Jul 18, 2016 City Council on 2016-07-18 10:00 AM

No, you're good. All right. Good morning. I wanted to welcome everybody to this meeting of the Dent City Council on Monday, July 18th, 2016. It is 10.05 a.m. We do have a quorum. Is our break over? Yes. Yeah, it is. You know, I don't think we've had a council meeting last week. We didn't have one last week, did we? So I would like for us, even though it's more of an informal process, just to take a moment of silence for everything. I'm not even going to all the events, but everything that has happened over the last week, week and a half, that's really created a lot of sadness and pain for many people around our country. So if you would just join me in a moment of silence, I really would appreciate that. Thank you all so much for indulging me with that, and we really do keep all the people who have experienced pain and tragedy in our thoughts and prayers. We'll go on to our first session, which is work session reports, which is 1A, receive or hold discussion, provide staff direction regarding the Street Maintenance Department Traffic Operations Division's annual programs. Thank you, Mayor. Tim Fisher is going to lead this presentation for us, and it would probably help if we could hold the questions to the end, unless it's something that is important for you to know right then and there. All right, thank you. Good morning. Morning. I'm going to go over the traffic, the street program first, and then the traffic ops group. City has a pretty big network of roadways. Value on that is about 385 million. Annual depreciations around 10 million. Our estimate is that the road system that the city maintains is used almost a million times every day. One of the things that we do to manage that is look at the overall condition index. That's a system where you look at both the surface distress and the ride index and combine that to an overall score. It's kind of like a grade, 0 to 100, 100 being the best. We've done three pavement management studies. First one was done in 2003. Second one was 2009. And we recently have completed our third study. So we do these approximately every six years. First study basically found that our funding level was very , very low in relationship to the need. The OCI portion of our maintenance program back in 2003 was only about $2.1 million, compared to today's level, which is in excess of seven. We've made substantial progress on the funding for the street program. Second study in '09 showed that because of those funding levels, we had continued to decline and that they were estimating about $15 to $16 million a year in annual funding to try to restore the OCI up to a more manageable level of around $70. And then the third study's recently been completed. And it's shown that some of the investments that we've made are helping us sustain value, but they're still estimating about a $15 million annual funding requirement to try to bring that OCI level back up to 70. And well, why is that important? Well, if you maintain your streets in better condition, not only do you get a better service level for your citizens, but you also lower your costs. Through preventative maintenance in the early cycle on a street, you have a lower cost than when if you let them deteriorate to where they become a failed street, you really can't do an overlay on them anymore, and you have to do more expensive reconstruction. So the reconstruction work is what we refer to as backlog, and that's our failed street inventory. And we managed to get that a little bit out of kilter. Our overall OCI was somewhat void up because we build a lot of new streets through new development. So our pattern distribution of streets kind of fell into a lot of good streets and a lot of very bad streets. OCI activities, the preventative maintenance that we're talking about. For asphalt, the minor ones are usually cracked seals and micro seals. The major ones are mills overlay and reconstruct. So as you go from minor to major, your unit costs go way up . Concrete, what you'll see is joint crack seal and panel replacement on the minor side, and more majors when you have to reconstruct an entire concrete street. So these are examples of minor maintenance, cracked seals and micro seals. Micro seals are kind of an urban chip seal. You see the county and the highways use chip seals a lot where they put asphalt and rock down. Micro seal is an asphalt emulsion. So micro seals also termed as slurry seal. It's very thin layer. You saw that recently out on Mingo Road. You go to more progressively larger operations, mill and overlay. You're actually removing the surface and restoring it. It's a higher expense, but it's a more substantive type repair. A good example of that recently would be out here on Bell near McKinney and Mingo. That was a thinner mill and overlay. And if you basically go too far through the life cycle of a street, aren't able to sustain and maintain it, then you end up doing a complete reconstruct where you have to remove the whole road, redo the subgrade, rebuild the roadway. In a maintenance operation, that typically means that we'll salvage at least half of the sidewalk, or excuse me, the curb and gutter along there . So we're not reconfiguring the road. We're salvaging what we can on the curbs and redoing the surface of the roadway through a complete reconstruct. We hear this term OCI improvements. Why is that important? In our pavement management program, the preventative maintenance for the pavements are basically classified as OCI activities. We do a lot of other things in the street program that don 't directly relate to improving and sustaining the pavement. So those are the non-OCI activities. Last year's budget, we had about a 57 and 43% breakdown in that. It ranges a little bit from year to year, but it's probably anywhere from one-third to about 40% is non-OCI activities. So what are those? Well, pothole repair, full-depth asphalt failures, utility cuts, curb and gutter replacements, asphalt replacements, activities that don't directly relate to the pavement management and the pavement management program that are still important. We also do severe weather emergency response, high water road closures, concrete panel leveling, and a variety of other activities. And those would be in the non-OCI category. So here's some examples of pothole repairs, base failures, where you actually cut out a section and redo a very small section. It's kind of a point-type repair. Here's some examples where you're redoing some sections of curb and gutter or sidewalk. A lot of the curb and gutter and sidewalk repairs that we do in our O&M budget are usually tied to the project level. We're out doing a project, and because we're there, we see certain things. But we do have some miscellaneous and minor sidewalk repairs that come in through citizen complaints or observations and being reported to us. Here's another example where a sidewalk has been removed and replaced. So this is a quick summary of the breakdown in our O&M budget. This does not include the bond program, but you can see that when you start doing some reconstruction work, it takes up a lot of money and takes a lot of your operating budget to do reconstructions. We've got mills and overlays, base failures, crack seals, utility cuts, and other types of activities. And so those are all done in our O&M budget. Can I break the rule? Sure. Just briefly. Sure. To make sure I understood what I heard you say. 37% reconstruction, are you saying that's the bond or that 's not the bond? That's not the bond. This is strictly O&M money in this graph. So okay. And all right. Are we going to quantify? Have you got that quantified here? 37% is how much actual dollars? What's the budget? It's about $11 million. I don't have that figure. So it's about $4 million. Correct. Okay. Correct. No, that's fine. This is basically a little bit of a history of the budget. We had a total budget number of about 3.3 when we did our first study. But of that, about, you know, $2 million was for OCI- related activities, whereas a little over 1.3 was non-OCI. And then we have had some support financially through COs and GOs in the history. We also had a brief period of funding support through the DCTA ELAP program, but that was a temporary funding tied to that half-cent sales tax that we dedicated towards that purpose. You can see that we have done a very good job of getting support from the council on ramping up our total investment in OCI. But I would point out a lot of that is still debt-related through the bond program. Linked to the strategic plan, one of the goals that we've set for the -- that the council has supported has been the -- improve the overall OCI from an average of about 65 to 70 by about 2025. So we're trying to elevate our road conditions through increased levels of preventative maintenance supplemental in the interim by some bond program for managing our backlog and reconstruction. And one potential way to help do that and provide that sustainable income level would be to continue a transition of the franchise fee over to the transportation fund. Current resolution by the council capped the level of income coming in on franchise fees for the general fund and put the surplus funds directly into the transportation fund. This program would transition the remaining 6.2 increment ally over a 10-year period. And that's one of your supplemental packages for your consideration in the budget process. And Chuck will cover that. The other action step would be to try to transition off of the debt funding for the management of the backlog. We have a very high backlog. And so we're trying to play catch up and we're doing that through the use of bonds. But bond funding is not as sustainable. And it will give you a lower cost in the long haul if you can do it through revenue. Yes, you had a question? Okay. I'm sorry. So I'm going to move out of streets. Is there any specific question on streets? Instead of trying to hold the street questions until the end, a couple of street questions. So want to open that up. Yes, Council Member. So I have a few. There are still some pretty really bad roads in Denton. And I know that we, the OCI, the percentage, when it gets a certain percentage, that's when you know when to start replacing it or fixing it. So my question is, what is the percentage now? Based on our most recent pavement study, our backlog, which is generally about a OCI of 40 or less, 45 or less, where 20% of our street segments are in that category. So in your backup, there's an exhibit on benchmarking. And we had the fourth highest backlog percentage out of the 48 in there. So we still have a very high backlog. Did that answer your question? Well, I guess I'm trying to determine at what point does the city say, okay, this street is really bad. We need to fix it. And then how do you determine to do whether just to do the mill and overlay or because right now in my mind, I'm thinking Hanover Street, which was really, really bad. And I think that's been, it's a complete reconstruction right now. So if you can just kind of walk me through like at what point in time would that needed to be replaced or maintained so it wouldn't have had to been a reconstruction? I'm going to go to this slide. Do you understand what I'm trying to say? Yeah, basically during this period of time in the first 40% of the life of the street. So if you think 40% of the life of about a 30 year street. You can do micro seals, slurry seals, crack seals and mills and overlays and sustain that pavement. If you let that slide to where you're now down at about 60% of its design life without maintenance, then you've kind of gotten the point where you really can't do less expensive surface type treatments. And then you're kind of in a this road is kind of beyond repair and it stays in your inventory until you can obtain enough money to get it off your backlog. Okay, and so how do streets determine, do we drive around? Do we accept phone calls from citizens? How do you determine what roads need? We do that through the pavement studies that we do every six years and our pavement management system and software. So we keep track of the condition of all the street segments through that system. And then that's used to help us develop the program to try to repair. So it becomes an issue of available funding. So eight to 10 years ago that available funding was quite limited. We were funding about $2 million out of about a $12 million need. So obviously there wasn't enough to meet all the needs. As we have gotten our funding levels up, we're getting closer to having a managed level of funding. I have just one more question. And it's about the sidewalks because that is in the non-OCI of the street. Can you just give me an update on the work log? And I know that there was a long time for completion on any new issues for sidewalks. And I'm just curious, are we still using the one contractor ? We're still using Floyd Smith. He has tried to ramp up his effort by providing workers. One of his challenges, and I think it's one of everyone's challenges right now, and that's just getting concrete, just getting a supply of concrete. As far as backlog, I don't think we have a huge backlog of requested sidewalk repairs. But we do have a pretty full plate trying to balance that contractor's workload to keep up with our bond program for the sidewalks and curb and gut ter that we're going to do associated with the street reconstruction, trying to do it also for our preventative maintenance program, and then also dealing with citizen requests on our list. Any other questions? Yes. Councilman, we'll go to--. Mayor Portini, the customary. Thank you, Mayor. A couple questions as to what and what fund is dedicated to what. So the street fund that the council initiated a few years back that is taking up right now the growth and franchise fees, that's dedicated to anything in particular? It's dedicated to OCI and non-OCI activities, and this is what it did last year and how it was distributed. So we do the best we can to try to balance and put more funds out of the O&M, not specifically in reconstruction. Now an example of why do we get involved in reconstruction within our O&M budget? We have streets that were set up for this much in the bond program, but because the conditions on either side are bigger sometimes we stretch those things and we'll use the O&M budget for that. However, reconstruction activity burns a lot of money very quickly. Same way with the discussion of arterials. Once we start doing reconstructions of arterials, they burn a lot of operating cash. And so it becomes a balancing act and we use the pavement management program as a tool to help us disperse those funds and allocate those funds. So the funds that are coming through the bond program, those are dedicated specifically to reconstruction, correct? Correct. In 2012, 2014. Right. And they're also, I think I had it here, but they're also dedicated specifically to the projects that were identified by the Blue Ribbon Comm ittees on the bond program. One of the things that we talked about recently at Mobility Committee, I think there was not a misunderstanding, but we tried to clarify the fact that, well, we have a million dollars in a particular line item on the street funding program. And I think there was some concept that that million dollars was specifically for sidewalks. And the clarification to that would be that that is for multiple activities, not just sidewalks. And Tim can talk about that. Coven and gutter, 88 ramps, those are generally done independent of the projects. We do, when we budget a project, do have an allowance for Coven, gutter, and sidewalk form. And so the project level funding that we have goes there. But when we go into the O&M piece, then if we get a citizen request that's ADA driven, for instance, we had some activities over in the Congress Street area, that series of activities alone was close to 200,000. So and this is, I guess, what I'm driving at a bit with this question, because I think we've done a great job of getting a sense of what is our total need in terms of streets, reconstruction, maintenance, moving forward. You guys have a price tag to that. You're trying to get us to a point of where we're funding that to where it needs to be. And hopefully we're making some good progress towards that. As it relates to sidewalk, which I think has just been an increasing citizen set of requests over the last several years for several reasons, do we have a price tag of the total need and how much we would need if we're funding that properly every year? I don't think we have that number at this time. I think we're working to respond to the Council's request on that. In the pavement management study that we've done, there was a commissioning of a additional set of work to do an inventory system for it. One of the supplemental packages that you have related to ADA compliance would have a component of instead of doing a drive-by to determine what the sidewalk locations are and what percentage of them are in poor condition and where the gaps are, then it would actually be a on-the-ground walk-through and get into more detail. The preliminary survey that came out on our sidewalks, of the sidewalks that we have in our inventory, and these are not sidewalks on textile right of ways, about 97 percent of them are in good condition. So we don't have a large percentage of our sidewalks that at least in that survey are showing up as in poor, very poor condition. But we have not at this point gotten the information long enough to develop a complete sidewalk plan with an identified budget. Well, and that's I guess would be helpful for me to know as we're moving through budget to get a sense of what would that cost to get us that. And then what does that tell us, data moving forward in future budget years in terms of what we can invest in it. I mean, I like the science that goes into the looking at streets, it depoliticizes the whole issue. And sidewalks are one of those things you get requests all the time and we had two million bucks to invest in it and there were tons more requests than what we could fund. So I think it would be helpful moving forward to have a similar scientific approach to sidewalks to the extent that you can. Of course, there's different types of criteria in terms of pedestrian counts and stuff like that that we determined. But because we're funding streets, we have a dedicated fund for bike paths and we have a sense of what that cost overall and what it would take to get us there. Sidewalks there seem to be a gap there. So as we're thinking comprehensive transportation, I think that would be helpful to have that information. That should be a component and a bill on objective of the ADA compliance study that is in the supplemental package. That would get us a more detailed on the ground type survey condition and would look at the ADA compliance component, but it would also just look at basic condition. Staff right now is looking at some software options as to how we would manage all that data and how we would go about doing that. Any other questions street related? Yes. Councilmember Gert. I have three questions. One of them is on the sidewalk question. Do you know what the life span of the sidewalk is? We know the street is 30 years. I imagine sidewalk would be more. It is a little bit more. I think there are some estimates that say 30 to 40 years, but there's usually kind of a window of time. You have the defects that show up early and then you have defects that tend to show up at the later end of the life span of the sidewalk. And my second question was is there a chart somewhere where all of the streets are categorized by their age essentially so you can see the oldest streets and when something has been done on the street? When we first set up the pavement management software in 2003, we didn't have a lot of date history of some of the older streets. As we set that software up in 2003, we used default settings kind of as a flag. We're not really sure what the age of this street is. Through subdivisions and installation dates, we tend to know what those are and those are tracked within our pavement software so we would have access to that. We are a little less focused on the age of the street and more focused on its condition so we tend to focus in on the OCI ratings as you do work on a street. It could be an old street, but it may have been redone and be