Feb 07, 2017 City Council on 2017-02-07 12:00 PM

We do have a quorum. We do expect Mayor Pro Tem to be here shortly. We'll move through our agenda for this work session. The first item on the agenda is citizen comments on consent agenda items. We have one card wishing to speak, Mr. Willie Hutspeth. If you'll come down, state your name and address. Your time will begin. Mayor and council members, my name is Willie Hutspeth. I live at 623 Newton. The consent agenda is too long. There are too many things that you are just passing along. You're doing something somewhere and it's out of the eye of the public and you're just passing them on right away. I think there's one other thing I need to start doing even though this is really a problem taking off work to come here during the day. I've got to figure out where do you get your information from. I think you've tried to tell me. I'm going to find out because I'm just going to have to bite the bullet and get on that. I've got to get where you are and this information you have and I'm not in office. I don't want to be in office. I'm a western with my son. Anyway, it must be nice staff to have real nice comfortable places to sit. This is ridiculous. See that young lady over there, the pretty one, African American woman. She should have a seat. I'm going to give her mine. Then I'm going to sit over here on the floor and I hope somebody takes a picture if I have to do a selfie. This is ridiculous. We need to be somewhere where we can sit down comfortably and listen at how our government is being ran by you. You're comfortable. I teased Sarah about eating and having a lunch. I have to blue bag my lunch and drag it in here and eat in front of you just to be here. You ask, "What just don't come?" Well, that's not how government works. We have to, it works. That's not how government works. We have to come here and listen to what you say and then do something about it. So my consent agenda, they're too long. This place is awful to come and sit. We can't sit over there to deal with. Listen at how you governing us. Thank you for the time. Thank you. All right, we'll move on to agenda item two, request for clarification of agenda items listed on the agenda. Request for clarification. Yes, council. Oh yeah, yeah, this would be the time to do that. Yeah. Item F, item J, item N, and item R, and I would only request staff presentations for item J and item R, please. Okay, so it's F, J, is it N? N. And R. Correct, thank you. Thank you. Any other clarifications? Yes, council member Gary. I'm sorry, I'm trying to see you through the fire, but that's okay. No, no, that's fine. I'm just teasing you. I sent an email as well requesting J and R and I was just making sure that that was on record. Okay, great. I do have any other questions, clarification. Council member Wasney. Just a general question on consent agenda. Regarding real estate purchases, I would like to see property appraisals also included in the backup for these real estate purchases because consent agendas are just that, consent agendas, and if there's a reason why that can't be included, could legal weigh in on that, please? We can certainly get that information to you. The property appraisals are generally going to be available to an individual from whom we're buying the property anyway, so I don't see that as a problem. So we will devise a mechanism to get that information to you. Yeah, I 'd appreciate that. I think the citizenry would appreciate that as well. Thank you. Yes, council member Hawkins. More just a comment on consent agenda item B, which is the regional fire training facility. I just appreciate how much information was in that and it just really explained how the bid went and how it was accepted and with recent talks about construction fire stations. So anyway, that's all I'd say. On agenda item G, which is the agreement for a development agreement. I read through that. Could somebody just give me a really brief overview of what this is really, how's this different than what we might be doing somewhere else or is this consistent? I'm just trying to understand what we're agreeing to here other than just the costs of the tap fees. What's unique about this is this is on the, excuse me, what's unique about this, this is in the very far southwest corner of our service area and with the Robson Ranch development and the Country Lakes development, we've had a lot of challenges getting utility service down to that far end of our system. So what we've attempted to do here is this front load impact fees for the development so that the city makes a commitment to provide service to the entire development. They're not tying up limited capacity in that area for speculative and maybe non-developed lots. So the only thing we're requesting here is front loading of impact fees and it's a solution and tool to deal with small developments out there on our perimeter. The city is looking at about a four to six million dollar additional impact fee funded transmission line there. So the rationale behind it is just trying to come up with the solution. Okay so right now, let's say this development is is in the process of being, this land is in the process of being developed. Is there sufficient water, so you're saying there's not sufficient water capacity to meet the needs of this development as it's proposed? Currently. We have an ability to take it on but as growth continues in that area, whether it be through the Ro bson development, we had a development agreement with them that involved a surcharge for impact fees. We had the Country Lakes, which was a litigation settlement, they had to pay additional surchar ges on impact fees. So we've had a little bit different tools that we've used. You know short answer is we will provide service and we will keep up with it but there's a considerable cash flow that's put on the rate payer to pay for that. So this is basically collecting them up front to try to get as much cash together as we can to get the infrastructure. Current ordinances don't allow us to front load them but a development agreement gives us that tool. Okay all right. Okay thank you. Appreciate it Tim. Any other clarifications of agenda items? Seeing none, we'll go on to work session reports 3A. Receive report and hold discussion on the housing on the housing programs and other activities carried out by the Denton Housing Authority and give staff direction regarding request for resolutions from developers applying for state tax credit. We'll let everybody clear out before we get started. Okay go ahead Ron. Thank you Mayor, members of council, associate manager, members of staff. Today we are bringing back this discussion regarding resolutions requested by developers to develop workforce affordable housing in the city. As a discussion that was held back in January 10th of this year there was some discussion regarding how DHA Denton Housing Authority can assist or participate in these developments. So with that I would like to introduce Sherry McDade with the Denton Housing Authority. She'll come up and introduce her staff as well as have a quick presentation. Sure and I'll be back to talk about those projects as we conclude this item. Good afternoon Mayor and member of the council and welcome to the new city manager. I'm Sherry McDade, I'm the CEO for Denton Housing Authority. I want to thank you for the opportunity to come back before you to present some information regarding the development and helping the housing authority further our mission for creating affordable housing. I have a member of our board who's here with me now, Salty Richel. He's here also and our board has spent many hours and years studying and reviewing affordable housing. We've been trained on tax credit housing, tax credit laws, market studies and we've been meeting with potential developers over the last several years. We have a very active board and they bring a wealth of personal knowledge to everything that we do. We've put together a development team that includes our senior staff and also we have consultants with expertise in development. Our development consultant is Ramon Guajardo senior. He's president of Rimmel Company out of Fort Worth, Texas and our attorney Maddie Goldsby-Jones who's a director with Cotes-Rose Law Firm in Dallas. They are both here to provide information and answer any questions that you may have regarding the tax credit program and the development that the housing authority is doing. I've asked that they provide this information to you and explain DHA's role in the development for the community and the financial opportunities that this will bring to the residents of our city. Mr. Guajardo will begin the PowerPoint presentation and we're all here to answer any questions that you may have. So I'll bring him to the PowerPoint. Thank you. Mr. Mayor, members of the City Council, City Manager, good afternoon and thank you for the opportunity to go over some information for you regarding housing and more specifically housing tax credits. Just briefly put it on the board, the the mission of the housing authority. The housing authority was created by the City Council years ago and the board is appointed by the mayor to serve in the capacity. Currently the housing authority has three developments, Pecan Place 24 units right south of downtown, Heritage Oaks 114 units which is a senior development, and most recently Renaissance Court on Hickory just in the southeast part of town with 150 units. The demand for rental housing in real quick question. If you could go back to that previous slide. Of those three are any of those, I know I don't think the common place is, I don't think Heritage Oaks is. Is Renaissance Court a partnership development with with someone or is that strictly owned and operated by the Dent on Housing Authority? Renaissance Court was a nine percent development with partnership with a developer with Carlton Properties out of Dallas. So it was a partnership, a nine percent application. I believe Pecan Place was also renovated with a tax credit allocation some years ago. Okay all right. Okay thank you. Sorry to interrupt you. No problem and I'd be happy to answer questions as we go along. I want to make sure I'm some of this information we presented to you back I think in October. I 'm going to go fairly quick but please stop if you have a question. You know I want to be able to make sure that you have the information. The market demand in in Denton as we all know is a very strong market. There was a market study that was done last year that determined that the occupancy rate back then and this was in spring of last year was 98.9 percent occupied and the study also showed that there would be a demand for nearly 4,000 new rental units over the next five years and that's with a conservative three percent annual growth estimate. Currently the Housing Authority has over 3,000 households on the housing choice voucher waiting list. These are families that qualify for these vouchers but there's just no voucher to be had so there's a waiting list. The other day I heard some data also about the rental market that said that in the last six years in the city of Denton there was not a single affordable housing unit that was developed within the city yet during the same period of time data shows there was an increase of 1200 households that needed this housing so obviously the demand is there. One of the ways that communities are utilizing to develop workforce housing affordable housing is the housing tax credit program. This is a national program it's codified in section 42 of the internal revenue code. Many people believe that this is a a HUD program. It is not it's out of the internal revenue and it's a means by directing private capital for the creation of affordable housing throughout the country. The tax credits are a dollar for dollar reduction for a 10- year period for the tax rate investor whether it's a bank syndication or an insurance company instead of paying income tax they can invest in a tax credit program with that equity then goes into help financing the construction of affordable housing in many communities. There is a mandatory 15-year compliance period for the development the owner of this project. The tax credits are awarded to owners of projects who then sell the credits to investors for a certain price and the price fluctuates in my history working with this program I've seen taxes being sold as little as 65 cents on a dollar and up to above a dollar ten. Currently the market is somewhat in a flux not knowing what the tax laws are going to be. They've dipped down to about 90 and maybe a little bit under many people are estimating these at about 95 cents. Three months ago these credits were being sold for about a dollar eight so you can see the fluctuation that has occurred. Yeah so the owners of the project they're able to sell the credits but they for that 15-year compliance period are not able to sell the actual project though in order to be in compliance they have to remain the owner is that correct? They can sell the property but there is a land use agreement land use restriction agreement that's placed on the property in the deed that it must be affordable for those 15 years and many times they take an extra extended Lora period for another 15 years so the property must be maintained at rent restriction levels for a period of 30 years. Now it can be sold but many times in the first 15 years is more difficult because the the tax credit investor has to be involved and they're still receiving their credits so it's difficult but yes it can be sold. Thank you. Restriction does not go away though. Quick question a couple follow-up it's helpful for me on these kind of discussions sort of have like specific concrete examples so the the the building that's currently being built the development out on McKinney Street the the one on McKinney Street in the partnership. The ver anda? Yes the veranda. Do we know what the tax credit value was for that when that project was was approved and do we know that it was five million dollars worth of tax credits ten million do we know that value? We know the the tax credit price is set when the project is closed financially when the actual the financial loans the tax credit investor will commit to buy the credits for a certain amount and and they commit to put that money over the first two years during construction they have to pay that equity into the project so that amount is known up front and we know how much they're putting in what the taxes were sold for and then the tax rate investor will receive those credits during the teen first ten years of the life of the So what was the value of that on the veranda? Do we know? I don't know right off hand. If you can maybe just. I'm thinking it was about six or seven million dollars maybe eight million dollars we can get specific information. Yeah if you could circul ate so whoever buys these credits they're not involved in the property. Let's say if I'm the one selling the credits to you you can get the credits but I'm still the property owner so I just basically get the the value of that cash infusion for my equity slash loan and things such as that. Okay well the ownership structure is there's a partnership that that is formed. No what I'm the tax credit the tax credit purchasers typically are not involved in that partnership is what I'm hearing. They're not involved in the management of the partnership technically they do own 99.99 percent of the partnership and ownership of the improvement so they are the owner of the improvements of record but they usually will defer the operation and management to the developer or the general partner. Gotcha thank you very helpful. But the the limited partner is 99.99 percent owner of the partnership that owns the improvements . Okay thank you. Okay now in in the situation where the housing authorities are involved usually the land is owned by the housing authority or one of its affiliates and then leases that land to the partnership for anywhere from 75 to 99 years. Okay it is a complicated program. No it's good to understand the details. Again talking about the 30 years affordability commitment is a 15 year compliance period and then a 15 extended use period for the total of 30 years. This agreement is a binding agreement and to the current owner and future successors. The agreement is recorded as a property restriction as the deed is filed so it's not something that anyone can get out of it. Once it becomes affordable the the deed is filed and that restriction is there for the duration of the 30 years. Now the housing tax credit program in Texas is administered by the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs. There are two different types of housing tax credits and this is where sometimes it's very confusing. There is a competitive nine percent program and a non-competitive four percent program and each of these programs is funded from different tax credit allocations. Again nine percent is very competitive the four percent is non-competitive and I'm going to go into a little bit more detail of each and answer any questions that you may have. We talk about area median income that the tax credit program basically is to provide quality affordable housing for households that meet 60 percent of the area median income and just for example in Denton County the average median income was 71,700 at 60 percent and there's the figures adjusted for family size. A family of one 60 percent of AMI is 30,000 a family of five is 46,500 approximately and then 50 percent of income are those figures. So when we talk about 60 percent of median income this is the level that we're referring to adjusted for family size. Mayor Pro Tem. Thank you mayor. Is that always based on the county income because I know the city of Denton tends to trend a little bit lower. It's more of an area median income and I think in this area is the Dallas Fort Worth or the Fort Worth Arlington I think it includes Denton also. It is calculated by the state and by HUD and it's not just the city of Denton it's the whole area. Okay thanks and it is calculated on an annual basis. Let's talk about the non-competitive four percent housing tax credit program. TDACA accepts applications and funds these applications year-round and although there is a statewide cap to the amount of tax credits that are awarded annually the cap rarely is reached . I think in the last 15 or so years it was reached only once. So the money's there those tax credits are there for the asking. Usually bonds are also used as part of the financing tax exempt bonds. These bonds may be issued by an affiliate of the housing authority and municipalities the county or the state of Texas. But the application for tax credit must include a resolution of non-opposition by the municipality which the site is located or in the county the site is in an unincorporated area in the county. So again a non-competitive four percent tax credit application requires a resolution of non-opposition from you for a project that's being done in the city of Denton. Okay yeah Councilmember Geary. I'm not real clear on how the bond issuance is related to the four percent program. So you're saying that the housing authority in Texas that administers this federal program can approve applications and then on upon approval a municipality can issue the bonds? Can issue the bonds to finance that project. What okay so in that case would the municipality be the GP or the LP? No it would be just the issuance of the bonds and usually a fee is paid. So the city one of its affiliates can issue the bonds the housing authority can issue the bonds. In the example of the veranda that's been built currently the housing authority's public facility corporation issued the bonds to finance that particular project in conjunction with the tax credit that it received . So when this type of bond is issued are there no is there no interest rate being paid or is it being paid by the 99 percent owners? It is paid by the partnership which is 99 percent of the limited partner and the general partner but it is part of the expense of the project to pay for the interest on those bonds. What's securing the bonds? The project itself. The improvements and the land are put up as collateral for the bonds. So the land is owned by the DHA or a housing authority affiliate. The structures on the land are owned by the GP. The bond can be issued by a government and then the interest is paid by the tenants. The interest is paid by the partnership which again gets its revenue from the rents from the tenants. Okay thank you. Yes council member Gregory. You said that the bond could be issued by the city. Is that what you're asking for the city to issue the bond? No. In the past like we did at the Veranda the public facility corporation of the housing authority issued the bonds for the last one. We anticipate they will issue the bonds for the future one. So it is not contemplated that we would ask the council to issue the bonds. So you're really talking to us about the the final bullet point which is needing a resolution of non-opposition. That's great. Now summarize this at the end of what we're asking you to consider. Yeah. Well and part of part of what because I know a lot of this is a repeat of what we saw before and part of my rationale for bringing this back before we issued any non-opposition was because the ask is can we become the exclusive partner with these type of developments and so what I'm hoping that we can get around to talking about today is that level of income stream that would be new to the Denton Housing Authority and what programs would be designed for that new revenue and what as a policy body this council would give direction on if that's what we want to do here's how we'd like to see that money spent. So that's really at least what I'm hoping to get out of this is a little bit more detail because that's really the only reason I would say to give exclusive authority to deal with these developers. I want to understand how can we use that to the benefit of achieving some of the goals that the council has stated as far as transitional housing and affordable housing. So very accurate Mayor and that's a few slides down. Okay good. I just want to make sure you're not going to spend a lot of time going off some okay all right fantastic. But I wanted to make sure that you had at least a very basic understanding of the tax credit program that leads us to those opportunities which you just described. I guess though if the housing authority is issuing the bonds all right then that means that the housing authority are they not fiscally responsible and liable for the I mean the security is the property but yet the bonds still have a an authority or some entity that is responsible for payment of that debt should the security pledge not be sufficient to let me ask Mayor Jones our attorney to answer that get in real time but you know well she can explain okay all right there's no liability to the housing authority. Good morning Mr. Mayor, Council, City Manager. I'll answer that one specific question because I know you have an objective you want to address. With respect to Councilwoman Begarra's question, the bonds are the private activity cap bonds so they're the bonds that are allocated through the priority set by the state and there is a private activity cap bonds for housing and when you do the transaction the sources are the tax credits at a four percent tax credit and bonds so a portion of the debt service will be the bonds and that's which would normally be your traditional debt and the credit so you syndicate the credit and then you get proceeds from the bonds and that makes up your total sources for the total development cost. So it's not full faith and credit of the city even though it's eligible to provide the issuance services for the transaction in the structure that's most popular with housing authorities because the housing authority has statutory authority to issue debt they will use the private activity cap bond and they will be the issuer and that's all their liability is. So it's a private activity cap bond the issuer is the housing authority's affiliate the borrower is the partnership and there's no exposure at all for the city by doing the no objection resolution and no exposure on behalf of the housing authority as being the issuer. Good thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. Moving on to the nine percent tax credit program this is the competitive there's an annual application and funding cycle this year the pre-applications were due January the ninth the final applications are due March the first. Remember that date important date coming up. The awards are made usually on the third week of July by the board of the Texas Department of Housing Community Affairs. The credits are awarded based on an original allocation formula that was that is determined by the state. The applications are scored and ranked within their region in accordance with the rules and laws outlined in the qualified allocation plan. You're going to hear us talk about the QAP that's the Bible of the program there's any questions everybody goes back to the QAP to see what it says. The final application must include a resolution from the local unit of government. That's you and for those in here. So and and this is I don't know if it's new information to me but I used to understand that that if you got a resolution of support or non-objection or however they're termed that you received a certain number of points for that. That's correct. If you didn't have it you just simply didn 't get the points and therefore that does affect your standing as far as the gap but when I read that sentence the final application must include a resolution. Does that even mean a resolution of non-support? I mean it has to have something there or you know and and there's probably a misstatement there you're correct a resolution does not have to be there but it is very very unlikely that an application will be funded without a resolution. For instance right now two or three points is going to make the difference between getting funded and not funded. A resolution of support from the city council will count 17 points. A resolution of non-opposition for an application is worth 14 points. That's three points that's enough to kill you already. A resolution of opposition will get you zero points. And now this is on the nine percent competitive. Your four percent although a resolution is required there's no points involved they just want to make sure that the city is not in opposition to your application. Okay but this one in the nine percent is very competitive. In 2017 85 pre-application were submitted in region three. Then it's in region three that includes Fort Worth, Dallas and all of North Texas. Okay now within region three there's two categories urban which is then falls in and then the rural areas and those are have separate allocations and you know you don't compete against each other but then it's within the urban category. And then we said out of the 85 applications we expect that eight will be funded in region three. One out of ten. Okay it's very competitive. We have potential uh opportunity for partnerships uh in in various uh projects put some names up there that that are currently in the mix. Talk quickly about the ver anda. This is one that's under construction. It is expected that the first building will be turned over this summer. It'll be completed the first part of next year. It is a partnership with the housing authority and NRP the developer 322 units. All of you probably are familiar with this. There was a memorandum of understanding that was negotiated and executed between the two parties. The developer and the housing authority. It calls for a distribution of the cash flow and the developer fee and the and the Denton housing authority had the right of first refusal to purchase the development after the first first 15 years of the compliance period. It was financed with a nine percent tax credit and you did pass a resolution uh for the for this project. Four percent. I'm sorry four percent. I'm even confused sometimes. Quick quick question on that. Do we know what the the value of that developer fee cash flow? What is that? I have a summary coming up there. Okay good good. Um the the other one that that's on the table right now uh there's two different projects next to each other. It's a standard and the Hudson at Mint Park station. Um this past year the housing authority entered into a memorandum of understanding with affiliates of Ohala Holdings, a private developer, and it outlined the business terms to create two partnership to construct these two projects. The standard at Met Park station is a 263 units of family development and the Hudson uh at Met Park station just adjacent to it's 160 elderly development. The terms of the MOU allow the housing authority to share the distribution of the developer fee cash flow of both projects and I have some projected figures here in a minute for you. The housing authority also retains the right of first refusal to purchase the development after 15 years for debt only and exit taxes. Both of these developments are scheduled to be financed in part with four percent tax credits. Uh the projects has been we have been working with Ohala for now five or six months. Uh they're way into the design. Uh the property will need to be rezoned. It is on schedule to to be heard by the zoning commission when? Later this month. Later this month. We'll be coming to you for for the uh zoning and then also there will be a request for the city council to consider resolutions of non-opposition for these projects. Now these are four percent projects not to be confused with the competitive ones. So the zoning will be coming forth for your consideration uh in the next few weeks and also a request for resolutions of non-opposition for both of these projects. These projects uh do have memorandums of understanding with the housing authority already and the housing authority is very supportive of this project and would request your consideration. I'll come right back. Yeah. So who manages these projects? Does the Denton County Housing Authority have any management control ? The housing authority currently has the right to review all the and approve all the financial documents. Uh it has the authority to review the design and approve the design and oversee the construction and have input into the management company they will manage the the complex. Okay thank you. That's all included in the memorandum of understanding. We made it very clear the role for the housing authority to play. It's just not a silent partner on the sideline. Council member Wozni. Wozni. Yes. Quick question because it seems a little bit um cart before the horse. I understand that they need a resolution from council in order to apply but as it works through its process i.e. going to planning and zoning where citizens are allowed to come and speak at a public hearing about a zoning change well what happens at at whatever point if and when uh an area or a neighborhood really stands up and says no then city council has already put in a resolution saying we're okay with it but we're accountable to our constituents so if you would walk me through all