak with regard to item 4G, which is a construction contract for security fences for substations. It's a $5.9 million contract. And we have some concerns about the way that the bid proposal was scored. With regard, if you pull up exhibit one to the agenda item, you'll see that you have some information there with regard to how the bids were scored. And I want to call your attention to item number nine. It's payment and performance bonds for project and it says per $100,000. And you'll see there that the contract has been recommended to be awarded to Walsh Hawk Construction. And their bond price per $100,000 is $5,000. And the way this bid proposal was calculated to arrive at the final price, you just pull down that - you go straight down that column and add them up. The problem with that is that's a $5,000 per $100,000. If you actually add those numbers up, the total contract price for that $5,000 per $100,000 is $294,000. If you look in the column directly next to that on A1 American Fencing, their price per $100,000 is $2,000. And that just reflects a $3,000 difference if you compare these prices next to each other. However, if you work that out over the entire contract price, the bond price for A1 is $115,000, which means that the actual cost to the city on those bonds , the difference is approximately $178,000. When you take into account the discrepancy between the two prices that's already built in in Exhibit 1, you're talking about having awarded the contract to Walsh when they were underbid by approximately $300,000. And that causes my clients some concern. And then with regard to the scoring process, if you kind of look as a starting point at those bond prices, the $5,000 bond and the $2,000 bond reflect what the bond companies are going to require these folks to pay to secure performance. The higher amount of -- the more you have to pay, the less likely the bond company is saying it is that you're going to perform, okay? So A1 is getting a better score from the bonding companies than Walsh is. However, during the bid process, they were evaluated as having a lower likelihood of performance. Their probability performance is four points lower than W alsh's. And those two things don't really mesh together very well. I'll have the two of the owners here of A1 are here. They're a 50-year company. They work for the Pentagon. They're good folks. I'll try to wrap up. And then I just want to also point out Mr. Kleinman's here, and he's going to talk to you a little bit about the specifications. There was a downgrade on our company on specifications. They bid according to the specifications. There was nothing in the contract documents that said a faster timeframe was going to get a better grade. And the product that A1 is going to use, we believe, is superior. And I think Mr. Kleinman will speak to that. Thank you for your time. >> Thank you, Sam. Any particular order of y'all -- or is it just -- I mean, I was going to say, I'm going to certainly accommodate you. Yeah. If you'll just state your name and address when you get there, the time will begin. I'll make sure I have a card for you. You Dennis? >> Dennis, yes. >> All right, yes. Dennis Kleinman. >> Dennis Kleinman addresses 4730 South Riverside Drive, Salt Lake City. I actually flew in to attend this meeting because what we 're concerned about is that the specifications stated our competitor's product, which is called VertiCrete, and our product, which is the Aftek wall system. In a previous bid a few years back, a similar specification was put out and both products were scored equally. And on this bid, our product was downgraded in its score. And our concern is if our product was specified and the other product was specified, why was there discrepancy in the scoring of the two products? You know, our product is a little different to the other system. It's more efficient. It's a safer product to install. And so we're just -- we're concerned as to why there's any discrepancy. If the specifications stated that product versus our product, they should at least be scored equally. And that is what our concern is on this whole situation. >> All right. >> Okay. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Richard or Doyle? >> Richard. >> Okay. Richard, if you'll state your name and address, your time will begin. Thank you, sir. >> Richard Hines with A1 American Fence. Worked on this project for a couple of months now putting it together and that's why I brought all these parties together to explain the position and the grading of it. All in all, on a $5.9 million bid, they were fairly close. And it was a good race run. But at the end of the day, after review of it and all of the years of doing it, it was a great competitive race and it was clear and my brother Doyle will bring you some documents to explain each in detail when you'll have time to review. Basically, that's why I'm here, brought the proper people to explain that and hopefully do the right thing with it. Thank you. >> Okay. Thank you. And Doyle Hines. >> That's me. >> If you'll state your name and address, your time will begin. If you have -- do you have handouts? >> If you'll accept them, I have handouts and spreadsheets. >> I mean, yeah. If you'll just hand them to the officer and he'll pass them out. Yes, thank you very much. >> Doyle Hines, 1507 Bear Path, President of the American F ence, 50-year-old company. Like my brother said, we do a lot of high security projects throughout the country from the Pentagon, CIA headquarters, National Security Advisory, Logan Airfield in Boston, Placerville, California Airport, DFW. The list goes on and on for 50 years. And we put this package together to get it. And when you go down to the evaluation of our company, it has us as if we were just starting out, in our opinion. I don't think -- I don't think with the bond, once you run that line item out, you see a true picture, our true picture was presented. If you'll look at those spreadsheets, as Mr. Sam said, you 'll see the difference in the money. $40,000, which we were $45,000 cheaper from the original bid opening. Then they give our competitor, which was lower than us, the opportunity to do a best in final. We should have had the opportunity to do a best in final, not the guy that was high. So in saying that, if you'll look at those spreadsheets or if you've got any questions, at any time, I'll be at your disposal to answer any of these questions. But as it stands, you're looking at $300,000 for this same fence that we are willing to put up, that our competitor was supposedly issued an award. $300,000 is a lot of money. So -- >> I'm not allowed to ask questions. >> Clarifying questions. >> Clarifying. >> So on the delivery -- the discrepancy in the delivery score between Walsh's and A1, you think that that has a little bit to do with you being scored as a company that is just starting out rather than being scored as a 50-year-old company. >> Correct. And if you'll look at the back page of those documents, this project -- they had a similar project bid several years ago. And if you'll look at their timeline, their timeline on 1,7 40 feet, I believe, they had 70-something days. We had 60 days, I think, allowed for this 2,100 feet. And all of this is a hypothetical proposal. They didn't have specs on the type of fence. And these are things that we can't start until the engineer gives us a type of finish, a color. So, you know, those are things that -- I think he's got seven days. You can jockey those numbers any way you want. But nowhere in those documents were you going to be rewarded if you show that you can get to the job sooner, nor did it say you would be penalized if you don't get there or if you get there early. But in this case, we're being penalized. And we were below the completion days. We were below -- we were in the scope timewise across the board. You know, if you'll look at the percentage of the bond rate on the project that was done a couple of years ago, they were 3%, roughly. So how do we go from 3% to this month's bid of 5%? When you do the math, just on those 2%, you're talking $120 ,000. From what they charged last year, a couple of years ago, at the 3% rate to this month's rate, they're up to 5%. $120,000. Why? There's got to be a reason. What we're asking is, is somebody just review what we have here? Because I truly don't think this was presented to counsel where they could run the columns out and see the true bond. They have not to exceed 5.9. But if you run that column out, their proposal is going to be 6.2 million. So you're going to have to reduce the quantity of fence if your contract is 5.9, because the math don't add up. They've got $200,000 extra in just bond creaming. And then we offered a $100,000 discount for early payment. The other competitors didn't do it. That's what 300 grand is, plus the $45,000 that we were cheaper on the base bid. It's not even reflective in these numbers. That was your time. Thank you. That was your time. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Okay, this is the - let me get back to my agenda. And we will - that ends our agenda item one. I see no more other cards. Now we have requests for clarification on agenda items, which will include the one we just heard about, if so inclined. Yes, Kathleen. Councilman Wozniak. I would ask our city manager, what is the process if we wanted to review this right now? Well, I would suggest that you let me ask Brent Heath to come and give an explanation of how the bidding process works and how the waiting is done and determined in advance. Obviously if the council wants to delay this, we need to ask the question of what would that do to bid that's being recommended and would it cause us to lose that bid. But let me ask Mr. - Do you have a follow-up? I do have a follow-up. There are many - and it's about the process. Many cities and counties around Texas and the state, when b ids of this size - this is almost 6 million - come before council, whoever it is who is going to explain the bids, whether it's the department or purchasing, actually comes before the elected body that is being asked to vote on this contract. And the bids are explained so that the council or the county commission can look at those bids and actually make a decision that it's not just placed on a consent agenda for, again, rubber stamp approval. So we're not going to change that today, but I think it's something that this council could seriously consider as we move forward just in terms of process. But that's - we'll move on and have Brian. I'd like to - I think we're always prepared, Ms. Wozni, to present the detail on this. These items are placed on the consent agenda with the expectation when we have staff here to go through as much detail explanation as the council would want. Certainly we don't anticipate any kind of a rubber stamp of what staff's doing, but Mr. Heath can, I think, explain that process, and our purchasing and procurement department can explain the process in detail. And we've had some of those discussions before. But if - with council's indulgence, I would like to ask Mr. Heath to go through that process and explain why we came to the conclusions we did and how the waiting system works when those were established in advance of the bids. Thank you, Brian. >> Thank you, Mr. Campbell. That's a great question that you brought up as well. We have been in front of the Public Utilities Board already on February the 22nd, and a presentation was given. It was an individual consideration item, and I'd like to go through that just very quickly if I could. It's just a few pages. This is the one that we gave the Public Utility Board on the 22nd of February, and because it was an individual consideration, it was unanimously approved 5-0. We did not prepare to come back and speak with the council on this topic, but we're happy to do so today. The issues that were brought up about the price and the bond and performance issues, those are some things that I became aware of today on that topic. So thank you all for bringing that to our attention. We do want to get those correct. But as far as the actual fence product goes, this is a presentation that Chris Lutrick, one of our engineers that's involved with our substation project, gave. And the outline is that we wanted to talk about what projects require the fence or the wall construction around Denton, a summary of the proposals that we got, which was shown in the matrix that was handed out, and some of the projects that HAC has actually done for us to date. And then there's questions that was asked. It was a very short presentation. This is somewhat hard to see. It's a grayed out map of the city of Denton. It shows location, geographical locations of 13 different substation projects that we're going to require substation fencing on. And of these projects that are shown, five of them are sites, substation sites that we presently own, and some of them are actually in construction. So we are needing to get some fence and some walls around these. One of them is one that's an existing site that we would be rebuilding the fence around it, and some of the other ones are future projects that we have yet to do in our CFP project. We've been estimating all of our budgetary numbers, approximately $500,000 per substation site for this type of a wall. And the quotations that came in, particularly the HAC quotation that came in, came out to be $451,000 per substation, so slightly less. We'll have to reevaluate that and look at that with these new numbers on the performance and payment bonds. This was the original exhibit before we knew about the performance bond topic today, and so you have a revised one that was handed out, and we'll have to look at that. One of the things that we did look at under the delivery time frame, which was one of the items that they were rated the lowest on, was there were two questions that was asked. The time frame between notification to proceed and beginning the substation construction, the numbers here, looks much better on the screen, it doesn 't look good there, was seven days from HAC, from HAC Construction's original, and then the BAFO best and final offer, and it was 30 days, so that's approximately four times as long on the delivery. The time to complete the station was-- I'm sorry, we got a question. Excuse me, Brent. So in our bid package, under scope of work or whatever, do we create an expectation on response time? In other words, the RFP or RFQ, I'm guessing, has some parameters. Does it have an expected delivery time that's in it? That's a good question. There's a couple ways, and I may have to ask purchasing to assist me with this, that we bid out packages and topics. One is just a standard straight bid process to where the only thing that can be considered is strictly price. We used to do years and years and years ago, that's all that the city of Denver did, was only price. But we found out sometimes, and I'm not saying this in particular, this project, but sometimes in the past, the low price gave you a low quality product. And so that wasn't always the things that should always be considered. And so we've gone to an RFP, a request for proposal process . This is under state law chapter 252, local Texas government code. It gives you that you can either do bids or you can do requests for proposals. The request for proposals allows you to have evaluation criteria. Right. So basically, here's all I'm asking the question. As if you were saying to me, I want you to bid on this, and I said, well, what's the scope of work? You give me a document, and I say my expected response time is 30 days. If I say 30 days, that shouldn't hurt me, because I'm meeting your-- this is just how my brain works. So that's why I'm asking the question. If it's just, tell us what your response time could be, and there's no scope of work defined in there, then I would say-- I'm trying to understand this scoring system and how you know how it works. And if you're-- because what I heard one of the gentlemen say was, we're meeting what was asked. Right. It was a three-year program for all 13 substations. But in construction, there will be various times throughout that three-year period when you need to request a substation site, to have a wall put around it when it actually gets fabricated, and when it gets installed. So there wasn't firm deadlines on that. It's within that three-year period. But within the RFP, there was criteria that was used as state law allows. And the criteria was, and it's specified on your evaluation sheet, 15 points out of 100 were dedicated strictly for delivery. And so it would be an expectation to get points that quicker delivery would be rated slightly higher than a lower delivery. Mayor, if I could clarify, if I understand Mr. Johnson's question, it is, did the 30 days in this example, for example, meet the minimum requirement that we established in the RFP, or were we simply asking, you tell us what your best delivery date is, and then we'll evaluate them against each other. I think that's-- It was the latter of what we did. But the 30 days also meant that. I think, Madam City Attorney, you had a comment. Thank you, Mayor. I have the RFP in front of me. And Mr. Heath is accurate. The criteria as far as the project schedule is set at 15%. And this is the language that's in the RFP, and I'm going to read this. There's just a couple of sentences. Ability to timely start and complete project. This includes the schedule to complete project and may include ability to meet required milestones of completion. That's the language in the RFP. So that is one of the evaluation criteria that was rated, weighted at 15% of the overall evaluation criteria. I'm good. And honestly, I'm not looking to rehash the entire thing. I'm just trying to understand how the scoring works. So because of the delivery-- We had a question. But before we-- thank you. Thank my colleagues for letting me know I had a little chocolate on mine. So thank you. Council Member Hawkins, you had a question. Well, it's a similar question. I'm just worried if there's a strategy to winning the project by saying you can deliver-- you know, if you figure out how to win the bid, is there also a penalty if you cannot complete the project? You know, I'm seeing to complete the project in seven days seems quite different than 30 days. I mean, that's, you know, a third, whatever, 25% or whatever I'm trying to say faster. And is there a penalty then also? I mean, if you cannot deliver-- On some projects, there are liquidated damages. I don't recall-- is there on this one as well, Karen? There's liquidated damages at 1500-- Well, I thought that was staff answering. Yeah. I'm sorry. Is-- In Auditor Head, there are liquidated damages in this particular RFP. Okay. Any other-- Okay. So the compliance to specifications was another 15 points. Probable performance was 20, and price was 50. So we always consider 50% or above as price is always at least that in any type of evaluated RFP process that we've done here at the City of Denton. As far as some of the questions that were brought up today, if I can address that, is why was the probable performance graded down? It's just because we haven't actually worked with A1 American Fence out of Orange County down around the Gulf Coast. And so we didn't have any experience with it. As far as the state law, Chapter 252, one of the things it does list under 252.043 is the bidders past relationship with the utility. These next slides show some that HAWK actually has done for the City of Denton that are complete. This one's at Cooper Creek. We actually energized this station in April of 2014. Just a story I might add, on January the 13th of this year, Council Member Briggs had worked with some neighbors that lived right behind this, and they were talking about possible city park around this substation site. And so we met with Parks and Recreation, had a good meeting . It was about a dozen people that attended. After that was over, I talked to one of the residents that lives right behind this particular wall in this picture. And they said, "So we know there's a lot of work going on out here, and we see some people, but when are y'all actually going to start using this subst ation? When's the activity going to increase and the noise increase?" And I said, "Well, this has actually been energized since April of 2014." And both the husband and wife looked very surprised, and they were pleased that they didn't know this was even being used. And so that just speaks to integrity and how good the wall is for the neighborhood. Another one that's been done recently is McKinney subst ation. Yes, sir? >> I just have a question. So on the probable performance, so I think what I heard you saying is if somebody has done business with the city before, that gives them an advantage on probable performance versus somebody that hasn't? >> That can be one of the variables that's considered. That wasn't the only variable. The fence that I've been showing these pictures on was the Verde Creek product that was mentioned earlier. We have some experience with that, and so we know the pros and cons of that. The AFTEC system that is being quoted by A1, we actually had another entity, not A1. It was Turner Fence that quoted that here a few years ago. And that's being used around our Kings Road substation right now. Not to say that it's not a good product, but it's running three months behind schedule right now, and it still is not complete. And so because of those reasons, not having a good positive experience with that product, that was one of the reasons that we did decide to go ahead and rate that product down. It may be an installation issue. We don't know the reason. >> I guess what I'm just trying to get to fairness. Like when I hear 50 year old company and the Pentagon and all these other places, because I always think about, I worry about, are we seeing all the potential people we could do business with that would want to have our business because we're such a great customer. I'm just not so sure on the probable performance, I guess I 'm struggling a little bit with how do we say that we don't think these people can perform if in fact some of the things they stated are accurate. I'm trying to understand that a little bit. >> One of the things, if we did expect better probable performance and you gave them maximum points of the 20, you went from 15 points and you added four more to it, or five more to get it up to the 20, they would still, it would not affect the outcome of the total evaluated evaluation. >> I'm just asking the question on probable performance. I'm just trying to understand how we determine that. >> Phil Williams, general manager at Dippin Municipal Electric. The one of the other things I understand from the bid package that came back was this company provided a bid package providing information, I believe an Excel spreadsheet that was over 800 lines of projects they had done. Those projects were, as they've said, around many entities you won't be secure. Most of those projects were cyclone fences or wrought iron. They were not 10 foot high concrete walls. I believe they had three concrete wall installations out of all those pages of, and they are a well established company, take that under word what they said. But then the information they provided back to us in the bid package, they didn't provide us the information they indicated that this is a core business of theirs to put concrete walls around substations. They provided projects that were around airports, around all these other secure facilities you have to do, but they weren't 10 foot high concrete walls. >> Got it. Okay. Thank you. >> Good. Very good. >> Yes, I'm sorry. Councilman Waskne. >> But out of fairness, it's a very specialized niche concrete walls around substations. If you're truly in the fence business, it's going to be a wide variety of materials that you use to build fencing. The fact that they've been in business for 50 years gives credibility or they wouldn't still be in business. The fact that if that RFP had contained zero concrete walls , I think that would give credence to the argument that, well, they've never done this before. But there were some instances of concrete walls to provide security. So I come back to out of fairness that we take this back to whatever that system is and have purchasing and again, city manager, what would the process be to open this back up? >> Before we get to that, I'd like to make sure we get everybody's thoughts on at least the question on the table. Councilmember Rhoades. >> I'm always concerned when council gets too into the weeds on deciding RFPs. There's a reason we're not part of that process until this point. I guess my question is I'm very uncomfortable when vendors come to us directly to pitch their side of the equation. We haven't seen anything up to this point of all of the different proposals in their entirety. We haven't heard from the other vendors. And for us to raise questions about that process unless there's something very glaring versus someone who's just dissatisfied about not winning a bid concerns me. Is there any other process in place as part of our RFP process in the city that's a trigger for somebody who's a vendor who feels dissatisfied with the process to lodge a complaint, file an appeal outside of coming to a council meeting to lobby? I mean, we do these by the thousands. These council meetings can become long. If that becomes the way that we deal with RFPs is here the losing bids come and make their appeal to us and we'd send it back for a re-looking at it. I think the process will be broken if we do that. So is there another process other than just coming to council to appeal these things? Well, let me make a comment and then if there's somebody else that would like to comment. Clearly I guess I learned that there was a problem or potential question about this yesterday. But there's clearly a process where a vendor can appeal or make comment to the purchasing department. We can have discussions about that if we get that information in advance far enough. But we've had discussions with this council about using the RFP process and how we establish a grading process several times as opposed to just taking a straight price is the only issue because the reliability of the company, the product that's involved, all of those things and we determine what the weights are for each of those on a case by case basis. It may be more important that we weight one more heavily than the other in a different kind of a project. So I share your concern. We bring hundreds of bids to the council. There is a way to evaluate that and if in fact we think there may be a need to look at the process, then I think we can do that. I don't know that the time to do that is on a specific bid that's before the council today. But I feel very confident in our process, in our evaluation process and who's involved in that. Will we make a mistake or make a decision that you wouldn't make as a council member in determining what the weights are? Yes, that's possible. But I have a great deal of reliance on the process that we have. We can do this any way that you want. We can take it back. Although I'd like to get an answer to the question, does it jeopardize the bid that we think is the best bid at the moment? And I would hate to see us jeopardize our ability to do that project. And I don't know, Anita, I didn't mean to interrupt if you had another comment. I don't know as I sit here how long these bids are live, but I suspect our purchasing department does know how long these will be alive so that whether we have any additional time or not or the urgency of the project, so I can't answer either of those questions. I will comment to council that if the council does choose, we do retain in our agenda postings the right to go into closed session so we can talk about legal issues only concerning this bid if the council desires to do that. And I've prepared a letter for you giving you an opinion that that is an appropriate use of your closed session to go into a closed meeting to talk about this item. So if you choose to go in that direction, we can certainly do that a little later in this meeting. >> May I put -- yeah. >> Well, if I could first ask the -- I guess it would be the DME staff, maybe it's the purchasing staff. If we delayed this a week or two weeks, maybe three weeks because of our March/Spring break, if we delayed this a few weeks before we took action, does it jeopardize any of the projects? Does it create a problem for the overall project? >> I don't believe it's going to cause us an immediate problem if that should occur. From what I've heard -- I'm not sure that's going to jeopardize any projects that we have in place at that time from that perspective. >> An observation. Mr. Roden, did you say it might make our meetings long? It might make our meetings long? I can't even imagine. But in fairness, twice we've heard recently that consent agenda items are just rubber stamp issues. I've never regarded it that way. I spend hours when I'm doing my preparation for council meetings reading the backup and staff spends hours and hours providing a lot of backup on every one of those consent agenda items that we have. So I'm troubled to hear that term that these are rubber stamp items because I don't think any item that comes before council is regarded by my colleagues as items to be rubber stamped. So I felt like I needed to put that out there as another point of view to what the consent agenda is about. >> Go ahead. >> Councilmember Riggs. >> So I want to say that I don't really mind vendors coming to talk to council because there are certain issues that we wouldn't know otherwise and I think it's only happened twice in a year. So I don't think that's a big issue. So I guess my question is about the RFP because in your presentation it seemed like from the beginning you knew what you wanted and who did it best. So no. >> No, we wanted to see what was out there in the marketplace and we have an evaluation criteria of which price is a significant portion, 50%, but there's other criteria. We've used different products with both the AFTEC product that's at King's Row that still has yet to be complete, which is the one in question today. The WASH product is the ones that we have built, three of them successfully already, and so they did get rated higher in the probable performance area and the other one is downgraded from that. We also understand that A1 was licensed by AFTEC, the one that has yet to be completed back in January, just maybe for this bid we're not sure. So those are all things that were considered during this evaluation of the products. And the main concern is that the gentleman mentioned that the one that was accepted is going to go over the $5.9 million, and so that sticks out to me as something that maybe we should look into on the numbers. >> Yeah, that's the only thing that I'm really glad was brought to our attention. I was unaware of the payment performance bond until actually the numbers came out today on that piece. But other than that, even with that factored in, I've talked to purchasing, they've recalculated the weighting of all of these with that factored in, they said that would not change the outcome of the total points that were awarded with this. And maybe purchasing can come up and help address that if there's additional questions on that. >> Yeah, I've got just two real quick questions then, Council Member Johnson. You're talking about this other product that's at the Kings row substation. >> Yes, sir. >> And that it's been delayed, I think you said- >> Three months. >> But is that the company that we're talking about now? That's a different company. >> Yeah, it's the same fence, the same wall system that they license for Turner that's putting it in now or for A1 to put in on this RFP. >> Right, but the Turner company is the one doing that job. >> It is a different company installing it. And so it may be different. >> And on the particular RFP, you've got them downgraded to a 12 on I think its deliverability probable performance. Turner's 12 most likely because of your experience there. >> And we didn't know if it was all their fault or some of the system fault. And so we did rate A1 higher than Turner. You will note that as well. >> Okay. >> It's at 15 I believe. >> The only other question and you can, I'm purchasing will probably answer this and so I'm going to put the question out there and then let Council Member Johnson ask his. Yeah, somebody's going to have to go over this bond thing because that was gone over real quickly and I'm not necessarily how all that works anyway so I just would like a little bit of explanation. >> And I'm not your expert on that piece at all. >> Sure, so we'll go ahead and answer, Council Member Johnson, if you go ahead and ask a question then we'll have purchasing come up and answer any other questions. >> Sure, yeah, so to clarify, I mean I'm asking my questions to understand the process and I would have absolutely zero desire for us as sitters of council and go through all these bids. We talked about on our retreat about, you know, you hire good people and you let them go to work and that we don't need to get in the weeds and be in all those meetings and all that detail so I'm not saying that I want to sit here and go through all those bids at all. My question is really to understand the process and the grading and how not because I want to get involved in it but better to understand it and so, Brian, I just want to make sure I understand what I heard you say early on was that this bond thing came to y'all's attention just yesterday. So when we have a situation where there's been a bid and we 've awarded a bid and then something comes to light like well maybe there was an error somewhere or maybe we didn't understand or they didn't respond in such a way, might have given somebody a looked upon less favorably than somebody else because of the way the question was asked or whatever. Do we ever go back and say well hold on, there's enough concern here, we want to just we're going to clarify and rebid or do we ever do that or I'm just trying to understand the process. Right, because of the agenda lead time that we have to put topics on, I believe actually Friday was when an email was first received that there were some questions about this and I heard about it yesterday and today I actually heard that it was a payment bond performance topic that there was discrepancy there. So it's a very fast time frame as far as how it all gets condensed into a short period of time. There's enough questions to where it's not that we can rec alculate and say oh we're awarding this to Roland, absolutely we would want to come back and make that recommendation that we, new information has come to light that would actually change the total tally or the outcome of the recommended awardee and we would do so. So that is not the case here. Yeah, the reason I'm asking the question is not because I absolutely believe we have fantastic people and our finance department and purchasing department is always getting awards and so I want to get in the middle of their business. I was just really trying to understand if it ever happens where we go back and re-bid, provide more clarification and re-bid, do we have a process for that? We can always cancel a bid and go out and re-bid and get new bids and go through the whole process again and we may once again come out with a clear winner or we may once again have some questions that are raised by whoever didn't get awarded the bid. So yes, those are all possibilities. So my input on this then, can I give input to city manager or is this not the time? Sure, I