Aug 01, 2016 City Council on 2016-08-01 11:00 AM

16, it is 1101. We do have a quorum. And before we grab our lunch, I wanted to sort of take care of a little housekeeping matter. On our agenda, we have a special called meeting for agenda item A, which is consider approval of an alternative environmentally sensitive area plan for the villages of Carmel, phase 4B. This was the item that was taken up where there was a 3-3 tie, and so it would therefore be rolled over to the next consecutive council meetings where there was a full quorum. And there is that here today. We do have one person speaking-- wishing to speak, but we also have this posted on tomorrow's agenda. So it's the council's pleasure we can hear that today and inform the gentleman here that we'll be hearing that today and he can fill out his blue card to speak when that comes up or we can postpone it till tomorrow. But if somebody's going to be absent tomorrow, I wouldn't necessarily want to do that. So I'll open that up just for some input from my colleagues . Yes, Councilmember Hawkins. I was the one that missed that council meeting when we had the vote. Are we prepared to do a presentation again on it today if we do do it today? Or whatever council prefers on this one does not bother me. Well, and we'll have two staff members here, my understanding, that can speak to that presentation and the aspects of that. But they'll also be available tomorrow also. OK. Well, I'm willing to take it up today if council wants to go that way. So I'll leave it up to you. Councilmember Pro Tem. I think since someone came today, I think seeing it on the agenda, I'd prefer today. I also have a late 11 PM flight tomorrow night. So in the event that the council meeting went too long and I needed to head out for that-- We never go to 11 PM. I'd want to avoid not being able to hit it tomorrow for that reason. Sure. OK. All right. Well, it sounds like we're OK with doing that. So we'll probably be here-- how long do you think these work sessions will take? About an hour and a half? Two hours? Two hours. Two hours. So 1230, 1 o'clock. Just be sure and fill out a blue card. All right. And we'll make sure-- You bet. Does someone have a contact number for you in case we think it might be done sooner than that, that we can contact you? If you could just leave one with the officer here, that'd be great. OK. Oh, I'm sorry. Yes. So we would vote on it today in this work session? That's correct. I have to leave at like 1-- I didn't realize we were going to go past 1 o'clock. So-- Can we do it now? Yeah, we can do it now if you want. Do y'all want to-- OK. All right. Well, that's good. [INAUDIBLE] Yes. Yeah. So if someone could provide him with a blue card, that'd be great. [INAUDIBLE] Thank you, Council Member Gary, for that update. Appreciate that. Well, I tell you what then. While they're checking on staff, let's go ahead and grab our lunch if people are hungry. And we'll go ahead and get started then with the special call session. Madam City Attorney, is that going to be OK to-- All right. OK. Thank you. All right. So, well, I'm going to go get something to eat. [AUDIO OUT] [AUDIO OUT] [AUDIO OUT] [AUDIO OUT] [AUDIO OUT] [AUDIO OUT] the out all end [PAUSE] [PAUSE] [PAUSE] >> All right. We're back on this meeting of the Dent City Council, Monday, August 1, 2016 at 1107 a.m. We're going to go ahead and take our special called work session, I'm sorry, special called agenda item at first to facilitate someone who's present to be able to speak at that, and to also have all the council here to be able to vote on it. So we're going to go ahead and move to our special called, I will now, we have not completed the work session, but I will now call the city council into a special called work session, or special called meeting, excuse me, to consider agenda item A, which is consider approval of an alternative environmentally sensitive area plan for the villages of Car mel, phase four B. Mr. City Manager? >> Thank you, Mayor. I'll tell you what, we're going to call on Deborah Vieira. Deborah is our environmental compliance coordinator. She really deals with the ESA component of that, and so we 're going to ask her to lead off, and so we can talk about the ESA component of that, and then if there are questions about other planning issues , we'll hopefully have our planning staff here to answer any other questions. So with that, Deborah, will you lead off? Okay, let's see how I can get this out. Okay, thank you. >> Good evening, council. My name is Deborah Vieira. I'm with the Environmental Services and Sustainability. Some of you heard me a couple of weeks ago about the alternative ESA plan for villages of Carmel, phase four B. I'm going to try to answer those questions that some of you posed the first time around, and I will try to bring up to speed the city council member that was not there at the first meeting. So, bear with me. Some of the information will be repeated. I'm going to focus only on the ESA component part of it. The planning part, that would be something that planning would hopefully be able to address. The applicant is requesting to actually remove a repair and buffer ESA in an exchange just to give us a mitigation for upland habitat. And we are going to go over the basics of what the different type of ESAs are, what they do, and so forth. The repair and buffer that the applicant is interested in to remove, it is 100 feet wide along an area where it currently catches out water. Typically, repair and buffer could be between 100 and 200. In this case, we are dealing with the narrower of the two. Why we have the two different widths is because the drainage area that goes through it. The more water goes through it, the more protective area we preserve. The less, the narrower. Most of the time, you will see that repair and buffer are nested inside floodplains where the floodway is. In this case, it's not. This repair and buffer is completely outside a floodplain. It joins further down to a floodplain, but at this particular point, the repair and buffer is completely outside the floodplain. Why is that significant? Why are you bringing that up? Because most of the time, when you have a repair and buffer nested inside a floodplain, we get a drainage easement for the floodplain. So by the nature of the drainage easement dedication, we are preserving the stream buffer itself. In this case, there's no drainage easement that will protect the repair and buffer. >> Okay. >> So what are some of the benefits of repair and buffers? It prevents development in the floodplain for those instances where repair and buffer are nested inside flood plain. It maintains soil infiltration. It maintains the bank storage of the floodplain because no disturbance is allowed. No buildings or encroachments are allowed. So that bank storage stays intact. It maintains the roughness of the channel. That means how much friction. So when we have a big event and there's a lot of water going through it, it slows down the water, typically. It removes pollutants through biophysical processing. That means that they can uptake some of the pollutants that reaches the waterways. It reduces the sediment via reducing overland flow velocity . What it does is because the velocity is slower, it allows the sediments that otherwise will be carried by the water to settle out of solution and put a deposition at the bottom of it. So when the water reaches the lake, it is definitely less sediment and more clear and more clean. It maintains the base flow in streams. That is the minimum amount of water that should be going to maintain that stream. It can influence the temperature of your shading because those are vegetated areas where shades are provided. The temperature of the water is lower. You have more amount of fish and other myconvertebrates that might live in that stream and that's good. Real quick question. Yes. On this particular one, because I think there are some and I think we mentioned in the last presentation that so this one doesn't have water in it all year. I mean, this isn't like a tributary of some river or something. It's just more of a so if it never rained, this thing would be dry. Correct. And so that maintains base flow in streams. That doesn't necessarily that's not necessarily applicable here. Is that correct? Well, not in this particular case, but in general, those are the benefits that repairing buffers provide. Okay. Did you have a question? Yes. Yes, I'm sorry. And then Councilman Wasney and then Councilman Briggs. Go ahead. What government authority has established the repair in buffer ESAs? So my question is, how did this get established? And was it the federal government that stepped in or was it the state that said this is a repair in buffer ESA? This is strictly a city regulated area. Okay. There are areas that the Court of Engineers defined as a repair in buffer as well. In this particular case, it's not. This is just a city designated area. So the Court of Engineers was not involved in the designation of this? What happened is sometimes we overlaps what we call repair in buffer. It meets the definition of what the court calls the repair in buffer as well as what we call repair in buffer. And in those instances, the two overlap. But in this particular case, the area, it might be Waters of the US, which is a separate designation under the court, but no repair in buffer. So back to the question. It was the city of Denton that established this as a repair in. Okay. Thank you. In 2002, the city adopted the ESA regulations with a map that came with it. That was a city designation. Thank you. Councilmember Briggs. So on the benefits here, the bullet points, the mayor pointed out that one no longer applies to this area. How many of these other bullet points do we know no longer apply to this area? Are there several? No, I will say probably if I can go back. Prevent development in the flood plain, that will not apply because we don't have a flood plain designated. And probably maintains way flow in streams. So two of the 14? Yes. Okay, thank you. But remember, what this repair in buffer is doing is working as the head is where the water start coming together and start forming a kind of more defined channel. Okay. If you can see in a different hierarchical, this is the area that less water goes in. And the more water comes in, the channel gets more and more defined. And then at that point, we might have a permanent water body. It allows for natural channel migration, meaning that because we don't allow any development to happen, streams they tend to move according to how much water goes through it throughout time. And by maintaining that separation of non-encroachment, we are helping for that to be maintained and allow the channel to migrate. It maintains the national hydrology. It maintains the integrity of water resources because all the filtration services that it provides, it contributes to the nutrients of the aquatic system. All those plants that live across, I'm sorry, along the repair and buffer, eventually all that organic matter end up in the water. And that is the source of food for many of the organisms that is in the food chain. There might be lower in the food chain, but it's part of the food chain. And provides corridors for wildlife. I believe Council Member Wasney asked me this during the hearing, and this is the area that we are talking. South of it, it was a repair and buffer, which the designation was removed because it was, that development was grandfathering before the ESA regulations were in place. And you asked me about how it joins the floodplain. So pretty much you have a more natural channel here. It goes to a channel through that subdivision. It gets into a more natural way and eventually joins the floodplain. And we have photograph of how those different sections looks like. So you can relate how the area photograph looks to how it looks in the ground. Council Member Briggs? Oh, Kevin, did you have a question? Yeah. Okay. So it is connected. Because the original one I thought that since it was developed that it didn't connect. It is connected. Water goes through it, but you will see the difference in the ecosystem. It is completely a swell, a grass swell on those stretches. Mayor Pro Tem. So prior to having the regulations in place, they wouldn't have had to, for that development, wouldn't have had to come in for an alternative ESA plan, correct? But they obviously still had to do something to mitigate the fact that water is going to have to flow through here at some point? Correct. And they provide an engineering solution to that. They dealt with the conveyance of water instead of the habitat present at that time. So let me know if you're going to get to this, and so I don 't ask you to be redundant ahead of time. So the benefit of us kind of applying these regulations back when we did was to be able to, A, identify them, and B, if there's a request to develop, we'd have the ability to mitigate it according to not just the drainage, but it sounds like the benefit is also the habitat issues, tree canopy issues, and things like that. Correct. Staff recognize that sometimes ESAs cannot be preserved for the sake of drainage or floodplain management and so on. So in those instances, the alternative ESA plan provides a tool for applicants to maybe not meet the letter of the code, which is the preservation and non-encroachment into the ESA , but to provide mitigation for the encroachment that they 're providing. Thanks. This is a more up-close look of it. Again, this is the area that we are considering today. Those two riparian buffers have been eliminated and designation have been removed. It continues to a more natural, it crosses Lakeview Boule vard and then join the floodplain. Okay. This is Lakeview Boulevard right here. This is the current post oak. The riparian buffer that we are talking about is right here . Okay. And even though it looks quite treed and heavily vegetated, remember, the ESA designation only covers for those 100 feet. Anything that goes beyond is not protected, and the applicant can remove those subject to the tree code, which is another set of regulations. But keep in mind that what we are protecting is only 100 feet wide. That's all that we can do at this point. And I'm going to show you how a 100 feet wide riparian buffer looks in the ground. So in that way, you can connect how the area photograph looks at street level. These are images of the riparian buffer when we did the field assessment. This is actually looking north of the stream. Okay. That riparian buffer designation that was removed south of it, this is what it looks like. It's a grass, soil, where water is conveyed. That natural stretch existing, this is what 100 feet looks like in the ground. If the riparian buffer that we are considering today were to be kept intact, this is how it's going to probably look. In March 2015, we did a field assessment. We determined that based on the drainage area, the protection only applies to the first 100 feet. It was scored, when we do a field assessment, we actually go to the site. We look for criteria, vegetation, soil, the hydrology pattern, the existing of invasive species, and so on. The assessment is quite long and extensive for us to determine that a ESA meets the criteria. During the process of scoring, the quality of the habitat is scored fair. Our system is a four level category. You have poor, you have fair, you have good, and you have excellent. This one is in the low end of fair. The vegetation that we found were post oaks, red cedars, and little blue stem grasses. Within that 100 feet of protected area, there are approximately 875 tree inches. So why did the riparian buffer rank as fair? Pretty much, we did the assessment, we tally all those characteristics. We found invasive species, Chinese pre-bred present, that that lowers the quality of the ESA. Potential for future channel instability due to soil types and tree root characteristics, meaning that the channel is showing some instability. Refill embeddedness, no potential for pools of water. When we're looking into a stream, there are different micro , I will say, ecosystem where you have different type of sections of the stream that deals with different velocities of the water, and allows for different type of organism to be there. In this particular case, no potential for pools of water. The pools substrate more than 80% sand silt, which decreases the squaring of the ESA. There was not a poor in stream aquatic habitat, and major localized gaps in riparian buffer, meaning that there were areas that there were openings, that were not contiguous. So here what we did, we started looking into the plant makeup of the riparian buffer that they have, versus what they're offering for mitigation, which is the upland habitat. And Mike will be able to discuss more into the upland habitat and what is existing and how have been used. >> Sorry, Council Member Briggs had a question. On the list in the upland, is that all existing or does that include new, like younger trees? >> Those are existing. >> Existing, okay. >> Okay, so pretty much in both habitat, oak is the predominant species. We found that cedar is higher in the riparian buffer versus in the upland, even though cedar is both present in both type of ecosystem . Elm is also present, but is in higher number in the upland mitigation area. >> Boat ark. >> So let's talk about what they are proposing for mitigation. They have a site on their property that at one point it was designated upland habitat. What upland habitat has to be is an area that is ten acres in size, larger or larger and contiguous. The species makeup have to be the one that you will find in a eastern cross timber forest habitat. And the protection only applies to residential uses, okay. This is important because if you compare the two ESOS, rip arian buffers versus upland, upland is only protected if you have residential uses. If you were to have riparian buffer and you were to put a commercial use, anything that is not residential, you will have to preserve the riparian buffer or go through an alternative ESA plan. Therefore, we are protecting more riparian buffers than up land habitat. Are we clear on that? It is a major distinction. So when we start looking into the CESA map and we tally the total acreage that we have currently designated as an up land habitat versus the area designated as a riparian buffer, the acre age on upland habitat is way less. And on top of that, only if you develop that area as a residential use is when you're going to protect it. This is images of the different Texas ecoregion. The area that we are talking about, where's my point, is in that area right here. So cross timber is sandwiched between the Blacklands and the prairie. It's a very narrow ecoregion and it's very scarce. And keep in mind, what we have left designated as a cross timber forest are areas that were not able to be cultivated or used for cattle. So they are more rare than riparian buffers. Not only the amount that we have for the entire state of Texas, but also because we preserve more riparian buffers than upland. This is an image of all the ESAs within that area. This is the area that we are talking about there being offered as a mitigation. That area have been partially used to meet tree code for existing phases of villages of Carmel. But there is an area left that the developer feel like they don't have to use to meet the tree code. And that's what is being offered to mitigate for the rip arian