of that because i do listen to my constituents and the process is important for something to come to planning and zoning first okay before it comes to council on this one my understanding is the request for the resolution for these two projects will not be coming forth until after the zoning has been approved and the public hearings are held on on that zoning change so you would have the opportunity to hear from your constituents uh see what happens at the zoning level and then uh at the council for zoning and then you would be asked to consider the resolution okay i appreciate that and if council could remind me weren't we asked at an earlier council meeting to um either approve the four percent or nine percent prior to this meeting so now i'm hearing that the resolutions really are not required until after the public hearing with planning and zoning i i if i could i i don't think that request came from the housing authority or the developer yeah yeah i'm not sure yeah we did have a request i believe from the developer to to approve those resolutions well let me it was a different one a different one okay okay mayor pro tem oh i'm sorry were you finished council member wasn't he okay yeah it's a good question i and i asked the same one last time we had this and i think i think as i understood it what's what's being requested in the resolution isn't saying we approve everything relating to this project because it still has to go through all sorts of city things before it ever hit the ground it's more of principally speaking are you against us putting forward an application for this sort of project in your town now to constituents hearing that it might appear dissonant especially if at the end of the day they feel like they haven't had a say yet but it certainly isn't holding our feet to the fire approving this legally speaking i asked so much for my question an approval of this one of these resolutions if done prior to a zoning case doesn't it's not obligating the council one way or the other to those future jurisdictional questions correct that that is correct you you are would be if you approved this request it you could conceivably deny the zoning deny the zoning so they are not tied together yeah because i i i'm sure the timing is going to be challenging some don't require zoning and therefore have the question is do they go through the zoning prior to that so my question is this the last time we met on this it seemed like the reason we were hesitating on those was it seemed like there's a bit of ambiguity as to whether or not you guys were involved in those projects at all and wanting to make sure but as i'm hearing you is there even a pathway for an entity a developer to come forward in our community without having some relationship with you or with us for an mo you because they 're going to need somebody to issue the bonds there is a path but one of our requests today is to make sure that that path does come through the housing authority and the didn't city council so to clear because the way the law is written and the regulations are written a a developer could come directly to you ask for a resolution and apply straight to the state and not involve the housing authority at all that is possible so we want to we 're asking you to consider a policy that in this community that the housing authority be an integral part of that process so on that point and this doesn't have to be now but you gave us last time a list of all the tax credit projects in denton it would be helpful to know which ones have that relationship and which ones don't just historically speaking and i will share that with you yeah but i still think this is part of a larger apartment question in town too because as i mentioned last time all of the existing ones are in my council district i think if there's less nimbyism there i'm certainly in favor of these sorts of things but i think as we think what is our future goal in terms of affordable housing and these sort of projects around the the city we need to think about that and where are they going and whether or not we have any there's policy implications to that for both schools for both just kind of good smart neighborhood development and see how we can't spread the wealth around the city a bit councilmember gary yes ma'am okay so i have two questions one how is it that we're authorized to give power to i mean what dha is asking is for us to authorize them to have some type of negotiation power is what i understand it or to filter requests through dha their public corporation how how is it that that's our authority to do that second question i'm curious as to if i'm a private developer what the benefit is of working with dha because they the developer did come to us prior and there was no mention of dha so i'm i'm curious to hear from them i'm not an attorney can i go ahead i think it's real simple both of them it's the resolution that's the linchpin to both of these programs one the four percent if you don't have a resolution of non-opposition you're out on the second one the nine percent if you don't have one of either support or non-opposition you get a certain amount of points if you don't get any resolution your project is most likely not going to be considered so the authority it's not a i don't think it's a expressed authority i think it's just the council is ultimately the gatekeeper of the types of of these kind of projects based upon our willingness to give the resolution or not and and my whole point was that if that's the case not understanding until recently how much additional revenue is available through developer fees and stuff and and other kind of fees and cash flow participation and rentals that is available to a partner i.e. the dent and housing authority in that regard and so if we're going to be giving resolutions of support or non-opposition if there's a way we can generate some value from that that would help our citizens in our either affordable affordable housing context our transitional housing context or our homelessness initiatives then i want to know what though what that amount of funding is and how the dent and housing authority plans to use that if this is something that we move forward on to further those initiatives as the as the council deems those so there's not any express it's it's these resolutions we have the power to say no and that's what gives us i'm going to say the leverage is that you should be given the presentation mayor very well explained did that was that helpful anita's not retired yet well i'm i don't i'm that's not a legal sit i'm just saying that's the practicality of it i mean that's just the practical aspect there there's um we've we have looked at this i think um fairly recently and the housing authority has the full power and authority to contract as does the city and so depending on what the council decides to do and the direction you decide to go we can certainly strike any kind of arrangement between the city and the housing authority to affect whatsoever you desire but the mayor's right the city sits in the catbird seat with regard to the leverage on the approval of these kinds of requests that are being made so i guess my second question then is when when you say that there's a value to be gained a potential value to be gained does that is that a part of a fixed amount of money that's you know now it's not going to the private developer a portion of it is going to dha is that how it works and i think you have that information with you in the next few slides okay so i'll just just keep in mind my question of why would a developer necessarily do this uh well yeah let's let's go ahead and run to the presentation that so these are the four percent tax credits that are in the pipeline and again i'll talk about the nine but these two four percent uh the housing authority has been working with the developer and he's here present uh we have negotiated and executed an mou that outlines our role and our share of of the uh developer fee and cash flow which i'll share with you in a minute um and and we're supporting them as they move through the process with the city to include zoning and the consideration of the resolution of non-opposition and in answer to your question i would support that you not consider the the resolution until it's properly zoned and you've had input from the public about that zoning request that way you can be responsive to your constituents all right okay all right moving on yes the nine percent applications again there's been confusion about four nine we talked about the two four percent that are on the table again this year um you know the application were due January the 9th 85 applications uh were received in region three three of which were project in the city of denton as of January the 31st the housing authority had negotiated although not executed yet but had negotiated an mou with one of the three developers creating a partnership for the purpose of making the final application and the application i said require it's essential to get the the uh residential support to get the 17 points to be competitive uh which the council has to approve um the three applications is palladium and didn't it's a family development of 180 units uh we are in negotiations very close to to executing uh an mou with them the board of commissioners have authorized uh the execution of this mou once we finalized the last few details uh this is a mixed income uh it will have some market rate units uh this problem this project is located at 288 and sherman the southeast corner of that intersection the second application is the reserve at sherman it's a family development 120 units we're currently negotiating the mou with them matter of fact we got a draft of it back that was marked up we're working on it um so we feel that that we will be able to have an mou but we don't have one yet the third one may heal point of the reserve at sherman is located in the same vicinity is on the northeast corner of 288 and sherman the third uh application may heal point uh propose a family development 150 units uh i was informed by the developer last week that they will not pursue this application in their withdrawing it my sense is they look at the points they're not competitive they're not going to spend any more time in it the two others are i believe both competitive and have a shot at getting funded okay yeah my understanding was this wasn't necessary and i appreciate the the background and factual information but my understanding this wasn't necessarily to advocate or approve or talk about a specific resolution on either one of these projects this is giving you background information to distinguish between the four and the nine and what to expect coming up on the nine percent sure okay thank you um here's what financial impact it could have with the mous the veranda which is under construction we had an mou the estimated revenue to the housing authority over the 15 years compliance period it's approximately three million dollars this is three million dollars that without the mou and your support it wouldn't have stayed in this community this would have gone to the developer uh or entities of the developer or the limited partner met park with ohala which the four percent that's in the pipeline the mou that has been executed would generate about 2.4 million over 15 years back to the housing authority met park hudson which is the elderly would generate about 1.9 million over 15 years back to the housing authority the mou that we are negotiating and the term that we've agreed with palladium so far would generate about 2.5 million dollars over 15 years if these well one sort of been done but if the other three are also approved and move forward and are constructed it could generate nearly 10 million dollars for the housing authority over a teen a 15 year period we have a question council member gravery so yeah this gets to the to the heart of the matter so help us as council members understand what that 9.8 million dollars means if it is staying here with the housing authority what can the housing authority do with that those funds next next couple of slides all right very good question you guys are way ahead of me but i wanted to know the the financial impact of the mous this is why and i'm a former bureaucrat local bureaucrat i understand the need to generate revenue for the programs that you want to do in this case quality affordable housing in my opinion this is one mechanism to partner with developers who are bringing a product already but also that that product can generate other resources to do other things in this community that needs to be done are these properties structured such ownership wise that they are on or off the tax rules they will be tax exempt they will be off the tax rolls this is another reason why i think it's important that some of this money be brought back into the community because they will not be paying taxes the way it would be structured uh and and this is a way that the project can generate money to help the programs in this community councilman oh i'm sorry council man briggs and councilman hawkins they would still be tax exempt even though we didn't partner they didn't partner with didn't housing if they did not partner with them they would not be tight they would be paying taxes it's it's the the inclusion of the housing authority as part of the partnership which would include being the general partner being uh the owner of the land and affordability of the units will all allow it to be tax exempt without that partnership it would not be so that might be the answer to your question councilmember hawkins councilmember griggory do you have a question no that's the answer to the question okay very good um yes i'm sorry may i put him it's a tax exempt across the board city school county yes and and what normally is done is uh the ownership structure is presented to the appraisal district uh and under the tax code and the government code of the state of texas that particular ownership structure allowed it to be exempt from all tax identities use the funds do we have a do we have an estimated value i mean like the veranda what's the what's the value of that once it's completed what's the uh i'm not sure what i'm trying to understand is 40 40 million usually my rule of thumb on taxes is that's what you're getting it's about a thousand dollars a door uh per year okay that's total school school yeah yeah okay all right it it may vary a hundred dollars no got you okay depending on the property but all right thousand dollars a door thank you per year oh yes that's my guy i i need an actual number like i need to know i need to know how much the city will be for feiting and property taxes by virtue of entering into these agreements like not an estimate okay uh i'm not sure how accurate we will try to get an accurate information because if the appraisal doesn't have an appraised and given you a value it's hard to pinpoint the exact number but we will try to give you the exact number as possible okay okay use the funds you know we talked about this revenue that would be generated to the housing authority here are some things that that uh in talking to uh the executive director sherry and the board here are some uses of of uh those funds to create more quality affordable housing to fund dha programs and operations and assistant fund and support services programs that are provided by other community agencies um one of the things that that the housing authority has discussed is providing up to five percent of the funds received in partnership with local agencies to provide support services for dha clients and the community and they're looking at contracting with united way to distribute these funds to the agencies uh united way has a good handle of who provides what where the needs are and the h a may establish other programs that address other housing needs and services so yeah no sherry go to the mic if you wouldn't mind please some of the things that we we can do in our discussion and negotiating the mou is that um we are putting in there that we set aside some specific units in these affordable housing deals that address some of our housing needs and issues that we have in the city right now we're dealing with the issue with homelessness well when we negotiate a deal with a developer we're going to ask that developer to set aside some units so we can specifically address that particular need now another need may be for veteran housing so we may be asking those developer to set aside some units for that if they're not partnering with the housing authority if they're not negotiating with someone who's local who knows what our needs are those things are not going to happen i understand what you're saying i understand how you feel about the property coming off the tax rolls but those are some of the things that we're able to do and we're able to negotiate to bring back to the city and bring back to the community we understand we see it every day we know what the need is every day we're turning people away because our waiting list is closed there's 3 000 people on there so without the housing authority being able to negotiate with these developers they do get to come in they build what they want to build and then they collect the money and they leave town no offense developers okay we have a question councilmember gary a belief for legal yes i had a question for illegal so when we um authorize the four or nine percent resolution in favor what i'm hearing is that we can't say we authorize it contingent upon a set aside of 10 or 15 percent for veterans housing is that correct well i think what we could do is um enter an interlocal agreement with the ditten housing authority and in that agreement we could reach strike any kind of terms that our negotiations lead us to and that both parties are willing to stand by so i think we could by separate instrument achieve whatsoever goals the council desires assuming that we have two willing parties at the table so i think we can get there for you if you want to go there aren't the two willing parties in my example the private developer and the city council i don't think she i think she was if my understanding was your question was without the ditten housing authority involved if the private developer comes to the city council for resolution are we able to put in conditions just with those parties not to my knowledge i i could stand to be corrected on that you're a little bit outside bailey wick but to my knowledge uh that would not be the case but we have this opportunity in working through the housing authority so i'll if i'm in error please correct me thank you council member wasney if you could go back to the slide that showed the three different uh projects with the number of units units right here so correct me but i believe you stated that they 're all family developments but example with the first 180 units not all 180 units are affordable housing second not all 120 units are affordable housing third one not all 150 units are affordable housing is that correct and is the developer also charging market rate for some of the apartments in these units the first one palladium is a mixed income not all of the 180 are affordable the second one reserve all of those would be affordable the third one i didn't get that detail when they informed me that they were withdrawing the application so that's off the table and i didn't get any more additional information on that one so if we go back to palladium where it's mixed out of 180 units what are we talking about percentage wise 80 20 70 30 50 50 what are we looking at let me ask the developers here ryan can you give us if you could go to the microphone please yeah just real quick thank you ryan combs with palladium with the developer yes thank you uh about 70 percent of our units would be set aside to serve affordable and and about 30 of our units would be a full market rate and so what that does is that allows us to be able to serve the full spectrum of the housing need in the area and and we do think it's a benefit to be able to work with the housing authority to be able to meet some of the needs of the city and to be able to build a relationship for the future that answer your question well i have one more question okay but the 38 percent of the units that are market rate would still be uh tax exempt is that correct yes that the whole development is tax-exempt and when it when we say market rate that just means that there's no restrictions to them they likely will still be 20 percent below market that just means that there's no there's no restrictions that the irs puts on tax credits there's none of those restrictions to those units well my point is if we 're going to give tax credits to a complex apartment complex it needs to be 100 percent affordable housing and not and not give i'm sorry not give you a pass or a buy on 30 percent of the project because with such a shortage of rental units in the city you know you're going to be able to rent those out my opinion at at market and so i just want council to consider that in terms of if we're going to give a tax credit then let's give a trap tax credit because we're really trying to help a certain number of families that need affordable housing so i i just wanted to be clear on that and to make sure that council was clear on that too and to pivot to councilwoman big gary's comment which i think has merit that instead of saying we could do this or we could do this or we could do this i think we make it a condition to approving the resolution that x number percentage of that if it's if it's legal is applied to veterans housing for an example so if we're going to provide a resolution and we have the power to put some strings on it i just think that's a smart move and one more comment if i can i think it brings up a bigger problem and i'll pivot off of councilman rodent that it's about planning in this city it's about planning it's about small area plans being in place so when these developers come in to a part of of our city we already have kind of an established guideline here's what the stakeholders in the neighborhood have said they're okay with it makes it easier on the developer so you're not having to jump through a lot of hoops with the city trying to figure out what you could do and where and are you going to get support but it really helps our city move forward in terms of concrete planning so i know i talk about these small area plans a lot and i just support our planning director because i know that's a priority for the planning department as well with the small area plans but if we fast forward four or five years and those small area plans are in place in this city it will make all of these discussions so much more effective and we will have already had from the neighborhood and the stakeholders what they're comfortable with so mayor pro tem yeah and i think most smaller area plans i 've seen have been created to keep this kind of stuff out so i'm not sure that 's the long-term solution for planning i think we need to get over some nimbyism in our community that but that's a longer conversation these tax credit rules in terms of what percentage this isn 't a city designed system this is federal and state policy correct that that's correct so we can't tweak that on our end to say no and what you really have to remember which is what ramon was talking about earlier is that this is an irs program that's set up to incentivize private development that the housing authority is now leveraging to take advantage for the for the city's benefit but they are still there they still have to be developments that are financially feasible on their own and so what's what's good about that to answer councilwoman your your concern is why would we as a developer and if i don't need to go no no no i don't mind you i just don't want i don't want a presentation from the developer if ramon can answer that i'm just really trying to keep this in a policy discussion instead of getting i guess my question is as i think we're coming around some good questions should it be 100 should be 80 i don't know what goes into incentivizing these projects not not being in that myself but my thought is we have the value in this discussion of having the denton housing authority who knows infinitely more about these issues than any of us so i think as it relates to what should be the strings attached what should be the percentage they're the ones kind of i think they're saying let us initiate these partnerships these memorandums of understandings and then them come to us to say here's a project we think works we think fits the community's needs based on what we're seeing and i'd much rather as a counselor i mean i think we can have some policy discussion on that but i think these guys are heading the right direction and could probably set those strings attached better at in that agreement between them and the developers than trying us to initiate that well and and so if we could go to the slide where you said the deed it was the proposal of the funds for the dent housing authority and this is and i know sherry i had a meeting with you sort of ad hoc there this is really um because we're looking at nine and a point eight million dollars let's say the same for discussion purposes we move forward with this you're looking at and i don't know how many of these would make but we got some revenue stream and then we have a a diminishment of revenue stream not only to us the city of dentin taxpayers but also to the school district and the county so we're making unilateral decisions to some degree that's going to affect some of the other taxing entities which we certainly need to be be aware of that but my whole point in bringing this discussion up is with that additional revenue i would want that additional revenue if we're going to be the ones that provide those conditions we work with the housing authority we enter into this interlocal agreement we put these contract terms together i would need to see more specifically because i'm just going to be truthful i mean five percent of 600 you know uh six hundred thousand dollars a year is thirty thousand dollars and if if i as a council as mayor are going to approve this kind of policy shift i would want to see very specifically and and be approving of as a council body what those additional funds are being especially if we're going to use it as a way to fund some initiatives that right now nobody's doing so this is helpful but that that doesn't give me a whole lot of meat on and i'm not saying we have to have that today i'm just saying that's what we i would need to see more of to be able to make a an absolute decision on if we move forward in this with this new paradigm or not that's just me i'm only one of seven up here so that's that that was yes council member hawkins and forgive me if i've missed this so if a project is built and it's off the tax rolls and we move families in and emergency services or any kind of city services needed who pays for those services there if there's no property tax being collected and if i'm missing something if dha well i'm just i wanted to know is is that that's what we're talking about yes yes yes that's right that would have been good about our intent that's okay council member craig rey well mayor you make a great point and one of the things that i was thinking here is uh that we may decide that it's worth it for us to lose a little bit of tax revenue property tax revenue for the benefit that we have because we we we are facing these opposing issues of of needing more affordable housing we hear that all the time and so that might be that might be we might find some justification in that but i we need to talk to our colleagues especially at the school district to see what the impact would be on them now i and i would want to sit down and talk with them because i know that the funding formulas between the school district and the state are an interesting set of calculations and and it may be that the state makes up for the revenue right and it may be that it doesn't if the state doesn't really make up for the cost then then then i would be very reluctant to make a unilateral decision that has a very negative impact on them so i think that that as we're embarking on this and and i think that today is the first time that it is really hit my radar screen that this partnership would mean that the properties would be tax exempt well and just to add one of the first thing you said in six years there's been no new affordable housing built but there's been 1200 households so i fully understand that there's a need and the city probably i can't figure the exact dollar but we are paying right now in a in a way too so i just wanted to add that i understand so and again the purpose of the discussion is to bring this policy issues and they are policy issues yes we do have specific projects on on in the pipeline for you to consider but this is a major policy you know as you look to add in affordable housing in your community how do you want to go about it who do you want involved in that decision making process you know these developers that apply for this nine percent credits submitted the application contacted the city without coming to the housing authority first they started contacting us in january you know if you have a policy of how this council is going to consider tax-free applications and approving resolutions for everyone to know if that policy includes the housing authority developers know where the first door is and start thinking and start planning the housing authority your point you're the commissioners and so it's not an extension but a creation of the city and so it should be working together in what the policy is in development affordable housing in denton and how can the two work together to make that accomplished to accomplish that and so it's a matter of letting everyone know what the process is in this community who the actors are and who you need to work with to make it happen question do and this seems to be sort of a new approach uh by the dent housing authority as far as the memorandum of understanding has there been conversation with the school district or the county as far as the impact from a revenue perspective uh like the veranda honestly and i i might have heard it but i don't remember hearing it that i knew it was tax-exempt but so i guess it would be automatically you would think it would be tax-exempt across the board but i didn't know that it was tax-exempt with the school and the county so i think that's a so in your discussions uh during this process with veranda and these has there been is there a process whereby the school and the county are brought into that discussion mayor when we were doing going through the development process for the veranda we did meet with the school superintendent and we did receive a letter of support from the school superintendent for the veranda okay the 322 units okay we have not been in discussion with them with the other developments yet so is that a process that even though it's not a formally prescribed process by statute is that a process that is important to you as far as to get that to get that buy-off from the school district no them knowing the implication is maybe additional services required for