mean, we have some outstanding questions but I mean , I know Council Member Wasney asked for some questions about, you know, what do we need to do here in this particular instance so if you want to... Well, I guess I would just say I completely believe in our staff and so if the staff believes that some of these questions that have come to light get, warrant a re-look, then great. I'm not going to tell our staff, this is Greg Johnson, I'm not going to tell our staff, I want you to re-bid the thing. I don't think it's my place. Okay. Let's hear from purchasing on just the bond, how all that works and how that's figured into the pricing because I didn't really follow that at all . I see Mr. Springer. Okay, go ahead. I'm Karen Smith, the assistant purchasing manager. So I talk about the bond issue. When it was bid out, it was bid out as a unit of one when it probably should have been adjusted the quantity as they brought to our attention and so we... Explain that. I don't even know what you mean by that. Oh, I got you. Okay. Let me see if I can get... I don't know if he has a... Sorry, I don't have a fancy presentation. So when it was originally bid, you can see here that this is a quantity of one and because the bonds are done by each project, this quantity should have been higher. And they brought that to our attention and we agree that that quantity should have been changed. So today we changed that to a quantity of 59 to account for the 5.9 million because the bonds, their price was per 100,000. And when we did that and recalculated, it didn't change the score. I mean, it changed the score, but it didn't change the outcome. So... I thought someone had said that they passed out this new evaluation that you all did. I mean, we don't have that, do we? I did not prepare one. Okay. I just would like to see... Apparently you all have done a reanalysis of this based upon the issues that were brought forward. Yes, sir. And I would just like to be able to see what that is. Do you have a slide on that or he's gonna pass them out? Okay. All right. Which one is it? Okay. Thank you. I have it here. I don't know if this is the... This is the one. Chuck, is this the one with the 2,500 or the 5,000? So I did want to comment too on that. So we changed... In the example you can see, we changed the quantity to 59 on line item 9, and it recalculated the pricing and the score, therefore changed to a 48. I will say that we use a mathematical formula to do both pricing and delivery. So those are all scored automatically through the formula. So it updated automatically when we changed the quantity. Yes, ma'am. Yes, go ahead. Sorry. In the original RFP, was the unit also one? When it originally went out, it went out just like this with the one. So the fact that it was one and not 59, question for our city attorney, does that put us in any type of legal quandary that the RFP... If it's okay with council, I did indicate earlier we could talk about this in closed session. So let's, if that's good with you, call that as a closed session item a little bit later in the meeting and we can discuss any of those legal issues . Would you like to do that, go into a closed session? Okay. So we'll do that. At what stage of the meeting would we do that, City Attorney? It's the call of the chair, but it might be convenient to do it when we do the rest of the closed sessions. Okay. All right. Anything else for me, sir? Any other... Just one, I guess. So when I look at these side by side, the original one and the new one that was just passed out. Yes, sir. The rankings or the evaluation, those point system, the point system, that didn't really change at all. Is that my understanding? Yes. It's all the formula that we use is in comparison to the low. So it's not in comparison to an estimate or anything like that. So the formula automatically is compared to the lowest price. And so the delivery is the same. So it is compared to the lowest one that is submitted. Okay. All right. So if there's not a huge dollar amount, then it wouldn't change significantly. Okay. All right. I don't have any more questions. We'll probably go into closed session when we get to closed session. Any more questions for staff on this particular agenda item of clarification? Seeing none. Thank you. Any other agenda items needing clarification? Mr. Member Rhoade. Thank you, Mayor. Agenda item, I think it's O, it's relating to the research project with SMU and the methane gas project out at the landfill. I just wanted to ask the question, it sounds like this was perhaps initiated by the SMU research team or maybe jointly initiated between our department and theirs. I just wanted to ask the question as to whether or not our local universities have any kind of program that could have accomplished this as well, whether that was looked into. Mr. C. Manger. Yes. I'd like to ask Scott Lebsack if he would with the solid waste department. Scott, if you would mind answering that question. And I know we had a similar question that was requested or asked at the public utility board meeting as well. Mayor, council, I'm Scott Lebsack and I do work in solid waste. The local universities are not, their engineering programs are not geared toward landfill and land management. And we have looked into that and in answer to your question , no, they're not set up with those programs where they could do this type of work. Thank you. Just to be clear, I think this is a great project and it's a great research project and it's one of those unique things about Denton's energy future that we do take advantage of methane from our landfills. With the success of this project, we anticipate there's possibilities that we may be able to double our gas revenues and we're hoping to be able to put on another generator and that would be very financially beneficial to us and that's why we're wanting to move ahead with the project. Great. Thanks. Yes, councilmember Hawkins. Yeah, I have two. Jay, it just seemed like kind of lawyer speak here and I didn't understand it when it got to the end here. In the additional amount of not to exceed 800,000 aggreg ating not to exceed 1.3, can somebody just explain that to me, what that aggregating to that amount means? Who wants to take that? I think that's a contract isn't that with Herrera? Yes. Yeah, that's our legal contract. You're on Jay, right? Yeah, that's it. That's NRG. That's an NRG. This particular item before the council would add an additional $800,000 to the existing contract making the total not to exceed amount of 1.395 million in this NRG litigation matter. Did that answer your question? Yes. Thank you. Mr. Hawkins, okay. Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead. Yes, apologize. And then on AA, the $2,000 that is coming out of hot funds, when something does that come out of the general, out of what am I trying to say? Where does that 2,000 out of hot funds come from? What category or what? Mr. Springer, Chuck Springer is our director of finance. Thank you, Chuck. I'll try this one. There's a set amount, if you're a member with the hot committee, there's a set amount that goes to public art every year, a certain percentage that goes to public art and is funded for that. So it comes out of that dedicated amount for public art. Okay. I was trying to recall because at the meeting, so that is just held as almost a placeholder as a percentage. And then when projects like this come up, it's taken out of there. Yeah, and it comes through the public art committee that Parks and Rec supports. Thanks, Chuck. Council Member Briggs. I had a question on Jay as well about the contract. I'm curious what the previous contract we approved was for. I have to do the math right quick, but it's 1.395 million minus 800,000. Oh, so it's whatever that is. Whatever that is. Okay. Any other questions? I do have one. I think only one. And mine was on Jay as well. Well, I struggle with, I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to get it to the public art committee, but I think it's going to be a good one. I think it's going to be a good one. I think it's going to be a good one. I think it's going to be a good one. I think it's going to be a good one. I think it's going to be a good one. I think it's going to be a good one. I think it's going to be a good one. Well, I struggle with, I understand that the attorney's fees may eventually end up with that amount. Not to exceed. I guess I struggle with approving something that large. For me, I would prefer to see more of an incremental approach, you know, 400,000 or 500,000, because this is some pretty heavy duty litigation. We're going to be probably having to talk about this several times in closed session as far as the direction, depending on how this case develops. That's just my preference. So what I'd like to do is just pull that item for individual consideration. I don't need a presentation, staff, just to give an opportunity if I need to do something different, then I have the opportunity to do that. We do have a closed session discussion on that item. Yes. Okay. All right. So clarification for consent agenda items. Council Member Hawkins. No, I'm good. I was just going to say just under an hour, we got through that. That's pretty good. Okay, great. Thank you. We're not done. Oh, we're not done with what? Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't see her. On Z, I was just wondering if someone, I know that we have a lot of people asking for a non-annexation agreement, and so I was just wondering if we could get some clarification on how this was done and why. Which one are you? Z. Z. Z, that's a different one. How it's different. Z. Z. Yes, who? Madam City Attorney. Thank you, Mayor. I'll take a crack at that one. This particular item was discussed by the council at the last city council meeting. This was an area on Ryan Road that was not contained within the larger grouping of areas to be annexed pursuant to our study which occurred in 2008. So this was an outlier, and last year it got a one-year non -annexation agreement. There is a proposal for development of this area at this point in time and pursuant to council discussion at the last council meeting. This is a very limited extension on that non-annexation agreement in order to pursue the possibility of obtaining a development agreement for that area along Ryan Road. So what I'm hearing you say is this is sort of different than all the other ones we've sort of been discussing as far as the donut holes and things such as that. Yes, sir. We talked about it last time. Yes, sir. This is entirely different. This is an outlying piece that was not considered in that original study. Any other follow-up questions, Council Member Briggs, for that? Okay. All right. Back on Jay. What have we spent to date on those fees, do we know? I can't give you the down to the nickel on it, but it's close to having -- we're close to having spent the amount in the original purchase order, which would be the 1.395 minus the 800,000, whatever that total is, we're close to having expended on. Would it be possible to maybe get that number prior to our council meeting? Sure. Absolutely. I'm going to help council meeting because it's open. It's an open data. Any other questions for clarification? Sorry. I'm sorry about that. I'd like to point out -- Oh, yes. Mr. City Manager. Let me mention several items so you'll be aware of what we are asking you to proceed with today. On the consent agenda, of course, we have the item G that we've been discussing this afternoon, but we also have consent agenda item U, which we 're going to ask you to pull from the agenda and not pass. That has to do with a -- I'll say this wrong, not pro temp amendment to a minor error in an annexation agreement, but the City Attorney has asked us to pull it for today. On the public hearings, public hearing 5A, the applicant in that case has asked that that item be postponed until April the 5th. So we're asking you to open that public hearing and continue it until April the 5th. On public hearing 5D, which is the Westgate Business Park, we're asking you to open that public hearing and postpone it until March the 22nd. 5D as in dog. Then on items for individual consideration following the public hearings, item 6A, there is an -- there is intended to be an alternate ordinance to the one that was proposed in your agenda. Anita, I don't know whether we yet have that, but we either need to substitute that alternate ordinance or pull this item at the direction or request of the City Attorney. >> Yes, sir. Just a touch of explanation on that. This relates to the TMPA, and there are four member cities involved. This is an ordinance that's going to be passed in identical form by all cities. We are first on the slate, unfortunately, so there will either be an alternate ordinance or if we can't get concurrence, and we're working on it right now from the three other cities as to some of the language in the ordinance, we will pull it all together. So if you can bear with us the rest of the afternoon, we will tell you definitively where we are and either give you the alternate or ask you to pull it entirely. >> And then we have one other as item 6B, which is also an item for individual consideration, having to do with setting hearing dates on annexations on a property, that we pull that item from the agenda today altogether. So we've got item 5A and 5D, which we're asking you to postpone, open those hearings, postpone, substitute an ordinance on 6A and pull item 6B altogether. And then Mayor, you'd ask that item J also be removed for individual consideration. >> Yeah, and I -- >> And item U, we need to pull all together. >> I'll reserve the right on J upon the closed session to maybe reconsider unless some other council member wants to pull it as well. >> We're trying to shorten your meeting. >> And finishing the summation of the city manager also, item U, which is at no time. >> Okay, any other -- I'm sorry. Yes. Councilmember Rhoad. >> I seem to recall this night, a year ago, when there was a significant local item on the ballot, come 7 o'clock, there was a lot of interest in what was happening tonight. There might be a lot of interest. I imagine there might be several council members distracted at about 7 o'clock looking at their computers trying to ascertain the early election results. Perhaps we can recognize that and everyone involved, we can take three minutes for everyone to just take some time and look at that. >> Well, and I think I'd ask the city manager if there's a possible way to maybe post it on the screens, but that might be irregular or illegal. So maybe we don't want people to have outbursts of nonverb als. But anyway. >> Maybe just a two-minute break. >> Sure. >> I think a break would be fine, Mayor, and I apologize. I haven't been able to visit with Billy. I'll find out whether we can post something up, but we'll check on it. >> So whoever's up talking during the public hearing portion or something and 7 o'clock gets here, we're going. Yes. >> Do you think we're going to be at public hearings by 7? >> Okay. We are through the consent agenda items. Request for clarification. We'll move into item 3A, work session is receive report, hold discussion, give staff direction regarding the FY 2014-15 comprehensive annual financial report and annual audit. And Mr. City Manager. >> Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'm going to ask Mr. Chuck Springer, our director of finance, if he would open this discussion, introduce any folks that he has to introduce who are here with us today, and make this presentation. Thank you, Chuck. >> Thank you, George. The annual audit and the other documents were enclosed within your package. This has gone to the audit finance committee. And we have with us from our external auditors, Jerry Ga ither and Sarah Dempsey. But before we get there, I want to say thank you to our accounting staff who spends about five months of the year on this process. I know if you've ever tried to go certain times to the audit finance committee, or the sorry, the finance conference room, you'll see a group of folks in there. Very busy. Those are external auditors. But we've had three years of what I would call extremely successful results out of our annual financial report. And I want to give kudos to our accounting staff. Kevin Ann Mullins over there, Cody Wood, and Harvey Jarvis is over there and all of the staff because they do yeoman's work in terms of getting this done and getting it done correctly. And with that, I'll let Jerry Gaither of Weaver and Tidwell , our external auditors, come up. >> Thank you. I'd also like to echo that and thank, appreciate the support and assistance provided by finance staff here in helping us do an effective and efficient audit and the professionalism which they conduct their business to help us do an efficient, effective audit and approve the process on an ongoing basis. We perform the audit in accordance with generally accepted auditing standards, in accordance with generally accepted governmental auditing standards and OMB A133. Our audit includes a review and evaluation of internal controls to determine the nature and extent of our test work and to determine that significant transaction controls over significant transaction cycles are operating as designed. Also test of controls in certain areas for reduction of our audit procedures and test of controls over compliance with major federal financial assistance programs. We also test all account balances by using vouching material transactions, sampling transactions, and performing analog procedures on those account balances. We issued an unmodified report on the financials or unmod ified opinion on the financial statements. State the financial statements are fairly reflected. It does include an emphasis paragraph relating to the adoption of a new governmental accounting standards board statement this year which had to be implemented. Accounting standards require statements to be prepared consistently with the prior year so any time a change in accounting principle is implemented then you'll have an emphasis paragraph in your audit opinion. We also issued a report on internal control relating to the financial statements that had no material weaknesses or findings in that report. We also issue a report on internal control over compliance with major federal financial assistance programs that had no findings in that either and we also issue an opinion on compliance with the compliance requirements of the major federal financial assistance programs and there were no material weaknesses in those controls and we had an unmodified opinion on compliance with those requirements. With that I will open it up to any questions that you might have about that. >> Mayor Pro Tem. >> Thank you. You're an accountant, right? >> Yes. >> Great eye contact. You know how to tell an extrovert accountant in a room full of accountants when he's talking to the other person he looks at the other person's shoes. >> I thought we wanted to get to these meetings quickly. >> I know. >> Just sit and stand up. >> Clearly not. I have to say that every time I read one of your reports I feel like there's some disclaimers up the front about what you do and what our responsibility is and after I read what my responsibility is I feel like I need to go and get the city checkbook and my calculator and double check their numbers. Do you know what I'm talking about? >> Yeah, well, kind of I do. Our responsibility is to give an opinion on the fairness of the presentation of the financial statement but it is the city's responsibility to prepare the financial statements and the accuracy of the financial statements. We're just issuing an opinion on those financial statements and opinion relates to test of transactions and sampling. We don't look at every transaction nor -- >> And so for an accountant to explain to an English major, tell me what a test of transaction looks like, what that means. >> Okay. Well, like I mentioned, we start off in the process -- the audit engagement starts off with the planning of the engagement. We identify areas of significant risk -- >> You need to go to the microphone. >> We identify areas of significant risk relating to the audit and we design our audit procedures relating to risk related to that engagement. After that, we also evaluate internal controls of significant transaction cycles. We look at those controls and we determine whether those controls are operating as designed. That provides you some level of comfort that the controls are operating as designed. So we go in and test certain controls that we're going to rely on to reduce the work that we do. We test a sample of transactions throughout the year to determine that those controls are accurate -- are operating as designed. If we can rely on those, then we go to what we consider our substantive test work. >> Okay. >> I see you have a question. >> Because you're using language that is very common for you to use. >> Uh-huh. >> But when you talk about internal controls, what you're talking about is -- >> So transaction properly authorized, approved, executed, some of the things that you've all been talking about. >> Okay. So that there's checks and balances, somebody is maybe double checking the math, those kinds of things. >> Yeah. >> So all of those procedures are -- >> We'll talk about the bid process. We'll look at the bid through -- >> You're sorely tethered. >> Through the process for the opening bid, if there are any change orders, we'll look at change orders of the bid. We'll look at the cash disbursements to make sure the cash going out matches up with what items were bid and then all the way through the recording of those transactions within the financial statements. >> Okay. That helps. I appreciate it. >> Okay. >> Councilmember Hawkins. >> Yeah. We had a couple meetings here recently with finance audit committee and we just met with you earlier today, but I appreciate you guys doing this every year and, two, something that was ringing in my ear was you said how easy it was to work with the City of Denton staff and they actually approached you and said how can we make this whole thing easier on you and what can we do and maybe if you could just repeat what you had said in the meeting. >> Yeah. That's really kind of uncommon. There's a lot of discussion with other entities about making the process efficient, but usually it's reducing, you know, the amount of work on the City's part and how that process becomes efficient, but very rarely does the City come to us and say how can we make this process more efficient for you as an audit. What can we do to help this process become efficient? And the City of Denton has been doing that and did do that this year to come to us and look for feedback from us on how we can make -- how they could help assist us in engagement to make it more efficient. We certainly appreciate that and I think that goes to the professionalism of the finance staff that you have here. >> Any other questions? Thank you. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you. We're going to go on to agenda item 3B, receive report, hold discussion, give staff direction regarding approval of purchase order through the National Joint Power Alliance for the purchase of prefabricated concrete restroom buildings at City of Denton North Lakes Field 5 and 6, Mack Park, Roberts Field, and the restroom con cession at Mack Park. >> Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I know that after the earlier discussion you're happy to talk about restrooms and this is Emerson Vorel, our director of parks and recreation's favorite topic to do this. >> Absolutely. >> Thank you, sir. >> I'm back. >> In the saddle again. >> Yes. Excuse me. So to speak. We discussed this purchase at the September 15th council meeting and you asked me and my staff to go out and try to compare some construction costs with site built facilities as well as other prefabricated restroom options. Now with the exception of the CXT product, what you see in your backup are estimates, okay? That's real important. These are not formal bids. We went out and asked a number of folks if they would give us estimates to do this work, unbinding I guess is what I'm trying to say. We sent proposals or sent requests I should say out to nine local builders. We got responses from three of them. We also talked to BLC architecture for a probable opinion from them as well. BLC, their estimate of cost was $923,223 for a site built. They also said in their opinion that they believe that the prefabricated option is always going to be a cheaper option than a site built one. Just as a reminder, the bid on the table right now, the bid from CXT is $757,073 for three buildings at three different locations. Lemco sent us back a bid of $1,014,000 for site built. That does not include any design fees. Just as a kind of a placeholder design fee for this type of work is usually in the area of 10%. Sometimes a little less, sometimes a little more, but just for the sake of dirty math while we're discussing this. They also offered a bid of $857,993 for the exact same thing that CXT bid. So that's about $100,000 more than CXT for the same product . They did offer a less costly option with a stucco exterior from another builder, another prefabricated structure. But we've honestly felt that was a lesser product than the CXT product that we're looking at right now. We spoke with Lynx Construction. Lynx site built bid including design fees. By the time we added the permits on was $677,377.75. This is a site built CMU block facility. It is a bit cheaper, it's almost $80,000 cheaper than what we're looking at from CXT. It is not a, we would lose the opportunity to possibly build this, I'm sorry, to move this structure sometime in the future or any of these structures should we elect to. But it is, there is a savings involved there at this point. >> You want to ask your question now? >> Well. >> Councilmember Hawkins. >> I'll wait, that was my question. >> Okay. >> So I'll wait. >> Alomar Construction gave us an estimate. They said they were willing to commit to a site built without design fees. Not to exceed $757,000, which is the same price as the CXT product that we've suggested. That was if there are no significant foundation work needed . And again, that's a site built block structure. So it would not be movable at any point in time. Six other folks that we sent requests to did not respond. One important additional item that I want to talk about with this CXT contract that's on the table at the moment. The design fees have already been paid to CXT for the structures that we're talking about. All three of those buildings have gone through the city's review process with building inspection. The building permits have been issued for those three structures. That was part of the purchasing process. We had to do it that way. It wasn't our choice. >> Elaborate on that a little bit. Because this was before you came to us and we said, hey, go back and see if you can't find something different. You're saying y'all went ahead and put it through the perm itting process? >> In order for building inspection to even consider whether, this is chicken or the egg, sir, whether we could even use this type of structure, we had to go through design review. In order to go through design review, we had to purchase the blueprints from CXT and we had to pay for the perm itting. >> I thought we had some of these that were done before. >> We do not have these prefabricated structures. >> So this is the first time we're using prefabricated structures? >> Yes, sir. >> Okay, all right. Building permits have actually been issued for these structures. If we elect to put the brakes on this and go in a different direction, the process will be, and we will pay for, an architect to draw up the designs. We'll start over with the design review process. And for those of you who are familiar with that process, it 's extensive. The design review will be based under newer building codes. >> Efficient and effective, that's what he meant. >> The design review will be based on the newer building codes. These were actually passed under the previous building codes, which will be more restrictive, which means the cost for these structures will be greater than what we're already talking about. So should you elect to move forward with the purchase of these prefabricated structures, these structures are almost indestructible. We do have the option of moving these at some point in time if we elect to. CXT, I will say, has held their price since the start of this process. And their prices have gone up since we started. And the CXT product for this package has already been reviewed and permitted. This is on your consent agenda for later this evening. Stand for questions. >> Councilmember Hawkins. >> Have we ever repurposed one of these buildings before or moved one? >> Well, we don't own one. >> Because this is the first time, so. >> The closest I could come to answering that is we were gifted a concrete building similar to this from the old Andrews company when they moved out. And we moved that out to the KDB and they used it for storage for a number of years out at the annex building out there at North Lakes. >> So you do think that's something that we should be in concern of when we're thinking of this project? >> Well, I think it's a consideration. We certainly don't want to go out and lift these a number of times. We did have a very specific conversation with the folks that build these about, is this a realistic expectation? And they said yes, they have done it before. It's not something you're going to run out and do willy n illy, if you will. It is a process. There are costs involved. But it definitely is an option. >> Okay. >> Councilmember Briggs. >> You may have addressed this, but with the prefab, there 's less maintenance and upkeep than the ones that are the prefab. >> With the prefab, every wall, the floor, the ceiling, it's basically a monolithic pour, it's all concrete. With the exception of fixtures, which may be broken no matter what style of building we use . We will never have a problem with the roof. And all we will do is paint it. >> And I know from previous discussions, one, cleaning the restrooms is a big issue. You guys, are these hosed down? >> Yes, ma'am. >> Okay, so that's pretty good for you guys. >> Yes, ma'am. >> We're going to go cast my walls and cast my ropes. >> Thank you. I think it's also a tornado shelter in the event of a storm in a park. In terms of it just provides so much more shelter than a concrete block. Concrete block walls crack. I mean, we went through this and it was a problem with the concrete block. So I'm very comfortable with this plan on the price. I understand how frustrating it's been to try to jump through all these different permitting hoops prior to. But as we enter into park season, if it's approved tonight, what is the timing for placement? >> The good folks at CXT have actually built these structures. As quickly as we could get the asbestos studies done on the existing structures and get them knocked down, they could have them delivered from Waxahachie. They're on the ground. >> So ready for our spring, summer, fall? >> Yes, ma'am. >> Good, thank you. >> Councilmember Rodin. >> Yeah, I was just going to say I appreciate you going through this process and looking at additional options. Although I was comfortable last time with this recommendation. So my suggestion is let's stop talking about bathrooms and let's get them on the ground. >> I'm going to need a new favorite topic, I guess. >> Well, and I can understand that. I still, I'm probably going to reluctantly vote for this, but there's got to be a better way. I mean, how big are these things? 100 square feet each or 50 square feet? >> [INAUDIBLE] >> No, no, if you could come to the microphone, please. >> Just one, just one of the buildings, I mean, and its associated cost. >> There's three separate buildings, one of them being a full size concession. The total square footage of the project is roughly 2,900 square feet. >> That's for all three buildings? >> All three buildings. >> So about 700 square feet, 800 square feet apiece? >> One is significantly smaller than the rest, but yes. >> We got to find a better way to not spend $300 a square foot, but I'm going to vote for this. But we need to start our own prefabrication concrete division of the city of Denton when we're paying $6 million for fences and $300,000 for restrooms and Council Mayor Pro Tem. >> We all have our issues, don't we? >> And that's no reflection on the Parks Department. It's very difficult just to take that in, but go ahead. >> Hi, the backup shows, in fact, the caption shows which three restrooms these will be replacing. Do we have any notion as to when we're going to replace the restrooms that are behind the pool, the swimming pool at Quaker Town Park, and the restrooms that are next door to the American Legion Hall and- >> Fred Moore. >> Fred Moore Park. >> The restrooms in Fred Moore, actually- >> It's a restroom concession stand there. >> Yes, we're in conversation with the community to actually take that structure down. There are restrooms built into the end of the American Legion annex. >> I know, I painted them. >> Okay, so actually Council Member Rodin has helped us a great deal here just in the last week, entering into discussion with the neighborhood to go ahead and take that structure down. It's not used and it needs to be removed. As far as the facility in Quaker Town Park, we have tried for a few years to get that property, get funding to rebuild it . To date, we've not been successful. We'll keep plugging away. We get funded, we'll replace it. >> So you mean through the budgetary process. >> Yes, sir. >> So it's something that could be remodeled or reconfig ured to be used. >> The Quaker Town restroom? >> Yes. >> It could be reused as- >> Sorry. >> Wait, so you mean rebuilt, just- >> Yeah, scraped off and rebuilt. Yeah, there's no saving that, baby. >> Yeah, I have some not so fine memories of when I was a kid using that. >> It's time. >> It's old. >> Okay, what else on this agenda item? Anybody? Nope, okay. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, you bet. And that's on the consent, is that correct? >> Yes, sir. >> Okay. >> Agenda item C, receive a report and hold discussion, give staff direction regarding the city budget process, financial planning assumptions, and debt service tax rate impacts. Related to the 2014 bond election and upcoming issuance of certificate of obligations. >> Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Chuck Springer is our director of finance. >> Sorry, Mr. Chuck Springer is our director of finance. And he and Mr. Langley have assured me this presentation and your discussion is, this is very important and shouldn't take more than a couple of hours. So we do anticipate a pretty lengthy discussion here. Thank you, Mr. Springer. >> Say that one more time. >> I'm serious. But it's Chuck presenting. >> We're going to run a tight meeting here. >> Yeah, let's go, Chuck. >> I want to say I've kind of got two presentations. One of them, the second one went to the audit finance committee and they requested we bring it to council looking at the debt rate in the upcoming year, which is impacted by our bond sales. The first one is just kind of a general informational presentation. There's not any specific direction that's necessary from the council, but it's just some background information. At the end, I'll kind of go over some other, several other sessions we're going to have during the year as we lead up to the proposed budget. Just want to kind of go over some of the general budgeting concepts. I like the general fund budget in this presentation, kind of talk about the budget cycle and development of the budget, what city staff does before it gets to the city council, and then some discussion of the general fund balance. I think it was appropriate that today we had the presentation of the annual financial report. Because one of the items that drives the budget is it's got to flow into the accounting system. So we use a fund accounting system as a key concept. When you think about the general fund or the hotel occup ancy tax fund or street maintenance fund, the reason that it's set up that way is really because of accounting principles and how we have to segregate that. So money is segregated for specific purposes. Sometimes it's because of legal restrictions under state law. For example, hotel occupancy tax funds can only be spent for certain purposes. So we have to segregate those funds to ensure that they're only spent for those purposes under state law or grant funds or debt service funds. In terms of cash is managed through a pool system, so we invest all these funds together. They're not separately invested by each separate fund. We invest them together for the efficiency. And each fund has kind of unique cost drivers and revenue streams. So you kind of have to understand each fund to understand the budget as a whole. The policies and strategic priorities really drive the formulation of the budget. This comes from the city council in terms of our strategic plan and then each year the strategic policies. And the funding strategy is set to try to match those policies. Then multi-year financial plans for the general fund and the utility funds, we have multi-year financial plans. They're really developed so that the decision makers can kind of understand the long term impacts of the decisions we're making. Are they sustainable and financially affordable over the long run? So some types of governmental funds, the general fund, which is most commonly what a lot of the budget discussion is about. The debt service fund, which is paying for our annual debt service. And then we have a lot of special revenue funds, like the street maintenance fund, the parks and recreation fund, our traffic safety fund, where we keep the hotel occupancy taxes. All of those are special revenue funds. And again, segregated for generally legal purposes or accounting purposes. Some other examples, we've got the new fund set up by the council for economic development. So we segregated those funds because it's for a specific purpose. Then we have proprietary funds, which is really the utility funds and those are enterprise funds. They follow a method of accounting basically the same as a business would versus governmental funds. Internal service funds like fleet, materials management, which is purchasing in the warehouse, our technology fund, risk and help. And basically those are segregated because they provide a service across the city to the general fund, to the utility funds. And so their costs are contained and then charged out to all the funds across the city. Therefore, that's why they're called an internal service fund. They're serving the others. And it's just a more efficient method of breaking down those costs based on the usage. This just gives the 2015-16 budget by fund, all the different funds. You can see our capital budget is the largest. It incorporates the utilities capital budget and the general capital budget. You see the second largest is the electric fund. And then we go to the general fund in terms of third largest. So just gives a little idea of the total budget. In terms of the general fund revenues and expenditures for the year, you can see what was budgeted. In terms of personnel, about half of the city's personnel is within the general fund. In all funds, it's about 1,565. And in terms of revenues to the general fund, what makes up the revenues? You can see the largest is ad valorem or property taxes. Sales tax is number two. Number three is cost of service transfers. There's a lot of services that the general fund provides, especially for the utility funds. Like human resources, finance, city manager's office, those type of things. And those services are recaptured through this cost of service transfer. >> Chuck, real quick question on that slide. I probably don't have it, but it'd be interesting to see. The, how the sales tax and ad valorem taxes, which comprise almost 60, over 60%. How those have tracked over the last few years. In other words, is sales tax becoming a greater percentage? Is it staying level? Is it decrease? It'd just be interesting to maybe get that, just to see a historical perspective of that. >> Okay. >> I've got the historical of over the ten year period, but I don't have them as a percent of the budget. >> Sure, sure. >> So here's the property tax value history. You can see before the financial crisis hit in 2008, the city was growing very strong in terms of expansion, double digit growth in assessed valuation. Then you can see the slow down with the negative year in 2010. And then we've kind of grown out of it in terms of property value growth. >> And I've done a little research on that before, but I've gone back a few more years to 1998, 99. And I'll tell you from 98 to 2007, we had growth probably, I think it was averaging 8 or 9%. I mean, it was pretty substantial. You see 13 and 11% in 2005 and 4 in those preceding years were pretty strong. Maybe not that strong, but we experienced a lot of growth during that time frame. >> And here's the same time period for sales tax growth on an annual basis. And you can see that sales tax is volatile by any kinds of means. If you look at 2008, 9, we had a decline. Then it was flat and you can see some years that were double digit, including the most recent year that just ended for us 14, 15 where we saw growth of about 10.22%. >> Councilmember Hawkins. >> Chuck, when you see a bump like that too, I mean, I know more people are moving in, more shops are opening. But have any tax incentives expired that were pretty big? I know Amy had just recently done a slide on that, but I couldn't remember. >> And we haven't had any of the sales tax expire. I think the first one that expires is in a couple more fiscal years. We haven't seen that. >> Thank you. But also along those lines, sometimes we have some very different months from comparison to the year before, the month, the year before. Because we've had some corrections from the state. Are those corrections big enough that they would account for some of the differences between the years? >> Not generally on an annual basis. Sometimes it's comparing to the same month in a prior year if you have adjustments. But overall on an annual basis, it tends to reflect more just the growth in general in the community. >> Thank you. >> Could you maybe go back to that last slide? I just want to see on the, you don't have what the actual taxes collected were, okay. >> I don't have the dollars. >> Yeah, on the sales tax, it went up about 50% in that time range. But here on the certified assessed value, it's only about, what is that, about 50, 60% maybe? Okay, all right, thanks. >> And here's our general fund expenditures by category. In terms of, you can see personnel services is by far the largest category. The second largest category is operations and that includes utilities, cleaning services, outside services such as the appraisal district, Denton County for collecting taxes, banking services, credit card services, fuel, all those kinds of categories. And in terms of expenditures by department for the general fund, you can see police and we've lumped together animal services and fire make up about 50% of the general fund. Which we've been running at for several years about 50% of the general fund. In terms of number three, parks and recreation is number three in terms of expenditures. Go over a little bit, five year financial forecast. I mentioned before that really the purpose of the five year forecast is to look at kind of budgetary decisions. And what kind of impact they're going to make in terms of five year forecast. We do that for the general fund, but we also do it for other major funds, all the utility funds do a five year forecast. The purposes of those are to kind of evaluate budgetary decisions for long term impacts. To ensure financial affordability and sustainability of budget decisions. The assumptions are conservative with the hope that future years will be outperformed. In other words, we're conservative on our assumptions of what's going to occur so that we can show those impacts. If things get a little bit better, then it might have a little bit less of impact. But if you've seen from those prior years, there's times when AV goes flat or negative in sales tax. So you want to be able to try not to bring on any programs that aren't going to be sustainable for the long term. Serves as an evaluation tool and not necessarily an estimation performance tool. It's really to evaluate those decisions in the long term to make sure that we feel comfortable with what financial position that's going to put us in. These were kind of the major revenue assumptions in the five year forecast that we used for the 15, 16 budget. Appraised value growth of 4%, 3% growth in sales tax. Cost of service transfers, basically the cost of services of the general fund to the utilities about 3%. And then return on investment, which is received from the utilities into the general fund. And in terms of expenditures, we assumed kind of a flat 3% inflationary compensation package. Health insurance, unfortunately, the kind of standard inflationary increase is more like 6% for health insurance. So we've assumed that. Vehicle replacements, and I'll get into this when I talk about the impact on the debt service rate in our next presentation. We have built in some kind of cash funding of vehicle repl acements in the long term plan. And then service enhancements, these are really additional packages. Increased services, an example last year would have been the medic unit for station seven was a service enhancement. In terms of the budgetary cycle, and some of this is internal. October 1, we always start the new budget year. In March is the budget kickoff for staff where they really start preparing all of the budgets. And April and May, the budgets are submitted by staff internally and reviewed. July, the city puts together a proposed budget for the city council. State law and our charter requires we give that to the city council by the end of July, August 1st. We receive final appraised values on July 25th. So it's always kind of a busy, enjoyable time for us. And then August, the budget is presented to the city council. We begin with workshops, public hearings, discussions, goes into September. And then the adoption of a tax rate and budget is required by state law by the end of September. And we start the whole process over again. In terms of development of the budget, really the basis of it is the strategic plan set forth by the council. And then council priorities set forth for that fiscal year, sometimes multiple fiscal years. An example would have been the emphasis on street maintenance over several years that began before was kind of a top council priority and part of the strategic plan. And that was built into the budget going forward for several years. It's the basis for resource allocation. That's really what a budget is. We have resources coming in. How are we going to allocate them? Annually, we seek the council's priorities prior to budget development. There was some of that discussion at your retreat and ongoing. It outlines the long term goals and objectives, the strategic plan, and we've got the five key focus areas. And I should say in this upcoming fiscal year, when we consider the budget, strategic outcomes are going to be considered or will be identified consistent with the What Works City projects. In other words, we're looking at these key focus areas and what are the outcomes or the measurements we want tying that together with the What Works Cities project. So that will be new during this fiscal year budgets discussion. The departmental budgets, we really start off with a base budget for the departments. And what that starts off with is their prior year budget less one time supplemental cost if they got new vehicles or one time costs. We back all those dollars out. So they kind of start off flat to the prior year. There's certain costs that we build in in terms of their personnel service calculators, fuel, utilities, insurance, we build those costs in. And that's their base year budget that they start with. >> Chuck, real quick, you hear a lot about zero base budgeting. What are the advantages and disadvantages to that just real briefly on this process? >> In terms of that, and there's kind of different levels of zero base budgeting. It's most base level, it basically says every year we're going to look at every program that we have and decide whether we want to do it or not. Do we still want to provide police service? Do we still want to provide fire service? Do we still want to maintain our parts? Kind of in a base level. And where I've seen that used is during the financial crisis in some communities like you read about Florida and those kind of places. Where their revenue stream decreased by 30% or more. A lot of times you see zero base budgeting and they say, we 've got 30% less. Let's prioritize what we want to do and everything that falls below the line, we're going to quit doing that. So that's kind of zero base budgeting. In terms of ours, we kind of start off with performing the same functions as in the prior year in terms of services. And then we can add additional services or take away services as directed by the city council. >> Yes, council member. >> Is there any type of report at the end of the year in terms of whether departments hit their budget, whether they didn't, was there cost over runs and if so, why were there any departments that didn't spend all their money? Is there any type of report that really comes through at the end of a budget cycle? >> Yeah, I mean in the annual financial report, there's one section and I don't think it's broken out by department in there, but we compare the budget to actual. In other words, here's what we budgeted in terms of revenues, what was the actual, what's the difference? And here's what we budgeted in terms of expenditures, what were the actual, what's the difference? The only other thing I should point out is in terms of budgetary authority, the city doesn't have the authority to expend greater than the council budgeted. I showed that general fund of a little over 108 million. We can't go above that budgeted authority without coming back to the city council for approval if we're going to go above the budgeted expenditure authority. Now revenues can come in higher. So generally in terms of expenditures, and I track this, usually I get a monthly report. We usually run 97, 98, 99% of expenditures in the general fund, for example. Sometimes revenues are over, but in terms of that, the budget is really set as a financial control. That's their maximum limit. And if they come a little bit under that, then that's okay, but they can't go over that. Now it's in total, it's not by department. But for the most part, very few departments go over their total budget unless there's some kind of change that we know about during the year. >> I want sort of a follow up on that. And you hear this sort of anecdotally. And I think that was part of the question is, is there, how do we sort of look at the data? You hear anecdotally, I'm not talking about city budget, I 'm just talking about budgeting in general. That people will, if they're going to be under budget, they may find ways to spend what they've been allocated. Because if they don't, then they won't be able to get those funds the subsequent year. And I think that's the thrust of some of the, at least some of the questioning is, okay, don't know if that's happening . Don't know how you would even verify that. Is that, what's your response to just, you hear that. >> Well, let me tell you what kind of expenditures, controls that we put on in finance toward the end of the year. Not that human nature would ever want that to occur. We put on expenditure controls where you can only transfer funds between, or transfer money between groups. Like if you have it in supplies or maintenance, it's limited where you can transfer the funds. In terms of a budgetary transfer. And then we put kind of limits on through purchasing what we're going to be able to expend toward the end of the year . So as we get near the end of the year, I usually get a higher level of review of anything going through purchasing and what's being requested. So we try to control them that way. I will also mention during the budgeting process, if you remember this year, we've done it several years. Sometimes there's some one time items that we recommend paying out of the current fiscal year from savings. So we'll come back to the council usually each year and say we anticipate some savings in the general fund. Here's some proposed one time items that we would like to expend those for. That goes to council and those are supplemental packages, even if they're going to be purchased in the current fiscal year. So that's usually what we look if their savings either can roll into fund balance or we can use it for projects. >> Just to give you a heads up, I'll probably take a break at two. >> Okay. >> So I'm not saying you have to have it wrapped. I'm just saying because we've been going at it almost two hours. Yes, Council Member Wilson. >> And for me, it was more of a positive reinforcement for departments that come in under budget so that if a department head does come in under budget, was there any recognition, was there any vehicle or tool that we had at the city to track that and see that to just basically pat somebody on the back for being going the extra mile and maybe not spending everything. Because I know we spend a lot of money at the city and department heads work hard to manage those funds so that was kind of the line of my questioning. Did we have a vehicle to tell these department heads job well done? In terms of that kind of the vehicle that we use the most is to consider if they do have some substantial savings and they have a one time purchase of something that they think will really assist their department. Because there's always unmet needs out there. We know there's always more services a lot of departments would like to offer. So we tend to do that through the budget process. We say we see you're going to have some savings. You've proposed this. Would you like that considered during the current fiscal year in terms of that? So that at least that kind of associates the department that's being conservative and saving with them being able to get a purchase that's going to help them or that they believe will enhance their service level of their department. Baseline adjustment requests, so we start off with the base budget. Baseline adjustment requests are really for inflationary cost or other types of costs less than 5,000. Supplies, software subscriptions sometimes go up, certain times of maintenance go up. Sometimes fuel goes up although it's been going down a lot lately but those kind of inflationary cost. And those are considered if the reallocation of base budget isn't sufficient. Normally what we do with departments with a smaller request like that will look at the other line items and historically what they've spent and we can say well historically we think you've spent about 2,000 or 1,000 less in this line item, let's just transfer that over to cover this cost and not increase your total budget. So that's what we do with baseline adjustments but there's some times where we have to bring those forward to adjust those costs. Supplemental request is probably what the council's most familiar with. These are funding requests for new and enhanced programs. Sometimes it's legal mandates or CIP related costs. Additional maintenance is necessary because of some added facilities. We have them include these costs for two years to kind of clearly identify reoccurring versus one time costs. Some of them are one time and these are the supplemental request that come out of the departments and are considered by the council. >> When they submit the supplementals, typically that's for equipment or something like that. But sometimes there's additional personnel that needs to be hired. How does that work? Does that come out of the supplemental too? >> Yeah, it's all built into that. So we look at the total cost. There's kind of a calculator, so to speak, with those so they can build in their costs for personnel. And then for equipment, supplies, uniforms, like the example with the medic unit. We needed another ambulance, so that was a one time cost, but the personnel was reoccurring. That's part of the request. Some of the supplies are reoccurring, but some of them are one time to equip those additional staff. So all of that is built into the supplemental request and then we have it for several year periods. So we can build it in when we talk about that financial forecast. Those are approved. Those dollars flow into that five year forecast to go forward. In terms of kind of budget reviews, the level. In other words, when a department proposes its budget, the first level is we have a budget office liaison. There's a budget office staff is assigned to each department that works with them. So they kind of go through all of the request and the numbers to make sure that they feel comfortable with it . The second level is the finance management staff. And when I talked about sometimes reallocating their base to cover those kind of costs, it's done at that level. That's usually myself and Brian and some other finance staff. And then the third level, it goes to city management, which is George and the ACM's for review at those kind of levels. So at any of those levels, changes and adjustments can be made in the budget process. And each level represents an opportunity to identify savings, make some changes in resources, and kind of rank the supplemental request. And also in these reviews, it provides the opportunity to reduce or eliminate costs or programs, especially during economic downturns. >> So thank you. At this level, going back to one of your earlier slides where you're talking about trying to align the budget with the strategic goals of the city. How does that play out in these internal to the department discussion, discussion with finance staff, and then ultimately city management? >> What's the nuts and bolts of that as you're going through this process, not just looking at how to eliminate programs or looking at cost effectiveness, but aligning to our strategic goals. How does that work out? >> A lot of that is kind of the initial discussions with the departments when it comes through. A lot of the, I don't know a lot, significant portion of the supplemental request may come down from George in terms of, here's some areas that are important to the council this year or the next couple of years. Let's put in a supplemental request or build a program for that. So some of what the departments are developing is kind of been top down through the city manager's office and their assistant city managers. And maybe George can even speak to that more. >> Let me just make an additional comment. Part of the process is even at the budget office liaisons in the departments, we've made a diligent effort to make sure they're aware of what the KFAs are in the strategic plan. And that we can identify all programs with some level of a priority based upon the KFAs and the strategic planning document. So I think we've over the last couple of years been able to kind of create that culture all the way through the organization to do that. One of the other things, I'm just going to take a minute to go back to the supplemental programs. Because those are opportunities too where we do in fact consider reductions in programming. If we determine, and I think it's happened a couple of times in the parks department in the last couple of years, where they've come forward with a supplemental program and just said this, in our opinion, is not something that's serving what it was originally intended to do. So we may recommend elimination of that as a supplemental program to reduce spending. So I don't know if that answers your question. >> Yeah, it does. And I guess as a follow up, understanding that these are all done, I think, department by department and given that in some cases a strategic goal might be interdisciplinary in nature. How is that sort of financial budgeting discussion fostered so that if I'm in a particular department I tend to be seeing things in a particular silo. But there's some larger goals that may require four departments coming together. What do you guys do to help foster that sort of interdisciplinary? >> Let me take a shot at Chuck. I don't mean to interrupt the president, but clearly even in the budget review process when departments bring their budgets forward, all of us on the management team, the city management team, the ACMs and myself, and the finance management staff are all in the room talking about those things together. It's interesting to see how many times, I'll just use an example, the judge has come forward and presented his budget and gotten sidetracked onto supporting somebody else's budget. This is something the police department needs and I know they do and I'm supportive of that. Same thing with parks where they'll come forward and say we 're aware of this. And part of that comes about because of the management structure of the organization where we've got ACMs over groups of departments that are interlinked in some way. So we've tried to make sure that we have a system in the review process that incorporates these people at the highest levels in those discussions so we can know and bring that higher level perspective on the whole process. And I don't know whether that answers your question or not. >> Yeah, and to be honest, some of it's just relationships in terms of the departments having relationships and reaching out to say here's a program we're looking at and getting assistance from the departments. Or a lot of times it crosses a lot of departments and you just get a group together to discuss that. I mean one of the examples is one of my difficult projects we're implementing a city wide time keeping system. So it impacts across a lot of departments. And so we have a lot of meetings with those various departments all together to get that right, so to speak. Some of our lean programs, for instance, have folks who are gone through a lot of those efforts in customer service. Going over to City Hall West and working through lean objectives in the planning department. And it just brings a different perspective to what we're trying to do. And it's proven in the last three years to be incredibly beneficial. In terms of general fund, fund balance, this is just a history of reserves. In terms of the ending fund balance, if you see the 930-15 number, you can see the increase from the prior year. It went up about 1.5 million. And you can see the percent of budgeted expenditures. Our current target is really 20%, allowing to go down to, and I'll go to the next screen, 20%. And it can be by policy, this is a fund balance policy set by the council, can go down to 15% in an unusual financial circumstances. But then the city is committed to bringing it back up to 20 % in five years. We're proposing a little change in that. The minimum would stay the same of the 20%. But implementing what we'd call a resiliency reserve up to 25% to really safeguard against those unusual financial circumstances. I think an example of that would have been the devastating tornadoes that went through over Christmas time. If we'd been one of the communities that had been hit, it can be several, several million dollars very quickly. If you think of a large retail center or something like that being hit by something like that, you can see what that is. So we're just proposing to leave the minimum at 20%, but just allowing a little resiliency reserve up to 25%. >> In finance audit, we had talked about cash funding vehicles. And possibly to get a program started, we might have to dip down into the, what am I trying to say, general fund there? >> Yeah, the general fund balance. >> The general fund balance. >> This next cycle of doing that, I wonder if staff could come up with some sort of, I don't know, just way that they feel like it's safe for us to start implementing a program like that. I know we had talked a little bit about that, because when you see- >> That's my next presentation, so I appreciate that lead in. >> Good segue. >> Well, I'll tell you what, before we, if you're through with this slide, let's go ahead and take a quick five minute break. Go ahead and finish this one off. >> Yeah, I'll just go over, this is the last one. Just kind of next steps in terms of additional presentations. We're looking at, before we really get into the proposed budget in March, talking about internal service utility funds, fire department presentation. I won't go over all of them, but you can see we're going to try to cover some other areas in the budget. Really covered the general fund here. And then get up to the point where we bring in a proposed budget. And we've tried to set the major utilities and major functions to be able to give presentations on their areas to the council. >> Thank you, Mayor. >> Thank you, Mayor. Last year, somewhere in the cycle, the manager provided for our council your overview of what you thought were budgetary priorities of council members based on discussions that had happened during the entire year. Where does that fall in the schedule there? >> I don't think he put it in there. He didn't know about it. >> Okay. >> But it is a critical point of what I try to do, Dalton, and we'll pursue that. >> So where do you think it would fall in? >> Well, it needs to be pretty quickly. It needs to be very early in the process. So probably in April, March, late March. >> So we could do it either in April 22nd or one of those earlier April meetings, March 22nd? >> March 22nd. I won't be here in March, but on March 20th. But yeah, sometime, at least by mid April, I'd like to get some feedback on it. >> Well, the reason I ask is because I had been wandering around town and something jumped up on my radar screen that I want to at some point share with council. I don't know that given the fullness of the agenda today that it would be appropriate, but I would sure like to be able to share something because I want to make I don't want to ask any departments to do any kind of work. On working up a proposal or supplemental package if the council is not interested. >> Well, we can do that. Just to comment on it. That's why and I've tried to emphasize and I think Chuck and Brian have too that what we what goes into this process is an all year long process. We're listening to you all year long. I mean, Kathleen, you and I had a discussion last week about something you had asked the chief to look at. So we're making notes about that and making sure. But that input throughout the year is probably as critical to establishing those priorities and associating them with our KFAs and our strategic plan as anything we do. >> Well, I was so impressed last year that, you know, because when you sent out that note before we had a discussion, I was certain that some somewhere some of my priorities weren't going to be listed. And you got everything. You're really paying attention here. I appreciate that. >> Okay. Any other questions? Any other questions on this portion of the presentation? If not, we'll take a five to ten minute break. Come back about two fifteen. >> Okay. Thank you. We're reconvening in our work session. We're on agenda item three C and Chuck has got about ten minutes left of his presentation to wrap up so we can move on to other. >> I promise I'll do it in ten. >> Yeah. All right. >> Really what I want to talk about here as we get into the budget process, if you remember last year and I'll go over to this, the debt service tax rate increased from about twenty one point. >> 0.5 cents to from twenty point, I'm sorry, twenty point eight five cents to twenty one point five cents about point six six three. We reduced the general fund property tax rate and increased the debt service tax rate. Last year was really the first year of the 2014 bond election program implementation. If you remember way back when when we passed that program, the information we sent out was probably up to a three cent tax increase for the implementation of that program. Right now we're projecting over the next couple of fiscal years that we'll add about eight tenths of a cent to fully implement the 2014 program. And again, these are under the five year assumptions, which are probably a little conservative. Four percent annual A.V. growth, current interest rates for this year and about a four and a half percent interest rate on the debt we issue in future years. Some savings we projected some savings about one hundred and forty thousand annually from this year's sale. We're looking at doing a refunding of outstanding debt to lower interest rate and the updated capital plan that's been approved by the Bond Oversight Committee and was in your packet today. And no increased cash funding of the capital program. So no, go ahead. I'm sorry. I was going to say the discussion here today is going to be some potential options to reduce or eliminate the debt service tax rate increase and to get some council's feedback as we move forward. Once we issue that debt, which will come back for council approval of what's called a parameters ordinance in April and will probably sell sometime in May. So those bonds. Once we issue, we kind of lock in our debt service for the upcoming fiscal year in the budget. So I'm kind of bringing this to you now before we issue to see if there's some direction to try to reduce this tax rate increase on the debt service side. And I know you're having seen this. I know you're going to talk about the surplus, but a couple of things. One is the assumptions. You've got four percent annual assessed value growth, but also we have assumptions of sales tax growth as far as in the fact you went through that chart earlier on and correct. And also, I know I'd ask you this during the break and I know Brian had asked about this and you all would rather know it sooner than later. But also in the five year forecast, there's an assumption built in that we have a one cent, I guess, O and M increase this next budget cycle. So what Brian had said and I think what you had said is, gosh, if there's consensus to try to budget without that and then if we have this additional money that you're fixing to describe and some others based upon the budget, recommended budget, then we can deal with that. So I just wanted to put that on the table. OK, and let me also clarify here on the debt service fund. The only thing we use to pay off those general obligation bonds or the property tax rate that you see up here. So sales taxes strictly in the general fund. All we use is property taxes to pay off debt. So I just wanted to clarify that part. So some options to eliminate the debt service tax increase. One thing we could do is simply extend the implementation of the 2014 bond election beyond six years. If we sell a little bit slower, it'll have less of an impact. So we'd have to reduce it. The calculations under those assumptions by about three million