in good condition, for example. Okay, thank you. And then my third question has to do with this chart. Do we know - is there a way to find out? I'm sure there is, but I'd really like to know what as a percentage of our general fund those numbers constitute. So are we tracking the same percentage year over year or are we going more or less? At one point, the street program had gone down to about 5% of the general fund and it was about sixth place in its priority and that evolution pretty much happened from about 1970 to about 2005 so it was a lesser priority within the budget and it was a smaller piece. Our rough estimates of the funding need for the street program on a cash versus debt basis sustainable is about 15%. That's very close - A general fund? Yes, and that's very close to the franchise fee income so that's part of the recommendation to transition the remaining 6.2 million into the street fund and then that way you could get off of the debt dependency for managing the backlog. Well the general fund is 179 million, is that right? How much is it? 107. So 15% of that is 18 million or so. And keep in mind that we're estimating about 15 million for OCI related and then you have the balance of the street operation needs that are also funded out of that. Okay, thank you. I've got to go ahead and get it. I just had a follow-up to Mayor Pro Tem Roden's sidewalk question and you said the ADA compliance study would kind of do sidewalks and so I just want to clarify it's not just existing right it would tell you where we need to install new ones because there are some - That would be the gap piece. Right now the street budget deals with maintenance of existing and the expansion of the sidewalk system currently and historically has been funded through bond programs and bond initiatives. We have I think some funding within the bond program for expansion of sidewalks. I'm not sure if I'm addressing your question or not. Let me take a stab at that. I think really the ADA compliance is going to be focused on existing sidewalks. As we construct new streets, new sidewalks, we're putting in ADA compliant ramps and to address compliance. So kind of moving forward we feel like we can tackle the ADA compliant. It's kind of what's existing out there. That's my question. How do we know that? So the starting point on that is actually the inventory that we've recently completed. So we have a mapping of the current inventory of sidewalks and that's in a data type format. What hasn't been done are the following successive steps which start looking at a prioritization kind of based on policy of how you would have priority areas whether they're go paths where there's people obviously walking here, that's a term that's being used, access to schools, access to shopping areas, places where people would logically want to walk and want to have sidewalk facilities. That's in my mind. I remember we had a speaker come and address council and as we found out within the two mile radius of school there's no busing. So there's a lot of older neighborhoods that don't account for sidewalks and safety to school so I just... Engineering basically looks at the transportation component as far as capital expansion. Right now the operations group is primarily focused on maintaining and sustaining what's already currently in place. Okay. Thank you. We've got a couple questions. I want to go back to your graph. I think it's slide 16. Yeah, the one right there. So this graph represents and if I go to your next slide which is expenditure table, that graph represents what set of numbers on this? I think I know what it is. It's the 1415 number so it's the 10,000,001.8. Okay, the 4.072 plus the 6.1. So it includes your OCI and non-OCI pieces. So then what I heard you say was that the street fund in a perfect world would be funded to the point where you've got your non-OCI coming out of that and then you have your OCI which encompasses your micro seal and all these other things and then road reconstruction. Is that in a perfect world? That's what we're trying to aim for. I guess my thought is and so maybe help me if I'm seeing this incorrectly is of course we've got this bond funding and I think was it 14 when we did another, was it 20 million? 2012 was 20 million. What was 14? 24 million. 2014 had, yeah. 24 million. 24 million. Correct. So then if we were to extend this chart on down in subsequent years, you're going to see CO and GO bond funding for OCI going down how many more years? I mean is that five or six more years or we got quite a... I believe it goes out to 19 or 20 I believe. Okay. Because my thought is and I still, I could be looking at this chart incorrectly because we have two problems with OCI. We have one is we've let them go so long we've got to do a lot of road reconstruction. We have a big backlog yes sir. And number two we've got to make sure that we're maintaining, we increase the maintenance aspect of our current roads that aren't so bad through micro seal and some whatever preventative maintenance. Yes. So when I see the 37% reconstruction in this graph, which what I'm understanding is this is not bond funded money. This is O&M money. And from what your report was some of it is if we get into a project that is bond funded we get into something more than what we think is needed. We don't have enough either enough money or we try to... And I don't know enough about these numbers but my concern is right now the things that are trying to help us with our OCI especially with all this new reconstruction we're doing, we're doing 1% crack seal and 6% micro seal. Which to me those are the big preventative maintenance issues for roads to really help them from moving into a deteriorated state. That's a very very small small percentage of that. And so I'm concerned that we're using O&M money for all this reconstruction because if we don't have enough if we haven't budgeted we haven't received enough bond funds for some of our street projects. That's another issue we need to address in a different way as far as I'm concerned than taking O&M money that we could use to be trying to maintain our streets that are better than using because that's 37% of 10 that's 3.7 million dollars that's almost 4 million dollars. So I don't know exactly what the answer is but I'm concerned that we know how to address the problems of current streets with preventative maintenance. But from what I look at this budget I mean mill and overlay is 19 but mill and overlay that means it's gotten pretty bad. I mean that's a that's not really to me a preventative maintenance is it not or is it? For asphalt depending on the depth that is a preventative maintenance cycle. Ideally you would probably do about two of those through the life of the street. So instead of it being a 30-year approximate design life you could push that out to 50 to possibly 60 years. I guess just to sum it up my thought is this 37% if we're having to go into our street maintenance fund to make up reconstruction projects to make up a delta that maybe the bonds don't reach we got to find another way to do that because we're robbing Peter to pay Paul we're saying we want to we want to continue we want to get to a point of OCI and if we've got bond funding in place what streets are continuing to deteriorate at a level that we get caught in this cycle. So I didn't know that we're using I thought most of the street fund was going towards non-OCI and OCI in the sense of preventative maintenance activities. I didn't know that we were using almost a 40% of it to do road reconstruction which I think correct me if I'm wrong but it seems like we're sort of that that's counterintuitive to me if we're trying to create more preventative maintenance we're trying to do more preventative maintenance we're not allocating the resources to do that which sort of keeps us in this loop but I could be totally wrong how I'm saying this. Well we're depending quite a bit on how the pavement management model gives us guidance and suggestion on how to pick our projects. We would like to shift over time getting into more prevent ative maintenance but part of that means we've got to get our backlog either managed or we have to have a community tolerance to this road's bad and it's going to stay bad for a while. So are you saying that this reconstruction portion is sort of the O&M's way of saying this is going to be this is going to go to contribute to decreasing our backlog or? Well it does yeah any reconstruct helps work on the backlog problem and if we look at our overall pavement condition and we look at our distribution backlog is clearly our number one problem right now. From a financial perspective and maybe this goes to the committees and the bond committees and people's fear of things not passing or whatever but we 're looking at four million dollars a year going towards reconstruction either to make up a deficit in bond funding or to just reconstruct a road. I certainly with the rates the way that I know we want to get away from debt funding but we're putting four million dollars a year already out of this fund to reconstruction when I think as we get more of these roads reconstructed we 're going to have to have more money for preventative maintenance or we're going to wind up back in the same situation. So I think there's some way we can look at this model to try to maybe I don't have enough understanding but that just seemed like a large amount of money for me to I didn't know that this was happening. So it's obviously a decision that was made by staff and that's okay and I don't understand all the science behind it but if we're borrowing, presting the community to fund 24 million, 20 million we need to just ask for what we need so that we can get caught up instead of four million. Anyway I just I struggle with that but that's just me that 's just me. Yes Council Member Pro Tem. As it relates to the 44 million that's bond funded has a clear priority list that the committee came up with that and anyone can go and see that. How does this get prioritized in terms of what you reconstruct out of this? Is it heading off that list and going and trying to get those tackled sooner or is it another list entirely? Well let me put the bond program in context of what it funded for the backlog. The 20 million at that time we had over 100 million worth backlog so it funded about 20 percent of it. When we did the 24 million which is distributed over a span of time at that time we were able to tackle about 38 percent of the remaining backlog that wasn't included in the first. So we've still been on the smaller side of tackling that problem. The problem from a funding standpoint occurred over about a 35 year period and we've been working over about a decade to change that direction. So a lot of the information that's been provided over that last decade has shown a funding need up here and a funding level here and we've been working to close that gap. We have not closed that gap or eliminated that gap. We're getting closer to it but again it's so much of it is debt dependent and so that's the message that I would try to communicate. Does reconstruction burn a lot of money out of your O&M budget? Yeah, it burns a lot of money out of your bond program too. It's an expensive solution. We just recently did Lillian Miller. Lillian Miller, that one road section was close to $1.9 million. I guess my question is this. Ever since those two bond programs passed and as part of the passing I would go to neighborhood programs and say here's the list of streets that are being suggested. I mean it's a great way to say all right we've got three streets in our neighborhood done and of course why aren't we getting them all? And so it's a great opportunity to educate on the need versus what we have funded. But I'll tell you what, those neighborhoods will hold you to it when you give them say hey this is scheduled for 2017 reconstruction. All of a sudden if they see a road that's leapfrogging that wasn't even on the list of either two bond programs, that creates I guess an unnecessary communication problem. So that's my question is what gets in that pot of streets? Is that going back to the list that was prioritized by the community or do you guys have your own priority list that's above and beyond that? It's all on that same list. It's all of that majority of the backlog that basically hadn't been funded yet. And sometimes that gets into how long can we hold that project off. Well I think if you look at projects like Eagle Drive you begin to see how that money gets added to that project because the segment was much smaller when we started and input that we've gotten from council and other have added kind of to that and so that's part of that 37% that you're looking at. In some cases it's a street in need that there aren't complicating factors with utilities underneath it and we're in a position to move forward with it because coordination with water and wastewater and at most gas are another component of the things that we have to juggle. The only... May I? Oh sure. It goes back to sidewalks. Sorry to beat this horse so much but just for the staff to take a look at and I've just followed this the last couple years is in South Lake they have a whole initiative of kind of closing gaps, adding sidewalks. They have a whole website that shows all the sidewalks they 've added and what not but the interesting piece of that, in fact this probably crosses into your world a little bit as well, the interesting piece of this is they have kind of interesting funding options for neighborhoods who are interested in getting something in their neighborhood. Of course their demographics are different than some of Denton's neighborhoods but they're able to do matching grants. I don't know if we've ever explored how neighborhoods could say give up right away to the city as a way to trigger a sidewalk project or some other sort of ... I know there's taxing abilities if they... I don't know the mechanism of this but if they agree to pay 5% of the total cost it helps kind of encourage a sidewalk project along by assessing them. So all that to say I'm wondering if we can't look as we're looking at getting more aggressive with sidewalks, some of these other examples out there and some more creative funding possibilities. One thing on sidewalks and I'm sure we've done this because I know we do it periodically with different activities around the city but because I know we've had that contract I mean for a long time with... Have we ever done an analysis of if we were to bring that in house? We've had some discussion about are we at the workload level and the expense level to justify bringing a concrete crew on. Those are pretty sizable crews and so we have found that we can help speed them along by doing some of the demo work and haul off but letting them do the form work in the poor. So right now we don't really feel that we're in a good position to bring in or recommend bring in a sidewalk installation crew. But we've done the... Because I know we brought in... What was it? Sewer line. We added a couple new sewer line installation crews. Right and we do installation of a certain percentage of our replacements on water and have been for 10 years. Well, understand that but it was we added a crew two or three years ago or whatever specifically because we thought we could do it cheaper and also it facil itated a more expeditious completion of a project because we didn't have to wait for contractors. So that's all I'm asking is... I'd like to if possible just to see maybe an informal staff report on that analysis of the whole sidewalk concrete installation costs and what we're paying and what would it cost if we did a crew in house. Okay. Yeah. We've had fairly competitive pricing from Floyd Smith and we have not really seen an outside contractor compete from a pricing standpoint and sometimes we don't even see submission of bids. Sure. Yeah, it's not so much from other contractors. It's sort of an analysis of if we had that in house with that cost. Yes, Councilmember Wasme. To your point, it was in the budget last year and it was a Millings truck that I believe we bought and a crew of five or six to go with it to bring that in house and the argument was that we could get it done faster if it was in house. So I'd sure like to take a look at what it would... What we're spending now to have a contractor work on these sidewalks and what it would look like bringing that in house because it distresses me to hear sidewalks are behind because we can't get concrete. Well, what can we do and are we thinking outside the box to try to secure more concrete? I know North Texas is in a building boom and that's what we 're up against. But I also know our citizens and our residents need and want sidewalks and it's a priority. It's a priority not just for ADA but it's a priority for all ages who want to walk on the sidewalks. So I'd like to take a look at what that would... Is your question... A matrix of bringing sidewalk... Is your question related to sidewalk additions or is it related to maintenance of existing sidewalks? I think for me, maintenance of existing sidewalks. Okay. Yes, whatever he does. Whatever we're paying somebody to do, what's the corresponding cost for the city to do. We ready to move on traffic... Any other questions on streets? Seeing none. You're over there all by yourself. Traffic ops, these...I'm not going to go through all these bullet points but these are basically the functions and duties that we have. It's a division of 12. It is about $2.1 million worth of funding right now. These 12 employees manage 116 traffic intersections that are signalized. We have school zone flashers, 17,000 traffic signs and about 1.4 million feet of pavement markings that we maintain with that staff and with that budget. These are some of the activities that we deal with. Traffic signals, pavement marking and street signage according to the manual on uniform traffic control devices and then ADA compliance for the signalized intersections for the pedestrian crossings. Then we're also more recently involved with maintaining bike lane markings. As the council has funded bike lane pavement markings, then they're going to have a finite life and that adds to the inventory of what we need to be responsible for. One of the issues that is of concern is aging infrastructure and the age of our signals. 