you know a certain school in the school district and also uh that's a good question though i want to know the answer to on the revenue side but if it's tax-exempt does does the state make that up that's a great question not so somebody could work on finding out that answer that'd be great but we do um part of the development process is we do like to talk to all the entities that may be affected by with the school district certainly because the children and so we like to let them know this project is in we're discussing this project this is where it's located is there a bus service do the kids have to walk to school how far you know what we do talk to the school district about great all right on the nine percent applications uh it is a requirement of the application that the city the county and the school district we notify that the application has been submitted but how much more discussion have been had on those nine percent i'm not aware of but the resolution only has to come from the city and either the four percent or nine percent that's correct question yes councilmember gary two things one i think from a policy standpoint and i really appreciate what you said about getting some direction from us in terms of policy there's nothing that would stop us from saying you know we'd like to see letters of support from the other taxing entities before these issues come up before us that's the first suggestion that i would make the second is i've been looking to find out where i guess i can't i can't find any of the fiscal information about the denton housing authority so i'm not able to see you know year over year what money has come in what's been spent is there a place that i can find that i you know i know that the housing authority gets a external audit annually and so the audit financial statements are available uh of the agency it's not online though i don't know okay no thank you again the the request of the council's your consideration of this policy we've been talking about that if you're going to consider issuing resolutions for both four percent and nine percent we would like for you to consider that those requests include a memorandum of understanding with the housing authority indicating that they work with the housing authority they're partnering with the housing authority and moving forward so that's a request uh on on the policy issue salty rochelle and i am a board member for the dent housing authority and within that board we have a second board which is the dent and public facilities corporation which is kind of our building arm of the dent housing authority and i'm president of that building arm one of the things in excuse my vernacular but we talk about this all the time in our meetings is if all we're doing is housing we are just pissing in the wind and i mean by that when we ask a developer to come to our community and work with us there's certain things we're providing we're gonna we're gonna provide that tax advantage we're gonna provide the fact that the reason they're not just they're not just partnering with us because we got a bunch of pretty faces on our board you can tell what a difficult situation that would be if that was the case uh they're partnering with us because we bring something to the table that we have to offer one of the things we bring is we've got a list of three thousand people that are looking for home for homes to to put their families in uh which we try to keep as current as possible it costs us money to put that out we did it a year and a half ago we're in the process of doing it very soon again uh when we get this next property a little closer to being online that we'll have a current list of people to those people don't have vouchers those are people on the waiting list to obtain the vouchers that's what they'd like to do is they'd like to be able to have an opportunity to be a part of that yes okay so we so we operate units that you saw 150 24 114 uh a very small inventory at this point in time why would a partner want to come to us and be a partner with the dentin housing authority well we've got the waiting list we've got a tax advantage that we bring to them if you have a 41 million dollar project and 27 million dollars of that is building cost and you don't have to spend 8.25 percent paid back to the state then you have some revenue that's coming to you from the entity that's the non-profit that's a dent in housing authority okay so in this particular case at 41 million dollars 27 percent you're talking about 2.25 million dollars worth of revenue stream as we come in as a partner with their construction cost at probably about 35 percent of the of the funding that would go toward the construction part of that project part of its land part of its cost of operations when it comes to the cost of operations we come in as an equal partner okay so the daily operations that continue on for the next 15 to 30 years we participate in also at 50 percent so you can see there's an opportunity to bring money back to our community to answer your question about the mix and why a mix is sometimes good for us we've seen more and more because of the nimb situation is that we don't want to concentrate populations into all low income what we call now workforce housing all market housing the advantage and what it forces the developer to do when he has a mix of units is it is it forces him to see i've got to compete against other people i've got 16 other units out there that are also in this marketplace that we're competing against okay in order for him to have market units in there he's got to bring a better quality i mean we've had people that have come to us and wanted to build bedrooms that were nine foot by nine foot for our people and we've told them we can't work with that criteria it's not something we could market or would want our people to be into long term okay uh it's not something that that we can sell because they're going to get into our units and they're going to say well there's something else across the street i can go to and they'll go there so there's an advantage for the builder to have that mix that we can offer them and that may change okay uh but with when we talk about the tax advantages when we talk about the situation that we need to do more than just housing we're actively working on our units that we're built bringing to to and we have now in the remanence court uh that they have an after school program that they have a tutorial program they have computers that they can work with that they have someone that is going to be there for summer programs that we operate so all these are things and part of that mix that we bring and trying to discuss with our developed builders that want to be partners with us and what we have to offer besides just pretty faces on our board okay and you can tell what a difficult situation that would be so i hope that clarifies a little bit of where we're trying to go yeah and i believe and this may be for you salty or it may be for somebody else on on i i understand now why the developer would want to have uh the housing authority as a partner because you have some expertise and you have some knowledge you have that that list and you also bring the the uh tax exempt status to the to the property so i guess my question is just the dollars and cents part of it is for um when we saw the the the slide that showed uh the possibility of over 15 years 9.8 million dollars uh does that really represent the the the taxes that we would be collecting uh and and if it is here's what i'm getting at it it might be for me it might be for me okay uh because that would almost be like like dedicating the property taxes from that for affordable housing uh and and if that's the case but but if if they're getting a tax break of of nine million a year and y'all are only getting 0.5 million a year off of it that's not cool that's not that's not a that's not a deal for anybody so i i need to see a little bit more clearly the numbers because it could be that that we could affect the same kind of of of dedication of public funds in a different way that would be more effective so now i need more information that's what happens when you get some information then you need more information exactly you hear what i'm saying what we'd like to be is the clearing house for the city of denton for projects that want to come to town and in that we bring a certain tax advantage for them in that we're going to retrieve for you the dollars that we think that we bring to the table okay that we can bring back to the community we can put into projects with united way we can put into let rent subsidy things we can put into things that have things that that might affect our homeless population our veterans populations and other things that we have and without some sort of control i mean what we've seen is the expansion of what we call today workforce housing we've tried to get away from the term of affordable housing and workforce housing is more an acceptable term when we go to try to sell it to neighborhoods okay we want to want them to realize that we 're going to bring you a very high standard of quality to your community we're going to ask them for the best product they possibly can we're going to ask them for the masonry that we think that we deserve we're going to ask them for the for the population mix that we think will work in a given area we're going to ask them for the square footages of units that are are acceptable within our community so we've got a lot of things i think to offer in the process of trying to get you the very best product we possibly can and get those revenues back to our community if we don't recover them ourselves they're going to go to england or they're going to go to c incinnati or high over they're going to go to to california and so go ahead i 'm sorry one of the things that's not we're going to wrap this up in about five or ten minutes yeah one of the things that that reflected in in that nine point eight million is the right of first refusal for the housing authority to purchase the property for debt only so if it's worth 10 million dollars and the debt is four million we buy for four and we get that equity for the housing authority so i didn't put that in because that's somewhat subjective but that always included that we buy for debt only after 15 years so let me sort of summarize what i've heard at least from what council seems to with additional information that would be helpful in making a final decision on this uh one is and you can use the veranda as a specific example what if it were on the tax rolls based upon their valuation of construction what would be the tax revenue for all the taxing entities that would be available um you know what is exactly the amount of revenue sharing that's currently uh afforded to the dent housing authority based upon the current mou or contract that's been executed sort of that could be a case study of here's what and then also what would be helpful to me to me is a more specific even not necessary to a budget level but if you have this much additional revenue what exactly are you going to what are you proposing to do it i mean to say we're going to all of a sudden bring in an additional 600 700 thousand dollars a year and for this body to make that decision without some really clear direction on specific uses of those funds i think it would be it'd be difficult for me to do that so i think we're in the still in the beginning stages of this one real quick question the bonds are financed over how many years are these 30 years 40 year bonds 30 year bonds say that typically 30 year bonds okay all right okay so after 15 years you still have i mean you've paid off some but you still have a majority of that the majority of the debt that was so that's sort of what i heard so i want to allow my colleagues to chime in for additional information that that would be helpful yes councilmember gary um i had also requested the financials of dha since they're not online if we could get that um also i would just say well the legal opinion if you don 't mind clarifying what it is that the council is authorized to do on their own versus what we have to do through the dha and then lastly i would just make a really broad suggestion that it's we're really putting the cart before the horse to be asked to make a policy decision without having the financial implications of it so if we could please have that discussion far far ahead of when we get to the point that the council is being asked to make a decision and i'll use the senior tax freeze as an example we had several discussions about the ramifications of that financially well before we were ever asked to you know have a voting discussion on it i think that's really the appropriate way to approach these types of discussions that can potentially have a huge impact on the bottom line for the city for years to come yes councilmember so um after seeing the information requested i would also um like to see that but i would like to ask council to keep the discussion open and ongoing um for the possibility of of this and i'm glad you used workforce housing because the people that live in these apartments are working i mean they are making money i mean so um anyway just to keep that in mind sure let me add the tax credit units the rents are not subsidized the rents are lowered a little bit because of the tax credit equity but the folks who live there have to pay that rent right they've got to have an income to pay that they are working right yes council member hawkins and to add just you know some letter or something from the school district or the county if they're going to want to participate something like that okay anything else all right thank you for your patience thank you very much i appreciate great information i appreciate that thank you very much all right well uh anybody want to take a break it'll take five minutes you move on let's move on okay yeah the next one's pretty pretty quick i think um yes i'm sorry somebody said mayor oh oh you're wrapping up the presentation sorry i just want some direction from from council as to the next steps uh as i know i've dotted out all the information that y'all requested is it a item i think it's no i think it's bring back the information we'll have to have another work session because i this wasn't a discussion to vote on a policy before having that it's really just an information gathering process and now i think we have the the elements of information that we can to to consider again in a little bit more detailed manner yeah is that is that that's clear okay yes thank you sorry about that ron no problem thank you all right we'll move on to agenda item 3b which is receive report hold discussion give staff direction regarding the administration of elections thank you good afternoon mayor and council give them just a second to yeah yeah okay the purpose of this item is to give the council some additional information on the administration of elections and denton and also to get direction from the council on your preference for adding additional polling locations in the city and we have denton county elections administrator frank phillips here to provide some um general information about elections welcome good afternoon mayor city council members wanted to introduce a couple of people uh kerry martin he's our deputy elections administrator and paula pascoe she's our contracts manager 90 of your interaction with our office will probably be through paula so i'm just fyi so i'm here to answer any questions you may have and apparently you're looking for some direction for may council yes councilman wadney welcome back to denton county thank you it's good to be back and i'm the one who brought this to council okay because the city has grown both in terms of population and in terms of sprawl with people living further and further away from established polling locations on election day okay so we would like to make that clarification and that differentiation that we're not talking about early voting locations because i think the county does a fabulous job in creating multiple um and easy to get to voting locations across denton county during early vote okay but when it comes to election day each of the four districts has one polling location in some of those districts the one-way drive time is 30 minutes so my opinion it is not a conducive environment to bringing voters to the polls on election day when they have such long drives and that as our city continues to grow we need to and i actually brought it up with our city secretary last year but i was too late for anything to be done so i brought it up earlier this year and i actually brought it to council in september so now it 's february and we're having that discussion so we had a map and there was a possible polling location in district three that was an addition and i believe there was another district that had an additional uh voting location can somebody remind me of that other district were these requests that you had made or okay so they all they all have additional suggested yeah so um council member was and you had requested us to look at adding an additional polling location in each district and so what the map that we provided in your background is um the four current election day polling locations and then we looked at potential city-owned facilities that could be used as polling locations in each district and so those are the the dots in the red here we're of course not limited to using city facilities as polling locations and the school district is currently going through an inventory to see which of their campuses district wide may be available for polling locations so so the the exact locations of those additional polling sites is flexible in terms of who controls the facility um in talking with the county the cost of each of these is we think going to be somewhere around five thousand dollars per additional location um but the that cost won't be finalized until we know the number of jurisdictions that will have an election and whether or not the school district would be interested in cost sharing for that so if the school district is not interested in cost sharing the city would bear the full cost of those locations and I want to ask frank to share a little bit of the other limitations that you have on adding additional polling locations yeah the only thing i would add to what alison just said is if because in may we all enter into a joint election with each other so if denton isd is in uh have an election at the same time that you are and and they are offering up sites you will share in those costs because you're both benefiting from the use of that facility now keep in mind if we can use city facilities or schools that keeps our costs down because we typically don't have to pay for those to use them do keep in mind that your cost will go up if there's fewer entities participating in the election the more entities that are participating we're spreading the cost amongst everybody so your cost will go down but it is a good it's just a guideline roughly five thousand dollars a polling site now that that fluctuates it depends on again how many entities are in the election and the site we're using i do want to say that i'm sure you've read tons of stuff in the paper over the last few months about um dent county elections and equipment uh we're in the process the county is of we're at least discussing the acquisition of new voting equipment hopefully when that happens we're going to at least double the amount of equipment we have now so one of the things that i have to keep in mind when because trust me the city of denton is not alone and asking for new additional polling locations uh everybody is really i have to keep in mind how much equipment i have on hand now now that doesn't necessarily mean you can't get another location that it means we have to reduce the amount of equipment that's at each location which may not be a problem it's still a convenience for voters if we can add additional polling sites and even if it doesn't have the same amount of equipment that four sites would have but we really look for guidance from our cities on what they want and then typically we work that out in your case with jenn ifer on what we can do now i always hesitate to stand up here and make you a promise of any specific polling sites at this point because i don't know who's going to be in the election in may yet we won't know until uh february 17th i believe is the last day to order the election for may so we'll know uh in about 10 days all of the entities that will be in the election and that tells me how many sites i can have to your point about cost sharing it's always been that way so that you know adding some polling locations in addition to what we have uh we've always cost shared with the other municipalities across denton county in the may election because that's when the municipal elections take place so it isn't anything new it's nothing new but you have every time you add a site you add personnel which adds cost exactly which adds cost to not only you but to everybody else in the election and they are all asking for additional sites as well most are especially the school districts because we're growing absolutely and it's part of the growing pains and my point is um instead of just keeping status quo and pretending we're not growing to you know try to get ahead of it because we are growing so question on what is the deadline of time because that's what i ran out of last year on trying to to you know get what is the deadline for us to agree to the sites and to have a guesstimate of cost from your office as soon as february 17th passes will be notified from everybody that's in the election so then we can produce our cost estimate so paula how how soon after that can we do it about the middle of march and uh i mean we i mean i understand your request so you don't have to re-submit that request we we have your request just to clarify your question council member wasney i think um we're looking for a direction from the council today as to if you would like for staff to pursue um additional polling locations do you want them in each district and if you have a preference for what those sites are so that we can work with the county proactively to kind of line up what those sites are and then we'll have an estimate of what the cost is once the filing deadline has passed we have several people queued up for questions so uh we're going to go with council member haw kins council member gregory and mayor pro tem and anybody else wants in after that thank you mayor i'm not fully convinced that this is going to help voter turnout but i'm hoping that this council does decide to add some polling locations and if we do commit to doing it this may i want us to do it next may too absolutely and that's what we would ask of you a lot of times we'll have jurisdictions ask for additional polling sites because they have something specific on their uh election coming up and then it seems like after that passes they tend to want to drop them and that hurts us sure you know if we commit we want the same commitment from you that we're going to be able to continue to utilize these sites okay i do agree with you i don't know that it will increase your turnout it is definitely more convenient for the voters okay well here's a different kind of question uh as you see by the map you know you have some uh districts that are more compact and some that are much less compact and so in early voting we have a number of early voting sites that are fairly convenient and it doesn't matter what district you live in you can go to any voting site and you can vote just say what district you're in show them your card give them your address so my question is we might not need to have nearly as many additional sites if on election day on saturday in may you don't have to go to the district two polling site to vote in district two that if you if you happen to be closer to you you see down there the green area way down on the south part of town close to lake louisville you live there you can go to the district one side or if you're over at dean your park for a ball game you can go to the district four site so the question is on election day is there anything that would prohibit people from voting at any of those sites and just picking the ballot for their district there is we have to on election day just because of the structure of the election code during early voting you can vote anywhere matter of fact not just in the city of denton if i live if you're in our joint contract if i worked in carolton lived in denton and it's more convenient for me to vote in carolton i can vote in carolton on the city of denton so it's the state election laws exactly but on election day i have to assign you to a specific location now not to go too far into this part of our allocation of equipment or acquiring new equipment will also include where their dent on county is going to remain a precinct based county the way we are now which is exactly what we're talking about or if we're going to go to a vote center county some counties their limited number in the state are allowed to become vote centers and a vote center county does exactly what you're asking for it's basically like early voting even on election day but you can reduce the number of polling sites that you have not that we would advocate that necessarily but gives you that potential so that's a decision the county is uh gonna have to make also may i have a question um yeah i don't i don't have any heartburn one way or the other i certainly would like to see more voter turnout um i know stats just because i kind of nerdily follow these things in local voting uh local elections the trend line is shooting way up in terms of the number of people who early vote at least in the city of denton so much so 2015 it was 63 percent of the total voter turnout was early vote right and we saw mail-in ballots are increasing because of a change in law i think that made that easier to do because they've allowed people to make annual applications right now and people that prior to allowing a voter to vote uh submit an annual application they would have to submit submit one for each election and so what that's done is people who normally did not vote in a mail election they now get a mail ballot and i just point that out because again we saw from 2013 13 mail-in votes to 2014 754 and that's the difference right and so i think the data should to some degree should drive our investments in this and it seems like the behavior of voters increasingly is more and more towards mail-in voters if they qualify more and more towards early voting if they qualify you know but i even know for people who run campaigns your goal is to get everyone there early voting right you can track them right absolutely and you can kind of see them from time to time so we're talking about a potential expenditure of twenty thousand dollars which isn't huge in order to increase people's voting opportunities but at the same time i'd much rather say if we're seeing the trends going on the other direction then i i i almost want to make that easier for folks right now like an extra early voting site or something like that or perhaps um you know so anyways again i don't have heartburn one or the other but it just seems like more and more people are choosing not to vote on election day i agree yeah keeling i just know if you had one okay so i have a question um there's the one now at north branch um the proposed would be at waterworks park um so would that be divided up and so if i lived anywhere in district two could i go to either one of those spots or would if i was used to going to one and i got you know how would that work would it be divided up by prec inct or is it pretty much open because that would be kind of confusing we're gonna have to break it down by voter precinct and because that's how we program yeah i don't yeah yeah it is confusing yes yes council member was oh well council member gary yeah um i would be in favor of additional sites for district three and district two seems like the greatest need um for district three would be for robeson because they're so far away from that polling station and for district two would be the preserve at pecan creek they're very far away from the polling station as well so that would be my preference yes well but it's not just robeson ranch take a look at how far-flung district three is you know it's everybody south of university that it's an issue to try to get um up to north lakes park and so when you drive down 377 for example and you see all the residential developments that are along there it's a hurdle to get across university it's been a hurdle since construction started it's still a hurdle and now we have construction on bonnie bray it's just it's the the vast distance to get from one point of the district to the other so to your point in terms of you asked for council direction i like fire station seven as a potential um vote location because it allows basically all of those neighborhoods and if you look at three it's so much easier to hop on john carroll and go south go vote at vintage than it is to fight your way north you have a a real concentration of um of people too who again um 377 and john carroll just easy to hop on and come south vote uh because you can get off on vintage boulevard vote and then go home it's just an issue to get all the way up to north lakes park so um i i'm in a fight for district three um and say we need another voting location i think district two is really sprawled and big as well and you know people look at their vote card they they know here's my precinct here's where i vote so we talk about the low turnout in city elections i want to give our voters the benefit of the doubt and there are people who just they want to vote on election day and while we have mail ballots it's restricted 65 and over so um early vote yes but if you commute monday through friday uh the early vote is tough too in weekends you're scrambling trying to get all your stuff done because you're going to start community again on monday so i come back to election day is a sacred day and uh we need to afford those voters the opportunity uh and the city needs to step up and uh add that additional polling location okay so council uh direction yeah mayor pro tem well i'd like to think through some of the ramifications of just adding some for some districts and not for others um and then i i want to dig in deeper onto this requirement to split it by precincts because it may not solve the problem for people south of the university to put something down by there depending on how that precinct breakdown is um and the other thing i'll just put this out for anyone trying to attract new voters to the city or younger voters who are maybe moved since they last registered to vote the biggest voter confusion in our town is people don't know what council district they live in and maybe they're registered for a different council district and it's hard enough to say here 's your forced place on election day figure out which one you're in here's your one two three four now you have to subdivide that by precincts which you probably have less knowledge of as to which precincts you're in um i don't