Apr 26, 2016 City Council on 2016-04-26 1:30 PM

Good afternoon. I wanted to welcome everybody to this Dent on City Council meeting on Tuesday, April 26, 2016. It is 1. 30. We are in the chambers today because early voting is going on in the work session room. So I appreciate everybody accommodating us for that. Agenda item number one is citizen comments on consent agenda items. Do we have any? No, I don't. We have no cards. We'll move on to work session reports. Item number two, A, is receive a report, hold discussion, and give staff direction regarding the City of Denton strategic plan and the performance management open data components of the What Works Cities initiative. Thank you, Mayor. As you all know, this has been a very exciting and important project for the city. And I'm going to ask Brian Langley if he would introduce this topic and give us a brief outline. Thank you, Brian. Thank you, Mayor, members of the council. I want to spend a few minutes today talking to you about our strategic plan and the connection with the What Works Cities program that we've been working on for several months. I do want to take a moment to introduce a special guest that we have with us today. Catherine Klossik is here from Johns Hopkins University, the Center for Government Excellence, and she'll be jointly making this presentation with me today. I'm going to be going through a few slides for you about our strategic plan, and then I'll turn it over to Catherine to go through more specifics about the What Works Cities program. So an overview of the presentation today is I'm going to, again, talk about the strategic plan briefly with you, talk about our key focus area, the goals and objectives that we have in the document, some of the action items that we had included this past year. Catherine will then talk about the What Works Cities program and some of the objectives that we had out of that. And then I'm going to talk to you about something that we 're calling strategic outcomes that we want to focus on in this next strategic planning process and the key action steps over the next 12 months that we want to try to achieve. And then finally we'll talk about our steps in updating the strategic plan. As a brief history of the strategic planning process, I wanted to go back and remind everyone about how we've proceeded over this over the last few years. It is something that we started in 2010-11 fiscal year, and we really did that by starting with the citizen survey, talking to the leadership team, the city council. We had a number of meetings to talk about what are some of the specific things that we want to accomplish in our strategic plan and some of the goals that we have as a community. And then we took a significant step forward by adopting the first citywide strategic plan for the city of Denton in April of 2011. That's the first one we'd ever had that covered all of the different operations in the city. We'd had multiple different plans for different departments , but never one that was an umbrella type document for the whole city. So we did that in April 2011. Since that time in spring of 2012, we created the first performance report with a series of performance metrics which tracked our progress in meeting all those objectives and goals. Each year after that, we've made some minor modifications and improvements to that to try to make it more meaningful for the council and more meaningful for the public and our staff. Last year, as you may recall, we created the key action steps, and these were very specific items that we wanted to identify for the council. We identified who was accountable for completing those different steps and when they would be done. So that's kind of, again, a brief overview of some of the things that we've done over the last few years. I think the way we're looking at it from the What Works Cities project standpoint is this is another evolution in our strategic planning process. This will be another element that gives us some more ref inement and some more details as we move forward. As a reminder for you and the public watching is we do have key focus areas. These are high level areas that we want to focus on in the city, and there's five, what we call KFAs, or key focus areas. Organizational excellence, public infrastructure, economic development, safe, livable, and family friendly community, and sustainable and environmental stewardship. And then within each one of those KFAs, we have a series of goals that we want to try to achieve. And I'm not going to read through all of these with you, but just to give you a little bit of the flavor of how this is structured. So KFA 1 is organizational excellence. One of the particular goals that we have is manage financial resources in a responsible manner, develop a high performance workforce, promote effective internal and external communication, and so forth. And so you have a series of goals that are a little bit more specific under each of the KFAs. And you can see that down here for KFA 4 and KFA 5 as well. Beneath each goal, there's a little bit more granular level of detail there as well, and we have objectives for each of the particular goals that we have. So I pulled out just one for you, and you have the entire strategic plan document in your backup. But just to give you, again, a little bit more flavor for how the document is structured, and this will be important as we move forward into the What Works Cities program as we talk to you about it. Goal 1.1 is to manage financial resources in a responsible manner, a goal that we have. But what does that mean? Well, here are all the objectives where we try to define what that means is we're going to utilize benchmarking, performance measurement, progress evaluation. We're going to develop and implement long-range strategic plans. We're going to provide timely, accurate, relevant financial information, and so forth. And so we describe that in more detail for each one of these goals in our strategic planning document. And as I mentioned to you, this past year we created key action steps, and these are high-level tasks that we wanted to link back to broad policy goals in the strategic plan and also link to our budget process, which is a really important piece of this whole process. If it's a strategic plan but it never connects with budget, it's just words on a page. This has to actually go back into our resource allocation process and how we're budgeting and where we're putting our dollars and our priorities. And so the action steps give us an opportunity to really talk specifically about what we want to do and then tell you what the budgetary impact is on that and establish some accountability for those things getting done . I pulled out just a few of those for you out of KFA 2, public infrastructure. There's about 23 of these that we identified last year for you in the strategic planning process. But just to give you, again, another couple of examples of these, in KFA 2 we wanted to develop and begin implementation of a plan to address parking issues in the downtown area. And that was scheduled to be done by September of 2016. Two departments were involved, transportation and economic development. Obviously we've taken some steps on that with taking down the old fire station and putting some parking there, and there's some other things that we're looking at in the downtown area. We've been talking with you about developing a plan to address current and future facility needs in the organization, in a new city hall potentially down the road. We've taken some steps with that. Creating a plan to remove or relocate dumpsters in the public rights away. And completing the design and begin construction of the way finding signage package for the downtown area. All things that we've talked about with the council, all things that we had some budgetary discussions about this past year, and we're on target to have those completed by these timelines here. But again, there's many of those that we have in the entire strategic planning document. Finally, one of the things that we also have that we included beginning in 2012 was a strategic plan performance report. And this is included in the quarterly financial reports that are sent to you in hard copy. They're also published on the website for the public to view. But it's a series of key performance indicators that we track across the city. And each one of these KFAs and each one of these goals that we're trying to achieve, we try to see what are some indicators that tell us whether we're on track with meeting those goals or not. And if we're not on track, how do we notice that and how do we take corrective action to get to where we want to be? So in total, there's over 100 different measures that we're tracking. You can see that they cover all the KFAs that are listed here. And we do track them by what we call on or above target. Or below target, which is within 5% of the target level that we want to be at. And something significantly below target would be anything more than 5% off of where we want it to be. So we track that on a quarterly basis. We send that to the council and the public. And then we meet with our management team to talk about how we can improve those areas. So that is the strategic plan as we've had it so far in '15 -'16. I'm going to talk to you in a moment about some of the changes that we want to make. I'm going to pause for a moment and ask you for any kind of feedback that you may have on the goals and objectives that we have in the strategic plan. Staff has looked at this in detail. We had a staff retreat recently. We're not looking to make any changes to the goals and objectives that are listed here. We think they're pretty reflective of where we want to be. But we wanted to seek the council's input on these to see if there's any feedback that you have or any changes that you want to make. We've got a couple. I also want to make sure, are all the members signed in so that you can request to speak? I don't know. I wouldn't. Councilmember Hawkins. Thank you, Mayor. Brian, if you go back a couple slides to the chart there, I just want to know how is the data collected? Who does that part? We have staff in our finance department who gets with all the departmental liaisons and they collect that data from the departments and roll that information up to these measures. In many cases there's different staff in different departments collecting different pieces of the data and so we have to work with them to collect it, aggregate it, and report it. It's very manual intensive. Gotcha. Thank you. A lot of work. Mayor Pro Tem. Brian, we've already had two previous discussions on preparing for the 2015, 2016, 2017 budget. And in my way of thinking, the conversation that we're having right now about the strategic plan is actually also one of the necessary steps that we take. This is actually a budgetary discussion. Do you know what I'm talking about? Absolutely. It's a key discussion as part of the budgetary process. We use a lot of complex language, jargon, terms. We talk a lot about process, but at the core of this project we're talking about setting priorities for the city , setting priorities for the council, what are the things that are important to you, and then trying to develop a budget to accomplish those. And so it is certainly a key element of the budgeting process in my mind. And that's why over the last few years we've tried to bring these documents forward during the budget process and then ask that you approve the strategic plan and the budget at the same time. Right. To try to link those two together. I hope that answers your question. What we're trying to do is not just pass a budget and provide the services, we're trying to accomplish the goals that we've set out through this strategic plan. So we're budgeting in a way that helps us achieve our goals . Yes, sir. So just a reminder to all of us and all of those that are watching and listening that this is a budget conversation because our goals guide our budgetary decisions. Yes, sir. Okay. So no changes that we're recommending to the goals and objectives. It sounds like the council is also in agreement with that, that there doesn't need to be any new changes to that. We are going to recommend -- I'm sorry, sir. Councilmember Wasney. I'm sorry. One last question with the term new city hall. I just want to emphasize that the council has not voted for a new city hall. That what we have voted on so far is to fund a space study. Is that correct? That's right. The discussions have been to try to determine what the needs would be for any new facility, if at all. So that's correct. I just want to make sure the public is real clear on that. Thanks. Okay. No changes to the goals and objectives. We are going to be talking to you in a moment about a new element of the strategic plan that we're proposing and we 're going to be looking at adding something called strategic objectives or outcomes that we want to actually achieve and these will be defined, measurable outcomes that we can show you. And we'll be walking those through with you in just a few minutes. But that's going to be a new element. The performance measures that we have, some of the ones that we've been tracking, will naturally kind of track back under some of those outcomes that we have. But there will be others that we'll need to create that will be new to really make those meaningful. So just as a little bit of a background for that, I wanted to make sure you understood that going forward. Some of these will change. We'll be bringing these back to you in more detail. But we really want to stay focused for the purpose of today 's discussion, just at the outcome levels when we talk about that. And finally, we will have some new action steps, obviously, that will be related to those. Some of those will have budgetary impacts. And so as we bring those back to you for additional discussion, as Councilmember Gregory mentioned, that will dovetail naturally into the budget discussion about which of these things are a priority, which of these things are important to us. And we'll talk more about that. Okay. All right. I think this is a great segue. I'm going to have Catherine come up and go through a few slides with you about the What Works Cities program. Catherine. >> Great. Thank you, Brian. Thank you, Mayor and City Council. I'm Catherine Klosek with the Johns Hopkins University Center for Government Excellence. And I'm a senior advisor on the What Works Cities initiative. What Works Cities is the newest and largest investment by Bloomberg Philanthropies. It's part of its government innovations portfolio. Other programs in that portfolio include the Mayor's Challenge and Innovation Teams, which you might have heard of. In doing -- in working on those programs throughout the country and throughout the world, Bloomberg Philanthropies realized that cities, especially mid-sized cities in this country, were facing certain challenges in really using data and evidence to make decisions. Those challenges might include staff capacity to collect data or even identifying where the data might be or leadership and things like that. And those types of challenges can really prevent cities from investing in the most meaningful and impactful programs. And so Bloomberg created What Works Cities as kind of a one -stop shop for cities to come and learn about best practices and receive guidance in really using data and evidence to make decisions in a meaningful way. So in addition to investing in this initiative, Bloomberg gathered this world-class group of partners to work with our world-class network of cities. So I mentioned I'm with the Johns Hopkins University Center for Government Excellence, or GOVEX. We were actually created as a new nonprofit within the university for this initiative. We hope to work with -- our goal is to work with 100 cities in three years. So we have two years left to go. And we're going to help those cities enhance their open data and performance management practices. So open data, you know, as you know, governments have a lot of data and information. Melissa mentioned this morning that here in Denton, the city supports over about 185 technology applications and solutions. So it can be hard to get your arms around all that data and information to find out where does it live, who owns it, what systems is it in, how can we get it out to the public in a really meaningful way, and how can we use it internally, how can departments share data with one another. So through WellWorks Cities engagement, we might help cities develop an open data policy, conduct an inventory, develop workflows, all to help identify that data and information, find out what's most important, and release it to the public. And there are some great examples of that here with voted enton.org, as well as the Open Data Day program that we're going to hear about a little bit later on. Performance and analytics is the other scope of work that we provide support on. So here in Denton, what that looks like is establishing a performance management framework that really helped to set those goals and identify those key action steps that are related to the strategic plan that you all already had in place. A performance management framework is really a venue to bring all relevant stakeholders together to talk about a key priority like ending homelessness, to look at the data, to discuss the strategies, see if you 're headed in the right direction, and if any adjustments need to be made. And we've seen it work. So these are just some of the results that we've seen through cities using open data and performance management around the country. New Orleans had a challenge with blight even before the storm. It was a challenge there because of poverty. And so they set a goal to reduce blight by 10,000 units. They stayed laser focused on that goal. They revisited the relevant data over and over again through their blight stat initiative. They were actually able to exceed their goal of reducing bl ighted units by 10,000 units in four years, because they identified that they were under utilizing share of sales. So once the data pointed them in that direction, they adjusted their strategy and they managed to exceed their goal. Baltimore City Stat, so I mentioned I'm from Baltimore. I actually grew up in Baltimore City, and I'm back there for this job, which is great. It's also great because City Stat is one of the initial stat programs. You may have heard of it already. And in its first year, it was actually they were able to save the city $13 million by identifying absenteeism and overtime and reducing that in certain departments, especially the police department. And Baltimore is also credited with having the nation's first 3-1-1 system. So they were able to decrease the amount of time it took to address potholes in graffiti and issues like that. Boston About Results, they have a really great dashboard. So they put a lot of indicators out there that the public are interested in. And they have also seen great results here through increasing youth engagement. They've increased internet use at the library. They also were able to take 400 guns off the street through their gun buyback program, which is something that they have really kept a close eye on. If you've heard of Operation Ceasefire, of course that was really born out of this initiative. CompStat in New York City is another one of the original performance management programs. You've likely heard of that as well. That's also credited with reducing violent crime and murder specifically in the 90s. And finally, I added Houston's Performance Improvement Program here. They have a lot of great examples. They take a look at 3-1-1 data over time in all departments , police response time. And in looking at fuel delivery efficiencies, they were able to save the city $270,000 annually. That's just one of the examples of the savings that they've been able to identify through performance management and open data and really identifying efficiencies here. And we're a year in through the Woodwork Cities Initiative. We hope to see more examples as we go along in the next two years. So we're actively working in 31 cities right now. So I mentioned we're working in mid-sized American cities. We define that as cities with populations of 100,000 to a million. And over half of those cities have applied so far, which we think is great. We think it shows that we're responding to the demand, we 're offering the right services, and we're really tapping into a momentum that already existed in mid-sized cities like Denton, like Waco, Texas, and all across the country, as you can see here. So we're all about measurement. So how do we know that what we're doing is working? So we rely on the Woodwork Cities standard, which is a set of activities and practices that a city can put in place to really make the most of using its data and using its evidence. It's a way to establish the foundational practices that every city needs to really do this in an effective way. And it's a continuum. So when we came to Denton several months ago to do our discovery session, what we noticed is that the first two elements of the standard on the continuum, commit and measure, were really strong. You all commit. You talk about data. You insert it when you're speaking publicly about progress that the city wants to make and has made. And measurement is there as well through the strategic plan . You've identified where you want to go and how you want to get there. So through the Woodwork Cities initiative in the past couple months since we've been working together, we've helped to develop the take stock portion, which is really about creating that venue, that performance management program, that place to come and revisit the metrics, discuss those goals, discuss those action steps, and see are we moving the needle? If not, are our strategies working? Do we need to adjust? And eventually get to act, which is the part where we're tying decisions, you're all tying decisions, budget decisions, in with the data. So really any conversation where maybe you need to make a legislative change or make a budgetary change, the question should be, what is the data? What does the data show? And by really developing these systems and processes and programs, you have a really good foundation to ask that question and to answer that question. And so we're doing this through working on performance management and open data. So performance management, we ask, what do you want to achieve? What are the results? Let's get right to what do we want to get out of this for the people of Denton, for the residents, for city government? That was the first question, and that's what led us down the path of setting up the performance management framework around the strategic plan, because it didn't make sense to sort of start from scratch, start over when you already had the strategic plan in place . So that's what we built on. And with open data, we really looked at, OK, what are the systems and processes and how can we really marry open data to performance management in a meaningful way to make sure that they're working together to make the most of these programs for the city of Denton and get the results for the people, because that's really what it's all about. And I think Brian's going to talk a little bit about the specifics of what that project looked like. So thank you. Thank you. Great. Well, let me tell you a little bit about what we've done for open data. We have developed an open data inventory of all the different data sets that are available on our website. We have a portal that we mentioned to you just a moment ago . We are looking at some software platforms that we can use that will improve access to data. We're using something right now which works but doesn't provide a lot of the visualization that we'd like for the data, doesn't provide the ease of access that perhaps we want to have ultimately there. We'd like to look at that as an improvement down the road. We've also worked to develop some data sets for a citizen- led project and they hosted an open data day on March 5th. Patrick McLeod, who's in the audience with us, he'll be presenting on that in just a few minutes on your second work session, talk about the results of that. So I think that's been very positive and learning more about what some of the folks in our community really want data for. That's been a very eye-opening experience for us as staff is to go out and talk to some of those folks in the community to figure out what they can use it for and how it can really improve a lot of different operations that we have. For performance management, we've been having weekly calls with Catherine and some other members of the What Works Cities team. I'm sure she'll be glad not to have to call us every week for a few weeks at least. We've talked about really focusing our strategic planning process around evidence and outcome-based decision-making and that's really, I think, been the key benefit that we've had. The key takeaway from this project is we've become more focused in on those kind of activities and hopefully that 'll help with the council when we're talking about issues, talk about it in those terms. I think that's always been kind of a weakness that we've had in our strategic plan is taking some of the goals and objectives that we had, which seemed a little esoteric perhaps, and putting them down into something that's more workable that we can actually use in the budgeting process that we talked about. So hopefully this will be a very good benefit for all of us . Oh, and we're also going to be having monthly performance management meetings with our staff. So what we're going to be doing is for all of the KPIs that we develop for the outcomes, which I'll show in just a moment, on a monthly basis we'll be meeting with those departments that are involved with those different areas to talk about where are we not performing as well as we want to, where are we doing better than we thought we were, and really learning from each other. These are not gotcha moments where we try to find out who's doing something wrong, but how do we learn through this process to finding what are the key drivers of these decisions, what are the key metrics that we need to be looking at and working as a team to get better at this over time. So as I mentioned earlier, to complement the strategic plan , we're recommending strategic outcomes be adopted this year as part of the document. We want to have, you know, really clear direction in the strategic plan document of the things that we want to achieve in the timeframe of when we want to achieve them. They're very measurable, very defined, related goals that we'd have. And they'd be organized by the five KFAs that we've already included and kind of talked about with you earlier. We have developed a draft of these outcomes. Those are attached as an exhibit in your materials. I'm going to go through only the outcomes with you in the PowerPoint presentation, but all of the key action steps that are listed, we'd be happy to talk to you about those today or at some future time if you have questions, we can certainly come back to you. We do want your feedback of any other outcomes that you think may be relevant to this discussion, our strategic planning process. We'd like for you to give us whatever those items might be. You may not know exactly what issue, how the wording should be today, but if you have a concept of something you want us to consider, we can go back and try to wordsmith that, research it a bit for you and bring back something for your consideration. And as I mentioned to you, we will be bringing back then, once we have the outcomes identified and the key action steps, we'll come back with very specific KPIs, key performance indicators to show you our progress of how we're actually progressing and meeting those different ones. So let's just jump into it. Here are the outcomes that we're recommending for KFA 1. The outcome number 1 would be to increase the overall satisfaction rate with customer service from 75 to 80% by 2020. These are numbers that came from our citizen survey. You may remember last year we did a citizen survey, and so we got some really good data out of that, and we want to really put that data to work for us is that now we have a baseline number of what our customer satisfaction rate was for 2015. And so we can measure that on an annual basis or every other year basis through citizen surveys to see how we're progressing and actually improving in those areas. But the goal would be to increase that by at least 5 percentage points by 2020. Outcome number 2 would be to improve the positive rating of information sharing and communications with the public from 49 to 60% by 2020. Again, that's citizen survey data that we had last year. We think that's very useful for us to kind of assess our performance in those areas, and we want to try to increase that over time. And then the third outcome would be to increase the percentage of residents positively rating the value received from their tax dollars from 53 to 60% by 2020. Again, also citizen survey data. This is one of the principal ways that we can actually get input back from all of our citizens in a scientific way that represents the entire population, and we want to start using that to measure results. For each one of those, there will be a series of action steps that we will take to influence the outcome. But the outcome is to actually have more satisfaction, higher levels of positive ratings for the citizens, or more sense of value that they're getting for the tax dollars that are being paid. Questions? Yes. Go ahead, Cas Merriman. Thank you, Mayor. When we're basing this off of the citizen satisfaction survey data that we have, and remind me, when they're asked these questions, so say the outcome number one, their overall satisfaction rate with customer service, are they asked follow-up questions to that so that we have an understanding of why they rated it the way they did so that we know how to tie that to what steps do we take to move the needle in the right direction? For some of those, yes. There are additional questions that give us a little bit more insight into what type of interaction it may have been. But those are also things that we can add in the future. We could add even more details to that survey to help us drill down a little bit to get more specific information of if you had a poor experience, what areas were it, did you have it in, help us understand that. So when we're creating the action steps associated with each of these outcomes, it's safe to say, and I'm not saying this in a bad way because I think this is the way you got to go, we're making educated hypotheses about what we think is going to move us in the right direction on that. A, is that how we're approaching it? And B, you mentioned having kind of these monthly meetings. Are we nimble enough, see the problem is we're only doing this so often, but are we nimble enough to be able to kind of make a change pretty quickly at the management level without coming back to the council to say we need to completely redo our strategic outcomes in order to tweak this thing to get us going in the right direction sooner than later. Talk to me about kind of how you foresee that working. Yeah, I think the first answer to your question is are we surmising from the survey results this is the right direction? Yes. I think that's our general consensus is that the action steps that we have really kind of addressing the areas that we think we're a little weaker in, and so we want to try to address those. But we can get through further surveys in the future, hopefully some more granular information which will help us try to hone in on exactly where we want to go. And then