42% of our signals are 20 years or older. If we had a 20 year design life, which is probably not bad for the hardware and the equipment on them, we'd need to be doing about six per year . We're certainly not funded or doing that level of activity. If we try to push those lives 30 years right now, 28% of our current inventory is 30 years or older. It's certainly getting to be towards the end of its lifespan. At that design life, we'd be doing about four per year. Our history over the last 10 years, we have not been keeping pace in funding that. That funding has mostly come out of bond funds. They are electronic components. There's also technology changes and some regulatory changes that occur along the way. Aging infrastructure is a concern with regards to our signals. How many signals did we have to replace in 2015? I think we replaced two through the bond program. I think we have funding in the bond program to replace about two signals a year. If we're not funding the capital replacement of our inventory and infrastructure and similar to the discussion of bond versus revenue, then the question is should that be a revenue funded replacement cyclone program? We do have a supplemental package in the budget proposal to replace two. This is just a pie graph of the 116 signals. The average age of our entire signal inventory is about 19 years. Like I said, about 42% of it fall in this 20 to plus 30 year range. In the past 20 years, we've replaced 24 signals. That's about an average of 1.2 per year. So if you use four to six as a guideline for that, certainly over the last 20 years we haven't kept pace. Of those 24 signals that were replaced, 18 of them were done by tech stops. Some of the highway widening projects funded the replacement of those signals. But those signals become ours and then as they go through their life cycle, if the highway is not widened, which is unlikely, then that falls on our responsibility to replace. Right now in the bond program, we have two signals per year for a total of 12 over that six year period. Pavement markings, we have about 1.4 million foot of those that we have to maintain with our staff and our budget. That does include some miles of bike lane, which has been added to our inventory. I'm not going to go over each one of these bullet points, but this talks about the array of responsibilities that fall into that. ADA compliance, where ADA compliance becomes an issue for the traffic operations group is at the signals and pedestrian crossings. Those are changing and so the days of being able to have a push button and be compliant, they're looking more for audible type signals for vision impaired handicapped individuals. This is an example where if we do a traffic signal replacement or an upgrade, then we will try to deal with the ADA component of it. So we get lots of, well, why does the signal cost so much? This is one of the reasons it costs more money, is we have to get into the design and bring it up to that standard. Knowing that we may not be back substantially with capital ized reinvestment for another 20, 30 years, it's important to bring them up to standard. This almost looks like a compliant ramp, but it's really not. And so the standards change and probably in the last 10 or 12 years, we've seen standards change on us at least three or four times. So even though you're building something that's compliant today, at some point in the not too distant future, it's probably going to be noncompliant. We've got 17,000 signs of all shape sizes and purposes that we maintain. They last about eight to 10 years. Right now, the funding level and support that we have for signage is fairly adequate, so we're able to keep up with that component of it. It's probably more the replacement of the signals and the ability to keep up with the markings that we're probably not fully funded for. That does include the expansion of the marking requirements related to bike lanes. And so we'll be needing to try to get additional supplemental funding to support that because the life cycles of markings are probably in the two to six, seven year range. Tied to the strategic plan is to try to keep the service levels of the traffic up and some of that can be done through the signalized intersections. A lot of times, they're the choke points of the arterial system. And trying to implement the intelligent transportation system to give us a remote capability to manage and monitor signals. And I'm done. >> Real quick question on the bike lane markings, like let 's say, for instance, on Congress. So I mean, I was on a street the other day where it had a marking like this and it's residential street and there was a sign that says bike lane , bikes can use the full lane. Is that sort of what, like on Congress? Because Congress is pretty narrow road with parking on both sides. So if we stick this symbol in the road, then that means basically the bike can use the entire lane because there's really nowhere to go on the side because cars can be parked there. Is that what the thought of that is? >> I'm going to defer that to engineering because we maintain those as opposed to -- >> Well, then this may be out of the scope of this. So that's fine. We can talk about that later. I'll talk with them on that. >> Okay. Sorry. >> No, no. You're good. Any other questions on traffic? Yes, Mayor Pro Tem. >> I just wanted to get clarity on something you said. You said when you put in a new traffic signal, you also bundle into that cost the ADA ramping for what may be a sidewalk or what may be in the future a sidewalk, I guess. You take that, I guess all four sections of that intersection. Did that happen recently on Crescent? Crescent and Carroll? >> I've got a hit now, I guess. >> Okay. I observed that. Okay. Thanks. >> Any other questions? All right. Thank you. >> Thank you, Tim. We'll go on to our next report, which is Workstation Report 1B. Receive report to hold a discussion, provide direction regarding transportation operations. >> Thank you, Mayor. I'm Martin Nelson. I'll be providing a staff presentation on this. In front of you, he handed out a presentation that he'll be going over. >> Well, good morning. I appreciate the opportunity to come before you this morning to visit a little bit about transportation operations. We interface with Tim's group. You heard a lot of information coming out of Tim's group. And transportation operations does work closely with that division, that department. So purpose of my discussion this morning is just to give you a quick oversight of transportation operations, some recent accomplishments, upcoming goals and objectives for the year, as well as some of the challenges associated with that. So one of the things that transportation operation does is work closely with the various transportation agencies and partners, not only here in our community, but certainly region-wide. TextDOT on major surface transportation projects, on-system projects, 35 Express, the large 35 Express project is one of those. Certainly DCTA, working with our colleagues there at DCTA in terms of improving, enhancing otherwise looking at service levels as they provide service to the community. And then working with the county and North Central Texas Council of Government. The county partners with us on a frequent basis to, whether it's financially backstopping certain projects or helping us to work through, again, with as a partner coming to the cog and looking at a multi-agency partnership to advance a particular mobility enhancement. And then again with North Central Texas Council of Government, we've got staff serving on the bike and pedestrian advisory committee, the surface transportation technical committee, and then staff also works with our RTC rep as part of those responsibilities. The bike and pedestrian program also comes under transportation operations. It's a recent element to transportation operations. Based on some of the resources provided here, within the last 18 to 24 months, this program has come on strong. Again, coordinating and working with not only our engineering department, our streets and traffic divisions, but as well as the planning department, parks department, and the community at large, going out and working with the stakeholders to identify needs, desires, and potential projects. And then staff also provides the support to the Mobility Committee and Traffic Safety Commission items that advance through those particular committees. Again, working with our colleagues in the various departments through the organization. Also some of the accomplishments within the past 12 to 18 months working with, again with the county and TxDOT and certainly with our engineering crew, we're able to identify and get TxDOT to recognize the importance of adding improvements to the 35 Express project, specifically Loop 288. When they took a look at Loop 288 and the opportunity for Brinker to provide mobility options as a parallel mobility option to Loop 288, as well as just the overall intersection there at Loop 288 and 35E. It's, I believe, our busiest intersection in our community. Up until about this time last year, the Loop 288 enhance ments or the enhanced intersection there or bridge was not going to be included in the current phase. So again, working closely with our partners at the county and engineering department, we were able to advance a solution or some greater enhancement to those elements of that project. Also earlier this spring, we worked with DISD and DCTA to implement a pilot program to take a look at some of the challenges out on FM 426 McKinney where students were walking along the roadside. We put in place a temporary or a pilot program again with DCTA to see if we could help DISD move students from within or inside their two mile no-b using zone and provide transportation options for those students along McKinney. Passenger amenities with DCTA. Can you remind me why we decided to do the DCTA/DISD partnership instead of doing the sidewalks? So you may recall last or earlier this year, there was a presentation that indicated that the potential cost of implementing or putting in sidewalks to Ryan High School to roughly a mockingbird area, so west of about a half mile west of 28 8, was going to be in the neighborhood of $300,000. Okay. And so we're in the process of working with TechStat and pulling FM 426 off system. FM 426 is a state roadway presently. The commission just recently elected to push it, take it off system. We still have some procedural activities to pull it completely off system. But the point is, once that happens, there is roughly a little over $19 million available for design and construction as part of that project. Our thought or the staff's position was that we'd like to take a look at some other options rather than potentially building a throwaway project that may, within the course of 18 to 36 months, be designed, installed, and then reconstruction of that roadway or components of that roadway would make those sidewalks incomplete. Okay. And is it, so you're saying that the street is coming back into the city's possession? That is correct. Basically, there's just a few more procedural things to go through? Correct. At the end of last month, the Texas Transportation Commission voted to take it off system. So now it comes back to the region and we'll put it on what they call a TIP amendment, Transportation Improvement Program amendment, which will take place, I believe, in the August to September timeframe and then final transfer will come in the November timeframe, we believe. And so when you say 18 to 36 months out, does that mean to start utility relocation or is that still on schedule? So because we don't have, because the street has not been pulled off system as of yet, we do not have the funds to initiate the design component of that. So the thought is, again, that we would get access to the funds sometime at the earliest in the November timeframe, but hopefully before the January timeframe. Then that process would start. This is in district too and it means quite a bit to Council man Gregory and I. So I just want to make sure that we're doing all the things that we can for the safety of our kids here. And as far as the partnership, so that would be, so we're looking, if we do continue to do that for at least 36 months, I mean, if it works, right? Correct. So we, again, I got a slide a little bit later we can talk about it, but since we're here, I'll mention it. We have the City of Denton, DCTA, and DISD have been working to evaluate that pilot program and we're coming to a final recommendation in terms of what elements, the frequency, total number of vouchers, and what the cost share might be on that particular program. Thank you. So back to accomplishments, the bike and ped education outreach is one of the things I'm most proud of. We have, within the last 18 to 24 months, really been able to get engaged with DISD, visit with students at the elementary level, get out to various events, whether it's Jazz Fest or the community market, various activities around town, getting into the local bike shop and visiting with the stakeholders at those locations as well as their patrons to find out what is it that our community, our citizens are wanting in terms of bike and pedestrian elements and infrastructure. So Julie Anderson, our bike and ped coordinator, has done a great job with that, which kind of segues into the next point in terms of recognition for these alternative transportation. We recently submitted, our first time through, we submitted for an application to the League of American Bicycles for a bicycle-friendly community. We received an honorable mention. Usually it's two, three, four times through that process before you get a head nod from that organization at that level. Of course, our overall goal is to become a bike, to be recognized as a bike-friendly community, but we're well on our way and part of these, part of the resources that Council has provided to us here in the past 18 months to 60 months has really pushed us along in those efforts. To that extent, we were recently invited to come down to the Texas Transport, I'm sorry, Texas Active Transportation Conference and give a presentation on just how far we've come in terms of our bike and pedestrian infrastructure and then consistently we're recognized at the regional level at North Central Texas Council of Government as a progressive and aggressive community in terms of bike and ped infrastructure. Did the American League of Bicyclists give any indications as to what we need to do to be recognized at a higher level? They do, but I don't have all those in front of me, but some of our goals and strategies here outline some of those components in terms of enhanced bike lanes as well as continuing to enhance our outreach program as well as ensuring getting to the enforcement side. As you know, the five E's. Right. So if we could just follow up with maybe an informal staff report or a report to the, I don't think that we've had that report on the transportation committee or mobility committee have we on the gap to get us moving to the next level. I know we've had some great reports from Ms. Anderson, but if we could just kind of have an idea of what the next steps are that we need to do. At your pleasure, we could do that presentation at the mobility committee and then roll that up to full council as well. So one of the things that we looked at was advancing our current status from 4.7 of transportation mode share. So improve our alternative transportation mode share from 4 .7% to 7%. This graph here demonstrates where the U.S. stands, where Texas is, and then it demonstrates the city of Denton's success compared to some of the other communities within the state. We feel like we have a great opportunity, we have a great culture here in terms of bike and pedestrian culture with the universities and some of the things that are taking place in our downtown area. And certainly think that some activities and some of the projects in the next three to four years by 2020, we can attain that 7% or get very close to it. So one of those things is taking a look at improving our bike count program. Here at the floor we didn't have anything in place last fall. We reached out with the council of government, got a mobile counter that you see here, just taking bicycle counts on identified roadways. We also implemented a manual count, which has some positives and negatives associated with that. So the long and the short is we'd like to bolster that manual bike count program with having counters in place. Having that data will certainly help us communicate with both our planning as well as our engineering department to identify where next to place bicycle infrastructure and/or pedestrian infrastructure. So the next element of that then would be updating the 2012 bike plan. In 2011 before 2012 there really wasn't a component to our mobility plan. And in the 2011 time frame, started moving towards adding this component to the mobility plan. And in February 2012, the council approved the 2012 bike plan. We think we've gone a long way in terms of implementing quite a bit of those components. And however, there's not a pedestrian component as part of that bike plan. We also like to take a look at some of the lessons learned. Again, we're five years into it. We've got a lot of the short term goals of that bike plan checked off. We're starting to get into the midterm items. We just feel that it's about time to start moving towards revising that plan and incorporating some of those lessons learned. And also, again, for the overall comprehensiveness of the plan, take a look at our Parks and Recreation Department component, which is the park trail plan and incorporate those. You heard quite a bit from Tim earlier today on the sidewalks. So we've heard from the mobility committee to take an emphasis and take a closer look at the downtown area. So aside from the sidewalk plan that Tim is managing, we've taken a look at the downtown area maybe within roughly a four block radius of the downtown to take a look at some of those sidewalk gaps and disconnects. How and where best can we remove those gaps? And to that extent, we're seeking some funding as part of this year's budget. But this particular photo shows Austin Street here on the left and on your right, the non-existent sidewalk. You can see the GOAT trail along McKinney. This is right out in front of City Hall. We've got a new piece of infrastructure there, the mid- block crossing that we'd like to tie that into. Tim talked a little bit about the safety markings as part of his program. We work closely with him. You can see one of the new dismount markings here down on Oak Street. We've got a number of them around the square as well. Also, again, I mentioned a little bit about our bike and pedestrian coordinator getting out into the community to support and otherwise talk a little bit about safety, not only on the bike side, but certainly the pedestrian side. Again, we'd like to continue our partnership with DCTA to improve our bus stops. Here on the far right, you can see the stop just there on Dallas Drive. We were fortunate to capture this photo shortly after the bus stop was implemented, and it shows kind of the before and after in one picture. The wooden bench that we've heard so much about was put out there voluntarily by a citizen to support the needs there with DCTA, but we're working closely with DCTA to work through the bus stop improvement program. Question? Has that other bench been removed? I understand that it has. Okay, thank you. So I won't spend much time here since we talked a little bit about the transportation options for McKinney Street, but we're going to continue to press forward with that, and we'd like to think that we'd have a recommendation to Council as an option as part of the upcoming budget year to provide some transportation options there. Again, we want to maintain and enhance our relationship with the various agencies. Recently in one of our stakeholder meetings, as it relates to a number of different projects, the director of - well, one of the assistant directors with TechSite Dallas was very complimentary of City of Denton Engineering and city staff as it relates to advancing a number of different projects, certainly 35E project, the Loop 288 and Brinker Road component, then 2181, 377, and a number of other projects. It was very complimentary of the way we've been working closely with that agency, so those were good words to hear, and we'd like to enhance and bolster that relationship. One of the other things we'd like to do, or that we've started with the county, and that is to identify resources for FM 1515. 