know part of me wants to uh focus group it to some folks to say which is easier which process makes the most sense because if our goal is to make it easier for folks i think we are adding a complication by subdividing it by precinct did somebody have their hand up yes if we're looking for direction i would wanted staff and all ison to kind of dive into all that because we could be here for a couple hours just and that's what so that's the direction okay gotcha okay if i could make a suggestion for us um i think i'm hearing that you're interested in adding that but want to see what that would look like overlaid with the precinct map and in district two i'm hearing that you may be more interested in having an additional location further south um so what we can do is work with the county overlay their precinct map with what we think would be possible locations um and send that out to the council and and maybe just have good direction on this next week um if you're comfortable with those yes and then we'll come back to you and and i was i was all for adding additional voting locations until i heard that it was going to have to that for example voting city council voting district three would be divided by precincts i i need to hear from y'all what we would do to notify the citizens you may be living in district three but you can no longer vote on election day at north lakes recreation center you're going to have to go down to fire station seven or wherever i need to know what kind of of implications that would have before i would agree to that because we we we may in an attempt to make it easier make it harder. Councilman Wasney. In response to to that and to council member Roden if you will recall when we voted for president in November you were restricted to your precinct on election day so we had precincts galore going voters knew they had to go to their precinct to vote so let's give the the voter the benefit of the doubt in terms of being smart enough to figure out we can notify but you know in the biggest election of the year people were restricted to their precincts people found their precincts because they wanted to vote. You mean our elections aren't the biggest one in the year? Wow okay so it sounds like we want it sounds like there's a an idea a notion to explore additional voter precincts to bring back some recommended locations for each district i don't i would never want to have a different number in each district and then what how these things get divided up by precinct and what are the notification procedures and just sort of some fact findings such as that is that express the direction? Yes that's good. Okay all right all right thank you thank you thank you very much thank you appreciate it thank you let's take about uh let's come back at two o'clock let's take a break come back at two o'clock we're going to reconvene our meeting of the denton city council on tuesday february the 7th 2017 it is 2 0 5 we are going to resume our work session reports work session report agenda item 3 c receive report and hold the discussion on the proposed city of denton solid waste and recycling department strategic plan good afternoon city manager council members thank you and we're here to talk about the solid waste department's development of our department strategic plan and that was we've had a 20-year plan that was now 20 years old so we were developing the next 15 to 20 year strategic plan for the department in light of the city council's development of their strategic plan so that we could complement and be under that and to do that we brought in a consultant that had expertise in solid waste planning and that with me today to do our presentation is scott pastranak from berns macdonald and i 'll turn that over to him and scott thank you vance and good afternoon mayor council members appreciate the opportunity here to be here with you today to talk about our efforts where we've worked in collaboration with the city of denton solid waste and recycling department staff to develop their strategic plan this has been a very collaborative action-oriented planning process where we convened a group of about 15 to 20 people from across all areas of the solid waste and recycling department as well as at all levels and we've worked with them through a facilitated process to get an understanding of what did they see as as the most important issues that they're facing and then worked with them to prioritize those issues which are known as as the key focus areas and then from there work to build out a plan so that they can identify the specific activities that need to be undertaken to address those activities in the form of various types of strategies and tactics and so the whole idea of this is to have a very action oriented plan also to recognize that no matter how effective an organization is there's always going to be a limitation to the number of key issues that it can work on at any one time and so we very specifically provided instructions that that they needed to come up with with five specific areas to focus on and so we're going to present to you today what those key five areas are within the plan itself is is not only to identify those those key five areas but for each one of those again what are those key strategies and tactics and we're going to walk through at a very high level today what some of those are but what's also in the plan is the schedule of when those activities would be undertaken who the staff are that are responsible for those activities and if there are any external costs or internal costs that are above and beyond just the regular budget items what those costs would be so when we're undertaking a planning process we think that it's really important to have a good understanding of what has happened in in the city prior to starting this this planning initiative and so we worked very closely to have an understanding of not only what was in the the city's current city-wide strategic plan but we also looked back at what was included in the the plan that Vance just referenced that was developed more than 20 years ago and the reason why we thought that that was so important is that the city has done a very effective job of really implementing many of the issues that were addressed and identified as part of that plan nevertheless there are a number of key uh principles or excuse me guiding principles that are still really relevant today and those six items are listed here before you and these were all important issues that were addressed when we were working with staff to develop this strategic plan the first is is focused on the financial side understanding that you must provide cost-effective services to the community the second deals with emerging technologies and this is an area where the city of Denton has been a true leader in the past with activities out at the landfill in terms of prolonging the capacity of of that site by circulating liquids or leachate into the facility and then more recently looking at and implementing programs to divert construction or building type materials as well as even more progressive programs to look into now issues such as as mining recycl ables out of the landfill and then the third item is is focusing on recognizing that solid waste is is a resource and in looking at what can be done from not only a recycling perspective but then at the landfill to maximize the extraction of gas to use that for energy purposes then number number four deals with with risk in terms of minimizing the risk to on the financial side as well as to human health and the environment and then number five was was focused on educational not only with schools within the local community but also how could the city collaborate with local universities and then number six is to minimize the impact of solid waste on the environment and public health so a key part of the of the plan was to understand and we worked with staff to specifically develop the mission and vision of of the solid waste and recycling department so the the key of hopefully an effective vision and mission statements is is to be able to communicate something very concisely as far as in the case of the mission that it is to deliver service excellence through innovative and responsible resource recovery and then the vision which is kind of like your your north star in terms of making sure that whatever you're working on that you're headed in that right direction is to look at managing waste as a resource. This is the the organizational chart of the department so we're not going to go through this in in a lot of detail but we still wanted to convey this to to the city council so that you can have an appreciation of the the breadth of breadth of services that are provided but I think more importantly to recognize that the city and this was a part of the planning process was reevaluated the organization of the department to make sure that it was in alignment with the key issues that were a part of the strategic plan and so just at a high level to look at this organizational chart the two boxes on the left focus on on operations be it collection as well as at the MSW facility which is also known as EcoWorks which includes the the landfill composting facility as well as the recycling operations and then the middle two boxes deal with a combination of combination of environmental issues as well as the financial administration and then the two boxes on the right are more outward or public facing in terms of what's provided from a planning and public outreach perspective as well as Keep Denton Beautiful. I did notice that on your agenda for this evening that you're going to recognize the 30th anniversary of Keep Dent Beautiful so that's a probably a good combination of issues to be considering today on on your council agenda so congratulations on Keep Dent Beautiful being a part of this community for such a long time. So let's let's now talk about again it's just the the five key focus areas and so they're they're summarized here and then we have just just one slide dedicated to each one so we'll take just a couple of minutes at the most per slide to be able to communicate what some of those key activities are and so we'll go through those individually. Before we do that though one of the things that we want to emphasize is that these five key focus areas represent a combination of some issues that have been addressed and important to the city for a very long time as well as some that that are maybe newer in their ideas. Also some of these may already be are being successfully addressed on the part of the city. I mean the city is already regarded well regarded here in Texas and nationally for a number of its recycling and diversion programs. Also safety is a really important issue to the city as well but just during the course of the planning process those were a couple of examples of where the city said you know what these these are really important we want to make sure that that they remain important to us going forward so they were two of the five key focus areas. So starting with focus area number one which which is focused on increasing recycling and waste minimization. There is a currently a 40% recycling goal in the city and historically and this is really pretty common with so many cities across the country is that there's been a more of a focus on on the residential sector but one of the the really focused discussions that we had as a part of this planning process was to continue that definitely on the residential side but to recognize that there is a significant need to look at increasing recycling for businesses as well as for the multifamily sector. So there are a number of strategies that were identified and are in the process of being implemented to address that as a part of the planning process. Do you have a question? Yeah go ahead sorry. So there is a currently a 40% recycling goal do you know how close we are to that? Sure so on the on the residential side it's it's very close. It's somewhere in the mid 30% range and that's a number that continues to evolve and on the commercial side it is significantly lower. One of the the key issues that we did talk about though as a part of the planning process and this is actually a part of a larger discussion going on nationally is how important is it to really even measure recycling goals based on a pure percentage basis and the reason for that is the just the composition of the waste stream and the recycling stream is continuing to evolve and just as another example of the leadership here in Denton one of the things that in addition to to still keeping that 40% recycling goal was to look at additional metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of the recycling program and to look at how many families or single family homes as well as businesses actually participate in the recycling program and so there are specific metrics and goals associated with both of those topics in the plan itself. Any other questions? Regarding metrics and goals is there a way to quantify the um i guess the weight so rather than saying you know we get this percentage of households we say this is the actual net weight of this particular waste stream and is there a way i guess is there a way to quantify that in terms of cost to the public? There so the in the plan and in another planning studies that we've done those are definitely metrics that that have been evaluated and then in the last couple years we did complete a financial cost of service and rate design study for the city so that does break out a lot of the key costs or key costs associated with the number of the programs which would address recycling as well. It seems that we've identified some time back that we could increase our recycling goal however you want to measure that goal if if our if the dentin development code was a little bit more clearly stated and specifically stated regarding new construction for commercial and for multifamily because right now the way it's stated some of the developers say it doesn't say specifically that i have to build a revetment that's big enough for both solid waste and recycling and and it seems like that we've identified that for i think three or four years i've been aware of that is one of the do we have a specific timeline when we plan to get that fixed so that so that the development code is is clear that all new construction for commercial multifamily have recycling containers available so i'll let vance answer the the detailed question of the timing but i will mention that specific to the to this issue for the first goal that is the the first key action step that is identified but as far as the up-to-date status we will do we will come back to you this spring to talk about that subject and how we can implement that improve the the design criteria and even the requirement perhaps to improve the amount of commercial recycling beyond residential thank you one thing in regards to that because i think the problem becomes when you have of course large multifamily developments that will need four eight i don't know what the largest yardage is on a dumpster then you pretty much can build that but when you have smaller developments who aren't going to be using you know but you have to you have to put in there what's our minimum size dumpster four yards three yards so you put three two three yards in there one for recycling one for for regular refuse there's no way they'll even come close to filling those up well then it becomes a magnet for people who are driving around looking for place so we've got to really i really hope that we try to address this issue very comprehensively on not to we do want to increase commercial recycling no doubt about it but i hope we can find some ways that will really be tailored to project sizes and the like that you know using carts maybe if you've got so many units or less that you know so i just one size doesn't fit all in this and it can really be a disincentive quite honestly right no i think that's that's actually an excellent point and that actually i think will be in the process of being addressed by by city staff because one of the key action steps is to work with businesses to actually go out in the field and to talk with them to understand what their needs are try to understand what's in their in their waystream so that so that the city can then provide levels of service that are most appropriate to fit their needs and i think there is also a very much to your point mayor recognition that servicing commercial businesses is is not necessarily the same as servicing multi-family apartment residents and so you've got to strike that balance so that you can minimize some of those issues that you identify so so the good thing is both of the questions that you all just raised are directly identified as specific specific action items within this plan and so going back council member gregory for your question the target completion date for that is that it's ongoing until the second quarter of 2018 when the code update is finalized so that's it's kind of the the level of detail that we got into the into the plan there's also a recognition that this is fluid and so to the extent that say for one one reason or another an issue gets either accelerated or maybe slows down this this plan can be updated accordingly so the next well we comment on that is it it doesn't seem like a particular item like this would need to wait for the entire code to be updated and that update has been delayed several times so that so that we we probably missed a lot of opportunity and so unless unless this is part of a really big set of gears where there's a lot of other moving parts that it has to mesh with i'd prefer to see it come sooner than than 2018 council member riggs i agree so the the second key focus area is to maximize landfill airspace utilization the city of denton has a very significant resource and asset in your landfill and so to have that last is as long as you can is in the interest of of the city and so there's a number of things that have been done to minimize the quantities of material that go into the landfill and so this is a continued focus of this plan so one of the key things that has been done in the past is to build a recycling system that can divert construction and demolition material and so part of this plan is to continue to grow that program to expand the reach of what's known as the building materials recovery program the city of denton is also embarked on a pretty innovative program to look at to look into actually mining of the landfill to recover recyclables and then reclaim soil from old landfill cells and then denton has also been a a long time leader here in in texas and again nationally by recirculating the leachate or the liquids in the landfill as that helps to speed the decomposition of the waste so that you can again gain more airspace as well as to generate more gas sooner to be able to recover that for energy so those are just some of the examples of what the city is proactively doing in that regard i was thinking the other day i was seeing the year after of the tornado the christmas tornadoes that hit east of dallas and mesquite and all like that and so many houses that had to be just completely raised and start over and i was wondering if in the building materials recovery program do we have any kind of a disaster plan if you will if if if we had a a disaster that came through and we had suddenly had a great deal of that material that was coming in have we ever done a desktop scenario for how to deal with a massive amount of that kind of material coming in in a short period of time yes as part of our general natural or man-made disaster plan emergency management we have a plan to handle large and smaller natural disasters ice storms tornadoes and how we would handle that material maximize the recycling where that were appropriate sometimes if the scope is so large you don't get to recycle to the maximum but most of those are going to be manageable with temporary storage sites and processing and recycling to the max and we that's another reason we have our building material recycling operation all of the material that comes in in open top roll-off containers we process we're getting diverting greater than 60 percent of that material that comes in from construction sites primarily so that's a very successful program thank you so the third key focus area is one that i briefly mentioned earlier and that is of safety and the reason why this rose to to become one of the the key five areas is really just an outcome of the number of very active operational programs that the city has both on the collection side as well as at the eco works facility and so it's just really important to make sure that the city would continue a culture of safety and to promote that on a departmental wide basis and just one of the examples that that we'll mention is that the the department decided to implement what's known as a stop work authority policy which just means that anybody within the organization if they're involved with with an activity or maybe if they just see it and they identify something that that's regarded as being unsafe then they can then say hey let's let's go ahead and stop this operation until we can resolve this issue and that's that's something that is um wouldn't say that everybody in in the industry does that but it's it's something that in our in our regard very proactive organizations will will put that that type of policy in place and so from our perspective and i think the city staff agree with this you can never do too much to to really have a focus on on safety so then the the fourth area of of key focus it deals with increasing efficiency which also has a direct correlation to remaining cost effective and so this is where and we did work with staff to develop a number of of metrics related to operational efficiency both at on the collection side as well as facility wise for example at the landfill so that so the city would be held accountable to meet or exceed industry standards within the operations there's also a recognition that because the city brings in third party customers that this operational efficiency needs to extend to those customers as well and so that's the the focus of the second bullet to maintain a short turnaround time which is the the total amount of time that say a third party truck would spend on site at the facility so to to make that as as reasonably brief as as possible and so then the the last area of focus number five is is on community satisfaction and i think the real driver for this is that probably more than any other department in the city solid waste and recycling has more interaction with with with your residents and businesses on a day in day out basis they're out there every day collecting refuse and recycling as well as working with a number of customers out at the eco works facility so so here the focus was to ensure that services are both accessible as well as convenient to your customers and then to create a culture of excellent customer service and so again there's a number of activities that are associated with with achieving that so that really summarizes what we wanted to communicate today in a pretty quick amount of time so if you all do have any additional questions we'll be happy to to answer those council member we heard yesterday and last month in the council committee on the environment that there had been a pretty that we were having an increase in the amount of methane emissions from the landfill area and that that when we asked why they said well that might be due to the fact that there had been about a 51 percent increase in solid waste flow in the last three or four years and also that we're having to actually just flare some of the methane that's coming off because we don't have enough generator capacity we have some generators out there to turn some of that methane into electricity but maybe not enough so we we'd ask for more information about why such a significant increase in the solid waste is that from third party customers or do you all need to do some more research before you can answer that kind of question i'll probably need a little time to give you a a better answer but we do we are a regional facility on many of our services and so we do have this sub-regional area around outside of our etj that brings that is collected by the private sector and that they do come in that does represent and i'll have to get you some numbers on how much that is i would say that if you're looking at uh i think that was for some of this information was perhaps discussed with your greenhouse gas yes okay i need to look at that presentation and that that only looks at part of the greenhouse gas production so just because we make more methane doesn't mean it is escaping into the environment well apparently some of it is according to the to the to the data so right what we'd like to do is get a little bit more specifics is that an accurate number and and if it is what can we do to to prevent that or to reduce that does it mean that we need to add some more electrical generating capacity there so that we can burn that as it's available so that we don't just have to flare it off and and then also you know i suppose i would like to i would like to have some assurance uh with the numbers and all that that when we're when we're accepting third-party waste streams that that the the money that we 're getting more than covers our costs okay uh that that the that didn't uh solid waste customers are not in any way subsidizing those costs and yeah generally uh that outside waste actually reduces the unit cost for us for us so we'll give you some more information on that and there are two other critical points i want to come comment on and it's on the excess methane that we're collecting we have a third party uh you know partner that operates our landfill gas to electric power plant we have been asking them to add a second generator and they 've said that it is not economical they can't get payback on adding a second generator so they have refused to do that so we are so we have we are looking at other methods to utilize beneficially utilize that excess gas that's sort of ongoing currently so we will we need to look at that contract too but i mean overall i'm asking these questions but i'll tell you i'm always impressed with the operation and the forward thinking and you have a conference coming up soon you're hosting an international conference um when is that well we have a state conference that we'll be hosting next year about this time okay and we'll have a state conference this year in san antonio we have a an international conference that is going to be actually in the washington baltimore area the baltimore convention center is the is the site that is actually a global solid waste conference and a topic no matter where you are on this globe so not just here in denton so and and many of those topics are you know we look to other people who have solved some of those issues and techniques they've used i'd say the european union has is a little bit ahead of us on some of those emerging technologies and ways to better manage the waste they've been well i understand people are looking to us also and yeah they uh we had 30 countries uh come in here last last month looking at how we do things so they could uh take those back but the other issue very important is is that we have in the last couple years uh we had discovered uh gas at our sort of the edge outside of the landfill we worked on putting in a system to manage that then uh recently well i don't remember the date but say about uh within the last two months we have seen the presence of gas escape out of that landfill not off of the property but in two different locations so we actually uh initiated an emergency purchase to solve that because one of those was an extremely high level of gas and we needed to get that taken care of so you'll see that coming forward uh you know after action approval of that emergency uh request those wells have already been placed in service okay so we are yes no no you can't council member breaks out a question so yeah following back on i'm also on the committee on the environment and we um i am very hard of hearing so okay so i'm also on the committee on the environment and heard the same report as uh councilman greg ory and so we heard that from 2015 um the greenhouse gas was up seven percent and so i understand that that's an issue and i would um also like to explore the need for more generators out there and um my question is if you can get back to me on how often we are flaring okay i can get uh we're actually flaring basically 24 hours a day for the excess gas okay and the reason for that is that we are producing more gas than that one engine will run so that rather than so we've got to treat the gas so that greenhouse gas methane is being produced because we have more mass there that doesn't necessarily mean that those greenhouse gases are being released in high levels of greenhouse gas are being released into the atmosphere because the purpose of that flare and that engine are to take the methane which is 20 plus times more potent greenhouse gas and treat that back down to a co2 level which is you know one 20th of of the greenhouse gas so we're we really want to make sure that our greenhouse gas impact into the environment though potentially high is not actually getting into the environment because we're doing this treatment hey vance if we could if you could just either come back with a work session because we're sort of straying a little bit uh out of posting so yeah it sounds like that this is a very this is an important issue yes yes go ahead so on as far as this are do we have any um composting programs coming up are we looking at any any more um like food waste issues or composting the wastewater program has a different composting program than we do we specialize in source separated organics food waste composting and we want to grow that program as part of our plan yes okay yeah thank you thank you yeah thank you yeah was that the was that the last slide on the presentation yes oh any other questions for vance and our presenter any other questions and it sounds like we might want some a little bit more further detail on the the gas issue out there yeah oh i'm sorry mayor proten i i i just wanted to echo some of the sentiments and you guys make me very proud as a city council member and also as a citizen what you do in fact just this morning my wife had me fill out a bunch of yard waste and i took it out at seven in the morning and it 's tremendous to see the operation i usually will take one of my kids out there because you see well there's the power for the rocks there's the concretes there's all the stuff and it's really just a great example of city government doing its job and uh so anyways thanks for all you guys doing thanks for keeping us on the cutting edge thank you very much and you know this is a team effort and you know from top to bottom you know we we have been working to make these things possible thank you well people come from all over the world to see this this program seriously i mean i entertained some of them the other day you guys are great thank you all very much appreciate that we'll go on to our