the answer to your second question of are we nim ble enough to make changes, I think we can. If we find out that we're not measuring the right thing or we're going in the wrong direction, we're going to come back with a recommended plan of action for this council of how we want to actually proceed and talk about that with you. So I think that's one of the real benefits of having those monthly performance management meetings is you get the staff who are involved in these decisions, the people who are involved in providing the services to the community to engage with you as management to find out what's working, what's not working, what are your push points that you're hearing about, and come back and make changes. And I do expect that we will learn from this experience and two years from now we will have much more specific things that we can focus on because we will have learned through that process. So I hope that answers your question. That's a lot of information. Councilmember Johnson. Thank you, Mayor. So Brian, I got to participate in one of the Kaizen events recently and I think it's pretty awesome when you get all those people in the room and you kind of set the tone for open mind, no hard feelings, we're really about attacking how we get better, not blaming anybody and so on. So on these surveys, do you believe we're getting a wide enough cross section of customer types, meaning are these general surveys, are we doing exit interviews after one time customers, are we doing exit interviews after repeat customers, how are we capturing just to make sure we're getting a good cross section of, meaning if it's an online fill out a satisfaction survey, most happy people don't take the time to go do those. Not to say that we don't want to hear from people that are unhappy because that's the stuff you want to go fix, but I think we want to make sure we're getting a good broad cross section of all, many customers in any given category. How are we doing that? Well, we hired a firm to do a scientific based survey. So they sent out the survey instrument to only certain households. So it was not something that was just placed up on the website to anybody and everybody can go take that survey. They tried to capture all the various demographic groups, age ranges, incomes, sections of the city, geography where people were. So they had a good cross section and they get a scientific sample and then they can make projections about what the overall population is feeling on these different areas. So that was really the principal way that we did it for citizens. But we also did a business survey, which was very specific to the business community because we also wanted to get their perspectives. And there were different questions, frankly, that they needed to be asked. So we tried to approach it from two different ways on that citizen, the citizen business survey. But it's not to say that's the only input that we have. We do have other things that we do periodically to get input back on different issues. And we certainly want to take those into account when we find out there's something that we could have handled differently. We try to make adjustments to that. Okay. That's good. Thanks. I'll follow that answer. Mayor Pro Tem. Well, and this is following up on Councilmember Johnson's question because I'm thinking about these, the notions of feedback loop. You know, you set a goal, you have some numbers, you know that you're wanting to improve those numbers. You're meeting monthly to come up with plans to make changes to improve customer service. So how often are we getting feedback from the customers? The survey that we're talking about, you said maybe once a year, maybe once every other year. I would think that once every other year would not be frequently enough. You need to do it nearly once every year in order to know if you've turned the bus in the right direction, if you're making progress. But what about in the course of that year, how we're measuring, how we're getting a sense as to whether we're making progress or not? Great points. I would think, you know, ideally you'd want to measure it at least once a year. That'd be what we'd recommend. There's a cost to that, obviously. But that gives you, you know, every year you have data, you can build a trend line off of that and compare to it on a year-to-year basis. But I think the other piece of this is in each of these outcomes we want to have key performance indicators that we track on a monthly, quarterly, annual basis so that we can see different activities or different levels of work that we're doing, how they influence the outcome. The outcome may be the survey and it's done once a year, but there's lots of other things that we can measure on a monthly basis to help us see are we making progress in moving that outcome to where we want it to be. So there'll be other activities that we look at on a much more frequent basis than annual, I guess is the answer to that. And I guess the reason I'm saying this is because what we may do, what staff may do is assume if we reduce call time, wait time, if call wait time right now is three minutes, and if we could reduce it to a minute and a half, we're going to get a higher level of customer satisfaction. So we may be spending a lot of time and energy in that activity only to find that that didn't move the dial at all . That that's not where we needed to be focusing our energy. So do you see what I'm saying? I'm just wanting to know that as the staff is working very hard on these goals that we're working on the goals that are making a difference. No, I absolutely agree with that. I think over time as we're tracking things, which might be a whole time or number of seconds it takes to answer a call at our call center or something to that effect, if we find that we're doing well in those but we're not influencing this outcome, then we need to be looking at something else. And I think that's that constant learning concept that we would have. But I think there's probably several things that we could do for a KPI to help us understand what influences this rating and track it. And that's the goal. Sure. And again, it's not going to be a perfect match probably right out of the gate. I think we're probably going to have to do some learning and data mining on this to make sure we're looking at the right things. But the outcome is that you want to have great customer service, great satisfaction from your customers. And how do you track that and influence it is really the question. I want to drill down on the phrase open data, open data. And when many of us went to TML, Texas Municipal League Conference down in San Antonio, I spent some time with some of the vendors there who had a software program. And I'm not going to plug one company over another, but I'm going to read off the cover page of one of those. Advancing the business of government. We're transforming the way government analyzes, shares, and compares financial and performance intelligence. So a piece of this puzzle that I would sure like to see would be looking at some of this software because it truly overlays the whole city. It's not just about comparing data department to department . But I watched some examples and it really opens up and makes easily accessible that data to the people of the city so they can hone in and take a look at non-competitive matters. But it was easy to look at, easy to study. And that's what's always hard when you're looking at data for, I'm sure, council too, as well as the public. It's hard. And this presented some formats that were friendly to the eyes and understanding. They were logical. And don't have to hold you to that today . Just something I think we as a council could look at if our goal is gathering and analyzing and sharing data. It's a tool I think we could use if we still choose. I've got a question, a couple of questions. And this may apply to some of what Councilmember Rhoads said. So I see these overall goals. But let me just sort of tell you some of the examples I'm thinking about in my head when I think of strategic performance measures and outcomes. Let's say for instance on the planning department that somehow there's a dashboard that the public can access or at least a project, someone who's got a project in there. That will give them the timeline of their project. Spell it out. Say how long it was in one place, how long it 's been with them, how long it's gone here, where are we exactly. Another one is an example was we had a question about sidewalk repair. And some of the response was that we were about six, I think it's six to eight months or even longer than that, behind in sort of some type of sidewalk project repairs. And so some of that kind of real time data as far as projects and when bond programs are completed. I know we have a bond link on our website that says how much money has been spent from those bonds and how many projects have been done out of so many. But if you're able to see what projects have been done. So when I think of how do we get here, maybe in my mind I just go down to sort of the macro level of okay to increase these. How are we going to do that? And that's sort of where I am on this. Are we sort of talking the same language here? Am I just thinking of something down in the weeds? No, I think so. If I could address that comment with Councilmember Wasney's . Okay. I think they're related is we're a big believer in using some kind of visualization product, which is some type of dashboard system that you would have. It also goes back to one of the other comments. I think Councilmember Hawkins asked about how do we prepare KPI information. We really want information that's automatically fed into some kind of visualization product. There's some open source solutions of products that are fairly inexpensive that are out there that we could have those populated as the information becomes available. And then we can use that of staff to manage our operations, which is a huge benefit for us. But then it's also a public facing document so that the public can understand how we're doing in those different areas. Mayor, to your specific concern, this is the first of several different outcomes that we have. So we have as we go into KFA 2 and 3 and 4 and 5, we have other outcomes, which maybe we'll have some action steps related to some of the areas that you're looking at. But those are areas that we would want to measure and report out in a real time basis when possible. It's challenging from a technicals perspective and to try not to spend a great deal of money to doing this. You want to try to do it as efficiently and cost effective as you can. But I think we can make a lot of progress on those areas. Something that we try to make progress, if we try to do this and make progress every quarter and get better and pick a solution and grow it over time, personally that's what I've seen is you'll have the most success with. Kansas City is a city that we were connected through with What Works Cities and they've been doing this for several years. And every year they've gotten a little bit better, a little bit more sophisticated at how they do it. And I think with your cooperation and help as we kind of look at those issues, I think we can make a lot of progress . I hope that answers your questions. Yeah, it does. Well, I think what you're saying is some of my specific concerns may be down the line with some of these other strategic outcome goals. I hope so. Yes, sir. Okay. Okay. So that's KFA 1. So let me jump into KFA 2, which is our public infrastructure KFA. We wanted to, as the first outcome here was improve all City of Denton arterials and collectors to maintain no less than a service level of C by 2030. This is a measure of congestion on the roadways. So we've talked a lot about pavement and how pavement should be at a certain quality. We've all talked about the OCI score, the overall condition index score. Well, there's a whole other element to this of what's the congestion level of the roadways, the capacity of the roadways that you have, how long does it take to get across town at different times of the day. There's an actual rating criteria that's used for that. And so we'd like to try to get that to a level of C by 2030 . That doesn't mean that all of them would be C. Hopefully some would be better than that. But as an average that we'd all be at that by 2030. And there's some impacts and financial impacts to make that happen in planning with our bond programs that we'd need to implement. Outcome number two, we have spent a lot of time talking to the council about over the last few years and that's to improve the roadway OCI score from an average of 65 to 70 by 2025. So it's almost a 10 year goal with a backlog of reconstruction projects being not more than 15 percent of all of our roadways in the city. This will have a significant financial component to it to transition. We've talked about with the council before about transitioning our franchise fees from the general fund, the remainder of the general funds franchise fees over into the street improvement fund. It's about seven hundred thousand dollars a year that we would need to transfer over a 10 year period to get to that mark. That means there's less money is available for other programs, other services when you're looking at supplemental packages and we're setting the budget. So that's something to kind of think about as we're going into this, but to get to that level over a 10 year period is going to take a significant financial investment, which we think is a good thing. We want to propose that to you, but it's not going to be easy. I guess it's the question. Yes, sir. Councilmember Rodin. Thank you, Mayor. So I like the way you tied outcome number two to to budget and giving us a sense because there's a sense in which I'd almost like to see what are different goals that were considered and what are the financial implications of those . If we had X amount of millions of dollars invested per year , we could get to this or if we scale back X number of million dollars, we could get to this point as we move forward and especially assuming we kind of adopt these or settle on these metrics. Is there a way that that budget implication could be tied directly to these as we're looking at it? Because we always talk about it in conjunction with budget. We see the strategic goals and a lot of our action items that we have and see how those action items contribute back to it. But to constantly have that in front of us that these these strategic goals involve budgetary decisions and this is what that price tag is. Is that what you're considering? Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a great point. And what we would propose is that assuming the council's in agreement with the outcomes once we go through this process that all of the action steps that we identify to get us there on an annual basis that we bring those back to the budgeting processes and tell you these are the estimated cost for all of these action steps. And what we think we need to do to achieve these outcomes and then that would be a great conversation during the budgeting process for the council to say which of these can we afford to do all of these or do we want to make some choices here? And how do we want to proceed? And that hopefully will give us some direction in the budget process frankly as we're kind of talking about what are the things most important to us and where do we really want to put our resources? I hope that would be a great tool for you. That's the goal. Councilmember Hawkins. I think you may have brought it up. Action steps. You know, whenever we're talking about roads, it's very interesting, especially even in District 4. It almost feels like we're maxed out. You know, we're fixing almost too many roads in one isolated area, but we need to fix them. And when you got what I got on council was one of the most important things people wanted were our roads, you know, need to be fixed. So I just want to know in that action step, maybe I'm ahead of myself here, but kind of what that max level would be to . I mean, if we threw a billion dollars at roads, it wouldn't mean we could just tear them all up right now or we couldn 't operate. So I know that's a mouthful, but I think you answered it previously with action steps. That's going to be kind of the next step there, really getting more detailed how that happens. Yes, and we have some action steps identified in the documents attached to it in your backup. But I guess the difference I would point out is we're not suggesting that we reconstruct all the roadways. Is that some are clearly to the point that they have to be reconstructed to get them back to a level of service that we think is appropriate. But others, hopefully we can just use some maintenance techniques and maintenance dollars so that you don't have to totally tear up the street, but you can put a slurry seal or you can chip seal it or you can make some improvements to that roadway, which will keep it at a high service level for years to come and prevent us from having to totally reconstruct it. Which does two things. It helps with the traffic congestion issues that you were talking about of having to tear up roadways and all the issues that are associated with that. But the cost of repairing those roadways, maintaining the roadways is so much more cost effective than reconstructing it to a magnitude of maybe 10. So that's what we're hoping to do is maintain the roadways that we have so that we don't have to reconstruct them any time in the future. Councilmember Johnson. So, well, I guess first to my colleagues, I would just like all of us to remember this moment. When we're getting into budget conversations, right, and because I think what we've got to make sure we do is to understand that there's going to have to be some puts and takes. Right, and we get into budget time and you've got everybody barking at you for their thing. Don't take my money. Just don't take my money. And I get that. But we have to make some tough decisions and we're never going to be able to do everything we want to do. And what I would like to see is get into and I like the way we're trying to start the budget process earlier. Because we have to start to set some major priorities such that if we said, you know, OCI from 65 to 70 by 2025. We may say, you know, that's not a good enough goal. We need to strive to do better than that goal. To be able to understand from staff, okay, if you want to do that, it's this much money over this period of time, you 're not going to be able to, you know, you said you don't want to increase tax rate. So then here's how much money you have to carve out somewhere else. And then start having those meaningful discussions earlier in the budget cycle and be willing to say to, you know, other departments, we understand that that's what you need. That's not our priority right now. That's going to have to wait. Because part of it, and we've talked about it with streets and bike lanes, for example. If you try to just sprinkle the money out everywhere, you 're not nearly as impactful as if you said, let me build one truly connected road with a bike lane all the way from A to B. Instead, we've built all these little small segments around so that we kind of peanut butter the money out everywhere. Some of that's for good reason because you might have a sewer line that has to be replaced somewhere and you don't want to tear the road up. But my point is, I would like for us to make sure we force ourselves early in the game to have those conversations so that we don't get down to close to the end on the budget cycle. And we've got now it's we're now we're playing with this small bucket based on what the budget looks like versus saying, you know, we may say the we want to see the OCI and I'm not going to say your O CI is the right measurement, but whatever it is, it's the best one we've got. Seventy five by twenty twenty. Well, then what does that mean? And and have the conversation openly and not let it become political and make sound, solid, sometimes tough decisions. So I want to challenge us to do that. The second thing I want to just bring up is I think we learned a little bit when we were talking about the street reconstruction plan and the timing of what roads were going to get fixed when. And there was some conversation about, well, the utilities, we don't have control and the utilities. And then what we learned ultimately was that was our internal utilities. And so forcing those interdepartmental discussions, that's one thing I've really appreciated about like these Kaizen events that we're doing where you're getting all these different departments involved. So I'm rambling. But what I guess what I'm getting at is the you know, everything goes up to an ACM and those different departments. And if it crosses over an ACM, I would like for us to make sure we're having those conversations about, well, I know that's what you're planning to do. But if you could modify your plan, that would allow us to meet this performance metric faster. And it's hard when you've got a machine that's this big. But you guys may be doing that. But if you're not, I would really encourage us to make sure that those departments are crossing over and having those conversations so we can maximize the efficiency of every dollar. Absolutely. Mayor Pro Tem. Not for discussion today, but as a note for future discussion on strategic outcome number two regarding the O CI key action step one is provide for the systematic transition of franchise fee revenue. Just as a note. I want to, I want to have a further discussion about that at some point, as we discuss the budget to see what the implications would be if there is federal or state legislation that somehow tempers with our franchise fee. I'm a little bit nervous about putting too many eggs into that basket that somebody else might control at some point. I just want to emphasize that the goals are great. I need to see what it's going to cost to get there. So that we can make then a really good decision. And I believe that's what Councilman Johnson was saying that, you know, the goals versus what does it cost. So that's a huge help from staff in terms of, you know, here are the goals that we're talking about. But here's what it's going to cost on a yearly projection to get there. And I think that will really help Council during budget time. So I appreciate your work on that. Thank you. Well, too, Brian, I think, you know, as we discussed the budget process for this year, which is different from previous years. And, you know, how do we look at sort of an amount that we think is going to be an assumption and then whatever revenues above that sort of goes in line with what Council member Washington, Councilmember Johnson says. Okay, this is what we got. How do we allocate it? So I appreciate you guys. I appreciate you guys doing that. Okay, I'm going to go to the last outcome that we have for KFA 2, outcome number three. And this one is increased percentage of city served by high speed broadband access from X to Y by 2020. Obviously, we don't know what the X is or the Y is at this point. But we're trying to get some good data about how many miles or feet of broadband access we have or what percentage of the city that we have is served by that. We don't have that just yet. But as a concept, we wanted to throw that out. I think that's something we've had some discussions with the Council about is getting more and more access to the community. So provided the Council is in agreement with that general direction, we can go to try to find the right metric to track for that. Okay. I'm going to go to KFA 3 now, economic development. The first outcome that we identified is improved the community appearance index rating of I-35 corridor. Again, from some undetermined amount to something else by 2020. We're still trying to look at that. We do have through the KDB program, it was interesting as when we were talking about this issue with our staff, is we do have some staff members who go out with citizens and they have some criteria, some subjective criteria that they use, the citizens do to evaluate different areas of the town in terms of beautification. And so one of the concepts that we talked about was adding I-35 to some type of project like that. And so that those citizens could subjectively try to tell us what they thought about those different areas and try to measure that over time if we made improvements to our right of way plan, how we did different design elements to the roadway and so forth to try to improve that corridor. So that's something that we've talked about doing. Again, I don't have the right metric for you just yet, but I want to see just from a concept level, is that something that's of interest to you to pursue and maybe we have to come back and change that slightly. Councilmember Briggs, you were sort of buzzing in and out so I wanted to touch base with you. My question really revolves around number five so I can wait until the end. I just didn't want to interrupt his presentation. Okay, you bet. All right, thanks. Okay, I'm going to keep going. Outcome number two was by 2020 increased the percentage of jobs paying $75,000 or more annually from 10 to 13% of total employment. So currently about 10% of the jobs in the city of Denton pay more than $75,000. The community of Denton pays more than $75,000. And so we're looking to try to increase that incrementally over time through economic development activities, different recruitment activities that we'd have with the businesses in town. We thought that would be an important area to focus on in economic development, but we wanted to, again, get the feedback of the council. Councilmember Briggs. No, I'm just going to wait. Are you done? For that outcome, yes. I was waiting until five. Okay, all right, so you're just waiting until the last one. Okay, I've got a question. Do we know what that translates into as far as the number of jobs from 10 to 13%? We do. I don't have that handy, but we can certainly get that for you. That'd be great. Yes, we do know that information. For each one of these two, I think it's important to mention you'll see in the backup that we've identified a data set that we'll be tracking for each one of these so that we know exactly what the data set is and we'll have that so we can show that to you, Mayor. So outcome number three is by 2020 create an additional 15% of taxable appraised value as a result of commercial and industrial development. It's a strategic goal. Do we want to try to increase commercial activity, industrial activity in the city, have a larger percentage of our tax base be related to that? I think that's a good thing. Outcome number four was increase the percentage of business owners that rate Denton as a good place to do business from 60% to 70% by 2020. So Councilmember Johnson, this is back to the issue that you and I were discussing a moment ago that we do have a business survey that 60% figure came from the business survey. So we want to try to improve that over time, certainly as high as we can, but try to pick some reasonable goal that we could get to by 2020 and then take steps to make that work. Yeah, Councilmember Johnson. So to that point, Brian, could you send us what the baseline is for each of these? So I mean, like on the customer survey, we're at 60%, so we know that. But like for 15% of taxable appraised value on commercial, could you send us for each of these what the current is? Yes, sir. I'd be happy to. That'd be interesting to see. Just in terms of what the dollar impact of those changes would be. Thank you. And then outcome number five was by 2020 increase the percentage of jobs earning a livable wage from X to Y. And again, we're not really sure what that metric is. We're trying to look at that. But the concept was to try to increase both the top end of the income number of jobs paying higher incomes and also increase the lower end as well. We're trying to look at what is livable wage, and that's a debatable subject perhaps about what that actual wage is and then what type of increase do we want to have in that. So that's again the concept. The metric is probably less important at this point than making sure that that's something that the council as a group feels like it's something we want to pursue. Councilmember Briggs. Well that basically addressed my question. What is the liv able wage considered? There's been an article in the paper recently about full-time job and not being able to afford rents. And so I was curious about for this purpose of the study what that was considered and if it would increase as rents increase, does that livable wage keep filling in? I think it would need to increase on an annual basis just for normal inflation that would happen. But I don't know, to answer your question, we don't know just yet. I think we can certainly research that more and bring you back something more specific and have that discussion. I think there's probably some sources that we can have of trying to figure out what that is. Thank you. It's not minimum wage though. I know that. Right, okay. Yeah, that was my next question. Okay. Okay. All right, two more to go. We're getting close. In AFA 4, outcome number one is improve the percentage of citizens that feel safe in Denton from 80 to 85% from 2020. This is also something out of the citizen survey that we had. But we want to try to get a little bit more specific geographically with this. Perhaps in the next survey we talked about maybe some additional questions that we could ask potentially. We're going to try to maybe find out a little bit more about why, if you don't feel safe, why is that, what are the types of situations or areas that you're having problems with, and how do we kind of target some of our services to help with that issue? Mayor Pro Tem. Yes. Do we know if there are some certain points where you just don't get it any higher, that there's always going to be people because of their particular situation, their own perception that are, that about the highest of the city is going to get is at this particular level? I don't know what that is. I don't want us to set some goals that are just simply not attainable. Yeah, I don't know exactly what that percentage is for that metric, but one of the benefits that we got from using the National Research Center, I think it was the company that did the survey for us, is we had benchmark data to all types of cities around the country that had asked very similar questions. And so we'll be able to see, this is not out of line with that, but we'll be able to see what are the averages, what are kind of really the top 10% of cities looking at and benchmark where we are going to be at. I don't think it will ever be 100%, but try to get as close to that as we possibly can. Well, I appreciate you reminding me about those benchmarks. I think that's one of the reasons that we particularly liked this survey set, because it gave us that as a way to compare ourselves. Yes, sir. Councilmember Johnson. Just a quick question. Do we get addresses on the surveys? Yes. Do you know? Yes. And maybe we're planning to do this, but I think if we plotted the data points related to the addresses, we might be able to identify looking at a map, a concentration of, here's this particular issue in this neighborhood that we would say, well, we don't need to wait for another survey to see how we need to go do this right now to fix this problem. So there's such good software programs out there now that will allow you to do that by address. Right. For those, and cross-reference it with code enforcement data or other types of data that we had on police calls or crime data, try to see what's going on and how do we focus that. That's exactly what