a year. So we'd take about 16 million off of the program and extend it a year is one option. Alternatively, the city could cash fund some of the program , in other words, not issue debt at the same dollar amount, about 3.15 million for the 20 year debt. All of the 2014 bond program is for long term assets. So we're issuing 20 year debt. Number three, if property values were to grow at about instead of 4%, about 7.7 in the upcoming fiscal year. And then 4% after that, that would eliminate the debt service tax rate increase. And four is to kind of begin cash funding a portion of the vehicle replacements. We had a discussion of this during the budget process last year. And one of the reasons, a couple reasons, I'll give some advantages, but this debt is issued over a five year period, so it's much shorter debt, has a much bigger impact on the tax rate . So I showed it those conservative assumptions if we took about 2 million from the fund balance in the current fiscal year and didn't issue that debt for vehicle replacements but cash funded it. And then in future years, you can see it's about 500,000, 750,000 growing up to a million. So just about a total of 5 million would be able to keep it flat. >> Question, cashmere Hawkins. >> Yeah, on number one, is staff possibly bringing that up because we're at capacity and we're not able to sell the bonds as fast as we thought we initially could or would because we can't use them as fast because we have so many projects going on? >> No, we made some adjustments, if you remember, in the audit finance committee. We kind of went over those adjustments and we delayed the sale of some of the projects and kind of sped up the sale of the other projects based on what's going on, what's on the ground. So number one isn't really because we can't get it out the door. Number one would simply be if we slow the program down, we 're going to have less impact on the tax rate. >> Joey, that's not a recommendation necessary. That's just trying to cite an option for how to reduce that . >> No, I understand that. I'm just saying I wanted to know where that option came from. >> Okay. Extending the debt. >> Yeah, the dollar amount really just came down from me putting it in the spreadsheets. How do I keep the tax rate level under these assumptions and what can I move out? >> Well, I just want to fully understand it and there's just so many projects going on and if we should do that anyway, that's what I'm trying to understand. >> Yeah, and we did move some back based on what we're getting out. So we go through that process every year. The staff who's involved in all those projects would get together and look at what we're planning on selling in the upcoming year to make adjustments to that program as necessary. >> Okay. >> Mayor Pro Tem. >> Thank you. What would the impact of option one be on the future bond programs that we're planning out, that we're anticipating in the years to come? >> It really delayed the next bond program for a year. >> Or what? >> I mean, it was initially planned as kind of a six year program and that we would start the process over again about a year before that program ran out. So it would really turn a six year program into a seven year program. >> I would think that if we did that, we would need to understand even more of what the implications would be in terms of projects such as fire training facilities that would be subject to yet another delay. So I would be concerned about that option. >> Councilmember Blasny. >> I think option four has a lot of merit. I know that staff came to us last year and spoke at length about cash funding portion of our vehicle replacements. And that it was such a common sense move to make in terms of instead of carrying that debt, which just gets bigger and goes on and on to really kind of make a conscious effort to try to cash fund it. And so I'm assuming because it's on this list this year that staff still sees the merit of that option. And so something to seriously consider without having to modify the bond election because that was something our voters voted for. And I sure want to honor that. >> Yeah, correct me if I'm wrong. My understanding is you're not asking us to choose one of these today. >> Not today, but any direction. At some point in May when we get ready to issue these bonds , we're going to have to know what are we going to issue for vehicle replacements. And once we sell them, we're going to have to pay that debt . So it's not necessarily today, but kind of early on in the budgetary process. >> Well, I had some observations on that, but I want to hold them till you finish your presentation. >> Okay. >> Council member, I mean, may I pretend? >> There is another option and that would be since the voters authorized the issuance of debt. And since they authorized that with the understanding that it could mean a tax rate of increase of such and such that we simply just do that, correct? >> That's another option, correct. >> Is it listed anywhere up there? >> No, really I brought this just to eliminate the debt service tax increase based on the budgetary discussions last year. Where the debt service tax rate increase was really absorbed by the general fund and reduced it. So kind of that direction I got from the council last year was we wanted to maintain it at the same level. >> Because I would be more interested in the bigger course of the discussion. If there's a way to avoid an increase in the O&M budget, the general budget revenue increase, I would rather hold that steady than, and let's do what the voters authorized us to do already. If it came down to those two choices, and I don't know that it will. If it came down to something like we did last year, it's working fine. >> Well, it's almost a compounding. We're talking about a one cent tax increase that we projected if we wanted to throw an M. But last year we shifted some of the current rate over to debt service. That minimizes what you can do in the general fund to the extent that you've done that. So if we tried to eliminate this by doing that same thing again this year, that's the kind of direction we need because we sure need to know that in advance. >> Well, I'm going to go ahead and make my comments now. And this is part of the thrust of what I've talked about about the budgeting process. In other words, I'm seeing on here that you've got a $2 million allocation from the general fund balance, which is this, I want to say surplus of what is above and beyond what we projected last year. In other words, we had some increase in revenue, some reduction in expenses, so we have this addition to our general fund. Which is great, I think that's great. And what I advocate is that these are all options. The one cent, the debt service. I'm saying I don't want to make those decisions in silos. In other words, if you have to have a direction in the next month on this, well that may affect the decisions we make in July or August on the budget. I'm simply saying that if we need to, if we have to delay, if we have to issue the bonds for the vehicle replacement this year. Because when we come to the budget, what you're saying is we have an extra $2 million that's above and beyond what we projected last year. Then we're going to have whatever the city manager's recommended budget is with any other kind of additional mon ies, whatever you want to call them, above and beyond the 4%, like 7.0 or 7.7 or 8 or 5 or. And that gives us a real comprehensive look at our financial situation so that the council can prioritize. Do we just go with what the voter said and then that allows us to do something else instead of sort of incrementally doing this which affects our decision in the future for this upcoming budget. So that's really what I advocate for is not to say I don't want a bond fund, but what I'm hearing you say, or I want a cash fund. What I'm hearing you say is if we don't make that decision with any kind of direction by April, you're just going to go ahead and issue bonds for the vehicle replacement for this year. Because you can't wait till the budget cycle that we have to decide on. I struggle with that because then we've got to make these decisions not knowing exactly what our budget is. I'd like to get those sort of at the same level. And I don't have an issue with bond funding this year because what are the rates on that five year bonds? >> One and a half to two. >> Okay, yeah, I mean, and I know that those can go up. I know that those can go up, but that's why I'm saying if we have a comprehensive discussion and if we set out a plan of yeah, we want to allocate whatever that is, half a million, 750,000. And we know what that's going to look like going into the budget and coming out of the budget. It just gives us a more comprehensive look. I've got to tell you, if you're financing stuff at one and a half to 2%, I mean, I would much rather look at the cash that we have available to do something else with and say, well, I'd rather fund that at one and a half percent and do something else with this money. But we can't do that until we actually have the budget presentation. So that's really my thought on that. >> Yeah, I mean, the only thing, when we issue debt for vehicles for five years, that's eating up some of our debt capacity. And there are other things that we might want debt fund that would be for 20 years that we can't, if we've used that capacity of that debt without raising the tax rate. >> And I get that. >> So there's capital projects that normally you think about funding with debt that we could, that we might be able to do other than vehicles which you'd normally spend cash on. >> And those are options that we can make a decision on. If we make a decision within 30 days to do the cash funding , then we don't have these other options that you've just said, well, we could debt fund this. And I'm just saying, I want the options in front that's a very comprehensive approach than sort of, not a piecemeal, I'm not saying that, but that would be my preference. Because to say that we're going to take $2 million out of the general fund to start this cash funding process without knowing what the next budget looks like or if there 's some other priority that pops up, that we might need to do some cash funding with, or to, I struggle with that. Those are my thoughts on that. So anyway, I'm sorry. Yes, sir. >> No, and I agree with that. But even at 1.5, I know that money is so cheap. But I do think it's important for one of these councils to at least start implementing some policy or something like that where we start cash funding vehicles, even if it's a small amount. >> Well, and I don't disagree with that. But that can be made during the budget process like they did last year. They said we've got 250,000 in here. >> Right. >> And we as a council decided, well, we would rather do something else. So that could be the same presentation this next year at whatever they would recommend. And then if we have $2 million, if we get an 8% increase in valuation, you just have a more comprehensive approach of here's the, I'll say bucket of money. Because it's not necessarily a bucket, it's more like a coffee cup of money. That we can actually say, okay, well, we're going to do this and we'll know exactly the impact of our decisions on those different financial decisions real time. Instead of, well, we want to do this. Well, how does that affect our decision making in July and August? So I don't disagree with you. >> Right. >> I don't disagree with you at all. But I think it would be something that we'd want presented at the same time. So we could still start that on this next budget cycle easily. But with this same thing, we just would have this year that we might bond fund. But I gotta tell you, when you're borrowing money at 1.5%, 2%. Well, I know we don't get that much return on our cash that 's sitting in the bank. But good heavens, that's, well, I wish I could get five year money at 1.5%. But anyway, so those are my thoughts on that. It's not to oppose this, it's not to oppose the policy of cash funding. It's really a question of when do we make that decision. And to me, the decision is made at the time where you're making all the budget decisions. And those are my thoughts on it. I mean, I'm just one person here with one vote, but that's sort of how I see it comprehensively. Yes? >> It almost feels to me like we, until we have some more overarching priorities for additional spending, right? Not here's assuming the 4%, assuming each department is rocking along just like they rock along, but for larger one time kind of expenses. So we've spent a lot of time talking about the need for municipal complex. So we spent time with the retreat. We didn't really walk away from the retreat like we did two years ago with here's our three, four key objectives, right? To me as a part of the starting early in the budget process , because I don't think we need to get in the weeds. I think we spent way too much time in the weeds last year as a council, inside the budget personally. But I think what we do need to do is to spend time as part of the budget process early in the game setting more high level priorities. So for example, I'm not saying this is what I'm saying we should do. For example, if we said we believe interest rates are going to increase and we think they're gonna start increasing based on the advice of our experts in one year and we think we're headed for a 200 basis point increase over the next whatever. So cash funding vehicles has to become important to us by the end of, or by the next fiscal cycle. So we're gonna set aside half a million now and a million then. And now we're gonna know our path to cash funding vehicles is here. But right now we also need to, this council might say a municipal complex is so important to us that we wanna make sure we've got the borrowing capacity to borrow, to float bonds for a municipal complex three years from now . Whatever we decide, right? Well, those priorities are gonna help you make decisions on whether we want to cash fund vehicles or not. Cuz that borrowing capacity might get eaten up with short term debt. Where you're really wanting to go lock long term debt while rates are still one and a half, you're not gonna lock them at one and a half. But if you can lock 20 year money at three, if you're expecting rates to go up 200 basis points, we'll go focus on your long term projects and lock it up. So I'm agreeing with you, I think, in a different way, which is setting those higher level priorities and talking about when those need to begin is what's gonna allow us to determine whether you short term debt or not, I think. Instead of going cash funding vehicles make sense or not. Well for me, one and a half percent money never spend your cash. Except, unless we can hear from our experts, guys you don't have the borrowing capacity to go do a municipal complex if you keep doing this. So you gotta eliminate this short term debt, that's what's gonna give you the borrowing capacity to go do your big project. Okay, now I get it. So then we start cash funding now even though it's one and a half percent money. I think until we get to that level discussion on setting those priorities and then let the staff, they're the experts on this stuff, go figure out. Well here's how we accomplish the things you said you wanted to accomplish. But making decisions on stuff like this in a vacuum, absent those other conversations, I don't think we get there. And then you look up and you go, well crap, now I can't borrow the long money to do my big project and I gotta go pay off these bonds. But I wasted money because now I'm paying a penalty or prepayment penalties or whatever it is. So I think getting to that larger high priority conversation needs to happen sooner. >> Okay, I'll just skim through the rest pretty quickly. Just to give you an idea, for '15, '16, our debt service for bonds, we had issued four vehicles, is 2.67 million. It's about 14.7% of our total debt service and about three cents on the tax rate. Projecting it out with no cash funding for '16, '17, it'd be about 2.85 million, same percentage, about three and a quarter. And then given some information on the projected fund balance. >> Real quick question. So hypothetically, let's say we said we're gonna start cash funding all the vehicles year one fully, all right? So I can understand what this slide is really saying. So what it's saying is if we said in 2016, '17, we're gonna take $5 million out of the fund balance and we're gonna buy all the vehicles we would have paid for with debt. All right? That means that our debt service portion of the tax rate would go down 3.25 cents because we're not funding that debt with that. Is that right? >> Over a five year period. >> Over a five year period. >> It's a five year period, so it would be declining each year till it go to zero in year five. >> Okay, all right, thanks. >> And that's just the chart again on historical and just some advantages, disadvantages. It would at least keep the debt service tax rate level under these assumptions. It increases future funding levels for the next bond election committee or debt capacity over the long term. It allows flexibility in the general fund if you have a downturn to cut the expenses before you have to cut those programs. But cash funding, it does reduce funding for other general government programs. It's a decision, it's a balancing act. >> On your third bullet point, on cash funding allows flexibility in the general fund in a recession to cut expenses. So let me make sure I understand what you're saying. So let's say we're cash funding vehicles. We hit a recession. What you're saying is we don't necessarily have to cash fund that year. We can use that money to go somewhere else. But that means we gotta make it up somewhere else. Most likely either by pulling out of the debt or issuing debt again. So, okay. >> You have to issue debt again. It just gives you a little bit more flexibility if you've got some cash funding. And that's all I have. And based on that direction, we'll just move forward with the planned bond sale for this year. And have the discussion on cash funding of vehicles, at least during the budget process. But we'll move forward with the vehicle funding of about $3 million in the debt issuance this year. If that's the direction I have. >> Well, and when we have that next discussion to really address the questions raised by Mr. Johnson about looking ahead and starting to ramp up with the notion that we're going to have to do something sooner rather than later about City Hall. And we're moving planning out, we're committing to some rent. And we kind of committed to ourselves that we were going to start addressing that situation soon. So that we don't have to pay rent any longer than is necessary. >> Any other questions? Yes, Councilmember Road. >> Connected to this, but when we do come back and we talk about where we ultimately vote on the issuance of debt. As it relates to the 2014 bond program, I really want us to think about a way that we can display for us and the citizens. What's been funded through that up to this point? What's been done and accomplished? And if we have a sense of what's going to be accomplished with that next issuance of debt specifically. A way that anyone can get on the website and see. I know I get asked that question a lot. I think we generate a lot of excitement at the time of selling this to the community when we ask for their votes. But the follow through, I think we can do a better job at that. So just to throw that out there as we're thinking ahead to this next issuance, if we can find a way to display that a little better. >> Well, to follow on that, I did a little fundraiser at UN T and had people at my table and were talking and that sort of concept came up of, well, the streets are so bad. Gosh, we've issued these bonds and these bonds. And so to have some way of showing here's what's been happening, maybe even down to the specific project. This project has been funded. Here's when it started, here's when it's finished. Just sort of a description of those specific projects. I think that's a great idea because it does show that we're doing something with it. And it may already exist as Brian's fixing to come up and probably tell us that it does. >> Well, I was just going to mention to you in the quarterly report that will go out in your packets on Friday . We'll have a new section that we've added, which is the status of the GeoBond programs for not only 2014, but also 2012. And you'll have for each of those bond propositions, you'll have a description of what's been sold so far and the status of each of those projects. So hopefully that'll address a lot of your points. >> Well, is that, okay, now we're going to get that. Does that go out on the website? >> Council will get that and it will also be on the website . That's correct. >> Is that, yes, Council Member. >> Well, I appreciate that and I know where to go find that on the website and download it in some PDF form and whatnot . But I mean, I'm thinking of it more in terms of it's a celebration. The citizens said, yes, we're willing, we're going to dig in and we're going to do this and we approve you to do it. I remember Chicago once when Mayor Emanuel got elected. They created a system where they had this digital picture of him going through fixing streets across the screen. And the whole idea was, here's what your government is doing for you. And there might be a more user friendly way to display that . We can discuss that later. But I do appreciate that, Scott. >> We'll give that some thought to see how we can get it out to the community better. >> You want to wear that hard hat with the shovel or do you want me to do it? >> I want Mayor Watz to do that. >> Okay, well, I'll be coming up out of a manhole. >> [LAUGH] >> Sure. >> Yes. Any other, yes, Council Member. >> I don't know when the next budget talks start again, but I know last time we were in the budget talks, we were talking about weaning ourself off of the franchise fee going into the street fund too, slowly. That had come up a couple times. Would that be part of this conversation or coming up or was , I know Kevin had brought it up a couple times and just flo ated that idea out there. >> In terms of kind of the budget going forward, what we've got set is the general fund just receives a set amount of the franchise fees. The dollar stays the same and all the growth in franchise fees is going to the street maintenance fund. So it is projected to increase each year based on that growth in franchise fees and the dollar amount that goes to the general fund just stays stable. So there's no growth in the general fund, but that's what we've projected going forward and that's kind of the plan going forward. All the growth in franchise fees goes to the street maintenance fund, so they have increasing resources each year. >> Okay. >> Yes. >> I don't think that's exactly what he had on based on what I recall that discussion. I think even accounting for the growth, which is great, we 've been doing that for some time now. There's still, I think, what about $7 million a year left in franchise fees that are the ungrowth portion? >> Yeah, the flat that stays in the general fund. >> And so I think part of the thought was because that's a predictable revenue source each year, some cities have opted to utilize that as a way to kind of fund streets because it's kind of tied to growth. That one of the policy discussions we did have is how do we start weaning ourselves off that out of the general fund and more directly get to a point where all six, what, seven million, whatever that is, is fully in street fund. So I think that's what the question was. >> Yes, well and to add to that, the face of council always changes and one of the reasons our roads were kind of in the condition they were is, it wasn't as important maybe to a previous council. So to just get that as it is funded that way, I think that 's where that conversation had come from. But not your council, Chris. >> Any other questions? Any other questions? Thank you, Chuck. Appreciate that. >> Thank you. >> All right, I was still thinking about that movie that, anyway, never mind. Mentioned in audit finance. We're going to go on to agenda item, I guess D, which is, is that right or did I skip one? >> No, I think D. >> D, yes. Receive report and hold discussion, give staff regarding the public art committee's recommendation to construct an outdoor sculpture of a 911 firefighters memorial bell tower , etc. And then to replace the bell tower at City Hall West with a replica. >> Thank you, Mayor. Mr. Boyle, as our parks director, will again present this item and has assured me that it's much shorter than Chuck's presentation. >> And it's much better than the last presentation I gave you as well, I might add. What we're bringing for you. Here we go. Now let's see if I can get these two enlarged. >> We'll put, never mind. >> Yeah. >> It's less expensive, but that's any better, Mayor. What has been proposed by the public art committee is a 911 firefighters memorial. Millie Giles is a local artist. She's the instigator of this. It was her concept and her idea to come up with this project. This will be a memorial to the firefighters who perished in the 911 attacks on the World Trade Center. It will be on the front of the fire central on Hickory Street. This steel structure that you can see here, if you view it from the side, it invokes the twin towers of the World Trade Center. There will be three words inscribed on the inside of these beams. And it's a little better picture of it. And it will say courage, dedication, and service. In the fourth one, there will be the number 343, which is the number of firefighters who perished that day. It's a steel tower constructed out of core 10 steel, steel structure. The bell that you see in this rendering, this artist's rendering, is actually the city's original fire bell from the late 1800s. It currently hangs in the belfry at City Hall West. We have received a certificate of appropriateness from the historic landmark commission. To remove the bell from City Hall West, have it refurbished , and have it hung in this bell tower where it will ring, it will be set up to ring. As part of that agreement, we will have a replica of this bell cast and hung back into City Hall West. It will also be made to chime, have all the equipment put in there so it can chime. Like I say, the original bell will be refurbished, hung in this structure. At the base of this structure is also, you can see here is a slab of granite. The firefighters have obtained a piece of I-beam that is actually from the World Trade Center. That I-beam will be mounted on the piece of granite. It's not real visible in that picture. I'll see which other one I've got. No, this is a shot from the inside looking up. We'll leave it here for now. And it will be covered, coated, such that it will be a piece that folks, it will be there for people to touch. It still has some chalk markings on it. We don't know if those are construction markings or they were markings from when the pile was deconstructed. But we think they add a lot to that particular piece. We've talked to Kirkpatrick Architecture Studio about preparing the design for this. And also because Fire Central is a historic building, we have presented this design concept to the Historic Landmark Commission. And they have granted a second certificate of appropriaten ess for this design in front of the fire building. I gotta tell you, trying to combine the creation of art with the city's purchasing rules and regs is really putting a square peg in a round hole. But I'm here today to get direction from you that will allow us to move forward with the design of this. The hope is that we can dedicate this on 9/11 of 16, which will be the 15 year anniversary of the attacks. >> Mayor Pro Tem and then Councilmember Wolff, yes. >> Thank you, Mayor. It's a related question. When you walk past that building, especially if you're walking from the west, you do not know what that building is. There's no sign indicating that it's the fire museum. The central fire station sign is around on Bell Avenue. Do we have any plans to put any kind of signage up there to identify what this building is? >> By his response, I see that maybe not at this moment. >> Not that I'm aware of. I thought I'd heard some conversation that there might be some coming for that building. >> It's related because this is to be part of a fire museum . >> Yes, sir. >> And if this is a firefighter museum, it seems like the front of the building ought to state that somewhere. And I do not think it needs to be on that piece of art. I'm not suggesting it at all. But while we're doing that, we need to get the labeling of this building clearly done. >> Good point. >> Councilmember Lozny and Councilmember Riggs. >> First of all, thank you. I think 9/11 was such a hard day in weeks and months after. But in terms of everybody coming to this memorial, was there a plan for anything brass being laid in the concrete that actually says in honor of, because we're going to know what it is. We're going to see the 343. We're going to know what that signifies. But for all the visitors who come to this, I want to just take a moment of silence. And I sure don't want to put it on the art itself. I don't want to put it on the granite where the steel beam is. But quite possibly on the concrete that's around it. >> In this area? >> Some kind of brass. >> Sure. >> In the concrete that says something with the date of 9/ 11 and to honor the firefighters who gave their lives, something. So that visitors who are new to our city, but also people who live in our city, who come to this know just in two seconds exactly what it is. >> Yeah, and at this point, and obviously we're just doing concepts at this point. That hasn't been designed into it, but we can sure, Millie 's back there shaking her head yes. We'll work on this and yeah, I agree with you. We just have to figure out what the appropriate signage is and where it's going to be placed. But yeah, I'm sure we can work that out. >> Councilmember Briggs. >> Hi. >> Hi. >> I'm neighbors with the retired firefighter who helped start the museum. And I have heard stories of them trying to get the bell out and then getting caught in. >> I had nothing to do with that. >> And is very excited about this and very happy. >> But I also at some point thought I heard that the metal was going to be from the towers. Is that the- >> That's what the I-beam, okay. It's just the I-beam that's mounted on the granite down here. >> That is, okay. >> That's the only piece that would be from the original World Trade Centers. >> Okay. >> Mayor Pro Tem. >> Thanks. The rendering that we have here, the photographs that we have, I suppose has been, it has to be retouched. Are those trees there right now? Are those trees going to end up as they grow obscuring or hiding the monument? >> There are actually crepe myrtles there at the moment. This is, as you said, this is a rendering. There are some crepe myrtles there that will have to be removed or transplanted. All of the plantings we'll look at and take that into consideration. >> Okay, because I was looking at those and thinking that may be a very bad plan if those trees end up hiding it. >> Yeah, I would agree. >> Any other questions? And so you're needing direction to move forward with this concept, in other words, begin to gather the costs and all those kinds of things. >> Yes, sir. >> Okay. I'm seeing a consensus on the council. All right, fantastic. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> That looks like that concludes our open session. We will now convene closed session at 2.55 PM. [MUSIC] >> The Denton City Council on March the 1st, 2016. We are on time at 6.30, so yay. [LAUGH] If you would, please stand with me if you're able to pledge allegiance to the US and the Texas flag. [BLANK_AUDIO] >> Honor the Texas flag. I pledge allegiance to thee, Texas. One state under God, one indivisible. [BLANK_AUDIO] >> Before we go into our agenda items, I just wanted to take a moment and just ask everybody to join me in a moment of silence. For Aurelie Navarrette, who was a Geyer student who trag ically lost her life this weekend. And our thoughts and prayers certainly go out to the family . So if you would, just join me in a moment of silence. Thank you. [BLANK_AUDIO] >> Thank you all very much. Thank you very much, and our thoughts and prayers are with them. Also, just want to make announcement ahead of time. This is an important night, election night, and early results are released at 7 o'clock. So instead of everybody trying to figure out what's going on, at about 7 o'clock, if we have a good break, if we have an opportunity to take a break, we'll take about a five minute break and then we'll come back. Just so we're not all distracted. So I've got one proclamation, so I'll be coming down front to read that. [BLANK_AUDIO] If you didn't get an agenda and you would like one, we ran out there, so we have some extras. So if you'd like one, just please raise your hand and he'll come out and give them to you, thank you. [BLANK_AUDIO] We'll give him a couple minutes. You bet, no problem. Is someone here for National Community Development Week? Come on down. [BLANK_AUDIO] We've got a proclamation. I want you to introduce yourselves and then tell us a little bit about what we're celebrating. >> I'm Larry Barnes. I'm chairman of the Community Development Advisory Council. >> Fantastic. >> Hi, I'm Mary Beth Cottingham. I'm vice chair of the committee. >> And I'm Christy Wood. I'm a member of the Human Services Advisory Committee. >> Tell us a little bit about this week that we're giving a proclamation to. >> Well, we basically have been involved in this program now for over 30 years. We've given away millions of dollars of federal block grants to supported projects and various programs in our community. Basically funded through the state such emergency as emergency solutions grant targeting homeless prevention, number of different activities. This year through HUD, we have about a million dollars to give out to the city. And that's been the number that we've had for several years . We have committees that work very hard in trying to determine where the priorities of the city are. This year we've also decided to increase our outreach a little bit so that indeed we could get more people actually requesting funds and are going to actually develop our first marketing plan. What that does though is that puts a little bit of responsibility on you, Mr. Mayor and council members, because you need to get the word out to our various elected officials that indeed the money that we get is not enough for the money that we actually need in the community. So it's a double edged sword. We enjoy our work. We have a great committee and we're pleased to be honored with this proclamation. >> You bet, thank you. >> And you guys do great work along with city staff, Barbara, for we do get those monies from the federal government and they go a long way to helping people in our community. So it's my honor to be able to read this proclamation tonight. Proclamation by the mayor of the city of Denton. Greetings, whereas the week of March 28th through April the 2nd, 2016 has been designated as National Community Development Week by the National Community Development Association to celebrate the Community Development Block Grant Program and the Home Investment Partnerships, parentheses home program. And whereas for the past 42 years, the CDBG program has provided annual funding and flexibility to local communities to provide decent, safe and sanitary housing, a suitable living environment and economic opportunities to low and moderate income people. And whereas for the past 25 years, the home program provides funding to local communities to create decent, safe, affordable housing opportunities for low income persons. Nationally, over 1 million units of affordable housing have been completed using home funds. And whereas since 1995, our community has received a total of $22,158,663 in CDBG funds and $10,845,710 in home funds. That's $33 million that have gone back into our community to help people here. That's wonderful. Whereas these funds have been used to revitalize neighborhoods through the following activities, streets, sidewalk, drainage and park improvements, programs that assist low income households in maintaining safe, energy efficient homes, home buyer assistance programs, support of other housing organizations that provide affordable rental housing and support of our local nonprofit organizations as they provide much needed services in the community. Now, therefore, I, Chris Watts, Mayor of the City of Denton , Texas, do hereby declare and proclaim the week of March 28th through April the 2nd as National Community Development Week in the City of Denton and urge all fellow citizens to support these two valuable programs that have made a tremendous contribution to the viability of the housing stock, infrastructure, public services and economic vitality of our community. Our community urges Congress and the administration to recognize the outstanding work being done locally and nationally by CDBG and home by supporting increased funding for both programs in FY17. So thank you very much. And Barbara, thank you so much for how you do these programs as well. Let's give them a hand. [ Applause ] Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You bet. [ Inaudible ] If we could roll the rules for citizens' comments, please. 