next agenda item which is 3d receive report hold discussion give staff direction regarding two potential and voluntary annexations thank you mayor mr city manager members of council oops let 's see if i can we'll go over that again no we're not today's work session item is an opportunity to bring forward to you a discussion um potential direction on two properties that the city is uh currently uh under review as far as development uh just to step back a little bit on a little bit history uh there were you know last year there were a couple projects that were developed in the etj in the county and because we don't have land use um jurisdiction they were able to proceed and all that we have um as part of a interlocal agreement with the county is platting requirements so they come through the city to plat but development ultimately is done through the county as far as building permits and anything building related um so as we get planning requests that come through the city uh we often ask ourselves you know does this property should this property be annexed or should it not what are the criteria 's that should be um reviewed against in order to make that decision uh we brought forward to you back in october a set of criteria manual i'm sorry uh annexation criteria uh those criteria is actually are existing in our existing in our uh thanks brian our current code of ordinances however back in 2002 when we created the dent in development code those criteria's were supposed to be repealed or at least expressly repealed they were not so we have them still out in our code of ordinances and we have our done development code which does not speak of annexation criteria so really this um this criteria that we're trying to bring forward to the city council is actually scheduled for next works our next council for adoption through an ordinance so we're gonna repeal the annexation criteria which is currently in the code of ordinances and bring it into the den development code and again that will be something that you guys will see uh next uh next work next council which is february 21st but before we did that we wanted to share with the council some some examples of how that criteria can apply to properties in the etj ones that we are currently seeing being proposed by development by developers to develop in the near future so those two properties um property one which we'll go over is located south of town it's on the north east corner of fort worth drive and um brush creek and the second one is north of town which is uh on the um on silver dome road between ferris road as well and cooper creek road so the first property here shown on this slide is the subject property is identified in this black um outline uh part of the property or development proposed is in the city zone nr1 the other is in the county it's currently unplatted it's made up of approximately 11 acres um and again seven acres of that is currently in the etj the exact count of parcels or tracks is six and what the applicant is proposing is to develop four pads or or parcels the first two would be 4 000 square foot um lots for restaurant use which is in the very corner of the property a 15 000 square foot building uh office uh in this general area here and then the remaining area would be developed with multi-family as you can see the red line delineates where approximately where that city limit line is currently um and so when we saw this we felt that if a development was going to come in and develop something to this effect or to this proposal this is something that maybe the city would consider annexing it fits within our criteria or at least the proposed criteria that we're hopefully going to bring forward to you and hopefully is is adopted so this is one uh property um i believe there's a second one well i know there's a second one the second one is north of town it's an existing mobile home park it's approximately 62.75 acres um the proposal um that the applicant is um i have brought forward is it's existing in this general vicinity here they're willing they 're proposing to expand the mobile home to the undeveloped areas and i'll just show you real quick in a zoomed in area this is the area that they're going to be proposing to add additional 153 proposed leasable lots or pad sites currently the mobile home has approximately 186 leasable leasable pad sites in both situations the properties are currently or will be served by water and sewer the mobile home park is currently served by sewer when they do expand they will be required to connect to our water system the property to the south is not currently served obviously there's nothing there currently however when developed they will be required to connect to both water and sewer in addition to water and sewer electric service is also going to be obviously required with development and in this particular location the dme certification states or shows that the property within the city is served by dme however the property in the etj is it's actually open for two other providers however dme has has explained to me that because we are sole providers for the property in the city limits we would probably most likely be the sole provider for this property if it were to be developed in the next coming months with regards to the property to the north they are currently being served by dme and we will continue to serve them with with electricity that concludes my presentation again the intent of this work session was to bring forward to you two examples of developments that are currently under review by the development services department they are in the etj we see development occurring soon and the request to council today is seeking direction on the potential annexation of these properties again using the criteria that we have drafted i believe you have a copy of the draft ordinance in your backup we see staff sees that they they meet the criteria for proceeding with annexation but again we will we will seek direction from council at this one i think property one makes sense because it's split right in two and it's also kind of right in the middle of everything okay property two just my opinion already out there um leave them alone you know that's just my call um so i would say yes for one no for two okay now it's further north um the loop is here um and if you were uh the um if you were to look at a map uh the water park is just to west of that area so is that so how do you get out there point out for a high geometry it's on ferris right here is it a oh oh oh in our tears yeah right that's where the city limit ends right there but everything that's colored is city property or city limits so they're on on immediately just adjacent to our um abutting city limits we currently provide sewer and with the future expansion uh they would be required to connect to water this is what's got us into problems is when our sewer and our water service goes out beyond our city limits correct where we don't have any control over what's being developed out there but we're providing utility service it all happened down in the foreman road and out there on i think mosh branch and so uh through those ccns and as my understanding right i don't i mean i'm with you on property one i don't have an issue with property two as far as if we were going to property property two is in our etj it's uh will eventually be part of the city if they're developing it i would think that we should go ahead so that it develops to our standards and criteria i'm trying to figure out how i feel on property two uh the costs that are recovered with sewer and water i mean they cover repairs and any work that is done within that etj boundary or yeah i'm looking at how and the answer is yes i don't know how i feel about two i'd probably go with dal ton i really i really like the idea of us staying on top of what's happening on our edges and getting a sense of it ahead of time and and making this decision and and part of me thinks as we see these properties start coming into development there's all sorts of ram ifications for us besides our city utilities it's roads it's everything else that they're butting up against that we will have to deal with the consequences of that but yet have no control over the development of that so i think as a default city position the idea ought to be every time there's some project on our periphery like this because you saw this on next to geier a similar type of a thing right on the edge of us uh multifamily impacting a lot of having to do with the roads right there so i like the idea of putting having a policy that puts us in front of me i think we go after them in these sorts of cases because it is going to be in the city and it's our best interest to make sure it develops according to our criteria just to make clear this site is an existing mobile home park their expansion is an expansion of that mobile home park is that correct that's correct thank you i guess one question is to do an involuntary annexation or maybe an annexation in general probably a little question my understanding is when we do an annexation the default zoning is rd5 correct and so let's just take this example we involuntarily annex that when do they become vested that they could still do the expansion even within our even during the annexation or if we annex that that basically nixes that is that's my question i understand that there's some state law that continued use because it's existing would continue what about the expansion basically there's there's a law that states that an existing use is going to be able to continue its use but there's also a portion of the law that states that if they're beginning to use the property in a specific way within 90 days from the date of the initial first reading of the annexation then they can they've already locked it in at that point so we have 90 days in order to decide whether or not they've actually demonstrated that they've begun to use the property in a certain way since this is an expansion we're pretty much locked into that particular use at that point yeah and my question wasn't to say we want to i want to do this to cut off that use i was just wanting to make sure i understood what the consequences were if any to them as far as being able to to move forward with their business plan and you're hearing you say there's not if the annex that there's not rd5 is how we slot them there is no default zoning per se but they would be required to file a zoning application after the annexation or we would do so and proactively zone them accordingly but since they have to use they're going to be non-con forming anyway okay so so they still would be able to expand without having to necessarily come forward and do a rezoning because they'd have a non-conforming for the expansion they would have to zone appropriately okay well that'd probably be an issue quite honestly okay well the direction let's take them one property at a time seems like one property one there seems to not be any dissenting consensus on that uh property two see it wasn't this in the old days where they said never mind yeah okay so we have one dissenter i don't know what i don't know what that means okay all right good any any word huh okay um it sounds like somebody correct me if i'm wrong that the consensus albeit not unanimous either way is uh to go ahead and move forward on both of these and you know that councilman wasney was against the announcing property to council member briggs still somewhat undecided and council member gary either way okay all right great okay that's it thank you thank you you bet all right agenda item e the city council requests the city attorney's office to brief the council on the texas open meetings act this should only take about five minutes right council we're going to call on deputy city attorney jennifer decurt is to brief this issue so jennifer thank you let me just find my presentation well we actually decided to slow down on the management team as far as being able to do the largest number of slides so we'll see if we get there today oh great i may have one but we'll go over it fairly quickly the actual certified class for this particular information it has to be at least an hour but we're going to condense that and we saved the best for last so thank you mayor city manager and council in the pursuit of efficient time management and since i'm the one who brought this forward initially to council i appreciate the city attorney's office in preparing a whole um outline of the texas open meetings act but to do that justice it really is hours and hours of presentation to go over all of the aspects of the texas open meetings act specifically i brought this to council to have a council discussion not so much a presentation from legal but a council discussion on what subject matter could and should be discussed here and also a council discussion on who may attend and who may not attend in addition councilwoman begheri asked for a discussion about additional training for council members so in light of that request i would sure like to go straight to the the chase of the matter and talk about some of the issues that we kind of want to talk about rather than just having a whole big tutorial because you can go to class all day on this and so i would ask for council input on my request to go straight to some of the issues that we have i don't have an issue with that because legal will get involved as we go from subject to subject any any input from colleagues everything okay mayor pro tem okay all right thank you okay so now then so that means you want to have a council dialogue about the i think couple things that you mentioned in council member begheri mentioned one one is who can be in the meetings and then what are the subject matters for uh close executive sessions is that well and how we reach consensus okay on whether or not it's a closed session okay okay now as far as your first question is concerned who can be in a closed session is what i'm assuming you're asking correct we can start with that okay who can be in a closed session the governmental body needs to be of course in the closed session and whoever is on staff that the government body believes will help with deliberation of the matter at hand and that leaves a little bit to your discretion if it is a person who is opposed to the city in a manner they are not allowed to be in the closed session you certainly can waive any privileges that you have such as attorney client privilege if you bring somebody like a third party in to deliberate with you that's the first question now in open session of course anybody can attend yep go ahead and then we'll go and then we'll come back to council so i with each of these topics i have a kind of a now scenario which is how we do things now and then i offer a suggestion on how i think we can raise the bar on that issue so under this one right now we follow the agenda on city council day with meetings either open or closed based on the agenda but city council has the power to vote on whether or not an item on the agenda should be closed so at the beginning of each council meeting when we're discussing the consent agenda council needs to vote up or down on each agenda closed session item because we have the power to do so as a government authority here so i need consensus from the legal department first that yes we have we have the right as a government body to vote to take something that's on the agenda that's marked closed and actually as a council vote to say no we want to have this item open is that correct that is correct with some exceptions you do have absolute discretion with most items that are considered closed there are two exceptions to that and that's going to be personnel issues they have a right to have it enclosed unless they request a public hearing on the matter also HIPAA related items like medical information you want to keep that private economic development i always call it a hybrid because generally you want to keep it enclosed because it gives you a competitive edge in negotiating terms and things of that nature but also you want to be mindful of the company's trade secrets or proprietary information that they may be providing you as the economic development director or whoever and whether or not you'll be disclosing that in open session so you have to do a balancing act on that particular item but generally all the other ones can be waived of course the attorney client privileged information you have to be very careful in wa iving and that goes for litigation items as well as any legal you know advice that we provide you because it could be detrimental to the city if you actually waive that item but it is in your discretion and you can do so as a body so i just want to point out to the council that that is an option that we have that we have not exercised we very carefully look at the consent agenda and very carefully take things out but we come and the closed is just the closed and what i would offer up is that this council needs to seriously consider on council day taking a look at each of the closed items and having that short discussion you know is it on the table are we open or closed on this and what are the ramifications what are the risks how does it compromise the city if it's held in open session and i would just say on the sake of transparency that it's worth a short discussion at the beginning of council meetings to be able to address those closed because this council has the authority to vote it open if there's a majority of four votes to open it up council member gary i'll second what council member wasney wasney said my concern here really is that i haven't seen the council have any um space within the agenda to exercise that particular right and responsibility that we have because i think it's more than just a right of ours i think we potentially open ourselves up to liability if we haphazardly enter into closed sessions without an actual discussion about what part of the agenda is going to be closed and what part will be open i think we can even parse out these particular items and say well some of it will have been open some of it will have been closed so i'd like to see it at the beginning of our council meetings when we do clarifications i'm sorry at the beginning of the work sessions i think that would be the the best way to do it but with the understanding that we could be in a closed session and decide you know we can have some of this discussion out in the public as well with respect to the people who are in the room again i have i have not seen an opportunity for us to have that discussion in a structured way so for instance at the beginning of our closed meetings we kind of go into closed meeting and that's it but i i think we need to be having a discussion for every single agenda item about who it is that we all agree needs to be in the room that's that's my reading of what's been provided to us and the open meetings act so i think it's a prudent course of action council member greg ory thanks um i suspect that that that you you've touched on two things where we must be in closed session but i suspect that if we 're doing certain economic development discussions that given the fact that that some of those are proprietary some of those they don't want to be identified because they're considering several different sites that it may be that in our the non-disclosure statements that the city manager or the economic development partnership director is involved in that if we had those discussions in an open session that the companies that are considering coming to town will just uh not do it that's correct if they know that that there's going to be a uh a possible debate and in four votes that says well you're going to be exposed there's a possibility that that your competition or that other cities that are competing for those same companies will be able to to listen in and put two and two together i think that's a bad move i think it will be harmful to the city we do compete against other cities for economic development absolutely regarding regarding council input we have an agenda committee and we have two council members on the agenda committee that that are that participate in and looking at the agendas and seeing what's going to be in closed session what's going to be an open session i participated in that for a year as mayor pro tem uh there were times when we in those agenda committee meetings directed staff to do all of the background information that was not proprietary that was not subject to closed meeting to be done in an open session so that people could be aware and then we do our discussions that must be done in closed session in closed session i i trust the the agenda committee on that the third item on who's going to be there the city manager the city attorney look at the agenda items and we have people going in and out of this room based on each agenda item if it's a dme item and if it has to do with property purchases then there's one set of people that comes in if it's a dme item that doesn't include property purchases then some of those people go out because it's dependent on that staff does not know what questions council is going to ask sometimes we don't know what questions we're going to ask until we get into closed session and having all of the staff that has pertinent and invaluable knowledge being in the room to hear the discussion and hear the questions allows for an efficiency in our meetings that it would not allow if if we uh are overly restrictive in who's sitting in here and then we have to pull people and pull them up to speed so that they understand the context of a question so um all of that is to say i'm comfortable with the with with the current way that we're doing things i think that the staff is being very careful about making sure that only those that have a need to be in the the the room for a closed discussion on a particular topic are there and if they're not then they're out of the room uh i don't have any heartburn over any of that at all does anyone have an example of a city that does this beginning of the session debate over closed session items and and voting on each one is there an example of any texas city that practices that it seems odd to me because it seems like in order to even have an an informed discussion on that you talked about knowing all the risks knowing everything we probably need to consult with our attorney and have a closed session to discuss our closed session items in order to be informed and come out i'm struggling to understand the problem that exists i mean can we point to certain closed session items that across the board we've been violating the law or we've been violating trust with our community as a result are we are we willing to point out those specifics just so i understand the specific problem that we're trying to address by creating an entirely new agenda item that seems odd to me to debate and discuss and vote on what gets in the closed session well before we move on i'm eventually i want to hear from our new city manager because i i want to hear what his thoughts are about this and and sorry i didn't touch it so you can speak but anyway because i think that's going to be helpful but yes so council member well my comment was regarding regarding that so i was just going to say that you know we have a commitment now to our city manager providing justification for each closed session and i think that will help quite a bit when council has the discussion so i'm i don't think that there would be an issue with having a spot on the agenda just to say yes everything's great or you know i have a question about that i think just as a reminder there are criminal penalties associated with calling closed sessions that shouldn't be closed sessions or taking closed session information and doing whatever with it that's why cities usually funnel it into a one person final decision maker because they're the ones that carry the risk and that's just just an aside that i wanted to remind you of there are this ranges from class c to class b on the criminal penalties i i don't have any interest in doing this at all uh at the beginning of the meeting looking at every closed session item and discussing who is going to be in the room for each item and i that sounds a very long exercise it sounds uh it sounds like we're trying to fix something once again that isn't broken to me since i've been on council for the last four years our closed session items have been so thoughtfully uh compliantly done that you can see dalton nailed it on the head the people come in and out the door who are needed here and i have no no interest in doing this at all uh council member braves and then council member baguieri then mayor potem then council member wassum and and let's we're gonna let's make sure if we start saying the same things we've said let's i mean i want to make this a really efficient conversation so if we start repeating ourselves i'm going to try to dial it back so i have a question following up you said there's one decision maker and someone asked me the other day who decides and i don't even really know that specifically is it the city attorney that makes that one overall decision or the city manager the law gives the city council the authority to use these closed sessions and as jennifer has mentioned there are some exceptions and some cautionary notes medical information and personnel matters trite secrets and proprietary data is uh is are the really hot topics that we have to be very careful about it is the call of the the city council however has shown whether or not you want to go into closed session there are some very good reasons for doing so um and so we look at these things the city manager does city attorney's office does but ultimately it's the council's call under the law that's my regard i was going to bring that up as well the idea that we funnel our our responsibility to the attorney that's not correct i mean our responsibility we can be criminally liable if we decide to not make a decision on an open meeting or if we go along with an open yes that is correct i'm sorry i did not mean to mislead but um my what i was talking about was such as we have a agenda committee so you have delegated that to your agenda committee to determine what it is that you 're going to put in closed session now if you see something on the agenda that you do not agree with you do have a duty to say something because you can be criminally liable so that that's kind of goes to the point that i think we've been trying to make here is that first you can't abd icate the duty to one person or to a non quorum of governing body which is an agenda committee like we can't tell the agenda committee will you decide if this is open or closed you can certainly make a suggestion but the process isn't there for the entire council to deliberate and it may be that every one of our closed meetings was perfectly i mean perfectly correct no no wrongdoing i'm not here to imply any of that what i'm saying is that we don't have a process to hold the people that have been elected accountable for when a meeting is closed or open it's not enough to say the attorney said it and it's not enough to put it in agenda committee mayor oh i'm sorry kathleen yes i mean mayor portent oh sorry yes no yeah sorry i'll lose track well in practice you know at the beginning of each meeting where we talk about what's on the agenda that covers not just consent agenda that covers any item on the agenda and i have seen people raise questions about things in closed session at that time and it's appropriate because that's on the agenda and they can raise an issue for discussion that we can decide to make a decision i've seen folks in the context of closed session raise questions about whether or not it was appropriate to be in closed session we've had a discussion on that in the context of appropriate closed sessions which all of them have been in my opinion since i've been on council i've seen folks uh every seat on this council real in people if they're straying even an inch as to what's being talked about and whether we're getting into policy and i've seen us pull ourselves back and say wait a second isn't that something we should be discussing in public that's not a legal issue that's a policy issue and we're like you're right let's hold that for the public part of this discussion so in practice we have a period uh in the agenda where we can raise questions if we want to but at the end of the day we have to trust our staff when it comes to who needs to be in the room for this i have no idea some of these ancillary people what they do or what their relation is to this issue i'm not their manager i have no idea some of them i don't even know their names so for us to be able to say to the city manager no that person needs to go seems just bad uh micromanaging on our part so we're gonna have to trust our city manager to decide who's relevant trust the opinion of our city attorney to say what's legal and what's not to keep us on track and then trust our discretion when there are some gray areas which i think we've done in practice so again i come back to what's the problem that we're trying to solve say for some people in our community who always want to bash us over closed sessions well we're a big city doing a lot so i think that that comes with the territory and we're just gonna have to move forward as member and i have several points if i can kind of run through them first of all to say that just because the agenda committee says it's okay that's not in texas state law texas state law doesn't talk about two members of council on an agenda committee it talks about the governing body and that is the quote out of texas state law the governing body shall decide this council is the governing body it does not say city manager decides city attorney decides it states governing body and let's circle back around in terms of criminal liability so if there's an issue that comes before they're not going to say well it was you can't defend in court well it was the agenda committee or it was the city manager the city attorney it was the governing body so let's just be real clear on that so an issue in closed session because you're asking what are some of the problems right now in closed session it's called council direction but it's actually a straw vote state law says a governing body may not conduct a straw vote during a closed session now we can discuss it in closed session but we must open it up for that council direction because that's actually a straw vote so just want to bring that out and you know emphasize that with legal say that so what you're saying is and i want to get legal opinion on this so what you're saying is if there's something in closed session and council gives direction to move forward or not move forward you're claiming you're saying that's a straw vote correct uh pursuant to state law you're saying state law says that's a straw vote state law says you cannot have a straw vote in a closed session that you've got to open it up because what's happening is things are being decided in closed session but there's no record of who is for it or against it because we don't record our meetings right so if i could just maybe because i want her to address that and then come back to you