we're thinking. Yes, sir. That's what we're going to do. Okay. Thanks. That's great. I'm going to keep going. Outcome number two here is by 2020, improve the percentage of citizens that rate their neighborhood as a good place to live from 78 to 85%. Again, similar type of concept, using the citizen survey. And the third one is by 2020, develop and support community programs which reduce the homeless population by 20%. And this is one we had quite a bit of dialogue about and at the staff level of the ultimate outcome obviously is that we want to end homelessness. But that's very difficult and challenging prospect to do that. So we wanted to try to reduce homelessness over time. By 2020, we'd love to see a 20% reduction. I know we have some new initiatives in the city that we're pursuing related to that. We have a coordinator position that we've jointly funded. And so hopefully this is a good goal and a good first step. I think it's a complicated issue, but hopefully it's something we can make a lot of progress on. I know the mayor's had an initiative on some issues related to this too. So that sounds good. Okay. Last one, KFA 5. Three additional outcomes that we listed for you here. The first one is to increase renewable energy portfolio from 40% to 74% by 2019. We've obviously had a number of discussions about the renewable dent plan. Even if that's a plan that we decided we don't want to pursue, I think the direction that we've heard from council is we still want more renewables. And so how do we get that over time would be the question either through that plan or some alternative means. I felt like that was an outcome that really needed to be there for KFA 5. We certainly want the feedback of the council. We also want to increase the percentage of landfill waste diverted from 36% to 40% by 2020. That obviously has an impact on our landfill, how the life of the landfill, our costs related to that operation. More recycle, lean is really good, and so we want to encourage that. And then outcome number three was something that we talked about at length with staff too, was increasing our bike and pedestrian count in Denton from 4.7 to 7% of total comm uters by 2020. This is one of those data elements that I didn't even know we had something like that, but we do. And we track that. And so by specifically targeting what it is that we want to do in those areas, we can measure our progress on making improvements to it. As you were mentioning that we do have some key projects underway for pedestrian and bicycle paths around the city. And so I think we can make some progress there. So those are the key outcomes that we would propose for you as part of this initial wave of process. I hope those make sense. Again, I know we throw around some terms and some jargon. This is all about setting priorities. What are the things that are most important to you? What are the areas that you really want to focus on? And then us taking that information away from you and coming back with a detailed plan to implement that vision that you have. That's really what we're trying to do here. And so I hope that hasn't gotten lost in some of the terminology. That's really not what we're trying to do. Councilmember Johnson. So I'm not sure how it fits, but one of the things you talked about earlier was, you know, right now what we've said is we're going to fund a study, a space study, as it relates to long term facility needs for the city. What I was thinking about the other day was have we done or are we planning to do as a part of that total operational costs of all of our current facilities? Meaning, we get into conversations about we might have to spend this much money to build a facility this big. And, you know, in my corporate life, the HR guy used to say , you got to -- it's important to note what's it going to cost you to fire somebody. It's also important to note what it's going to cost you to keep them. And often we don't think about what does it cost us to keep it, right? So many of our facilities are very old. There's also inefficiencies with people moving from one to other facility all throughout the day, which is production time gone. Have we thought about as a part of how we look at facility needs to look at total operational costs, number one, of all of our current facilities, because they're probably pretty efficient in terms of electricity usage and environmental things, but then also just the inefficiency of having employees moving from building to building throughout the day for different meetings. I was here early this morning. You got a staff meeting. The entire parking lot and the entire parking lot across the way is filled with people coming here from other facilities just to have a staff meeting. So you got commuter time. So I'd just like to make sure that as we think about this that we take a holistic approach, because it's not just about what would a building cost and what could we sell another building for and the net of that , but also just the efficiency increases, but also the operational dysfunctionality of having all these different buildings. I don't know where that fits in here, but maybe it's for another time, but I wanted to get that out. I think that's a great point. We can bring something back to you as part of that facility plan to try to address that. I know we have some metrics on what it is on a cost per square foot basis to operate buildings and comparing those new versus old and its dramatic differences, but we haven't baked into that analysis some of the commute time. So we'll try to look at that so we can come back. So that probably was off topic, but I'm thinking about that as a goal of mine. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Councilmember Rodin. Brian, I love this. I think adding these additional metrics, I think, helps us as council members stay on track. It helps the citizens kind of understand what our goals are and whether we're succeeding or failing in doing that and not failing in a bad sense, but understanding where we have room for improvement and we need to adjust and make changes. Having ambiguous goals feels good, but you're not quite sure if you're making the progress you need. So I think this is a good step in the right track, so I look forward to kind of seeing us iterate on this year after year as we get better at it. So I applaud you and thank you for working with the What Works Cities team and everything that kind of went into making this happen. A couple of questions. And this is just a point to make of maybe further research on the outcome number three that was on the previous slide. At RTC last month, there was a presentation on a bike count that they did, which was different than the bike count that we did at the city level, using kind of some different techniques and a different approach. Again, I didn't dig into the weeds enough to know what accounts for those differences or which ones we ought to be trusting in or which one we can depend on moving forward. So to just get some eyes on their count as it relates to ours to see if that needs to be adjusted for outcome number three. I guess my last one is a question, and I do appreciate the commitment on the part of the senior management and the other staff involved in What Works Cities, because it's one thing for us from a policy level saying go do this, but you guys are going to have to make it happen. And it's taken a lot of time beyond your normal scope of work. You mentioned it this morning at a citizen meeting that we had on this topic that this is a part-time job for you and other staff members that was kind of added in in order to do this. When we went to New York last week, heard from other cities , of course the big cities for a while have had things like offices of innovations and mayor innovation, chief innovation officers and data analytic positions and data whole teams that are helping drive the city to get better and better at data and to help the departments work better, make sure that that's presented to the citizens in a more meaningful way. And now we're starting to see mid-sized cities do that too. I remember two cities I talked with, Providence, Rhode Island, only 170,000 people. They have a chief innovation officer, data analytics on staff. Jackson, Mississippi, 170,000, met a guy who was just appointed as their kind of chief data analyst. We're not there and we're kind of trying to do it with what we have, which I think is great. As you've been, and if you're not prepared to answer this question, let me know. This might be something that we just think ahead in terms of long-term budget planning. But as you've been kind of in this game working hand-in- hand with What Works Cities for this last year, understanding capacity issues of what it takes to really get good at this. I mean, I appreciate the idea of let's have a low-cost tech solution to start off with to get a good dashboard. Use existing staff members, and I get that. But at some point to really supercharge our efforts, if we think this is the direction of the future and the way we need to go, at some point I think we need to start thinking what do we need to invest in terms of FTEs? What do we need to invest in terms of technological infrastructure to do it right? Do you have any, are you prepared to make any recommendations at this point? Or are we going to see any of that as it relates to this budget cycle or moving forward, just so we can make sure we're continuing with this momentum that was started this year? Well, those are good points. I think at this point for me personally, where I am is that I think we're doing a pretty good job with the staff that we have and putting this together and bringing this forward and integrating it into the budget process. I think ultimately to take it to a higher level, it may take more resources to get there. But I'm comfortable where we are right now. Honestly, I think over time we may see as we kind of identify a business case for if we hire some positions or get additional resources in a certain area, if that's going to help us save money or help us generate effic iencies in other areas and we think the business case is there, then I think there will be a real compelling argument for that. Right now it's hard for me to justify that because I simply don't know. But maybe as we kind of evaluate this and grow this over the next couple of years, we'll have a better idea of what that might look like. But I think you've got to have a business case or service impact obviously of how you want to approach your service delivery and have the best services that you can. But financially can you support additional staff through some of these programs and innovations that you're going to get? I'm just not sure at this point. But that's what I'd like to try to look at certainly over time. Hopefully that helps you. Councilmember Hawkins. I don't know if there's really a question here. Maybe there will be one. But the budget process is always just one of the toughest things that we go through, probably the most important votes that we make. And I know all this work that you're going to be doing up front is going to make that process I think so much more efficient and easier on us because we will, I love how she said the laser focus. And sometimes I feel like I even, you lose focus on that, what you're actually trying to do with the budget because you're kind of at the end and you're trying to weigh a bunch of things. And I think that's what I'm going to appreciate most about getting all this data, getting it done in a clean way where we go to the budget and we're making efficient decisions and we're all focused on the same place there. So not really a question, but I'm very excited about this being in place. Thank you. That'll be good. Councilmember Wasney. So if we really look at what works cities, and I know that we saw New Orleans, Baltimore, Boston, New York, and Houston. The magnitude of the issues in those large cities, very different than the magnitude of the issues here in Denton. So another city that jumped out was Kansas City, and that came from you in terms of that they've been working on part of this data analyst path for a longer period of time. What is it about Kansas City that they're doing that you really like? Well, one of the things I really like about Kansas City is they have a program called KCSTAT. And I think Catherine mentioned that just briefly. But they have a visualization product, as you were talking about earlier, that shows a lot of the things that they're measuring. And when you click on those elements, you can see very quickly how they're doing. Are they on track? Are they off track? What's causing it to be where they don't think it should be going in terms of a particular measurement that they have? And then you can also drill down and get the data beneath each one of those. If you want to export that data and to use it for some other purpose, you can do that very easily. And they've linked all that back to their budgeting process very effectively. So I think they've done a really good job with it. It's been over the last four or five years that they've done that. So I think there's kind of an evolutionary track with that. It's a council manager form of government. So I think there's a lot of similarities there that we can build on. It is a much larger city than Denton. But I think there's a lot of things that I see that we could try to do over time. Hopefully with a lot of the staff that we have, we're keeping our costs down as low as they can be. So to emphasize, they do have one of those software programs in terms of putting the data in for an easy access out. That's right. Thank you. Thank you. I see no more questions. Well, I just want to -- this was my last slide. Just next steps, again, just to mention to you that I will be bringing this back. I think this has been a very helpful conversation from my point of view. I hope it's been helpful for council. We'll bring this back before you again, continue with the budget process. And then as we submit this document to you for your consideration, September will also submit the strategic plan and the budget together. So you'll see that together in the connections. And I'll try to come back with some of the cost information that was requested so you can see that very clearly. I do want to take a moment to thank you for your leadership . Kevin Roden was really the spearheaded kind of getting us involved in the What Works Cities project. Mary, I know you've been very involved too, and I very much appreciate all of your leadership as well as Mr. Campbell's . I also wanted to take a moment to thank Katherine publicly for all of her help. She's just been great to work with. In fact, the whole What Works Cities team has been excellent. And I would be remiss if I didn't thank my team who's been helping me on this project, as I could not have done this by myself. Allison, they're back there somewhere, Allison Rehm, Jessica Rogers and Melissa Craft. They've been just a tremendous team to work through on this project. And I just want to say thank you for all their help. Fantastic. Thank you. Thank you, Brian. Before we move on to the next agenda item, I failed and overlooked to get council clarification on consent agenda items. I know we have some staff here that could be released based upon that. Are there any council any clarifications on? Okay. Councilmember Briggs. About the police lobby, $333,000 on the consent agenda. I haven't found the item yet, but I was wondering if we could have an overview of what that might all entail in the square feet of the lobby. I'm sorry. Do you know what item it is? I'm sorry. Consent agenda. To eat. Yeah. To eat. Either Elton Brock. Would you come up to the microphone for a minute? I have a rendering of the of the project. I don't have the square footage currently in front of me. If that would help. Anything will help. Yeah. Thank you. Elton, do you know the square footage that we're talking about? No. A variety of upgrades that we're going to do that are going to affect the overall square footage. We're really adding any square footage to the building. We're really adding any square footage to the building, I can tell, right? No. We're just some upgrades to the glass, bulletproof glass, and some design features inside there are going to make it more functional. All right. So the key features that we had was the ballistic enhancement that we talked about. They're putting in ballistic glass and ballistic panels into the wall there that separates the public access area from the staff. Currently, it's just an open box out there in the lobby. In light of the recent developments throughout the country, it's just a better environment for us. If we bring somebody in, say someone's seeking shelter in the police department, it creates a better opportunity for them to be safe as well as safety of our staff. The second thing was I have these 3D models. Like I say, it was created by Kirkpatrick. So this was to help understand what the space was going to look like. It's not significantly different. You have the door there to the right and the first frame there that accesses the hallway that leads back to our jail currently. The next slide is a different view. That on the left is the current bathroom. They're not changing anything significant there. A top-down view shows you that hallway access and those blocked off areas on the record section as it currently stands are as they intend to develop that out so that there 's a better space for those ladies to work. And here's from the back view. So it's not that we're creating space. We're just creating a more functional space that's safer for both the public and the staff. >> Okay. >> Does that answer your question? >> Yeah, I'm really glad we're getting the glass. Is it the bulletproof glass that's so expensive? I'm just trying to figure out why it's $333,000. >> Yes, ma'am. All the elements that come into play here, it's expensive to do the bulletproof glass. It's expensive to do the bulletproof panels. >> Okay. >> So it's the materials. >> Yes, ma'am. It's very expensive. >> Okay. Thank you. >> Councilmember Wasney. >> Mine is a backtrack, actually, to thank Brian Langley for working so hard. And everything you do, it's a standard of excellence and standard of performance that I'm just happy that you're here with the City of Denton. And thank you very much. So the light went out before I was able to say that last time. But I know that it's an important -- he's an important element and key to the money here in Denton. So thank you, Brian. >> Okay. Any other clarifications? I have one. I wanted to check other councilmembers. Mine is on agenda item 2, let's see, which one is it? It's the one on Hickory -- I mean, on Eagle Drive. Oh, C, 2C. Yeah, I don't have an issue with the contract going through , but I know that there's been a couple public meetings about the -- somebody referred to it as a road diet where we're reducing that down to one lane each way, bicycle lanes and a left turn lane. I don't remember seeing that. So this isn't about blocking the construction. I know the mobility committee has seen it. But I just want to have another work session on that design as it moves forward so I can understand the matrix of how that decision was made because that's a pretty heavily traveled street. And so it's just about just wanting a little bit more data on that. Mayor Pro Tem. >> Well, a question on that. Are you wanting to pull this? >> No, no, no. >> Are you wanting to delay the operation? >> No, no, no. Because the paving is done in the current width that we have. It's just a matter of the striping and the configuration of the pavement once it's done. I just want to get some more data on that. So, no, this isn't any way trying to delay or put off the contract and/or the construction. That's correct. Yes. Any other questions for clarification? All right. Thank you. In fact, we'll go to work session item number 2B, which is receive report and hold a daily discussion regarding the results of the 2016 Denton Open Data Day. >> Thank you, Mayor Bryan. He's also going to present this work session item. Thank you, Bryan. >> Thank you, Mr. Campbell, Mayor, members of the council. I did want to take a moment to have one of our community members, Patrick McCloud, here today with us to talk about the Open Data Day and some of the things that he and some of his colleagues did on March 5th. And so I'm going to turn it over to him to go through this presentation very quickly. I think he's got a little bit of a time crunch issue, so probably about 10 or 15-minute short presentation with your indulgence. He'll go through that. So, Patrick? >> Yes. Thank you. Hello, everyone. Mayor, council. My name is Patrick McCloud, and I'm here today presenting on behalf of myself, but also Dr. Jesse Hamner from the UNT Libraries. >> Could you maybe move the mic up just a little bit and move in a little bit closer to us so we can hear you? >> Better? >> Yeah, it's better. >> Okay. >> Thank you. Dr. Hamner couldn't be here today, so I'm here to let everyone know about what we did for Open Data Day 2016. A little bit of background for the Open Data community at Denton. We have a wonderful, thriving, growing ecosystem here around technology in general, and open data in particular. We have an organization, TechMill. We have a lot of very active people in TechMill. TechMill does some wonderful community work and community outreach. One of the things that TechMill has started is LittleDoc, well, it's not started, it's been going on for a while now, which is the Little D Open Coffee Club, which meets every other Tuesday at 8 a.m. And it's just a forum for anybody, anybody who's interested can come. We talk about all manner of technology issues, everything from nuts and bolts, technical stuff, all the way to technology and the community. We also have a website, opendenton.com. I don't know if anybody's checked this out before, but I'd encourage you to take a look at it. Open access and open data are something that are kind of cornerstones in our local tech community, and two things that are increasingly impactful when it comes to all levels of government, federal, state, local. And one of the expressions of this is Open Data Day, which is actually an international event. They are organized from small towns all over the world, all the way to major metropolitan areas. They can be just a couple of people with an idea, all the way up to teams of tens of people working on incredibly complex ideas. So for our goals for Open Data Day this year in Denton, we wanted to work on cleaning up some data, because most data has to have usually a good bit of cleaning up before it's actually usable. We wanted to convert some crime data and code enforcement data into maps, or one way that you can take data out of a tabular format and make it more relevant and more understandable to people . We also wanted to compute distances from social services to areas of need where residents live. This was in partnership with Serve Denton. One of the major components that we wanted to achieve was building a web dashboard, mobile compatible, so that it was something that you could see and access on your phone or tablet, as well as sitting down at just a regular desktop computer. We also wanted to map and analyze blight, which turned out to be a bit of a lofty goal, but we made some pretty good progress on that. One of the core components of Open Data Day anywhere is kind of engaging a broader community about the importance of open data and access to open data. And finally, we wanted to accomplish as many of these things as we could, so we could lay the groundwork for further success for Open Data Days in the future and on smaller projects between 2016 Open Data Day and 2017 Open Data Day. One of the beautiful things about the open data ecosystem is that there are lots of stakeholders that stand to benefit from open data. And as far as benefits that can accrue to city government from open data, we have a better understanding of citizen needs, better or evidence-based decision-making, clarifying difficult decisions that cities often find themselves making, with hopefully the idea that better data will facilitate better decisions. Also, it allows for citizen feedback for citizen buy-in on decisions, and it also, we believe, attracts expertise to Dutton. Here are some pictures of our event. This was held at Willis Library on the campus of the University of North Texas. We had about, I want to say, between 40, 40 to 50 people, all said and done, many of whom stayed the entire day, and we were divided up into teams, and we had a team working on data cleaning and data management, a team working on geocoding data, which is taking data, adding some sort of geographic component to it so that it can be mapped. We had another team working on dashboard design, and then we had a team of people kind of floating around helping each of the teams as the need arose. When everything was said and done, we wrote a little over 3 ,000 lines of code. We also provided lots of documentation for this code, which is something that is critical and often gets overlooked, whether it's open data or just regular data. We were able to build a web dashboard. We had a couple of people who I believe had backgrounds in anthropology who coded the homeless surveys that we obtained, I believe, through Sir Denton, but I think those came from the city. We were able to geocode a number of interesting data sets, including about 10 years' worth of crime reports that were provided by the Denton Police Department, about 94,000 reports altogether. We were also able to make some progress on transportation needs assessment and on moving forward with some blight and poverty metrics. So this is one of the things that we were able to create. This is a map of Denton, and this shows our distance to health care services. The health care services that we were able to identify in here came from the CHNA data set, which comes from United Way, which we were also able to obtain with the help of Sir Denton. So this is kind of the distance from when you live in one of these polygons on this map. It's the average distance that you would travel on a surface road to access health care. Quick question on that slide. The dots represent what? The dots represent the center of each polygon. For the purposes of getting the map produced, that's kind of the best that we were able to do in the space of a day. Each dot is the center mass of that particular polygon. We had a monthly crime movie, and unfortunately, my co-presenter was the one who made this and is not here today, and so I do not have the movie to show you. But we would be glad to share that with you as soon as we can get that. What we were able to do here is take those 10 years of crime reports and make a map for each month of each year over those 10 years, and then place those into an animation so you can see crime moving around in different parts of the city. The crime report data is one of the data sets that I was particularly interested in because in these we get not only an address where a crime was reported, but we also get a UCR code, which is Universal Criminal Record, I believe, code, which classifies what type of crime it is. It gives you the opportunity to be able to drill down into looking at what types of crime are occurring at what times and what locations. This is an example of a page from the mobile dashboard that our dashboard team built during Open Day to Day. This is taking, this is mapping some of the code violations obtained from... Gosh. Yeah, sorry. Code enforcement, sorry. We also have another map here with code enforcement violations. This is just for November 2015. This is total number of violations by polygon. These polygons conform roughly to census blocks from the US Census. This is something that Jesse was working on. This is a more detailed version of accessibility and access to health care and food in Denton. This is an ongoing project, and we hope to have some more results to share with you in the next couple of months on this. So as far as proposed next steps, we are looking forward to continuing to work with Serve Denton to work on some decision support questions that Pat Smith and Jesse and I had discussed. We also want to be able to further refine the dashboard that's been built to bring in some metrics that are of interest to council in general and to individual council members in particular. TechMill has started a wonderful workshop series that is bringing expertise on different aspects of web design, programming, and data science to the public. These events are usually held at the North Branch of the Denton Public Library, and if you visit TechMill's website, there's a wealth of information there on these events. As far as looking at potential sources of funding for further work in many of these areas, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has neighborhood stabilization program grants that we think could be pretty promising for the city to pursue with some of the data that we were able to work with. There's also the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which does grants for public health. Serve Denton is looking at some possibilities there. And finally, Dr. Chaitin Tawari, who's a professor in the Geography Department at the University of North Texas and was one of the people who worked with us closely on Open Data Day, was very excited about the possibility of submitting a grant to the National Science Foundation around supporting further development of open data between both partnerships between citizens in the city and partnerships between different units of the city. I just saw a typo. Great. So as far as workflow for monthly data releases, one of the most important things in the open data ecosystem is having repeatable, standardized access to data. You don't want to have to go and ask somebody once every month or once every couple of weeks for the latest round of data of whatever it is that they're taking care of. That's a really, it's a really rough way to for things to work. So this is something that having established a workflow and having established a platform to realize that workflow are very important. Good question. Council Member Riggs. Well, I can wait till your presentation. So some of the things that go into establishing that workflow are data governance in terms of policy at the city level about how you deal with data, what is involved in open data, what data is going to be provided, how often it's going to be provided, if there are any legal considerations with some of the data . Also agreed upon standard formats that the data will be provided in. Oftentimes, different software vendors will have a particular proprietary format for their software. I am more of a fan of adhering to the most common denominator format for data because that makes it much easier for everybody to use. And it is usually easily ingestible into just about any piece of software that you would want to use. One of the other things is consistent variable naming. You want to be sure you're describing the same thing in the same way across different units of government and across different subjects. If you have data of that type. I know the UNT libraries have had several conversations about hosting some open data for the city. I can't really speak to that. That would be more Dr. Amner 's area. And also, it would be great to be able to include juried data uploads from other sources. So jury just simply means that it's reviewed data. You kind of know what you're doing. You're doing some quality control on it. So you're just not uploading anything. As far as more data that we would want, and just about anybody who works in open data always wants more data. We would love to be able to get some