buffer. >> Got a question. Yes, Council Member. >> So what is that size? >> The total? >> No, what they're offering. Because there's already a designated space for tree code they can't touch. So what is the? >> Do you have that acreage? >> It's about two acres. >> It's about two acres. >> So we're voting for, to protect the riparian buffer or adding two acres to the designated tree park? >> Yeah. >> Is that what we're asked to do today? >> Correct. >> Just the two acres? >> Two acres. >> What is important is, and we will go more into the details of why that area was removed from upland habitat designation. By keeping those additional two acres plus all the area that have to be kept to meet the tree code, we are totally about 5.82 acres total, okay? What they have left, not designated for meeting tree code, is two acres. But all together, if we add all the pieces together, we will have approximately 5.82 acres. Are we, any questions on that? >> Is that Council Member Briggs? >> Okay. >> You look puzzled. >> I'm good. >> Okay. >> I understand. >> Okay. Is there a cross timber description and issues? The cross timber is an ancient forest that has been under extensive pressures in settlement. And that's why I say, whatever is left is because it was not either cultivated or cannot be used for cattle. So that's one of the reasons of the rotary. It is recognized as an urban forest, surviving on small pockets of undeveloped land and struggling to hold in areas that are under rapid urbanization. Perfect example would be this site. Post oak is the most common species found in cross timber forest, and it has a very low tolerance to development. If you change the hydrology pattern around cross timber, it really affects those trees and their chances for those trees to survive. The state of Texas have- >> I'm sorry, we got a question. Council Member Briggs? >> Do we know the percentage that's left of the cross tim bers? >> For the entire ecoregion? No, we don't. >> Why? Because it is subject to the regulations for each city, which therefore is that we don't know. >> Okay. >> The state have tried to preserve those sites as much as possible as nature preserve. The cross timber ecoregion is home to a diversity of wildlife. Even though most of the larger wildlife have been, is no longer live there because it's more urban in nature than more pristine. The cross timber ecoregion also lies within the central fly way of avian migration. Many of neotropical migrant, waterfowl, and birds are bred past through our part of the country and stop and spend their breeding of winter season here. You can thank this to Dr. Banks. So what it does is provides a stopping ground for migrating birds. This is how the upland habitat looks like right now. >> Curious on that picture in the foreground, it looks like a cut. What is it? >> Well, let me show you if I can escape. >> And if you got a slide on it somewhere else, that's fine . I just was curious. >> Yeah, this. Okay. Where are you? >> I mean, is that development that's come up? >> Yes. >> Okay, all right. Thank you. >> Pretty much we're talking about this area right here. >> Okay. Thank you. >> Yes, I'm sorry. >> Councilmember Begayar. >> And they're actually, so I drove through there. They're going to build a retaining wall right where that cut is because they've already cut through and there's retaining walls built in the other parts of the preserved area, correct? >> Correct. >> So in 2008, the city make a field assessment of that up land habitat. The tract was actually annexed into the city limit in 2004. Based on some aerial photograph, that tree stand used to be larger. But portion of it was clear between 2003 and 2004 prior to city annexing the property. Okay, so that means that that area were not subject to ESAs and were not subject to tree code. When we assess that total area was 5.82 acres. Because it doesn't meet the 10 acre minimum size, the designation was removed even though the habitat was still present. So you have two component of the designation. You have the species make up, the habitat, and you have the minimum size. If either of those conditions are not met, the ESA designation is removed. Even though the upland habitat designation was removed, any trees that were removed from that tree stand were subject to the tree code. Okay, the difference between the tree code and the upland habitat is, we look for the habitat, the under stories that live underneath the trees. The tree code deals with the tree itself. Okay, so in a tree stands set aside for tree code preservation, you can go in and remove the under story, leave the trees intact. If that area were to be preserved under the ESA regulations , you are protecting the entire ecosystem. The tree and whatever goes underneath. Yes, Councilor, Mayor Pro Tem. Would it be protecting of the entire, almost six acres, or just the area that is being used to mitigate for this alternative ESA? If the proposed mitigation were to be approved, only the two acres designated for tree to meet mitigation under the ESA would be subject to the ESA regulation. All the rest that have been set aside for tree preservation , the habitat would not have to be protected, only the trees itself. Right, thanks. If approved, as mitigation would be subject to 17.9, which is the section of the code that deals with the upland habitat. Oh, I'm sorry. Council Member Briggs. So I have a question. Council Member Baggierre mentioned that there would be a retaining wall. Now, would that be around the full area, or would it need to be, would it be around the full six acres, or would the two acres that are preserved need to stay natural without a retaining wall? Whatever the edge of that area is to be protected, the retaining wall will not be able to encroach into that area. It could be along the edge of it, but not be able to actually encroach. No retaining wall would be able to be inside the mitigation area. Right, so it would just basically circle it? I will let the applicant answer that, because I don't know what the other plans for future phases, if that retaining wall will extend. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Why staff is recommending approval of the alternative ESA plan? It's because it preserves a component of unique acre region , cross timber that is under extreme pressure. We saw how narrow it is compared to the other adjacent acre regions. It is more rare than riparian buffer. Less upland habitat in the city than riparian buffer. Okay, again, you only preserve upland if you are residential. If you were to be commercial, you don't have to preserve. Riparian buffer, we protect them all the time. Disregard of what they use is unless you have to go through an alternative ESA plan. Larger contiguous area of tree, tree canopy and habitat under proposed option. If we use these two acres of mitigation in conjunction with what have been set aside for tree code, we have a larger area of tree stem. Riparian buffer is a fair condition now and will degrade in the future. One of the points that staff made during the first presentation is when post oak is developed along the east side of this riparian buffer, the hydrology pattern is going to change. All the water that now goes into it when it rains will be diverted away from this area. So eventually, the riparian buffer will go away. It's a matter of time. So what the applicant is saying now is let me remove the designation now. Let me put some residential lots in it. In exchange, I'm going to give you an upland habitat in conjunction adjacent to what I'm already preserving for tree code and make it a larger area. It's going to degrade the riparian buffer. It's just a matter of time. Councilmember Geary. So I understand the hydrology of the riparian buffer area and the degradation that you're talking about. Isn't that the same situation that we have with a preserve of the post oak preserve? I'm assuming it's post oaks that's going to be preserved in that area. The hydrology has completely been destroyed. So you're going to have essentially this artificial preserve, I guess you could call it, but the ecosystem that originated that particular stand of trees is completely different. So won't we see some degradation of that in the future as well? I would say maybe along the edges because the habitat will be more sensitive to the disturbance. But as the larger the tree stand is, the more protection you provide towards the center. So I would say that chances are the core of that tree stand will stay longer as it is than actually the riparian buffer . The hydrology is going to change. And not only that, think about the width of the riparian buffer is 100 feet. So you have more surface subject to impact. When you have a tree stand with a larger area, less exposed edges. So you have to kind of think in that way and see the chances for that area to stay as natural as it is. We had a question, Council Member Brayden. Can I just have some clarification? I know that the riparian buffer is 100 feet wide. You keep saying that. But what is the landmass? Like how big is it compared to the two acres that we're trying to preserve? Like if you're -- Yeah, if we need to answer those either, relay it on to the -- just so we can hear over the microphone. Yeah, and this is being televised. It's around one acre. So it's one acre, 100 feet wide? No, we're talking about the existing vegetation. The existing vegetation, and that goes beyond the protected 100 feet, is around one acre. Okay. I guess you wanted to know the area if you calculate the length by the width. Is that the area that you are interested to know? Do we have that number? No. Okay. Unfortunately. The other thing is this riparian buffer is connected through a series of swell, grassy swells, and eventually goes to reach the floodplain. So if this area were to be removed and we are concerned about the pollutants that might reach, the pollutant would have a chance to be mitigated, to be filtrated by the remaining riparian buffer downstream of the site before it reaches the floodplain. So it's not like a lot of pollutant would be able to reach the floodplain with no type of filtration whatsoever. So question on that. So if, maybe I'm not understanding exactly, when they say removing the ESA, the riparian buffer, and that they will put lots for development for houses, nine houses I believe. So there won't be any grassy swell. There won't be, I mean, they're re-diverting the drainage altogether somewhere else that then is going to come back and connect back into that grassy swell somewhere else. So that riparian buffer will basically have lots on top of it. Correct. Okay. All right. Thank you. And pretty much that's the end of my presentation. Okay. Yes. Mayor Pro Tem. This could be for planning as well, but the paper did a story on this after our last discussion and included a picture of a guy sitting on a pile of mulch essentially. In my opinion confused, I think, a couple different areas. What was pictured there wasn't this development project. Is that correct? I will defer that question to Mike Bell. Yes. That's correct. The confusing two different projects, the newspaper and the picture was Trees Removed for the Preserve at Pecan Creek, sections H and I, which has been approved for several decades. It was unrelated to this project. Thanks for clarifying that. Councilmember Hawkins. Thank you. Can you go back to the picture that shows the 100-foot rip arian buffer? Here? It was an actual picture of one that looked similar. Okay. I think right there. Right here. Yep. Okay. So I'm the one that missed that last meeting, so I just want to make sure that I have clarity on everything that's going on. What we are deciding on is if the development was going to move forward right now, we would leave the riparian buffer. It would look similar to that, which does not have that long of a shelf life, which has just a fair credit score, whatever you want to say, which it can always work on. Okay. But in trade, if we were to decide to mitigate that, we are going to add an additional two acres of tree stand, which will have a longer life typically, or maybe, than that rip arian buffer. And that riparian buffer is just going to -- the water is going to divert and meet again. It is going to put a little -- will it put more stress on the downstream riparian, or does it work like that? Well, for -- when somebody develops, they have to assess the capacity downstream of it. Okay. Okay. And if I'm not mistaken, there is capacity. Otherwise, they would have to release the water in a different way, in a different pattern. Okay. So from conveyance standpoint, they would be able to put that additional runoff through that channel. And just to add to that, P&Z recommended this 7-0. Correct. And staff is recommending this also. Correct. And from -- when I read the original P&Z minutes, there was nobody that spoke in opposition of this. Is that correct? Correct. Okay. Thank you. Councilmember Riggs. Isn't there an area that Parks has -- so neither one of these areas connects to that open area, which would be for habitat -- This area would be publicly owned. It's a partnership between Parkland Dedication and upland habitat preservation altogether. This area right here, it would be privately maintained. It would be owned by the HOA of that homeowner. Even though it would provide a park amenity to that community, it would not be owned by the city. Would the -- Yes, go ahead, Chair. Would the riparian buffers be owned by the city or that be -- It would be privately maintained. Privately maintained. Yeah. The only time that we have some jurisdiction, not ownership , but some authority over is when riparian buffers are within floodplains, and those floodplains are encompassed by a drainage eas ement. Councilmember Riggs. One of the things that's interesting about this is this was -- we created these designations in order to preserve these riparian buffers around the city or to bring developers to the table so that we could come up with better solutions. And so I've got a hypothetical question, because this seems to be a unique case in which we have an opportunity to kind of allow for the preservation of something that's rare in our city, that happens to be on the same plot of development to be able to do that, which is a rare kind of swapping ability. So my hypothetical is this. Had we not had that upland habitat as part of this equation , say that was just open prairie field or something like that, in this request for an ESA, alternative ESA came through and you had nothing to swap it with there, but maybe there was some other suggestion of how to mitigate the difference. Would that have -- I'm putting you on a strange spot -- would that have changed staff recommendation? Well, my first advice to the applicant is work with what you have. If you have an ESA, the same type of ESA that you're encro aching, mitigate with that because we will be comparing apples to apples. My second choice is if you have any other type of ESAs, then use that as a mitigation because the ESA exists already there. My third option is if you don't have nothing to mitigate, then you will have to go through some sort of engineering solutions. And then we will have to deal with more like the runoff, the water quality, the treatment of the runoff before it joins the rest. So it is a -- there are options out there, but my preferred option is if you already have an ESA to work with, my recommendation would be mitigate with what you have. It's kind of hard to recreate an existing habitat. Well, and that's why I kind of appreciate -- I mean, I think it sounds like P&Z started talking about tree preservation code and kind of looking at this comprehensive ly anyways, but I do appreciate this aspect that this triggered that sort of creative approach from our staff and working with the developer to find something that seems to be a win-win for everyone. So I just applaud you for that. Councilmember Gregory. Thank you, Mayor. Slide 14. Sorry. Thank you. That shows the inventory of trees. In an earlier slide, you had indicated that there was about 875 tree inches in the riparian buffer, but I don't see any comparison to the number of tree inches in the upland mitigation area. Do you have the presentation? Yeah, that would be something that planning would be able to give you that information. Oh, but we don't have it now. No, as a part of my presentation. Oh. Planning have the presentation that was provided to P&Z and city councils, and that information is part of that presentation. Can somebody share that with us before we vote? Yeah. Okay. I just want to be clear of the question. So this is the number of trees that were total 875 inches. And then we would preserve within that two acres in the up land habitat the same number of inches. So 875 would be taken from riparian and saved in the upland habitat. Oh, so the same number. Yes. And we've already double-checked in that two something acres to verify that there's enough. There is. There's actually a little more left over that the app wants to use for its tree code credits. Okay. Thank you. Councilman Wasney. Could you go back to the last map that we had? This one? Right here. So every section that is red is actually an environmentally sensitive area that over the course of time the city has relaxed the standard to allow development. Is that correct? That area is part of the plan development for the preserved . That plan development was approved prior to the development code and the ESA regulations. Therefore, they were grandfathered in under the old set of regulations. So I'm talking about, because I'm getting a view from 30, 000 feet here. So that each section that we see, I love the ... It's here, over here, here, here, here, here. Yes. What we have done, if you go to the city website and the E SA map, we have kept all those areas that have been designated. Just keep in mind that when the ESA map was created, it's a very close approximation of where the ESAs are suspected to be. Sometimes after field assessment, we remove that designation because the criteria is not met. The perfect example would be the upland habitat designation removed. The habitat was there, but the size criteria was not met. The designation was removed. Sometimes the map has a map error and after field assessment, we remove those designations. So when you see all those red areas, I will encourage to go case by case, pull the actual field assessment and know why that designation was either removed or mitigated or not subject to the ESA regulations. To my point, those were ESA areas that for one reason or another fell out of their protected status. Correct. Council Member Briggs. Can you go back to the tree count slide? So on the upland mitigation area, is that just the oak 82, is that the total or is that just the two acres that we are talking about? The two acres. Okay. And so he mentioned that I think the quote was a little left for tree code credits. That's the first time I 've heard about that. Can you explain what that means? And is that included in the 5.2 acres we're talking about here or would that also be needed if we kept the ESA? Right. Two different, one is an ESA protection for trees. The other is the tree code, which everybody is subject to. So they have to preserve at the very minimum 12.5% of their trees on site and we're not going to let them double count the ones that protect for the ESA for the ones that they count for tree code. So they've done some rough numbers and we looked at them to say that they can preserve the 835 inches and the two acres and still meet their 12.5% for the tree code outside of the two acres. So there's 875 inches just for the ESA protection and then you take the whole acreage of the entire phase, 12.5% of those trees can be saved on top of that. There's a distinction needs to be made here. We're not trading acreage for acreage. So it's not two for two. We're trading inches for inches. So 875 inches from the repairing buffer we're going to save 875 inches in the ESA area, but we're not necessarily protecting the entire two acres. So once they've saved their 875 inches, the rest of it can go if it's not saved by tree code. Oh, okay. But the intent being, and we've looked at this, that they 're going to save all that area basically to meet their ESA protection and their tree code. So at this point we're assuming all those trees are going to be saved. But there's no guarantee. Well, he can manipulate his tree code to save trees elsewhere on site if he wanted to. But the intent for him is to keep them all in one place. All right. Thank you. Couple questions on that. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought I heard you say that , let's say for instance, we don't approve the exchange of the ESA for the upland habitat. So they go and develop up there, take out whatever trees they have up there, but that they're still going to divert the drainage or the water flow away from this current ESA drainage place. No matter what happens, that water flow is going to go a different direction. And what you're saying is over time, due to that, and it may be 20 or 30 years, I mean, the tree canopy that's currently in the ESA may eventually begin to die off because of the lack of, I'm assuming, water that is available to it. All right. That answers one of my questions. Second question is, which this is sort of, as probably was in the last meeting, but maybe a little more nuanced, but it seems a little bit more direct to me now, that are we able to impose a restriction? In other words, he's going to save the 875 inches in the up land habitat, but if he went and preserved trees somewhere else, then some of those trees could be removed from that. And we understand that the intent is to maintain that in its current form, to increase that amount. Is that a condition that can be placed upon this development, or is that just something we just, I mean, is that part of what the council is able to do? Like if we were to say, yes, we will allow you to, we will remove this ESA designation, transfer it over here, but in addition to that, this, whatever it is, 5.5 something acres has to be preserved, and that's where you have to, I mean, if that's the will of the council. I'm just saying, is that opportunity available or not? And I guess maybe that's a question for the city attorney or staff or whoever might be able to help me with that. Does my question make sense, number one, because you said there's no guarantee. 875 inches are staying, if you approve this, they're staying no matter what. But there's about a thousand or so inches in that five acre tract, so the extra 125 they're going to use for tree code. That's their plan now, but they don't have to. Right. So you're asking can we condition that extra 125 inches as part of this? Yes. That I do not know. Okay. Sure, and so let's sort of, I think there's a couple of questions for the applicant when he comes up to speak, so we'll sort of put that over in that column. And yes, Council Member, Mayor Pro Tem wrote. I want to clarify what I think you're asking and make sure I understand what's happening. So this entire area, what is it, almost eight acres? Five. Six? Five. About six. So that's the entire stand as it exists today. Yeah. And you're saying a portion of that is protected by virtue of previous tree preservation code, that that can't be cut down, so that's not at risk. The portion of inches that get protected, the swap from, if we approve this alternative ESA, is protected no matter what, if this is approved. So really just down to the question that you're asking about, is the remaining 100, what was it, 100 something inches? Okay. Just making sure I'm clear on that, because what you're saying is that potentially at risk is not as large as I think we think it is. Yeah. So if, and when you're talking about caliper inches, so if you got a 20 inch, all right, post oaks aren't that big, maybe 8 to 10 inch post oak. How many inches are you saying that's remaining about 100, how much, what? I think about 125. So if you had 10 inch trees, that's 12 trees. Right. Okay. I just want to make sure I understand, sort of bring it down. Okay. The other thing that I would like to bring is if the council decides to approve the proposed mitigation, staff would like to put a condition that whatever mitigation is provided is subject to chapter 17 of the development code, because that's where no cutting of the trees, no cutting of the understory is specified. So if we can, if a condition, if there's a vote for approval, then just add that condition, because that would protect that area as an ESA. Okay. All right. Okay. Any other questions for staff before we hear from the applicant? Oh, I guess you also have a presentation, so forgive me. Sure. We'll wait and do the planning presentation. I apologize. Bear with me one sec. All right. This is the P&Z presentation, but it has a little bit more detail. And I'll go through it very quickly, because we have covered a lot of it already. Great. Thank you, Mike. This will give you a bit overall where everything is. So 4A has already been approved. It's the left side. 4B is the right side. Phase 5 has also been approved. We're looking -- here's the old ESA area and then Brokarian buffer, how it fits into the larger ecosystem. We've talked about -- we are assuming that ESA will go dry. And if you look up in your backup, the lot layout of Phase 4B is actually in there. It doesn't show up, and the scale doesn't show up on a PowerPoint, but if you want to see how the road is actually going to be laid out, you can see why that water will not be in the channel. And again, the protection is not to save an acreage, but to designate an area. Within that area, the 875 inches have to be saved. So we're not saving acreage for acreage. Actually, it comes out to 1,270, so it's even more than I thought. 1,270 inches is in that tree preserve area. So the two scenarios -- the total what we would get is 270 inches. If this were not to be approved, it would be the minimum they have to save. If you do approve this plan, 925 inches would be the minimum that they have to save. In the end, we would get an upland habitat and lose a rip arian buffer, but if we did not approve this, then we would lose both in the future. This is where we're talking about previous phases. Phase 4A preserves 790 inches in their final plat. In Phase 2, save 997 inches in their final plat. Those are protected today. Can't touch them. If we approved this all together, we'd get about 2,700 inches in about 5.8, but a five-acre park, roughly, including all these areas. And then, as I said, they want to use the remainder of those inches to use a tree cut. So we're anticipating we'll get to save almost the entire 2 ,700 inches. The benefits, we get to protect an environmental resource, create a joint tree park in the villages of Carmel that will serve all phases 1 through 5, preserve a greater amount of trees overall, and in the end, the cost is we lose the riparian buffer ESA. Again, we did send notices. We received two in favor, and several people at PNZ actually came and spoke in favor at the meeting. So that concludes my presentation. Okay. Any questions for Planning Staff? Yes, Councilmember Gregory. So is it the Planning Staff that names these roads? Is it the developer that names the roads? Do they submit the roads for planning approval? The names are approved at final plat, and the developer creates the names, the fire department checks to make sure they haven't been used before, or that they're not confusing names. Well, they confused me because I was out there driving around, and I got on Ocean View. And then I saw Marina, and I couldn't find an ocean anywhere. So I don't know. Maybe that's a bad idea for future. Maybe we ought to be a little bit more -- I know that's picky. Never mind. Any other questions for staff? I also do want to point out, if you look in your backup for the lot layout, you'll see that Post Oak continues -- it's right away for Sixth Lane Road, continues right beside this ESA. So that road getting built will take a lot of the water out , too. All right. Any other questions, comments? Yes. Councilmember Wozni. So if we lose the riparian, and we know the tree preserve, but let's go the other way, because it's been pretty one- sided presentation today. If we keep the riparian, what will the tree preserve look like? Right. 12.5% is the minimum they have to preserve. And that's two acres out of the five, not the entire five, correct? That's correct, just the two acres. And 270 inches of that would be saved. So that's the 12.5% per the tree code, because it's no longer protected as this ESA plan. But the 925 doesn't take into account, or does it? Yes, it does, the 875 taken out of the ESA. Correct. Plus the 50 they'd have to keep if they just met the tree code for the rest of those trees. So 925 is the very, very minimum they will have in those two acres. So it's a matter of taking the tree preserve and making it bigger, essentially, and protecting it. Correct. Thank you. Council Member Riggs. So if we kept the riparian buffer ESA, they would have two areas, natural areas, that would remain? Not correct. The ESA would stay for a while, correct, and then they could cut down the upland habitat area and save just 270 inches. That's the minimum they have to save per the tree code. Out of the two acres. Correct. Because I was there, I mean, and there's -- so I'm just -- okay, thank you. Any other questions for staff? Seeing none, thank you. We've got one speaker. Rod Zilke, applicant, if you'll come up and state your name and address. And your time will begin. And how much -- does the applicant get additional time because they're the applicant, Madam City Attorney, on these? I just wanted to make sure so -- okay. Sounds like you got enough. All right. Name and address. Councilman, my name is Rod Zilke with ZPS Consulting Engineers at 1111 Main Street in Grapevine, Texas. First of all, I'd like to apologize to you all. I'm the applicant on this project. I'd like to apologize for not speaking the first night it was present. It was my error. I thought as the applicant I'd get a chance to speak. Consequently, I didn't fill out a blue card. You'd think after doing this as many years as I have, I would have figured that out by now. I think I could have presented a lot of information that night and I'll try and answer your questions here and clarify so many of these issues. It's been very frustrating for me to sit on the sidelines and listen to all these questions and not be able to respond. First of all, let me take you up to a kind of a 30,000-foot elevation and look at this a little bit. This -- Let's start off. Yeah, you're going to need to stay behind the mic. I guess I can point. I'm the engineer, not the owner of any of these properties, but I've been associated with all of the properties from Sw isher Road, off the map over here to South Apocryphus Page since 2004. So I know all of kind of how this area has come together and did all the engineering on it, so I know a lot of information. So please feel free to ask me questions. I want to start off by talking about -- where did my pointer go? This area here. This area -- the areas around this are represented by four different property owners. When we started developing this area, we recognized this riparian buffer here as being a key part of the original E SA plan of the city. When the city redesignated it as not ESA because they reduced this contiguous size requirement, we still got all these property owners together and said, how can we preserve this valuable asset? The tree code has a provision in it for a tree trust. It encourages tree trusts. So with staff support, and again, this is before most of y' all's time, with council support, we actually tried to create a tree trust, not only in this area, but some other areas. And before Ms. Burgess' tenure as council for the city, we were eventually told by the legal department that although the tree code allows and encourages tree trusts, we can't deal with that. And I can't be more specific than that. But basically, we could not use the tree trust to save this piece of property. I mentioned that just so y'all have that background because you're fixing to deal with a new tree ordinance pretty soon , and I think that's going to be part of your discussion. In any event, to save this piece of property, we have a very complex mosaic of plats and property owners trying to piece this five acres together and save it. And this is the last piece of the puzzle. This is how we can complete the five acres. We've tried to preserve this five acres by giving it to the parks department to say, we'll do anything to preserve this . That's another thing to keep in mind as you're considering the tree code, is it's difficult right now in the city of Denton under your current tree code to preserve trees without them being in my front yard or your front yard. So the intent right now, we're still discussing this with the parks department if there's some way for them to take it over to ensure the preservation. But right now, the intent has always been from the beginning to preserve this tree park. The quality of the habitat, as Deborah pointed out, has not changed any from its original designation as high quality upland habitat. The only thing that's changed over the years is semantics, is basically in your code now, it doesn't qualify because it's not a big enough contiguous area. So in any event, that's my comment on the tree preserve. I'd like to get back down to this area and clarify some things. One of the reasons that we felt that this riparian buffer was not a high quality riparian buffer, there's two reasons . One, if you look at the city's evaluation, Deborah pointed it out as fair. It's a very complex evaluation and it gets pretty low rankings in quite a few categories. The most important thing to me is it is no longer connected to any other riparian buffer. And I'd like to clarify that because there seems to be some ambiguity. This is Post Oak Boulevard here, half of it which is built. The part you see in red is now all enclosed in a 72 inch and larger pipe. It's all underground under the roadway. The picture you may have seen is there's a little swale here which was where material was borrowed to build this half of the road. So future Post Oak Boulevard, that swale will be all pavement. I'm losing my pointer here and I can't, there it is. Right now there's a 72 inch pipe stubbed up and ends right here and has a 48 inch pipe that comes off. And this riparian buffer drains into that pipe and goes into this drainage system underneath existing Post Oak Boulevard. So it does not have any natural connection to Pecan Creek or the lake. And in fact, from here all the way down, all the way down to Post Oak Boulevard will at some point in the future be enclosed in a pipe and will be pavement. It's a six lane divided thoroughfare. This project is dedicating the right of way for this six lane divided thoroughfare. And as Mike mentioned, a portion of it actually runs along the edge of this riparian buffer, actually clips a little piece of it. So the construction of future Post Oak Boulevard in addition to the development itself, but in large part due to the construction of Post Oak Boule vard and this 72 inch pipe will enclose the drainage that goes in this riparian buffer. So in effect, it will dry up the riparian buffer that's been mentioned. So in addition, and I'll also mention for habitat considerations that Pokers Page Road also includes a little piece of this. And there's only half of that's built now. So the other half of it will be that this project will dedicate the right of way for that. And then Post Oak Pokers Page Boulevard will be widened. And it's a four lane thoroughfare. So now you have the intersection of two major thoroughfares . Drainage considerations from engineering of these facilities will dry this up. On top of that, we felt it wasn't in good conscious to encourage wildlife habitat at the intersection of two major thoroughfares. So suggesting this area up here as mitigation for that, we thought that was better wildlife habitat. It's larger and it has more value than this lower quality riparian area that's actually going to be immediately adjacent to a six lane divided thoroughfare. And a four lane thoroughfare that has no connectivity to any other riparian buffer the way it currently exists. And will have less connectivity when future Post Oak Boule vard is built. I'd like to tell you a lot of other things, but I don't really want to wear you out. So with that, I'll just let you all ask questions or tell me to sit down. Any questions? Yes. I'm curious if you know what is going to be north of the -- what's in that property because there's a pond there. North of what now? Well, I'm sorry, above your line, yellow line. Above the riparian buffer we're talking about? No, of your -- right here. Just right up where the tree preserve thing is. Above the tree preserve? Yeah. To the right. Do you know -- is that your property? In this area here? Yeah, is that going to be -- is that yours? We're working on this property right now. This is going to be homes. There's a -- I forget the term -- a contract being prepared or a letter of understanding for the Parks Department to actually acquire a big chunk of this ESA from this property owner. So a big portion of this will be -- I mean, the agreement's not finalized, but it's pretty far along. A big chunk of this will be tree park. Of course, Post Oak Boulevard's a six-lane divided thorough fare comes through here. So there's a big chunk of this is public right-of-way. And then everything east of that will -- I say everything -- a good portion of what's east of that is intended to become tree park. And then what's west of that will be homes. All homes. Okay. Thank you. Councilmember Gregory. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you for leaving it on this map. When I drove out there and looked around, it seemed to me that approximately along where that yellow line is marking the northern boundary of this development that we're talking about, that that's a ridge. That's a what? That that seems to be a ridge. But you're the engineer. Where does the water switch from flowing south to flowing north? It actually is a high area. And it flows in a couple different directions. I didn't bring the drainage area map with you. But a portion of this area drains south. A portion of it drains here. And I even think the northern portion of this area is actually picked up in a drainage system in here. And is that the same on to the east? Yes. And some of it actually drains to the east through -- this whole area in here, I don't want to worry about it. I don't want to worry you all out. But you mentioned the picture of the guy on the wood chips was on this project right here. This area was -- again, I was involved with it in 2004. I believe it was all strip mined for sand and gravel. So it was just pits and piles of rubble, waste area. And so the drainage pattern in there was almost undefinable because of the way the strip mines left it. I mean, my editorial comment is that area grew back in hack berries and mesquites, and that's now exempt in your current plan. And that pile of chips was mostly trees that are now exempt in your current code or plan to be exempt in your current code. But in any event, the drainage pattern was almost undefin able. Council Member Briggs and then -- okay. Okay. So I guess you answered that. So that story, that picture was from this -- No, no. It was from an adjacent project. From the adjacent property. There's a project boundary line right about here. Okay. And it was on this project here. Okay. Council Member Hawkins. Yeah, we were discussing that additional extra 125 inches of trees if we were going to approve this alternative ESA. Do you think that would be an issue to include that 125 with the developer or would we need to talk to the developer? I'm not sure I -- I followed the whole conversation. So I'd be glad to look at it all. I've looked at these trees so many ways. I feel like I know each one of them personally. And our intent is to preserve this whole area. So if it's -- I imagine that could be worked out. I just don't know the details of what the implication of that is. And then I'd have to discuss it with the owner, of course. Okay. Council Member Briggs. So in our last discussion, the riparian buffer will become -- is it nine homes? Is that -- they want to do nine homes right there in that area? The seminary plant, I believe that's correct. That's -- I mean, we're just getting to final planting it now. Okay. So -- And the developer, I believe, said that if they don't go there, they will go somewhere up near the tree preserve. I'm sorry, I didn't understand that. The nine houses, if they do not get built here, they will get built somewhere and that that would eat into the tree preserve possibly. Is that -- That's a real complicated question because of how the tree code and the ESA code and the preservation requirements all interact. But, yes, if we didn't use this area -- I mean, if we didn 't use this area -- some of this area for mitigation for the riparian buffer as we've proposed, then it's possible it could be homes. Now, I'm not going to tell you it's nine for nine exact. I haven't looked at -- Right. I mean, it's really a complicated question. Right. But a little bit of -- some of the two acres you're saying could be -- Yes, ma'am. -- for homes and then that would allow this to stay? I can say that with confidence, yeah. Okay. Thank you. Any other questions for the applicant? Any other questions? Any other comments from the applicant? All right. Thank you for your time. Fantastic. Thank you. Thank you, Rod. Any discussion? Councilmember Wasney. One more question. Oh, yes. You need to go to the mic. I don't hear a row. Okay. I'll speak up. So to clarify, the riparian buffer, there's a six-lane road that's going to encroach in this buffer anyway? Is that correct? A portion of it. We haven't surveyed it, but I've got an exhibit here I'll show you. Do you have a picture of that that we could put up on the screen? Sure. Thank you. I've got a friend. I didn't -- Mike, do you have something that you'd be able to at least point out? I'm going to ask you a question. I'm sorry. I don't see where this could get pulled up. Maybe we can just pass around the map. Sure. Yeah, we'll just pass around the map. That's fine. We'll pass around the map. I just wanted it for the benefit of the viewing public. So it's a little bit -- yeah. Any other questions? Oh, Councilmember Briggs, I'm sorry, yes. So is that of the 100 feet? This comes into what? The red into the 100 feet? Or is that currently without -- The orange area on that map there is the city riparian buffer map. I just overlaid that post oak boulevard right away on there . So that orange area is the -- as designated on the city map , the full 100 foot width. Because I do know, isn't this what you asked for, Council member Gregory? Last time you asked to see the post oak expansion, the road expansion? No, I was -- Go ahead, Ken. I was asking about the Poker's Page expansion. Oh, okay. Go ahead, Councilmember Gregory. So as I'm looking at this preliminary planting map or whatever we're seeing, the lots that are on the east side that have a little curve on them, the backyards of those lots are going to be backing up to the future post oak road, which will be a four or six lane road? That's correct. Okay. You're not the sales office. You're not the developer. Thank you. Having seen the outcry of the Preservative Creek neighborhood, when it was clear that nobody had explained to them that Lakeview was going to be that major thoroughfare going north and south until they -- so much that it became post oak. I'm going on record to say the developer, as they're selling homes, needs to make sure that the folks know that their backyards will be backing up to a future thoroughfare. I think that's a good point. Thank you. So if you pass that word on, and it's now on the record, and I'm sure it will be ignored because that's how sales people are. I will pass that along. We've got a little bit of -- I know that that was in regards to the repairing buffer discussion that we're having right now. Yes. If I could, I think this would clarify a lot of issues. This black line is the center of that stream of the repairing buffer and how it fits into the proposed layout of this development. So you could say this would be the area impacted by the repairing buffer ESA. This is the area proposed for the tree preserve, how that fits in the overall layout. And here's post oak, that six-lane road. Okay. So then based upon that layout, what you're saying is or what the developer -- someone mentioned at the last meeting was, if we do the swap, that hatched area that is the ESA would then become residential lots. Is that my understanding of what was described? Okay. All right. And if we didn't, then somewhere up there in that hatched area for the tree preserve or the upland habitat would become residential lots. We just don't know how many. All right. Yes. I was prepared to make a motion. Okay. I don't know if there's any other questions. Any other questions for staff, for the applicant? Seeing none, thank you, gentlemen. Mayor Pro Tem. I'm going to move approval of the alternative ESA as proposed with the condition suggested by staff to protect the under store, I guess, giving it the designation of up land habitat. Okay. And I believe that was subject to -- the condition was subject to Chapter 17 of the DENT Development Code. Is that correct? Yeah. That's correct. Okay. All right. Thank you. Council Member Gregory. Second. All right. On our special call meeting, all in favor, please signify by raising your right hand. Is that -- okay. All right. It looks like that's a unanimous vote. Thank you very much. Passes 7-0. We're now going to move on. Anybody need a break? Need a five-minute break? All right. Let's take a five-minute break. And then we're going to move on to Agenda Item B so that Council Member Gary can hear. We're back on. It's about 1243, meeting of the DENT City Council, Monday, August 1st. We are back now to our work session reports. We will take work session Item 1B first to accommodate time schedules. Receive report. Hold discussion against staff direction regarding the compensation and classification study conducted by UM Global HR. Thank you, Mayor. Carla Romine-Heggmark, our Director of Human Resources, will kick this off and introduce our speakers. Good afternoon, Mayor, members of the City Council. On July 21st, we had Daniela Berry and Elena Mason with UM Global HR come to Council, do a presentation on some compensation philosophies and objectives, share with you some of the challenges they were hearing and observing themselves about our pay plan, and then they shared a high-level overview of the results that they had from the market survey. Today we asked them to come back and share with you their recommendations for a pay structure to address the challenges that we've been experiencing. They'll talk to you about the cost implications of their recommendations, and then they will share with you some of the trends they're seeing in the market on merit and other rewards and recognition programs. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Dan. Thank you, Carla. Good afternoon. The only thing that messed up my presentation was switching from good morning to good afternoon. Again, you -- We can stay long enough where you can be saying good evening. Yeah. I'll compliment you on staying awake last time that we talked, and we'll try to keep you intrigued again. Of course, it's an interesting topic for you. Today we're going to present the final report results. The last time on January 21st we gave you an overview. We 'll try to bring you up to speed a little bit, and we've added some things in here for those of you that weren't present. And we began just by going over the table of contents here. We're not going to do it in detail for some of these things we did already covered, but we'll be looking at the objectives of the study, give you an overview of our approach, which is unique to us. The methods used for job analysis, the summary of -- we talked about job complexity levels last time on the way that we measure jobs and also on the point factor analysis method. These methods are also unique to us. We developed them, and so we'll explain them to you this time. We'll give you our recommended pay plans and the new grades , and then also do the high-level findings about external competitiveness, the variable pay practices, and merit pay matrix trends. The financial estimates we'll give you, we're basically looking at when we developed the new pay plans, you have new grade structures, and so you'll have new minimum and maximums for the grades. And so what happens is when you assign jobs to the new grades, some people's salaries may be below the minimum of the new grade they're in, and we call that minimum match. And so that creates a deficit, and so the first cost is associated with bringing those individuals up to the pay grade that they've been assigned. The second one would be an optional internal equity. Yes, sir? >> Just before you move on, are those -- you'll probably hit it in this slide. I'll wait. I apologize for cutting you off. >> No, that's okay. We're used to it. We like participation. >> Well, I just want to be like everybody else here, so. >> Oh, okay. The objectives of the study and the overview of our approach. Basically, we have three major objectives. One was to review the internal equity situation, and this included addressing salary compression among jobs in the same grade. And that's when you find that salary compression is when people with more experience that have been there longer find themselves being paid the same as people who just walked in the door. And so the salaries get compressed. Address salary compression between supervisors and direct reports. Most people expect that the supervisor will make more than their direct reports. Alignment of jobs into grades. This has to do with looking at the way the positions are assigned to grades and whether there's internal equity. And we're going to show you the results of before and after . The second objective was to determine the market competit iveness, which is basically a market study. To alleviate the difficulties in finding qualified candidates, alleviate retention issues brought about by internal competition. And alleviate retention issues in general. Update salary structures. Address compression due to narrow and thin pay plans designed. Last time when we did on July 21st the compensation overview, we talked about the range that you have in your current pay plan and how narrow it is versus the ranges that we're recommending. We're going to address salaries topping out more quickly than expected. I'm just going to bring this up because bring you up to speed. There was 101 employees at the top 75% of their percentile for their grade. And you have 70 employees in the city that are at or above. In other words, they're at the very top. So they can't get any salary increases whatsoever unless they get promoted. The other one was to address the FLSA concerns through better pay plans designs. FLSA is the Fair Labor Standards Act out of the Department of Labor which controls the non-exempt and overtime rules. The big change is you probably read about it in the newspapers. It used to be 23,600 was the threshold for your non-exempt positions. That was raised to 47,476 which is a 40% increase. And that impacts not only the city of Denton but all organizations that are subject to the FLSA. Meaning that they're going to have to meet that threshold, that higher threshold. Okay. Just a little bit of the overview of our approach. We have five steps. Communication. The objective of communication is to maintain project transparency and leverage institutional knowledge. This was part of the transparency was part of the RFP and that they wanted the employees to be able to see what we're doing. And to that respect, we held town halls and have had several meetings to accomplish that. Institutional knowledge is in our approach to doing compensation studies, we think of it as problem solving. And so we don't have cookie cutter approaches or solutions. We go in and we try to identify what are the issues are you facing with respect to compensation. And then go out and do research, collect data, and design a system that addresses those specifically to the city of Denton. The second part is job evaluation. The objective there is to determine the internal worth of the job. Meaning it's worth relative to other positions within the city of Denton. We use the position description questionnaire to update any job descriptions that needed to be updated. So we had the town hall meetings, we asked employees and their supervisors if they had jobs that had changed over the last ten years or five years. And they felt that their job description no longer captured what they do, that we would like them to fill out an online PDQ as we call it. And from that we would generate a new job description. On the other side of that, if you felt your job had just changed not significant enough, but you did have some changes, just go ahead and update the job description for that. We conducted several interviews with directors and managers . Then we did our job complexity review analysis and then a point factor analysis to finish the internal evaluation. The market study, we talked about somewhat the last time. Defined the labor market, designed the survey questionnaire , which is a questionnaire that we send out to participants and ask them to fill out. Also one of the things that we do is we actually collect data. We have national data sets that we use and we have published data. But we actually define organizations and we go out and get data. So we have a large data set that's similar to the data that we have for the city of Denton. Meaning that we have employee, identifier for the employee, how many years they've been there, what they're paid, what their job is for each of the organizations that participated. So they don't report to us averages. We calculate our own averages on that. Pay structures, we use the market data to update the existing pay plans. We developed wider and consistent pay ranges as we talked about last time. And we developed consistent pay differentials. Pay differentials are the midpoint differences between grades. Right now, the differentials are not uniform and they're very wide. And so we've implemented a structural midpoint differential of 10% for your non-exempt and around 5% for your exempt positions to make it consistent. The use of the grade assignments is where you take your positions and you assign them to the grades. Right now they're assigned to grades in your current pay plan. When we develop a new pay plan, they're going to be assigned to new grades. I pointed out last time if you had jobs, say you had 20 positions, job titles that were in grade three, it's not necessarily true that all 20 of those positions will go into the same new grade. And the reason is that we had talked about before, you didn 't have enough grades. And so there were plenty of jobs that should be in a different grade. But the above grade was too high and the below grade was too low. So they were kind of force fit into that grade. The methods used for job analysis, yes, I wish I could walk around. This is the theoretical underpinnings of what we use. When we talked about last time on the overview of compensation, one of the first things you have to do is structure your jobs in a hierarchy. And along with that hierarchy, the higher you go in the hierarchy, the higher your compensation is. And so we use this model. It actually can go up to nine levels. We have six here. If we were doing the state of Texas, we'd be at nine. But depending on the size of the organization. This is based on cognitive research and lots done all throughout on United States' major universities. I'm a cognitive psychologist. This is a model that we developed and that we use to do that. So let me explain it a little bit. We talk about job complexity level. Jobs that are more complex take longer to complete, require more decision making, present more unknowns, present more ambiguity, and require more alternative plans and solutions . So when you look at this, let's see if I can get this going . Let's start with the level six, the highest level, the executive positions. What we have here is on the right-hand side you'll see roll in the organization. And you'll see that number 10 plus. And what we're saying is the span time horizon for doing that work is ten years. So you really have to evaluate the results of a person in that position after ten years for what they're doing. Their role in the organization is to establish strategic value, the mission and vision. How can it be ten years? Well, you have a strategic plan that is a ten-year plan, isn't it? So whoever comes in that role, and by the way, you would be at this level as well, the city council, city attorney, city manager. You're looking at here's where the city is now, where do we plan to be in ten years. Ten years is a long time. So if you look at our definition, it's going to take longer to complete. It's going to require more decision making. It certainly can present more unknowns. It's going to present more ambiguity and require more alternative plans and solutions. That's why it's the most complex job there. And so you have to be ready to deal with that. Examples of things that can influence it that's happened already is the economy. The economy was slow and then all of a sudden it got good. That changes things. Elections change things. So all of these things make that job more complex. As we go down to the next level, it shows a five to ten year time horizon. These people in these positions work on strategic availability and business strategy. And as you can see as we go down, the time frame, time horizon gets smaller and smaller. Until we get down to level one, where it's zero to three months, it's really these people who are doing jobs that their work gets done anywhere from an hour to three months. It doesn't take longer than three months. If it does, they're going to go to the next level. The one thing you'll know on that, you see that bidire ctional arrow there, is we're trying to illustrate the role that each one of these