with your other points or somebody address it as far as a straw vote direction whatever that means i mean last meeting sorry let me turn my microphone on here let me make one comment before i address that issue this notion of compliance with the open meetings act applies to all of us the city council the governing body but also to staff to the city manager to the city attorney i have always had a standing policy that we will warn if we see that we're drifting off topic or if something doesn't qualify and we will warn again that we under the right circumstances would even get up and walk out of a meeting ourselves because the law applies to us equally as it does to the city manager and to the city council so we look at this very closely we do give an opinion we give it in writing for the topics that do qualify and if we think it doesn't then we won't be participating either so we're very cautious about that with regard to the work ings the inner workings of the closed meetings you know the council is not voting i'm not even sure what we're talking about exactly with the straw vote but as we discuss these items there will be it may become clear where some people stand on things that doesn't mean that a vote has been taken or a straw vote has been taken from time to time and particularly with attorney items we may look at an issue council may look at an issue and say we would like to move forward with a different type of negotiation or give a different number in litigation or something such as that i don't view that as being a straw vote i look at that is providing some direction in a situation where we're entitled to discuss about that in in closed session because it is very sensitive and it could potentially cost the city a lot of money so i don't know jennifer you have a comment up there about i mean she she has a second you are allowed to do that with competitive matters of course for um dme you can do that in closed session that's not a straw vote that's not a straw vote yeah and um giving staff direction is a lot different from voting on an item of public interest and i agree with what anita said so if you're polling council members as to how they're going to vote in a late and this is where most of the litigation lies in open session then that is considered a straw vote so i don't know if you see a distinction there yeah go ahead you said you had a couple more points but i do consider it a straw vote because it determines what direction and what decision this council makes so i just want to emphasize i do consider it a straw vote so here's another um remedy and it's the timeline on when council receives the agenda because right now we receive the agenda and the backup on friday afternoon late with everybody but the agenda committee met two weeks prior to that so what i'd like council to consider is that agenda committee meets on a wednesday two days later in the friday packet that is delivered to all of the council members have that draft agenda and with no backup because staff is still trying to get back up but have the draft agenda delivered to us so that we're already now this far ahead of of the game in terms of seeing the agenda in particular taking a look at what is listed under closed session so now it's going to give us 10 to 12 days to seek out staff question that closed session really really take a look at it rather than because right now we get it friday city's closed saturday and sunday so it gives us monday because at tuesday 11 o'clock 12 we're here so if there is no council movement on discussing the closed at the beginning of each council meeting then at least provide council with that draft agenda 10 days 12 days ahead of the meeting so we can see what's coming you know that's that's just i think good business practice and something i think is is a fix to help dig into the closed session so that we have adequate time to really sit down and meet with legal or meet with economic development if you need to put it in an attorney envelope and seal it up for whatever reason at least give this council this governing body that draft agenda when the agenda committee has has approved it understanding that you know there may be a few changes but i think that's just i think that's just smart i want to circle back if i can on the issue of recording the closed sessions and a lot of cities in texas do record their closed sessions state law gives you two options and only two you can have a certified agenda but a certified agenda is not a verbatim transcript it's only a summary of each topic recording of the session can only be opened by a court order so it's not as if you're going to just have willy-nilly opening of a tape of a closed session however we have an internal auditor who's going to report on february 24th who's going to come in and i'm just using this as an example who may very well in his risk assessment be very anxious to have a recording of a closed session to really understand what went on in that closed session he may he may pursue a court order another council member may pursue a court order if something happened during a council meeting and it's very subjective when you have a certified agenda because it's one person's opinion on what the summary is i would like to also plant the seed that the council start taping their closed sessions and law requires that you keep that for two years and it's only open by court order which is per state law do you have i mean you got a couple i want to give some other people some opportunity to council member gregor right now in our agenda that we had today item two as council member rodin talked about says request for clarification of agenda items listed on the agenda we've already used that in this group if we have some concerns about a particular item that's in the closed session so i think that part of the the request that you've made is already built into our agenda if there was a concern about a particular agenda item it could be brought up there if it wasn't brought up before to the mayor or the city manager or the city attorney so i think that's pretty much covered i'm going to talk a little bit about straw votes i'm going to get specific we have lawsuits and we talk about uh settlements and when we first start talking about settlements there are different numbers thrown out from zero i don't want to give the bum a thing to uh some fairly generous numbers to settle a lawsuit and make the the suit go away there then is some discussion and at some point we have to come up with a number to give our staff to go and negotiate with and the mayor looks around the room when we when we it looks like we're settling on a number to see if anybody has strong objection to that we nod we wiggle our fingers but it's not a straw vote we've got to go out into an open meeting and say okay i vote that our settlement number is uh uh fifty thousand dollars we've just ruined ourselves in terms of our negotiations you can't do that in public that harms the city that harms the taxpayers so i don't know how you get the information that you need to give to the staff to give direction without finding a way to give consensus and and seeking consensus from staff is from the council to give direction to staff is not a straw vote and i don't think there's anyone in the texas attorney general's office who would suggest that it is council member baguerre in response to that and also to mayor pro tem rodent's statement thinking back to settlement negotiations you're absolutely correct we can't say okay well give give them a million dollars or give them zero dollars we can't vote on that in public but what we can do is arrive at a number and close session and then go into open session and vote if we want to proceed with settlement without identifying the settlement amount and i think that is something that we should be doing because we're not unanimous quite often and that is actually a vote that we're taking when we go forward with settlements okay mayor pro tem i i still think there's a lot of strategic problems with that that you're signaling the fact that you're interested in settling which could be still part of the negotiations in there i'll know attorney uh but look i think this is a serious allegation you're saying we have participated in straw votes and now this is out there in the city and i want to clarify this right now is there from our city attorney in your opinion have we participated in a straw vote during your tenure here as city attorney no sir i know what i'll let you do that okay so i would ask those making that allegation this is serious there's a violation of law that now just going out there people are talking about the city's violating all these laws and we're sowing distrust in the community by just bringing up this bs so what can you point to specifically where we violated the law and conducted a straw vote in closed session the date and the item number then i'd have to go through every single agenda because we do raise our hands in here for council consensus but we but we cloak it under council consensus and i'd like you to get specific because you've made a serious legal allegation okay and and we need to take a step back here just for a moment i there if you're saying that this council if you're saying this council has taken straw votes then you're basically saying we have all broken the law i'm not i'm not in agreement with that if we need to have an understanding of a bit clearer understanding of direction but i can tell you uh i have spent much of my energy and time managing closed sessions i think every one of us have had times when we said wait stop for a moment we're we're getting beyond that we 're getting beyond that uh as far as some of these particulars about we go out and vote in a settlement discussion you know we 're going to settle we're going to vote out in public that we're going to settle i don't know if that's a straw vote or not i mean to give direction uh when you're talking about real estate contracts you're certainly not going to go out and say what the price is i think everybody agrees with that i don't think anybody would agree we need to hold these negotiations and this is this is my concern all right you know this isn't about necessarily closed sessions it's not necessarily about how we do this specifically because we have mechanisms in our agenda i have nearly every one of us have at some point at least in an open session i've even said hey we need to talk about do we want to go in and go in closed session with this item i've seen that occur so i don't think that it's it's a fair assessment that we have not nor do we have a process whereby we can contest that if there's some way to understand what some of those closed sessions may be moving forward a little bit quicker than the the friday delivery of the packet totally get that those agenda committee meetings those are so fluid i mean in no way do we sit there and say this is the actual agenda things are coming off things come on sometimes things come on that the agenda committee doesn't know what's on there because it might need to be on there pretty quickly sometimes things come off that we didn't anticipate to come off but in no way would i say that this council including all of us sitting here at this table is not committed to transparency to following the law and making sure that we do what we need to do in public and that when we have a closed session item that we really try to make sure that it's as tight as possible when it comes to policy decisions that need to be made in public or specific direction to city staff so i mean council member road not mayor protein might hear what you're saying i hope that people out in the public that are hearing this some may automatically assume we're all lawbreakers there's going to be people that do that uh i i think that because if we're saying that then every one of us here culpable every one of us sitting at this table i'm not sure anybody's really saying that but if they are then that's an interesting point so as far as moving forward on specifics i think the city manager has certainly heard some of our concerns i think the city manager has his own opinion about some of these things moving forward he's certainly taking a step to give us in our friday packets some more information about closed sessions saying justification for closed sessions folks i'm going to tell you i don't think it's the government's responsibility nor their duty to do everything everything everything in public simply because it would compromise the interests of the city on many fronts which would raise our taxes decrease our services impact our economic development there's not one government body that does that not just in this state but in any state um i can't tell you how many meetings must occur at the state and national level that are behind closed doors all right but i truly believe that we are committed here in the city of denton to make sure that we do all we can to be as transparent as possible could we do better we can always do better does it mean we've broken the law i don't think so uh so we can move on to a couple more of your i think you talked about a couple of suggestions if you want to weigh in you can mr city manager but i think you've heard the discussion so i certainly would invite you to do that i mean you're sort of new here new set of eyes fresh approach so it with council's discretion i'd like to get if he had once opportunity take the opportunity just to address a couple things that he's heard and just what what his thoughts are if that's okay with you sir i guess the easy answer to start would be i agree with everyone so hopefully i'm on neutral now yeah yeah i i've definitely have met with uh almost all of you individually this is a big issue i get that um i've actually been meeting with the department directors legal well one by one discussing uh you know and and really there's a there's a commitment uh from me to make sure that uh council has a justification for exactly why we would uh need to go into a closed session i 've made it very clear at the staff meetings one-on-one meetings with the department has it just because we can doesn't mean we should and that there needs to be uh some very strong justification i mean typically what you will see um is where i think is the mayor's state and where our fid uciary responsibility responsibilities are being put at risk uh you know negotiations on uh settling lawsuits i agree with uh council member rodin there's there's real value in the other side sometimes not knowing you've got that authority um you know to ensure that we're getting the best settlement if it goes that direction for uh for the for the citizens of denton and making sure that we're not overpaying on things obviously personnel issues there's character issues there's those sorts of things that we need to be very careful about um you know but we are we are putting an extra we've already implemented a new procedure where if anyone uh feels the need to go into a closed session meaning they 've got to justify it through both my office and the city attorney's office city attorney is not looking for ways to get us into a closed session they're absolutely um looking for whether it complies with the law and then it's really um you know ultimately up to both of us to decide whether it needs to go in there my commitment to the to the council and of course the community is going to be that we will limit those items to the extent possible you will always have a solid justification or we won't ask you to go in and and to a closed session and the only reason that we would make that recommendation is if we in some way felt that having the conversation in public is in in any way harming the ability to you know to utilize taxpayer funds as efficiently as possible um i have certainly witnessed uh communities that that look for any way to get into a closed session and i think a lot of these comments and fears concerns are are absolutely they're founded in certain areas that is not the approach we're going to take and um we're certainly open if anyone disagrees with our you know my assessment or the uh let me see attorneys of pants we're certainly open to to communication i there may there may be a um a different way of handling um you know the disposition of an item i think we can always look at it's an iterative process to continue making it better but um my my direction has been very clear that we will only go in if necessary and we will provide you written justification whether it's two weeks in advance or a few days in advance to know why we're going in there why it's absolutely critical and what the downside of of not being a closed session is i i'm not sure from a practical business perspective there's any other way to handle that because we really have the obligation also to protect you and protect the city's resources in terms of the the folks that are in the closed session um i've heard that loud and clear from many of you and we're already addressing that as well in this uh current work planning environment having that discussion that the fewer the better but i think as council member gregory stated pretty articul ately there there is a time where we need to be able to pull in those experts so we can give you the answers that you demand and deserve uh as efficiently as possible and um but again i've definitely heard the concerns it's it's many of you if not most of you have brought up this the subject to me and we're doing what we can to provide you as well the justification for your constituents as to why this was necessary so we're always open to new ideas uh new ways of dealing with it on the agenda but for right now i think we've made some small incremental steps and we'll continue to do so okay great yes and it wasn't my intent to say everything needs to be an open you know there are absolutely issues and state law gives nine separate categories when legally we can uh move into closed session to discuss something and those are nine important categories but to the city manager's comment could we or should we you know is is truly the the pivot point so my goal is to help raise the bar here um and i appreciate the packet that came out last friday uh because it did have a justification for each closed session as to why it should be enclosed and i appreciate that and so um if can can we try to change the system then so that after the agenda committee meets that we get those agendas in that friday packet because that would certainly i think help all of this on so many different levels and we're not asking for staff backup because it's going to take time so much time just that raw draft agenda i think would be hugely helpful yeah i don't i don't have an issue with that i just know those are fairly fluid but uh if there's no potential legal implications or things such as that people just have to understand that some of those things may come off and some of them may come on um and i mean that's not an issue with me personally so uh is there anybody that sees downside to that okay all right so that's one thing we can start to do absolutely yes and then to um councilman gregory's point that we do have a point on the agenda that says comments on so i would just say that now that it's very very um transparent that council can vote on a closed session item that that would be the appropriate time for a council member to come forward and say i would like council to vote on this closed um session item and that's allowable under the texas law so i would see that moving forward as well is that yes councilman i'm confused by which what are you talking about now oh when you get your agenda and it says i know where it is so we talk about we talk about consent what i'm saying is that legally this council and an individual council member can say item to be closed i would like to take a council vote and uh hear from legal city manager but caveat that with any moment we can go into closed session if we feel it's necessary right well the key is if something's enclosed the discussion would be do we not have that item in closed session yes vote to actually have it in open okay i understand thank you okay i think that's i think and maybe i'm incorrect but that's sort of always been my understanding is that if somebody really had an objection to closed session that somebody could bring it up and i don't know if it's a vote like i mean you can't vote in a work session but you can have a consensus of sure we you know let's let's do that uh so whether it's potato potato as far as vote or consensus or direction i don't know but i've always understood that was always possible in fact it 's been emphasized i think over the last year or two that that was available but so yes i mean i don't think that really changes anything as far as it just maybe becomes maybe an explanation explanation point on it instead of a period but um any other comments quite yes mayor pro tem you know i i don't want to also create this feeling among staff because i know there's there's a sense in which we are doing a lot of things and some of those things require us to get in closed session and get the information help move those things along and so what i'd hate to create is this sense of council doesn't want a lot of closed session items so let's start putting quotas or really we'll get ourselves into the point where we're going to slow things down which isn't in the best interest of the city we've got major major things going on and i would like to give the freedom as a council member to the staff if you need 50 things on closed agenda that day i don't care what the public perception is we're moving our city forward and we need to do it and so that's my personal opinion so if it comes out that the direction here of the council is slow things down make sure it looks like there's less closed meetings because people are beating us up over these things i think that's to the detriment of the city so that i might be alone in that opinion so if that's the direction you're getting i guess we have to do that but i want to make sure that we're able to keep these things moving forward i haven't really heard that in this discussion as far as a sense of let's slow down or i think it's i think what i've heard is just a continued commitment to making sure that we you know we're we're having the closed sessions we need to have and that a reiteration that any council member on a closed session item can bring that up and ask or request that that be taken off of the closed session agenda and put on an open session and the council can choose to do that or the council can choose to say no we're going to go into i've just heard that the phrase limit the number of closed sessions sure i understand and we have folks out in the community that are counting them comparing them to the number of other cities looking over a trajectory of time we're entering into an election cycle which no doubt those same folks will get in the mix and and bring these things up i just want to make sure we're moving in what's in the best interest of the city sure well and and let's let's let's just let's put it out there i mean most of our closed sessions i would probably say i don't know what percentage is because we have a publicly owned electric utility company i mean a lot of them are competitive matters either dealing with real estate uh primarily real estate or projects and so state law is pretty clear on that and that also if a council member would rather have something in an open session that is a competitive matter they can also ask for that as well so we stand i mean there's only and somebody correct me 13 uh municipally owned utilities like ours in the state of texas are in the night in the state of texas at our size what size are we 70 i believe the count there's 72 total across the state but the the citizens of denton uh own one of the the top six i believe are we sixth i believe that was the case apologize i was watching from afar so right so yes yeah poster child for close session so uh there's 72 misplaced utilities in the state of texas but certainly most of those are distribution only and very small uh i would say there's probably about dozen our you know we're number six uh in probably in top dozen you go down to 25 000 customers we're at 51 000 since you came in um make sure we're going to steal into posting it's about closed sessions sure well it is about closed sessions because you're correct that most of our closed sessions have to do with phil's presentations and dm e presentations and what direction we need to give going forward do you believe it puts dm e as at a competitive disadvantage let's say on a property acquisition okay um we come up with some terms in closed session about what we think we want to do going forward on a property acquisition do you believe that it would put you at a competitive disadvantage to come out of closed session not addressing any of the terms whatsoever and just say let's take a vote who wants to go forward with what we discussed will that put you at a disadvantage so our real estate our real estate issues for dm e to me are no different than real estate issues for the rest of the city for streets water wastewater public you know drainage any of those so it's not an issue of electric competitiveness there it's a matter of negotiation for the property you had a comment madam city attorney i thought right i think i think phil picked that up and that is the real estate pieces he's he's accurate they're identical all over the city the competitive piece is a little different and grounded in a different statue so let me just ask a question of clarification because um i think the specifics and the details are important on what you're saying so what i thought i heard you say so correct me if i'm i'm wrong um we have a closed session on some type of real estate transaction doesn't matter who it's from we give direction here's your offer here's the terms and so forth and so what i'm hearing you say is you come out and you vote and you say you ratify whatever direction was given in closed session without necessarily stating what that direction is is that so you're saying we come out in closed session and say we all vote to move forward on on the direction as discussed is that primarily because if there's a dissenting opinion that that that at least is known publicly is that part of that or what what absolutely i mean i think when we're moving forward with these multi-million dollar projects people need to know who desc ends and who is in favor of it okay all right yes but they don't know what you're voting for what what you're having a public vote and you're hiding all the possible information about the vote from the citizens and not even telling them exactly what you're voting on and so what's the value yeah and then we're going to go to councilmember gregory at some point that information becomes public and we vote on it either in consent or an individual action item and at that point you can trace what's happened for the activity i mean it's no longer a proprietary matter at that point it's very public we take a public vote on it so yeah at the time nobody knows what you're talking about afterwards people will know what you 're talking about okay councilmember gregory well maybe or maybe not because somebody made dissent because they think that we need to pay more somebody made dissent because they think that we need to pay less and that never comes out okay yeah so if i may go on yes i 'm just saying we're getting really in the weeds and so i want to i want to start to wrap this up yeah i understand but but it's a weedy conversation uh the other thing that happens is we we we we have a public vote on some property negotiation and it's um maybe a four to three vote well what is the what is the owner of the property that we 're negotiating with to take from that what would you take from that well there are three people that that don't like this price you don't know if they don't like it because they think it's too lower because they think it's too high you don't know but it's certainly going to slow down the negotiations and and it's and it's uh and it's not going to help the city's position uh and you've made a public vote it's in the public but nobody knows what it's about so how public is it how transparent how much more transparent is it uh i don't see that it's that much more transparent uh i i'm looking at scenarios where it where where the citizens are benefited and where the citizens are not benefited and i see many more scenarios where they don't benefit from from what you're proposing than then then where they do benefit i think the city attorney had a comment i might you might step up too much just a little bit okay i might just mention that anytime the council takes a vote also if you look at for example um one of the items that we have on the agenda for today it's not posted for a vote it's only posted for discussion and deliberation uh and providing staff direction so it would not be posted for a vote at that point in time for any purpose we try to post with specificity the action to be taken so that the public can be advised as to what is going to be under consideration by the council so we'd look at that posting very closely and and make sure that it's going to comport with exactly what is going to happen and then the more interested the public is than the more specific the posting would need to be i'm gonna go and i really feel like it goes against looking transparent if we're all of a sudden voting on things with code names or something like i don't know what they voted on again councilors voted on something again and then 60 days later somebody's trying to trace it all together that's crazy okay so i did i am a little crazy here's an example a couple of weeks ago we we worked on a contract for our new city auditor uh uh now today we're actually going to vote on that contract in public it's now a public contract and if somebody doesn't like that contract you can vote no if if we have a vote to settle something there's going to be a public vote at time or vote on a real estate deal that's your chance to vote no if you think that we're paying too much or whatever so i think in most cases we have that opportunity to register a public vote on that yeah and so that's where i was a little confused because then when you talked about coming out of closed session and saying well council voted i don't even know you're not even given any direction but then you said then when it later comes to a public vote so most of these things outside of only a very very few exceptions that i can recall and it's probably contracts or something but there comes a time when it is a public vote it's with full transparency as far as here's the contractor voting on here the terms um so that that helps me understand sort of at least you think that it's almost like two votes one sort of out of closed session and then one when it comes up for the actual official public vote of approval or disapproval that's that's usually taken in public so i want to summarize sort of where we are as far as action items that at least i've heard going from going from here one is that we are going to begin to send out the draft agenda items after an agenda committee meeting send out the draft ag endas after they've been changed