water usage or power usage data from Denton Municipal. One thing that we were looking at in terms of establishing some metrics for blind and poverty were the number of late skipped or delinquent bills in a certain area. We're not talking about the individual level. We're talking about at an aggregation for a particular area. And also the number of customers utilizing plus one assistance. As far as DPS, arrest records would be something that we feel would be fruitful to be able to investigate. We also have a longer list of more data as well. One of the things that has most excited me as somebody who was born here and has lived here most of my life is the community spanning partnerships that we've been able to build in open day to day. And these partnerships being able to continue and thrive and grow. For open day to day this year, we had the city of Denton involved, TechMill, the University of North Texas, served Denton, and then just individual citizens that were interested in helping out. One of the people who just showed up, we didn't even know he was going to show up, was one of the then graduate students who was a research assistant on the city of Dallas blight study that was conducted by three professors from the Department of Public Administration at the University of North Texas. He just heard about what we were doing and thought it would be neat to show up. As far as a proposed next steps where we would like to go. We want to further investigate and evaluate blight and service impacts. Do more work towards establishing workflow for consistent monthly data releases. Start and hopefully be more involved in some discussions about live data and APIs that we might be able to make available. Jesse has a career proposal through the University of North Texas in conjunction with someone else at UNT whose name I don't remember. Who is, we also have documentation on this that would be an extension of partnership that grew out of open day to day. And lastly, we would like to be able to look at the data that we have collected so far and that we would like, hopefully more data that we would like to collect in the future and compare Denton to other municipalities in Denton County. Council Member Briggs. So I have a few questions and some observations. Well, first I'm kind of curious what the biggest surprise was in the process of pulling this event together. Did you, was there anything learned that you may do next different next or? I was, I was shocked at the turnout. We had a smaller open day to day event in 2015 that was more of an educational outreach event instead of a project based event like this year's event was. And we had about 25 people or so, and logistically speaking that's fairly easy to deal with, but when 50 people show up , it gets to be a little overwhelming and you end up spending a lot of your time trying to deal with logistical issues instead of putting all of these people to work on things to be done. So just the logistics of the day and being a bit more mindful of what it takes when you have more people show up than you plan. And on the one of the maps you mentioned, access to food stores or access to food just kind of in speaking. I think so I'm that's pretty interesting to me and I'm wondering if you think we can use this type of data and analysis to help guide targeted incentives like for neighborhoods to get grocery into those underserved areas. Is that yes, absolutely. That is, that was the reason that Pat Smith brought this problem to us was to try to be able to identify where to, where to be able to put mobile food pantries to be able to help the most people in need. And I think that that question translates pretty solidly to , you know, a more long term, more static idea of where to put resources. Okay. And my next question is about the DME you mentioned wanting to get. And so I looked and noticed that some other cities look at bills and they, they gather them by the neighborhood, the size and the neighborhood and their electric and water usage. And they compare those and they kind of get an estimate of that neighborhood and then they use that as as a guide for conservation. And so I know right now on our bill we just get our own use comparison like this is what you use last month and this is what you used. And so I'm wondering if that may be something that we could do as well. I think that would be a possible neighborhood. Yes. And I know that we've we've had some good conversations with with DME and we're hoping that those conversations will continue and grow. And I think there any number of interesting things that unlocking that data could provide. And I think that that definitely fits in that framework. Thank you. Councilmember Johnson. Thank you, Mayor. This is awesome. And so I was just sitting here thinking about some of you might know it's campaign season. We've had a few forums and we've heard from some folks that they like to be able to see more information more readily available to research those things that are near and dear to them. And obviously we've embarked upon a redesign of the Web site, try to make things more user friendly and so on. And so I'm sitting here looking at this volunteer activity and what you guys were able to accomplish in a day in terms of just here's these things we found because people said they wanted them. And as we're embarking upon this Web site redesign, I was thinking, well, who better to tell us whether we can provide the information that people want. But first, what is it that people want? Because we hear anecdotes, right? Kind of coming from here, here, but this tech community is pretty engaged and savvy in terms of gathering not only data, but also what is the data people want to see. So I was just going to throw out as a brainstorm an idea because these people are doing this for free. I mean, it's amazing to me that people would take their time to do what it is they do all day every day on their free time. So it's pretty amazing to me. I want to throw out an idea that how could we think about providing some funding? Because this is number one. Well, this is very low cost labor we're getting right now because it's free and we can identify with that up here. But to think about it, in other words, if we as a city provided some level of funding, how could that make you guys more efficient or make it more impactful? Not meaning necessarily that everybody gets paid, but like what tools could we provide or what, you know, outside of donuts and coffee. Because what I'm thinking about is, number one, tools to engage with our citizenry to say what is it that you really want access to and you're able to see? Because we hear from people, you know, from a transparency standpoint, we can't see the budget. And then when you tell them, well, here's where you get to it on the website. Oh, or we can't see this or that. But what else is it they want to see? Is it a different format they'd like to see it in? And do people want to see pie charts instead of long spreadsheets or what is it? Because we're going to go build this new website anyway. So I'd like to throw out how we brainstorm or where it comes from. Maybe it's not for today. But from you guys, from TechMill and all the group to say, well, here's how we could go and find out what it is that citizens really want to have access to. Here's the format they want to see it in. And here's what you're going to need from us to make that happen or from your website designer. And it's better for us to do it or for them to do it. Kind of take that next step before we go and just design something. I think, you know, this community would be the ones who could probably really tell us here's what they want to see and here's how they want to see it. But I don't think it's fair for us to keep asking for that for free. So, you know, how we get to that. But I'd like for us to think about that. I'm not -- I wouldn't be one of those people to ask about that because the actual design stuff is what I'm worst at. I'm more of a numbers person. But we do have several people in our community who work in the area called user experience and user design, which is all about kind of meeting people where their needs are, finding out what they want to see, how they want to see it, and then building your product, whether it's a website or whether it's a mobile app or whatever, around what they want to see and what they need. >> Okay. Thanks. >> Councilmember Rodin. >> Thank you, Patrick, for your service and for coming here today. I think it pairs well with our What Works City discussion. It shows the other arm to open data, and that is when you open up data, it's not just helping us meet our goals, but there's several goals out in the community. You mentioned Sir Denton has certain goals. They have certain data sets. There's plenty of other players out in the community, from NTC Cog, you mentioned, to North Texas Commission from a regional perspective that are looking at data and trying to solve problems. We've got two universities whose students are increasingly interested in looking at real world problems, and if the data is just easily available, heck, we're going to get a lot of free things, not because they're not motivated. They're motivated by something. It's either solving some problem in their particular sphere of influence, but it demonstrates the power of open data to do these things. You know, the fact that we can get in our car and open up one of hundreds of GPS apps, that's built on government data. The fact that we all know that tornadoes are going to come and take down City Hall later today, that's because weather data is all government data that's been opened up, and not only does it create -- that's no official prediction, by the way. But it's all government data that's been opened up that not only can be used to create interesting solutions to common problems, specific problems that we're doing, but in a lot of those cases, it's created economic development. Think of the billions of dollars that have been created off GPS types of apps, because the government opened up data and people have been able to create jobs off of that. So all that to say, I love this because it puts flesh on the bones we're talking about, about open data, and it shows that real life solutions -- real world solutions can come about. So thank you for that. Thanks for your service. Please pass it on. One of the things I recommended a couple weeks ago was the creation of a citizen committee as we're to couple with this What Works Cities initiative so that we could kind of formalize -- you had some recommendations on there that none of us know what the heck you're talking about when you 're talking about variables and data. But we have people on staff that do. To be able to formalize these recommendations, give a real platform where you guys can kind of help advise us on how to get better at this. So hopefully you're going to be a part of that and others. So thank you. Sure. I look forward to it. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you for leading the charge on this. And I was hoping that you could email us that movie. I'm very -- I want to see that movie there. And I know it really wasn't your job to analyze the data but more compile it. But in that crime movie, did you see a pattern or what did you end up seeing at the end? The -- I guess either depending on which side of the equation you're looking at it from, either the worst time to be out or the best time to commit crimes 2 a.m. Gotcha. And that seems to be -- that seems to be irrespective of the type of crime, too, which there's a little bit more crime of certain types than others at around 2 a.m. Okay. See, I've done mine at 2 p.m. But anyway. Okay. But yeah, you could email us that. That'd be great. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Any other questions? Thank you so much, Patrick, for that presentation. I think that helps me because I think what you've sort of shown here is what I was thinking about in conjunction with the What Works Cities. In other words, how do we put all this data in a form that 's visual that we actually can see? Because I know at the What Works Cities workshop that we did, one of the things they were talking about was on this crime data that sometimes they could see that, well, if we moved resources from one neighborhood to another, that that would help with that. But then you also have the issue of how do you convince neighborhoods of some of that shifting that they're not going to be subject to. So data is important. So thank you for really putting that in a form that at least I can understand and see its impact. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you. All right. We're going to go on to agenda item number 2C, which is always one that I really enjoy. Here, Dr. Banks come up and I'll read the I'll read the caption while I get it after that. Receive report and hold discussion give staff direction concerning the upcoming 2016 mosquito season. You never have known so much about mosquitoes as when we hear Dr. Banks presentation. So thank you. It's always nice to know that people know more than me about a lot of things. Thank you, Mayor. I am going to ask Dr. Kenneth Banks to present this item for your discussion and consideration. Thank you. Thanks for that great introduction. Good afternoon, council members. It's that time of year again and I'm here to go over the 2016 mosquito season and talk in a little detail about our surveillance and response plan. I think it's an opportunity anytime we do this to give some public education. And so I wanted to go over it in some detail. There's a few folks in the audience that I would like to introduce. Juan Rodriguez, who is the chief epidemiologist and assistant director for Denton County Public Health Department is in the audience. And Juan does a great job there on a lot of things, including mosquitoes. And also Dr. Jim Kennedy from the University of North Texas is here. Dr. Kennedy is the person that heads up the students that go out and do the work for our surveillance component of our surveillance and response plan. And I also wanted to point out that Robbie Stengel from PCO Public Communication Office is here. PCO does a large number of activities related to the mosquito surveillance and response plan. And I've actually included the 2016 PCO plan for the mosquito season as a part of your backup. So if there are any difficult questions on anything related to mosquitoes or public information, et cetera, I've brought all the people with the real answers. So I'll go real quickly through the surveillance and response plan. Basically, we've had this plan in place since 2002. It was developed in response to West Nile virus coming into this country and spreading from the East Coast towards the West Coast. In 2002, it was just getting into this area of the country, and so we developed the plan at that time. We were very fortunate in that when we began planning for putting this information together, we really wanted to focus on using monitoring data to make decisions on the mosquito populations and base all of our local responses on the concept of using that monitoring data. Monitoring has been conducted all this time by the University of North Texas, Dr. Kennedy and his students. It's been a real pleasure to watch some of those students come through and get their degrees and go on to work in the field. And now we're beginning to work with them as they've risen up through various organizations. So we've maintained a lot of contact. It's been a really, really fun thing to see through the years. Our whole plan is based on the concept of integrated pest management. So we want to use information about the pests that we're trying to control to figure out the best ways to effectively deal with the disease concern. Each risk level that we have established for the plan has actions for surveillance, public education, and mosquito control. I'll go through those very briefly, if I can make this go the right direction. There we go. Risk level one is what we deem normal response. Keep in mind that we put this plan together in 2002. It was one of the first ones in this area. And we didn't know at the time whether West Nile Virus was going to become endemic in this area of the country or in the United States in general. And so we have a low risk level that basically says we've not seen any West Nile Virus activity in three or more years within this area. And within this area is approximately 100 mile radius. I don't think we're ever going to be at risk level one again. And so we typically start the season at risk level two. Basically, the probability of human outbreak is low. And the trigger is simply that we've had West Nile Virus in the area over the last few years. Risk level three steps up a little bit and is triggered by us having a single West Nile Virus positive trap within our trapping network. And I'll go over the trapping network details in just a minute. But we do have a very extensive trapping network that we run the entire mosquito season. Risk level four is a public health warning. That's when we've seen multiple mosquito traps test positive for West Nile Virus, especially when they become collected at different locations at different times in the city. Or it's triggered by a single human positive case of West N ile Virus. Risk level five is our highest risk level. That's when we have human outbreak confirmed. That's more than one human case of West Nile Virus. At that point at risk level five, our surveillance and response plan states that staff will bring the current status of the mosquito program to the city council, including where we're at within the season, weather information, what we're seeing in the mosquito populations, what we're seeing with both mosquito and human diseases. And at that time, we'll ask council for resolution for adult assigning, for spraying for adult mosquitoes. If council so direct staff, that is enacted by resolution. That resolution may contain additional stipulations to it. For example, in 2012 when we had such a bad year for West N ile Virus, there was an additional stipulation to spray in cases where we had three or more consecutive positive trap results. So the MSRP can be adjusted according to the conditions at the time, and that adjustment is enacted by that resolution . Setting spray triggers is very challenging. You'll see a number of different spray triggers that are enacted by municipalities or mosquito control districts. These decisions involve some very complex biological, ecological, meteorological, and public health factors. We're always going to make that decision within complete information. There will always be some strong feelings from the public about whether we should spray or whether we shouldn't. And you'll see again a full spectrum. Some cities or mosquito control districts will spray for nu isance only. Some will spray when there's an indication of diseases within some form of surveillance. Some will spray based on human cases. Some will not spray at all. So you'll see a full spectrum depending on the location and the particular control district or municipality. So it can be thought of as a threshold. If you're spraying routinely, are you being most protective of public health? Are you over applying? Are you having effect on non-target organisms? Are you having unanticipated environmental effects? Are you building up resistance in the mosquito population? Are you spending more money than you need to? Are you being less efficient than you could be? On the high thresholds, the arguments could be made that humans are serving at least in part as a sentinel. We don't know about asymptomatic effects. So in the case of West Nile virus, there are a fair number of people that won't exhibit symptoms. So there are issues there. There's a lag time from infection to diagnosis. Are we under applying? Are we making applications too late, et cetera? So we're trying to balance a number of different factors every time we're looking at the issue of when to spray and how much to spray. In terms of monitoring, monitoring is done generally speaking starting up at the beginning of May. And it will run through generally October into early November depending on the weather. Typical end of the season is going to be an overnight freezing temperature. There's two types of monitoring that we do right now. Basically, the monitoring that's done currently is what we deem routine monitoring, which is samples that are sent to the Texas Department of State Health Services. The state will actually speciate the mosquitoes and then test them for a variety of different viruses, including West Nile virus. A few years ago, we implemented another program here locally with some instrumentation and methodology collectively deemed Ramp, rapid analyte measurement platform that allows us to do West Nile virus testing locally at the university. This is a very important component of the program. The Department of State Health Services is a great benefit to us. They perform this service to us for no charge and basically are providing us extremely useful information. But when the mosquito season gets busy, it can take some time to get the information. It may be a week or more before we get test results. With the Ramp platform, we're able to use local researchers and they're able to give us a turnaround time of less than a day. So from the time that the trap is collected until the time that we have the results, we're typically looking at a day or less. So especially when we get into a situation like 2012 where we have a lot of West Nile virus in the area, having the ability to do that rapid testing is very, very crucial. There are two types of traps that are routinely deployed. The one on the top picture is what's referred to as a CDC light trap. It uses basically light and heat as an attractant. The thermos there is not full of coffee or something else. It's actually full of CO2, dry ice. And so it mimics what we're breathing out and attracts the mosquitoes. The trap on the bottom is what's known as a gravid trap. And it's basically baited with stagnant water and its intention is to catch a mosquito that's trying to actively lay eggs in that stagnant water. So by targeting areas in the city with these various types of traps, we're able to get a good idea of what mosquitoes are out there and also get a good idea of West Nile virus presence if it's there. The trap results, once we get them, are posted on our website. PCO kicked off our mosquito campaign earlier this week and you probably saw a notice for that. We've got a huge amount of information on the website, various frequently asked questions, what people can do to protect themselves, how people can help us with control by activities that they perform around their home like eliminating stagnant water. There's a huge amount of additional links on that site to other organizations that have good information on mosquito issues. We also put our trapping map up there. The trapping map will have the locations of the traps that we've deployed and it will allow you to be able to see whether there's been a negative or positive trap. A few years ago we made this to where you could scale it and where it would be accessible on mobile devices so that you're able to zoom in, zoom out. You can see where the trap is in location to where you're at. You can also play a time series animation where you can see how the trap network builds and where we see positive traps through the course of the season. We use the same platform for doing our spraying. If we do get to conducting a spraying event, we'll put a map up there with that spray area on there as part of the notification. Again, people can zoom in and see exactly where the spraying event is occurring. We have a question. Councilmember Walsley. Yes. It used to be just a mosquito bite. Now it's life changing. So we have a new mosquito that we are all reading about, the Zika mosquito, the Zika virus. So are we trapping and testing for that? And if we are, is the trapping and testing the same as the West Nile? And if we're not testing for it, why not? Okay. I have a whole section on emerging viruses, including Zika, and a few slides from now. So if we could, I can get through this and then we'll go through that issue, if that's okay. Yeah. Okay. Very quickly, mosquito control, what we like to focus on is larval control. The mosquitoes are much more difficult to deal with when they become flying adults. We use BTI, Bacillus thuringiensis isurilensis, which is a bacterial agent that is very specific to mosquito larvae and doesn't affect other organisms that are in the water with the mosquito larvae. We will put that out as a municipal organization that is done through the drainage department, parks department, code enforcement. We also provide that BTI to citizens. There's information on the website that allows the citizens to find the areas in which they can go pick this up free of charge. They've just got to have a driver's license or utility bill to show that they're residents of the city of Denton. It does have to be properly applied and so we give some education along with distributing that material. It's basically for applying to water, so for larval control . In terms of our equipment, just very briefly, we have two ultra low volume sprayers. One is in service, one is in backup. The units have been serviced here recently and calibrated. They're required to be calibrated once per season in accordance with state law. We have our spray contractor on standby and we've got enough chemical on hand right now for doing at least three to four spray events. So we're in pretty good shape with the sprayer. I think it's important that people realize that this is quite different from the fogging that used to be done years ago. This is a very sophisticated instrument. It's using very sophisticated pesticide that is designed to target mosquitoes. Anytime you apply an aerial pesticide, you have the potential for having impacts on non-target organisms. But this is done in such a way that the concentrations are adjusted to be more specific to mosquitoes. The timing is adjusted to be more specific to mosquitoes. So we do everything we can to try to control the organism. We're trying to impact and minimize the impacts on other organisms. One thing that's interesting about this unit too is that it 's radar controlled. And so it cannot apply more than the specified amount of pesticide. It has a window of speed in which it can operate. If you go above that speed, it shuts off. If you go below that speed, it shuts off. If you're in that range, it will adjust itself according to how fast the vehicle is moving. So over application simply can't be done unless the system is overwritten. I have a question. Councilmember Riggs. Just confirmation. When you said the timing, you mean time of day that it's done? That's correct. Yes. Yes. What we try to do is to time it so that organisms like bees , butterflies, dragonflies, et cetera, are not going to be up and actively flying. This pesticide has to actually physically hit the organism that we're trying to control. And it's got to hit that organism with enough concentration to elicit toxicity. So for a bigger organism, if we can either not hit it or hit it with a small amount, it's got a much better chance of surviving. Thanks. Very quickly on public information, the PCO releases a bilingual general information campaign at the start of each season. Works with the county to provide consistent information on a regional basis. As the risk levels increase, we see more and more active role of PCO getting the word out to people, making sure that everyone's aware that those risk levels are going up. If council authorizes the adult deciding the spraying, PCO coordinates with the other city departments to inform citizens of the spray event. We have a number of ways of letting people know where the spraying will occur. These include code red. We have robo calls that will give an automated call to every address that exists within the spray area. Press releases, social media messages, and DTV. We will have specialty notices on occasion. People can sign up for email notifications. We deploy street signs, and we have web page updates with the maps. The goal that we have is a 24 hour minimum notification. This gives an opportunity for people to make any kind of preparations that they want to with regards to the spraying event. Real quickly, just to give you an indication of how much activity goes on, in 2015, which was a fairly light season, we had a few positive traps, no human cases. We did about 4374 BTI applications through drainage, about 392 BTI treatments were provided to citizens. There were 458 traps that were deployed under the routine monitoring and about 215 deployed for ramp testing. We did have 10 positive traps and fortunately no human cases of West Nile virus. So getting into emerging diseases. Now we're not only dealing with West Nile virus, but we have the potential for some other diseases that are around. Chicken Goonya and dengue have been talked about for a while now. Zika has recently come into the Western Hemisphere in the 2015 timeframe and has received a lot of media coverage over the course of the last year or so. I think it's very, very important to realize that Zika virus is a very different disease than West Nile virus. It's got a different mosquito. It's got a different mode of transmission. And we'll talk about that in some detail. We have had one travel related case in Denton County on April 12, 2016. So far in the continental United States, there have been no cases of local transmission of Zika virus. This has all been, all diagnosed cases have been related to people that have traveled. So Zika virus is kind of interesting. It's been around for a while. It was first isolated in Uganda in 1947. And at the time, Zika virus was not thought of as being all that serious of a disease. When you're in an area that has endemic Ebola and other forms of some pretty nasty viruses, it wasn't really considered to be a huge consequence to public health. It tends to have relatively mild symptoms. Only about 20% of the people infected with it even know that they're ill. And as a result, it has had a tendency to be overlooked. Before 2007, there were sporadic outbreaks of human cases that were mainly reported from Africa and Southeast Asia. And then in 2007, there was a fairly large outbreak on Yap Island in the federal states of Micronesia. And then a big outbreak, more than 28,000 suspected cases from French Polynesia. Now it's beginning to move into South America and has become well established there, well established in the Caribbean. And basically, we're seeing a pretty substantial amount of what is deemed active transmission, which is effectively transmission that is occurring locally indicating that the disease is endemic. This is already a dated slide. I put this together on April 6, 2016. The numbers have changed slightly. The travel associated cases in the United States as of the time of this map were 346. Now it's up to 388. Still no locally acquired. Of these 346 cases, 31 were pregnant women. The other 347 cases were from sexual transmission and one person developed Guillain-Barre syndrome. I think it's real important to realize that the Zika disease is transmitted from person to person via sexual contact, or it can be transmitted from a person to a mosquito, and then that mosquito can transmit it to another person. It is a very, very different disease from West Nile virus. West Nile virus is predominantly a bird and mosquito disease. What West Nile virus does is basically build up in the bird and mosquito population to a point in which it has a higher probability of spilling over into the human population. It's still spread by vector, a mosquito, but it's a