levels has with respect to the strategic vision and mission of the organization. Everybody has a role. If anybody in any of their levels doesn't perform their role, you'll find a hard time in reaching your strategic mission and vision. Also what I find interesting is as you go down, starting with strategic value here, then strategic viability, business strategy, strategic operational planning, strategic execution, you see that all of these are tied to the very top one. As you're developing your strategies for implementation, you go down here to your level three positions. And there is no mouse. Here it is. Tactical implementation, down to work process, facilitation , and then finally to operational execution. This position right here, level two, is where you're going to find most of your employees. They're very important positions because they're enablers. They're the people that facilitate the work of the people below them to make sure that things get done. So you see, as people design where they want to be, somebody has to carry out and execute and deliver. And so everybody has a role in this model. This gives you a little bit better definition of how we put positions into these levels. So at level work, work involves direct hands-on manual administrative clerical or service delivery work to make, complete something, or perform tasks that are specified beforehand. Work products are generally completed in zero to three months. So what we do is we evaluate jobs on each of these levels using their job descriptions, and then we slot the jobs into it. So if you think of these levels as bins, we'll take the jobs. And these are all the level one jobs. These are all the level two jobs, and so on. Level two work involves general control of a work process, which I think is one of the more important operational tasks that people have to perform. They control a work process project or task. This is your first line of supervisors, by the way. They're responsibility for technical or specialized areas that require some interpretation. This is also the first level where supervisors, managers supervise other employees. Let me say a little bit about the difference between level one and level two. On level one, when you hire people into that, you pretty much, the work is defined. Everybody, you have a manual. It's all documented. You know what they're going to do. You know what the work product looks like already. And so the people have to do that. They don't do a lot of changes and usually don't expect any surprises. If they run into a novel situation, they'll go to their supervisors, level two, and seek solutions to that problem. But it should be rare because they know everything that could occur has already occurred and been documented. On level two, the difference there is that they have to monitor the work, and they have to get feedback, and then they have to change and adapt as they get that information. So the work gets more complex as you go. Then you go to level three. These people are usually managing a variety of the level tw os. So your level two people could be various areas, and now these people are managing them. And as you go up, that's how it gets more complex as you go up. And so we know that the amount of information you have to process and the cognitive reasoning and thinking that goes into each of these levels is qualitatively different between one, two, three, four, et cetera. If you've heard of the Peter Principle, a person doing really well at one level, being promoted to the next level, doing really well there, being promoted to the next level, and then falling apart. They've met the wall, and that's what's happening here. They're really good within the level that they're in, cognitively. They're real comfortable. As they go to the next level, they're real comfortable. They finally hit a level of work where they're not comfortable, and that can result in problems in doing work. Thankfully, there are people who love level one work. They don't want to do level two work. You know that. When you try to hire supervisors out of rank and file, they don't want to go there. Not just because of the fact that they're not getting overtime, but the type of work and stress that they have to go through. They don't want it. So this is basically how our model is set up. It works really well. It is intuitive to employees and to organizations when they see it, and especially when they see the output of it. Let me move along. Question. Okay. So I completely understand that leveling based on your background as a cognitive psychologist, because you're basically measuring it upon mental work. Do you do any differentiation based on the certain physical conditions in the work? Yes. I'm going to go into that next. Okay. This is out of order. Okay. Let me go to this. And I'm thinking about the difference between the guy with DME who gets to stand on the ground all the time. Yeah. And the guy who's up in the bucket in the blowing wind with lightning bouncing all around. What this does is this gives us a hierarchy for initially slotting jobs. Almost like an org chart. The difference between this and an org chart is an org chart is designed on authority. And this one isn't. It builds in authority within it. And so once we put positions within a level, then we have other procedures that spread them out within that level. And that's what your question has to do. The job complexity level rank is based on the time it takes to complete the longest task, the time horizon, in which an individual uses discretion to produce an output without feedback from a supervisor or client. Because they're doing work and they're using their own mental powers to make decisions before they get any input. And this is basically what we're doing is we're taking it and we're going to quantify every single one of your jobs based on this structure. The nature of the work, manual, operational, coordinating, supervisory, tactical, operational, tactical, strategic, and strategic also define these levels. And then ranking the jobs within each level is low, medium, and high. So what you see here is vertically we see level one, level two, level three, and then you see it one, one, one, two, one, three, etc. That means that we take each level and then we further slot the jobs as to low, medium, and high in that. What does that mean? It means it's based on the questions you're asking about, the type of work we do that's done and that's required. What comes into account here is we call it a point factor job evaluation. And we use 14 factors this takes to arrange the jobs within a level and also to validate the leveling that we've been doing. Let me say one more thing about the job complexity level because before I go into this, we have four iterations. We will evaluate the jobs independently and assign them a number, one, two, one, three, one, four, one, five. So every job in here gets assigned a number. We take this information and we meet with your general managers and your directors and the ACMs and we say, here are the positions. These are the people in the positions and this is the quant ified number that we've given them. And then they review them and they give us their feedback. And they will tell us, well, no, we think you have these ones out of order or these ones should be the same. And it's interesting because you'll see that jobs can be rated higher or lower irrespective of the grade they're currently in. And they don't even see that they're doing that. The directors and managers notice they don't have a problem with that. And so what we're doing is we're already beginning the real ignment. So we've had two iterations when we do this. The next iteration is we go to these point factors. And the point factors is a system that we developed that assigns points to each position. And the factors are knowledge, experience, consequences of error, formal education, etc. You can see here. Let me go back one because these things changed. We changed the presentation and I see a little bit of it's out of order. Let's look at knowledge, for example. On the bottom there we show you that the knowledge factor consists of six levels. It's the fundamental, the associate, intermediate, advanced , expert, and master. Each one of those levels has points assigned to it. The higher you go, the more points you get. And so then we go to experience, the same thing. The experience that's required for the job has points. If it's zero to six months, one year, three years, up to ten years. And so you'll get points for that. Consequences of error are what happens if you were to do your job wrong. What would be the outcomes and consequences of doing that? Formal education is just like you're used to seeing. Whether it's a high school diploma that's required, AA degree, or high school with specific coursework, BA, etc. And so you get points for that. We also have equivalencies if you have eight years of experience on the job as equivalent to a four year BA. So we don't penalize people if they don't have formal education. Supervision given, whether you're responsible for actually supervising other employees, you get points for that. Our system is set up too that you don't have to actually be the supervisor. You could have a role in it. For example, you may be the person that assigns people to jobs and controls the time. And so you would get points for that. If we go up a little bit higher, because there's 14 levels on this factor, and say you're doing the performance review . And you do the review, but you're only recommending it to this person who's actually going to sign off on it. You will get points for that, as will the person who signs off on it. We have working conditions, whether you're working outside, whether you're up on a high rise, where you're dealing with dangerous situations. So consequences of errors and working conditions will address the question that you brought up. Customer interactions, here by customers we mean external customers, not internal customers. So your call center representatives and those people, the fire department, these people will all have high scores on customer interactions because they deal with it on a daily basis. Professional credentials in our work that we've done over the years, many of the things that employees have told us that they felt that most systems favored people with degrees and that they didn't get credit. They could be in the same grade as somebody else, yet their job required certifications. And so our system looks at three levels of certification. We look at the ones that are required by either the state or the federal government. Then we look at ones that are required by the profession you're in. For example, if you're going to be a PE engineer, it comes from the profession, although the state may require it as well. And then we have other ones that are decided by the city because we think that there's certain types of credential ing and experience certifications that a person will receive that actually impacts the work that they do. And so we give you points for that. So if you're HVAC or if you're in a training program, like for your lineman and stuff, you'll get points for that. Budget responsibilities, same thing and so on. And so we get scores. Total scores you can get is 10,661. Nobody gets that many because of the way the system is set up. So we see usually the highest, we'll see it will be in the 9,000s. So what we've done then is we've put the jobs in a hierarchy and then within that hierarchy we have a method for distingu ishing which ones are higher or low paid. Now how do we use it? Okay, let me get this mouse to work. What you're looking at here is before and after. The before is your current grades in your current pay grant . The lines differentiate your exempt positions from your non -exempt, in other words, your hourly from your salaried employees. The current grades that you have go from grade two to grade 10s and 9s. There's actually, you had two career ladders, so we've actually merged them here. And you'll see, let's look at, for example, at grade three. You see grade three here. If you go over here, what this says is there's 26 people that are in positions that are in grade three. These people all are paid roughly the same in the sense that the entry level pay is the same, the maximum pay is the same, and the midpoint is the same. When we evaluated the jobs, we found that 15 of the positions were rated as 1.2. When we quantified them in the job complexity level, 10 of them were rated 1.3 and one was rated 2.1. That tells us that people are in grade three and that there 's not internal equity, because there's people in positions in grade three where some people are doing significantly more complex work than other people, but they're being paid the same. So we know that these 10 people here should be in a higher grade, not necessarily the next one you have. In fact, one of the problems we indicated last time, that the midpoint for grade four is so far away from grade three , that it costs you money to promote them. And in fact, the way your thing was set up, a person wouldn 't go to four, they'd go to five because they were separated . And you can ask us afterwards because you missed that part. Apologize for that. But the point is here is that we see that you have a grade with jobs, and they're not necessarily the way we would like to see them lined up. Okay? >> Yes. >> So. >> Okay, I'm sorry. >> Okay. So grade four is the same thing. You see there's 66 people in grade four and the jobs are rated 41 with 1.2, 17, etc. And by the way, the employees know this. They know who has the easy job and who has the more difficult job. They may not be able to articulate it like this, but they do feel that they're not being paid fairly. The other thing we use this for is to determine the value of the job. We know that, or the grade, for grade four, because there's 41 of the 66 are at 1.2, we know that grade four is a 1.2 level job, job grade. And our rule is that all jobs in the same grade should have the same complexity level. In other words, if you have a grade four job, they should all be 1.2s. If they're not, it's a problem. And that's what we presented to the managers. We would say the majority of your jobs in this grade are 1. 3. Your job is a 2.1 or your job is a 1.2. And they would validate that or not. You may have addressed this before, but on the before area, how long has the city been doing this? Is this -- do we know that? This -- well, you've had your pay plan for about 10 years. 10 years? And don't be excited about it because this methodology that we use is brand new. The only one uses it. Most people don't understand job classification and reclass ification. This kind of illustrates it. The idea is to put the jobs that have the same monetary value in the same grades. But do you have a method to do that? We believe our method does that. So this before chart is common today? Yes, yes. When we go in and look at the organizations, this is how we propose and do evaluate their jobs and come out. And they love it. We don't get -- when we're finished with a project, you don 't get a lot of employee complaints. You don't get a lot of directors, managers' complaints partly because of this. The other part is because we take into account what your issues are. We listen. And people see what we're doing. And so -- and they feel they've been a part of it. We have -- our rule is you can do it to people or you can do it with people. And we find out if we do it with people, we do a better job and they're happier with the results and it's more likely to be beneficial. Now, if you look at the after result, you can notice something there. There's only one complexity level per grade. Every position in there. So this is what your new system looks like. When we finish with the grade and Elena will show you the grade structure, what we're doing is we're dropping positions into the grades based on their complexity level and other information. The market value, their point factor scores, and also the value to the city on that. You will have unusual jobs that the market can't capture. And so the complexity level and the point factor can sometimes overrule the market. An example we use is you have a household hazardous waste supervisor, which has a corresponding position, say, in Plano or the city of Richardson. The difference is, and I know because I used to live in Richardson, is Richardson doesn't come to your curb and pick this stuff up. You can take it there and they will handle it for free. If you don't live in Richardson, you have to pay 90 bucks. But they don't come and pick it up. The city of Denton does. So those jobs, even though they have the same title, they 're inherently different. On the market, that job is $10,000 less than the value that 's here in the city of Denton. Would we conclude that Denton is paying too much? No, because our point factor analysis shows us that the total points have that job scored very high. And also the complexity level is very high. And so we know it's in the very low position. So the pay is right, it's grade that's wrong. And so it needs to be in the correct grade. So we feel we have a lot of backups for checking our data. So what happens if after the new system is implemented, people discover, ah, this particular job is not quite where it should be. Even after all of the analysis, and I'm impressed with the variety of ways that you look at it, something was missed. And the job really -- other people that are working, you know, cohorts, like you said, other people notice. Gee, you're the customer service person that has to deal with all of the folks that have the most complex and complaints and the most intense anger with the complaints. And somehow you've been able to figure out a way to think on your feet, respond to them, go to the other people that you need to go to get the answers, whatever it is. But some people discover, okay, this person's been misclass ified. Bound to happen with this many employees. That at some spot some job was misclassified. What happens then? Well, I would be up to the city if they wanted to have a review process. And I'm sure you would, a person could say that I would like to have my job reevaluated, I guess, if you're thinking about it. Pardon me? >> Desk audit. >> A desk audit of the job? A desk audit is the preferred way for doing a job evaluation, the only problem is it takes about a year and a half. Because you have to sit down with everybody and do a complete documented desk audit one by one. So it's a very time consuming project. What we're trying to do is have a methodology that gets you there one third of the time, but it's just as reliable. But let me answer one more part to your question. What we do is we use a lot of statistics and a lot of data, as you're going to see, and you have seen before. But we use that data to cut the problems down to size. Not every job is a problem. If you have 600 jobs, probably 50 or 100 are problem jobs that it's difficult to classify in the right grade. So we know that we can rule out about 500 of those jobs, and then we look at that. That's why we meet, we look at those ones. That's why we meet with the directors and supervisors so that they give their input on their job complexity rating and they change them. Are they right? Not always. Sometimes I know they're wrong because I developed the system. But we do it and we change it. Then we do the point factor, and the point factor will tell us something. Because if the point factor score is in the next level and the job is in the lower level, one of those numbers is wrong. So we have to go back and reevaluate it. Then we get the market data. The market data also informs us, and we do it. We give this information to the directors and supervisors, which we have, and we've met with them, and we've looked at the grade assignments. And we take into account all of the information. And now this is where people that are doing the jobs and manning the jobs can say, the market may say this, this may say this. But here's the reason why we think it should be in this grade. And it could be because it's a hard to fill position or because the entry level is critical for what they're doing. So by the time we get done, it's not just the statistical analysis. We've taken into account the expertise of the managers and supervisors who are in charge of those jobs. So it'll go to them and then it changes. And sometimes people say, gee, your data changes a lot. And I suggest because we collect objective data and then we collect subjective data. And then we go collect some more objective data and then we do it again. Do you have a question? Yes, I have a question. On these charts both before and after, at what grade level are the council appointees, the city manager, city attorney , and municipal judge? They would dare up in the 6-3. There are 6-3. You'll see it on the left side. On the right side, for some reason I only went, I didn't include the executive level manager. So it only goes up to 4.3 level. But they'll be up there. And there won't be very many. Your directors and your general managers are going to be 6. 