if there's been some discussion in those agenda in those agenda committee meetings not just what's handed to us and then passed on if we've done some manipulation of that or we've taken some off put some on that those will come come forward then it's there's a reiteration of we have the opportunity excuse me at the beginning of each council member under clarification of agenda items for a council member to raise a question or to make a request to remove something from the closed session agenda and move it to the open session and at that point council will have to decide a consensus on whether to move forward with that request or to let it remain on the closed session agenda now as far as anything else with specificity of changing our procedures those are the only i mean we've talked about a lot of things and a lot of possibilities but those are the two that it seems like we've gotten a consensus or we've gotten some some consensus and direction on we're okay with the sending out of the agenda and then just the reiteration of the other have i missed something in that regard and we've also learned from our city manager that there's a continued emphasis on the justification of closed session items that the goal is to not have closed session items unless they need to be in closed session and secondly that the people who are in closed session are there to help facilitate the orderly deliberation of that whether it be they need to hear the context of the question or that's simply easy enough to wear if they need to be out there it 's a yes or no and and and it's my understanding too based also uh from what i understand that if a council member has so correct me if i'm wrong if a council member has a question or an objection on particular personnel in the room for that particular closed session item they can raise that and we go through the same process as we do on the is that is that my understanding of that right it's entirely within the council's call to determine who's going to be in the meeting however in the interest of efficiency and good communication many times the manager and and i may have some of our staff in so that that information can be passed but it's entirely with one exception and that is your your attorney has to be present when you're speaking to an attorney item but other than that it's the council's call as to who is present so are first of all i appreciate the discussion i do i mean it's you know these are the kinds of discussions you need to have some of us still may be a little frustrated we may still want to but this is an ongoing discussion this isn't a one and done deal here if there's an issue that continues to creep up and pop up we certainly can deliberate as a body to try to address that that's the nature of this beast so i i do appreciate the candor and the the ideas and the suggestions to help with this yes one of the reasons that i i think this was on the agenda was because i had mentioned the possibility of making open meetings um an annual requirement for our classes i know in several cities that it is an annual requirement so i'd like to address that briefly if possible i'd like for it to be an annual requirement and are you talking about what i attended when i first got on council you have to go to tml uh class or whatever it is it's like 1.8 hours one is the open meeting and then there's like 0.8 for public information act if i remember correctly then we'll go to may pro tem then councilman was can we treat it like an ap test i mean unless there's some major changes on this and i pass an exam demonstrating sufficient knowledge of this um and i'm serving on council for six years can i opt out at some point i mean and again assuming there's no new law that i need to be made aware of that i wasn't already it's not an ap test that's a remedial class ap test requires mastery yeah i mean that's my point again i think some of these things are are are softly alleging that we're all confused as to these things and abandon that just abandon all i say abandon it but that 's that's what all that's what how this thing's play it play out right you 're feeding into a narrative out there and you're continuing with these sorts of claims of we need to all get refreshers every year and that's fine and if we need it we need it but i think if i've been able to demonstrate sufficient i'm not even going to be on council next year so i don't care um again it just seems a bit pedantic uh to to require that if it's unnecessary councilor wasney i think we're just trying to raise the bar so i'm in favor of the once a year once a year requirement and with the constant turnover on council to just have council as it's seated once a year new council in the summer everybody's required to because you can take it online it's easy you can be in your pajamas at home with your laptop and you can take it it's easy um and to raise the bar i'm in favor of it okay i'm not in favor of this it sounds like getting your food handler's card an expiration date at one of my restaurants and it kevin's right you can take the test in 15 seconds and so i'm anyway well and and i guess we all took tml class that's a requirement right i do there to go through the basic tml thing at in the beginning yeah the training you have to yeah that's my took it council member breaks so maybe not a requirement every year but um for somebody who is um re-elected or um just the option to go and take it i think would be would be great i mean as a refresher sure well i think we have the option now if we wanted to if people wanted to take it they i think what she's asking for is it be mandatory uh and i mean you know look i hear what everybody's saying i mean i don't know if i if there's people out there who have an innate distrust of city council and city bureaucracy that's fine whether we take a 1.8 hour course is not going to change that opinion uh but also i know i've got to take what is it 30 hours 15 hours of 30 hours of continuing legal education every year even though i don't necessarily practice law to be able to maintain my license so it doesn't really matter to me i'm not going to say i think we should do that because i don't think we should if we did do it i'm not going to be all been out of shape about it because it's 1.8 hours i think to me it's just more when i look at something i don't just look at what the specific either item is or request i try to understand what's underneath it and i think that's what council member mayor pro tem is talking about is is there an issue uh that we're really trying to do we do are all of us up here saying we have no idea what the open meetings request open meetings access we have just spent what an hour hour and a half talking about probably as much as we would almost talk about in in that seminar uh so um i'm i'm ambivalent on that particular request sure i heard both you and mayor pro tem mentioned you know the idea that suggesting this feeds into some narrative of distrust or some type of dark vision of government i have a real problem with that perspective because how is it that you can continually improve your organization if you don't identify ways to improve your organization to me that doesn't mean something is wrong it just it's a way to continually improve and the fact that every time somebody brings up a way to change a process or um you know a different approach is immediately met by some people with oh well you hate government or it's feeding into mist rust there's five old fuddy duddies that are constantly emailing us that's not what this is about this is about improving everything that we do together that's why cles are part of legal requirements that's why so many certifications require continual updating of your skill set that's something that improves our positioning and it improves our ability to govern it's nothing pernicious about what government is it 's just an improvement well first of all i don't know if i would agree with your assessment that that's what i think every time this issue gets raised as i said i'm i'm sort of ambivalent to this i but i understand some other people's opinion uh it doesn't matter personally i think this is a question we need to revisit when we have the new council i mean we've got three new people coming on this council all right and they're going to have to take that training uh well at least three uh you know as far as i know um and i think that they're going to have to take it and so i i think that it would be good for us to have that discussion and i'm not trying to put it off as you said you're not going to be on council somebody may be occupying that seat may have a very totally different opinion than you do of that and and vice versa for anybody's seat who may change over um and i think it would be good to hear what what those what those discussions are so i certainly am not opposed to having that discussion again or even if moving forward with that that particular but i'd like to give the people who are going to be here and probably just as quickly as you know three or four months which will go by very quickly an opportunity to weigh in on that and from time to time we have had that we've we've uh because in the past when when you get your training it's generally either online or you go to the texas municipal league new uh newly elected officials that was beneficial for me because i got to hear from people all over the state and hear the discussions but a couple of years later here during our summer retreat or workshop when i guess it was uh an hour or two before we started our uh budget training we had uh our city attorney give us an update and it was it was a different experience to have the council members all sitting together hearing the same thing and having a discussion uh my personal experience is uh while the training wasn't all that uh difficult every time you hear training based on your past experience you're picking up or hearing something this time that you didn't hear before because of the experience that you've had so i don't object to it at all uh and i think it would be beneficial for us to have some of that from time to time as a group to have that discussion and it and it could be very interesting after the new council is seated uh because they will have gotten training in maybe several different formats and we have it all together uh some some update and it gives us a chance to have the discussion again all right any other discussion on this agenda item i'm almost afraid to even call the next agenda item any other questions for our presenter okay great presentation by the way all right okay i will convene the closed session at 405 pm we will consider the following items consultation with attorneys under texas government code section 551.071 deliberations regarding real property under texas government code section 551.072 [Music] right to this meeting of the dent city council on february the 7th 2017 it is 6 32 we have a special treat for us tonight we have troop 65 from the first united methods church here boy scouts who are here for their citizenship badge and they're going to lead us in the pledge of allegiance to both the american and the texas flag so if y'all could come down here and i'll sort of give you the cue [Music] [Music] very much and thank you for being here mayor yes might note that that boy scout troop was originally chartered in 1918 it has been operating continuously for 99 years okay we've got some proclamations and resolutions and the first one myra if you'll come up here please it's myr crown over our past representative for house district 64 in the texas house of representatives and it's my pleasure this evening to read a proclamation by the mayor honoring you myra for your just countless hours of service to our community and all that you've done for our community through representing our community in the texas house of representatives so thank you very much for that this is a mayor by the proclamation by the mayor of the city of denton whereas the honorable myra crownover served as a state representative for house district 64 in the texas house of representatives from 2000 to 2016 representing one-fourth of denton county including the university of north texas texas women's university and north texas north central texas college excuse me she is a true dentonite having lived and worked in denton for more than 30 years and whereas representative crownover has always served with children in mind and as a voice of some of the most vulnerable in our state she had authored the house bill 790 which expanded newborn screening to all 29 genetic disorders recommended by the american college of medical genetics in 2006 the department of state health services began screening all newborns in the state for 28 of the disorders and in 2009 she successfully fought for the funding to add cystic fib rosis since 2005 over 500 newborn texans have been diagnosed with a treatable genetic disorder and since 2010 93 newborns have been diagnosed with the cystic fibrosis and whereas every session representative crownover worked with the parents and guardians of the residents of the denton state school to defend the state school system from attacks by special interest groups that seek to profit from the privat ization of services to the state's most vulnerable citizens and whereas representative crownover persistently and diligently worked to pass a statewide ban on smoking in the workplace while the fight continues at the state level to come to combat the deadly effects of secondhand smoke representative crownover inspired the city of denton to take up this cause and pass a local comprehensive smoking ordinance due to her leadership and advocating for a smoke-free workplace denton is a safer and healthier community now therefore i chris watts mayor of the city of denton tex as do hereby declare the appreciation of myrra crownover and proclaim the day of february the 7th 2017 as the honorable myrra crownover day and urge all citizens to join together in honoring our representative who is being recognized by this prestigious award thank you so much for the time that you gave to our community you want to say a few words thank you thank you that was a beautiful way to put 16 years in one little short paragraph thank you uh it's just such a wonderful honor to have served our community and it has been such a blessing for me and now i look at these people that are serving their community and i know how much work it is and all the sacrifice involved but i know that sometimes if you work really really hard at something and you persevere that it adds up to something worth doing so one of my favorite quotes is uh teddy roosevelt's um one of the best prizes that life has to offer is to work hard at work worth doing and so here in this chamber they are working on work worth doing and obviously some good things have happened in the legislature so thank you so much i'm honored to be here tonight thank you thank you thank you keep getting beautiful loren come on up uh-oh crowd come on okay everybody here fantastic well what i want to do is read the proclamation and then give you just a few moments to just sort of explain the anniversary and the significance of that and the significance of keep dentin beautiful to our city proclamation by the mayor of the city of denton whereas keep dentin beautiful inc kdb a community non-profit and partner of the city of denton is celebrating 30 years of service in 2017 and whereas the organization began as a citizen's task force in 1987 assigned with making recommendations for the beautification of entryways into the city and whereas kdb has evolved over the years in the thriving affiliate of keep dentin beautiful and keep texas beautiful supported by more than 6 000 volunteers annually and 11 member volunteer board of directors and whereas the city of denton has provided tremendous support and partnership for keep dentin beautiful over its 30 years to help kdb achieve its mission of a clean beautiful and vibrant city vibrant dentin and whereas kdb will be celebrating its 30th anniversary with events and activities throughout the year to share the unique legacy of the organization and its role in the dentin community and now therefore i chris was mayor of the city of denton texas do hereby declare and proclaim 2017 the whole year the 30th anniversary year of keep dentin beautiful and recognize the long-running effects of kdb and its volunteers to improve the beauty and quality of life in our community so lauren i want you to just take a few minutes and tell us a little bit about the the year and what's coming up absolutely well i'm lauren barker i'm the program manager for keep dentin beautiful and uh we are here tonight as mayor watt said to celebrate 30 years of service to the dentin community and while kdb started out as a citizen's task force actually appointed by council way back in 87 we are now an affiliate organization of keep america beautiful keep texas beautiful we work with thousands of volunteers a year and really the the vision has remained largely the same we provide opportunities for our citizens to get involved and i have very hands-on way in improving their community making it a better place to live uh because of that we have touched a lot of lives a lot of people in this room we've got our crew here tonight but this is a small fraction a very important fraction of the group of people that commit to making our community a better place to live every single year so i do want to introduce um jean green law dr jean green law she was an original council appointee to the citizens task force when it first started up and she also is the she has a special project that she wants to share with you so thank you lauren i did start at the beginning margaret sm ith appointed me to the committee so i have a long history with kdb i'm also an author and the committee and the board asked me to write a book and i thought oh he's going to read it so i came up i had an ep iphany and i came up with the idea coloring books are all the rage so this just came out this week you can get it on the kdb website it's titled keeping debt and beautiful a 30-year history coloring book it has a little bit of our history our major events our major projects and my one of my favorite being the education grants and we have matt mcmath here one of our education grant winners did they leave oh they had a great big sign great big sign um also there are many things around town you have no idea that kdb did those beautiful pots on the square we got the grant that paid for those now the city keeps them filled beautifully but we got the grant so by this find our history find out we're doing and most important of all i asked matt to put on the last page an empty page except for a beautiful frame and my text on this is how will you keep debt and beautiful so please buy one of these share it with people and come out and volunteer for all our things and keep that beautiful here thank you this is the artist our wonderful artist for the coloring book matt sallick he did a fantastic job so go check out matt's page as well and we have tons of other stuff planned this year our 30th anniversary committee full of volunteers that have been working very hard so look for more exciting events throughout the year and thank you all for for coming and cheering us on and supporting us over the years thank you very great wonderful yes thank you all thank you thank you all for coming and thank you for volunteering okay we have another proclamation with those involved with the national wear red day please come forward oh watch out it doesn't want you to come does it and that's a hard thing to say national wear red day let's say that 10 times very fast well i'm going to read the proclamation now and then afterwards if you could just introduce yourself and anybody here and then just tell us a little bit about uh that's okay yeah that's good proclamation by the mayor of the city of denton whereas cardiovascular disease kills one in three women in the u.s yet 80 percent of cardiovascular disease may be prevented and whereas cardiovascular diseases and stroke kill one woman every 80 seconds in the united states and whereas an estimated 44 million women in the united states are affected by cardiovascular disease and whereas 90 percent of women have one or more risk factors for developing heart disease or stroke and whereas women are less likely to call 911 for themselves when experiencing symptoms of a heart attack than they are if someone else were having a heart attack and whereas only 36 percent of african-american women and 34 percent of hispanic women know that heart disease is their greatest health risk compared with 65 percent of caucasian women and whereas the american heart association's go red for women movement motivates women to learn their family history and to meet with a health care provider to determine their risk for cardiovascular diseases and strokes whereas women involved with the go red for women movement live healthier lives and whereas go red for women encourages women to take control of their heart health by knowing and managing these five numbers the total cholesterol the hdl the good cholesterol blood sugar blood pressure and body mass index bmi now therefore i chris watts mayor the city of denton texas do hereby declare and proclaim february 3rd february 3rd and today the seventh uh as national wear red day and denton and urge all citizens to show their support for women and the fight against heart disease by commemorating this day by wearing the color red by increasing awareness speaking about our heart disease and empowering women to reduce the risk for cardiovascular disease we can save thousands of lives each year and i know you've got an event coming up i think this week so i want to hear a little bit about that too thank you mayor we're very excited about the opportunity that we have this friday for our annual luncheon style show and mayor watts is coming this year i'm very excited to have you join us um uh this is just a few of our committee members here michael pesuric uncle blank tanya parker michelle barber carolyn simmons amy waddell and mara robinson with american heart association um this is an important thing to us in this community i personally have not been affected by heart disease but when you hear the numbers about women the number one killer of women is heart disease and we don't stop and think about that we don't take care of ourselves so we urge you husbands wives boyfriends girlfriends whatever take care of yourself and please join us in this go red movement because it's very important to your health and to the health of our community also and we look forward to our luncheon on friday so we still have a couple of tickets left not many and we would love to have you join us thank you thank you we have one more if i could have city attorney anita burges down front and center please well as everyone knows by now if you don't you're going to find out right now and uh our city attorney has announced her retirement and i believe her last official day at least here at the office is the friday february the 10th i have a nickname for it's ld lame duck and so it becomes very helpful anita and i anita you and i came on about the same time on council in fact i think i was on just a few months before we hired you so uh i'm going to take a few moments before i read the resolution to say it's been a pleasure to know you you've been a friend a mentor and a colleague i've learned so much about city operations from you and you're just a great woman of character you have served our country in the military i believe as a colonel in the marines is that correct that's right yes absolutely absolutely and i will tell this story because it's a funny story if it was when i was first on council and and i won't give the specifics because some people may remember this meeting but there was a meeting in which i became very passionate about what was being said and was in the process of going to express that passion and i felt a very gentle touch on my shoulder and a whisper in my ear with a very authoritative command stand down i will never forget that and so whenever i'm wanting to encourage someone to relax i remember that just stand down so uh it's with pleasure that i will read uh this resolution and the plaque and we will miss you tremendously you've been a great asset to this community and a great asset to our country i wish you the best in your retirement and your trips because i know you they're well deserved so it's hard to say sometimes goodbye to a friend but it's not goodbye it's just see you down the road as long as you don't tell me to stand down i think that's the only time you did that actually i was too afraid to do otherwise okay this is a plaque that reads the city of dent on expresses its gratitude to you anita e burges for devotion and invaluable service to the citizens of denton serving from october 2008 through march 2017 as an employee of the city of denton legal department employees such as you are a valued asset to our community your contribution to the city of denton are greatly appreciated let's saw it signed by our city manager todd howman thank you todd there's more there's more there's more anita burges to all those these presents shall come greetings whereas anita burges has served as the city attorney of the city of denton texas since october the 6th 2008 and whereas miss burges will be retiring from the city attorney position on march 31st 2017 actually that's my birthday how dare you that's how dare you uh whereas prior to her work with the city of denton miss burges was the city attorney for lubbock texas for 13 years was a partner in an active trial practice specializing in employment law served in the u.s marine corps in both an active duty and reserve status for 28 years and retired in 2003 with the rank of colonel and whereas while serving in the marine corps she received a number of personal awards which include the legion of merit the navy commendation medal the meritorious service medal and the military manager of the year award and whereas miss burges has served as both prosecutor and defense counsel in felony and misdeme anor trials special assistant u.s attorney principal duty for a major federal installation supervising attorney for all equal employment opportunity and personnel cases at all marine corps commands west of the mississippi and the lead counsel for all western marine corps installations in water right matters and whereas miss burges court admissions include the united states supreme court the court of military appeals the united states court of appeals fifth circuit and the united states district courts in the north northern western and eastern districts of texas and whereas the city of denton has been extremely fortunate and having enjoyed a need of service and direction as well as the leadership that she she has provided the city of denton with expert legal advice and provision now therefore the city council of the city of denton texas hereby resolves that the sincere and warm appreciation of Anita burges felt by the city council and staff of the city of denton be formally conveyed to her in a permanent manner by reading this resolution and to the official minutes of the city of denton and aff ording to her a true copy thereof be it further resolved that the city of denton does hereby officially and sincerely extend its thanks to need a burges for her successful career as the city attorney for the city of denton texas i think we need to vote do we need a vote on this yes all right we have a motion do we have a second we have a second uh everyone signify by raising your right hand if all approved and we see no we see no uh dissents so i need and i want to give any council member that would like to say a few words the opportunity to do that so yeah i want to i'm going to set this right here because it's getting heavy in my arm anita congratulations you have been uh one of the toughest professionals i've met yet the class iest professional that i met and your ability to tell us to stand down without those words and just say something like yeah i don't think that's a very good idea uh anyways you you have been uh and i've told this to a lot of staff members but it it really is is is true you've been a mentor to me on several things and helping me understand the profession that we're in the profession that you're in and this volunteer thing that we're in in terms of being a true public servant so thanks you've done that in your whole life so well deserved retirement thank you for your service yes yes i'm up mayor okay i'm just gonna let y'all do your own thing okay well it probably don't need to say my uh two terms here on council has been a little bit of a roller coaster but one thing that i could always count on is just your steadfast leadership i could always count on you um it was never unwavering you're an incredible role model you show patience intelligence strength and like kevin said you just show so much class um i and the city of denton will miss you greatly i have a three-year-old daughter and it would be a dream come true to know that uh she turns out like you and knows that there's women out there like you um thank you so much for everything i'm just so grateful that i get to know you so madam city attorney first of all i have so much respect for you because of what you gave to our country the time and the effort and the expertise it all goes to show that you truly exemplify what it means to have a servant's heart and you brought that heart to denton as well we haven't always agreed doesn't matter i respect you immensely i want to say more than anybody but there's judges watching i'm sure so you've been a real role model and i find myself you know playing things in my head in terms of what wouldn 't how would i need to handle this so i really thank you for that i thank you for your service to the city and i especially thank you for your service to this country for my solution thank you for your service and for your service to the city and to citizens that i can send you to speak with you took the time to help guide them through the some of the legal avenues that they can get advice you guys saw and that was really important to me because i couldn't help them with that because i'm not for setting up and i have a brother who's an attorney and an an amoreen so i i really understand a little bit more about your background i appreciate the heavy lifting and there's been some heavy lifting that has gone on in the past few years that without your legal guidance and counsel we would be in much tougher situation i appreciate all of the work that you've done the professionalism that you've shown and the friendship that you've shown i want to say thank you for being kind to me and being honest with me in your office and i think we share some of the same style i really i like your necklaces i think you have great taste in jewelry and i wish you um much luck on your next journey well i think it's time for me to retire so that i can engage in some of this body mass loss and exercise and all of that kind of thing so my my time is here for that and and to do some traveling and so i look very much forward to that i would like to thank the mayor for his very diplomatic leadership and all of the