different mosquito and it is a different mode of ampl ification of the disease. The mosquito that spreads West Nile virus in this area is a single species. From the last 13 or so years of trapping day that we have, 99% of the West Nile virus is related to one mosquito, a Cu lex quincafasciatus. That mosquito is a relatively non-selective feeding mosquito, meaning that it will feed on birds or humans. It doesn't really prefer what it's, have a high preference for its host. As a result, it will have a tendency to feed on birds because they're easier targets. The virus will amplify up, getting more virus between birds and mosquitoes to the point at which it actually has a higher probability of spilling over into the human population. So from the human disease standpoint, it's all about the probability of how much West Nile virus exists in the mosquito population. That's why it's so important to do surveillance of mosquito populations and understand what that disease is doing. The mosquito that transmits Zika and chikungunya and dengue fever is a different type of mosquito. Aedes albopictus, the Asian tiger mosquito, or Aedes aegypt i, the yellow fever mosquito. They're a much smaller mosquito. They are, have a tendency to be fairly aggressive daytime biting mosquitoes. So now we not only have the feeding from the West Nile virus mosquitoes at night to worry about, but we also have the daytime feeding of the Aedes mosquito. Another interesting dynamic about the Aedes mosquito is that it's a very weak flyer. So it has a tendency once it emerges from the water as an adult to stay within the area that it is, even more so than the West Nile virus mosquito. Aedes has a particular survival methodology as well. It doesn't tend to take a single blood meal from a single person. Instead of, a QLEX quincafaciatis will bite a person, take a full blood meal, and use the proteins to create the eggs to complete its life cycle. For an Aedes mosquito like albopictus, it will have a tendency to take a small blood meal and then fly to the next person and take another blood meal and eventually get enough proteins. So we're dealing with a different type of mosquito, a different type of disease. One of the main concerns that have occurred so far with the Zika virus is not related to the symptoms of infection of the virus itself, but actually related to some of the after effects of the virus. So I essentially went through this slide already, so I'll move on. Just to want to point out that the issue of Zika infection is going to, in and of itself, not usually be a big deal. It's a very mild disease, but it has a tendency to create some complications. For example, there have been, and are ongoing active studies that indicate that there may be a link between Zika virus infection and microcephalic babies. Basically babies that are born with some brain damage and small heads due to the infection that occurred within the mother. There's a lot of information that still needs to be derived from additional research on that. When the infection occurs appears to be an important component, but there seems to be a strong causal link there . With regards to other types of infections, Guyane-Barre is a complication that appears to be correlated with Zika infection. It's a disease where your immune system will actually attack the lining of your neurons, making it difficult for you to transmit neurological signals in your body. So it can cause partial paralysis. Sometimes it's recoverable, sometimes it leads to some very long standing, if not permanent complications. So it's definitely a disease to be cognizant of, but we also have to keep in mind that it's not amplified with a non-human host. It is strictly transmitted from human to human, or human to mosquito to another human. You've got a disease like West Nile or even Chicken Goony Virus that can have other hosts serve as a reservoir. So in the case of West Nile, it's predominantly birds. In the case of Chicken Goony, it's birds, rodents, other mammals. So I did a comparison of West Nile Virus and Zika here to just kind of look at the different differences between those diseases. The vectors are, we've talked about different types of mosquitoes. Zika virus with the 80s mosquito, 80s mosquitoes do prefer humans. They're very weak flyers compared to the Culex quincafaciat us. They have different time of days that they're active. They're both artificial container breeders, which means they will have a tendency to use small little containers of water instead of natural habitat to lay their eggs. The mode of mosquito infection is infected birds with ampl ification with West Nile virus. Zika virus is infected humans. Transmission to human occurs via mosquito bite with West N ile. With Zika, it can be a mosquito bite or human to human via sexual contact. The mosquito virus testing, getting back to the question that was asked earlier, the CDC recommendation with regards to mosquito virus testing for West Nile virus is that that should be done because it's endemic in the United States. It has the amplification potential with a reservoir host that lives here, which would be various types of birds. And the risk to humans tends to correlate very well with the increase in mosquito infection rates. Right now, at this point, the CDC is recommending to not assess mosquito populations for the Zika virus because it's non endemic in the United States. All of the cases that we have are travel related. There's no amplification within nonhuman host in other areas of the world. Primates can be infected. We don't have indigenous primates in this country, so there 's no amplification with nonhuman host. And there is a possibility of transmission from human to human. At this point, we could have a very large outbreak of Zika virus in the human population and no Zika virus showing up in the mosquitoes. So right now, the advice from the or the recommendation from the CDC is to not test for Zika virus in mosquito populations, but to instead focus on public education, particularly related to people's travel and practices when they come back from traveling into areas that have a lot of Zika virus. And then also understanding the risk factors associated with behaviors when they get back. Generally, human health impacts, both of them are going to be fairly asymptomatic, about 80 percent in both cases. Very mild symptoms, typically speaking, in a Zika virus infection. It does have some nuances like having a rash and conjunctiv itis. But the real issue right now is the concern of the link to microcephaly and Guillain-Barré syndrome. Very quickly, with regards to expenditures so far for this mosquito season, we've got our UNT monitoring contract in place. Ramp supplies purchased, larvicide purchased. Total right now is about $25,000. To give you an idea of what the impacts are from various years, from a spray event or individual purchases, I put the 2012 through 2015 expenditures. The 2012 expenditures were when we had the really bad West Nile virus year. We had 36 cases here in the city of Denton. We spent quite a bit of money on mosquito control, but I think it's important to point out that those, that money included the purchase of two sprayers. And those sprayers cost approximately $15,600 combined. So subtracting that out, that would put that year at about $41,000. So generally speaking, we had several, probably around 38 spray events that occurred that year. Generally speaking, a spray event is going to run about $ 500 to $600. So that can give you a sense of kind of a year like 2015, where we had no spray event, versus a year like 2012, where we had quite a few. Just very briefly, I'd always like to have the acknowled gments of everyone that helps with this program. This includes the drainage department, emergency management , PCO, parks, technology services, water department, watershed. Every group works and works hard to make sure that we've got a successful program every year. And of course, thanks to the UNT researchers, Jim Kennedy, Bethany Hambrick, which I'm thinking Bethany's still here. Is that correct? Okay. Yeah, we knew we were going to lose her. She'll be sorely missed. There's a number of other graduate students as well. So that's all I have with regards to my presentation. I'd be happy to answer any questions that anyone might have . It just all lit up. Mayor Pro Tem. Well, this is only slightly related to the first question. Mr. Roden is one of the smartest people in the room, but with you here, not quite. I don't know about that. So are we going to get hit with a tornado tonight, right here? Yeah, I'm thinking no. Thank you. Okay, moving on. Councillor Johnson. Did you have a question? No, I had some real questions. Okay, all right. I talked with a resident who said that their backyard probably is or should be a testing spot because their next door neighbor has a swimming pool that has not been tended to in years. Okay. And at times, the these folks are fairly good about getting those those biscuits or right, right, and throwing them over the fence and getting them into the pool. But but not always right. Do we have this maybe as much for the city manager is for you. Do we have some some policies in place for folks who have either abandoned swimming pools or I'm thinking about another email that we got recently with with satellite pictures of a backyard. So you cannot see it from the street, but it's clearly a hoarders house and their backyard is completely filled. And I'm sure with a lot of objects that are containing things that are holding water. Do we do we have a way of dealing with those situations that are that are there. It's not just a nuisance of an ice or something like that. It's a health hazard. Right. Yes, we do. There that actually falls under the nuisance code with regards to the swimming pool. Specifically, we have stagn ant water ordinance that deals with the ability of that stagnant water to produce mosquitoes or other nuisance effects. And so that definitely can be can be addressed. The if the homeowner could simply get in touch with code enforcement code enforcement handles that initially we very often provide support to them. We even have provisions to be able to enter into properties that have been abandoned and treat them with larvicide. And so there's a number of different ways we can we can address that is larval side. The main thing that we do or is there a way that we can address the abandoned pool by by requiring it to be filled in or something like that or do we do that. Generally speaking, because we're dealing with a property issue, we treat it with larvicide. But the larvicides that we use for the pools are a little bit different than the B TI. There's still a material based product, but we've been able to obtain a different form of that product so that it will be an extended release tablet that will provide protection for approximately six months. And so what we do is when we when we're in an abandoned pool or an unmaintained pool situation, we'll treat with that type of larvicide because we're cognizant of the fact that we can't just we want to take care of it at one time and be sure that it's not going to produce mosquito larva during the entire season. Now, if it's an occupied home, then code enforcement will have a tendency to work with those individuals to get the get the pool maintained or at least get it treated. Okay, another question and this is only slightly sarcastic. When I was a kid in the 60s, and the sprayer truck was going around the streets. We got on our bikes and rode right behind it. We figured that that no mosquitoes would bite us if we were right there. I have a feeling now that that probably was a bad idea. Right. Explains a lot. I don't know why. My question is with this with this interesting technology that these sprayers have of radars that monitor how fast the vehicle is moving and do that adjustment. Do we do we have anything or is it just the vehicle operator that that is noticing if there's a parade of kids on bicycles and they and they shut the thing off and tell the kids to go home. That there's always going to be observational issues that would cause something like that to to happen. And so generally speaking, because of the time in which we treat for these mosquitoes, that doesn't tend to be a problem. But the there's the operator is a very professional person. They're not going they're going to understand that issue and they'll they'll they'll shut it down. But we could do it at 2 a.m. in the morning and get all the criminals. That's a possibility. You wouldn't get as many mosquitoes. But Councilmember Johnson. Thank you, Mayor. So not the smartest person in the world, but but you have a unique way of making me feel like the dumbest person in the world. So if I get the summation of your presentation, we're OK. That's good. Yeah, we're in good shape. We're we're ready to respond for West Nauvirus. We are in communication with the state, with the county regarding where we're at with the Zika virus right now. We're following the CDC recommendations at this point. Things could change. But at this point in space and time, if we don't have endemic virus in the human population for Zika, we're not going to have it in the mosquitoes because there's no source. You just did it again. So thanks, Doc. Sure. Councilmember Briggs. Well, my question was along the lines of Mayor Pro Tems. It's we've been getting a lot of emails and concerns about neighbors with stagnant water and what to do. And some I shared your your release that we got for the city of Denton and we're level two now. And I had a couple of responses. Should we email him? You know, Dr. Banks, so you may have got a couple of responses. But I guess we should direct them to see. Yes, that's right. That's the place to start because they 're able through the code to go on to private property and and begin the process. Like I said, we oftentimes will be called out to provide some support to them. But it starts with community improvement services. Thank you. Mayor Hawkins. Thank you, Mayor. I've had the privilege of hearing this presentation now two days in a row. I'm sorry. It's OK. It's good. But last night a question came up, you know, when there's a lot of rain, they thought there was going to be a lot of mosquitoes. And you had a very interesting answer to that. And I thought that, you know, if you could. Sure. Yeah. Again, like I said, when we have we have one mosquito in this area that spreads West Nile virus, Culex quincavasiat is, that particular mosquito actually tends to increase in numbers when it gets drier. And that is very different than what most people would think. Most people would think just based on observation, if you have more rainfall, you're going to get more mosquitoes. You do get more mosquitoes, but they're not the type that are going to be carrying the virus. In fact, we have a tendency to see the Culex quincavasiatis numbers go down if we get a lot of successive rainfalls because it washes them out of the drainage infrastructure in those areas where where they're at. If you in terms of ways in which they tend to increase when it gets drier, one of the things that I've observed through the through the years is that when we have drier and drier situations, we have people irrigating more. Our irrigation, our lawns and our infrastructure set up so that if water lands on someone's yard, it has a tendency to run off to the street. That water will eventually make it into an underground storm drain. And so when you have people that are irrigating with just enough water to cause flow off of their yards, you'll see that start to accumulate on the sides of the roads and eventually make it into the underground infrastructure. When it gets to those underground storm drains, you're always going to have slumps in the pipes. You're going to have little pockets where that water can stand, and that just creates a perfect environment for the adult mosquitoes to rest because it's high humidity and it 's relatively cool. And they've got a great opportunity to lay their eggs right in an area where they're not going to to be disturbed. So it's real important to the people realize that that's that's going on. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't irrigate. It just simply means that you should irrigate so that it doesn't run off in a large amount from your yard. And I'm sure you've probably all seen that. You can go through neighborhoods in the summertime and you'll see a little small rivulet of water going by from people irrig ating. It just creates a really good environment for those mosquitoes. In fact, those gravid traps that I mentioned earlier are baited with water that's simply soaked in grass or hay. And so it creates a stagnant water odor that attracts the mosquito. You're creating the same thing in the drainage infrastructure, taking little yard clippings off, susp ending them, basically getting into that infrastructure. All right. Any other questions? Thank you. Appreciate that. Thank you very much. Jennifer, you all right? Okay. I just need to know if we need to take a break or not. So we'll plow forward. We'll go on to agenda item 2D, which is receive, report, and hold discussion, give staff direction regarding Denton Parks Foundation projects, including the Eureka playground replacement. Thank you, Mayor. And I'm going to ask Emerson Vorlaug, Director of Parks, to introduce this item for discussion and consideration. I'm actually going to introduce Mark Culp right now. Mark is the president of the Park Foundation, and he is prepared to address you all. Well, thank you very much for the time and that it will take me to present some information on the Park Foundation. I've got a little happier and more pleasant news about Eure ka and the foundation in general. But I'm certainly glad that you all are paying attention to the mosquitoes because while it's a very technical subject, it's one that all of us perk up and listen to. And I was glad to hear you all were as concerned about it as I think everybody else is as well. So I am the Parks Foundation president for 2016. I've served on the foundation since 2006, so almost 10 years now. We've got an 18-member board. It's all volunteers. The board consists of a number of professionals and talented business people. We've got a CPA. We've got a lawyer. Don't hold that against him because it's me. We've got a banker. We've got several folks that have marketing and IT experience. And we've got several people that are from the UNT/TWU faculty, including a local icon that I think everybody knows, Ms. Betty Myers, which I've had the privilege to serve on the board with for the last 10 years. She's been a magnificent leader of the group, starting it from humble beginnings to something now that I'm quite proud of what we're doing. I think it's important for everybody to understand that not one person on this board receives any compensation for the work that they perform on this foundation and that they've performed over the last 10 years. So I'm here today to ask for approval for extending and increasing the funding for the foundation that you all were kind enough to provide some three years ago and to kind of give you some background on what we were able to accomplish and to give specifics on what we're asking for in terms of future support. So three years ago in 2013, the board approved a three-year , $35,000 budget item so we could hire an executive director . And we did that. We hired her and she's been in place for 2014 through 2016. It's Molly Kampke. Molly? Molly's here. Wonderful lady. I've had the privilege to work with her over those three years and she's just been magnificent. And I want to spend a little bit of time telling you the extraordinary things we've been able to accomplish now that we've had this executive director. So prior to Molly coming in place, the foundation acted primarily as a 501(c)(3) pass-through for various charitable events here in Denton. It included Cinco de Mayo, Juneteenth, and several of the running events that take place. There are administrative costs, as I'm sure you can understand, for handling the $40,000 to $50,000 a year that it takes to handle the monies on these pass-throughs. We serve in a similar role for the city's senior center. We handle another $75,000 to $100,000 for them. So this volunteer board has a lot of responsibilities ensuring that that money is used in the proper way and that we're shepherding it in the way that it's intended. During, well I guess I should say this, that it is a lot of work for a volunteer board to handle. But we're doing it and we're doing it happily. I'm certainly very, very proud of my role and what I'm doing for this organization. But that's not all we do. We also conduct our own fundraising to do and support various other projects. Those projects include fundraising for various things that we support in the community. Prior to Molly, we averaged about $16,000 a year that we raised for various purposes in Denton. Since Molly, she's increased it about 30% her first year, just these kinds of activities, and 25% in the second year. Obviously, there are administrative costs, operating costs to handle this, most particularly where we spend our money is on financial audits. We have to be sure that we're spending the money appropriately and we do that regularly. We also have marketing costs, not so much in the past, but now that we have a day-to-day executive director, she encourages us to market ourselves and market our progress and market what we've been able to accomplish. So this year's budget includes about $7,000 for the audits and another four or five for the marketing efforts. Now that includes no administrative support at all. That administrative support unfortunately falls to Molly and occasionally with some help from city staff, and I'd much rather have her fundraising, but it has to be done. I also offer up my staff, which happens to be just across the street from time to time to help her with mailings and copying and things like that. And we happily do it and I love the community and I want to continue and we will continue supporting that, but there are those administrative challenges. So we still have funds left over though and those funds in the past have been used primarily to fund scholarships for children and needy families who can't afford to participate in fee-based park programming. We understand that there has to be fee-based park programming for lots of reasons. We dealt with that in detail with our board. It's just a reality when you start looking at the dollars, but there are families that can't afford it. And what we want to do and one of the main missions I have in being part of that board is to try and raise money so that every child, regardless of their financial means or situation, has the opportunity to participate in those programs just like those from more fortunate families. Last year, under Molly's guidance, we raised money for scholarships to help 100 families. And I'm very, very, very proud of that. Based on cash on hand this year, in large part again due to Molly's efforts and projected revenue increases that I'm going to talk about a little bit because of what Molly's been doing, I think we can increase that funding by another 25%. So I'm proud and happy of that. Molly can give you the particular figures. She's given them to me and right now I'm blanking on what the number is. But we are going in the right direction here. So roughly 75% of those scholarships are used for summer programming. Obviously that is a time of greater need for those families that need these scholarships because the schools aren't in session now. And there's more time for kids to spend time unsupervised and that's never good. And what we can offer if we can continue to increase our scholarship program is to give them opportunities to participate and to be mentored by the wonderful, excellent people that Emerson has on his staff and that he hires to promote these park programs. But that's not all we've done. In addition to funding scholarships, we've also raised funds for capital projects as well. I'm going to talk about it, Eureka, in a second, but that's not the only project that we have raised money for, for capital projects. Last year we raised $10,000 to provide shade structures for the water park. That was something we didn't have out there. It was something that there was a need for. We had some extra funds. We felt like it was a good use of those funds and we provided them. And Emerson can tell you that it was a really big hit. Not only that, it also produced the positive benefit that they're renting these shade structures. So the Parks Department now has a revenue stream. Again, Emerson knows the details. I don't, but the Parks Department is getting a revenue stream from the shade structures that we've raised the money for. And frankly, it was an amenity that was needed and has been a very nice addition. But of course, I'm sure all of you are aware of Molly's biggest accomplishment, and that was the Eureka Playground. Under Molly's leadership, we raised, I know most of you probably know, but literally $500,000 in cash and in kind donations. Let me tell you, this does not happen without Molly Tempe. This does not do it. We could not have gotten this done based upon where we were with a volunteer board before the city council showed the wisdom to give us the opportunity to show you what we can do with some money. If you haven't been out to this finished playground, you just must go. I've got to tell you, it is the coolest playground ever. And I'm a little biased, of course, but I mean, it is one heck of a great playground. But the build of the playground and the existence of the playground is really only one part of what we accomplished. The bigger thing we accomplished was the community build, the camaraderie, the volunteers that came out to support this project. 3,000 plus people came out to do this over a one-week time period. I don't know if you all had the opportunity to be there for some of it, but it was certainly uplifting for me. And it makes me proud that I've been on the foundation board. It makes me proud to be part of this community. And I just am thrilled by how many kids are going to enjoy this over the years. And I want to say this delicately because I tremendously respect what this council does. I understand because I volunteer a lot of time to this foundation that you all are volunteers as well. And what a tough job you have sitting through council meeting this afternoon. What a responsibility. And a lot of what you're focused on is to try and build satisfaction with city government services. And as a trial lawyer, I can tell you that a lot of the times you get responses to how do we feel about the city. And they remember the five minutes they spent on the phone call instead of three or maybe we could try and cut three to one. And maybe that will make us a little happier. But when people have a positive image of the city when they go into these kind of situations, they get more patience. And anybody who is out there as part of this bill and that saw what we have produced and have been out there with their kids and their grandkids are going to give you the benefit of the doubt. They're not going to come with city staff and with this council and be ready to complain about every little thing that goes wrong. It's sure it's going to happen. But if they have that positive feeling about what this community does as a whole, they're going to say, hey, they 've done a lot for us. And I'll give them a pass for this. And I think you're going to see dividends from that sort of thing. I'd like, if we're ready, Emerson. I don't know if you all know this or not, but DTV has done a really cool video on the bill and I've picked out two minutes and 15 seconds. I cut it as tight as I could. And I really think is we're seeing I'd really encourage you all to see the whole thing. But I don't want to take all that time today. But if we're ready, I'd love if we could play this. I think you I think you all really enjoy it. The ones that go in circles. A twisty slide? Yes. OK. What would you like? Football fields. A couple of things we'll do is try to include the things that are really popular and then also things that are really unique and maybe relevant to local history and just the area in general. So from here, I'll have lists and lists of ideas that the children have shared. I'll sit down and start designing a new playground, trying to include as many of the ideas from the children as we possibly can. We're really talking about doing more than building a playground. We're really building the dreams of children. We're building a stronger community through this process. Mud's caked on our shoes, our pants, on the gloves. Like when we pick things up from the ground, you know, we 're covered in mud, but it's good. When they said rain or shine, that's one thing I'm very happy that they committed to when they were asking for volunteers. And that's one of the reasons why I felt I was going to be here no matter what, because worst case scenario, if a hurricane blasts through, we all just hide under here and we can still eat. Now we're here at the building process. And I look around and I'm reminded of what I love about Denton. This is what makes Denton unique. We have this wonderful sense of community and everyone out here is here because you love this town and you want to get back. Just to look up and see lines of people out there ready to help and they're just, they're here. They're not getting paid. They're here to give their time and make the community a better place. It's definitely overwhelming and I'm so grateful for everyone that's come out. These folks have been working 12 to 14 hour days for six days and they've done a hell of a job. Woo! For me, it's just a huge sense of accomplishment. A lot of pride. Well welcome and what a beautiful, wonderful day when I pulled in. I couldn't find a parking spot. Okay, guys! Wow! I wanted to show the clip of Emerson because I've worked hand in hand with Emerson for 10 years now. And he's just a wonderful man. I can't thank you enough to allow us to, on the foundation, to work with city personnel that have that big a heart. I wanted to show that clip because it wasn't just all about the playground that's out there. It's the inspiration and the feelings and the emotion that I felt, that the volunteers felt, and that city staff felt in what we accomplished out there. Just before the clip of Emerson, there was a clip of Chr issy Maloof. I don't know how many of you know Chrissy. She's a 30-something mom of two who chaired the coordination of volunteer efforts. And Chrissy was motivated to do this, like those kids that were on that tape, because she was out to the first Eureka! Playground, and she loved it. She wanted her kids and her grandkids to have the opportunity to play on it. And the playground had met its time. It was time to move on. And she wanted to be a major part of doing that. Her efforts were absolutely amazing. A pure volunteer. She inspired me, honestly. She really did. Wonderful person. I'd encourage you all to watch the entire thing. If you can watch it without shedding a tear, then you're a lot tougher than I am. It's really worth it. It's really worth it to watch it. Hundreds of kids have already shared their smiles with their parents and their grandparents by playing on this playground already. I don't know if you all have been out there, but that place is packed regularly. And the old playground was, too. And the question I ask myself is just how much community spirit is that going to create over the next 25 or 30 years? That's something that, not to say you shouldn't do the studies and you shouldn't do all this work, but it's something that you cannot replace. We don't do it, but for