1s. Your assistant city attorneys are going to be 6-2s. And then your city attorney and your city manager council member. You guys would be in the 6-3 category. And so you have to have your thinking caps on at all times. So on the left side, on the after, you're saying they're down there in the GEO 669, 668. I mean, are they included in that chart? No, they're not. They are on the one before. If you go down, you'll see it says G21, G22, M23, M24. And I just noticed that when I was sitting here that I hadn 't included the top jobs. But there's what we're talking about, eight people. Well, based on what you've just said, it's clear that I am underqualified, but I am paid appropriately. Paid appropriately. Yes. So if you were -- I think I'm getting this, and I do apologize for missing the first conversation. But let's say you're in a smaller corporation or a smaller entity, but you wear more hats. But it's kind of called the same position as, say, let's just compare it like Dallas, something like that. They might be on the same grade level but have a higher complexity, and then it would go to the next one and it might move them a grade higher. Yeah. Yeah. Let me say something on the complexity level between the one and the two and stuff like that. There's a qualitative difference. It's easy to promote a person in grades within a level because the cognitive strain or demands are equivalent. So you can promote people horizontally. That's no problem. When you're going to move them from a level one job to a level two, that's a big difference. And skill and experience isn't going to get you there. It's the level of cognitive thinking that you are comfortable doing that will get you there. And so usually if you acquire more skills, get more education and stuff, it's going to keep you horizontally, and eventually you will graduate to the next level. So it's a matter of time and it's a matter of maturation as well. And so when we talk about career ladders and we talk to people, we always help them design them within the level and then going up a level because you don't want to promote people up to a place they're not ready for yet. And so it's a little more considerate. I don't know if I -- No, well, I was trying to get some clarity if we are comparing jobs when we're a smaller size city to jobs in a bigger size city, why they would possibly be paid the same or maybe even higher because they are asked to do a number of different things too, not just do the same task over and over and over again. One of the things I forgot to mention that's a very good question is that the city of Denton, when we met with the employees, they all told us they wore many hats. We're a full-service city. We're an MOU, municipally owned utility, these types of things. And what we found out was it was true. When we looked at the job complexity levels in general, in our exempt positions, the level one positions, you generally just go to one three. And that will be all your level ones. That's not the case here. There are several non-exempt positions that are in the level two category because the people are doing multiple functions and there's cross-training is required. So that the departments tend to hire employees, cross-train them so that they can deal with when people go on vacation, absences, illnesses, and stuff like that. Right. And so it makes the job more complex. But that complexity rating goes in here and it's reflected in that your jobs generally are higher. You have one position that's a level one and it's grade two . You don't have a grade one. And that person is your custodian. That's the only one person I believe they're in parks and recreation. Well, and all of our assistant city managers can operate at Backhoe too. And they do. So I just wanted to make that clear. That's a good backup job. Yeah. But yeah, this takes that into account. And by the way, it helps us make the comparisons with the market because we can look at the information we get that we're comparing to and we can tell. We look at one of the things we look at is the organizational chart. And so if you look at the depth, the depth of the organizational chart, so a smaller city you might have a director and then you might have assistant director. But you'll have your middle level managers and stuff like that. You go to a city like Dallas or something, you're going to have a director, you're going to have assistant director and associate director. Right. And so there's a big difference in what they're paying and trying to find out where they're going. Elaine will probably address that when she talks about blended jobs and stuff. But this captures that issue really well because it puts them on the same scale. So we can take, you have five pay plans. We can tell you which job in your general pay plan is equally complex to a job in DME. If they're both two ones, they have the same complexity level. So that means that we can go across disciplines and make these evaluations. And it's really good in situations like this where you have multiple pay plans or in situations where we dealt with like at Texas Tech University, which has several hospitals and research institutes and is all over the state, at least on the west Texas side. And they have several pay plans. And so they wanted to know if they were paying equivalent by region and also by pay plan. And so we were able to put everybody on the same scale. If you have no more questions, I'm ready to have Elaine come up, I believe, to talk about the recommended pay structure. So I just wanted you to know the amount of work that we go through in evaluating. We've evaluated your jobs at least three times we've read your job descriptions. And Elaine will tell you about the 1700 that she read from the external areas too. But we have that iterative process which is capped off by judgment by people saying, your method's really good but it doesn't take into account this variable. It doesn't because we couldn't quantify it, but now we're bringing it in and we will make exceptions. >> [INAUDIBLE] >> Okay. >> Real quick question. Would it be easier for you if we held our questions and let you get through the presentation or does this material end itself? Would that be too difficult to do? What do you think? >> It will be a lot easier if you keep your questions and then towards the end of the presentation and we tackle it. >> Good deal. >> But she's more succinct than me, so don't be afraid to ask questions. >> Good deal, thank you. >> Okay, at this time I'd like to talk about our recommended pay plan structures. Last week we talked about what a pay plan structure is. It is actually a structured guideline. It's a written form to let you know how much and when and how often do you have to pay the employees the minute they walk in the door or even before they walk in the door. And today we're going to show you what we have put together as a result of the studies that we've done. Before we give you the table, we'd like to highlight the changes that we've done to the pay plans. We have combined the two career ladders that you have. If you remember the last time we showed you that fan-shaped pay plans and it's also in the shape of an airplane, that's your pay plan. We have combined the career ladder, which is in the business side and the technical side that used to be different. We combined those two together. We made your exempt pay plan compliant with the new FLSA rule. The new FLSA rule is going to be in effect in the first of December of this year, and we needed to make sure that your pay plan is reflective of that. We have expanded the range spread from 35% to a uniform 66% spread. What it is is that before you have the minimum and the maximum that's a little bit too close to each other, that's 35%. What we've done is almost double that to 66%. The pay plans are cut into seven segments to allow for career progression within pay grades. Seven segments, meaning we have deciles and quartiles there now before you only have your minimum, your midpoint, and your maximum. Now we want to give you a better and a clearer line of sight for both administrators and for both employees as well to see what's in the horizon in terms of pay plans. Each of the pay plans now have consistent grade different ials. Before you have 5%, 21%, sometimes 31% grade differentials between grade. And now we made that consistent. For your non-exempt, we made it all 10% for your exempt. We made it 4.5 for the general pay plan and 5% for the technical and 5% for the DME. Your pay plan encourages progression through ranges rather than immediate promotion or reclassification. Now the downside of having a very narrow pay plan is that when somebody's already on the top end of that range, you either are forced to make that position red line, meaning you don't increase the salary anymore, or you are forced to promote the person even though it's not warranted just to provide salary increases. So with that, this is the table that we're referencing. Now remember that we have this in our last presentation. This is the graphical representation of what pay plans are. We talked to you about the pay line policy and the upper bound and the lower bound as well as the grade different ials. The tables on the left are your existing pay plans. You have the business operation and the technical operation . Remember I talked to you about that, combining together? So what you're going to read this is from G01, if you want to upgrade somebody, you go to the right to the G02. But there's a problem with this because this is your business operation career ladder and this is the technical. And by definition, according to career ladder, these are totally different group or job families altogether. So not very many people actually jumped immediately from G 01 to G02. So what's happening is you have to promote, to give somebody salary increases or upgrade somebody within the business operation, you have to promote from G01 to G03. And the difference between those G01 and G03 can be 35 percent. I'm sorry, can be 7 percent to 15 percent. So there's not a lot of consistencies in between the grades . Now going to the after pay plan, this is what we have done. We have increased the range from 35 percent to 66 percent. And we made the grade differentials, for example, G0500 to G0510, 525, 30, so on and so forth. We made those differentials between those grades as a uniform 10 percent. 10 percent in the case of the non-exempt general pay plan. The same thing for your minimum to minimum differentials, P 10 to P10, P25 to P25, P50 to P50, so on and so forth. And remember I mentioned about the pay line policy. The pay line policy is the differences between your P50 to P50 that will be very clear if you actually plot it in your -- in a graph. So this is the general pay plan non-exempt. Moving on to the non-exempt in the technology department. The technology services department will bear the same structure in the recommendation side. There's also a 66 percent range spread, whereas before it has a 50 percent range spread. And the differential between the two is now also a uniform 10 percent. Now remember the reason why we only have two pay grades for the non-exempt in the technology services is because by definition, most of the computer related jobs are actually exempted from overtime pay. And because of the nature of their job. What these are, these are the positions that are actually support system, clerical in nature, as well as technical support system. That are not directly related, not directly hands on in terms of development or application, develop architecture. Moving on to the DME pay plan. The DME pay plan, again on the left, is your existing pay plans. Remember that in the technology there's only one, there's only one side. They do not have the business side. So they only have a technical operation, which is made our life a lot easier. For the DME, they also have both the business and the technical. So again, like what we did with the general pay plan, we combined these two. And again, we have expanded the range from 40% to 66%. And made the differentials as in the general pay plan a uniform 10% as well. This is the exempt pay plan. The first one is the non-exempt. Those people that you actually would like or need to pay overtime pay, every time they go beyond 40 hours a week. And this pay plan is for your exempt pay plan. People that do not need to be paid overtime pay by nature of the job that they do. And also the threshold, their salaries beyond the threshold of what the FLSA require. If you notice that in the exempt general pay plan, we have not two but four pay plans that we have combined together. The reason for this is because in the exempt pay plan, we now go into the territory of those supervisory and management career ladder. So in addition to the business professional, we have the technical professional that we've combined together. And we have made it into one table. The range spread, your existing is from 39 to 50%. We made that a uniform 66%. The great differentials in the past is 4% to 26. We made that 4.5%. Now the reason why this is 4.5% is because we are starting out at a high point already based on the FLSA rule. And we wanted to make sure that our highest number is still contained while we're keeping the structure balanced as 66% as well. Now this is the technology services pay plan. What we have here, again, we put together, we combine together the technical professional as well as the technical professional with supervisory or management position. And we made that, again, 66% rather than 50. And then actually this is now 5% differentials instead of 15. So 5% differentials between grade, again, we wanted to make sure that our highest number is not too high. That's the reason why it is 5%. For the DME pay plan, again, this is 66% range spread up from 40%. And from 10% to 30% differentials, we made this 5% differentials between grades. And once again, I'd like to remind that the reason why we wanted to expand the range spread is because we're having to face the challenges of people or salaries that are going to be at the top end of the ranges quickly than they should be because of the structure. The structure can bear. And also we wanted to make sure that you have enough room for your merit increases, for your merit program, and for your certification pay program. This is the management pay plan now. The energy management organization. Oh, I'm sorry. This is the energy management organization, the EMO. This is under the DME department. For the EMO, or energy management organization, we've instituted the same policy, 66% range spread. And we also made that differentials as 5% between each grade as well. For the management pay plan, again, this is also 66%. However, the differentials between grades are slightly higher because we are already starting out with a slightly higher. This is because we know that when we analyzed the existing salaries between directors and ACMs, we've seen a lot of compressions in between them. And so structurally, you can address compression. The best way to do that is structurally instead of giving money just to address compression. What we did here is we increased this by 15%. I'm sorry, to 15% from 13% differentials to 15% grade differentials. The technology management is the same concept. Again, 66% and 15% grade differentials as well. The management pay plan for DME is also the same concept. Now I'd like to move on to the findings that we've put together based on the market data, market study that we've done. Now again, I'd like to remind that this is the compensation study, or this result is for the base salaries only. Before we move on to the table, I'd like to say that there are natural variations in salaries, differences in organizational structures. We've talked, Dan has talked in length about that in his presentation earlier. Complexities of jobs differ by organizations. Those that wear multiple hats tend to be more difficult than the ones that are highly specialized. There are differences in organizational structures between public and private sectors as well. In our study, we have private sectors, but we separated them so we know exactly how much the city of Denham differs between public and between private. Differences in job title nomenclatures. Now sometimes, just the job title alone actually affects or give differences in the salaries in the open market. Longevity can present variations in salaries too. The longer the incumbency, the higher the salaries tend to be. So those who have been here or those who have been in that organization for many, many years tend to have higher salaries. It's just the way it is because it is a general expectation , of course, that the longer you are here, your salary should increase along with your incumbency. The external competitiveness of base salaries. Now I'd like to define to you what external competitiveness is. The last time we met, we showed you in comparison or index ing to the market average. Market average is just one measure. We want to know within that average what are our choices, what are the ranges between that. So we defined for you an external competitiveness of base salaries. Because indexing to mean or the average is only an approximation, this is why we did this, and we used the confidence interval to actually define our external competitiveness. So what is a confidence interval? It is a defined range where we can confidently say that the probability that our data points are within this range is either 90 or 95 percent accurate. This is what we call the external competitive range. So how is external competitive range defined? We calculated 95 percent confidence interval to define the range values that are likely to contain the parameters or the boundaries that we consider to be competitive. Now this means that we expect our data points to fall within the interval estimates 95 percent of the time. So now that we've defined those data points, we wanted to see, we now have a lower bound and the upper bound because there is a range now. Now we wanted to compare the Denton salaries. If the Denton salary is within this range, then we know that the Denton salary is competitive. If the Denton salary is below this range of confidence interval range, then we know that the salary is below the competitive range. And I'm going to show you the table later, but this is an illustration of what I'm talking about. The information that are under the red block, red blocks, that's the sub-department. I did not put job titles in here on purpose. This is the current salary, Denton salaries. The yellow block will be the competitive range. It will show you if it is within the range or within competitive range or above the competitive range by how much, below the competitive range by how much. The errors that show here is if you notice, when we indexed or when we compare the salary with the mean or the market average, you get that index. For example, here we say that 45,334, compare that with the average in the market. So if you look at the average, 47,625, you get a 95% index. What this tells you right off the bat is that the salary is 5% lower than the mean. But what it doesn't tell you is that, okay, that's 95% or 5 % lower, is that within competitive range still. Now, the confidence interval will define that for you. Because the CI lower bound and the confidence interval lower bound is 45,180, and this is 45,334. This is higher than that. So therefore, it tells you that the salary in the city of Denton is actually still within the competitive range between this number and that number. Now, you get confidence interval by calculating your standard deviation. If you know your mean, your sample mean or your population mean, you can always calculate your standard deviation. And from your standard deviation, you can calculate your standard error. And from your standard error, you calculate your MOE or your margins of errors. With the margins of errors, you can tell that 2445 plus 476 25 is 50,069. 