1515 is Airport Road. We know there's a substantial number of developments taking place out on Airport Road, and we recognize the fact that the infrastructure there may not be up to par , so working with the county to identify funding to start the design phase and then work closely with the county and the COG to identify construction for out year. So we've just really kicked that off here within the last six to eight months. So challenges. One of the things we have coming forward is on-street challenges. We have significant on-street challenge or on-street parking pressure around the universities, partly in our downtown, and then with our City Hall East and Union Pacific Railroad area over by the rail yard development. Another one of the challenges, and quite frankly, one of the things, we just met with the University of North Texas late last week to start working on a comprehensive program more specific to their university or their campus as well as some of the out lying neighborhoods. We're also working with our fire department. They have some concerns and issues as it relates to on-st reet parking, creating some barriers to public safety. Implementation of sidewalk infrastructure. We partner with engineering as well as the streets department. I don't know that I need to go into much more detail on that. I think Tim and Council asked plenty of questions on that. We have quite a few challenges associated with that, but certainly that's on our radar to advance. And then regional toll revenue funding. Our region has really been blessed in the last seven to ten years with access to these funds that were generated off the 121 toll project. So what does that mean? Denton County proper and all the communities involved received somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.4 billion off of that program. Now that we're, again, seven, eight, nine years into that program, those funds are starting to dwindle. We as a region have implemented a number of projects. We've got two ongoing projects, Bonnie Bray and May Hill, that were supported through those funds as well as components to the 35E project. So as those funds go away, we'll have to be diligent in working with our partners at the cog as well as tax dot to identify additional funding for major transportation infrastructure. So with that, I'd take any questions that you may have. Let's go to Council Member Geary. Regarding FM 1515, is that a county road or a state? That is a tax dot road. Okay, it's a tax dot road. So would it be, okay, so with FM 426, we asked to take over a jurisdiction of that road, correct? That is correct. And that means that that would free up a certain amount of funds for us and we would be responsible for maintenance, sidewalks, and improvements and things of that nature. Correct. Let me clarify. One of the benefits on the FM 426 project was it was included as a regional toll revenue funded project. So it had those funds programmed so that when it comes off system, those funds will carry over. Okay. Right now, tax dot has not identified needs or desire to fund any type of enhancement on FM 1515. So there are no funds attached to FM 1515? There are no funds presently attached, however, working with the county to identify some residual funding that they have, which would be really the very front end of the design component. Would there be benefits to taking FM 1515 out of tax dot's jurisdiction? So there could be, however, the funding element. The benefits would be it's under our control. We would advance the design and construction on maybe a more aggressive timeline. However, without the funding to do that, we're not in a position to make that happen. So maybe the desire and maybe the approach would be or one option would be, again, identify the funding for the design element and get it into or at least get it programmed for those enhancements and then seek once it gets built to the standard that we would accept, then maybe turn it over. Again, there's out year cost associated with that, whether it's maintenance or just overall maintenance associated with it. I guess what I'm thinking of is when we have a number of industries that we have incentivized to build over there and a part of their incentives are that they undertake improvements to the infrastructure in that region or in that particular localized area. Is it possible for some of those reimbursable expenses for these new businesses coming in to be allocated towards improvements of FM 1515 if it's not in our jurisdiction? I would have to defer to the finance folks on some of that. I'm not quite certain on how those funding mechanisms would work. Everybody's looking around. We don't have an answer. That's okay. I think in the realm of possibility we can look into it, but I'm not secure in my understanding of how those reimbursement. Yeah, if we could get maybe a white informal staff report on that, just to explore that question. Yeah, that's a good question. Thank you. Mayor Pro Tem, you had a question? Sure, yeah, I've got a couple questions. One relates to the county partnership. So we see some clear examples of that recently with Brinker 288. I even think that pedestrian bridge crossing I-35, I think the county helped. Correct. That was actually a regional toll revenue funded project. The pedestrian bridge at UNT? Oh, not at UNT. I was thinking on the- Well, anyways, I seem to recall I think Commissioner Eads helped part of that. But all that to say is we see on these big projects, obviously the county's at the table because they're helping fund with these things. We see a few examples of some smaller projects. So I can think of when we were first initiating the bike plan, Commissioner Coleman came forward and said, "I have discretionary funds. I'd love to see some bike lanes in his jurisdiction, in his precinct." Not precinct, but in his district. What do you call them? Precinct. Precinct. And we were able to kind of partner with him and that was a small scale. It wasn't a major intersection on a highway or anything like that. Is there a mechanism by which we're able to kind of look for those opportunities from time to time when there's smaller projects in the county may have? I know we're always thinking about it with large projects, but are we thinking about that funding? Correct. From time to time, Commissioner Coleman has extended an offer, "Hey, I do have some transportation funding." Commissioner Eads as well. So we typically work with our transportation consultant to interface with the county and see how and where. And again, one of those particular projects would be the FM 1515. Also a potential enhancement to the 1830 Hobson Lane intersection. And I think we sufficiently beat the horse of sidewalks, but something you said made me ask a question of kind of how this all integrates. So you pitched this idea of an update to the pedestrian bike plan, which doesn't really have a pedestrian component to it up to this point. We talked about in the team session the need for kind of a comprehensive study of what our needs are, both from existing and new even and what that cost would be. How does your plan interface or your concept of what we would do in an update to this plan, how would that interface with what we just talked about in terms of a larger comprehensive study of needs? Well, certainly I think it would be rolled into how the consultant or planning organization would take a look at that. We've got a lot of data, as Tim indicated. Julie has quite a bit of that information. Again, our lessons learned, what works. And certainly as we move through that, then the priorit ization. Understand we look at certain priorities. The ADA component obviously is a top or one of the top priorities. Then we look at how we connect to activity centers of varying degrees, whether it's a school for safety issues, whether it's a retail or entertainment area. And so I would tell you that yes, that would get incorporated into how we look at a more comprehensive approach to those needs. Not taking away what both our engineering and street department had done in terms of their own work. Right. Right. I guess I can talk with you guys more offline about this, understanding how those two connect. In other words, if we fund one aspect of that but not the other, what are we left with in terms of lack of direction? Or if we were to fund your request for an update but yet didn't fund a more comprehensive scientific study of needs and total cost, does that get us anywhere? Or are we just kind of talking about here's what our goals are without really a sense of what the funding component. So how those two interact, I think I've got more questions. We can talk offline about that. Finally, I just wanted you to mention it briefly. I think in the slide previous to this, and we've had a lot of conversation, I think we will coming up on parking down east of Bell. Can you elaborate a little bit more on the current status of that conversation with the railroad and the cog and all that? So we've been working with DCTA or we started working with DCTA over a year ago on trying to communicate some of the pressures that our respective facilities were receiving from each other. The transit patrons using City Hall East customer service parking. Likewise, we might have folks reporting for jury duty parking in the transit center parking lot. So we started a conversation which quickly broadened to other options or other issues. And one of the things we're looking at is working with the railroad to secure some additional parking maybe adjacent to the Center for Visual Arts. We know that the rail yard is coming online. That will create some additional pressure in the downtown area. We're looking at an overall update or improvement to the existing parking lot at the corner of Exposition and Hickory. And then as part of that whole project, a system integration, if you will, back to integrating the vehicles, the buses with the rail, and then the active transportation component, the sidewalk and the bike lanes. We've got a number of rail lines that are underutilized or not utilized at all that cross Sycamore. We'd like to see if we could work with the railroad to either update or remove those all together to make cycling and the bus movement across Sy camore a little more efficient and safer. As well as looking at utilizing or incorporating our Quiet Zone program for McKinney, Hickory, Sycamore, and Prairie into that greater project. One of the things we were looking at was maybe leveraging, trying to find a way to leverage our funds for the Quiet Zone with the Council of Government and with North Central Texas Council, with DCTA and COG to get a larger project rather than just Quiet Zones. So we're knee deep in conversations with the railroad. We think there's some interest on their part. There's certainly interest from the COG. In fact, they had worked with us a little bit on some planning activities, as well as the DCTA. >> Council Member Grigger. The only question I have is more of just a, if you could maybe send out a report or have John about the, where we are with the Brinker Loop 288, just that whole sort of project. Where is it in its path moving forward? And that's, I mean. >> I can quickly. >> Yeah. >> We can back that up. We understand that that particular project will be advanced as a design bid build rather than a design build. And we understand that TxTOT has targeted the September time frame to let the project. So I have not seen it out to bid just yet. It has not been identified. That doesn't, I've not been told that it's been out to bid, but that doesn't mean it's not been advertised within the last 24 to 48 business hours . >> Okay. All right. Good. Any other questions? All right. Thank you. Let's take a short break. I believe lunch is served. And Sarah, I believe you had to leave at 12. >> [INAUDIBLE] >> Okay, yeah. All right. So let's grab a, let's take about a ten minute break. Five, ten minute break. Grab us some lunch if you're hungry and. >> [INAUDIBLE] >> 2016 is 1145. And we are now at our work session agenda item 1C, which is receive, report, and hold discussion give staff direction regarding the preliminary FY 2016-17 proposed budget capital improvement program and five year financial forecast. And I believe Mr. City Manager, you. >> Yeah. Chuck Springer, our director of finance, will present the staff presentation. A couple things. First of all, I hope you'll notice in Chuck's presentation that we've really tried to do a good job and address the strategic outcomes that and key action items that the council's approved of the strategic plan. Hopefully another thing you'll notice is that we're trying to expand on the capacity of public safety. We'll be looking at and trying to address the public infrastructure needs, many of which we've talked about this morning. And so to that end, we've really tried to take a look at the supplemental decision packages and give you our ranking from a staff perspective of what those things look like. Obviously, all of the numbers, revenue, and expense are not , we don't have all of those numbers presently. But really, I think the longer term, more important focus for us is to kind of, one, for you to give the priorities that council may have as it relates to supplemental decision packages. But I think the more important part of that is to talk to us and give us some direction as it relates to maybe the tax rate. It's very important that we can get a consensus on the tax rate that requires five votes. If we were unable to come to consensus on a tax rate, then obviously it will default to the effective tax rate and Chuck will be prepared to go into more discussion on that. But I really think that your direction as it relates to a consensus on the tax rate is very important. That's really the basis for the budget that hopefully you would receive from the city manager. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Chuck and let him answer all the difficult questions that he may have. >> I wanted to echo those sentiments, Howard. This is an opportunity for us as councilmembers to really just have an honest conversation with staff about what we're looking for in the upcoming budget, some of our priorities, whether it be tax rate, whether it be supplemental packages . And that way, the more information we give them today, that way they'll be able to go back and formulate a budget that seems to be in line with sort of the consensus that we're trying to share. So we don't want to -- I guess I don't want to be in the conversation in August and all of a sudden something that's been very important for two or three months. That's the first time we hear it. If it's something that's important to you today, let's get it out there so staff is able to put that in the mix as they continue to formulate the budget. >> Chuck, you're up. >> Thank you, Howard. I have a brief presentation and I had included in the packet some spreadsheets and when we get to that point, we'll hand those out so you'll have those to look at a little bit easier than going on to your iPads. In terms of the theme of the budget, I'm not going to highlight all of these. We've gone through these before. Howard mentioned expanding public safety. I will say I've kind of added on to the continued street maintenance expansion. We've kind of highlighted the next bullet, maintenance of other general government infrastructure that we've been talking about a lot today and others. We talked about traffic signals, sidewalks, parking lots, buildings, kind of an overall maintenance of public infrastructure emphasis. And then utility infrastructure replacement and expansion. In terms of the objective today, what we're trying to get to today is again continue the preliminary budget discussions. One of the questions, as you notice, we have a lot of here. Want to be able to answer questions you have regarding the general fund supplemental packages that we sent out on July 1st. So if there's questions on packages. Receive direction on any additional supplemental packages to be considered. Are there any that we haven't included that are a council priority, as the mayor mentioned? And then receive direction for the proposed budget, discussing the preliminary priorities and the spreadsheet that we'll hand out that we list some of those are in a priority order. And I'll go through that. Changes to those priorities. This is kind of the staff's first run at this. Are there some changes that the council wants to make where we've misinterpreted the priorities of the council and then tax rate adjustments, as Howard had mentioned. So with that, I'm going to ask Nancy to hand out this. It's a three page handout and this is included in the backup, but I think it's a lot easier to go over and there's really about four areas on here. And I'm also going to feel, give me a moment, I'm going to pull up some backup behind this. Let me try to size this a little bit better so we can go over it. The first thing I want to go over is this top sheet and to kind of historically, one of the ways in which we try to kind of meet the city's needs is to look each year for funds that are still remaining available from the current year budget or where we've seen revenues come in higher than budgeted. Are there some funds available from the current year that we can apply toward supplemental packages? We've done this historically every year. And these are kind of one time items. This isn't really a recurring revenue source, but one time items. So that's the first spreadsheet I want to go over quickly with the council and I'll just put it up on the PDF for the viewing public as well as for the council to look at. But you can see the items that are listed on there. That totals about 1.1 million are some requests. On the left is the department that's requesting it, what it is and the requested dollar amount. Security cameras at the library, the self-contained breathing apparatus, the medic unit 8 vehicle. You'll see medic unit 8. The operational cost when we get into the 16-17 supplemental packages for the general fund. Patient lift system, station alerting system, all kind of one time items requested by the fire department. We talked about the comprehensive study of streets and right away and sidewalks for ADA to be coordinated by the engineering department. Parking lot replacement and we'll get into that a little bit with the recurring. But one of the items that was studied when they did the OCI study for streets was what are the conditions of the city owned parking lots? Like at the civic center, recreation centers, those kind of things. And looking at a program to maintain those, to rebuild what 's necessary and maintain those just like we do the streets. So this package here would do some parking lot replacement at the civic center. When I get to the 16-17 operating budget, you'll see a recommendation for ongoing parking lot maintenance. To do basically the same thing that you do with streets is there's some preventive maintenance to extend the life of those parking lots and ones that need to be replaced. Yes, Mayor. >> Can you help me understand? So I'm reading this title. Supplemental packages funded in FY1516. So these have been funded? >> Correct. No. These are what would be proposed in the upcoming budget to fund with funds still available from the 15-16 budget mainly because of cost savings and revenues being a little higher than anticipated. So these are all items right now that are just proposed. >> Okay. So then -- so when we had our first sort of preliminary discussion on the five-year forecast and all that, we showed that there was an addition to the fund balance above and beyond what we had projected. Is that where we're saying these funds would come out? Because it's about 1.6 or 1 point something like that, 1.5. >> When I estimated in June, it was about 1.8, but my estimate has changed a little bit, lowered a little bit because of some additional expenditures we've had to incur on some different items. So on this particular one, then like downtown sidewalk improvements, it says traffic safety fund, so I guess that's where some of them come from. But this is -- I think we had a -- or I brought up that maybe we need to have a conversation about this particular expense. Is this something we want to look at the TIF, if that's something that we want -- since it is specifically downtown sidewalk improvement. Okay. I just want to make sure I'm trying to understand because I saw funded and I thought we've already funded it. >> No, this is all -- all of these are just kind of a real preliminary look at where we are in developing the budget in terms of all supplemental packages for 16/17, just how potentially we could fund them. >> I'm getting ahead of myself, but I'm trying to understand how I think about this. I know on the last page of this you've got a priority ranking. What determined -- what got it on this sort of list versus that list? Does this mean that if they made it on this list that the priority of this supersedes the priority ranking that I'm going to find on the third sheet? >> No. Really what we looked at, sometimes we kind of segregate out what of the supplemental packages that are -- that are high priority, not necessarily, you know, one, two, three, but a high priority. What of those potentially could be funded out of 15/16? So we kind of look at it that way. I'm going to get to another sheet that shows some use of fund balance in the Traffic Safety Fund. Again, those are what could potentially be funded. The Traffic Safety Fund, it's very limited by state law as to what we can fund, where this is really one-time type purchases that can be funded. So if you looked at those, those would all be high priority projects. Now we don't have this ranking intermixed with that, but they're high priority ranking projects in terms of that. >> I think the key -- I think the key is, first of all, they're one-time, but they may have a companion piece that's being recommended in the supplemental packages for 16/17 when we get to that. >> Councilmember Waske. >> Just so we're clear, it's 1.1 million, and this is a staff recommendation. But is it possible to also move some pieces out of here and insert some pieces off the big supplemental list, correct? >> Correct. And that's one of the items. Are