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 decorum. 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 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. The attorney general has 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. Go ahead. No, I was just in follow-up to that proclamation, which I thought was fantastic, just to, for people's awareness, there are five of us going to D.C. next week to do just that, as he suggested, which is talk to our representatives in Congress about those very issues. Yes, thank you very much, and you are correct. So we'll go on to agenda item 3-1, which our citizen reports, Anya Martinez, regarding a children's museum using City Hall West as a potential space for the project. And if you could just state your name and address and your time will begin. Yes. Hi, I'm Anya Martinez, and I'm the founder and director of Explorium Denton Children's Museum. Can I put this? If you'll set it down, they should be able to pull it up on the screen. This will come up, I promise. Is there a buzzer? Just go? Okay, hi, thank you so much for having me tonight. I'm pretty sure most of you know about Explorium. In fact, I'd like to take this moment to just thank publicly those of you that have contributed to this project personally in one way or another. I'm going to spare you the details of its inception and all of the history and what a children's museum actually is, because I know that most of you have children and some of you have grandchildren and you kind of know the gist, and I know that you love them and they're your reason for existing. I have zero expertise in museums or business for that matter. I have a barely employable degree in sociology and a slightly more useful master's degree in family studies and child development. But what I do have is children, and I have a love of Denton that spans almost 20 years now. So I started this project almost four years ago with these thoughts, among others, that my boys ought to have something local that they truly love and that their mom helped build, that our community deserves and can support something local rather than constantly taking our business elsewhere, that Denton is becoming a tourist destination and we ought to have a children's attraction, if that's what you want to call it, for families to interact together, that this project could employ local graduates, bring families together, and fill in gaps where children might be having trouble understanding key elements in a structured education, and that Explorium could partner with local entities like the city, the county, the universities to make sure we don't just cater to the families who can afford to take their kids on trips to museums, but welcome all area children and their families to learn and play together. Everything we do right now is on location, the way most children's museums start out, and the average children's museum takes about four to seven years to establish a brick-and-mortar location. I know the city of Denton values a family-friendly community and has included that in their strategic plan, and I'd like to give a few examples of how other similar cities have teamed up with emerging children's museums in the past and are now flourishing children's museums, bringing families closer together. So I've listed a few cities here. Beaumont, Texas, children's museum started out on location as most. They fundraised for about four years through Junior League funding, hired a consultant, kind of went back to the drawing board, and recently renov ated a space that was given to them in their civic center and are utilizing that now as their children's museum. Augusta, Georgia, a little bit larger city, started on location. Their city rec center gave them a little corner of about 1, 000 square feet where they're operating as an early childhood children's museum. Evansville, Indiana, started on location also through Junior League activities. The city of Evansville Redevelopment Commission gifted them a former central library building. The Wonder Lab in Bloomington, Indiana, started on location and three years later opened a temporary location in a historic building on their downtown square. The Frisco SciTech building, which many of you may have visited, very similar Junior League action, started in 2009. It was opened by the Frisco Community Development Corporation and is supported by the city of Frisco. They are in a city building. And finally, the Fort Collins Discovery Center, which is the formerly Discovery Science Center, merged together with the city. They actually had a bond election and just kind of made it happen. And they had, they just got it together and figured it all out. And they're working as a nonprofit, half of it and half of it as the city, with kind of a mixed salaries and mixed operating expenses. I'm here because I'd like to plant a seed with regards to the future of City Hall West. Maybe it could be a museum. Maybe it could be the first location for Exploring Denton Children's Museum. I know that City Hall West is an old historic building and it's a wonderful place and it's gonna be gutted and it's got a big question mark over it. So why not? That's why I'm here. We are gonna continue to, and we have in the past, apply for grants and various forms of funding to keep us moving, to cover salaries and other things that may come up in the future. We have a very tiny little operating budget. We have no salaries. We are all volunteers and we hope to be a legitimate up and running children's museum very soon. Well, we have several questions, several clarifying questions. Okay, please. Council Member Briggs. Don't you have an event coming up pretty soon? Why, yes, Ms. Briggs, we actually do. It's called Touch a Truck. Last year, Touch a Truck yielded 2,400 participants that we were able to keep track of and it generated over $5,500 toward our first large fundraiser. We were able to purchase our first exhibit with that, which is actually a human-sized operation game. It's pretty awesome. Thank you. So that's on Saturday. Oh, sorry. Council Member Johnson. Well, Anya, thank you for coming out. The question I'm going to ask is more clarification about your event on Saturday. Because I got to see the map of all the amazing vehicles you're going to have out there. So anybody that has children or if you're just a big kid and love fire trucks and helicopters and stuff, you don't have to be a kid to come to this thing , right? No. So where is it going to be and what time is it going to start? Okay. So the event takes place this Saturday at C.H. Collins Stadium parking lot, which is out on Long Road on the north side of town. And the event takes place from 10 to 2, but there's a secret little gap from 9 to 10. We're inviting families with children who have special needs to come attend. And during that time, we will not be honking horns or having lights or sirens going so that we can accommodate some of those families. So there's going to be 40 plus really cool vehicles. And we've actually expanded a little bit this year to include some community organizations like Habitat for Humanity and Serve Denton. They're going to come and provide different activities for children who maybe aren't as interested in the vehicles. And I hear that Batman is making an appearance. So that's pretty awesome. And then my other question is the dollar amounts that you had on your sheet out by each city, what were -- Those are population. Those are population. Okay. I think thousands. I know. Gotcha. I know you. Thank you. Council Member Wasney. So you had the list of cities because they correspond to the population of Denton. Well yes. So one of the very first things I did when I had this idea in my tiny pea brain was I looked at other communities that were like Denton and had children's museums or science centers or something similar going on. So I looked at not just the population. Obviously Beaumont is not terribly like Denton other than the population and their proximity to Houston versus our proximity to Dallas and Fort Worth maybe. But I was just looking at similar minded communities with similar number of residents and how they're making it work. And with these particular ones, their relationship with the city was what these ones were for. And second question, have you considered a corporate sponsor to possibly step in and do some heavy lifting in terms of financial contributions coming in? Well yes and no. So last year we had just gotten our 501(c)(3) designation. And so we did hire a grant writer. We applied for a series of grants to actually try to get a mobile unit to start with, like a really cool, tripped out science mobile, mobile museum. And that actually did not pan out. And so I'm starting to now look at other options and maybe start with a building instead of starting with a mobile unit. So I did develop a piece of a prospectus that actually I believe somebody on the council up there has a copy of it somewhere. But there's a miniature version of it that I gave Ms. Wal ters to give you guys to kind of show what I'm sending out to prospective donors. As far as within the city of Denton, I've only approached a few smaller scale businesses. But I do have a few ideas of who I'd like to approach with the right backing and the right training maybe. Like I said, I've got zero business background. I just like talking to people and I like talking about this idea. Great. Thank you. Thank you. Councilmember Hawkins. Thank you, Mayor. How many years have you been doing this now? Okay. I established this group, this organization in May of 2012. So we're coming up on four years now. And how much money have you raised at this point? Well, if I had to go back and just add up the money that we 've raised, I guess probably around $25,000. Wow. But we've spent money along the way as well. So -- Well, this is a great idea, a great thing too. And where -- I got to ask this -- where is this human-sized operation game stored? Is this in your house? You know what? This is another really awesome thing about Denton. It's just everybody just kind of pitches in. If I feel like I need to go have coffee with someone, I just do. And so Pete Camp actually approached me one day and asked how she could help. So of course I asked her for a billion dollars and she said no. But then I told her something else I needed was storage. And so David is letting me store a lot of our stuff in his storage unit behind his local business. So I'm very thankful. But I do have a ton of stuff in my garage. Sure. And Cody's got stuff in her attic. You are fully committed. Totally. Well, thank you for coming out. Councilmember Rodin. You've got heart, so that beats education and experience any time. Thank you for coming up here and telling us about this. A couple of questions. And what I intend to do is ask our staff tonight in new business to look into this a little bit more. But what would help, I think, us on council and the staff is I've got a question for you. Could you put together a bit of a report on those cities detailing a little bit more specifically what the city does to contribute to those? Because as I think through this, I imagine we already have crossovers with what our libraries are doing and what parks and recs are doing. Having some of those examples, I think, would help our team analyze that. Could you do that for us? I'm sure I can. Do you want to give me a deadline? No. A couple weeks. You know I'm homework oriented, so. Two weeks. Okay. Thank you. All right. Well, thank you very much. Thank you for sharing that with us. Thank you for having me. And I look forward to getting that report and seeing what staff can compile. Thank you very much. Thank you. Our next speaker will be Mr. Willie Hudspeth. Get your name and number and your time will begin. Name and address, I'm sorry. Okay. Mayor and council members, I requested that I be at the end of the meeting. Oh. Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Well, would you like to be at the end of the meeting? Do you still have that rule? Can we? If council, we haven't changed it yet, but. The rule still is in application on the rotating basis. So I think if the council desires to do that, I think it would be at the council's pleasure. Council? Sure. Sure. You bet. Okay. Thank you. All right. Thank you. And we've come to agenda item 3C, which is additional citizen report. We have one card. David Zoltner, if you'll come down and state your name and address and your time will begin. Good evening, mayor and council members. My name is David Zoltner. I live at 2501 Timber Trail in Denton. Since the council rules or procedure have somehow worked their way back to your front burner over the past couple weeks, especially this matter of open mic and scheduled citizens reports, I'd like to address a little bit of confusion over some open meeting postings and some First Amendment conflicts as well as actually some half truths that I just heard on this rules or procedure video that you just played. But first I want to backtrack just a few weeks and acknowledge the fact that you all did the right thing when you repealed that closed session confidentiality ordinance a few weeks ago. And I think in hindsight you know that was the right thing to do rather than try and amend it or tweak it in any way. So again, thank you. My issue tonight concerns this scheduled citizen report versus open mic discussion I overheard during your last work session and make the point that there 's a major distinction between the two in terms of citizen engagement. City has it correct regarding the open mic or public comments label as far as open meeting is concerned. But the council or public have no prior notice because the council has no prior notice regarding a subject matter, a governing body may not deliberate open mic topics but may ask clarifying questions as your video correctly states. However, if a citizen goes to the trouble to seek out city secretary in advance to be placed on a future agenda with clearly defined subject matter for a citizen report, then the rules have changed dramatically. That citizen report is now a properly posted agenda item no different under law than any other agenda item or staff report. You are free to discuss with the citizen, deliberate amongst yourselves and even take action or no action as you see fit. The bottom line is it's all about sufficient notice requirements and posting, not who schedules the subject or where it might actually be located on the agenda. Under the Texas Open Meeting Act, you are permitted to deliberate any matter brought before you if posted properly by staff or citizen. This little game of jeopardy where you only ask questions of a scheduled citizen report is not only insulting to citizens who present information but may be a waste of time if they actually hope to share valuable information with council. Yes, you can always choose to ignore a posted citizen report if you choose, but you cannot use the Open Meetings Act as an excuse to do so. Tonight's meeting is actually a case study. My comments obviously fall under the open mic or public comments category. That means I'm not properly posted and we're not at liberty to discuss any further what I have to say right now. My good friend Willie Hudsbeth would represent a scheduled citizen report but under an inadequate posting regarding City Hall would never pass muster as sufficient public notice to discuss whatever Willie has on his mind tonight. Sorry, Willie. Ms. Martinez on the other hand is a properly posted agenda topic. This means you would have been free to deliberate and respond to her in any matter about her City Hall West concerns without violating the Open Meetings Act. Time won't allow me to get into another troublesome First Amendment issue, but I will be in touch with City Secretary to be scheduled hopefully on March 22nd so we can hopefully explore another important free speech issue over a procedure rule falsely claiming that citizens cannot personally address City Council members by name. Hope to see you March 22nd. In the meantime, if anyone questions what I've had to say so far, please contact the Open Government Section of the Texas Attorney General at 8 77-673-6839 or the Freedom of Information Foundation at 800-580-6651. Thank you very much. Thank you. All right, that concludes agenda items for agenda item three. We will now go into the consent agenda and one sort of housekeeping measure is Mr. Hudsbeth. Okay, well, he, Mr. Hudsbeth had filled out a card to speak on the consent agenda item, but that's allowed during the work session unless that item was pulled and I believe he asked to speak on agenda item AA, is that correct? I'm sorry, 4AA. 4AA, so, oh, so, okay, all right. It's not being pulled at this time, so, all right, thank you. All right, Council Member Hawkins. Are we on consent agenda? Yes, I'm sorry, consent agenda item, agenda item four, yes. Okay, thank you, Mayor. I move approval of consent agenda items A through AA with the exceptions of we're going to be pulling items G as in go and U for another time and we're replacing item J with the alternate ordinance just handed to us. Thank you. Okay. Council Member Johnson. Second. We have a motion and a second on consent agenda items four, pulling G and U to be considered some other time and then substitute ordinance for agenda item J, is that correct? That is correct. All right, let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries unanimously. We're going to go to agenda items 5A, which is continue public hearing, consider adoption of an ordinance regarding amending sub-chapter 35.7, the Fry Street Overlay District. I believe that's been, oh, we're going to open the public meeting on that, yes. Creating a Fry Street Overlay District to create a new sub- district and development standard for mixed use building on approximately 1.7 acres. I will now open the public hearing. Mr. City Manager. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. We have requested, the applicant has requested that this item be opened and then continued to the date of April the 5th. I think we are not planning to make a presentation unless council has questions at this point, but the recommendation is to continue until April 5th. Mayor Pro Tem Gregory. Thank you, Mayor. I move that we move to continue until April 5th. Council Member Hawkins. I second. All right. We have a motion and a second. Let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries unanimously. We'll go on to public hearing agenda item B. We're going to miss our seven o'clock break because we're going to get started. Yeah. Yeah, no, no. We're going to, yeah, we'll just move through. No groaning out there if you look at your phones. Agenda item B, which is continue a public hearing, consider amending section 35.7.95, 35.7.10.5, and 35.7.3.5, the DENT development code to include additional façade materials as architectural requirements to Oak Hickory Historic District, Belle Avenue Historic Conservation District, and the West Oak Area Historic District. Planning and zoning commission recommended approval seven zero. We will now open the public hearing. All right. Mr. Mayor, I'd like to ask Amy Bissett, our director of development services, if she would present this for public hearing. Thank you, Mayor and council members. What you are considering tonight is an amendment to the historic district standards for all three of our historic districts. Specifically it would be an amendment to include additional façade materials and more specifically call out cementitious siding as an allowable façade material for new construction only within our two historic districts and our one conservation district. Specifically the Oak Hickory Historic District, the Belle Avenue Historic Conservation District, and the West Oak Historic District. What you have coming around is a handout right now. Our new historic preservation officer handed Jennifer the handouts and these are all of the responses that we've received today in opposition and in favor of this. I will be summarizing them for you as well as we move forward with this presentation. This to give you a little bit of a perspective, the way that our historic districts are codified in the development code is they are essentially overlay districts which means that a change to their district code is a zoning amendment. So that is the purpose of the public hearing tonight is to consider this zoning amendment for these three districts. The overlay districts or the district codes speak to the design standards that are expected within each historic district as well as approval criteria for certain modifications or alterations that may be made. There are criteria and approval layers that must be gone through. To give you a little bit of background, over the last year or more we have received multiple inquiries or applications from homeowners in our historic districts who are interested in using cementitious siding or more commonly known as hard y board specifically for new construction only. This would apply for new garages, workshops, storage buildings or even new infill houses within a historic district. As we have seen the demand for this code change over the last year or more, we have engaged those district property owners and I will talk to you a little bit more about the process that we have used there to determine the desirability of adding this as an allowable facade material. To start with a little bit of clarity on definitions, cementitious siding or hardy board planks are siding. It is a cement fiberboard product that is used as exterior siding. It is intended to replicate wood. The benefits of using hardy board is that this is a more durable product that lasts longer than wood. It is tested and rated against fire, insects, water and wind. When a property owner makes an investment in a home in a historic district, it is a very substantial economic commitment because of the standards that we hold them to for preservation. What we have seen over the last year or more is that property owners are looking for an opportunity to build accessory structures out of a material that is more economically viable for them and also will last longer and be more durable. We call it hardy board because James Hardy is a leading manufacturer of this product. Generally you see hardy board used in a variety of applications when we are not talking about historic districts. New single family homes utilize the siding product, accessory structures and it is a common practice for infill homes in historic districts to be constructed using hardy board as the siding. In fact, the picture on the lower right is a new construction infill home in a historic district in Houston that one of our staff members owned when he lived there. We actually pulled this picture for the purpose of the presentation. Currently our DDC historic standards speak slightly to facade materials, but they don't differentiate between new construction and preservation activities. The allowable facade materials apply to both of those and there is no differentiation. Any approval of new construction or preservation activities associated with siding would require a certificate of appropriateness, which is approved by the Historic Landmark Commission on a case by case basis. They actually review the application and determine that the proposed materials are consistent with the existing time period and style of the home. Today allowable facade materials are brick, wood siding, wood, stone and stucco. There's no consistency in the code today regarding new product applications. So what are we not proposing a change to? Preserved historic homes in Denton would maintain facade materials of brick, wood siding, wood, stone and stucco. There's no proposed change to the preservation activities associated with a primary structure. This would apply to original contributing structures within the historic districts. What's displayed on the screen today are the permitted materials in the way that they're listed in each of the three historic districts. And the Oak Hickory Historic District says that the only permitted facade materials are brick, wood siding, wood, stone and stucco and that all of the treatments and materials must be typical of the style and period of the main building. The Belle Avenue Historic Conservation District is the only one that today allows for some additional facade materials and you can see the statement in yellow, artificial facsimiles of these materials will be considered on a case by case basis. However, the Belle Avenue Historic District does not differentiate between the use of those materials on the original structure versus an accessory structure in new construction. The West Oak Historic District reads the way that the Oak H ickory Historic District does, very strict interpretation of those allowable materials only. So what we took to the Historic Landmark Commission and to the Planning and Zoning Commission was a proposed change in the wording to each of the three historic district codes so that they all read consistently. So the proposal from staff was what you see in yellow here, which is the addition of the statement, the use of smooth sided cementitious siding is permitted on new construction and accessory buildings. Artificial facsimiles of these materials will be considered on a case by case basis as material technologies progress. We proposed to add that second sentence because we know that there may be building materials in the future that would be suitable for historic districts that we can't define today, but that would still require approval through a certificate of appropriateness by the Historic Landmark Commission before a homeowner could proceed. To provide the same consistency with the Belle Avenue Hist oric Conservation District, we staff proposed the addition of the phrase, the use of smooth sided cementitious siding is permitted on new construction and accessory buildings and that all facade treatments and materials must be typical of the style and period of the main building. That was a statement that existed in the other two historic codes that we felt was appropriate to propose in the Belle Avenue Conservation District as well. Lastly, the West Oak Historic District, this is the same verbiage as the previous two. The change would be what is displayed in yellow. We did a considerable amount of community engagement to determine whether or not the property owners within the districts wanted to see these materials as allowable facade materials, but we also wanted to benchmark against other cities that are similar to Denton. We polled comparable cities last August and determined that everyone that we polled allows this particular facade material on new construction. Not every city allows it only on new construction. Some are more permissible with the original structures, but Arlington, Dallas, Granbury, Grapevine, Fort Worth, Mansfield, Plano, and Waxahachie all permit cementitious siding as an allowable facade material on new structures in historic districts. We also polled and did an informal poll to our residents in all three historic districts and we invited them to a community meeting in October of 2015 to get a general idea of what type of support we saw from the districts. We saw overwhelmingly a majority wanted to see these materials added to their codes that allowed them more flexibility and allowed them to focus their primary financial investment on their home and be able to construct accessory buildings at an economically viable cost. In addition to a general support for the addition of this code change, we also heard from the historic districts that they want to see more revisions to the historic district ordinances. As I believe you are all aware, with the new addition of our historic preservation officer, one of his first tasks is to put together a project plan and timeline to engage all three historic districts in an update or rewrite of their codes. In the coming month, we will see that proposal come from Mr . McAllen. We will take it to the Historic Landmark Commission for them to have a look at, here is how we propose that we help facilitate a collaborative update of each of the historic codes. However, this specific code amendment does not preclude us from being able to make additional code amendments in the future. This is a fairly simple amendment that helps facilitate healthy growth and construction within the historic districts and would allow us to come back and do a more comprehensive amendment in the future. On January 24th of 2016, we published in the Denton Record Chronicle public hearing notices for Historic Landmark Commission meeting on February 8th and the Planning and Zoning Commission meeting on February 10th. The HLC voted unanimously 8-0 to support this recommendation coming to City Council. The Planning and Zoning Commission voted 6-0 in support as well, but they recommended an amendment to the language to eliminate the criteria of it only being smooth sided hardy board. They felt that in some cases a wood grain would be more appropriate and that it would be considered on a case by case basis by the Historic Land mark Commission to determine whether smooth or wood grain would be ultimately more appropriate. And they also just changed by saying cementitious siding is also permitted rather than just saying is permitted. On February 12th, certified mailed notices were again sent to residents within the three historic districts. Based on HLC's recommendation that we notify everybody in all three districts as well as within a 200 foot boundary of the districts. As of today, we have received, and I'm going to amend this a little bit because we got two by fax late this afternoon, 45 written responses with 33 in favor, three neutral, and nine in opposition. On February 16th, we had scheduled a public hearing. We asked you at that time to postpone it to today to make sure that every property owner had received a notification and knew that this public hearing was taking place in order to allow for citizen input. We do recommend approval. Staff recommends approval. The Planning and Zoning Commission recommends approval of the amended language proposed by the Planning and Zoning Commission, which is the use of cementitious siding is also permitted on new construction and accessory buildings. Artificial facsimiles of these materials will be considered on a case by case basis as material technologies progress, and we recommend that this be amended in all three of the districts. I'm happy to answer any questions. I've got a real quick question before everybody chimes and presses their button. I see the change, the use of, I don't even know if I want to try to pronounce that. I don't know how long you had to practice on that, but s iding is also permitted. And then where it says artificial facsimiles of these materials, so when you put that in the whole context of it, the ordinance, you're not just referring to the cementitious material, you're referring to that whole list of materials. That's correct. You're referring to the brick, wood, siding, wood, stone, and stucco. So if there's a new material that comes that is a brick fac simile that the Historic Landmark Commission would determine would be appropriate, then that would be allowed. Yeah, I just wanted to make sure I was reading that correctly in full context. Council Member Wasney. And how long has planning been working on this Hardy Board proposal? At least since February of last year, so more than a year. More than a year. And our new historic preservation officer and welcome to Denton has been here for two weeks. Yes, that's correct. So just want to kind of, you know, plant that information. Also on how many in favor did we have? We have 33 in favor, 3 neutral, and 9 in opposition. Because I read through the ones in favor and I see that 6 are from one address and 8 are from another address, so that's 14. They're actually, they're property owners that own multiple houses within that district. So they have the ability to provide that feedback for each property that they own. But that's their mailing address that you're seeing listed on there. That's correct. It still skews the numbers just a little bit because it's still coming from just one property owner. I just wanted to make that point that it's 14 out of the 33 . Okay, thank you. Council Member Rodin. Thank you. I think when you talked about a meeting you had perhaps in the fall, and there was a little chart on there, and I don't think it's that readable to the public, is that folks who chimed in one way or the other during the, in the context of that meeting? This was when we mailed out the informal survey. We collected that information prior to going into the neighborhood meeting, and this shows 25 in favor in the Oak Hickory Historic District, 2 in Belle Avenue, 3 in West Oak, and then 2 miscellaneous, with one of those not in favor. So did you have one meeting or a meeting in each of the districts? We had one meeting and invited all three. Okay, gotcha. So there wasn't actually a poll taken at the meeting. It was in preparation for the meeting. There was a survey given out. That's correct. And you had mentioned at the outset of this that there were , there's been inquiries, interest, and applications put forward as it relates to asking for this sort of, just trying to get some clarification as to whether or not they could, do we have pending applications currently on this? We actually have an application that is a certificate of appropriateness for an accessory structure that the Historic Landmark Commission approved their certificate of appropriateness this fall, but they approved it with the condition that the siding material had to comply with whatever the district code said at the time of construction . The intent of that was that the application asked for