2445 minus 47625 is 45,180. This is how we got our competitive range or our confidence interval range. So there are two measures. One indexing to the average and the other is comparing with the competitive range. Go ahead. I know you want us to wait. But would you stay on that slide? No, no. The one you were just on. Oh, I'm sorry. There you go. We have with our contracts with our civil servants, our fire department and our police department, I believe, you all may need to correct me. Our goal is for those salaries, those salary structures to be within, I think, 5% of the mean of some comparison groups. Am I correct on that? Okay. I'm getting an odd yes. So is this the formula that you were talking about, about determining the mean and then the margin of error, is that something similar? Because I'm looking at this margin of error of 2.445, I'm guessing that's a margin of error either below or above, which looks like it's pretty close to about 5%. Because we're doing a 95% interval. Okay. So what that means is that our goal is to be within about 5% of the mean of the market. Right. So this is what we've calculated to be competitive range. So 95%. So if you actually look at that, it's in your standard distribution, standard distribution. Oh, if you explain it anymore, I'll lose it. Yes is fine. Yeah. Standard deviation is when I decided to stay in the administration and not go into research. Right. Okay. To show you what the result of the analysis, we have the red block. This is the table that we've compared your salaries against public organizations. Again, we calculated, like we said, 95% confidence interval . The red block in the table is the comparison of the salaries and in the final analysis, these positions or these incumbents have fallen below your competitive range, external competitive range. That's what the red block is about. The blue block is those positions that we've analyzed and concluded that are over the competitive range, above the competitive range. The green block are those positions that are within the competitive range. So going back here on the red block, we've analyzed and concluded that there are 433 people or incumbents that are below the competitive range. Now, if you index that simply by the mean, they are 11% below the index, 11% below the mean. But if you look at their competitive range, they are 8% below. So 11% versus 8%, but actually 8% is the better measure. They are below by 8%. If you look at the blue block in the table, these are the positions that we've analyzed and concluded there are above the competitive range. We have about 405 incumbents and they are above in the index at 110%. And within the competitive range, they are 7% above the competitive range. In the green block, these are the positions that we've noted to be within the competitive range. We have about 156 employees and they are at par with the market. What this tells me is that whatever you've been doing in the past, I know that you have merit programs that have been really well received in the past. It's working. Whatever you're doing in the past is working for you. Because what we see in the open market within the parameters and the boundaries that we have established as your peers, you don't look bad. You don't look bad. So you will have only 433 people that are below that competitive range. And meanwhile, you have 156 that are within the competitive range among the public organizations that we've compared you with. Now, in the private organizations, remember that not all positions are present in private organizations, especially those positions that has to do with code enforce ments, those positions that are involved with putting together ordinances or implementing them. They're not present in the private sector. In the table, the gray block here are the positions that are below the private market. 2.1% on the average, 85.6% if you compare with the index, 567 people below the private organizations. The brown block represents the positions or employees' incumbents that are above the competitive range when compared to the private organizations. 58 of them, 5.5% over the competitive range. And of course, we also have those that are within the competitive range, and there are five of those. One note about the private organizations, some of the positions' base salaries are actually lower simply because their compensation is made up of base salaries plus stock options. And when they provided the data to us, they took out the stock options and gave us base salaries. So resulting in that is that some of the positions have appeared to be lower than the positions that you have here. And that's because we were comparing only base salaries. The next item is the variable pay practices. Now, this is part of the mandate of the project. One of the -- On that information, last time when we did the compensation overview, we showed you the overview of how Denton compared to the public and private sector, saying it was 2%, you know, within the public and 8% below the market. And we also said that we personally don't like those types of comparison because it's a gross overgeneralization. And what we're showing you here is that while you might be within 2% of the market, or you might be at market, on the big picture, within the jobs, there's some that are above and some are below, and some that are right at. And so our concern is, are the ones that are below. And so we know that all organizations have limited resources, so when you want to apply those resources, you want to apply them where it's needed, not across the board necessarily. That's exactly right. Okay. Moving on to the variable pay practices as part of the mandate to the project. What is variable pay? Variable pay is a form of supplemental compensation that is often given in cash, and it's not base building. Base building means salaries or any amount that you put into the salary that builds into the salary over time, and it compounds every year. Variable pay does not and should not build base salaries. It should always be, in my opinion, professional opinion, should always be supplemental. Why is it important to survey variable pay? Because variable pay is generally used as motivational retention and attraction factor as well. Now remember I talked to you last time and say that base salaries or salaries are not all there is to it. Some people actually leave organizations not because of the salaries, and sometimes it's just $1 difference in salaries and they move and jump ship. That is because in addition to the salaries, there will always be supplemental compensation that some organization made so very attractive that it's hard to pass. Strategic utility of variable pay, it is used as part of a strategic hiring, used as part of retention or for matching offers, used as part of morale boosting as well. Now here's what we've gathered as far as variable pay is concerned. We have 69 organizations in the study, only 14 of them have provided the variable pay information along with policies. There's not enough time for them to respond very quickly to us. We generally have goal based programs. We have longevity bonuses, sign on payments, safety pay programs, phone allowances, language incentives, tuition reimburse ment pay, auto allowance, and certification pay. Now the certification pay that we're referencing here are not the certification for the law enforcement. The certification pay for your law enforcement and for your fire department actually are base building. These are not base building. Now most organizations actually have longevity bonus, almost all of them. And goal based programs, this is actually novel, it's very uncommon, and it usually typically exists only among municipally owned utilities. Now here are the average annual pay for variable pay. The goal based program, we have noted that the average pay for that on an annual basis is 10,192. Safety pay programs, $3,000. Now the safety pay programs are usually in the water, wastewater utility department. And safety pay programs also are present in other organizations. They are actually hazardous material pay and those positions that actually work in jail centers. Spot awards, $650 per year on the average. What it is is that it's more than just a pat in the back. In some organizations they give some cash for a job well done, especially when it involves quality improvement. Auto allowance is $5,095 on the average. Longevity pay, $3,439. Phone allowance, $614. Master certification and certification pay. Now I actually took the time to differentiate this. Master certification is for your law enforcement, for the law enforcement. Certification pay are those certification pay that are non- base building. These are for the hot skills. For example, positions in the technology. Hot skills such as CCNA certification, they're very hot within a certain period of time, but then the technology changes. And it's very dynamic and so it's no longer hot. The thing is you can always put it in place and you can always put it in dormant when it's no longer hot or when the funding is not available. Tuition reimbursement pay, we noted that it's $5,400 per year on the average. The next item is the merit pay. I mentioned earlier that you do have merit pay in the past and it's been working for you. And it's very good for sustainability purposes in terms of your competitiveness. Because it ensures that your salaries are within or at par with the market. But it also recognizes performance. You don't just give it, but it is based on the strength of the performance of the employee. Merit pay is a form of recognition, often in a percentage of salary that is base building. Variable pay is non-base building. Merit pay is base building. Merit pay is a motivational and retention factor. It indicates the organization's intent to recognize and reward performance according to defined criteria. The strategic considerations of implementing merit pay, because it is not just what the organization pay, but also what the employees produce. So therefore, you have to have criteria and parameters that you must implement along with your payout system. Structurally, pay plans should have enough room to accommodate merit-based increases without resulting in compression. What we've done for you in terms of pay plan, we widened that and we made sure that you have enough room between the lower bound and the upper bound. So that when you continue your merit pay, you have enough room to do that, to implement just that. Here's what we found in the market. Now, again, 16 organizations out of 69 that we have survey ed have provided their planned fiscal year 2017 merit and salary increases. Now, this is just at the time of collection. These are all tentative at the time of collection, and this may change again when they finalize their budgets for FY 2017. As you can see, the general salary increases within the organizations that we benchmark is 3% on the average. And on the average, the planned merit increases is actually 3% as well. The general salary increases include market-based adjustments, pay structure fixes, new positions, promotions , and transfers. And actually, the merit pay plan is also built into the general salary increases plan. So that's what we found in the market. Now, going to the cost estimates. Before we show you the table on the cost estimate, I'd like to say that the following costs that we've estimated for you are for structural changes. Because we've done your pay plan, there are costs associated with the changes in the pay plan structures. This is also associated with internal equity analysis. These estimates are not merit increases. They do not include any variable pay as well. The priority that we've put together are those salaries that are going to be falling below the new minimum. Falling below the new minimum. That is our priority in this particular presentation. And we've given you an option as well, should you wish to fix the internal equity, some of the issues in the internal equity for the hard to fill positions as well. And when we calculated your option, we actually put in criteria in there that is based on the years in position, as well as if they are below the market and if their positions are actually hard to fill. Here are our cost estimates. Again, the priority is what we wanted for you to note today . In the general pay plan, we've calculated about 101 employees that are going to be falling below the new minimum. Under the DME, we have about 13 employees. And under the technology services, we have about seven employees. For a total of $333,098 for 121 employees altogether. Again, I'd like to mention that the approximate, the estimates that we've given you here has general fund, actually with an approximate of $190,000 out of this $333, 098. Now, I'd like to mention that in my 25 years in the business, this is actually the lowest figure that I ever presented to the city council or to the leadership of any of my clients. $333,098. And we're still actually working on this. This figure may change because as we reanalyze the allocation of the grades, the allocation of the jobs into grades, we may see some changes in that, finalization by the directors and by the general managers. The option that we're providing here are for your hard to fill positions. Because in as much as we would like to put people on the new minimum, we are going to see some compression between the new minimum and the people that have been there for longer periods of time. But we wanted to make sure that we only recognize the internal equity or the compression issues when it comes to hard to fill positions. We want to take care of our hard to fill positions because they're very hard to fill. But in addition to being hard to fill, we also put in a criteria that the position or the incumbent should be there no less than five years and no greater than ten years. The reason for that is that when we analyze your internal equity, this is when we figure out, this is when we find out that the compression starts in five years and actually ends in ten years. And the position will have to be below the external competitive range that we put together. And it should be below internal P25. The internal P25, remember I mentioned that the pay plan has seven segments. There's P10, P25, P50. And employees, of course, who are not currently under disciplinary proceedings. With that, questions please. I have about three or four. If you'd go to the previous slide. There you go. I'm a little confused because I see it looks like just in general pay plan that we need to do a correction of 264,709 . But yet I look over at the note and it says that we would only need about $190,000 from general fund. Is that because the general pay plan includes some of our other utilities like water, waste water and things like that? Correct, yes. We're going to actually break it out by pay fund. But we didn't have the date at the time. So that probably needs to be adjusted. You want to stand next to us as well? And take the P? I mean. Yeah, they pointed it out. They would like to have it. I think maybe one of the city council members asked for it. Okay. But that's exactly right. Then I have a question on slide 29. 