the Council in 2013, having the courage to say, "Yeah, we're going to allow them to have an executive director so that they can really take this thing off." And I think we have. And I want to share with you where we're at, a little bit of where we're going, and then I'll be specific with what we're asking. If we can keep Molly in her job beyond 2016, and I'll say this, in 2013 the Council said year by year, but we're shooting for three. We'll fund a halftime position at $35,000 a year, and that 's what we've had, and that's what we paid Molly for 2014 through 2016. And I can tell you this, Molly didn't work halftime. She didn't work full-time. She worked full-time plus one. Now, I'm not asking for that kind of funding, but I'm just telling you you got your money's worth from the effort that she put in. And I think if we can do this extended and provide some more funding, I think there's just no telling what this foundation can do . And I want to share with you a little bit about what 2016 looks like and what the next couple of years look like just based on what we know right now. So following up on 2015 and the build of Eureka, Molly's already raised another $100,000, another $100,000 on top of the $500. We've got two basketball courts going up at Lake Forest and Milam Parks that are going to be ready to be played on by early summer. Beyond that $100,000, we've got a group of donors identified by Molly, nurtured by Molly. It started with a very small thing. There were discussions and meetings and that led to one thing and it led to another. This group pushed us over the $500,000 level on Eureka. They then supplied $100,000 for the basketball courts. And this is not hearsay. I was at the meeting myself after Emerson and Molly had direct conversations with them. I had direct conversations with Emerson and with Molly. And this same group, and I'm being careful not to name their names because they ask us not to. They basically want to be anonymous for the most part. And so I think that's the way it is. I think you probably can see on the donor wall that's going up at Eureka a reference that might allow you to make some judgments about that. But there's a group that very much loves Denton. And I mean, honestly, Denton is the kind of community that creates these kind of people. My wife and I moved from Dallas 30 years ago and came here because we felt that spirit of this community. And my daughter is now in Athens, Georgia. Much to our dissatisfaction. Hope she'll get back. We're empty nested. And one of the things I want to do as an empty nested adult is to help this community because it provided a great place to raise my daughter. And I'm very, very proud of that. So this group has expressed interest in donating no less than. $500,000 more over the next 2 to 3 years. This single group alone. And that's probably a little low based on what now they've asked us for some ideas and we're still in discussions about it. Frankly, and you all know this business people on this. These folks are business people, obviously very good business people, and they want to see us show results. I think they were very impressed by Eureka. I think they want to see us get the basketball courts up on time on schedule. But I feel pretty good that this is going to happen. The sort of momentum that we have created with Eureka is something that I don't want to lose. And we simply cannot do this job without an executive director cannot be done. I was on the board for nearly seven years where we struggled hard to write, try and raise money. And we were happy to raise $15,000, $20,000 to cover our overhead and get some scholarship funding out to these kids that needed the money to participate in these programs. We can do much, much more, I think. The request that we're making is that the city increase its commitment for another three years. Now, we understand it's year to year and you can tell us no after one year, but alike commitment and increase it from $ 35,000 to $77,000. So here's where we came up with this number. The $35,000 really moves Molly from halftime to three quarter time plus a 3% increase from her. Now, the accountants at the city are crunching these numbers. I didn't come here making this up. They crunched them for me. So I'm just regurgitating what they're saying and you guys can certainly confirm it directly. The request also includes another $15,000 for part time administrative help. We think that we can maybe get a part time UNT, TWAU student to work by the hour as needed to provide some administrative support. Otherwise, we're just catching where we catch can with support from my staff when city people can come in and jump in and help a little bit here on some of the administrative stuff. This will allow Molly to avoid having to do that and she can actually do what she's best at, which is to raise money . I know it's no small request, but I think we've delivered a , Molly has delivered a pretty major bang for the buck. And so I hope you will find it as a reasonable request and whatever you can do for us, we'll certainly appreciate it. I want to thank you for the opportunity. I have a question, Councilmember Rodin. Thanks for your presentation and the video. Very moving to kind of hear from your perspective of just the community involvement and what it means for our community. It's fantastic. So thank you for that. Just curious, because I imagine this decision ultimately being made during budget time. If you guys have put together this from a ROI perspective, I remember being here on council when we initially adopted this $35,000, which if you think about it, from what has been raised in these last three years from an ROI perspective of public investment in order to really magnify and increase private investment in what is ultimately public goods. You can't beat that. So I think what would be helpful for us just as part of this ongoing discussion is somebody just to put that ROI down on paper, even projected ROI over the next three years . If we had in this direction with the $77,000 plus the $15, 000, I think we took a bet, a gamble on it, and it certainly has paid off. And so it would just be nice to see those figures in writing. Any other questions? Well, I tell you what, thank you so much for what you guys did. Oh, Johnson, I'll get you after my comments. Okay. The time I was out there, I tried to contribute, but when it takes you three hours to cut a board at an angle and put a notch in, you do your best. You just do your best. But when I really did pull up out there for the grand opening where I almost broke the zipline, I couldn't find a parking place, and it was just unbelievable to see how many people. And what I heard was that wasn't just because of that day. That's the way it was many, many days. So thank you so much for your work and your hard work and dedication, and Molly, for your work and dedication, all the board members for what you guys contribute. Because in the end, we got a $500,000 to $600,000 facility that was basically gifted to us by the citizens of this community. So I really want to thank you guys for that so much. And thank you, Kevin. That's a good point to really put that down as far as that rate of return. I hate to reduce everything to numbers, but it sure it will be impressive to see it. I can tell you that right now. So thank you, Mark, for your leadership in this and your commitment to the board for so many, many years. And to see it go from its infancy to now where it is now, that's just got to be quite rewarding. It's been my pleasure. This is a great community, and this is just one way we can show how great it is. And I appreciate your words for Emerson, because Emerson, you do a great job with the parks, and you're very dedicated and committed to our parks and just improving those. So thank you very much for that as well. Thank you very much. Thank you all for your consideration. You bet. We'll go on to the next item, which is Receive Report and Hold Discussion. Give staff direction regarding the parks and recreation departments and your report. Thank you, Mayor. And we're now going to have the opportunity to hear from Mr. Emerson Voral. Thank you, Em erson. Well, we've made it through strategic plans, open data, mosquitoes. Now we're going to talk about the good, how we're going to fix the bad, and a little bit of ugly. And I'm not referring to three of the four assistant city managers either. Let's see. All right, so first off, when I talk about our department, some awards and recognition, some good things that have happened in the last year. Waterworks Park was named by the good people of Denton as the best children's birthday party venue. North Lakes was the runner up in the best of Denton Health and Fitness Club. That's quite an accomplishment when you figure, when you look at the for profit facilities that we 're up against. That's quite a feather in our cap, we think. We had Jim Shoemaker, Caroline Seward, Monica Martin, Sarah Travis all receive their national certified parks and recreation professional certifications. That's a big deal. Our marketing staff received so many trophies, we got to build them a new trophy case. Delique Hovey graduated from the Leadership Denton program. We had folks become certified playground inspectors. The park maintenance group placed second in the state in the parks rodeo. Janie McLeod was the chair of the United Way for the city. Callie Flewellen was a leader on loan. Monica Martin, Caroline Seward, Maria Dennison presented at a regional aquatic conference. Jim Mays presented at a regional, I'm sorry, a state trail conference. So you can see our folks have been out there, they've been winning awards, they've been studying, learning, improving themselves, doing good things. In addition to their day to day. So let's talk about the good. Some of the projects that we've completed. You just heard all about Eureka. Wow. That's all I can say is wow. Civic Center Pool, the top right and the bottom left pictures, although they may not look like it. I took those Saturday, I'm sorry, Sunday out there at the pool. That renovation project is going great guns, almost ready. That's a CIP project. It will open on Memorial Day. Right, aquatics? Okay, it will open on Memorial Day weekend. That's a wonderful renovation to a facility that's been around for a lot of years. Oh, and I meant to tell you all to just to be contrary, if you have questions, go ahead and ask them while I'm doing this. Don't hold them for the end, please. Another project we're real proud of, the golf driving range . We completely refurbished this facility. Took it back in house, took the operation of it back in house. Most of that was paid for out of the rec fund as opposed to general fund dollars. That's a project that turned out very, very nicely. It's been very busy out there. Here's a fun one, Fred Moore Park. We partnered with the folks at Serve Denton and at Target for the funding for this project as well as the labor for this project. One of the best grills or smokers in the city. It is embedded in a significant amount of concrete, so don 't get any ideas about wandering away with it. In addition to that, that group assembled the bleachers that you see there. We had new concrete pads poured underneath it. Those are around the large stage facility at Fred Moore Park. Great partnership with the folks from Target. Like I say, their dollars as well as their equity and a lot of other folks in town that came in and participated with that one as well. Emerson, just to give a little background on the bleachers, that was a project with the Denton Together Coalition and Serve Denton. We had, it was probably 50 to 70 junior high kids in the Civic Center putting those bleachers together. They knew more how to do it. I told you I can't even cut a board in a notch, so I wasn't any help. But it was amazing to see them get in there and got it done . So really appreciated that. Wonderful group. Council asked us to use some of that tree fund money and plant some trees. The dog on it, we did. This picture was from yesterday. This is out at South Lakes Park. All down the trail there. You can see that all those trees are irrigated as well. This is North Lakes Park, down parallel to Windsor. We're supposed to interrupt, right? Okay, sure, go ahead. I exit Southridge all the time. That's South Lakes. It looks awesome. Thank you. It really does. You guys did it pretty quick, it seemed. But, yeah, it was all laid out and done very well. Well, good job. Mayor Pro Tem. How do you get that picture? Drone. Bucket truck. 80 feet in the air. Oh, bucket truck. Okay, I thought it would be a drone. We'll take you any time you want to go. So that's 445 trees between four projects that we identified using tree fund money. North Lakes, South Lakes, North Point Park, and Carl Young Park as well. So one of the other projects that we took on, this was a year ago. This is what it looks like today. Well, at least it did this morning. Quaker Town Park, we put it back together after Arts and Jazz Fest last year. That was no small project either. Mayor Pro Tem. And looking at the weather forecast, you could have a big job ahead again. After this was over last year, you said that you were going to ask the Festival Foundation to do some type of a bond, insurance bond, to cover that. Did we do anything like that? We had quite a few discussions internally with legal and risk management. The bonding and the insurance don't really appear to be beneficial to the city. We're developing a contract that we're going to go to the event organizers with. And if we get to a point similar to what you saw on that first slide, where we anticipate that type of weather and that type of effect, they'll have the option at that point to either suspend the event or commit to the funds to rehabilitate the park when it's over. We don't want to be responsible for turning down or shutting down their event unless it's a true public safety issue. We don't want that liability and that blame, but we want to make them responsible for the damages, if you will. But we don't have that new contract in place. It's not in place at the moment, no. When do you anticipate that to happen? Well, John Cabrales and I are going to head out to the park here as soon as I can spring him from this meeting, and we 're going to see what we can do about that. All right. Lake Forest down on the south side of town. The rains last spring actually damaged the dam down there. The folks in drainage came out and assisted us with doing repairs to that dam. Another great partnership within the city. Fred Moore Park. You can see the church behind this ball field. We received complaints and comments from the church that the foul balls were going over and hitting the church. We used some park dedication, I'm sorry, some park development money. Went in and actually completely rebuilt all the fences, the backstop, the bleachers, the dugouts. We haven't had any complaints since that time. On to some programming type issues within our organization. In 2014, we hosted nine tournaments in the city, softball tournaments, certified tournaments. In 2016, we have, at this point, we have 27 tournaments on the book. Those tournaments put heads in beds. They bring people into town. They buy gas. We've turned in the reports. We turn them in quarterly to council. You can see the economic impact that those tournaments have on the city, the positive. One of the things that we're asking for in the budget this year is we're asking for a couple of field service workers to help pull some of the slack. All of this is on the weekend. All of this work is on the weekend. That's when the tournaments take place. We're rolling up a lot of overtime to have folks in to stay and work these tournaments and then be there Friday and Saturday nights to prepare the fields for the next morning. Mayor Pro Tem. Are you thinking about completing a request for hot funds to help with that also? We can't use hot funds for athletic fields. Even for overtime for tournaments that bring in heads to beds? No, sir. No kidding. I don't write the rules. Another programming positive for us in 2005, 2006, we lost some personnel at the recreation centers. One of the programs that got cut was our therapeutic recreation programming. We're bringing that back online. We're actually asking in the next budget, we're asking to convert a halftime position to a full-time position to help with the programming involved with this. Councilmember Briggs. Is this for the adaptive recreation? Does that fall in line with the same? Yes, ma'am. Because we've had several parents, and I'm on Ditten Moms Group, and it's actually been a request. So I'm just glad it's in here. And along with our programming issues, hopefully not an issue, this is a real positive. We took a vacant position just last week. We received permission and converted one of our vacant positions to an assistant director within our department and promoted DeLee Covey. She's the one on the right in this picture, to assistant director, and she's going to be responsible for all of the leisure services operations in our organization. This is a wonderful move for us. We're really glad to have DeLee as part of our organization , and we're real excited to have her especially in this position now. All right. Coming soon to a park near you. There it is, the wave pool. At the end of this season at Waterworks Park, we will start construction and complete it by spring of '17. Brand new wave pool and a new full service concession. There will be in the budget process, our budget request this year, there will be a number of FTEs that will be turned in associated with this. My staff promises me, right, at least full recovery of those costs. And we think there will be some profit involved in this or some revenue above costs with this as well. The figures they've shown me have been very, very conservative, and we're real excited about this project. We're in final design right now. We'll go out to bid for this in the very near future. This is a CIP project. Next one up is the splash park or spray ground that's going to be installed in Carl Young Park. We're in final design stages with this right now. We had to slow down a little bit and figure out exactly which way council want us to go with the restroom facilities. We have to put a restroom in with this project as well so the kids have got a place to change and to take care of their business. Because this will be a little longer stay at this facility than what they would be in a standard neighborhood park. But this is a CIP and a partial funding from CDBG funds, and we're rocking forward with the design on this one. It will not be open this spring, we hope by midsummer. Maybe, maybe depending on what issues we run into with planning, this project may be up and running. >> Mayor Pro Tem. >> Thank you, Mayor. Is that designed that it could be expandable? >> This particular one is not. We kicked that around quite a bit. And our feeling is rather than overload this park and to continue to expand on it, we would rather spread the wealth around. We suspect that this is going to be a very, very successful activity location. But what we want to do is, at the risk of sounding terribly gritty, we want to build more and spread it around a little bit. >> Are you planning on putting some type of a covered p avilion close to it? >> One of the projects that the Park Foundation is talking about being part of in the next year is funding shade for this project. >> Having a grandchild who's had a couple of birthday parties at a similar facility in Dallas, the pavilion is very helpful and a way to preserve it in advance so that the mothers do not have fights on Saturdays for the birthday parties. It would be very helpful. It can get pretty ugly out there. >> I imagine. All right. This is a project that Mark Culp spoke with you about. On the left side of the screen, as I'm looking at it, is Lake Forest Park. On the right side is Milam Park. These are the projects that were a donation, a gift to the city. I can tell you that the basketball court on the left, there 's actually a shade structure, I'm sorry, a pavilion just off the screen to the right of it that has all the concrete all poured underneath it. And as of this morning, that court is now orange and black. It looks real similar to the school colors of Oklahoma State University. There'll be a basketball court as soon as things get dry enough that will be installed at Milam Park as well to go with that shelter. That shelter will have concrete underneath it and we'll install rock around the posts to dress that shelter up a little bit. Teen Council is another initiative that we're working on. The applications for the Teen Council are out there in the community right now. They close the end of this week. We'll get those to council to let you all make some selections for that Teen Council. We'll fill out, round out the rest of that Teen Council with the expectation that it will be up and functioning when school starts this fall. Budget package, we've got a halftime temp seasonal request in our budget to help facilitate this programming as well. All right, a council request to look at some additional work at the cemeteries, some additional maintenance of the cemeteries. We've submitted a supplemental request. What we're saying in the first year is come in and hire a firm to do a full inventory, including some ground penet rating radar. You have to keep in mind how old these cemeteries are. You have to keep in mind also that some of the records were lost and some fires along the way before we inherited these cemeteries. We don't know exactly where, nobody knows exactly where all of the graves are out here. So we'd like to improve on that. We'd like the consultant to come in and lay out the map and lay out a roadmap for us of how we proceed with the maintenance of these cemeteries. And more specifically, the infrastructure, the stones, the crypts, what that would look like. We don't have experts on historic cemetery maintenance on staff. So we'd like somebody to lay that path out for us and then we'll see where it goes from there. Trail connectivity. I'm sorry. I was going to make a point. Some of us want to invest in parks for our children. Some of us want to invest in bike lanes for ourselves. Some of us want to invest in cemeteries for our future. Moving right along. Moving right along. No, no, no. I don't recognize Mayor Pro Tem. Go. Trail connectivity, another big issue with council and all of our citizens. All right. So what you're looking at from the north, you're looking at the end of, I just went completely blank. Wait, it's in my notes. Evers Parkway, okay? The school you see in the background on the left is Evers Elementary. We've been fortunate enough to receive a $1.3 million grant and we're trying desperately to get this, get out and bid so that we don't lose the grant. It starts at Evers Park, goes up through the neighborhood. It gives the kiddos, I'm going to do this with a laser pointer so everybody can see. Maybe, there we go. I'll lose it on the screen, I lied to you. Let's do it this way. This is Evers Elementary. This is a drainage area, a detention area. This is a channel. The kids that live up in these neighborhoods on the other side of that channel have no way to get to Evers Elementary , the library or the park. Without crossing that ditch or walking down the shoulder of Locust, there is no sidewalk on Locust. This will give them that path. So there'll be a bridge here. We'll continue the sidewalk up around the city drainage facility. This is North Point Park right here. We'll do another bridge here to cross the channel. Go on up to Hercules. Come on down to Nicosia. There's some funding in this grant to do a hawk signal, that's a pedestrian signal. This spur of it will go up to the UNT Discovery Park. The Vela Soccer Complex on down 77 through the park. Connect to the Windsor Bike Lane and connect to some trails in the park as well. This, the construction drawings went over to TechStat on Monday for their review to move forward with bidding on this project. Councilmember Johnson. So who got us the grant? Which one of my staff members did? James Mays. Awesome. Thank you. Yep. More trail connectivity. This is another bucket truck picture. You're at the intersection of Windsor and Hinkle looking west. This green space that you see will become a new community in the very near future. Jim Mays has been negotiating with the owner of this property to take their park dedication, park development fees, and continue the trail that the developer of this property is going to be required to build parallel to Windsor through this area here. We'll continue that trail over the drainage ditch. This becomes Bowling Green Park on the far side of these trees. We would connect that trail to the sidewalk in Bowling Green Park and then try to run that trail all the way up to it eventually connects with North Lakes Recreation Center. Another great gain in that neighborhood. North Lakes Dog Park, the facility you see there is looking from the south. That's the McNatt Animal Adoption Facility. We have the funding in place. We're waiting for a little bit of time to get our folks ready. And we'll do this one with in-house staff. We're going to build the city's second dog park out adjacent to the McNatt facility. Fred Moore Park Restroom. If you're familiar with Fred Moore Park, you know just to the left of this picture, to this restroom, there is a restroom built into the Fred Moore Annex building. It accesses from the exterior. We have worked with the community now to get permission to tear this structure down. That's another big step in the right direction. It has not been used in probably eight or ten years. We had to get the community behind us and get their buy-in to allow us to remove this facility. We've done that now with Councilmember Roden's help. Thank you, Kevin. And this one's had all the surveys and testing done and it 's just about to go by the wayside. The next three projects are CDBG-funded projects. They have been approved by the CDBG board and will be coming to Council in the very near future. If you all approve these, this is Fred Moore on the north side of the creek. So the right side of this picture is the drainage channel. The left side is the cemetery. We've had requests from the community to turn this into an athletic field, not lighted, but improved athletic field so that those kiddos can play some football and play some soccer and some other sports out here. The CDBG board has voted this one, voted positively recommended. Going to bring a recommendation to you all for approval. We'll take out that slab that's in the middle of this picture. We'll take out the sidewalk that bisects this and run it back down along the creek. We will not remove any trees, but we will move those light poles. We'll fix the drainage down the middle of it, irrig ate this and turn it into an athletic field. There it is, the Quaker Town Park Restroom, the infamous. We have received funding. Let me rephrase that, I'm sorry. The CDBG board will recommend to Council to grant funding to have us replace this facility. I don't want to say this thing is old, but there's a great picture in Jim May's office of Floyd Smith. It's literally Floyd in the bottom of the Civic Center pool pouring the concrete in the bottom of the pool. That picture is dated 1965 and this building looked old in the background of that picture then. It's not ADA accessible. I've had citizens describe it as third world. We have a chance to improve our system here. The third project that receives CDBG recommendation for funding, this is the Londonderry Playground. This is at the far north end of South Lakes Park. Since we've rent through the CIP, this was not a playground that was included in the CIP. The last couple of years have been a little bit tough on this one. You can see there's a panel there, a sheet of plywood blocking what should be a slide. This rascal got old on us in a hurry and it just needs to be replaced. Again, Jim Mays went out and wrote a CDBG grant and it will come to you all for approval, hopefully. Okay, Downtown Pocket Park. This is property that we bought a couple of years ago. This is what it looks like today, literally today. There's a design concept that is just a concept, folks. Don 't hold us to it, but that's what that property could look like. This is not a funded project right now, but this is one that's out there spinning around in request, again, from council for some pocket parks, maybe some green space downtown. This is one that's out there waiting to fund. Pretty much all familiar with the Firefighters Memorial Bell. This is another project that we'll be working on and we are working on right now trying to get this one up and going. It's funded with CIP, Public Arts CIP. This is a great project. We're really looking forward to this one. Couple of challenges ahead. And this next slide that I'm going to show you and talk about, I want to be real clear before I bring it up. This is not a shot at our police department at all. All of those folks have been very, very helpful. They've been great partners, but we have some problems and we have some issues and we have with the homeless. And it's a big issue. It's a broad issue that there's no silver bullet, no quick fix. But I will tell you how it impacts parks. This picture was Sunday morning in the park. We have issues. We got CDBG funding to replace a shelter in Mack Park. There's a group of homeless folks who have kind of taken that shelter over. We're a little bit limited in what we can do to ask those folks to leave. We used to serve 40 to 50 meals a day there during the summer as part of the summer food program. We now serve five to ten because the folks don't want to go to that shelter. Moms don't want their kids at that shelter . It's a big problem. I'm just making you all aware of it. We 've got work to do. We have issues with folks. There are no picnic tables under the pavilion at the Civic Center. They become beds. We have to be very careful at the Civic Center. Sometimes some of these folks get a little bit on the sneaky side, prop open some doors when we're not looking, and we wind up with folks in there at night or we wind up with one staff person in there in the evening hours letting walkers go. And there are people in the building that we're not aware are in the building. This is an issue and we all need to work together and figure out some good solutions. I don't have those solutions. I don't know what they are. I 'll tell you we'll commit to work with anybody that wants to . But it's an issue for us. All right. So anybody know what this represents? That would be the last indoor recreational space built in this city. In the 1990 census, there were approximately 64,000 people living in Denton. So we've doubled in population. We've added no indoor gym nasium space since 1989. And the last thing that we've got going here is the fact that we can't, we're having a hard time finding summer staff. So if you know somebody that's looking for a summer job, put us in contact with them, please, by all means. Along the lines of that gym space, I've got to say it out loud. The 2030 plan says the population in our fair city is going to double by 2013. That means I need pretty much another one of everything that's on the ground today. I need another one in the next 15 years. If the economy stays good, that might be three bond elections over a 15-year period. So in three bond elections, I need to replace everything that we have on the ground today. We've got work to do. Questions? All right. Mayor Pro Tem. Did you mean replace or duplicate? I mean duplicate. Okay. Any other questions? Seeing none. Thank you. Thank you. Let's take a 10-minute break to 5.15 before we hear out the last presentation for work session. All right. Welcome back. We're reconvening in our Denton City Council meeting work session Tuesday, April 26, 2016. It is 5.17. Our next item, work agenda item is 2F, receive report, hold discussion against staff direction regarding a professional service agreement related to the collection of delinquent taxes on behalf of the city of Denton. Thank you, Mayor. I'm going to ask Brian Langley, our assistant city manager and chief financial officer, if he would present this item for your consideration. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Mr. Campbell. Mayor, members of the council, I promise to not mention key focus areas, strategic outcomes or mosquitoes. So we'll go through this presentation relatively quickly. I do want to spend a few minutes today talking to you about our delinquent tax collection services. I have a very short presentation. Just to give you an overview of what I'm about to review with you is talk a little bit about the terms and conditions of the current contract that we have in place. Discuss some of the key aspects of the request for qualifications or RFQ that we sent out earlier this year. Review for you the proposals that we received and share with you the evaluation criteria that we used. And then finally show you the staff recommendation that was provided to you. The current contract was originally awarded to Saucon Bor oughs back in July of 2005. A new contract was approved in November of 2008 and that was following an extensive RFP evaluation. The initial term expired in June of 2011, but it was extended through June of 2016. So that's why we're here today is that contract is expiring at the end of June. And therefore we wanted to have a process in place to select a new contract going forward. All fees for tax collection services are paid directly by delinquent taxpayers. They're not paid with the city of Denton does not write a check to any of the firms that collect taxes for property taxes. Those are all paid by the delinquent taxpayers. A 20% fee is added to delinquent accounts for that purpose to pay for the delinquent fees. Some of the requests for call qualifications key aspects that I want to mention to you. We did send a notice of an RFQ back in February on February 9th. Proposals were due back on March 15th. The RFQ requested a variety of different information. Some of the highlights of that was we wanted to talk about the collection performance history for each of the firms. And to have them to try to provide similar clients to the city of Denton in terms of demographics and collection patterns and so forth. We also wanted the qualifications of each of the law firms. We wanted them to show the evidence of their practices and procedures for delinquent tax collections. And finally, we wanted to see some references for each of the firms. We did receive 4 proposals back from the McCreary, Purdue, Saco and Burroughs and Limeberger firms. Incidentally, these are the same 4 firms that proposed back in 2008. They all do a lot of work around the Metroplex. In tax collections, the Purdue firm did partner with a different local firm than they had suggested back in 2008. McCreary firm had suggested the same partnership with the Hayes firm that they had suggested back in 2008. The evaluation criteria that we used were the following 3 metrics. We looked at the demonstrated qualifications, experience and credentials of the firms. And that was 20% of the evaluation. The historical performance levels and demonstrated capabilities was 60% of the evaluation. And then finally, delinquent tax collection procedures for accounts, technological capabilities, available legal services, the oral presentations that they made to us and their overall response was another 20%. So that's the criteria that was used. The panel consisted, the evaluation panel consisted of myself, Chuck Springer, as you know, our Director of Finance, Tony Puente, the Assistant Finance Director, Elton Brock, the Purchasing Manager. We reviewed as a panel each written proposal in detail. We also conducted oral interviews with each firms over a four hour period. So each firm was given roughly about an hour to meet with us and go through their proposal. And we were given an opportunity to ask questions of them and they had an opportunity to ask questions of us. We provided an independent review of all proposals with the intent of receiving the most tax, most effective tax collection services possible for the City of Denton. That was the intent of the panel and the process that we used to try to provide the best services that we could. So after all of that work and process, staff is recommending the firm of Saco and Burroughs for the delin quent tax collection services contract. And there's a number of reasons for that that I'll briefly provide to you. In our view, the company or the firm has a strong history of collection performance and responsiveness. They were very instrumental in leading an effort to collect some difficult property tax accounts. The new view of molecular accounts related to a radioactive site that was in town, they were very instrumental in getting the collections on that. And they've also been instrumental in working with Textodot on some of the property condemnation cases that they've had to pursue. They've also been very proactive on bankruptcy accounts. And there are some specific instances of some accounts that we're aware of that they've protected the city's interest in bankruptcy proceedings. They've also been very active over the last almost 20 years from 1987 to 2015 and initiating more than 65% of the delin quent tax collection auction proceedings in Denton County. The one firm, Saco and Burroughs, has been responsible for more than 65% of those. They also have evidence of assisting taxpayers with information and payment arrangements. And we found that these are important details when you do have people who are having difficulty paying taxes. They need to get in touch with someone, someone here locally is generally preferable so they can work out an arrangement, try to understand their situation and their options. They also currently have the contract with the Denton Independent School District, which in our view leverages Denton's collections. And there's two reasons that we think that is the case. The first is that by having combined delinquencies for both school district and city taxes, it optimizes the collections for the firm to actually chase some of those larger accounts with us included in the mix. And then secondly, we feel like if there are two different delinquent accounts, one for the school district and one for the city, the city is always going to be the lower of the two accounts and therefore we will feel like we'll get stronger collections just being part of that same proceeding. As I mentioned to you, their principal tax collection attorneys work in Denton and maintain a strong local presence to assist taxpayers and staff. And we do think that is a benefit to the city. The McCreary firm received the second highest ranking from the panel. They have a contract with Denton County. We thought that was very favorable. The local affiliated law firm, in our view, will have a more limited role in providing collection services. One of the things that we'd asked for the McCreary firm to do was to provide us with their collection data for the county, who they collect for, for just the city of Denton accounts that they collect for. And they were not able to do that. So I couldn't compare their collection performance directly against our city of Denton collection performance. So that made it difficult to do that. Something that's information we certainly wanted, but they indicated they were not able to provide that. With all of this said, I do want to tell you the rankings are inherently subjective in nature. The service offerings of all of these firms are very similar. All firms are capable of performing delinquent tax collections. All are qualified. They all know what they're doing in this business. And any of them would be a well qualified firm. So the purpose of this presentation is to get some direction from the council on which firm you'd like to award the contract to. After your direction, we'd like to move forward with bringing a contract forward at the next available meeting, either May 3rd or the one following that. And the contract would become effective on July 1st. So that is my presentation. I'll be happy to answer any questions. I know we have several members in the audience from these different firms that are here today as well. And if the council would like to hear from them, they are available. Council Member Briggs. Have we ever thought about doing this in-house or looked at that in comparison? Well, the way the law is written is that you can't charge the collection fee if it's an in-house legal staff member. That's my understanding. Well, part of my concern is the 20% fee. Usually when someone cannot pay their taxes, it's because they're down on their luck and they're having issues and then adding that fee on top of it. So I'm just curious about that. Right. Council Member Wasney. Could you pull up Exhibit 7? It's the evaluation matrix. Do you have that in your PowerPoint? I have it as a handout. Maybe we can zoom in on that. It might be a little quicker. I can get to it from the Internet. So if you look at the 100 versus the 95, it looks like the 5% difference falls under collection procedures, technology , legal services, and overall response. So one of the things that you said was really important to this whole matrix of finding someone to fulfill this contract was local presence. And I do know that McCreary has had an office down at the actual tax office since 1985 with four full-time employees down there. So this is 2006. Do the math. What's that? 30 years. So that they do have a local presence, have had a local presence with the four full-time employees down there at the tax office. They rent space in the building and they have their employees there. And so that's item one. Item two, there is a local presence because they're tied to a local law firm as well. But more important than being tied to the local law firm is having those four full-time employees on site at the tax office. And I think that that is a bonus and something that I don't know if the staff weighed that in their considerations. I did find in all the backup material, McCreary's county tax collection percentage, and it's 68%. So it is there. You want to comment on that? If I could, that is the entire county, not just Denton. And so the comparison we were looking for was their collection rate for just City of Denton County, for the county, just our geographic boundaries, not the entire Dent on County area. That way we would have an apples to apples comparison of their collection performance on the same accounts that Saco and Burroughs have been collecting. We were not able to get that. And then one last point, Burroughs and Saco is also collecting for the Denton ISD, but McCreary is also collecting for Denton County. So for me, that's equal weight there in terms of trying to weigh. So I guess my specific question is, because otherwise they both get 100%. What is the 5% and how did staff do the 15 and not the 20? We looked at all of these factors that I have on slide eight. Those were really the primary ones. It was not so much about the local presence. Local presence is one of those. But all of these issues came into play in determining what we felt like was the best value for the organization and for the city. The other aspect of it that we looked at is from a technological standpoint, we were concerned that they could not pull out of their system collection information just for the city of Denton accounts that they've been collecting on for the county. Again, it's a very small margin of difference between the firms, but those are some of the reasons why. As a panel, we felt like it was slightly lower. Councilmember Rhoad. RFPs and RFQs are usually handled on a consent agenda. Why are we digging into the weeds on this one? Was there some specific request from council that caused us to have a presentation like this versus putting it on a consent agenda? If I could, Brian, we had sent, I think, an informal staff report outlining the criteria, the process, essentially as Brian has gone over it here and had requests from, I guess, two or three members of the council that they'd rather discuss this in a work session first. So we pulled it off the consent agenda and off the agenda altogether until we got some direction from the council. So for the sake of just understanding why we're approaching it this way, I'd be curious to hear from my fellow council members who requested that, what they were intrigued about with this to approach it in this manner. Sure. I was one of those. Based on the informal staff report, it seemed like there might have been based upon the wording about the 20 percent , because I know 20 percent isn't set by the state. That's the maximum that a firm could offer to charge less than 20 percent. I mean, that's basically the statute. So based upon that wording, I was curious if there were, because it said we couldn't consider price because the state sets the fee in the informal staff report. So I thought, well, did someone submit something less than 20 percent? Because that was, I mean, the law is not that it's set at 20 percent, but that's just what everybody charges because they say that's the max. So that's really my question is also, we tend to always go to the max. And I'm not sure why that is unless it's just once you set that precedent, then you just don't want to back off of that. So that was one reason not having seen the actual proposals that I didn't know for sure. And also, I guess for me, you've talked about collection rates at the city level. So if a collection rate dropped by a percent, do we know what value that is, monetary value that is? Yes. Just a moment. I'll quote for you the two figures for 2014, the amount collected was three hundred and fifty nine thousand dollars for 2014. And prior accounts combined is four hundred and ninety three thousand dollars. So a percent lower would be forty nine hundred dollars. Right. That's correct. And so the 20 percent is off of the entire collection. Let's just say five hundred thousand, then that'd be what, a hundred thousand, I guess. And I guess I didn't know until now that one of the other firms had a presence at the county. I mean, I thought I'd heard that, but I didn't know that they had a presence at the county. That's the slide I went through with you, slide nine. They do have a contract. McCreary does have a contract with Denton County. No, I'm saying that they did that they had a presence actually in the tax building. So, yeah, Councilmember Rhoad, that was that was my question was the pricing number one and some of those financial figures. Councilmember Hawkins. Yeah, Brian on businesses registered in Texas, the only firm there, Purdue, Brandon, Fielder, you know, minor ing ester. It shows that they're not registered in Texas. Where did that come from? Because I think that they are registered in Texas. Councilmember Hawkins, can you help me understand what you 're looking at? I'm not sure. On Exhibit 7. I just wanted to make sure that all things are fair there. Business registered in Texas. It's that last check mark. Brian, it does not have a check mark. Oh, it's on the evaluation matrix. I don't know if that's potentially a typo. I don't recall. I have to take a look at that. Okay, that's an interest. Thank you. Sure, if you could. Yeah, we'll pick that. We'll pick those up. You bet. Thank you. You're good. Councilmember Johnson. Yeah, a couple of questions and comments. So if I'm understanding it correct, Brian, the 20% is not 20% over and above what the person owed in their taxes. It's actually a percentage of what's collected. Is that correct? Or no? It's a percentage of what's collected above and beyond. If they owe $1,000, they would have to pay $1,000 plus another 20% of $1,200. That's what I thought. Okay, I just was misunderstanding the $100,000 of the $500. Yeah. Secondly, a clarification on that. You mentioned that McCre ary couldn't provide the county collection performance information. Is that because they're contractually bound to not be able to do that? Or was it just that they couldn't slice out the piece we wanted? My understanding is that they could not get that data out of their system. Okay. Just in that particular format. And help me understand on the, in other words, because when I read it, I thought indicator of past performance. You know, I would think about, you know, like, have you built a building like this before? Where are they? Have you delivered on time? What's your on time delivery? What's your these? So when I think about indication of past performance, I would just think not necessarily how are you performing here because you haven't you've never collected them here. But what's your performance overall based on other municipalities or whatever else? That's what I thought it meant in there. Well, I think each of the firms can provide collection data for other clients that they have. There's no question about that. The comparability of that information is really, really difficult because of the different demographics of the communities, different issues involved, the types of accounts, how much is how much is business, personal property, how much is commercial. So comparing Flower Mound against Carrollton or Garland against Denton, it's very, very difficult. And that's why we wanted to see if they could that apples to apples comparison. Okay, so those are my questions. Here's my comment. This will be now, I think, the third time in the last couple of months where now we had the first time that I remember a contract had been awarded. Somebody that didn't get the bid complained, filed a complaint or wanted to complain and then we ended up in a council meeting kind of digging in the weeds on the bids and all that stuff. And so I know this hasn't been awarded yet. I was on a consent agenda. Here's what I don't want to do. I don't want us up here because I Councilmember Roden said it when we were we were talking about that one that day is that here's what I predict will happen. Staff is going to go do their job. Staff is going to award a contract or recommend awarding of a contract. Somebody is going to call a council member. We're going to start wanting to dig into the details of the bids and all that stuff. And so what you're saying, what you predicted has come true . This is the third one, I think, if I'm remembering correctly, in a very short period of time. So when I got the informal staff report, I was confused a little bit by the 20% set by the state and I'm all about competition. And so I did ask some questions about is that a set fee? Can people compete? Could somebody say I'll do it for 18%? How does that work? But having said all that, I'm getting uncomfortable a little bit with, you know, we've had some conversations about should council members be able to sit in staff meetings. And so now what I'm seeing is we're now starting to second guess staff on contract awards. I'm not saying it's not this is just me. I don't want to start doing that. I don't want to spend a bunch of our time doing that because, you know, I feel like if this guy doesn't direct his staff and they don't do the job right, then ultimately he's got to answer to us. But I don't want us to start getting into the details of how you measured and how Elton did his job and all those sort of things. So I'm more about the process, wanting to make sure that we if we want to change criteria, we want to question the process and change the process next time or whatever it was. I would advocate for that. I don't want us to get in a situation where we're always now, you know, trying to call the plays on Monday. The game was on Sunday, if that makes any sense to anybody. Thanks. Well, it does. But I must say I don't necessarily agree with that analysis from my perspective. I mean, I don't think that just because I mean, the situation we had before where there was an award of a contract, there was a protest that to me that's very different than here. There was a recommendation. We sent out requests for qualifications. And so I hear what you're saying. I'm not worried about that. I mean, it's basically up to us to decide the contracts. And if some for some reason I would rather award a contract to someone else based upon a certain set of criteria, I need to find make sure that I have those questions answered . So I'm not worried about all of a sudden we're going to start deciding all these consent agenda item contracts. But I mean, if we have questions, I guess we have questions . So but I get I get your concern. Absolutely. Any other questions for staff? I guess, you know, I guess for me as I as a research law, I guess I get confused about the 20 percent because that is the maximum. And I guess everybody wants to get the maximum. But when I think about our citizens, it's like, well, why are we saying we're going to award the maximum amount allowed by the state? I guess and part of the weeds is to understand that process , because I don't know if this is primarily a software program that can send out letters or if there's actually a certain amount of trial appearances, which do cost more money. So I think in some respects to understand exactly what we 're we're going to say what we're charging, what's being charged for our citizens to have a clear understanding of what exactly that includes. So that was I mean, the 20 percent really was the thing that triggered me just by the wording. I thought somebody submitted a different price. And for clarification, Mayor, that the 20 percent was what I started digging into. Yeah, I would rather what I'm advocating for is I would rather not. You're right. We haven't we haven't awarded the contract and sent agenda item. I totally get it. I'm more talking about our process. So I would rather have those sort of things may be vetted having staff conversations and some some of those things. You know, hey, maybe you guys go back out. We got these folks all sitting here and you're right. And that I think one of them we had awarded a contract and one of them, I don't think it was I think it was a consent item. And we said, go back. Sure. If I remember right. So I see this one kind of the same way. I'm just sensitive to sure. What I want to do is I want to hire people, give them their mission, let them go do their job. Right. And that's what I'm getting at. Yeah. Yeah. No, I understand that. Yeah. Yeah. Mayor Pro Tem. Well, the question now, since we've been talking about the 20 percent and I don't I did not find it. I was not looking that carefully for the 20 percent issue. Did all of the Mr. Langley, did all of the firms that that that put in a proposal proposed to charge the full 20 percent? Yes, that's correct. Did did at any point council give direction that we should give? Extra credit or points for firms that charge less than 20 percent if that was a concern of council. Have we done that ? I've not received anything like this. Is it the interest of this council to in some way put this out for rebid and and and give points in a refigure a new matrix with points for for proposals that would charge less than 20 percent? Mayor, may I address that question? I think there's a couple of things here for the council to consider. The first is, is that we're trying to collect as much revenue as we can. And if by reducing that, that percentage is paid to a firm to collect that is going to ultimately decrease the collections that we get. I think that's a concern and something that we should be concerned about. Secondly, I would tell you that these are all professional services and the Texas state law on that is very clear on professional services that you cannot try to make awards based on price for professional services. It has to be based on qualification. So I can't have one firm try to give us lower price and use that as the primary reason for awarding the contract of that firm. Well, that's that's helpful. That's helpful. So then the other question I would have them. I think that maybe make the other question I was asking. Do we know if if there are tax collection firms and other parts of the state that are not charging the full 20 percent? Do we have we heard of that anywhere? I'm not aware of it. I'd be surprised if they charge less than 20 percent. It used to be 15 percent years ago. That was changed in the legislature a number of years ago to 20 percent. So I'd be surprised if any firms were using that. My guess is that 20 percent is is to recover the cost incurred by the law firm in order to do the work that they need to do, do the studies they need to do, make the contacts that they need to make. And to cover the cost of their their staff, the overhead, the rent that they're charging, things like that. Yes, sir. OK, thanks. Council member, do we do we have any insight and I'm sure our folks we contract with for this do as it relates to the demographics of the folks who tend to require this sort of collection services. I think the concern for the 20 percent is probably motivated by this maybe impression that the predominant amount of folks here fall into a lower income classification and therefore can't pay. I'm not sure if that's the case. I mean, the one example they gave was a large company that went out of business or something that that that owed the city significant amount of taxes. That wouldn't qualify for me as a hardship case that I'm concerned about as a city council member. Those folks need to pay. And so I don't know if there's demographic data, but to me, if there's concern over that 20 percent, that makes a lot of difference to me. So it's just thrown around as if we're talking about predominantly lower income folks. So I don't know if you have data, Brian. I don't have that with me. I can certainly get it. We can certainly take a look at that. Thanks, Member Johnson. What we're trying to do is Max is collect the money that we are owed. And last thing I want to do is to focus on a reduction of the service fee that reduces our ability to collect the money that we're owed. Right. Because in other words, if I'm in the tax collection business, I've got to make a profit or I'm not going to do the work. If I have to reduce my fee in order to get the contract, what's really going to happen? I'm going to have to make sure that I can collect them and still make a profit. So logically, I'm going to have to I'm going to have to either accept less profit, which is possible, or carve out some part of the process that allows me to take some cost out. So I don't want to get so focused on the fee that I lose sight of the mission, which is to collect the taxes. So if I want to focus on the fee, everybody's here. Maybe we could just have a little auction. Low levity. Councilmember Wasney. But if we do focus on the fee and the 20 percent, and maybe we haven't had that discussion in the past when these contracts came forward. So I would like to see if there are other firms around the state who collect and do less than the 20 percent just to get that matrix. Because we kind of have just had one or two firms, you know , for the last 30 years doing this this job for the city. So I think it I think it's a fair question to say. Is anybody else around the state charging less than 20? Why ? If it comes back and it's pretty much across the board, 20, then we have our answer. Okay. Councilmember Rhoad. I guess on that point, none of those responded to this RFQ. So if there are, it's moved from the point of view of their interest in doing business with the city of Denton. So I guess I'll just say I'm comfortable with what the staff recommended based on the qualifications. And I'm glad we had this discussion because I think we all kind of learned something as a result of it. So if you're looking for council direction on this, I'm comfortable with the staff recommendation. Okay. Any other comment? Councilmember Johnson. Yeah, I would just say the again, referencing back to kind of the other situation that we were where we did kind of the same thing as I would say, if there are if council sees issues with the with the criteria that we've set in terms of how we score, what how things are weighted. You know, I do have I personally have a little bit of heart burn with the indicator of past performance. I mean, they all came out so close. I don't know. But like, meaning indicator of past performance to me is how how good are you at collecting taxes? Period. You haven't collected any in our city. From our for the city because you haven't had the contract, but that that probably shouldn't hurt your score in terms of it's just like what's your collection percentage in similar types of size debt in my mind. But I just don't feel like I'm having some heartburn with. If we want to if we want to modify the criteria going forward, if we want to modify the process, if we want to modify the judgment criteria and all that stuff, I think that's a conversation we should have. But I just don't want us to get in the practice of it's been done. And now we don't like the way that it was scored or the way staff designed it. I'm fine with taking up that conversation for next time. And frankly, I don't whether it's a 20 percent fee or an 18 or 17 or 19, it doesn't move the needle for this for what the city receives. And what I don't want to do is disincentivize, de-incentiv ize, whatever the right word is, somebody's desire to go do the job by trying to squeeze the fee. I don't think that's what moves the needle for us. Whether it's one or two or three percent one way or the other, it probably doesn't move the needle. So I mean, for me, they were all so close. I think they're all awesome. I know them all. They're all wonderful people. I don't want to go. I don't want us to start doing things this way. So for me, I would say I'm comfortable with the decision that's been made. And if we don't like the way that we've that the judgment that the that the criteria are all set for choosing, then let's revisit that going into the next round. Councilmember Briggs. This is this is a work session. And I thought this was the place where if we had questions or issues with certain things that we were to work them out . And so I I am one of the council members who received this and I didn't really understand it. Of course, this is all new. And this is the first time that I've been in this tax collection process. And so I had questions. I had concerns for our our citizens that were paying above paying the 20 percent. So I wanted to know more about that. And also, I really don't know the collection process. So I'm wondering if somebody can walk me through that. Like when when do you get paid? You get paid before you do the collections. How do you know is the 20 percent on is that paid up front? And then everything else comes in. That's kind of what I really want to know to understand it. Well, I'm not sure I can go through all the details from from the podium without doing giving some information out to remember that. But essentially, the fee is paid once the collections are made. So as the collections are made, the fee is paid at that time on whatever collections those are. So it's it could be that there are partial payments or payment arrangements that are made, but it's coming in as those payments are received. There's a number of accounts that are very standard in terms of how they collect. They may be sending out letters, maybe sending out other kinds of routine type matters. There's others that go all the way to an auction proceeding that I mentioned to you. There are other bankruptcies for commercial accounts, which