the ability to use Hardy Board, but the ordinance as it read that day would not allow it, but they wanted to go ahead and approve the COA, and if the time comes that it's time to put siding on that accessory structure and Hardy Board is not permitted, then the applicant would be restricted to wood. Okay, thank you. And one more clarification. There's a number of locally designated historic landmark houses outside of these three districts. I live in one of them. But this wouldn't apply to any of those with this current set of amendments. This is only applying to the houses that are within those three districts. Is that true? That is correct. Those that have a local landmark designation but are not within a historic district would still be subject to a certificate of appropriateness process. The design standards that we would hold that home to would be the Secretary of the Interior, and we would utilize our own design standards within the D DC. As such, Hardy Board would be allowable on a new construction. As is with the code written. That is correct. Okay, thank you so much. Mayor Pro Tem. Thank you, Mayor. I've heard comments from citizens. One of the real concerns that I'm hearing again and again is about the appropriate appearance of the cementitious - was that right? Wow. English majors do get some mileage out of that material. So how do we have any kind of assurance with these changes that only appropriate cementitious materials would be used? We would require that the accessory structure be consistent with the primary structure. So the Hardy Board that would be used would have to be - would be compatible with or look like the primary structure. And second to that, every one of those would be subject to a certificate of appropriateness review. So the historic preservation officer would review it and make a recommendation to the historic landmark commission about whether or not it was appropriate. And then ultimately the historic landmark commission would approve or deny the use of that specific siding material on a case-by-case basis. The certificate of appropriateness would be required even if a person decided to use wooden siding. Yes, sir. So one of the concerns is that Hardy Board comes in a lot of different forms. It can look like shiplap or all kinds of things, but it also comes in sheets, just like plywood comes in sheets. So if somebody came and they wanted to build a garage, a detached garage, and they wanted to use either a sheet of plywood to cover it or sheets of Hardy Board, if that didn't match what was around in the neighborhood, would that be allowed? No, it would not. And what would stop it from being - from happening? The historic landmark commission would deny their COA, and then if they tried to go for a building permit, we would note immediately that they did not have a COA and we would not issue them a building permit. And what is our comfort level that the historic landmark commission would deny those kinds of requests? They have historically upheld the codes as they are written to a T. Okay. To the point that they - even though at times may have wished to approve Hardy Board because they felt like it was appropriate in that specific application, they did not do so because it was - a strict interpretation of the code would not allow it. All right. Thank you. Council Member Briggs. My question is for more clarification. Could you go back to the slide of the vote from the P&Z and the HLC? I think where smooth sided is marked out. Does that mean that wood grain would be allowed? It would be considered allowable under that certificate of appropriateness application. And that was a P&Z change? Yes. Has the HLC - are they - It hasn't gone back to the HLC at this point. Okay. Thank you. Council Member Hawkins. Thank you, Mayor. I've heard some residents, they're not actually concerned with the Hardy Board or not. It's just kind of how we've gotten to this point. So I just don't really know how these districts started, how they - and how the rules and regulations formed in the very beginning. I mean, I hope that's not a huge answer, but is there kind of a quick answer to that? It was a very grassroots effort by the neighborhoods involved to be heavily engaged in the drafting of the original code, which is what still stands today, which is why we believe that it's very important that they be heavily involved in any revisions and be in support of any revisions. One of the things that we've observed over the last year as we have struggled with how to accommodate this request is that we don't have a standardized process in place by which property owners within a district could say, "We want to update our code. Here's the one, two, three steps in order to do that." And that's one of the things that HLC has identified as a task that we need to get in place very soon so that we have a process by which we can facilitate code amendments and engage the community. And we'll utilize the plan to do a review and update of each of the three codes as a testing ground for that. And just so I'm clear, staff has recommended approval. P&Z has too, and HLC? That's correct. Okay. Thank you. Council Member Johnson. Thank you, Mayor. Amy, do you know what year the code was written? Probably 1980 maybe? Is that right? It's about 30 years, roughly. It needs to be updated. So one of the things that I recall reading that was that they really didn't have any provisions for as building materials, new emerging technology comes along, that that could be considered, which I think is a lot of the some of the concerns that I've heard. Hardy Board technology has come a long way since Hardy Board was originally introduced. So I think, you know, I've heard some of the concerns from folks, and then when you -- it's not the Hardy Board from the 1980s, 1990s, because that was not really high quality material. What has staff done, and I would love to hear from Roman on this, by the way, on his opinion, because I think we went out and got a rock star as our HPO, and so with all of his experience, I'd love to hear his opinion. What investigation have we done on cementitious materials and, you know, the look and feel and benefits? Have we done some investigation on it? We did some investigation and education with the neighborhood meeting that we held in October. We talked about the different types and the progression of it over time and how it -- when it was a newer product, it was not considered to be an appropriate product for historic districts, but that over time, as it has evolved, it has become a standard practice to have it be an allowable material, specifically with new construction. When you start to get into the preservation of the original building, there's some risk associated with the use of too much Hardy Board in those cases, and that's really why we're keeping it limited to accessory structures only. So we did do that. The senior planner who put together these code amendments did a significant amount of research on what the different types of Hardy Board, as well as what the practices are in neighboring communities. Okay. Thanks. So I don't know if this is the right time, but I would love to hear from Roman, given that he's the expert on what his opinion is of -- is this an okay time or -- Sure. You want to do that now? We can do it after the public comments. It's up to you. Yeah, I can wait. You want to wait? Sure. Oh, he's going to -- sorry about that. He's up. Go ahead, Paul, Mayor. If you think it would add something to the conversation, come on down and just share your thoughts. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, Mr. Campbell, and city councilmen and women. I've heard all the questions. I just have a note on this that it's just a -- let me find where I've written that. This just simply clarifies the art ordinance as it is. I wasn't a part of the early on discussions, but generally, actually, the term generally is in there, but if you -- when you're reading that ordinance right at the front, I know there must have been some debate about that. But if I was interpreting it, I would have thought the intention of the ordinance, even as it was written, would be to allow for it. That's probably stepping a little bit of territory that you all covered in the past, and it is generally with a period, not generally with a comma. So to me, this is just a nice -- it's a good bit of work, and it helps clarify some things, and I think it just needs to go forward to your question on the siding. I would have probably stuck with the smooth siding. All the times I've seen hardy plank applied in the historic district, it's generally -- it's been smooth. I haven't actually seen an appropriate application of it, because milled lumber ends up very flat, and we don't often use, you know, raw -- there are, but when this came up, and I thought about it, and I remember you mentioning it at the last city council meeting, I've seen applications of the rough cedar siding one that's meant to mimic rough cedar siding, and this also gets to your question about larger sheets. So I've seen an application where you take a 4x8 sheet that has that sort of texture on one side, and then 1x2s with a cedar texture to it, or applied every foot, 16 inches, 18 inches to mimic a board and batten condition, and it works really well. Again, depends on the situation. You wouldn't do that probably in the West Oak District, where you have, you know, much more stately homes, but you might in some other application , and all our districts, quite frankly, are really beautiful with stunning homes that are well appointed, let's just say. But there are historic homes all over. I can't wait to get on my bike and travel a little bit more on the East Side and look at the type of modest structures that I'm really passionate about, and some of them have a little bit of a rougher texture. Council Member Briggs. So you would like to see it in its original form, basically , the way the HLC voted for it with Smoothside, or is there a reference to the type of hardy board that you would like for us to put into it for clarification? No, this works. This just works, and it's going to work, but it takes a level of trust, and Council Member Gregory, this is what you got, you alluded to. When I started in Brownsville five years ago, I guess it was, there was a learning curve to always, to everything, even to me, right? We all have television these days, and there's a bunch of shows about fixer uppers and flip this house and restore this or that, and we can watch that and learn a little. But the testament, or kind of the Bible on this subject, is the United States Secretary of Interior's standards for historic preservation and historic districts and historic rehabilitation. And this amendment, as it's written, even if you put that in there, you still, your historic preservation officer and the historic landmark committee in this case should really be looking to those standards, and you have to have some faith that they're going to be interpreted well, and that takes time to develop that faith. We all are learning all the time, but that's, I would say it's fine with that amendment, because I'm sure there's going to be an application that could come up in the historic district. Or not only that, if you have new infill projects, and if we think about the Denton 2030 plan and all the great work that, you know, historic preservation comes up a lot in there, but so does economic development. And sometimes you want to produce a little excitement in a community. I mean, you might have an area where there's just one or two houses that have been designated or protected, you might have a really great architect come in and design a beautiful piece of work, and who knows, he could have something textured on it, or some other material could come up. So for me, the flexibility is fine. We all just have to keep honing our skills and looking at the great, good works of art and good, as all the homes are really just essentially great works of art. Most of these homes were built by a craftsman and his team and architects. But you also have the modest ones. And so the rough texture could come up. That's my best answer on it. Go ahead. Yes. Well, I just wanted to clarify, since you're here, that if you were to write this, it would look similar. This amendment now, to move us forward, and as a, I don't want to call it a pat, as a little stop gap measure, so we can get off whether it's generally communal or generally period, but go ahead and allow the material. Sure, this would be great. But let me, obviously, there's a lot of work to do on the ordinance, and I definitely am working on a timeline for doing that. I think it'll, I rewrote the city of Brownsville's ordinance while doing a lot, you know, sometimes you have a lot of things come up, demolitions and rehabs that you don't want to let get out of control, so you have to kind of keep a lot of things moving. It takes a while to amend an ordinance as well and reach out to the community and reach out to everyone who has an idea and has a concern and make sure we get it all in there. I'm certified in this kind of seed program about community involvement and decision, so I plan on using those skills and those tools to make sure we really reach out and make sure we present something that everyone can agree to. A couple more questions. Mayor Proctor. Thank you. In that sentence where there's the strikeout, when you leave it out, it says the use of cementitious siding is also permitted on new construction and accessory buildings. Now striking out smooth siding doesn't mean that you are prohibited from using smooth siding. It doesn't. I mean, it would allow you to use smooth siding or another siding. Is that correct? That's right. Okay. So it just actually provides a little bit more flexibility. It's just a flexibility, right? And then we're trusting the discretion and the good judgment of the Historic Landmark Commission to exercise good judgment as they issue those CO As. Thanks. Councilmember Wasney. So the Planning Department's been working on this for a year, and you've been here for two weeks? Yes. So if you were given the opportunity to have free rein over writing this hardy board, just the wording, because we welcome you and you are our new expert on our historic districts. If we were to give you free rein to write this in any fashion that your expertise would drive, would you duplicate this or would you tweak it? Would you welcome some time to make some changes in this? Because we recognize you've only been here two weeks, and is there -- do you welcome -- I welcome it. I mean, to be clear, I think this is a very -- this was a good bit of work, and it addressed an issue that needed to be addressed. I would do this as is, because it's going to take a bit -- if I'm going to spend some time -- I've actually got some eyes on a couple of other things that I'm a little concerned about that we ought to get to, too. So there needs to be a comprehensive way to kind of get this all addressed, and I think we can accomplish that in the next several months. I don't want to put a date on it. I want to make sure I'm still sort of planning what needs the most attention immediately, but obviously this is urgent. So just last question, we have your stamp of approval as it stands right now. Yes. Yes. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Seeing no further questions, thank you. We're going to go ahead and open up for public comment. Amy Anderson, if you'll come state your name and address, and your time will begin. There's a couple of X marks on here, so I'm not sure. Yes. Exactly. 924 West Oak. I think our planner actually was addressing one of my things, because I went up for a garage and got turned down for the very due nature, because in a garage you don't want fire. But I was never engaged, by the way. So wherever she went, I was never engaged. They said there was a lot of engagement. There was one meeting to which I don't think I could attend to that I even didn't know about. So I think engagement's a little bit poor. I don't think there was substantial engagement. And if you're going to do substantial, you need to send out more than one notice in the DRC, because I read it all the time, and I miss that one. You could send an email. You could send out a flyer under the door. Something like that. The reason I had two checks was I think the wording was vague. I'm still a little confused. We're leaving off the approval that's up for you guys is no smooth siding. Is that right? That's taken out? I mean, just make sure, because I hear smooth, I hear not smooth. And that was my concern of what was coming up, because there's some siding that's considered cementous that has asbestos in it, right? So if we're not, you know, not all cementous siding is hard y board, and some of it looks really trashy. So I just want to make sure that's the reason I'm a little worried about it. But I'm a little concerned about the lack of engagement and the statement that there was a lot of engagement. I saw how many on that one thing that said, oh, what, 10 people showed up? There's a lot of people that live in the Okkeree Historic District and the other historic district. I don't call that engagement. If you want to know, you have to get more people to come out, and only one person owning 10 houses is kind of stacking the vote, as it were. One person, one vote, not 10 houses, 10 votes. So I'm a little concerned about that. But I would like a little more advanced notice on what's going on. I've only gotten the last mail. And a lot of it doesn't come with much advanced notice. Like I got one the day after a meeting occurred. Whoopie doo. That's not a good thing to do, folks. And as far as this, is there any penalty? I mean, I'm not going to do it, clearly, because I haven't built my garage. But what if somebody gets a COA for putting wood up and then goes off and puts up hardy board? What's the penalty? We've put up three story buildings in the land of two story buildings. That building still stands across from Datco. So I don't see that there's any teeth in this. So I'm going to, whoops, sorry, I guess I'm bumping in. I just wondered if there was any or are we just wasting a lot of time for nothing. But I thank you all for considering this very seriously and listening. Because we do need a comprehensive plan. I'm currently renovating my house. I'm investing a lot of money in this. And I would like to see that, you know, my investment pays off and not having people that have never lived in a historic district or dealt with an old house, I got to pull out copper wrapped with I'm not sure what wiring around it, right, plumbing with lead seals in it. I'm spending a lot of money. And I've got people that don't even know what it looks like to live in a house that was built before 1980. So these are the people telling me what I can do. So I think it's a little worrisome that people that don't live in the districts have a lot of say. So thank you all. >> Thank you. >> Our next speaker is Annette Ramsey, state your name and address and your time will begin. >> My name is Annette Ramsey and I live at 722 West Oak Street. And I am not a very political person. But I really began observing city government two years ago after I had a really bad experience with the planning department. Some really good things came out of that. As a neighborhood, as a historic neighborhood, we came together. We formed a nonprofit. We were able to finally get historically appropriate street lamps, which we've been hoping for for many years. But we noticed a huge problem with the very antiquated historic district code. And we began begging for you guys to consider changing it. That was two years ago. So a year ago, we finally gave up and we wrote our own code . We thought maybe naively that if we did some of the heavy lifting, we're pretty good riders. And we carefully went over the code and looked at what works in other cities that you would of course want to look at it. No. The city council members who were ad hocing on this refused to talk about it, kept telling us repeatedly, wait a few more months. I know we were told that at least twice. City employees would not even engage in this period. They wouldn't talk to us. We would love to talk to you. We would love to, but we can't. So there isn't transparency and we're very, very frustrated . In the past two years, I have sat through many, many hours of meetings. And you haven't lived until you've been through the HLC meeting and you sat for 45 minutes and listened to them deciding whether or not it's okay to paint a house cardboard color. Frankly, it's paint. And that's just not what is a problem with historic houses. Frankly what has developed for me is a serious distrust of city staff members, particularly from the planning department. Those are the ones who won't engage. I did look through the materials you had and on agenda item five, and I guess, or the number five under your supporting documentation. And I just saw Amy's presentation that it had changed. I was really kind of bothered by the way the votes were presented and that one person did, and it was one person's name who voted 10 times. And it did make it look like there was a lot more support for this than there was. In a city that is loaded with people who have PhDs, that kind of documentation is really unacceptable. It needs to be more clear that here's the number of people who had multiple properties. Here's the number of people where two people voted from one residence. Some of the people made comments. It was clear they didn't even understand what they were voting for. The other thing that I really question is what kind of citizen input there was. I did attend a citizen meeting two years ago, and when I was writing an article a couple weeks ago, I found the notes where the person who coordinated our meeting, where 25 citizens were there, and we were mad and we were saying that we did not like what was going on, what a decision that planning had just made, this planning staff member then went to the HLC a week later and reported that it was all okay and that we agreed to it. So after two years, my question is, why is this suddenly a priority? Why are we not waiting for this new staff member to take his place? And why can we not engage with you? We want to. We want to help the city be better. We care to. We live in these 100-year-old houses, and trust me, there are a lot of work and a lot of money. So I just ask that you let the new historic preservation officer do his job. We've waited two years. Please let us get this right. - Councilmember Rodin. - Thank you. - Councilmember Rodin, I have a couple of comments. On the point of this amendment, are you approving of this particular amendment? - You know, I'm okay with it if you will promise that we can be involved and engaged and that you will take a look at our code that we spent so many, many hours writing. The code we have was written for an architect, and that has never been on the HLC, and that's a large part of why there have been problems is that architects have architect language that most people, and especially planning, don't understand . - Okay. Thank you. I see no further questions. Those are the only requests to speak cards we have. I'll read the request not to speak at the end, but I wanted to give anybody that's - this is a public hearing, so if you don't have to fill out a card, if you want to come down and speak on this issue, please come down and state your name and address, and your time will begin. - Oh, you're good. You're good. My name is John Morse. My residence is 918 West Oak Street. I also own 717 West Oak Street, and please forgive me. I did not fill out my form and say I approve of this measure, so you put two more in the approval. Sorry, it's two from one guy, but it's two properties. Okay. As I understand it, the limited thing that you are doing tonight is just expanding the materials that can be used and limiting them, the new synthetic materials, I'll call them, to detached substructures, not the main structure, the historical structure. I had the same thing happen to me that Mary's going through . I wanted to build a garage. I got the COA. Everything's approved. It's out of wood. The builder is building it, and he says, "Why are we doing this?" I said, "Because we have to. We're in a district." He said, "If I could use Hardy Board, I could do this at one third the price, the siding that you're paying for this building," which is not historical. It's a garage. Based upon that and the fact that you're going to have people coming before the board for approval of the buildings, and they're going to be looking at the code, and they're going to say, "Yes, you can use that board," or, "No, you cannot use that board." I have faith in them that they can do their job. So that's where I'm at. Okay. Thank you. All right. See no questions. Thank you. No, no, yeah, there's, yeah, I'm sorry. Sorry, Mr. Morris. This is a public hearing. Anybody wishing to speak, please come down, state your name and address, and your time will begin. Anybody wishing to speak? All right. We'll go ahead and read the cards wishing not to speak. Brian and Vicki Morrison are in opposition. Cementous siding is not in keeping with historic materials. As a purist, I believe that adherence to existing siding materials is preferable. William Matthews is in support. Angie Matthews is in support. So we've got all our comment cards read and we will now close the public hearing. Councilmember Gregory? Thank you, Mayor. I move approval of the item. Councilmember Rodin, go ahead and then we'll take comments because we got a couple of speakers. Second. We have a motion to second. Before we take a vote, Councilmember Hawkins? Yeah. Can I ask Roman one more question here, is that okay? I think I feel comfortable voting for this, but I just kind of want to get it on record. How you feel moving forward, this code is going to be looked at, how it's going to be written, is there going to be public involvement? How do you see all that going? Are you going to try to have meetings or just generally how do you think about all that? I haven't had extensive time to plan the plan of action, but my thinking is these, I think the historic district that I was looking over before was around 1,800 houses. When I look at the three little maps on my wall and my bike out there up front, that's not going to take hard to meet a lot of those people. So if I'm going to hold a meeting, I think I'll just hand deliver every flyer and put a smiley face on it or something like that and just make sure we get everybody out that we can get out and maybe have a draft of proposed changes just based on this dialogue and everything we've looked at. And then a lot of photographs of houses and the ability for people to kind of sketch out any problems or mark any ideas they have. And so the key is just getting people to open up and get those ideas out. Any procedural issues that we might have to look at. For example, on an upcoming HLC committee meeting, we do have a roof and it's going to HLC. It's a composition, someone's changing their roof and it's a three-tab composition to an architectural roof. I'd like to see that go to an administrative approval. I don't think it's necessary to bring that to a meeting. So things like that, I'd kind of feel out and see if people are okay with that idea. Basically just be as inclusive as I can and then propose it . Of course, go through the process, the HLC, the PNZ and then to the city council. And involve the residents. Involve the residents heavily. That's all. Great. Thank you. Welcome to Denton. Thank you. Thank you. Councilmember Wozni. You can stand up. Yeah, thanks. My question has been on the process. Not so much on a Hardy board specific. And I know people hear this for me often that it is about the process. It is about citizen engagement. And had we gone to all four districts separately to say our neighborhood's going to have a meeting, what do you think? I think that would have been a good route to take. And again, just public involvement in the process. So boy, I welcome you to Denton. And we just are happy to have a captain of our ship for historical preservation. You are an architect. So I want to let our citizens know that we have really brought on board a professional to shepherd us through. Because preserving and protecting our historic districts is number one. It's why we live in Denton. We want to take care of those neighborhoods. And the only way to do it is to have a captain of the ship who is a specialist. So thank you. I did hear you emphasize that you want to bring people into the discussion and into the process. And I just want to say thank you that I heard those words because they're truly important to me and truly important to our citizens. So thank you. I could have Amy come up. I've got a couple of questions as it relates to that citizen engagement. Because it was raised by a couple of speakers and now by Councilmember Wasney. And I just want to clarify the process. I think it's been extensive, but I just want to clarify what I think I heard. So HLC essentially initiated this to begin with. They did. Correct? And they're a citizen commission. They are. And they initiated it after seeing repeated requests from property owners for a change. So you work with them to come up with a plan and it sounds like you sent a survey out to – who did you send that survey to? We sent the survey to every property owner in all three districts. And it was an informal survey, meaning it wasn't a public hearing or something that was a requirement. It was just – we wanted – that was our initial – we feel like we're hearing this from the neighborhoods, but we want to see if maybe we're missing something. And so we sent that survey out first and got – I don't recall the exact number of responses, but it was enough to say we need to consider this further. And so we then had a work session with the Historic Land mark Commission to talk about the process for updating it and making sure that the neighborhoods were engaged and that we really heard from them what they wanted. At that time, the Historic Landmark Commission directed us to host a neighborhood meeting, and we did. It was – there was not a lot of people in attendance. How did you advertise for that meeting? We mailed an invitation and sent out email invitations. To all the people in the district. And then – so then you had the meeting, so people had that opportunity to go to. Then did it go back to HLC? For further discussion. That's correct. For this particular amendment suggestion? Well, first it went to HLC again as a discussion about timing, and at that point in time, they agreed as a body that they were going to make a recommendation to the city council for the change. They didn't actually vote on it at that time, but they said this is the direction we want to go and gave us the direction to continue working on drafting an amendment. And then it came back to them again in February with the proposed amendment that's before you today. Was that a public hearing? It was, yes. So that was a public – were people noticed for that? It was just noticed in the paper. Okay. Which is why we – the mailing notices were not required at all in this case, but when we had the public hearing at the Historic Landmark Commission meeting, they said we don't care if it's required or not. We want every property owner to be notified. So for P&Z, when it then went to P&Z for their discussion, was that noticed? It was noticed in the paper, yes. Okay. And then it came here for us, and how was this noticed? It was noticed in the paper, and then the mailing went out to every property owner within the district as well as within 200 feet of the boundary of each district. So two citizen boards and commissions, P&Z, HLC, a citizen survey, a community meeting, three public hearings, including the one tonight. I don't know how much more citizen engagement we can have for Hardy Board on accessory siding. So I think that's pretty significant for this. So thanks for what you did with that. Council Member Briggs. So I want to go back to the amendment that we're voting on, and P&Z marked out smooth. Just can you guess if that went back to HLC, if it would be an 8-0 vote still? I'm just kind of -- because it didn't go back to them, and so I'm not real sure how they feel about the amendment. In all of the discussions that we had with HLC, we never discussed limiting it to smooth siding. When we brought it back as being limited to smooth siding, they were comfortable with that because they have a preference for smooth siding, and they felt like that delineation was a good one. But they were surprised to see it because it was not in the previous discussions, if I recall correctly, limiting it to that scope. I think that because we had not talked about that limitation prior to it coming back, they would support it, just because that's the conversation and the nature of the conversations that we had. The smooth siding was proposed. We had an architect write this particular code amendment, and as Roman said, in many cases smooth siding would be the appropriate application of this particular facade material. However, with the layer of protection of the certificate of appropriateness, if it's not a smooth sided application and it's not consistent with the main structure, it would not be approved. By the elimination of smooth siding, it does not mean that it excludes smooth siding. It just means that it is more broad than just smooth siding . Any other questions? We have a motion and a second. Let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries 7-0. We've got agenda item, lost my place, 5C. That's going to be annexation. We have several speakers on that. Let's take a quick 10-minute break because once we get into that, it's going to take a while. Let's go ahead and take a 10-minute break, come back at 8-0 -5. Want to welcome everybody back to this meeting of the Dent on City Council on March 1, 2016. We are reconvening, and now we're on agenda item number 5C, is 8-10. Hold the first of two public hearings to consider annex ation and -- I'm sorry, excuse me. Let me try again. Hold the first of two public hearings to consider annexing approximately 4,132.4 acres, 40 acres of land contained in 10 of the 15 annexation areas. Is there a staff presentation on this? Okay. So we'll go ahead and open the public hearing. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'm going to ask Amy Bissett, our Director of Development Services, to present this item for council consideration. And I think we have about -- Thank you, Mayor and council members. Just a moment to get it open. What's before you today is the first of two required public hearings to consider annexing approximately 4,132 acres of land. This acreage is contained in 10 of 15 annexation areas that were identified in our 2010 annexation plan. These particular properties received a non-annexation agreement in 2010 and received a one-year extension on that non-annexation agreement in 2015. That extension expires on March 16. Four of the annexation areas include approximately 2,800 acres of land and are primarily located in the northwestern quadrant of the city of Denton's extraterritorial jurisdiction and are identified as PAA 1, 2, 3, and 4. The remaining four areas include approximately 1,300 acres of land and are considered unincorporated ETJ pockets located within the body of the city of Denton. I want to give you a little bit of background on why we're here tonight and what we're doing. The Denton plan is our comprehensive plan. As you know, we just recently adopted a new one, the 2030 plan, but we had one that was adopted in 1999 that identified that -- looked at our growth patterns and saw -- projected the population growth over the next 25 years or so and looked at that anticipated growth and said, "Today, our land area for the whole city of Dent on is a little less than 40,000 acres. If we're going to accommodate the population growth that we anticipate, we're going to need some additional land inside the city of Denton to be able to provide single-family homes and services and schools to those residents that we expect as population grows." So in that Denton plan, there was a call for an aggressive annexation plan. The primary purpose of it was to accommodate single-family residential growth using a calculator of density per acre. In 2009, there was a study completed that was in response to what the Denton plan called out in terms of a need for additional acreage to accommodate residents. And in that study, it was determined at that point in time that we would need approximately an additional 7,500 acres in order to accommodate the growth of the city. Specifically in that Denton plan, there's a statement that 's made, "Adopt an aggressive annexation policy in order to manage the density and quality of growth within the current ETJ." I want to provide that background to show why we're here today and that this is really a culmination of a lot of that work that was done quite some time ago. So the 2000 annexation study was performed and several goals were identified. The intent was to protect the northern I-35 corridor and the future west loop 288 corridor. When I show you the annexation areas in a moment, you'll notice that the larger ones are concentrated in those two areas. Further goals were to manage the city's growth and the city 's CCN, to manage land use in probable growth areas. In other words, to make sure that we can facilitate the kind of development we wanted to see in areas that we knew would grow. Create a logical, contiguous city of Denton boundary, reduce pockets of unincorporated areas that were within the city limits, provide future growth areas as recommended in the Denton plan, and then put a priority ranking on potential annexation areas based on a scoring system. From that 2009 annexation study, there were two different types of annexation areas that were identified. The first one was called potential annexation areas, which is why you see today that they're labeled PAA 1, 2, 3, and 4. They are larger and they were intended to specifically increase acreage in the city to accommodate the anticipated growth, and they focused on development patterns where they saw growth coming and focused on protecting those main thoroughfare corridors through Denton. The other areas were identified as donut holes. They're smaller that were already inside the corporate city limits. That was abbreviated to DH, which is why you see some of the areas today that we'll be talking about, DH 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 14. The intent with this was to eliminate smaller areas that were considered donut holes in the city. Once that study was complete, we initiated the 2010 annex ation program. Annexation is an act by a city to bring property that is in our ETJ, in other words, outside of the city limits, into the city limits. In these cases that we're talking about today, many or all of them are in ag use today, and they would remain in ag use if they came inside the city limits. The program began in 2010, but it continues today. What I'm standing here today doing is working from that 2010 plan. In 2010, if a property was in one of the target areas that had been identified in the study, if that property was in agricultural use and met certain exemption requirements, we offered them a non-annexation agreement. What that meant was that we would delay annexation for five years. The properties that we're contemplating today signed non- annexation agreements in 2010. We agreed to delay annexation. In 2015, we offered a one-year extension on those annex ation agreements for the properties that still qualified under that agricultural exemption. Today, 2016, those extensions are set to expire on March 16 th. That's what we're here talking about. Just to give you a big overview, this is a map that includes all of the areas that we will contemplate today. The four PAA areas, proposed annexation areas, as you see, are on the northwest quadrant of the city, and they do primarily border and surround I-35 North on the northern corridor of town and the future west loop 288. They also are the ones further south are near the Denton Enterprise Airport, which is a prime area for future growth in Denton. The ones to the south are those abbreviated donut holes, and those are small pockets within the city limits that are not in the city limits. PAA 1, this particular annexation area is located near Jim Crystal and Tom Cole Road. It's approximately 741 acres that we're contemplating annex ing today. PAA 2 is located near 1173 and West University Drive, and it is just west of I-35. It's approximately 476 acres. You'll notice that, just to back up just a little bit for the audience, the area that is contemplated is in a black border. The red parcels are those that are under non-annexation agreements today that are getting ready to expire. The other ones are already in the city limits or are under some other arrangement. You can see in PAA 2 that many of those properties have already been annexed, but there are a handful that are still under non-annexation agreements. PAA 3 is located near Ganser Road and Bartold Road. It is north of 1173 and west of I-35. It also borders the I-35 corridor, and it's approximately 4 65 acres. PAA 4 is located near Milam Road and Loop 288. It is east of I-35, also bordering that corridor, and it is approximately 1,100 acres. DH 1 is on the south side of FM 2449, west of John Payne Road, and it's approximately 261 acres. DH 2 is located near University and Thomas J. Egan Road, north of Jim Crystal, and it is approximately 203 acres. DH 3 is located on the south side of Springside Road, south and west of Corbin Road, and west of I-35, and it's approximately 279 acres. DH 4 is located at Bonnie Bray in Fort Worth Drive, east of Vintage Boulevard, and it's approximately 274 acres. DH 5 is on the north side of Brush Creek Road, west of Country Club Road, and it's approximately 321 acres. DH 14 is on the south side of Robinson, east of Thoroughb red Trail, and it's approximately 2 acres. Our annexation schedule, in order to contemplate annexing these properties as their extensions expire, there's a required series of times that I'll be in front of you over the next couple of months. Tonight is our first public hearing. There's no action associated with this. It's an opportunity for us to hear from the public. March 3rd will be a second public hearing. April 5th will be the first reading of the annexation ordin ances, which is where we actually read through the parcels that we're contemplating annexing. April 6th, we will publish those ordinances in the Denton Record Chronicle, and May 10th is the second reading of the ordinances and the potential vote to adopt the annexation ordinances. That is my presentation. I'm happy to answer questions. Any questions for staff before we take public comments? Seeing none, thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you, Amy. First speaker is Burt Yarbrough. If you would come down, state your name, address, and your time will begin. Good evening. My name is Burt Yarbrough. We're in the PAA1. Is it possible to get that map back up? If not, I can just... PAA1? Yes. Yes, right there. Okay, the center portion of that, including parcels 36699, 36705, 36702, 37080, 37077, which basically, this is my property. It includes 311 acres out of all of this mass. You've got 741 acres in that grouping. This is family settlement from the 1800s. It's been one operating farm ever since that time period. It's still one operating farm. It's very rural. It's livestock, agricultural, hunting, birds, deer. We have no city, nothing that we need to be in the city. The city is not going to bring anything to us, and there's nothing that I see or have been told on the planning boards west of Hickory Creek that will affect us in any time, near future or even distant future for that matter. I would like to see the opt-out agreements go out another five to ten years minimum. There's no reason that I need to be city of Denton. Thank you for your time. >> Thank you. >> I'm trying to read what that road is on the west boundary. Is that a road? Looks like there's a name there. I'm just trying to get an idea of what -- Sea wolf? Sea something. >> They know it better than I do. Sea wolf. >> Okay. Sea wolf. Okay. All right. Okay. Thank you. I'm sorry. Thank you for that clarification. The next speaker will be Janelle Birch. My name is Janelle Birch, 4478 Country Club Road. Good evening, Mayor and Council members. We're back here again. The Birch family farm totals a little more than 450 acres, all of Donut Hole 5, and 140 acres of Donut Hole 4, which is almost half. Approximately 340 acres of the 450 is in floodplain. That's 70 to 80 percent of the total farm. And the highland that is there is not located in all one block. It's spread out. Therefore, with so much floodplain, it cannot be developed. And this, okay. >> It'll come on automatically. There you go. >> That is a survey map of the farm. And the black area is floodplain. Grandfather Birch bought the farm in 1932 because it flooded and would make good fertile farmland. Well, guess what? That's all it is good for now with more than 340 acres in the floodplain. And I can tell you, it does flood when we have the rain. The land is being used now as it was in Grandfather Birch's time, growing crops, hay, and raising cattle. The yearly goal is to make enough to pay the taxes. During the 2000 annexation, several other long-time family- owned farms and ranches, in lieu of annexation, received restrictive covenances. These restrictive covenances will expire in 2031. Therefore, they are protected from annexation as long as they continue to meet the restrictions. That's 2031. Some of those properties are located only a half a mile from our farm on the other side of Country Club Road. There's also property south of Hickory Creek Road that have these restricted covenances. And there's also areas north of Donut Hole 4 with these restricted covenances. Therefore, annexing Donut Hole 4 and 5 will not eliminate donut holes in the city. And as far as city services are concerned, we have plenty of well water that's better than city water. We have septic systems already in place. And county emergency service have always served us quite adequately. For my husband, Richard and I, his sister, Nelda, and husband, Charlie, it is our goal to live on the farm until the day we die, just as Grand father Birch and Dad Birch did. Our preference is to not be annexed. Please renew the non-annexation agreement currently attached to the property. We can only hope that you as a council will not ignore the voices of the property owners, the rural property owners of the City of Denton can be true partners in the city's future by leaving us in the country. Thank you. [Applause] >> Now, there were no questions. Thank you. I'm sorry. Thank you. >> Don't have a question? >> No, there's no questions. I don't see. >> Okay. >> What I'm going to do is I'm going to call the next speaker, and then I'll call the one that will be on deck after that, since we have so many. Linda Roberts will be the next speaker. And then after Linda will be Ray Roberts. >> Good evening. Thank you for hearing us. I'm Linda Roberts. I live at 2136 Chin Road. That's in PAA4 area. In 1992, my family moved to our current residence for the purpose of being in the country and to enjoy the benefits of country life. We are not planning on selling our land, and we have approximately 10 acres and just hope to remain there for quite a while. Now we are to be annexed by the city, and we don't want this. We wish to remain in the country and not be annexed. Upon annexation, our taxes will increase. We are now on a fixed income, and this increase in taxes will be a financial burden for my family. Our taxes will increase with very little, if any, increase in services from the city. Our taxes will be increased by officials we did not have an opportunity to elect. We will experience taxation without representation. So we request that our property, 2136 Chin Road, not be annexed by the city. Thank you. >> Thank you. Ray Roberts, come down and state your name and address. And then after Mr. Roberts will be LaDonna Pocras, I believe. >> I've got to be careful what I say. I'm Ray Roberts. I live at 2136 Chin Road, and we're just off of Bonnie Bray and Ganzer Road in the annex area. We sold our home in Dallas to get away from the city, and we moved to Denton to be in the country. And by coming up here, we have worked hard to concentrate on Denton, helping and doing things up here, and not going back to Dallas or other cities. Over the years, we've worked hard to support the city of Denton as much as possible. I would make all the purchases with Denton to avoid Dallas. One of my duties in Dallas was to purchase automobiles for the company, and I elected to make all those purchases in Denton or Sanger to bring the money up to this area. And my main duty was a pilot. I flew a large airplane. I quit about four months ago, but I made all possible stops I could make at the local airport to buy the fuel and actually do maintenance at that airport . We'd have an airplane up here now if we had a hangar for it , but it didn't have one large enough. We did bring it up to let students operate, not actually operate, but review it, look it over at foreign students out at the airport. I brought it up and let it sit there all day and taught them what they'd expect when they went back to, I think, Japan. I worked several large gardens at our little 10-acre plot. Most of it is a garden. And we do have some animals. And I've joined the Denton Masters Gardeners Group so I can furnish food, garden, and stuff to the Freedom House, the different ministries, and free of charge. We don't charge for any of this. I wanted to make sure this freedom does not come to an end and that we can stay in Denton as a country, not in the city. It just won't match. And I don't want to move. We want to stay there. So that's it. Thank you. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. Next speaker is LaDonna Paukris. And then after her will be Larry Paukris. Am I pronouncing that correctly? Yes. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Council Mayor Watts. LaDonna Paukris, 9080 Wolf Run, Ponder, Texas. We are in PAA1. We have three pieces of property there. We are located off of Seawolf Road. And we've been there 20 years. We moved to the country to be in the country, not in the city. We are west of Hickory Creek, which Hickory Creek is known to flood. And some of our property is also in flood area. And it doesn't make sense. The example we were given was to control and make room for growth. Well, we are ag and we plan to stay ag. We raise cattle and we raise hay. I don't plan to build apartments or anything else on our property. We're in the country. We're ag. We want to remain ag. And we do not want to be annexed. There's no need to come all the way out there. You're reaching because if you take the time to drive the city of Denton, the streets and roads in Denton are horrible. And they've already said that we're not going to get any services. You need to spend that two plus million dollars that you're spending to annex all these properties and put it into Denton where it belongs, not taking in people that don't need to be in the city. We don't need that we've got our own water wells. We've got our own septic systems. We have the county maintenance or the county emergency services. City is not going to give us anything. So what do you need our property for? You don't have any need to come all the way out there and take us in. We're ag. We want to stay ag. And we don't want to be in the city of Denton. I think you could better be stewards, better stewards of your funds by putting them into the city where they need to go because the streets and the curbs and the properties in Denton need to be addressed instead of going out taking in properties that you don't have any intention of taking care of anyway. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Pokrus and then after Mr. Pokrus is Jane, is it Meany or Mary? It's 4711. Yes, I'm sorry. All right. My name is Larry Pokrus. I live at 9080 Wolf Run Ponder. I don't do say ponder. And there's just a few things that I would like to ask about why basically do you want to annex this in. We're all in 25 to 40 acre, well, from 10 to 40 acre plots around. So there's not going to be any opportunity for growth around us. So we don't need to be annexed in. But then there's another thing we've been wondering about. And I think it's DH2. There's some property across the road from us. There's three pieces of property in question. One is the milestone wedding venue. They have not been annexed in. That is a very expensive piece of property and building there. And it would be a big tax base for the city had they be annexed in. But everything around them was but they weren't. And I don't know if it was a brother-in-law deal or just who the brother-in-law was. But we wonder about that. So everything that my wife has said, that's pretty little of what I was going to talk about. But I just want to express that do not want to be annexed in the city. Thank you. Thank you. Jane, the address is 4711 North Bonnie Bray. Jane, I had a hard time reading last. M-E-A-N-E-Y? Jane here? I'll put -- I'll put the card aside and if they come -- that's fine. Okay, Mary Gregory is up. And then Deborah Cottle will be next. Most of you know me. I've met almost every one of you. Been fighting this fight a long time. I'm Robin Gregory. It says Mary. Sorry. But I go by Robin. And I've been fighting since 2010 with you guys. And I hate that, but I appreciate it, Mayor Watts, Council, that you've allowed me the opportunity to speak again. My husband Chuck, he's met and talked with several of you. And most of you are more than aware of my stance on annex ation. It is a no-go for this girl. We moved to the country for a reason. Listening to the historical group here as they talked about planning and zoning and not getting all of their letters and not being noticed on time and all of the ins and outs and the secretive stuff of that, I was like, God dang, are they being annexed too? Because that's exactly what I was going through. I was like, dad gum. You know, there are so many things that I have learned through this process. And over the course of meeting each and every one of you, one of the things that we have heard is a myriad of conflicting statements, half-truths, partial truths, non-truths, and just flat out no truth. I mean, it's unbelievable. So I'm going to take a few minutes to try to dispel some of that today. As far as PAA 1, I can't do it for all of them, although I was here in 2010 and I watched every person on this annexation come and speak and oppose and it fall on deaf ears. This is a new council. I hope our pleas will not fall on deaf ears again. But one of the first things we've said, and you've heard me mention it, is that we're going to be giving city services. And that's not quite true. We're not going to get city services. We're going to get water by our well. We're not going to get water from the city of Denton. We are not going to get sewer from the city of Denton, not unless a developer comes, steps in and places those services. According to the 2010 plan, annexation plan that Mark C unningham, who was the city planner here in Denton at that time, he said his program plainly states no full city services until a developer steps in. We will have police. We will have fire, as long as it's a small fire truck, because a big one can come down my road. And we can have trash if we're willing to take our trash cans down half a mile down the dirt road. So in the 22 years I've lived on my property at 491 Hickory Creek Court, which is the dirt road, we've never had to call the police. I think the fire department came out one time for a brush fire. I found them in my backyard. That was a trip on 4th of July. It's like, what are you doing? And there was no fire at my place. And I've called Richard Webster, the animal control guy, one time for stray cattle in my yard. You know, no benefit to me, just more money. $1,200 I can spend on fences at my place. The city of Denton in 2010 paid a consulting firm, Frieze and Nichols, probably a large amount of money, to tell them about this whole annexation thing. They prioritized according to the doughnut holes and the P AAs and all of that, which ones were considered low priority, high priority, and such as that. PAA 5, which you don't see anywhere here, was advised as the lowest priority. PAA 1 was right there with it. And PAA 5 is totally off your annexation plan for the city. And PAA 1 should be there as well. Services according to the plan, again done by the city, Mark Cunningham and his group, would create a deficit in the budget of close to $2.6 million. And that excludes the cost of vehicles for police or code enforcement or such as that. And that's per your own study. That's not what I came up with. That's what the city came up with. That's a cumulative for all of the services. It's not just PAA 1. Nor does that study talk about the increased burden that it will provide the city. Sorry, I can't even go. There's so much to go. I could go on for hours. Thank you. Deborah Cottle and then Sylvia Pena. Hello, I'm Deborah Cottle, PAA 1, and I'm 480 Hickory Creek Court. And everything that I was planning on saying, I've changed. But I did send a letter to all of you guys with lots of little hands outs and things. One of the things that really struck me, and I just wrote some notes, is how much time and effort that was needed to go into the historical district and keeping that pure. There was notices. There were neighborhood opportunities to speak about this. Never once, never once were we ever spoken to and asked, what could this bring to us? It just happened. And in 2010, what I thought was really, really interesting, like the Fries and Nichols study, not you, completely different group, except a couple, disregarded what they said. And being stewards, the thought was, there must be some other agenda going on. At that time, the Luke 288 hadn't been situated. At one point, it was going through my lower pasture, then it was going through the road. Well, that's now settled. And from your 2030 plan, we're still rural. So there's nothing that's going to be happening out there. You have control of what we do. And we're large in PAA1, we're large, vast areas of land that individuals own that we're not going to develop. Another thing that I thought was really, really interesting , and I'm probably shooting myself in the foot, but everywhere that I get all these conflicting dates and information and I can never get anything straight, is here's my extension. And my extension is terminated. March the 1st, am I part of the city? Not March 16th, I'm March the 1st. So what does that mean for me? Do I get to vote now in the city of Denton? Am I in no man's land or did it just expire? So most of you have spoken to, I've sent the letter of all the other things that I have questions on and there's nothing that you can give us or give me. I can't physically take my trash bin a half mile down the road. I live alone, can't do it. So that's it. So I don't know whether I'm part of the city or not, but I 've definitely expired as of midnight tonight. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Sylvia Pena and then Jody Ismert is up next. Hello, my name is Sylvia Pena. I live next door to her, 470 Hickory Creek Court. And basically I probably have the smallest amount of property. We have between my parents and my husband and I bought a five acre lot about 15 years ago because we, my husband and I wanted to have children and raise them out in the country. Then we split the acreage and so my parents who are now on a fixed income own two and a half acres and we are on two and a half acres. And we worked our tails off to build a home and then had three children to put in the home and we wanted to raise them out in the country. And that's what we're doing and right now it's just scary to see. You guys are trying to annex roads that you haven't driven out to look at, places that don't want to be annexed. And like several of the people here said, we have already paid for our well water. We've already paid for our sewer systems. We live on a private road that we've already been told will not get fixed. And if we are in the city limits, we would have to like, I think, right off that piece of property so that we could get it fixed. And let me tell you, whenever it rained that last year, it rained like crazy, we all pitched in to fix it because that's kind of what you do out in the country. You pitch in and do stuff that you have to get done. My husband gets up at 4.30 in the morning to leave and there's a tree across the only road that can get you in and out of our property. Well, there were already men out there working on that. It was our neighbors. So that's the kind of thing you do out in the country. And as I heard about the lady that was here talking about the other stuff, anyway, before us, it's just amazing to me that why do you want more land for you guys to develop more? We don't want to sell. We don't want to give land to the city. And the only thing that's going to happen is our taxes are going to go up. And I'm a part-time teacher. I'm trying to raise my kids on a part-time teacher salary. I'm sure you guys know how much that I make. And my husband is a blue collar worker. So we don't have any more to give to the city of Denton. And even though some of these people, they have 300, 400 acres, I'm sure that they're farms. They're not going to have all this money to pay all these extra taxes. And it's just, I don't know, it's mind boggling. But I'm totally against it. My parents couldn't be here tonight and their property's right behind ours. Same thing. We can't afford it. So hopefully you guys will listen this time around. Thank you. Thank you. Jodi Ismert and then Rick Chapman. Jodi Ismert, 819 Anna Street. And kind of like that lady was eloquently said, talking about her neighbors. I live in the city of Denton, but I consider these people to be my neighbors out in the country. And I am standing here today talking to you in solidarity with them. They do not want to be annexed. I don't see a reason why our city would come together to annex people who don't want to be annexed. If you don't want to be annexed, you don't want to be annex ed. If you move to the country, you want to live in the country . If you move to the city, you want to live in the city. There's no reason for us to annex them. Most of these people have come to you guys, like I have, with many, many, many past issues. You all know my face very well. Many, many past issues, anyhow. But these people have come to you guys and they have been here until 3.30 in the morning, I heard, stating they do not want to be annexed. I have come to you many times with many, many issues. I have been here to the wee hours of morning. And sometimes it feels like it falls on deaf ears. You're not hearing us. And even though another lady had mentioned that this is a new city council that she's speaking to right now, it may as well be the same city council she spoke to then. Because it just seems like it's everything we bring to you falls on deaf ears. And it seems like when we have these concerns that are extremely important to people, we are telling you what we want and you're not listening to the people who you are here to be serving. If they don't want to be annexed, we should not annex them. We should allow them to enjoy their property that they own in their own right. So I, again, stand in full solidarity with my neighbors. Thank you. >> Thank you. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Rick Chapman. Rick Chapman and then Deborah Amatar. >> My name is Richard Chapman and I'm here for my in-laws that live at 2946 Ganser Road. They're an elderly couple. Of course, I would be called elderly too, but they're much more elderly. Bob Merritt, I'm here for Bob Merritt and Jackie Merritt. Bob is very ill at this time and could not make this meeting and it was very important to him. So he asked me if I would come in his behalf. This is on PAA3. This is off of Ganser Road. It's approximately 100 and 100.45 acres. A little history on this property is that he bought this property with the intent of raising buffalo and he has. There's been as many as 40 or 45 buffalo. He's keeping the herd down. But his son and the Merritts got together and decided to build an event center, which would include, you could have weddings, corporate events. It's a very large facility with a unique situation of having a hotel also on the event center for the events, not as a hotel for public to come in. So this would allow people that need to come in from out of state to be able to stay at the event center in the hotel without having to go off the property. They built that. Then the city of Denton and the Merritts agreed after this plan came out, agreed to turn over the event center area to the city as far as annexing to the city of 3.45 acres. With the future thought was that they could renew the annex ation, keep it from happening in three different increments, 15 years increments. So he ended up with 97 acres not annexed in the city and 3. 45 annexed in the city. Now you have this event center, which now is in the city. And the city gets the taxes off of it. The event center got nothing in return. They got $8,000 worth of tax increase. They don't have any city water. They don't have any -- they have a well, which is a good well. They have their own sewer system. They don't have trash. They don't have a dog catcher. But they're going to need more than a dog catcher whenever a buffalo gets out. This is a buffalo ranch. It is not a place to be cut up and houses put on. That's why he bought this place. And so I just wanted to plead with you in his behalf and Jackie Merritt's behalf that we already have given to the city. We already have given the part that will make them the most money. The other part is ag. We have a pipeline, a major pipeline on each side of the property that came in after it was purchased. So we can't build on those sections. When we had a huge electrical line, power grid came down the backside. We can't build under that. So all we have left is the areas. There should be a lot more. But anyway, I thank you for listening to me, Mayor and Council. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Deborah Armatard. And then Patsy DeBaca. >> Hi, my name is Deborah Armatard and I live at 2003 Misty wood Lane. Watching these proceedings just now, I felt like I was watching a movie, a riveting, inspiring Hollywood movie about a bunch of amazing people who live in an amazing rural area who band together and all speak up and defend their land and at the end they end up winning. I hope that's the end of this movie. And I hope that you guys are not going to play the role of the bad guys in this film because this is the role that the bad guys would play. I'm not saying that you're being the bad guys now. You're just -- you're thinking. You're silently thinking and waiting and that's good. It's up to you what role you want to play in this movie. Also I live in Denton. I don't know if I said that. Have you ever played the board game of Risk? It's a game of world domination. But it also reminds me of the way we do city planning here in Denton. The board game is a world map and the goal of this game is to eliminate the donut holes and take over the world. It's a really fun game to play. There's a lot of strategy involved. But it wouldn't be so fun if all of a sudden people, human beings materialized out of the board and said no. We don't want to be world dominated by you. We live here. This is our property. We have plans for this land. Please go away. Please leave us alone. Please go back to your home. Take care of your own roads. Take care of your own families. That's what they're telling us. If that happened to me, I would have a heart attack probably if that happened to me while I was playing Risk. But I would definitely, after that, I would stop playing. It's not a game anymore. Game over. No fun. I don't see how you can go on playing this game after they 've come out of the game board again and again and said this is not a game year after year . You give them more time or previous councils have given them more time. Then they come back. Don't do this to us. I'm ashamed. I'm ashamed that this is even happening. I wonder what your mothers would say. I know what my mother would say if I was considering doing something like this. What your pastors would say. I'm just so ashamed. I can't say much more. I'm so ashamed. Please don't be the bad guys in this movie. Please give these good people the happy ending that they deserve. Thanks. Thank you. Pat DeBaca and then up will be David Molen. My name is Pat C. DeBaca. I live on 9861 Jim Crystal Road. I lived there for nearly going on 15 years. No one around me, none of my neighbors planned on or had built homes there. Next 10 or 15 years, I don't foresee anybody building a home in that area. In fact, people want more land, not less. So I don't know who's going to subdivide what. But yet I'm going to have to pay taxes for things I'm not going to receive. When I was in high school, I got my first check and it was two-thirds less than what I thought. Actually, one-third less than what I thought. They told me, "Well, you're going to be able to retire in a lifestyle as when you were working. And your medicine will be all covered, all your medical bills." Well, 60 years came. No, no, you got to go to 62. 