29. As I'm looking at that, I'm looking at the, I'm trying to count up the total number of employees. And so when I look at that section, there's 433 that are jobs below the public market. And then there's 405 jobs competitive and 156 above. If I'm adding correctly, that's 994. Correct. Yet I thought that we had about 1400 employees. Yes, because this particular table did not include the craft pay plan. The folks in the craft, we don't include the civil service in here as well. So. Thank you. That explains that. On slide 18. And this actually refers to several slides. I'm trying to do quick counts. And on this particular one, it looks like the before pay grades totaled 26 or 25 grades. And the after, it goes down to 20 grades. And that seemed to happen almost in every before and after scenario in this set of slides. Most of them we ended up with a few fewer grades and a couple. There were some more. Could you explain that? Yeah, the, we had talked about if you look at your pay structure, we didn't have that this slide, but we had it last time. And it has that, it looks like an airplane. And so you would have your grades are set up so that half of your grades are in the technical and half of them are in the business operations. And so when a person is in business. Okay. So they go to grade one, they go to grade three. They don't have a grade two. And what we did was we merged them. All right. And that's how we gave you more grades without making a huge change. Then a couple of slides after this, and you really don't have to go to that one. But there was a comparison group for our energy management organization. The fact that we're probably comparing ourselves in most cases to private entities that don't tend to reveal their actual salaries. How did you do that comparison? When we, they were given, we were given the data salaries, databases from the organizations without the names of their employees. There's only job titles. There's the annual base salaries. And in some cases, there are some information on incentives and merits as well. But in most cases, we don't, private industries will never give you the incentives and will never give you the merit. We'll just give you the base salaries. They also provided us job descriptions. Okay. So when we compare the jobs, we made sure that when we're comparing them, we compare by years of service, whatever years of service you have in here, and the years of service in the private organizations or any other organizations, as well as the job content. So you did get data from private EMOs. Yes. All right. And, but that did not include things such as some of their benefits, some of their bonuses, and I suppose it didn't include things such as stock options either. No, I did try. I tried. Okay. Thank you. I think a lot of my questions have been answered in this, but you may have discussed it last time as well, but I did hear that there were a few in our organization that are paid too much. So how do you, because if they're paid too less, we know how to remedy that, how do you manage the ones that are paid, overpaid in the structure? They're actually not so much as paid too much or overly paid. They are just within the context of our competitive range definition. They are above the competitive range. What we recommend you do is just do not give any salary increases to those that we only focus on the ones that are below the market. Okay. Could I do a follow-up to that one? Sure. Do you mind, Ms. Wasney, if I do a follow-up to that? Because I've seen some of these studies before. I think in some cases you see some of those where someone is above the range or paid too much simply because the comparison group is rather small and the person within the organization, within our organization, may be maxed out in terms of their level of experience or their number of cert ifications and extra value that they brought to the organization. Do you find that to be the case or did you all dig that deeply into when you found some of the outliers? Yeah, we did dig deeply. We actually, on a granulated level, we compared not just the YOS, which is the years of service, and the job content . We also compare the organizational line of authority. We also compared the certifications, the education background that's necessary for the job to be successfully achieved. And we also made sure that the salaries can be explained by any variable, for example, years of service. If the salaries within the city is higher, it is almost always that because the jobs are more complex, number one, number two, or the incumbent has been here for many years. And that the available jobs that we have in the market does not compare with what you have here. For example, if we have folks here that have been here for 30 years and what we have found in the market is only up to 20 years, then immediately we know that we have differences in there. We explained that. We have several notes in our detailed analysis that we provided to HR. Okay, thank you. Sure. That's what it was. I have a question and I have a request. The first question, how do other organizations remedy their pay discrepancies? And do they do that by using a multiyear remediation process? Yes. That's exactly actually the most common practice. And we have, we actually have another version of this presentation where we provided you with a recommendation of the multi-phase project to remedy, multi-phase approach to remedy the below the market positions. And it goes from year one, year two, to year three. Of course, underlying economic factors has already been included in the alternative proposal for you. Because we know that the report date when we presented it to you is actually June 2016. And in the year two and year three, we know that inflation could happen. And so we made sure that we put in the time value of money when we presented our proposed, alternative proposal. But yeah, it's a multi-phase approach usually. I looked up inflation today and it stands at 1%, so I just want to throw that out there. So my request, because you're still working on figures, and here's my request. I'd like to see what an immediate pay remedy for 50,000 and below would be. Between 50 and 100,000 over a two year, and 100,000 and above over a three year. If you could, next time we see you, if we could see what that looks like out of the general fund. Thank you. >> Just the general fund? Just the general fund? >> Yes, because utilities and the others, you said you're still working on those numbers in terms of the totals. >> Any other questions? Comments? I guess on that, the remedy, are you talking about for the ones that are below or ones that are above or both? >> The ones that are below. >> Okay, all right. Yes, Mayor Pro Tem. >> From a budget perspective, I didn't know we had them scheduled to come back on a future agenda topic, but what do you need from us from getting this budget moving forward in the next few weeks to kind of get us in a position to make some decisions? >> Actually, we'll be talking about budget on Thursday, and Chuck will be able to address that particular issue, but we believe that as part of the budget, we have the dollars necessary to implement the pay plan. >> The 190,000 that was pointed out of the general fund, I guess. >> That's correct. >> Right. I guess my question's for my colleague to kind of understand what your question, what's behind that request? What's the value of breaking up the various income brackets and tackling some immediately, tackling some over two years and tackling some over, is there a budget strategy behind that? Or what's the goal given that staff's already identified those funds to knock it out now? >> I think it's status of trying to raise a family on 50, 000 and less. So a pay raise, and if you really study all the numbers, the people below 50,000, in a nutshell, I think stand to make the biggest gain in some of these. Now, without exception, there are a few job titles, and I 'll emphasize few, who fall into kind of a big pay raise when you study that. But if you really look at some of the, let's just say 25 to 50, and they fall into that very important category, which was category two, which if you had to put a name on it, they're the workhors es that run this city. They're the people who really get up every day, and they're that level too. They may not be a supervisor, but they work very hard. So that's the methodology behind my request, is putting emphasis on the 50,000 and less. If you're over $100,000 in the city of Denton, I think that 's a really nice paycheck. >> Yeah, but I guess the staff recommendation is to tackle all that. They're not saying don't tackle the under 50,000. They're saying tackle that. We've got the money to tackle the whole thing and fix our entire pay plan. What's your budget strategy to not tackle those other ones now and to string that over the course of two or three years? >> Until we see the numbers on Thursday, I think that's premature. So at this point, we're just gathering information. But instead of seeing the whole nut, I'd like to see a little bit how it's branched out. >> Okay. >> And so can we have those numbers about the Thursday budget presentation? >> Let me call on Brian Langley. I want to make sure I understand what numbers we're looking for. Are you asking to have the 333,000 of the adjustments that have been recommended to bring people up to the minimums? You want to see those by fund? Is that the question or you want to see it by fund and then with those tranches of salaries that you talked about? >> If we could see the slide towards the end of her presentation. And she said it was broken out. >> This number? >> Yes. >> No, I think it's the next slide. >> This is it. >> I think it's 190,000 that's off to the right there. >> Right. >> Yeah. >> So of the three pay plans that are proposed, the general DME and tech services, 190,000 is the general fund impact for those. Of the 333. I may not be understanding the question. That's what I want to ask. I still want to see it broken out. Even if it's two different categories. 50,000 and under and 50,000 and over. >> Okay. >> To see numbers. So we see employee count, for example. Well, how many of those are 50,000 and under? If we can just fine tune it just a little bit. >> Okay. And you want to see that for this group and by fund and then what the salaries are? >> If that's possible. >> Sure. >> Appreciate that. >> We'd be happy to do that. >> Good. Thank you. >> Any other questions? Yes. Fantastic. Yes. >> Yeah, thank you. This is hugely comprehensive. I think it's the best compensation report that I've seen. And a lot of my family has been in city and county government. So I've watched some of these presentations and this is the best yet. So thank you. >> Thank you very much. Appreciate it. >> Yes. Yes. >> Well, and it's very gratifying to hear your comment that as compared to other cities that you've done work for that we don't have a whole lot to do to make up those shortfalls, which is very good. And I'm assuming that that's because of the merit pay that we've had into place where the staff is also able to adjust for any internal or external inequities that are discovered. Could the manager comment on that? >> We do have the ability to adjust the internal equity. And that has been done when we've found positions that are too far off the market. >> And do you also, if you have somebody who according to your data is paid above, has risen above some of those numbers that we saw, that when they're out of their scale that their merit raises would be smaller simply because of the comparison groups? >> Yes. We've tried to recognize those people that were below market but also those people that were above market. I'll go back to what Elena said, when we looked at these individually to a large degree, those salaries that were over the market were primarily due to the longevity of the people in those positions. That was probably the number one driving issue as to those positions that were over market. >> Great. Councilmember Hawkins. >> Just to add, the first time hearing this I feel like I'm swimming right now and I need to get caught up by Thursday. But I was very impressed how you did factor in the number of responsibilities and how complex some of these jobs are. The number of hats, you addressed how many hats they wear. I just appreciate you throwing that in there and taking that into account when compiling this data. So thank you. >> Yeah, I mean, I gotta tell you, I'm very impressed with people who do things that I would find very challenging to do. And that is that kind of number crunching and that kind of very data intensive analysis. So thank you so much for that. One question I do have is, I know that we've talked about how do we bring up those that are below the competitive salaries. How do we address that? The ones that are above, what was the term you used? What was the term that is used? It's not overpaid, but what's the other term? >> Pre-level. >> Yeah. >> They are simply above the competitive range. >> Competitive range, that's it. Because that was about 400. I mean, that was almost as much as the ones below. So I think I would be curious as to, of those that are identified in that group, well, let me back up. My only thought of correcting that is, as you said, you just quote unquote don't give increases and let the competitive range sort of catch up to them. Is that correct? Is that what I thought I heard you say? >> Usually the practice, other organizations, what they do, they just keep it. They keep it at a status quo for the time being until a certain period of time. But what they don't do is reduce the salaries. >> No, no, and I understand that. So my question would be, based upon the budget discussions of the merit increases in the either 3% or 2%, whatever we're factoring into the budget, maybe historically in the last year or two, how much of those increases went to some of those job descriptions that were considered above the competitive range? In other words, have we been dealing with that? We might not have known they were above the competitive range until now. So what is sort of the plan for that? Basically, if someone's above the competitive range, we know we're not going to quote unquote give them just a salary bump across the board. But from a merit perspective, does that still make them eligible for a merit increase even though they're already above the competitive range? How is that usually handled? >> Well, usually those positions are still eligible for merit increases depending on the strength of their performance. >> Okay. >> Now, once again, going back to the definition of the competitive range and also why they're above the competitive range. Most of the reasons why they're above the competitive range is simply because of the longevity. And the complexity of the job that you have in here. You value your jobs internally different than the other organizations. Now, remember in our peers, we have municipalities with no electric department. So we have municipalities with a little less than your number of people. And so those jobs, even though they're similar in most cases, the longevity really provides a variation in the salaries. >> Okay. It would be nice to sort of see an analysis of that. Because I know you presented a number to correct the under the competitive range. It'd be interesting to see what the over competitive range is. Just raw numbers. >> Sure. >> But also then sort of an indication of the factors of longevity and so forth. So just have some analysis on that as well. >> There's nothing wrong with being over the competitive range. By definition, somebody's going to be over. So the people usually don't get redlined. In other words, stopped until they hit the maximum of the range they're in. But you'll see that, and as Elaine has tried to explain, a lot of it has to do with years of experience. Also, we're dealing with two time periods. For me, for example, in my lifespan, I lived and worked where we got cost of livings every year. We looked to see what the cost of living was because it was guaranteed 12, 15 years ago. That stopped, and we went to merit and stuff. So those people that were hired and are still with those organizations, they were generally above market. Because they enjoyed the 15 or 20 years when they got those guaranteed, not related to performance, but just cost of living. >> Okay. >> Inplation, so to speak. >> Yeah, just some additional data on that would be fine. Carla wanted, I think, Lisa. >> Sorry. I just want to clarify, just because they're above the competitive range doesn't mean that they're at or above maximum of our pay structure. So the competitive range, the market data, we're setting that somewhere in our new pay plan between P25 and P50. So there's still a bunch of room in the pay plan. So what we've done in the past is people were actually max ed out. They still got a merit, but it was lump sum. So it wasn't to base pay, but it was a lump sum increase that they got. >> Okay. All right. Mayor Pro Tem. >> Well, I'm trying to distinguish these in my head too, because it sounds like we're connecting somebody's pay with whether or not we think they ought to be eligible for merit . And I would think these are, to some degree, two separate conversations, right? Because if it's merit, the very basis of it is whether or not somebody deserves it, not to try and fix a pay structure that this is meant to fix. So I'm kind of thinking out loud here, but as we're kind of entertaining these two subjects, they are independent on that basis. And so if I'm an employee of an organization, and for whatever reason I've got myself up above the average, I might be an outstanding employee and deserving of merit. And so I wouldn't want us to make any policy decisions along those lines that would keep somebody from continuing to be motivated. >> Yeah, I was just trying to understand how all this fits together. Any other questions? Thank you all so much. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. >> I'd also like to thank you for listening, for both the presentations for a long time. Nobody fell asleep. Thank you very much. >> Thank you. You bet. You bet. >> We've got one more agenda item, but I understand there was a committee on the environment meeting that was scheduled for 2 o'clock, is that right? >> 2.30. >> I'm sorry, what? >> 2.30. >> 2.30. So I mean, I could put this out to you guys. City manager said we could move this. We could move A to a different date if you all were so inclined. I mean, I would, I've got a meeting that I'm supposed to be at 1.30 or 2 with some people here at the city. That's sort of my, would be my preference as to move it to a date that would be, you know, still advantageous to the presenters and the information they need to give us, but allow us to move to a different date. >> Sure. >> Everybody okay with that? >> Yeah. >> All right. Fantastic. Well, given that, we're down to concluding items. Any concluding items? I have one real quick one. Anybody else have one? And this is something for my colleagues to think about and I'd like the city manager maybe to think about this and Madam City Attorney, if I get way off, just rattle your paper. We were informed that the city would not be receiving a emergency services grant from the state of $600,000. It went to, I think it was about four or five non-profits, four non-profits primarily who benefit the homeless. I think it's Friends of the Family, Hope Incorporated, CCA, what's the other one? >> Salvation Army. >> Salvation Army. So I really want us to think about, I'll just tell you what my thoughts were. I want us to talk about a work session where if we can find something in the budget to help just a little bit, and I'm going to be talking to my colleague or my mayor at the city of Louisville to see if they would be able to do something as well to help offset some of it. Not obviously all of it, but whatever we could do that we could come up with a discussion. I know that when we had the community services grant presentation that there was a restroom in there for $80,000 that I'd had a question about. Is this something we'd want to put in the parks budget and use this money for something else? That's something we might can do. But I really want us to think about if there's some way we can help in any way to buy a little time for next year to help these organizations try to improve their scores in order to qualify for that grant again. Because that's a big hit and that's going to affect people 's lives in a very direct and immediate way. So not saying we got to do the whole thing and I'm going to really try to reach out to some other organizations and municipalities to see if they can help. But just want us to be aware of that and have a conversation about it. Councilmember Geary. Along those lines, if we could just get a little bit of backup material in terms of understanding the timeline of the grant. You know, why it was renewed, why it wasn't renewed and a little bit of context for what has happened that would help me since I'm new. Yes. Thank you. All right. Fantastic. Yes. Councilmember Gregory. Well, I appreciate you bringing it up. I was anticipating that we might hear something in our budget discussions about this when we hear from the Human Services Advisory Committee and their recommendations for budgetary allocations. And seeing if they might want to even reconsider some of their decisions in light of this or if we want to reconsider some of our decisions about total amount that we 're putting in. So I would imagine that we could do that in terms of our budget workshop on Thursday. Fantastic. Yes. Great. Anything else? Anybody else? Concluding items? All right. Thank you all very much. Appreciate your patience. We will stand adjourned.