there some priorities -- are there some priorities that the initial run that staff's made at this proposed budget, are there some priorities that we're missing? >> So council may deem something a priority that staff has not. >> Correct. >> Thank you. >> Any more questions on this first page? And I'll really try to confuse you with the next one. The next one is really looking at, again, general fund supplemental requests, but these are funded from another source. We've really got two sources in here. We've got traffic safety funds in here, and then -- let me -- we've also got -- well, I'll just go through the projects. It's easier to do it that way. In terms of the traffic safety fund, this is some right-of- way accessibility funding for ADA, and this is really kind of improvements at signals , so to speak. I think Tim had that picture up there where we're kind of used to signals being where you press the button to be able to go across. Well, now the guidelines have changed a little bit. So these would be just kind of signal improvements relating to ADA requirements, not necessarily concrete but more just signal improvements at different intersections. >> So this is on the traffic signal replacement. Tim indicated that two per year were already funded from the bond program, and that's correct? >> Correct. >> So this would be an additional two per year? >> Well, the one down here on the bottom, that would be one more. That would be a third. This 340,000, it's about 340,000 per intersection for replacement. And then when we get to the general fund supplemental packages, the fourth one is proposed within the general fund. So this would be the third one per year. We were doing about two per year from bond funds. This 340,000 here out of the traffic safety fund would be number three. And then when I get to that full list of the general fund, the fourth one is on there. >> And I would remind council that Tim indicated that we replaced two last year in 2015. So it's a pretty tall order in terms of 340,000. So just keep that in mind as we're deciding priorities on this budget. >> The second one down, the fire department traffic signal preemption. That's just adding more traffic signals that the fire department, when they get ready to go through, can kind of press the button and switch the signals so that they're green for their traffic flow helping to reduce their response times. These are some additional ones and additional signals. Economic development, that is proposed to be funded by the chamber. So we've put it on here as a package, but the chamber has proposed to fund that. The bus stop improvements that Mark talked about. This is really when DCTA comes to do the bus stop, sometimes there's a little bit of work that the city has to do to bring it into compliance in addition to the stop. So these funds are used in conjunction with DCTA for any kind of small improvements that may be necessary further down at a corner or something like that related to the bus stop. >> Question from councilmember Begarry. >> Regarding that CRM system that's funded by chamber, so there's -- chamber has economic development there as well. Is this going to be a shared CRM system or how is it going to work? >> I think it would be the city system. Do you want to come respond to this one? >> Sorry to interrupt the lunch. >> That's all right. This is one of the recommendations from the consultant report that you all heard about a few weeks ago is using an integrated CRM system that all parties that are engaged with prospects would use. And the funding actually would be leftover funding that is a part of the city's contract with the chamber. So they've got some excess funding that we would ask them to utilize to purchase this system that we would all use. And we haven't selected a system yet but this is approximate pricing based on the demonstrations that we've received. >> Okay. So this is from last year's economic development contract with the chamber then? >> This is actually about two or three years ago there was a vacancy in economic development on the chamber side and there was a significant salary savings during that vacancy. And they asked for a one time exception to be able to hold on to that additional funding for some joint one time projects and this is remaining from that. >> Okay. Thank you. >> You're welcome. >> Thank you, Mayor. Could you remind us, please, what the traffic safety fund is, where that money is coming from? >> Okay. That's a good question. The safety fund is set up on the red light camera program where the funds come in from that and a portion of that goes back out to the state and a portion goes to the contractor. So the city receives those funds. The use of those funds are restricted by state law for certain specific purposes related to pedestrian movement, traffic movement and those type of things. So we've picked these projects with consultation with the police department in terms of what would fit within those funds. And let me also mention we've been building up some fund balance in that fund. You can see the use of it. The contract with that outside company requires that if that contract is ended early for some reason that we pay their capital cost. So there's some future liability if the contract's ended early. So we've kind of built up some of that fund balance and feel like it's time to start drawing it down now as we end, as we get near the end of that contract period. >> Well, you anticipated my next question because I was adding it up to see how much it was altogether. And I was wondering how much we're receiving on an annual basis because if my numbers are correct, it's about $806,000. >> The fund had about $1.3 million in it at the beginning of this fiscal year. We estimated an increase maybe about $400,000 to $500,000 during the fiscal year. >> How close are we to the end of the contract that would remove us from the jeopardy of having to pay off their capital? >> We have the expert over here on the Traffic Safety Fund who's just stood up. >> The current contract runs through May of 2019. And just to clarify, the original contract, there were two caveats. If the legislature takes action that ends the program, then we can walk away from the contract or if the court rules it to be unconstitutional, any other action there, then we're stuck in that contract until then. >> Thank you. >> I have a question on this. On the Fred Moore Park Soccer and Football fields, I believe it shows 50%. >> Yes. >> And maybe this is a question for Emerson, how was the determination made for it to be 50% out of the park dedication, park development fund? Because that's all they got for that radius or how did we arrive at those particular allocations of funding? >> When we submitted the grant request to CDBG, we knew the cost of the project. We asked for half of that project from CDBG knowing that we would match the other half with park development funds. >> Do we have sufficient park development funds for this particular radius to cover that whole amount? >> I would have to look at that, Mayor. I don't have that answer right here. We could certainly look at it though. >> Thank you. >> I wanted to mention on that one, I know it shows kind of , you know, net funding is zero, but that was a council requested project, so we wanted to make sure that council is aware of what we're doing even though it may not have a general fund impact. >> I have a question before you move on about the intersection radar detection. Does that act as like a red light camera would? Is it? >> No. That's the preemption system that we have called Opticon, I believe, and so that's a feature that public safety uses to change signals as they approach. >> I think that's the preemption one. >> That's the traffic signal preemption. Is that the same thing? >> I think Mr. Fisher is going to come up to volunteer to answer about that package. >> Okay. Thank you. >> It's some improved technology for detection to replace some of the old in the ground loops, so it's more sensitive for picking up bicyclists, for instance, so if a bicyclist came up to an intersection, magnetic loop wouldn't pick it up, but the radar would sense the movement, so it's components to upgrade some of our older signals that are otherwise maybe in good shape, but could it improve the technology? >> Okay. So it's not necessarily a radar speed for -- okay. I got you. >> No. It's more of a detection for the control of the signal. >> Okay. Thank you. >> And I think part of the reason is sometimes if a bicycl ist come up and they're waiting in that intersection, you know where you wait and it has to kick off to know somebody's there and may not know they're there to kick off the light to switch the loop, so it's really for kind of that detection at the intersection when the light switches for -- >> And when there's maybe not a crossing block? Because that does the same thing, right? >> Yeah, if you press the button, correct. >> Okay. >> I'm sorry. I had a follow-up question on the traffic safety fund. If I thought I heard you correctly that the contract, the current contract requires us to cover capital expenses even if it's due to an action by the Texas legislature, did I hear that opposite of that? >> That's opposite, sir. And just to clarify, we have a flat rate per camera that we pay that covers all of those things and we're responsible for that flat contract rate. It's not just a capital piece that would, you know, go down over time. >> So if the legislature passes something, we're not responsible for reimbursing the capital cost, that flat rate, correct? >> Yes, that's correct. >> And over the passage of time, does that flat rate go down based upon depreciation or has it stayed the same since contract inception to contract termination? >> Actually, at one point early on, it had a consumer price index clause, an escalator, and it went up when we weren't making any money and we're actually in the red. And we renegotiated that part of it and it's been a flat rate ever since and there aren't any plans for it to go up. >> Okay. All right. Thank you. Sorry about that. >> I'm going to move down a little bit to the rest on that page. >> You just thought you had a short presentation. >> Slide count wise, I guess it was. These are a couple of other projects that we're listing and the council was introduced to these when the police department made their presentation . And these are the upgrading of the radios to the digital format. We've broken it out between police and fire department, roughly about a million dollars each because there was some discussion about doing one one year and one the other. And then a replacement of the, a replacement slash or upgrade of the computer aided dispatch system. So these are items that what we would propose right now is to increase the capital budget and to fund these with debt, probably over a ten year time frame. So we've listed them here as general fund capital request. As part of the proposed budget, you'll see the capital budget as part of that. But we wanted to list these items since there were some important packages that had been brought up to let you know potentially how we would propose to fund these. Okay, I'm going to go to the next one and this one doesn't really show up that well. I'm going to put it up here, but I think it's easier to work from the list that's in front of you. And I will mention we've got in here the department, what key focus area it's in, this priority ranking. You can see this one is ranked from one to 29. Again this isn't all of the supplemental packages. This is just what potentially could be funded based on the preliminary budget estimates. And we've got the requested expense amount, some revenue costs, offsets, net cost, and then we do a cumulative total. Let me also talk a little bit about the colors on here. What we've tried to do, if you look at the key at the bottom, is kind of move the line up from funding about five million up to about 4.6 million with a half cent tax rate reduction. So we've kind of tried to show in this priority order as tax rate reductions are moved up in order, for example, a one cent reduction would eliminate the funding for all of the yellow and the pink. And you go up another half cent, so one and a half cent tax rate reduction, and roughly, this is all rough numbers. We still don't have the final certified value, so please take these as estimates, would eliminate the blue, yellow, and red where the two cent tax rate reduction would really take away all of the supplemental packages that are in color there. So wanted to kind of give council a little bit of sense of impact against these are preliminary numbers. We'll kind of have real numbers after the 25th, but just wanted to give a first blush in terms of an impact of those. So really the questions here are if the council wants to have some discussion on the tax rate that they would like to see proposed in the budget, as well as, you know, we've listed these from one to 29. Are there some that are higher priority that aren't even here, or are some of them that are down toward the bottom should be a much higher priority ? Councilmember Wasney. So back to the traffic signal replacement. This is the last line item under the white. Traffic control traffic signal replacement, 340,000. I'd like to see that removed because we already, as discussed previously, have two traffic signal replacements in the bond. We on the page previous to that, we already have a traffic signal replacement that's being paid for by the traffic safety fund. That's three. When I asked this morning how many did we have to replace last year, the answer was two. That's just something I'd like to lay on the table for my fellow council to noodle. And the last item under pink, internal auditor. There is nothing that says revenue cost offset. I know that we're presently paying for an outside auditing company, so that figure is lacking in this. Can I ask Mr. Langley? Can I answer that? We're required under state law and federal law to have an external audit, but that is separate from the work that would be done by the internal auditor. The external audit must be performed under certain guidelines and we have to hire an outside firm to do that. Okay. That has the capability to do that. So if we were to hire an internal auditor, they would review different processes within the city, but that's separate from the city's financial report. So there's not a savings there. We still require to do to hire the external audit for a financial report. Okay. Understand. I understand and I thank you for that. Can I clarify on the other? You were talking about the traffic signal replacements. I think what Tim had answered or meant to answer was we replaced two last year. That's what we funded out of the bond program. In terms of what they were recommending replacement, I think their minimum recommendation was four based on trying to replace four a year to maintain the age at no more than 30 years. I think if you were trying to maintain the age of the existing traffic signals at 20 years, he was saying you would need to replace six a year. So I think the two that were replaced were just all we had the funding for out of the bond program. But in terms of what they would recommend annually replacing, I think they would recommend a minimum of four per year to replace just to keep the age of our existing stock at 30 years or below. Understand that. It's still 340,000 purchased one. So again, I'm looking at this list and I'm looking at the auditor and the cost of the auditor and if we took out the traffic control of 340, that 's a substantial number that would help offset the 194 of bringing in an internal auditor. And I understand the council has not had that discussion yet in terms of consensus on whether we do that or not. I'm certainly in favor of it. But I'm saying that's where I would make the swap to find the money and move that auditor out of the last place pink into the white. >> Any other? Yes. Councilmember Geary. >> I'll second that. I know we haven't had the discussion about auditor yet. I'm assuming we'll have it today because we're talking about priorities, but I could be wrong. So yeah, that would be in the white section for me as well. So one thing that I noticed was that there are a number of kind of tech upgrades and again going back to economic development. Last time when you guys were here, I think it was two weeks ago or three weeks ago you made the presentation and we talked about potentially removing some functions out of Chamber of Commerce and the cost savings that would come from that. Wondering if we can take some of those cost savings and use it to fund these technological upgrades and if that's a possibility as opposed to using general fund. >> I think at this point we are not clear yet on the impact that the change to the distribution of duties, how that's going to impact the budget in terms of the Chamber contract and the funding allocation associated with that. What we've done so far is sit down with the Chamber of Commerce and we're looking at getting back together the first week of August to talk about proposed changes to the contract. I think the challenge with changing the dollar amount that 's being funded to the Chamber, in other words reducing that in order to cover these costs, the challenge with that is the costs associated with compiling proposals, which is what we 're going to bring in house, is really human costs. It's a person whose responsibilities include compiling proposals, but that person also has significant other responsibilities and so to cut funding would be a challenge without eliminating a person in FTE on the Chamber side who does a lot of other things in addition to compiling proposals. It's more time than it is actual hard costs associated with that change. >> So I guess my point would just be that this is an $11, 000 request and the contract with the Chamber of Commerce is $260,000 if I remember correctly. And we are reducing the amount of work that we're asking the Chamber to do, so that's kind of the point that I'm trying to make, but I do appreciate the top level view in terms of staff time. >> I do think that in early August when we meet with the Chamber next, where we're working on a proposal for how we would bring that function in house , they're working on a proposal of how they'll implement the marketing scorecard, which is going to be a new responsibility on their side and that was a part of the recommendation from the consultant as well. We might have a better idea in early August of any fiscal impact to the Chamber contract in terms of what we would be bringing forward to you. And certainly if you give us direction to find a way to reduce the contract in a way that would cover these expenses, then we would pursue that. >> Thank you. >> So what I think I'm hearing you say is that simply transferring some of those functions from the Chamber of Commerce to the city doesn't necessarily mean any reduction in cost. It simply means instead of paying them the contract, we're going to have to be assuming those responsibilities and probably hiring some additional staff in house to take care of those functions. >> We're not proposing at this point in time hiring additional staff in house. We feel like it's something that we can bring in house and that the efficiencies associated with it will mean that the impact is minimized in terms of time and that we're asking the Chamber to take on some additional responsibilities as well . So it's kind of a swap in responsibility where things are more efficient. >> Okay. Thanks. >> Chuck, I had a couple questions. >> Yes, sir. >> Item one, item priority item number 20, which is internal audit contract services. If we had an internal auditor, would we anticipate that that would sort of -- >> Not be necessary. >> Or some portion of it. Some portion -- I'm not saying it just -- oh, you just X the whole thing out. I mean, I don't know. I don't know what we've done with what audits we're doing with those funds. But is it anticipated that some of that could be offset by the internal auditor? >> Yes. And we have in the current budget before any additions, we have 75,000 that we use on an annual basis for contract auditing services. This 100,000 would be in addition to that. But we would foresee if an individual was hired that this amount would go down probably significantly. There may be some that they want to have in addition to the 75,000 for