are very different than a residential account. There's lots of different pieces to it and they may take a different form or fashion just depending on the type of account that it is. But they have some standard procedures once it goes to link one of sending out some notifications, working those through, trying to make contact with the taxpayer and working that process. So hopefully that answers your question a little bit. There's some real detailed procedures in the proposals that each firm details exactly kind of what their their individual procedures are for the firm. They're similar. Most of them are very similar. I hope that helps. So so the law firm does not get any money, the 20 percent, until that collection is is taken. That's right. That's right. Okay. Thank you. Councilmember Hawkins. Thank you, Mayor. Yeah, my my concern mostly was just about the process, about just how this happened. I just wanted to make sure all things were equal. And the only thing that came out to me was if the business was registered in Texas or not. They're all so close and I too know all of them and think they're all great. And Jill won't want to emcee with me anymore and all that. And so I'm just but I just that was my concern. I don't want to get in staff's way. I think Greg made some good points there, too. So I just but it's so close. I just want to make sure that all things were equal because , you know, I that's all I was trying to bring up there. So two questions. Who had it before Sockland Boroughs? Before Sockland Boroughs, Purdue has collected at one point . Never Purdue. Leinberger has collected McCreary has collected before. So I guess Leinberger had it before Sockland Boroughs. Okay. All right. I don't remember the ordering of those. So just to refresh my memory, because I don't I don't know if I got a clear answer to when you answered Councilman Was ney's question on the five percent difference. We talked about location and all that. Did you all know that there was a location actually at the tax of the county? So you did. You did. Okay. I went through that. Okay. Absolutely. Okay. Fantastic. And what I couldn't remember on the staff report, what's the what's the term of the contract? We're looking at a five year term. Okay. What was the last term? Three years plus two one year renewals. Three years plus two options for two one year renewals. All right. And the reason we're not doing that is what? Because it had been a number of years since we went through a proposal process. Okay. And I had a feeling that we needed to do that, take a look at this issue to make sure we were comfortable with where we were. So it had been since 2005. They've been with us. 2008 was the last RFQ or RFP that we did. 2008? Yes. Okay. But as far as the difference between going to three years plus two one year renewals moving forward as compared to five years. Well, my recommendation on that is a five year contract. These are going to be the same firms that you're going to see again in three years. Or if we're going to be looking at a contract extension, these are politically sensitive issues to bring this back up. My preference would be for a five year contract. Why would you say it's a politically sensitive issue? Well, it's just. I mean, we all know everybody that's. I mean, it's. I mean, it seems like it's business. What makes you say that? Well, I guess what I'm saying by that is there's a lot of interest in these kinds of contracts around the state where people are trying to make proposals around the state. And they can be politically sensitive issues around the state. And so if this was a standard agreement, we would have went through this process. It would have been on the consent agenda or something like that. It's just not that way. And it's not that way in other communities. Okay. Mayor Pro Tem. Thank you, Mayor. Well, the agenda says receive a report. We've received it. Hold a discussion. We've held it. Give staff direction. Mr. Roden started. Nobody else has followed suit. While I have a great deal of respect for all three of the local firms that are represented here, I would recommend that we put this on the next agenda. With the staff recommendation. And if we need to put it on as an item for individual consideration, whichever, whichever works best, I would be okay with it. Either item for individual consideration or consent to go with the staff recommendation. Thank you. I would probably say just put it on consent. Somebody needs to pull it. They can pull it. Okay. I mean, that's that's certainly any other questions, comments. All right. Thank you for your time. I appreciate it. All right. That ends our. Well, I will now convene the closed session at closed session. It's five fifty seven p.m. We will consider the following items. Consultation with attorneys under Texas government. So section five five one point zero seven one deliberations regarding real property under Texas government code section five five one point zero seven two deliberations regarding economic development negotiations under Texas government code section five five one point zero eight seven. And I believe the closed sessions are downstairs in the basement. All right. Thank you. All right. I want to welcome everybody to this special call meeting of the city of Denton City Council at six thirty five and the council chambers at City Hall two fifteen East McKinney Street. First item on the agenda is pledge allegiance to the US and Texas flag. Would you stand if you're able? Thank you. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Honor the Texas flag. I pledge allegiance to the Texas one state under God one and indivisible. Just want to let everybody know we're going to get you out of here before the weather hits. So we're moving right along. Next item is the consent agenda. Mayor Pro Tem. I move approval of all of the items on the consent agenda. Councilmember Rhoad. Second. We have a motion and a second for approval of the consent agenda. Let's vote on the board please. Motion carries seven zero. We now move on to our public hearing portion of the agenda agenda items three three a is hold a public hearing and consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton Texas adopting roadway impact fees per service unit etc. I will now this is a public hearing so I will now open the public hearing. Thank you Mr. Mayor we PS Aurora has a very brief presentation and then you have two cards two speakers to address this item as well. Thank you Mr. Aurora. This is the public hearing for adoption of the roadway impact fees. We had a first public hearing on this already today is the second public hearing to go over the calculation and the recommendation for the roadway impact fees. The first public hearing covered the land use plan and impact fee CIP. It was adopted on March 22nd pursuant to the state law items to cover today is the impact fee calculation and the impact recommendation. These are the five service areas that we have defined and we have already seen these. This is the 10 year 10 year growth projected from based on the land use that was adopted already. And we had done a sample calculation for service area D which is the total vehicle miles the total growth in that service area D and then the vehicle miles for that. And this was done for each service area as you can see service area D so all the service areas have a separate vehicle mile. We did an impact fee CIP for each service area that is based on the build out condition the 10 year CIP and what is the existing deficiency. And you have seen these in earlier presentations on this. The calculation is relatively simple. We have the vehicle miles that we saw earlier. This is the value of the total dollars that we need in a 10 year window in the service area D which is not sad but service area D. And we divide that number by the total vehicle miles and it comes out with the vehicle mile maximum service fee per vehicle mile, 1,945. And this calculation was then done for each service area and we have a separate maximum fee per vehicle mile for each service area. We converted that into a single family maximum and when we average the each service area we get a number which is about $9,634. And that is where we need to determine what is that we want to charge. And these are some of the numbers that you have seen before what the other cities are charging at 38%, 60%, 45% and a little over 20% in Fort Worth with 3,000 and up in general. So this has gone to the mobility committee. You have seen the recommendation $3,000 road impact fee for single family . That was the recommendation from mobility committee as well as a 25% reduction for all non-residential users. And then bring the road impact fee ordinance for review by the council after one year of the implementation so that we see how we are implementing it. And then we have a number of issues that are coming up during implementation. And in general, the first year is not where you see a lot of activity in the road impact fee. It happens usually after the first year. So first year is the learning process. We did the same thing on water waste water. The first year we found out what was going on, how we could apply to apartments and then we continue to work on it. Based on everything we learned during that time. And this gives us the time to do it and make it off Denton. Currently it is based on lots of impact fee ordinances we have seen and we have put together an ordinance. It is pretty close to what we want, but we will have more information that goes into it. I had done a presentation to Dent County Developers Alliance. I do want to thank Lee Allison. She accommodated me on a special call meeting. They usually do one meeting. They did a second meeting on October 29. And the meeting went very well. I had shown them all the details of the calculations and going to a $3,000 impact fee basically is about a 70% reduction or 69% based on the numbers that we have. 69% reduction as well as another 25% on top of it. So they didn't really have an issue with that. Their only recommendation was to provide some incentives in the infill area. And I will show you how we are possibly doing it right now while we are going to go back and work on in the next year. So CIAC recommendation, CIAC, the Capital Improvement Advisory Committee was appointed by the council for the state regulation. $3,000 road impact fee for single family, 25% reduction for all non-residential users. They do have some additional recommendations beside that, and I will go through that very quickly. They want to do an overlay for infill area. And this is a specific recommendation that came from them, is to look at what are the limited road capacity expansion that we can do. So if you have a very limited right of way, if you have buildings already in that area, in the downtown area, you cannot expand the road. Look at all those roads and come out with an overlay that defines that infill area. So that is the recommendation, and that within the first year after adoption of the road impact fee. Second recommendation, which I feel will actually help a lot, is any existing structures. A lot of them happen to be an infill area, or they may be a little blighted somewhere else in the city. If they are enhanced architecturally, or somebody adds to that and enhances the structure so it looks good, then any additional traffic up to 10 times the existing traffic will be exempt from road impact fees. That is what the recommendation from the CIAC, which will then allow any infill development to continue on, because when they do develop, they take out a building in the downtown area. This allows them to add to that and still not have to worry about road impact fee, because they can go up to 10 times the traffic generation and still not have to pay road impact fees, if the council adopts the ordinance. The third one was that if there is enough traffic generated by a development, that the level of service, the LOS drops. We've got a question. Yes, Council Member. Can you go back to the last slide? Yes. PS, what would be the process for some, who would determine what aesthetically enhanced means? Like how would you, how would we determine that? Well, you know, when they come in and, I mean, I don't think we have a fixed criteria, but the building looks dil apidated. So then they're going to come in and, you know, make architectural or aesthetic improvements to that so that the building looks decent and is good for occupancy. Yeah. We just have to spend some time on that one, I think. Okay. Council Member Rodin. Remind me, CIAC, is that the commission that's P&Z, essentially? Yes, it was. And just caution you from using take away, take out a building in the downtown area. That might be cause concern for folks, but I get what you mean by that concept. The question is on the previous slide from this, as we come back in a year, so as we look at kind of adjusting things, as we understand and we're wanting to iterate a bit in order to kind of meet the goals that we have in terms of development and encouraging in certain areas, is one of those things that could be changed easily a realignment of the zones? Change easily, what is that? Realignment of the zones. In other words, we've created zones under certain geographical. Is that easily changed? Yeah. Actually, what we had discussed was to create an overlay, you know, and that overlay, most of that would be in one zone only. That covers the downtown anyway. It would create its own zone. Yes, it will create an overlay so that it will create its own zone. Okay, okay. Thank you. That way we don't have to change the impact we study and don't have to do anything of that nature. Okay, thanks. Yeah. And the last recommendation was from the CISC was that if a large enough development comes in that reduces the, that is enough traffic that the level of service gets below sea on an affected street, then the staff would require the developer to construct capacity enhancements which are proportionate to the development's impact. And then when they do that, then you credit the impact fee because they are doing the work, so the impact fee will be credited. So today's action is to hold the public hearing number two, consider approval of road impact fees as follows. The residential impact fee of $612.25 per vehicle mile, which amounts to $3,000 for a single family. And when we do a 25% reduction on that, that is for non- residential, that amounts to $459.19 per vehicle mile. Adopt the additional CISC recommendations and then adopt the roadway impact fee ordinance. And I'll stand for any questions. Councilmember Hawkins. Thank you, Mayor. Yes, can you walk me through if a developer had a project that was in three phases and they had figured out the economics of it kind of under today's code, how would that work if then the second phase would be under if we did pass this road impact fee, would they be grandfathered in or is that a totally, they'd be under the new impact fee? In the ordinance, we have a provision where a larger development, if they have multiple phases, that they could come and have an agreement with the city. Because otherwise, you know, what we have as part of the ordinance, and the state law is pretty explicit in that, is that you have one year within which to pull all the building permits for any final plan that has already occurred prior to the adoption of the ordinance. So if they had a final plan already approved before May, if it goes May 15th is the current date on this, if it gets approved. So anything that got approved as a final plan before May 15 th, and from the May 15th time on, within one year, they pull all the building permits, then they don't have to pay any road impact fees. We have to keep in mind that road impact fees are not a charge which is additional. It is in lieu of what is a current DDC requirement. I understand that. Okay. Thank you. Councilmember Johnson. Well, I just want to say, so P.S., with all due respect, the numbers that we're working with here are like the sum total. And I think what we've seen is when you get into the individual categories, once you start walking through those individual categories and the multipliers that are chosen, I think, from where I sit anyway, I don't think we have nearly enough information to make the decision today, is my opinion. I think we still have plenty of work to do because from where I sit, unintended consequences on this one could have huge impact on some projects that we have incentivized, that we're pushing hard to recruit certain types of businesses to town. And I had wanted to see this recommendation, like where we left it last time, this one applied to several existing projects that have recently been built in town to see what 's the difference between the exactions or what they actually had to build versus what this impact would be. I've personally reached out to a lot of folks in the private community, home builders, apartment builders, fast food builders, to get them to apply this and send us the feedback. And I've gotten, a lot of us have that now. So for me, I'm not going to be comfortable at all moving forward with a vote on this tonight. So I'd like for us to consider postponing it. And I don't even know if it's date certain. Just postpone it until we all have time to really, really see the detail of what the impacts would be and what those unintended consequences might be before we move forward with any kind of action tonight. Mayor Pro Tem. I would think that it would rather be a postponement to date certain would be an event certain, which would be to get those comparisons because I too have, and I suspect all of us have gotten those emails showing what the current costs are. But I really need to see them lined up with what the cost would be if we passed this as it stands. I need to see a side by side comparison. I don't think that would be too difficult to put together. So I would think within a month or so we could probably get that and finish this up. Councilmember Briggs. I'm okay with this as well postponing so I can understand it better. This is a public hearing we have open. The public hearing we do have three speakers. So I guess, Madam City Attorney, it seems like what we've done in the past is just continue the public hearing. Is that correct? Or how do we want to do this? We can certainly continue the public hearing. We do have speakers who have indicated they want to speak. So perhaps we should give them that opportunity or the opportunity if we continue the public hearing to speak at the next continued meeting. So I would suggest, Mr. Mayor, it might be their convenience. And point of order, we ought to, as they make their decision, we ought to let them know that if they speak once in a public hearing, they're done. So they might want to wait until we see that comparison before they do that. Okay. Yeah. So my understanding is this would be a continuation of a public hearing. Anyone who gives public testimony today will be precluded from giving public testimony when we reopen the public hearing or reopen the continued public hearing at an event. Is that correct, Madam City Attorney? Yes, sir. Okay. So we do have three cards, a David Lady, a Lee Allison, and a Bob Shelton. So if, and this is a public hearing, so anyone else who wants to speak, if you want to come down and speak today, you're more than welcome to. State your name and address and your time will begin. But it sounds like that we will be continuing this, which will then afford you an opportunity to speak at a later time when we have a little bit more information that may also be disseminated to you ahead of time. So I'm going to go ahead and call one more time. Is anybody wishing to speak at this time? Okay. Seeing nobody else come forward. Lee Allison with Allison Engineering Group. And I'm here tonight representing the Denton Community Development Alliance. I do want to appreciate PS for approaching us earlier and spending an hour with me last week to go over this. I do want to say that we're here to speak in favor of the road impact fees, but not necessarily the ordinance as it's written today. We do believe that it's a good way to help balance the cost of the cost of future development. We also think it needs to be fair and reasonable and appropriate. The DCDA does have expertise. We like to share it with the community. We appreciate the opportunity to be involved and can help be resources to the council, the PNZ and the staff as appropriate. I do have a few things I'd like to share with you. And if you'll indulge me with a little help from above and pardon my baby boomer PowerPoint presentation here. But we understand with the roadway impact fees that perimeter paving requirements will go away. The signal participation fees will go away. The right of way for external perimeter streets will go away. And I'll accept and need any demands actually generated by that development. If you got to have a road, you got to have a road. We think that'll happen. We have an idea that really the recommended fee ought to be more in the 15% range than where it is now. Part of our justification is that and think of this as taxes or income, existing development shouldn't really be paying for future roadway capacity. That's I think that's a fair thing to say. But existing development is paying for city services. They should be paying for routine maintenance and routine upgrades in the tax structures, the income structure. Unfortunately, we have some postponed maintenance and postponed upgrades. For example, Mission Street, an older street. It's not curb and gutter, et cetera. Developers expected to upgrade it. Why hasn't the public upgraded it all the time? It's been there in the last 50 or 60 years. Riney Road and Mosh Branch Road where developers are constructing perimeter street paving. We don't think the future development, while it should be paying for future roadway capacity, and they could come in and should come in and help pay for city services and even routine maintenance and routine upgrades. But why are they having to share the burden of paying for maintenance and upgrades that has been postponed that was not their responsibility to pay for as well? We hope you'll take those in your consideration as you're deliberating. And I know you have been. Some additional concerns we have is that future construction of roads that previous developers made payments in lieu of for perimeter paving. There's money sitting out there. That road may not be on the plan. When is it ever going to be finished? They'll be down here every year. I anticipate begging for their project to be in the next bond program to get it paved and it may not be on the program. You're going to deal with future finish out construction of roads where developers constructed the perimeter paving in front of their sites. You got a little patchwork out there and somebody's waiting for the rest of their road to be paved. They went to the trouble to do it. Why isn't the city finishing it out? And how will these intentions be fulfilled in the future? The planning for the future and preparation and get us out of the hole of being behind on maintenance and upgrades. We also ask that when you look at other cities for comparisons, there's lots of reasons people look at coming to any location. Employment opportunities, business, et cetera. We urge you to be careful when you're looking at other city impact fees . It should be done, but also look at the household income in that city and the business property taxes or the property taxes per square mile of city or per capita. Some cities, I know of fast food developers that will go to another city and pay $100,000 more for a lot because of the location and the economic opportunities. We need to figure out a way, you get to figure out a way, to how do we balance our free structures and our cost and our development in such a way that we can incentivize and attract and bring forward the developments that we need to help improve the quality of life while still sustaining the quality of life for all the residents we have and for all the people who will be involved in coming and businesses that will come here. And I appreciate it. Thank you for the time. Thank you. Catch you another day. You bet. Anyone else wishing to speak? This is a public hearing. Come on down. Yes, Councilmember Gregory. I would ask that Mr. Allison provide a hard copy of those for us to receive, to look at or send them via email to all of the council members. Okay. All right. State your name and address. Your time will begin. Bob Shelton, 2308 Ranch House Drive, Denton, Texas. I'm not here to oppose really your road impact ordinance. You know, the way it's written, I have not studied it enough to really sit here and critique it like Lee has. One thing that did stand out to me is the way it's going to be imposed in the timeline for the imposing of the ordinance. The way I was reading it once it's adopted, I think you had a May 15th or something that you had to file a final plat on your project in order to be grandfathered in the deal. We have one instance where we're doing a small subdivision, a 100 lot subdivision over here on the north side of town. We filed a preliminary plat on the whole project. We did a final plat construction in phase one. We have phase two coming up with only a preliminary plat. At phase two, we'll be subject to these road impact fees of $3,000 a lot, which, you know, doesn't seem like much. It adds $150,000 to a cost in that project. And I know most of you know me around here. We do a lot of work with Dior Horton. We've been the catalyst in the entitlement for close to 900 lots for them in the last three years. Some of what we've done, some of what we haven't. But most of those projects are multi-phase projects. And to put a burden, in other words, I guess what I'm trying to get to is when are you vested? We come in here and we do all of our financial analysis based on a preliminary plat. We go by the rules at that time. We've got to approve preliminary plat. It says we do so much concrete. We do this. We do that. We feel like we take those ordinances or those specifications at the time and we use those to do our analysis on it. Now we're changing the rules midstream again. And really that's the only comment that I've got. I'd like to see if you have a preliminary plat that is your grandfather with your project. I know that you've got to pull all your building permits. A builder can't come in and pull 100 building permits just to save. The only thing that worries houses is which house is going to go on which lot. So pretty burdensome really. All right. Any questions? All right. Thank you. That's certainly something for us to consider. I think that goes to Council Member Hawkins' question. Thank you. This is a public hearing. Anybody else wishing to speak at this time? If not, Chair would entertain. Chair would entertain. Thank you, Chair. Yes. I would like to make a motion that we continue this public hearing until an event certain at such time that the council has received a full matrix of the -- man, I just -- hold on a second. Stop for a second. I'm going to make a comment first. I don't think that we should just continue this to the event certain of us receiving the matrix because we might get that matrix in three days. There's a lot of study left to be done on this thing in my opinion. So the question is, event certain until such time the consensus of council as we've received enough information to -- I mean, that's -- I would be more inclined to go date certain and push it out far enough to where I'm confident that we will have had time to completely vet it. So I'm going to make the motion. If someone wants to offer a friendly amendment, we can do that. June 21st. Is that out there far enough for you? June 21st? Yeah. So -- I think if we did it June 21st and then if we had not provided the information you want, you can continue it again. Yeah, I'm going to be more comfortable with a date certain. Okay. So my motion is to continue this public hearing to date certain June 21st. Pro Tem. I would second, but I'm wondering procedurally given the fact that we might want to really roll our sleeves up when we see this matrix, is it permissible in between these hearings to have a work session so that we can study this and ask a lot of questions on the matrix? I don't know if that's appropriate . We can? Okay. Second. We have a motion and a second. Let's vote on the board. Carried 7-0. Move into our concluding items. Agenda item 4. I've just got a couple real quick. Come on, man. I've got a couple. I've got one real good one. Two good ones, actually. Councilmember Hawkins? No, go ahead. I was hoping -- I guess everybody knows that Verizon has been sold to Frontier. And boy, this has been a joy to deal with for everybody. So I don't know what I'm even asking for here, but if there's some sort of informal staff report or something in our franchise agreement when something like this happens about a local representative or something, a lot of people just -- they don't know where to -- they're trying to call somebody for help. So I don't know if that's even anything that the city can help with. So I'm requesting that or little assistance on that. And two, for the people out there who do not know, North Texas Boulevard Bridge is coming down this weekend. So on Friday at about 9 o'clock, that will be blocked off and we'll have to use the service roads until I think Monday around 9 a.m., something like that. So I would like to give everybody out there, if you do not know, a heads up . And the fire and police are very prepared and aware and they're going to be doing their best. So anyway, and go to Jazz Fest. Bye. Okay, I've got a couple real quick. I think we have a great opportunity and I'd like to get a work session on this to partner with the Behavioral Health Leadership Team and United Way as Joe Mulroy has put this together over a year and a half, two years to really revolutionize mental health services delivered to citizens in Denton County. And one opportunity they have is to work with the Veterans Administration. The Veterans Administration has indicated that they can find 5,000 square feet of office space. They will staff it with 29 employees, mental health employees, to the tune of about $3 million a year for just a couple of years. They need it temporarily until they build their new facility. So I want to have a work session on exploring. We're going to have 18,000 square feet that is going to be vacant over at City Hall West and two years is probably going to take what it's going to take for us to figure out what to do with it, how we're going to finance it. I want to explore an opportunity to partner with them temporarily to bring those kind of mental health services to our veterans here in Denton County. I think it's a great opportunity in that regard. Secondly, I want to, congratulations are in order for DTV's David Mc Elroy. Is he, if he could come out here please? Is he here? Yeah, I hear the door open. David, come out please. Come on out. He is accepted at the position of PEG, which is Public Education and Government Manager for the City of San Antonio. His last day with the City of Denton will be this Friday, and I'm not sure why somebody didn't tell us this sooner than this, but I'm telling you I'm sort of upset about that . But simply put, his contributions with DTV have benefited the organization, the citizens we serve. And David, thank you so much for your service to Denton, and you will be missed, but gosh, going down to San Antonio , that's a pretty big step. Good congratulations to you. Thank you very much for being here. Absolutely. And don't ride your motorcycle down there. Thank you, David . Appreciate it. Any others? Doesn't look like it. Well, we're going to beat the storm out then, so. Everybody be safe.