62? No, you got to go to 65. I became 65, 66. Now in 69, I'm paying more for health care than anything else. My retirement is more and more entities are taking more and more money out of my fixed income. If this keeps up, my expenditures will be more than my income. Thank you, government. Thank you. David Mullen and then Don Logan. David Mullen, 701 Chisholm Trail, Denton. Don't live in any of the zones there. Just a citizen that wants to talk about this issue. Because I understand several things. First of all, I was on the Denton Plan 2030 committee. Spent two years figuring out the best places to put houses based upon, do we want centralized growth? Do we want growth sprawled all over everywhere? So I understand that part of it. I also understand from a planning point that in the past, the city of Denton has had a black eye. In the past, because I worked for the county, the county planning office. And I can tell you, when I have to tell people, I'm sorry, but you're in Denton's ETJ, they would just as soon put out their open carry gun and put it to my head. That's getting better. Thank you, Amy. And I've told her that. It's getting better. But that's a lot of the perception and the reason why people don't want to be annexed or be involved in the city is because of their perception of how the city is. It takes too long to get approved. It takes too long to get, I mean, it takes too much money to get all these things done. I'm not getting enough stuff. We're getting a lot of that. I'm not getting enough for my money. I understand that. But on the flip side, I also know about the UNT economic development, what they say the population of this city is going to be in 15 years, 207,000 people. I've also kept up with the North Central Texas Council of Governments, what they say the population of the city is going to be in 2050 when most of us aren't here, 600,000 people. So if they're right, we've got to put them somewhere. Where are we going to put them? I don't know. But I know annexation is a definite part of that because we have to find places to put them somewhere. I understand people with farmlands don't want to leave. I get that. I'm glad I'm not in your position. I'm glad I don't have to make that decision. But I would say annexate, whether you decide to annex any of these people or go a different route, annexation is something that is necessary. And it's going to have to happen. And I know I'm not going to get any applause. I might even get some stabs in the back from the people behind me. That's okay because I'm kind of neutral on this and I'm looking at it from a different perspective. I do, however, have a couple of questions for you, a couple of concerns. Number one, roads. It's been brought up. If you develop roads and you charge a certain access fee to pay for those roads, is that access fee only going to go to pay for these new roads or are you going to take some of that money to pay for the mistakes of the roads that we have now? That's part of my question. Also, are you going to be able to guarantee the same water quality to all these people that the current people in the city of Denton have? I don't know. I'd like to know that. And should you decide to annex, the density of the houses is a big issue for me. Putting ten houses on a one acre lot can happen because that's what developers want to happen. But it just, that's real, I mean, look at, drive out to Savannah, drive out to Paloma Creek, drive out to those places and see what that looks like. That's just some things I really wish that you would consider if you indeed decide to go this route and annex and develop. I just think that there's some things you guys need to think about. Thank you. Thank you. Don Logan is up and then Tammy Tubbs. My name is Don Logan. We live at 4269 South Bonnie Bray out there on one of these doughnut holes. You guys are looking at. About 20 years ago, we bought eight acres out there and our son, son-in-law and daughter wanted half of it. So they do and they've had four wonderful grandkids since that time. It's a beautiful place to grow, to raise grandkids out there. We have our own water well, our own septic tank and we haul our trash down to a local place and the way I understand it, you guys are, I'm not talking about you guys, but what the plan is, we're going to go on into the city of Denton and they're not going to furnish us water. They're not going to furnish a sewer. So we're going to be given a prize of, oh, now we got to pay new taxes that we haven't had to pay. We raised a few cows out there and we really hope you guys vote against this. Thank you. Thank you. Tammy Tubbs and then Nathan Harvey. Hello. Thank you for giving us this opportunity to come up for you tonight. My name is Tammy Tubbs. That was my daddy. So I'm the one with the four crazy kids out in the country. But I just, everyone has said so much that I don't need to repeat everything that was said. But the one thing I will say is I, as I was just kind of listening to the presentation beforehand and just a few minutes ago, I understand that there are things that the city needs to do to project growth and all of that. But looking at annexation, annexing our property is very personal to us and it affects our families deeply. And we moved where we moved for very specific reasons because we wanted to have the freedom to just raise our kids and raise cattle and do all of that sort of thing. And I hope you consider that, that when you look to vote for this, that there are serious consequences to the families that are out there living in the country, sharing the load between neighbors and all of those things. And the taxes alone can be a pretty heavy burden for those of us who have, with four kids, no, all of us. And so I just want you guys to consider all of the people that have come before you tonight and just hear our voices and think about that before you vote. So thank you. Thank you. Those are all the cards I have that are wishing to speak, but this is a public hearing and also I have some cards not wishing to speak, which I will read into the record. But this is a public hearing. Anybody wishing to speak, come down, state your name and address and your time will begin. Oh, I'm sorry. You're right, Mr. Harvey. My apologies. I apologize for that. We've been at this about nine hours, so my brain's a little ... I apologize. Thank you, sir. So again, my name is Nathan Harvey. It's 4353 South Bonnie Bray. So I'm within DH4. We heard Mrs. Burch come up and talk about DH4 earlier. It's the one that I think they have a very large percentage of that area. They talked about how a lot of it's in a floodplain. The areas that aren't within that floodplain and aren't within their property, the rest of that is mainly residences already. They're small acreage in the area of like six, seven, nine acre, small scale farms. So what we're talking about, I heard earlier when this was brought up that the reason was mentioned multiple times, that was for growth and for population expansion. But this is established residences. There's not really much opportunity here to add residences here with these established homes. These homes have septic, they have well water. There's no services that we're looking for to be provided for us. So there's just not really any benefit for us. And it doesn't seem like there's any benefit for the city because there's not gonna be any growth opportunity there, at least not anytime soon. I did set up kind of last minute when I realized what was happening here with the annexation, I went online last night and set up an online petition for the residences within DH4. So it's only been about 24 hours. And I sent it to those residents I had an email address for and I just checked before I came down and already 80% of them have signed the petition. So it's clearly something we don't want. And so I just want to make sure we came down and spoke our opinion and made that clear. And I thank you. Thank you. Appreciate that. Sorry for that mix up. Thank you, sir. Okay, open to the public. Come on down, state your name and address and your time will begin. Mayor Chuck Gregory, I think if you remember, I took you on a tour out there a few years back and council members, thanks for the opportunity to talk about this. I'm Chuck Gregory, live off of Jim Crystal Road out there on Hickory Creek. And I think my wife pretty well stated most of everything that we've emailed you in our case in this. And I just kind of wanted to bring a couple things to your mind here. I wasn't going to speak, Mayor, so you can throw my non-spe ak card away there. But the 2030 plan has PAA1, which is where we are, as rural . And we would like, obviously, to continue on with that plan . If you decide to vote to annex all these properties, I would at least like you to consider the fact that according to the state law from I understand right, we have three options to renew this non-annexation agreement. Now the second one expired, which ran out this year. First one was five, which could have been 15. And I understand the part about planning. Cities do need to plan. I understand that. We need to annex property. We understand that part. I mean, the reason we moved out in the country was to get away from the city. I drive to work. I work in a maintenance planning department for a major airline here. So I understand planning. And I understand that's got to happen somewhere down the road. But if you decide to go ahead and annex, at least offer these rural properties, the ones like us that have acreage, there's no plans for development out in our area, none whatsoever. We're large acres, large tracts of land. We plan on living there and retiring and turning it over to our kids. So I would appeal to you to at least consider the third non -annexation agreement for 15 years. That's going to give the city the control that you need and want over the development, which I understand coming from a planning perspective. We get that. But it's going to allow you the control if somebody does sell out and develop, then non-annexation agreement is null and void. It gets annexed. Otherwise we go on with our lives for at least 15 years knowing that we're in the city. We're not going to get any benefits by being in the city. We don't have to pay taxes for something we're not getting or being represented with. So I would, like I said, I would appeal to you to at least consider that if you don't vote no. I think we would all, everybody in here so far has pleaded with you to really consider what it does to the lives of the folks out there. So thanks for your time. I appreciate you and I hope your conscience will vote against this. Thank you. I have a question from Councilmember Johnson. Chuck, do you have any problem getting Robin to tell you what she really thinks at home? No, none whatsoever. Okay. Thank you. Okay. All right. Anybody else wish to speak? Come down, state your name and address and your time will begin. Yeah. Go ahead. Come on, ma'am. We'll get you next. My name is Leslie Buell. I live at 6778 Seawolf Road. I'm actually on Seawolf and I'm not eloquent. I wasn't planning on coming to talk, but there were some things on my head that hadn't been said yet. So I'm going to try and focus on what I haven't heard, but I want you all to know that I absolutely agree with all my neighbors and all the hard work that they 've done on some of this stuff. But when you were talking at the beginning, you were talking about what your goal was for annexation. And part of that included protecting that I-35 and the west side of the loop 288. PAA-1 does not give you guys that goal. It doesn't get met, okay, because we are too far away from that. We're protected by Hickory Creek being a floodplain, okay? So that doesn't accomplish your goal. To give us something that we have to be taxed on and we're not getting any services out of is not what government is here to do. The citizens don't elect people to do things that we don't get any benefit from, okay? We went today, we voted at the polls, and we chose people that we wanted because they want to represent us. So that's what we're looking for you guys. We don't want to be part of the city. We don't get any services. Right now, my trash service is cheaper right now than I can get it if I get annexed into the city. It costs $60 a month if I go to the city. It's 29 right now from private. So not only would I be paying more taxes, but I also have to pay more for the services. Out in the country, we know who do we call if there's a stray animal. We all know somebody to call. We don't have to call the city to help us out. We don't have to use the city services to come out and help us in the city. We help each other, okay? The other thing that concerns me is that we're being taxed without any representation. You guys want us to do something for you that we're getting nothing for. We have no control over any of that. We spend our money in Denton because we choose to spend our money in Denton. I work outside of Denton. I work a lot in Tarrant County, Dallas County. I come home and I come to the city of Denton to spend my money because that is my choice to support the city. And I want to be able to continue that. I want to be able to continue to support the city that I love, that I love to go do things at without being forced to support them with my tax money. Because if I have to support them with my tax money and all my taxes go up, it's going to be a burden for me and my family to even live here. So that's all that I would have to say and I appreciate you guys letting us be here and talk and being open minded to consider things that maybe your predecessors weren't willing to even consider. So we do appreciate that. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Come on. >> State your name and address and your time will begin. >> Good morning, folks. Zach Youngblood, 836 Hawes Drive, Copper Canyon. Mr. Mayor, Council. I don't know if you all know your local history, but Copper Canyon was incorporated in 1973 when it was under threat of annexation by Highland Village, which could only grow out to the west. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be an option for many of the owners in the various tracks you all are discussing annexation of because of population requirements under current Texas law, which is very sad. I also heard Ms. Gregory speak earlier that according to the recent nickel study, PAA1 was considered low priority. And the one word that I have not heard anybody say during this whole discussion tonight is Denton Energy Center or Denton Airport expansion, both of which will be located within that tract. So I did find an article on the Dallas Morning News from the 2010 discussion where several of the people who were under threat of annexation now spoke and essentially said the same thing they're saying. They aren't going to benefit. And I'm curious if in 2010 the city financial analysis said it was going to end up costing the city $2.6 million over 10 years for the properties under consideration now. Have you all seen the financial analysis currently? Especially, as I said, PAA1 is not going to be developed single family if the airport extension and the Denton Energy Center ends up being built out there. Thank you. Thank you. This is a public hearing. Anybody else wishing to speak, come down and state your name and address and your time will begin. Yes, my name is Skyler. I live at 9088 Wolf Run. I just have a wife and three kids. I moved out to the country because I didn't want to be in the city. I wanted a place for my kids to where they can go out and play. I don't have to worry about them. I'm not well and septic. I'll get no use as any of my daughter doesn't even go to Denton ISD. She goes to Ponder. I just don't see any benefit of getting annexed in. And my wife and I are planning to live there until we die as long as the state of the world. We don't want anyone around us. Just, but. It might be our own. Thank you. Public hearing. Anybody else wishing to speak? Anybody else wishing to speak? I'm going to call it one more time. Now I'll read the cards that I have. Richard Birch in opposition. Shirley Green in opposition. Larry Green in opposition. Leslie Buell in opposition. I think I'm going to go ahead and read it and see in opposition is Tamara Cohen. In opposition is Mary Gregory. We've got that Robin Gregory. I'm sorry. Excuse me. Yes, ma'am. Mark Cohen in opposition. Tamara Cohen in opposition. We have another one from Deborah Cottle. She has spoken and then the one that Jane. Mignese, I believe Jane Mincy is in opposition. Those are all the cars that we have. And so seeing no one else wish to speak, we will now close the public hearing. And I believe there's no action on this. I believe there's no action on this item. Is that correct, Madam City Attorney? Yes, Mr. Mayor, this is only a public hearing. So this is no action tonight at all on this item. Okay. We will now call the next agenda item, which will be 5D, which is hold a public hearing considered option of an ordinance of the city of Denton, Texas, designating a certain area within the city limits of Denton as Westgate Business Park. I will go ahead and open the public hearing, but we'll let them clear out here for just a moment because we're going to. Yes. Nope. Yeah, we're not going to make a presentation. Mr. City Manager, we have, oh, Mayor Pro Tem. On item 5D, I move that we postpone until March 22nd. Council Member Hawkins? I second. All right. We have a motion and a second for agenda item 5D. Let's vote on the board, please. Who's second? Council Member Hawkins? Yes. Who's not voted? Motion carries 7-0. We'll now move on to our agenda item 6, which is items for individual consideration. Agenda item A is consider approval of a concurrent ordinance with the cities of Bryan, Garland, and Greenville, Texas, electing the provisions sub-tapter C -1 of Chapter 163. Do we have a presentation? Apparently Mr. Phil Williams is going to make a presentation. Thank you, Phil. I think this is the one, Mr. Mayor, you have an alternate resolution. Go ahead. Mr. Williams? Thank you, Mayor, Council. I come to you now to talk about a concurrent ordinance with Texas Municipal Power Agency. Just a reminder to the audience, to the Council, Texas Municipal Power Agency is a joint power agency that is member cities are Bryan, Denton, Garland, and Greenville. The assets of the Texas Municipal Power Agency is a 470 meg awatt coal burning unit located about 30 miles east of the Bryan College Station area in Carlos, Texas. Also the Texas Municipal Power Agency has 250 miles of transmission line to provide that power to the Arcox grid and to also to link the grid to the member cities. It also consists of about over 10,000 acres of mining land. Mining was discontinued there 15 years ago. This land has been reclaimed and has left it in a nice condition as seedlings have been replanted, lakes that are good for the area of left, wet lands have been restored, and of course the wildlife enjoys it there. As I said before, it was created by a state statue in the late 70s so that the member cities could have economies of scale to build a lignite unit. Each member city has identical take or pay power agreements which means we are must take all the power generated by the unit. We must pay all the expenses of the Municipal Power Agency. Recent legislation was passed to address issues not addressed by the original statue. The original statue in the 70s did not contemplate the condition the market is in today and did not contemplate what we would do when we got ready to draw near the end maybe of the power agency or the end of some of the usefulness of some of the assets. All member cities must adopt a concurrent ordinance that adopts most recent state regulation and I'll go through what those main issues are. Denton is the first city of the four member cities to address this concurrent ordinance. Because of that, we've had this out for the other member city attorneys to review. They provided their updates. Because of that, we have revised from what was originally posted and I believe that's been handed out. Yes, sir, it has. And so, most of that has been wording changed, no substantive changes to that. Because of that, we are a little bit at risk. I may be back in front of you on the 22nd as these other cities go to adopt their we've kind of set the staking ground of here's the ordinance to pass. They may have to change this in the future. I may be back in front of you again, but somebody's got to be first. So here we are. The items that were addressed was to permit the board to delegate authority to allow nonresidents to serve on the board. That's important to the city of Bryan, who has many electric customers outside their city limits and they want to be allowed some of those outside the city limits electric customers to serve on this board. Allow us for removal of a board member as the original legislation stated that a board member was appointed and they could not be removed during their two year term. And so this will allow for removal of a board member if desired by city council that appointed them permits member cities to dissolve TMPA, which is an issue we'll be discussing in the next few years. It allows the assets to the member cities to be assigned to the member cities upon dissolution of TMPA. It also allows for two governing boards, one for generation and one for transmission. So as we progress on with TMPA, some member cities may have a desire to opt out of generation and stay in the transmission piece of the business or vice versa. It clarifies the authority for TMPA to sell facilities, which is something that's under consideration now since TMPA recently issued a request for proposal from entities for the power plant assets. It also authorizes the member cities to be able to issue bonds to finance TMPA improvements. That would be useful in case any member cities decide to proceed on with TMPA and there's needed improvements made to the plant, they would need the ability to finance those improvements. That is a quick summary of the resolution ordinance in front of you. Staying for any questions. >> Councilmember Hawkins. >> Thank you, Mayor. If you can go back to those slides on four about dissolving TMPA and then I think it's seven on selling it. Excuse me. Under our current governance, are we able to do that or is? >> No, the original legislation that created TMPA, created the agency, did not lead the ability to do that. >> Gotcha. >> That is why we're here in front of you tonight is we first had to get the state to adopt an ordinance to allow that, but then to adopt what the state allows us to do, all four cities have to agree to adopt what recently the state passed. >> Okay. Thank you. >> Councilmember Riggs. >> And all of these items have been addressed. Every city has gone through and these are every city has already looked at these items? >> Yes. We've been discussing these for the last at least 18 months . >> This is an agreement. >> To come to an agreement from all member city attorneys. >> Okay. Thank you. >> We do have one card to speak. Any more questions for staff? Willie Hutsbitt. Okay. All right. He's choosing not to speak. Councilmember Johnson. >> Thank you, Mayor. I move approval of item 6A. >> Councilmember Hawkins. >> I'll second. >> We have a vote. I'm sorry, Madam City Attorney. >> Just clarifying that is on the substitute ordinance that was handed out. >> Madam 6A with the substitute ordinance handed out to us. Thank you. >> I second as well. Councilmember Hawkins. >> Yeah, I second on the substitute. >> Okay. All right. So, oh, Councilmember Riggs. >> I haven't had a chance to read the ordinance. I didn't know. Was it? Is it a new one since we got in here? >> Very, very minor changes pursuant to our work this afternoon as we talked about in the work session. Some very, very minor changes that were made pursuant to our conversations with the other three member cities in order to get agreement among all of us. So they were very, very minor. >> Was it gone over up here just now? Or is it? >> Yes, Mr. Williams spoke to the issue. >> Okay. >> Did -- well, did he -- Phil, did you highlight the changes from the original ordinance to the current one? >> I did not specifically identify those things. The items that were added were clarifying language such as part of the ordinance stated that the term of the board members would be one year when you start and two years for some. And they wanted to clarify that all board members ultimately would have two-year terms. So that was one of the clarifications that was added. >> Okay. All right. Thank you. >> Okay. We have a motion and a second which includes the new ordinance that was handed out. Is that correct, Madam City Attorney? >> Yes, sir. >> Let's vote on the board, please. >> Motion carried, 7-0. I believe we're pulling agenda item 7B. Is that correct? >> That's correct, Mr. Mayor. >> All right. So we're not going to be considering that tonight. >> That's our request that you omit that from the agenda. >> Okay. Any problem with that, Councilmembers? Don't see any? Okay. Presentation from members of the public. We've got one. Mr. Hussbuth, if you'll state your name and address. Your time will begin. >> Yes. Mayor and City Councilmembers, my name is Willie Hussbuth, I live at 623 Newton. First, well, the first item is the young lady that was killed over by Geyer High School. I just want to make sure that I state something for the record in my concern of something's got to be done about these schools and kids crossing the street. I'm not here to say what should be done because I don't really know what to be done, what can be done. I bet I feel just like you do. This is just sad. So something's got to be done instead of just saying, "Oh, isn't it awful," and go to the wake and all that and then do nothing. Something needs to be done. I just don't know what yet. Okay. I just want to make sure I state that about that. Too many meetings are being held at times when I have to take off work to get to. And it looks like there's quite a bit done at those 1 o' clock and 12 o'clock times. So much so that I'm going to have to take off and come to them. Now you restrict us though. You won't let us talk, the citizens. It seems like if you run for office and you get in the office, much of the time or much of what you say when you're trying to get in the office, the language seems to take on the "It's for the people. It's here for you, the citizens," that kind of tone. But then when you get in office, much of your policies and what you do seems to be the opposite of that, i.e., the afternoon meetings and the Friday lunche ons. You all had a discussion about the traffic and what's happening at Ryan and the traffic there at a Friday away from here place. I don't even know when that was discussed about. Oh, you met with the school district at that time and you worked out on something and none of us had a chance to--I didn't have a chance to go to that . So there's too many of those meetings. I just want to make that comment. And I got to figure out what I was trying to write here. I can't remember the room. Well, and lastly, I want to say--oh, that's what it was. Mr. Jim Mays, they did so much work at Fred Moore Park. No. Yeah, Fred Moore Park. It is an excellent--it was an excellent job. He needs to be applauded. And the--his director, I can't think of his name. What? His director. What's his name? Emerson Voil, is that what you're talking about? That's right, Voil. Yes. Boy, you did something right for a changed city, people. That is the best job in my--that I've ever seen. The stands were added. The most was redone. You do that every year. You've got the big barbecue pit and just an excellent job. So I want to applaud you for doing that. That is--that really did--that was a good thing that you did. I want to say that. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Well, we've come to our Agenda 8, which is concluding items . Council Member Briggs? Just in that same vein with--I don't want to get emotional, but with the children that we've lost in this horrible, tragic accident, we've had lots of emails and phone calls from citizens asking us to do something. You know, we're not really sure what to do. Speed limits, lighting, you know, there's a lot of things to address. But I also wanted to bring up maybe to explore a partnership with the DISD and our bike and pedestrian coordinator to maybe get some education into those schools, not just elementary schools, but the middle and high schools. Show film, just remind them, because we do this for our younger children and then we just forget and we just let them go and be adults. And they're not yet. So anything that we can do, there's a lot of support in our community right now for this. So I just kind of wanted to throw that out there and see if , you know, an assembly, you know, anything, but sooner rather than later, because I think it would also benefit the kids to see the city stepping up and trying to do something . Okay. Thank you. Council Member Hawkins? Thank you, Mayor. This Thursday, March the 3rd, at 6 p.m., there's an open house meeting on Lillian Miller. The subject will be Lillian Miller and the construction project. And that's at McMath Middle School this Thursday, March the 3rd, 6 to 8 p.m. Just want to invite anybody to come out, fire, police, streets. I think the contractor's going to be there. And just open house, come, you know, in and out there and ask them all questions. But I invite everybody to come. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Rodin? A few things. We got a couple emails recently asking about a tree canopy study. Last time we talked about it, it was before we initiated our pretty large tree giveaway program or the current incarnation of that. I'd like to revisit that study. As we think about data and getting to goals and putting metrics on things, it seems like we need some sort of baseline study relating to that. So I'd like to get some sort of discussion as to whether or not that's appropriate to look at again. Secondly, this talk of annexation, this may just be for my curiosity, but it might be part of the public information process as we move forward. It occurs to me that the vast majority of even us sitting up here, perhaps with the exception of me where my house is, were not in the original city limits of Denton. So the city grew over time through an annexation process to the point where it is today. Most of the city we know of today was not in the original city of Denton. So I would just think that if there's any, I tried to Google it, I couldn't find that information. That would just be an interesting educational piece to understand how the city has grown historically. There is for anyone who's interested, this Saturday is Open Data Day. It's an international affair going on all throughout the world. Denton as of last look is the only city in Texas that is taking part in this. But this is in conjunction with the University of North Texas, the Bloomberg project that we're a part of, the city of Denton. Over at Willis Library from 8 to 5, if anyone wants to go and watch a bunch of computer geeks hack away at issues relating to the city of Denton, I know they're working with Pat Smith and Serve Denton on how to put some data to bear on the homelessness issue. So it might be fun just to kind of get a glimpse of that, which would be interesting. Finally, I thought we had a great presentation on the Expl orium project. Certainly the idea of a children's museum is not new. My guess is given its goals, perhaps even folks at the library have talked about this in the past. Maybe there's been discussion. As you saw, I asked Anya for a report to see what other cities are doing. But if we can get that conversation going internally to see what options there might be looking ahead, thanks. - Councilmember Johnson. - Thank you, Mayor. Well, I'm disappointed Anya Martinez didn't hang around for the full night because I wanted to wait until the end. But I want to plug the Touch a Truck event that's going on Saturday out at C.H. Collins. It's pretty awesome. Another great example of our great city and how a citizen will just take something and go with it. And this lady's worked her tail off and she's a mom. But I'll be out there with my Batmobile so that kids can have fun in that. But I got the map as one of the sponsors. I got the map the other day. It's amazing. All the vehicles and different types. She's got helicopters. I mean, she's got you name it, it's out there. And certainly the city is participating heavily in that. It's a really, really cool event. I took my children last year. And so I'd love to have people come out to that. There's going to be one Batmobile. That's mine. And then the last thing I was going to mention is I think Kevin touched on a little bit. But I think if we can think about how we might be able to provide some education about annexation. Meaning we heard some of the people say tonight, you don't need to take my property to develop it. I just want to make sure that people, we do whatever we can to educate that if you have an agricultural exemption and you're raising cattle, you can keep your ag exemption and keep raising your cattle. If you don't want to ever develop your property, you don't have to. And a couple of the examples that we heard on why I think this education is important spoke of residential developments specifically as something that they don't want. As if they're in the city, but those developments happen in the county. And so providing some education for folks of part of the idea of protection and management could also be that I never met anybody that had a lot of land who didn't say they were never going to sell it until somebody came and offered them a big bucket of money for it. You don't have control over what your neighbor does with your property. And so to help people understand that what can be developed if that property isn't in the city. So all those things I think part of the education process be important for people to understand what it means. What annexation means versus eminent domain and those things. >> Okay. Great. Councilmember Wasney, was that it? Councilmember Johnson? >> That's it. I went way too long anyway. That's what I do. >> Okay. Councilmember Wasney. >> This comes back to the public meeting on Lillian Miller. And is there any way that staff can have it filmed? Because we have a lot of people in those surrounding neighborhoods who may not be able to make the meeting but may truly benefit from the subject and topic matter. And put that on the city website so that people can see and hear from our different city departments on what's happening in that neighborhood. >> Well let me get -- let me go in order. Yeah, they'll look into that. I don't know if they can -- has it -- >> Yeah, because it's not here. I don't know if the availability -- >> It may be available, but I'll check on it. >> Okay. Thank you. >> Councilmember Mayer-Protem and then Joy will come back to you. >> Thanks, Mayor. I was excited to hear the first suggestion for what we might do with City Hall West. I suspect it will not be the last. And I would hope that maybe city manager at some time you could in the not too distant future maybe work with some staff and assign some folks and give us maybe in an informal staff report or in a workshop session some idea about how we might go about collecting all of the variety of ideas for how that facility might be used. And in the process as we're collecting those, if we find out some -- for example, if it turns out that that may not be the very best use for City Hall West for the Exploratorium, that if there is another place that we know of or another partnership that we could help facilitate to make something like that happen, that we could do that. And I don't know if that's appropriate to do as part of our facility use study or if that may be an addendum to it. Because I don't know that we're thinking a lot about City Hall West as being used by city staff, but maybe we are. But anyhow, if you would put that in there. >> I've got just a couple. And one of them was City Hall West. I'd ask for a workshop on that for us to talk about that and try to begin to brainstorm some ideas on that. Of course, I've not been shy about my thoughts on it. So I would like that to get started sooner than later because those kind of discussions take a while to try to figure them out. And it would be nice to go ahead and get on that. The second one is this came up at the Great Conversations Fundraiser in North Texas that someone asked about why do we not have a trolley from the downtown, down Hickory and Oak and/or Oak, and to help with the circulator, hop on, hop off. Which that's been floated back when my predecessor was here . And it didn't seem like at the time we were going through a recession and trying to recover from all that. And so I'd like to maybe dust that off a little bit, get it off the shelf and dust it off. And let's take a look at it and see. Let's brainstorm again with DCT because downtown has changed tremendously in the last three or four years, five years. So it'd be a good conversation I think to have. May really make that part of a unique experience for people . Anything else? Okay. Thank you. We will now stand adjourned. [BLANK_AUDIO]