outside contract services. But they also may want, you know, have some other needs. >> Okay. A couple other questions. And that brings up an additional one, but on the priority ranking number five, which is the concession stand, and we're showing a revenue/cost offset of 610,000. >> That is really the additions. If you remember during the bond program, we're making some additions to the splash park out there. And I think it's a wave pool addition. And in order to do that, we have to hire additional part- time lifeguards. You have to have coverage of that. But what the Parks Department is estimating that our increased revenue from that facility will offset those increased costs for all the part-time lifeguard staff. And we may need a little bit more in terms of the staff for the food sales. But they're estimating that all of those additional costs will be offset by additional revenue because of that new attraction. >> And I guess a couple questions I have, and they don't have to be answered now, but maybe a follow-up email to the council, is how did we estimate that 610,000? Because if that's short, it means we've got to make it up somewhere. Because I don't remember what the revenue was for the water park in general, you know, year by year. So it seems like that'd be a -- this is in addition to what we're currently experiencing out there. So I would just like to see some kind of -- not formula, but how did we arrive at this number? So that does -- that answers my question for priority ranking number five. I have a couple more, but two couple general ones. But this -- it looks like we got a total supplemental requested as far as what you guys are -- ranked them as $6.25 million. >> Our total supplemental request was -- >> I'm sorry about how you all rank. I know the other 17 something. Of course, then we have the net cost of 5 million. So that's based upon what valuation were you basing that estimate upon? >> 10% -- okay, 10%. >> 10% preliminary value estimate that you heard back in June. >> So a 2-cent -- from what I heard in the beginning from the city manager, from myself, and from what I've heard from staff, is it seems like there 's some idea of a tax rate reduction. You know, people may have some appetite for that. But so a 2-cent tax rate reduction, if let's say all the assumptions prove to, 10% assessed value, that's certified, and we have a 2-cent tax reduction , what does that in general reduce or instead of it being 10% more on average, people are paying in additional taxes? If you do the 10% -- I'm just saying, what does that really work out to in actual dollar increase in the amount of taxes paid on average by a property on either commercial or residential? Because that's really what we're hearing. We're hearing taxes keep going up, and I'm trying to get an idea percentage-wise. If it's not 10%, if we knock it down 2 cents, what does that effectively make it? >> Well, in terms of having that analysis, I really have to wait until I get the property tax values in. Because remember, part of that 10% growth is from new construction. This isn't everybody's values going up 10%. Part of that 10% growth is from new construction. Last year, the growth from new construction was about 2.6%. So somewhere between 2 and 3 of that 10% would be from new construction. >> Does this value -- does this -- when you figured out your 2 cents, did that include an estimate for new construction? >> Well, the 10% growth that we're estimating includes new construction and existing values increases. Does that make sense? >> Yes. And so then there's been some discussion about if somehow there wasn't a consensus on the tax rate, what would happen? And it's my understanding that we would revert to a effective rate of last year or the tax rate, whichever is less. >> It would revert to the effective rate which will be calculated this year. >> Correct. Correct. That's correct. >> Or the prior year's tax rate, whichever is less. >> And would it be safe to say without doing all of that analysis that if by some chance that occurred, the list we're looking at is basically gone. In other words, if we -- you said 1 cent, half cent, 1 cent , 1.5, 2 cent. If you extended this on out, this chart on out to a 3 cent reduction or a 4 cent reduction, at what point does the whole list that we see sort of disappear? >> Well, every cent is about 925,000. So -- and again, you know, this is kind of based on projection what was last year. >> No, I understand that. I understand. Sure. >> But the effective rate last year was about 3 -- almost 3 .5 cents. I think 3.3 cents. So you would take roughly about another 1,250,000 off the list. So you'd probably go up to somewhere in between police and fire dispatchers and between priority 3 and 4. >> Okay. >> You'd have somewhere maybe around $2 million, roughly, I 'd estimate. But again, these are all estimates. But if you went to the effective rate, it's probably somewhere between 3 and 4. >> And you'd mention this back on the internal audit that right now in the budget is 75,000. >> Correct. >> Internal audit contract services. And that the -- this indicates an additional 100,000. So we're operating from a budget that sort of -- we're going by what it was either last year or some kind of incremental increase or is it just what it was last year? This is it. And so that's -- got you. That's what I wanted to know. All right. Thank you. Yes. >> While we're having this discussion, it seems interesting that we're -- that there's a proposal to borrow money, $5 million for clearly needed items with the fire department and the police department for our communication systems. But then we're also in priority rank number 21 talking about cash funding capital projects. In addition to that, I would think that if we -- and I'm very sympathetic to leaving that in, but I think my inclination would be on this particular year to use that half million dollars, apply it so that instead of borrowing $5 million, we would only borrow $4.5. But we've established that fund for upcoming years. And then we -- because then we're at least cash funding a portion of those capital items and we're borrowing less money and we're incurring less interest. Does that make sense? >> Yeah. So you mean for the police on the fire page? >> Yeah. >> What I mean, the police and fire communication items that are listed at $5 million that we would only borrow $4.5 and that we would use the .5 that's under priority ranking number 21 for the other .5. >> And that's assuming that the council can agree upon a tax rate that is at least -- you don't go to -- see, this is where I'm really struggling with this conversation, I'll be honest with you, is that this is -- we're trying to figure this out, but we're not really talking about what kind of thoughts we have on tax rate reduction. We have to have this conversation. But everything we talk about is dependent upon what kind of consensus we have on a tax rate. Let's say, for instance, there's four of us here that think , well, if it comes in at 10 or 12%, we should be able to drop the rate by 2 cents. That's just where we are. If that's the case, I'm not saying that is, but if that's the case, everything in the green and on down, if all the assumptions prove correct, we have the amount listed in the white to trade with. So that's really -- I mean, we're trying to give staff direction, but it seems like -- and so if I'm incorrect, then be sure and let me know. But it seems like that really is critical to your analysis of the budget to really present is what kind of direction are you thinking -- what kind of money are you going to have to work with? And then you can formulate a budget from that, and that is a result of what tax rate we set based upon the assessed value, which you have an estimate of that. If it comes in more, we can adjust it. So I may be premature in that conversation, but I just wanted to just put that out there because that's critically important. Let's see. I think you had your hand up, and then we'll go over here. Yes. So I will say that I am in favor of some sort of reduction. I don't know at this point where that would fall, but I wanted to put that out there on the table since it is important. But I also, since the conversation started about the internal auditor, go ahead and say that I am for that, moving that from the pink up as well. So -- Okay. Councilmember Wasney. You're spot on, Mr. Mayor, that we're kind of putting a cart before the horse. However, I think it's a good discussion to have because staff hears priorities that council is voicing, and I think it's good because individual council members hear what other council members are considering priorities. So with that, I'd like to move on to our police chief. If we could have Chief Howell come up and answer some questions about the police department. Well, I mean, are you -- you mean in -- There's still -- yeah. Okay. Well, okay, go ahead. Go ahead, Chief. Oh, no, wait. Sarah had a question, and she's got to go here soon, so I'm sorry, Sarah. Yeah. I have to leave. So on my direction, and I'll put this out there, you guys can have this discussion. I look at this a little bit differently, which is I think we're at about $3 million at the effective rate is how much we're talking about increased -- we'll have increased sales tax, we'll have some increased franchise tax, and that'll put us at about -- and new property on the roll. So my guess is 2.5 million, 3 million. I'm not sure if that's exactly right, but I think that's what effective rate is. Everything below that 2.5 or 3 million mark on this sheet represents a tax increase for our ad valorem taxpayers. That's really what I -- how I read this document. So when I go through it, I'm asking myself, do I want a tax increase for this? Do I want a tax increase for that? Because that's what it amounts to when you go above the effective rate. So I understand that we're talking about reducing the tax rate. It is a 2 cent or 3 cent or however much. It's a rate reduction, but it's a tax increase. So I don't want us to get caught up in the idea that somehow we're reducing taxes. No, we're deciding how much to increase taxes by having this discussion. So that's my point about that. My starting point is the effective rate. And I know that that's difficult, but that's my starting point. I'm open to moving a little bit from the effective rate. My guess is it's going to be about 3.5 cents, but not a whole lot. So I think we really ought to stay in the white category and pretty leanly. So thank you. All right. Any -- chief? Come on up. I will say, Councilmember Gregory, to your comment. I understand that. From my perspective, if this is on a 10-year note, if it's on a 10-year bond, I think is what we're talking. I don't even know -- 10-year treasuries are like 1% or 1.25 %. So if this thing is about a 1.5% interest rate over 10 years or less than 2, I struggle with using cash funding -- I mean, if we want to pay for all of it, we should just take it out of the general fund surplus, but to save half a million dollars when money is so cheap right now, I just really struggle with that. But that's just me. Well, in that regard, then, the argument would be to leave it out completely. And of course, if we're going to stay in the white column, then it's not an issue to discuss at this time anyway. Sure. Okay. Chief? Councilmember Wasney, I believe, had some questions. Were you consulted in terms of this short list of priorities when we look at just the items in white that are the -- were you consulted? Yes. So there are two items I want to ask about. One is the crime scene investigator in terms of full-time employee. Tell me how that would help your department. There are a lot of capabilities that could be enhanced in regards to crime scene processing, processing evidence ourselves in-house, that additional help in that regard would be. That position was not placed at a real high priority because we have, in fact, converted an existing position to a crime scene investigator to add to what we currently have now. We've already achieved that point. So that would have been actually adding a second person in that regard. It's still something I think we're going to put in for in the future, but it's not in terms of an absolute priority compared to the rest of it. It would not be a first choice. So tell me about the parking lot fencing. The parking lot fencing, which I don't believe was funded, was a package that we put in to enhance security to mainly to our back parking lot, which is where employees park and where a lot of our squad city automobiles are also kept. Have you had vandalism in that parking lot? There has over the years, there's been vandalisms, there's been thefts, there's been people documenting vehicles, I mean criminal, the criminal element documenting vehicles that are driven on it by employees or city vehicles. So a lot of activity still now, people cutting across the parking lot in the back. That area is not a real high traffic area except for us. So we feel like to include that or we wanted to include that in our supplemental package to just increase our security on the back side of the building. So for my fellow council members, I think that's important. When an officer reports for duty and they park their car and they leave their car behind the police station that they don't have to worry that their vehicle is going to get broken into, that our squad cars are secure and safe back in that parking lot, it's $60,000 and I think it's something that we need to consider. Is there anything else as our police chief in the city of Denton, because this supplemental list was created some time ago, is there anything else in light of recent developments that you would add to this list and if you can't add it today, I would welcome your input in the future to add any other budget requests because we're going to be talking budget for the next couple of months. If there's anything that you feel your department needs and needs in this next budget cycle, I welcome that input. >> Okay. Thank you. The only thing immediately that might come in mind is some additional personal safety devices like ballistic vests for some of our officers. We supply a low level ballistic vest to all of our officers when they come in, but I think it's probably apparent now that there's a need to have at least have available a little higher enhanced level of that to the front line officers. So that just right up front, that would be one of the only things. >> Could we have a staff report outlining those costs? >> Sure. Absolutely. >> Thank you. >> Is there a camera in the parking lot currently or any kind of video surveillance that watches -- okay. That's my other question. In the additional animal shelter staff, could you kind of go into detail a little bit about what that position is? Is that -- >> It's additional animal control officers. They would be doing a number of different duties within the shelter. You know, I think as everybody's aware, the volume of animals that coming into the shelter is continuing to rise all the time. We're hitting maximum levels pretty often of the capacity of the shelter, which is pretty significant considering that we more than doubled the capacity of the shelter from the old location. So there's going to be, I think, for some time an increasing need of additional staff in the shelter. >> And so I have a question about employment. As far as animal shelter staff, is it instead of training each individual to go through police, is it possibility to create just a receptionist position and/or hire people to clean out kennels rather than use police staff for that? >> Sure. I mean, the level of -- there could be positions incorporated into the shelter staff that were not potentially enforcement positions, if that's what you 're -- >> Right. Because some enforcement officers are acting as reception ists, and I'm just curious if -- >> They pretty much do everything. >> Do everything, right. >> Like if there could be some relief where we can free up those officers to do other things. >> Right. That's entirely possible. >> Okay. Thank you. >> Any other questions? Yes, Councilmember Rosen. Mayor Pro Tem, I'm sorry. Not for the chief? Okay. >> Okay. >> I do have one question on the fence, chief. Was that a solid fence or is that an opaque fence that you had requested around the parking lot because if it's a chain link, people can still see through and -- >> Yeah, it was estimated. We had two estimates on it. One at a six foot and one at an eight foot chain link fence , but there was one of the estimates included in opaque covering with it. >> Okay. Right. Good. Okay. Thank you. >> I didn't think our code allowed for chain link fences. >> We're the city. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. >> I could be wrong. I don't know. >> I think we can still put -- >> Chain link over the city. >> Yeah, it doesn't allow for chain link fences. >> It does or doesn't? >> Doesn't. >> All right. Councilmember Pro Tem. >> I have some violations in my backyard apparently. Back to the tax rate question because I think this is important, Chuck. And I wish councilmember Begarry was still here because she made some semantical remarks about tax rate increases if we don't roll back to the effective rates, which I disagree with the way that was put forward. That would assume that we can have no growth in property values over time if that's the case. So what's your response to that? There's no real, in fact, tax rate increase to the extent that we don't roll back to the effective rate, correct? >> I think what state law calculation is trying to get at with the effective rate, what the calculation is designed to get at is to bring in the same dollars as the prior year exclusive of new growth. So in other words, that would be a noninflationary growth. In other words, just bring in the same dollars that you had the prior year excluding new growth. So I think that's what she was referring to. In other words, it would be the same dollars we had the prior year, but I think we all know the reality is there's inflationary growth. But that's what the effective tax rate. Now there's another calculation we do, the rollback tax rate, where if you exceed that, a petition can come to the city and the vote would be to roll it back to the rollback rate. That's an increase. That's 1.08%. So the rollback rate is kind of an 8% increase from the prior year. >> In terms of the increases we're seeing in valuation, because that's what it is. It's an increase in property valuation by the tax assessors going through. We've not upped the rates that have resulted in this. The rate is what it is. And I guess depending on what we decide is going to be what it is. And that would, in my mind, really signal a tax rate decrease if we choose to go back 1%, 1.5%, 2, or whatever. So I think the semantics of this are important moving forward. We may not all agree on how to message that, but I think there's a lot of confusion in our community about how this works. And I think we can do well to help communicate and not add additional confusion to this discussion as people are out there kind of struggling with their increase in values. That's just my two cents, how to think through this. But in terms of what this 10% or whatever it ends up being represents, do we have any data in terms of how that plays out across the spectrum of types of properties or property values across our city? Not yet. And we get some, there's standard information that has to come from the appraisal district to the city that we can kind of look at different categories and see what they were and potentially backing out some of the new growth. But some of that other data is mainly just housed at the appraisal district. We do get kind of an electronic tax roll from the appraisal district that we load into our GIS system, but that usually occurs in the September timeframe. So we don't get that initially when we're analyzing this data. It comes a little bit later once they've kind of finalized their process. And would that also have kind of a distinction between commercial and residential as well as maybe strata types of values? And we get some of that information from the appraisal district on the 24th, but not necessarily a parcel by parcel type information, more in aggregate. Do they give us data in terms of numbers or percentages of people who have challenged their appraisal during the period in which they could do that? We don't receive that from them on the 25th. I don't think we receive it after that. It would be something we can make a request to them about and see if they could run some reports for us. But we don't receive that data from them. I mean, a lot of this is how, I mean, your average citizen who owns property has that possibility of going through that process. I've never taken advantage of that myself. I probably should have over the years, but I haven't. I love paying now. So I understand every property owner has that right to go through the process. I think knowing how many people took advantage of that this last year and then what the results of that were. In other words, if we're trying to give tax relief through us playing with our rates and concerned individuals have had that opportunity to go through and perhaps to great success, and I don't know, all of that sort of data impacts what I feel like we ought to be doing here as a city council in terms of if the goal is to apply relief, I'd want to know what sort of relief has already been gained by the citizens through the legitimate processes in place. And so I don't know if there's data in terms of the success rates of that. If so, what's the average percentage decrease that they get from what was originally assessed to what they have now and what that percentage is above and beyond what the average, all that is crucial to me in terms of understanding if we're looking at fairness, equity, and just thinking about how we grow our city and invest in things that we need to do as a fast growth city and a number of infrastructure things, that in a good year we have the potential to really getting ahead on as we've talked about with a couple of discussions this morning. To me, this is the time you invest, in my opinion, from a tax philosophy. But that sort of data is going to be crucial. So depending on when we get that, it's going to help me know where I fall on this. Just sort of, you're right, the semantics of it can be quite challenging. I think that's the whole discussion down in Austin with revenue caps. But from what I've heard is it's almost, it's become so simple that we tend to overlook that. And that is people look at what they paid last year in taxes. Let's say I paid $2,000 in city taxes. This year, with the combination of the assessed value increase and the applied tax rate, what am I going to be paying this year? And I think, because that's really what you're saying the effective rate is, is that if I paid $2,000 last year, and we only wanted everybody to pay what they paid last year, then we would set the tax rate accordingly to collect the same amount of money. And it may vary because of the assessed values are different. I mean, I'll tell you, I take advantage of that every year because, and based upon some of my own activities, there's no way I could have even gotten it down to a 10% or less increase from last year. I mean, there's some segments in the, especially in the commercial property realm that have gone up 20, 30, 40, 50, 60% range. But I think it's a worthy, because that's the discussion they're having in Austin, is it's not, they're not concerned with tax rates. They're saying, if your tax rate stays the same and your assessed value goes up, you will pay more taxes than you did last year. And the key for us is we have to decide what are our priorities, how much of that do we take into consideration. And I don't know what the effective rate's going to be or what, I didn't understand what she was saying about the three cent increase, but by the 25 th, you'll have all that appropriate data to be able to give us a really, really clear picture of if we do this, then this, then this, then this. Is that correct? Yes. And then we'll know what the new construction rate is. We'll know if we have the effective rate, how much more growth we have available or additional revenue based upon the new growth because that's not calculated in the effective rate, if I'm understanding correctly. We backed that out correctly. No, that's a very worthy conversation. I think because of just the increases last year, we had 10% or 9% last year or something, 11% before that. Now, the years subsequent to that were all pretty, pretty, well, were less. And I think that's, I think that would be part of that data is when we were in the recession, if we were to collect the same amount of taxes that we did the previous year and some of those years, we would have had to have raised the tax rate because we had some negative valuation in that regard. So I think it's a comprehensive look at the whole picture, but I think that's, it was really just about how much am I writing the check for? You know? In light of these comments, it seems to me that fairly soon , we probably ought to just, even before we have a conversation about the auditor or anything like that, we're going to need to do what you asked us to do. Council Member Begheri already did it. She said she's not going to be in favor of anything above the effective tax rate. I think that's what I heard her say. I don't want to put words into her mouth, but I think that 's what I heard her say. Now if we have two more council members that agree with her and they say, "That's what I want too," then we can eliminate several meetings, several hours, and a lot of staff time because our discussion is very, very short as far as what kind of new items go into the budget because it's going to be hardly anything. And so, you know, I don't know if today is the day when we reveal our feelings and make that statement or if we wait until we have our certified tax rolls come in, but that's going to tell us what we need to know. And it may be that we need to wait until the certified tax rolls because we'll find out, and I think more detail at that time, what the new values, new things that have come on have been billed because that doesn't count as far as the certified tax rate. But that's going to tell us what we need to know. And we can save the staff a lot of time. We can save ourselves some meetings, some half-day, full- day meetings that we have slated because there's not going to be much to talk about if we only have $2 million of new revenue to discuss. Right. Well, and that's -- and I agree with that. Obviously the 25th is a very critical date for data to be able to get out to the council. Here's what it is. We're basing this on assumptions right now, but here's what the certified roll is. Here's what we calculate to be the new construction because they give you that figure, don't they, in the certified roll, what the new construction is. And they hold back some, I know, for some that are being -- they have to, what, certify 95% of the roll? That's right. So I don't think this discussion is necessarily in vain at the level of specificity that we've been talking about only in that it does give staff some idea. But as far as continuing this on for another hour or so, it probably would be better to wait until that data comes in because I will tell you, I've heard from several people about either a one or two -- even just, let's say, a one cent tax reduction or even potentially a two cent. Well, you're still limiting this considerably. But not having the data, I certainly can't say what my incl ination is because I don't know what the certified value is. But let me clarify, Mayor. The other part of state law is we're required by the 31st for the city manager to propose a budget to the council. So we can't really have a discussion after the 25th, okay, here's the tax rate data. What do you want us to bring? We get the tax rate data and we propose a budget to the council and put everything together. So I think part of the discussion today is is there direction for the city manager in terms of what you want us to bring back as a proposed budget? Once we bring back the proposed council can change it. But I think part of the discussion today was do you want us to bring back a budget with a tax rate decrease and if, you know, is it whatever you think the city manager feels comfortable proposing or would you rather set a specific guideline for him to come back with something, at least a minimum of something? Good question. Colleagues want to weigh in on that? Yes, Mayor Pro Tem. Well, I think Councilmember Gregory's statement as fatal istic as it may have sounded is important. I mean, if there's two other folks who have some incl ination sitting here that has any inclination of wanting to get back to the effective rate, I think we need to know that today so that we either figure out we need to begin bargaining or being persuasive or something like that if we're going to hit something else other than that. But it helps us all, not just from your point of view of budgeting, but for us to know where we're starting. She's put down a here's where I'm not going. Again, she's not here to defend herself. No one else has kind of set a real clear sense either way. So I'd hate to leave this meeting without at least clar ifying that to know that we're not in those troubled waters of not being able to hit five votes to set a tax rate that's above the effective rate as we get through this meeting. So is there a way to take a poll at least on that point? Because that's going to be crucial because I'd hate for that to be one of those things that we wait on. And then we get done working out a budget and then we get to the end of September and then that vote comes and we're surprised. And I make a suggestion on that because I think to ask for a, even it not be a commitment but some kind of statement about what you're doing in that regard would, to me it's very premature. I don't know. I mean, am I for the effective rate? I don't know. But from a budget perspective, what I'm hearing is the challenge is by law, city manager has to submit a budget. Once it's submitted, we can do whatever we want with it. The problem becomes what budget does the city manager submit? So me personally, if the city manager submits a budget, let 's just say for example for discussion. We just say we want a budget based upon the effective rate. Let's just say that just for discussion sake. But along with that budget, sort of like what we did here, I mean it's basically what we did right here. Okay, here's the budget with an effective rate. But if you don't want to go down to the effective rate because by that time we will know, we'll be able to calculate what that would mean. In other words, would that mean that the rate is 63 cents, 64 cents, 65 cents, whatever it is? We'll know that by that time. Or you could say direction on 2 cents. Or on no decrease. The problem becomes that really, I can tell you I'm probably going to be very hesitant to not have any type of tax rate decrease. I'm not saying I'm decreasing people's taxes. I'm saying a tax rate decrease. What it would be, I've always thought in my mind because if it comes in at 10% or more, I'd really like to look at a 2 cent because I really don't know how the numbers are going to play out. But this is the first time we've seen this, prioritization. And then we can move it around sort of like Councilmember Wasme. So Mr. City Manager, what is the most helpful for you? You're the one that has to submit the budget by law. So what? >> Well, and I think what Chuck was trying to say is very important to us. I mean, what do you expect the budget from the City Manager to look like and what kind of tax rate decrease, if that's where we're going, do you want to see? Because to a large degree, whatever that is for the council will determine obviously where we land on priorities for supplemental packages. So I think that's critically important for us to know. Even if it may not be set in stone, what kind of budget do you really want to see? In the absence of anything, we've kind of provided for you the general approach that we would have normally taken on budget preparation. And so if you don't like this, then we need to know what that looks like. >> Okay. All right. Well, first of all, let me say I like the way this has been presented simply because it gives what the impacts are of decisions that we make. In other words, if we decided a half cent, no tax decrease, half cent, one, two, and from what I understand, if you went to three, you just subtract about $900,000 off of this $3.1 million mark at the end of the white, which quite frankly would put you almost to just the priority rankings one, two, and three. If you had a three cent tax reduction, if I took off $900, 000, it's going to put you about in between that 1.8 and 2.4 million. So but no, the way it's been presented, I have no problems with that. In fact, I think it's been very helpful. Yes? >> Mayor, if I could, I wanted to try to maybe offer something that might help in the discussion. I mean, one of the things I think we need to decide as a group is what are the priorities that we want to pursue and put in the budget, the priorities that we want to pursue, and that then determines the tax rate that we want to set versus trying to set the tax rate without knowing the priorities. And so as we kind of talk through this process with the council, if we could make sure that we're on track on the priorities, that will naturally determine what our financial plan is going to look like rather than us trying to determine that in the absence of knowing what those are. So the priorities in terms of the things that you want to have in the budget, the areas you want to focus on in improving, whether it's services in the police department or fire department or whatnot or streets, if we can know those are the areas that we want to focus on, then based on whatever the actual certified values are, we'll know what the rate is that we need to set to make those things happen. So it's really kind of looking at what is the objective, the things that we want to try to achieve, and then us working back to that with the numbers. I want to have the policy set the numbers, not the numbers set the policy. So it may be helpful for you as a body to think about that as we kind of look at these issues of what are really the outcomes that we want to achieve. I'm going to go to Keely now. Come on. Yes. So I just want to clarify that the police department and fire department radio digital system replacement is going to happen regardless because that's going to be debt funded. I don't know. That's what I think it's on the tape. Okay. Another portion of this you didn't realize that the tax rate is broken into two areas. You've got your debt service tax rate and your M&O tax rate and those together. When we talk about a reduction in the tax rate, we're really talking about reduction in the M&O, the general fund portion, because the debt service portion is set. But realize if we take a reduction there, we're going to have to look at our capital program and can we afford that capital program going forward with the reduction on the other side. There's M&O impacts to some of those capital programs. When we add parks, when we do other things, there's impacts on the general fund side. So I think if we were to say let's bring back a budget that is at the effective tax rate, we're going to reevaluate the capital program at that same time and say can we do this. Realize when we had the bond election that capital program was based on a three cent tax rate increase to fund the bond program. We've been basically because of higher growth trying to absorb that same program without any tax rate impact. But I think just to say, well, yeah, let's fund that. That's debt because that takes a portion of the tax rate away from the M&O in future years. That five cent is going to raise the debt service tax rate next year and then we have that much less available for the general fund. So I mean it could impact both sides where we say, okay, we need to slow down this six year capital program if we're going to go back to the effective tax rate because we can't absorb that much in the debt service tax rate with this reduction. I mean the equation is on both sides. >> Did you have a follow up? Because we just had a couple other questions. >> It wasn't to that specific. It's just a different question. >> Sure. Go ahead. >> Is it possible to have the departments really look at the supplemental request? Because when I heard the chief say that the crime scene investigator wasn't really a priority anymore and that was going to be asked for in the future, I was a little bit surprised that it's still on a list for us to be considering. So I don't know if anybody else feels the same way about something that they've requested that may help us make our decision for one, two, three later on. >> Okay. All right. Yes. Oh, you want to respond to that. >> Well, I do. If you go to the supplemental request in your backup, each one of the various departments in the city have tried to give us their ranking for their particular projects. This brings everything together. And so if you go back to the original supplemental decision package for the police, then you can see how they rank their particular projects. >> Councilmember Wasney. >> Mr. Langley, thank you because you brought us back to point and sometimes we need to be brought back to point. So your question specifically, finance needs to hear what are the priorities. So for Councilwoman Wasney, police, fire, auditor. So if we're slimming it down to what are your priorities, those are my priorities. In terms of tax rate reduction, I agree with the mayor until our figures come in on the 25th, whether it's a two cent reduction, one and a half. But this city is growing and we have needs that have to meet that growth. And those needs cost money, so there has to be a balance. There has to be a balance. And so other council members were wondering and so until we see the figures on the 25th, but I think a two cent or one and a half cent reduction is reasonable. But it's preliminary until we see the actual figures on the 25th. So in that vein, can I ask for the fire chief to come up please? [BLANK_AUDIO] >> Yes, Councilmember. >> So I just want to say that the fire training captain is a priority this year because it's going to get us ready for the ISO rating that is coming in 2017. Is that correct? >> That is correct. It's also a restored position that was eliminated in budget reductions about six or seven years ago. >> We talked about this last year and said let's put it off a year. And so we put it off a year. I'm happy to see medic unit eight that we've found money for the vehicle. But right now we're looking for money for the staff. And I know what a difference medic unit seven has made to Southwest Denton. So I again would echo the fire chief's priority that we pay for that staff for that medic unit eight. One of the things that didn't make the short list is something called a breathing air compressor for 45,000. Can you tell me what that is and why do we need it? >> That is a one time cost to in one of our replacement stations to establish the ability to fill the breathing air tanks at that station. What we're trying to do is increase the number of facilities in different regions of the city where we can do that. It's part of all the strategy that we talked to you about to improve response time. That a lot of the things that we've done as a smaller city represented going to one single location for delivery of a lot of our equipment or for refill of equipment. With a subsequent significant impact on response time certainly as we've grown as a city. So that's what that does. That adds another compressor at an additional station strategically located so that we can fill breathing air bottles at different locations. >> So I'd encourage my fellow council members to take a look at adding that back into our short list. A question on the station or the patient lift system. And it looks like we found money for that. Does that cover all the fire stations? >> No it does not. What we have proposed in this budget is one additional lift . As we order replacements and certainly with the new one, with the new Medicaid that's proposed in the one time funding. It includes the lift system already built into that new medic system. But of the existing ambulances we're replacing those one per year. So this represents an additional one that we were able to have funded or proposed this year. >> How many do we need total to have all our stations covered? >> I believe there would, after this year with this one, there would be four additional lifts that would need to be added. Because I saw the value of that when I was at station three and spent a day with them. And what that does is as the gurney comes in and out of the ambulance, it helps them get that lift up or lift down. And there's an automatic gadget that goes underneath the gurney. And even if a firefighter's back goes out, now we're looking at a lot more than $35,000 in terms of rehab, surgery, downtime and all of that. Maybe next year put in two and the following year put in two and at that point all of our stations will be covered because I think that's just an important tool for our firefighters. They're out there using those gurneys every single day. Thank you. >> Thank you. Okay. Let's see. Questions? Over here. Councilmember Pro Tem. >> At some point in this discussion of looking at the tax rate and I guess to get to your question, I mean, again, I think we've noted a number of infrastructure issues that for whatever reason, councils before, cities before, let go by the wayside because of other priorities. And so one, for instance, is streets that I feel like we've made some great headway on. We have the opportunity to start investing an additional $ 600,000 a year to get the franchise fees pulled over, which is significant. I mean, I would just like to, as I'm leaving council, be able to say we put some fundamentals in place that we got infrastructure and a lot of these kind of things funded in the way they needed to be funded for a long-term trajectory so we're not stuck. I counsel 20 years from now thinking what did that bozo do that was sitting in this seat to make those sorts of decisions for some whatever temporary interest they had at the time. So to me, that becomes, to me, when we have this surplus, that becomes an opportunity to get ahead and put some fundamentals in place to start making some sound investment decisions. So that's just one statement in terms of a priority. But are we going to look at the impact, as you touched on it, as you're relating to our debt capacity moving forward depending on how we set this rate in terms of how that changes projected tax rate increases down the road? Now, we've held off on some. I think last year we held off on one. We've held off perhaps a couple during my time. But that's all part of a long-term financial forecast in which those are plugged into account for growth under certain assumptions. That to me becomes an important thing to look at too because I might be making a big tax cut this year only to put who's ever sitting in this seat the possibility in a year that might not be as good as this year having to make a tax increase in a couple years as a result of decisions we make today. Do you plan on talking about that or addressing those hypotheticals so we understand the consequences of any of our decisions? I mean, I'll look at the five-year projection of the debt service tax rate. When we do the five-year financial forecast for the general fund, a portion of that is how much is going to debt service and how much is going to the general fund so you can see what's the potential revenues to the general fund. So that will be part of the five-year forecast analysis when we look at that. What I was kind of bringing up was that some of those have O&M impacts and the concern would be we wouldn't want to fund the capital side and not be able to have the capacity on the O&M side. The other question I had was as it relates to how much of the homestead exemption we're able to tweak to try and tackle some of this tax relief question. Again, that's why part of my question about how much is it impacting commercial versus residential and what that trajectory has been over the last few years. What are we able to do in terms of homestead exemption that might bring some tax relief to homeowners? The council on an annual basis can change. Right now the exemption for most homesteaded property is $5 ,000, but the council on an annual basis can change that. So if they wanted to increase the homestead exemption, I think every $5,000 is about $600,000 very roughly in impact to revenue. So if they wanted, that's something other than just the overall tax rate that can be adjusted to affect the impact on those with homesteaded properties. But it's, again, it's only homesteaded properties. It makes that impact on a certain group of taxpayers. I feel like I've seen this before. Have we ever gotten a listing of other cities in the region and what their homestead exemption is? I feel like we got some somewhat recently. I think we have. Usually the appraisal district puts that out so we can get that information. And some don't have it at all and some have a higher homest ead. It's a little bit all over the board somewhat. Thank you. I think the important thing that we need to think about when we talk about homestead exemptions or when we talk about, for example, the current movement to freeze property taxes for seniors, which I would be able to take advantage of in about eight months, is that that only benefits a small group of the residents of the city because we have a lot of seniors, for example, that don't own their homes. They rent. They won't benefit at all from any homestead exemption or from any senior citizen tax ad valorem tax freeze. In fact, they'll probably end up suffering because the burden is going to have to go to other entities to cover the cost of doing business for the city. And it means that people who are financially able to own their own homes get a break, but people who are already in kind of a different situation where they can't own their own home and they have to rent will probably end up bearing a bigger burden because landlords, when their taxes go up, when their property taxes go up, they pass that on to their renters. And so those folks will be bearing a bigger part of the burden. So it's when we talk about homestead exemptions, when we talk about senior homestead exemptions or when we talk about senior freezes, what we're talking about is shifting the cost for doing government, the cost for providing medic units and police, additional police officers. We're just talking about shifting that to other folks. Sometimes folks that are probably less able to deal with it than the folks that are getting the break. So I mentioned that because that's weighing heavy on me right now as I'm thinking about our discussion about what kind of a tax rate reduction I'm interested in because I'm nervous about the impact of a senior homestead exemption or a senior tax freeze. Because I think that as we play out three, four, five years down the road, as we look at our long-term budget impacts, that's going to have a significant budget impact because we have an aging population. And so it seems to me that I'm probably going to take a different approach than I had where I was thinking about of a cent to a cent and a half reduction in the tax rate. But I'm thinking about something much less because we're going to have to protect the revenue source for the city in order to provide the service that all of our citizens, including our seniors, are expecting to get. I just want to bring us back to point, and that's our budget discussion in terms of staff asking for direction. Just want to confirm that employee health care costs to the city last year went up 6% and this year you're anticipating another 6% increase, is that correct? That's what we're estimating right now. So that's 12% in two years. So I'm assuming because you've talked about it before that salary increase for employees in that 3 to 5% range, and I will go on the record right now that I am not in favor of that. And so this will be year five of a 3 to 5% pay raise, not tax, but pay salary increase. I'd like to see an estimate in dollars of what that 3 to 5% pay increase would be in this upcoming budget. I know that you prepared that for us last year, and I'd like to take a look at that this year as well. Thank you. Question on that. I thought that it was an average of 3%, not 5%, an average of 3% merit raise, not across the board raise. So can I get clarification on that? It is an average of 3% merit. I think the maximum anyone could receive based on where, you know, and this is -- we're going to come back with the consultant study, so this may change next year, based on where they're at in their pay range, if they're below midpoint, the maximum anybody could receive would be a 5% if they were a high achiever, but on average, it's a 3% merit program. Then in case of point, if we're going to say range, the range is 0 to 5%, because there are people that don't get any raises because of the consideration of how long they've been working or that their job performance does not warrant that , but for accuracy's sake, it's an average of 3% merit raise. Correct. And this brings up just a question on the process of what we're looking at here today. So like, let's take, for instance, the -- how do you want to frame it? For 3%, the average 3% merit increase, that cost to the budget in the current proposal, and we haven't received it yet, but -- so that number, it's not factored in anywhere. I mean, in these supplementals, this is based upon all the numbers from last year, or are we saying that staff is saying we've got a general quote-un quote base budget that's increased maybe 1% or 2% for all these things like the pay raise, some inflationary costs for fuel, and those kind of things. So that's getting in the weeds. I want to give you direction. Okay, you want direction? I'm going to give you direction. And I'm just -- somebody just wants to scream up and throw something at me, that's fine, but I'd rather go conservative than go non-conservative. I think you need to look at a 1.5 to 2-cent tax reduction. We need something like this to show that if we go less than that, what do we add back? And so your concerns -- I mean, this isn't set in stone, but I'd hate for you to come in and give a half-cent budget, and then all of a sudden everybody pops up and says they want 2-cent or 1.5, and then we've got to do what we've done every time before then. We've got to start peeling stuff out, and that's difficult to do. None of this is set in stone that you present to us in the first place. I mean, because even in the supplemental one-time packages, there's some things there that I'd like to do differently, but until I see these final -- the first recommendation based upon the final numbers, I just -- it's hard for me to delve into that. But that's my suggestion. If there's anybody that just has a real heartburn against that direction, speak now, because it's always -- it's going to change. It's going to change. I'm just trying to get it to where, if somehow it's worse than that, we're not having to really beat ourselves to death trying to figure it out, whereas if it's -- if we all want something less than that, that's going to make it a little bit easier process. Does that make sense? And I -- and as far as priorities, I look at the priorities as you sort of got them listed here, and I don't have any problem with that. You've got police and fire as a main priority. You've got the street funding with the franchise fee migration in there, so -- but all the others I know that those will all be fluid as we move through this process. Any questions on that? Yes. I just want to emphasize that I do have a problem with that traffic signal replacement of 340,000 being in that top. Yeah. And he -- yeah, he can take that into consideration. Anything else? Mayor? Yes, I'm sorry. I mean, I think there's going to be difficulty no matter how we deal with it. Yes, sir. I agree. And I get it. I mean, it's hard for me to read the tea leaves because no one's that committal on things. I'm probably more in the half to one cent. I mean, I'm not in the half to one cent range discussion. It'll be just as difficult for us to come with a proposed city manager's budget of a 2% cut -- 2 cents. 2 cents. Sorry. Thanks. 2 cent cut. Then -- and then, if there's some desire to put some supplemental packages back on the table, that requires us to then come back and say, no, we 're actually going to now raise the tax rate, right, based on what's recommended by the city manager. That I would argue is more difficult for the council to do than for us to say, let's come assuming this and peel off these particular packages out of that to get to what we want. I'm just saying it's going to be difficult anyway you look at it. Sure. I understand. But what's going to be presented to the public is the city manager has recommended 2 cent tax and it's hard to go back from that. Well -- I mean, even if we see it, because -- so that's why I'm more inclined to say, let's settle on -- well, I mean, there's probably several ways to tackle this, but I think it's difficult anyway you look at it. So what are you proposing? I'd really like to hear from everybody about what -- I guess we heard from you. We've heard from her. I'm less going to put my foot down and say if I don't get this, then I'm going to vote against this. And I would hope we would all kind of have that posture at this point, understanding there's a lot of conversation to be had. So I've kind of stated kind of where I feel like I'm following. I think it would just be helpful across the board and then is there a consensus there that isn't 2% such that maybe we can -- Oh, I don't think the consensus is 2 cents. 2 cents, I'm sorry, percent. No, somebody had to give directions, so I just stepped out there. I mean, so -- I mean, no, Dalton said a half cent, one cent . You're saying a half cent, one cent. I don't know what -- and you were at one and a half or two cents or something like that. So I'm just saying we've got to give him some direction. And I don't even know if I'm going to say that that's his recommended city manager budget. That's more of almost -- well, here's what the council said , bring us something that looks like this. So I'd also want to be careful how I put words into the city manager's mouth of what his -- so I'm open. Somebody had to step out and give directions. So if there needs to be a change, let's hear it. Do you have any sense of where you're coming from in terms of tax rate? Not at the moment, not without seeing the effective tax rate and all the information coming later, but I'm okay with the mayor's recommendation. And is the 25th July or August? Yes, yeah, that's next week. Yeah, okay. That's next week. Any other objections? I was going to say we could compromise and make it one and a half cents. I don't know if I'm feeling the love today to get brain protein. I'm teasing you. Somebody had to give directions, so that's it. If somebody feels that strongly that it would be more difficult to do what you said, I'm open to that. I'm not sold on that. I just really want to make sure that we -- and I'll let you have the last say in that. What would you prefer? No, any direction is good. I guess that direction would also consider the change in the supplemental decision package that Councilmember Wasney presented on the internal auditor . Well depending on how you arrange that stuff. The good thing is we can always change it. We can have that discussion. Yes. Well, I would say on that point we've not had a single discussion on it. And I think there's going to be a lot of discussion in terms of what does our external auditor do? What do we already do for these contracts that you mentioned we already have in terms of looking at different auditing process? What do we do internally? So I'm certainly not in favor of making that sort of switch up from the bottom of the list to towards the top without having that policy discussion. So I just think we don't have any -- we've heard a lot of conversation over the election cycle on this, but we haven't heard a lot of facts. And so I think getting those facts on the table would be helpful. Yeah. And in that regard, I would rather have some data rather than just the political decision. I'd rather it be a decision based on what value the city is actually getting currently and what we might see that we would get otherwise. And I think we have to have that discussion before we could move that up. And it may be that that's a very good thing to move up. But I haven't heard anything to support that at this time. Regarding the internal auditor, it was my understanding that it's in the charter. So if I could have some sort of legal on how that will correlate. It sounds like your question is, is it a specific requirement or is it discretionary? That the internal auditor -- That we have one. Interacts with council. Yes. Yes. That makes sense. Madam City Attorney. If it does, I'll put something in the status report on Friday if that's acceptable. Thank you. So again, as it stands today, based on Chuck's presentation as it relates to what particular packages we were proposing to be funded from this year, those that would be funded from other sources such as the traffic safety and then those that we were contemplating would be debt related along with the essentially the supplemental decision programs in white is kind of where we are. Is that consensus from the council so that we can prepare the budget accordingly? Subject -- yeah, as a starting point. The only thing I would say is two questions and that was the one I had for Emerson is that breakdown of the -- I forgot what it was. Fred Moore Soccer Football Fields, how much of that was Park Dedication Fund? How do we come to that decision? How much is in the Park Dedication Fund for situations like that? And also Downtown Sidewalk Improvement, about 200,000 of that's coming from the one-time funds from the general fund. And so I'd be open to a discussion about is that -- do we need to find funding from somewhere else? Yes, Councilmember Wood. >> The mayor also asked about the wave pool and how do they come up with the guesstimate numbers on revenue. >> Yes. We have a number of other related budget related issues that we'll discuss either in informal staff report or have a council request. >> So clarification on that item, I believe Chuck mentioned he said splash park when he was standing here, but that has nothing to do with the splash park. It's the water park. >> Wave pool. >> Yeah, I just wanted to get clarification for those because there's a lot of excitement about the splash park. So I'm just making sure. Thank you. >> Yes, Mayor Proctor. >> And I recall this from the last couple years and just a suggestion because it was helpful for me as a council member and that is you kept a running document that had all these questions that are being raised in one spot instead of separate staff reports here or there. If you recall doing that, am I right? That's helpful to me to see that all together. >> And we're going -- there was a series of questions that came out of our June 14th discussion so we kind of started that document so you'll get the first draft of it with the proposed budget and we'll add on. Sometimes it takes us a little bit of time so we'll say that it's coming but we try to keep that running document. >> Okay, anything else? Any other questions? All right. Well, then that will conclude our agenda item 1C. We're on to agenda item 1-2, concluding items or -- yeah, 2 . Any concluding items? Yes, Councilmember Wasmuth. >> I'd like us to take a look at the 911 system and the fact that when people call code enforcement that they can call 911. I'm wondering from the dispatchers in evaluation of does that muck up the system in terms of number of calls coming in? >> My assumption is that 911 would be a real emergency and not just somebody who needs to cut the high grass next to their fence. >> Are people calling code enforcement to 911? >> I understand that the public is allowed to call 911 on a code enforcement issue. >> Well, and we may be -- I'm not sure if we can even address that because it's not really posted but we'll get a report out. >> If we could get a report on that. And also if we could have staff evaluate the stop sign policy in residential neighborhoods. This isn't private gated neighborhoods but neighborhoods where the city controls the stop signs. I know that vintage has had a number of stop signs removed to much concern of a lot of the neighbors there. And so I'd like to take a look at that stop sign policy, when it was changed, why it was changed and to make sure that we're not short changing our residential neighborhoods in terms of stop signs. Thank you. >> Any others? Seeing none. All right. We will adjourn. Thank you. >> All right. >> Thank you.