contributions he makes makes to the city every day he's awesome so mayor thank you very much and i'd also like to thank my staff without which certainly no city attorney can function so guys you're awesome you're professional thank you for your excellence to the city council i guess to you all i would say thank you for your selfless dedication to the city your you do a fine job every day every week every meeting i know it's tough but you come together you rise above yourself and you do the right thing so thank you and i'll see you on the other side [Applause] thank you again nita for the time and commitment energy and and life that you put into our city all right we'll move on to presentation from members of the public do i have i don't know i don't see any of those i don't see anybody jumping up and okay all right i'm trying to agenda item b do i is that i'm sorry yes it is okay yes is that i think that's okay here it is yeah i think this is this is because i think we're yeah the um yeah could we run the denton city council has adopted rules of procedure including a code of conduct which applies to citizens as well as council members these rules were enacted to promote an orderly process and to preserve decorum here is a brief review of the rules that apply to citizens reports citizens will have four minutes to give a report there will be an electronic beep when time has expired if the remarks are not concluded by that time the citizen will be asked to stop speaking if the citizen does not cease and a second request is made the mayor will request to have the citizen removed from the council chambers citizens are asked to not approach the dais if a citizen has papers or other materials to hand out to the council please let the city secretary know and she will have a staff member distribute the materials to the council the attorney general has ruled that council members may listen to citizens speak and may ask questions of citizens for clarification of the issue council members will not engage citizens in discussion of a topic because to do so could potentially be a violation of the open meetings act when speaking to the council citizens are to direct all remarks and questions to the council as a whole and not to any individual member please refrain from making abusive personal impertinent profane or slanderous remarks anyone who violates this rule will immediately be removed from the council chambers citizens adherence to these rules will help make an effective presentation and will preserve the order and decorum of our proceedings copies of the rules of procedure are available from the city secretary i got a question randall there's some that have agenda item b marked on here and i'm not sure what that is but whoever was said it was an open mic if you'll come down and state your name and did you fill out a card sir okay all right yeah come on down okay all right we'll figure it out okay thank you yeah if you'll just state your name and address and your time will begin hello my name is bud border i live at 320 falton street good evening and it's an honor to come here for my first time to speak to the city council pardon my nerves if you i'm a little nervous i'm here tonight to speak on the growing need to protect threatened members of the community and to protect the sovereignty of our police force from being manipulated into an abusive position by our federal and state governments i've lived in denton longer than anywhere in my life and i call this place my home and this community my own our values are under attack our people are under attack and the sovereignty of our police force is under attack from divis ive legislation we need to take a stand for the sovereignty of our city's rights the concept of our police force being forced to carry out the current administration's dirty work will impinge on our rights as citizens in a republic of sovereign states it will endanger many who deserve respect and protection and is a slap in the face to conservativism we are more and we are strong and we need to stand together as a community to protect ourselves against the state and federal infring ement to protect members of our community who are most at risk this is not a partisan issue this is a human issue it it's a direct threat to our rights as a home rule community and we find ourselves in a new and strange political climate with the dangerous shifts we are experiencing i believe that history is watching and we will be judged by the choices we make today i choose to stand i choose to protect us to believe in us to resist any threat foreign or domestic no matter how it shows its face history will know our names and the choices we make how we make a stand to protect our values and our community are how we capitulate to overbearing federal infringement as a non-partisan city council i urge you to look at the needs of and security of our city rather than demands of our overre aching federal and state administrations bent on party politics do not let our police force become thugs for party politics when i was young and afraid i would tell myself be brave and figure it out now i'm asking us as a community to come together and say the same thing be brave and figure it out we need to protect ourselves we need to protect our community and we are a strong and proud community i'm proud to be here proud to live in denton this is the longest i've ever lived anywhere this means a lot to me i don't have much more to say but thank you for your time tonight and i look forward to opening up a line of dialogue with all of you in the future thank you thank you thank you our next speaker is deb arm ator if you'll come down state your name and address your time will begin deb armont are 2003 misty wood lane and i too am going to be speaking on the same topic this is deeply personal topic for me for a number of reasons my my children go to school with a number of uh play playmates and classmates who have benefited from daca whose who have family members who are undocumented um and uh there if if their family members go away if their parents get sent away um we might may as well be sending denton public school children away um this is a city uh that has been built literally physically uh as as you know um by uh the work of immigrants many of whom have been undocumented many of whom are from mexico this is another reason this is personal for me um i happen to be a jew and the child the grandchild of immigrants who fled anti-semitic violence in one country in in ukraine to come to the united states that preceded the holocaust but as you know in europe at the time of the holocaust cities who uh collaborated with the third rike were simply following the law and i know that's an extreme comparison to make but i i really see the bullying coming from our our governor towards towards cities that that dare to um even just not have our our police uh do the job of a federal government agency ice uh to to threatened to threaten those cities with defunding to threaten uh elected representatives such as yourselves with uh dethroning you i i don't see how he even has the power to do that i know that state legislation uh does have the power to deny funds um and uh but i i strongly encourage you for uh for the people who cannot come here today to speak for themselves because they're afraid and they're afraid for their lives they're afraid that they'll be separated from their from their children who again are our public school children um and i also uh want to urge you um just as the previous speaker said on behalf of our police um to to please consider revising our police protocol our police have a job to do and that's to protect our city and i think they they know very full well that uh on undocumented um members of our community are not a security threat um but instead uh they are in in many ways have come to be pillars of our community uh we depend on them financially in so many ways they're the parents of our public school children um and i i don't see why our police should have to keep on doing the job of a federal government agency um to fill up our jails with people who are not criminals who have committed no crime other than just to raise their children as american citizens under daca i know many stories um but all i'll say for now is in addition to the moral argument which you all know this would really save us uh money at the same time money's being taken away from from us um and uh it's it's simply doing the right thing and i i think you all know the moral arguments i know you're all good people so thank you thank you we'll go on to agenda item four consent agenda but be yeah no the yeah that was the open mic there's two speakers allowed an open mic and you fill out a blue card yes yep before we go on to the consent agenda i just wanted again welcome our new city manager mr todd howman to his first not official city council meeting but first one out here on the day so welcome again sir okay we'll go on to consent agenda council member hawkins i move approval of consent agenda items a through r but there are four of them for that we're going to poll for individual it's f j n and r okay and those will be considered for individual consideration after the consent agenda vote uh mayor pro tem rodin second all right we have a motion and a second for the consent agenda items save for agenda item f j n and r which will be pulled and be considered individually so let's vote on the board please motion carries seven zero let me pull those up okay considering consent agenda item f which has been pulled as an item for individual consideration agenda item f caption reads consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of denton approving a right of way use an encroachment agreement between the city of denton and the university of north texas granting permission to the university of north texas construct a raised crosswalk with signs markings and other pertinences was there a i don't believe there was a presentation on this or whether uh council member gary i requested that we remove this and move it to individual consideration only because i wanted to recognize two people who i know were involved in this and that's michael hennan who was on our who's on our traffic safety commission and he was just appointed so he hit the ground running and started working on this project and grant hail who is the president of the unt student government association who uh brought this issue to the forefront for everybody it was a very unsafe crossing path at unt and through the partnership of the city and unt we were able to make it a much more safe crossing path so i want to specifically thank those two people okay and we do have a card wishing to speak before we move to recognize uh movements mr willy hudspeth if you'd like to come down state your name and address your time will begin for consent agenda item 4f mayor city council my name is willy hudspeth i live at 623 newton i'd like to add a couple of streets to be considered at university of north texas as well at the corner of that would be jago and oak when crossing the street going west on jago and oak there's not a if you just simply put dotted spaces showing that the far right lane continues on and the left lane has to move over to the left lane right now the left lane is right in front of the far right lane as you cross the street that's one dangerous intersection i 'd like to for you to look at and you mentioned before the confusion of carol and hickory going east and that green bicycle lane that is in the center it's in the center of the far right lane which has to turn and the left lane the green bicycle lane is in the center really that's a good design to tell you the truth and it's safe but what i would suggest you do is repaint that green spacing often because it's already worn off and it is very very confusing that the bikes are supposed to be in the center i ride bikes every morning and i know how hard it is for people in cars automobiles to see me i know that so i just i see them and i'm very careful but even with that knowledge there was a bicyclist in that lane and i almost hit the person because they didn't know where to go so those are my two suggestions thank you thank you council member gregory thank you mayor move approval of item f council member hawkins i second let's vote on the board please motion for uh agenda item 4f carries unanimously we'll go on to agenda item 4j consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of denton texas authorizing the approval of a second amendment to a professional services agreement between the city of denton and gl power solutions inc for transmission planning and nert transmission planning compliance and evening mayor and council uh this consent agenda item that you've asked to staff for presentation on is for contractor power solutions to give a little background on why this is needed uh dme is a transmission service provider a tsp responsible to the following agencies regulatory agencies the requirement for this type of study that's that this consultant provides first went back to uh i guess the august 2003 uh power outage that was the largest ever in history in the northeast took out 50 million customers out of service after that congress passed the energy act of 2005 and after that act it empowered the federal energy regulatory commission to enhance the rules and to be able to penalize utilities for not following the regulatory rules to ensure reliability uh ferk federal energy regulatory commission therefore utilizes the north american electric liability corporation nirk to enforce those rules nirk in turn utilizes regional providers in our region texas reliability entity to do that on a region by region basis they perform audits of all the electric utilities in their region we completed an audit on the about three-year cycle we just completed ours earlier in 2016 with no issues they also audit urcot the electric liability council of texas which is the grid operator for texas the grid operator is a balancing authority balancing the energy load with the energy generation and so uh they're managing the reliability of all the texas the advantages and power solutions what power solutions does for us that's regulatory requirement is they take the electric grid in our service area and evaluates that grid on a segment by segment basis by transmission asset by asset basis and they take what urcot provides them as here's the steady state of the transmission grid and they run analysis run 1300 iterations of okay if this line fails what's the impact on the remainder of the system if this breaker fails what's the impact on the remainder of the system and by doing that analysis they identify here's a place where you need to enhance reliability here's your future transmission projects that's what we put in place to put in our budget together to bring the cap to bring the capital budget to the council is to lay out the projects that are required where they identify additional reliability concerns power solutions we first started having to adhere to this in 2010 power solutions was already being used by texas municipal power agency texas municipal power agency has most of the interconnect ions that dme interacts with and so they already had much of the information that was needed to provide a transmission study for us they also had a great reputation and the resources to be able to do this having worked at a large investor on utility before a larger firm would have their own staff to be able to perform these studies due to our size we can't afford to have that kind of staff or the resources that they have to do this but by being able to tap into this contract it gives us access to someone to individuals that have just as much intellectual knowledge to be able to perform those studies as large utilities have they give us that range of services and level of respect for for our services for our studies changing consultants would be costly because a new consultant would have to start over with establishing what all the values are for each piece of equipment in our transmission system that would be a large database to have to replicate they bill on hourly basis for the work perform there's no obligation to fill the contract at any point in time if we decided we wanted to switch to a different contractor or bring this service in house we could but there's no minimum expenditure this is just to authorize a amount of expenditure to go forward that's end of presentation staying ready for any questions sure and we do have a speaker blue card wishing to speak but we'll take public comments after we have staff discussion before the vote councilmember briggs so i i was curious if the increased funding um has anything to do with the dinton energy center um this contract amendment so i believe the total contract is now close to two million dollars uh the expenditure for the study that any any generator that would come in onto our transmission system would require an air connection study so that study was i believe less than a hundred thousand dollars uh that's not the sole driver for this increase in contract the the increase in contract uh the regulatory rules and the concern for liability of the grid system has increased and increased the number of requirements and the amount of of work that is required on this contract to be done we initially done this contract expected to go for five years it's gone for four this amount of funds we expect unless regulatory requirements increase again should take us through for three more years councilmember gary so if i understood you correctly part of this study will address the dinton energy center transmission needs no that study has already been filed okay i apologize um and so we're clear it's for an annual amount of money that we're approving today this is for an amount of money that will take us for the next three years okay so the first amendment or i'm sorry the first contract was in 2013 and then there was an amendment to that in 2015 which moved the price up a little bit upwards and so we're we're now moving the price up again but it's for another three year period correct correct okay and i just want to be clear one of the reasons i had asked to remove this from consent is just because of the increase in price over 2013 almost a million dollars there to today which is almost two million dollars okay i might need some clarification because when i read the caption it says uh what you're asking for is an amendment of a million dollars to add to the contract to where now it's not to exceed 1.96 9 million dollars so we're basically going it was 900 something so we're doubling it correct that's to cover three years correct so when i read the ais and in 2013 the original contract um says the original contract was awarded by council on fe bruary 5th 2013 in the amount of eight eight hundred fifty seven thousand four hundred sixty nine dollars sorry the the preceding sentence before that says in the original proposal the time estimated by tbpwr solutions for activities required in 2013 was 1483 hours so they figured 1415 hundred hours eight hundred fifty seven thousand dollars that's and so i may be looking at this wrong but that's five hundred and seventy eight dollars an hour is that is that what they're building i tried to find in the contracts where they're billing but do well they have an hourly rate stated in the contract and i know it's not that amount of money what you're paying for in addition to the hour of their staff is you're paying for the software okay that they have as proprietary for them of how they run the data sets against the urcot model okay all right okay i was just looking for that okay so so some of these funds have already been expended i mean from i mean we're just asking for an amendment it looks like it 's a big number two million two million dollars but some of that has already been expended so you're just sort of adding on to the contract instead of right writing a whole new contract or something like that so if we were to write have written a new contract it would have been only for a million dollars but since we're adding it to the not to exceed original amount that's what seems to uh and that's covers i guess from 2013 to now you're saying three years 2020 so that two million dollars is technically supposed to be covering seven years okay all right okay any other questions before we take public comment thing that we have a speaker mr william hudspeth if you'll come down state your name and address your time will begin mayor and city council members my name is william hudspeth i live at 623 newton i'm retired well i thought i was until i opened up my shop just for fun now i'm working hard again i don't have three million dollars i don't think i've ever made three million dollars in my lifetime how can you in good conscience sit there and even consider spending this kind of money for someone to tell you something that i i'll bet if you will not forbid if you already done it do it again that is extremely large amount of money what i want you to do as council people spend my tax dollars in a way that it is smart and the least amount you can spend i just paid my taxes lord help me i've made the mistake of owning two pieces of property those taxes were astronomical they they hurt me so bad to have to pay those and then they hear you even consider three million dollars do you know how much money oh yes you do because you you spend that often that's a lot of money again as a taxpayer i want you to be smart with the money that i give you i want you to pay out the least amount that you have to and i want you to be smart about it this doesn't sound like you're smart i think we could do better than what we're doing with this uh this the money that you're considering to spend at this time thank you feel i got a real quick question you'd mentioned it as far as why we're going to have did you or have we done a an analysis of if we were to pull this in house if we were to hire the people with the expertise to do this any idea what that would run i mean have we when we looked at trying to contract this out did we look at if we were to bring this in what it would be or did we not would they not have enough work or i mean what what were some of the factors you saw you saw in the report how many hours a year and so that's not a full year and and then also we don't have the software or the hardware software package developed for them to do this this is a regulatory requirement for a report we have to file in april and so to take a different approach at this time at this time there would be enough time to switch to another provider we can certainly look at the other providers i was in a meeting earlier today with other general managers and asking what each one of them did and it's either the larger ones have it in house the ones our size usually contract out okay so part of this is we're hitting running up against the deadline and so when we were looking at a three-year contract part of that is just to get us past this hump of april i guess because we've got to file a report or there's some kind of probably penalty or or some consequence to that okay all right okay thank you okay any other questions seeing none council member hawkins move approval of consent uh item j mayor protem second all right we have a motion and a second for agenda item 4 j uh let's vote on the board please okay motion carries six one we'll move on to agenda item 4 in it's considered option of an ordinance of the city of denton authorizing the city manager is designated to execute a contract with the denton parks foundation for administrative and fundraising support of denton parks and recreation projects council member gary i had requested that this item be moved to individual consideration um for a little bit of background when this initially came before us it was during the budget process it was a supplemental request i voted against it at that time so i wanted to be consistent with my vote at that time and not simply consent to it on the consent agenda tonight i also wanted to clarify um one or two points first is that i'm thrilled with the work of the parks department uh the parks foundation and the parks department since they're here as well but uh so this is certainly not a discussion about the work of the parks foundation or the people who carry it out more so it's a discussion about um how non-profit organizations come to us for funding and i thought this would be a good opportunity to point out that we have dozens of non-profit organizations that receive city funding and each of them goes through a different process so the process that parks foundation was able to obtain this money was through the supplement supplemental budget process which is very different than what some of our homeless organizations and other organizations get money from and i would simply like to ask that we take a very hard look at that um additionally i wanted to request from the parks department or parks foundation if they are able to find a city that funds their park foundation to please let me know i haven't been able to find a parks foundation in the north texas area that's funded through taxpayer funding either in whole or in part so that is the reason i pulled it thank you thank you we do have a blue card public wishing to speak mr william hudson this is on agenda item four in and mr husbett i think i've got two cards for in so uh you you've got another one for r coming up but i just wanted to make sure that i wasn't leave anything out same topic in no n is the one about the parks foundation yes yes that's the one we're on right now yes my concern as it was when this was talked about before it had nothing to do with per se the who's going to sign and who's going to represent us if that's the the case it is any area i notice the ones that i'm aware of that there are no african-american supervisors they have never had any in the history of dent ever those are the ones i want to have something to say here's what i want to say why is that the list are well now the fire department has finally hired one african-american in its history one dme has never i want to make sure that this is this this communication to you ever in the history had a supervisor the parks department is another one my question is why is that my god told me don't assume it's because of the color of your skin i'm in a training process with him he's trying to get me to quit thinking about that and to treat everybody like i'd like to be treated i had a test today when someone cut me off you know i'm old so i don't drive fast anymore my motorcycle is a three-whe eler anyway so i just wonder why is it the only thing i can see is the color of the person's skin and i'm just wondering why is this council and others before you why is that the case why aren't there anybody in the supervisor's positions in the parks department dme one in the fire department thanks sir council member hawkins thank you mayor uh you know more of a comment i just wanted to remind everybody in 2014 this position was kind of done on just a tryout basis you know we were paying this position 35 000 a year and it was supposed to be part-time and i bet you if the person sitting in this audience really added up her hours it was a full-time job and she blew it out of the water i mean she killed it she raised money she went over and beyond so this still is an underpaid position just in my opinion at this level so i just wanted to add that how successful this was this is the reason the your your rika 2 playground was built so i just wanted to put that on the record please council member was ney if you've been to your rika 2 playground with your grandchildren or your children then you know the value that we're talking about tonight and every time my granddaughters are in town that's their first request so as a personal thank you to all the sweat and tears and organization and just grit to germ ination and hard work to make that project happen it's full it's full of moms and dads and grandparents and kids and dogs and its parks are the essence of a city and it's the heart and soul of what a city dedicates back to its citizens so on behalf of a grandmother who loves your rika 2 and her granddaughters who love your rika 2 i i support this position and thank you for all your hard work i just have a real quick question of a reminder how much was raised during the capital campaign for your r ika 2 do we do we know that oh here it comes i just i just want to make sure i remember hello i'm christine taylor with the budget i said budget with the parks department and during molly's three years her biggest year for the rika 2 campaign she raised a total of during the three years 808 000 dollars thank you now councilmember hawkins you know uh display i'm just teasing you uh before we make the motion i i understand councilmember gary as far as the process on you know there 's some non-profits where we have a sort of a committee structure for social services and things such as that so yeah it you know be interesting to know how we delineate which non-profit goes through which process for funding requests so i would be interested in seeing that as well i will support this this motion because uh i hope not too many people saw it sitting out here but i did do the zip line i didn't do it very well i started out and i just hit the ground so i guess i was too big i've got it i've got it on video thanks a lot i appreciate that okay uh any other questions seeing none let's vote on the board for agenda oh i'm sorry need to do a motion first oh did we not do that well councilmember gregory you got a motion thank you mayor i i i move approval of item in with the comment that that um um you know not only are the folks sitting in the audience taxpayers but all of the the folks sitting on the dice are taxpayers and when when i can vote for uh spending tax dollars in a way that has such a outstanding return on our investment as this i am pleased to do it and pleased to make the motion to to approve item in okay mayor proten and i i'll add to it too i think one thing that makes a distinction with other non-profits is what they're bringing to the table in terms of funding is invested in city-owned property uh so it's actually adding capacity to something that taxpayers otherwise would have to pay for themselves which is a distinction uh to their non-profit so i agree this is a fantastic return on investment you add a little bit of public funding to unlock a whole lot of private funding uh that's a smart decision so i second that all right now we have a motion in a second let's vote for agenda item four in motion carries six one our last consent agenda item that was pulled is agenda item four r considered option of an ordinance accepting competitive proposals and awarding a public works contract for the construction of a water line improvements for phase one of the dentin municipal energy center electric energy center project uh providing for the expenditures of funds thereof thank you mayor so this is phase one of line water extension just give a quick overview and evaluation map next steps uh sea water is not available west of the dentin enterprise airport where the dentin energy center is located uh dm us paid to extend that water line to the dcc site extension must be a loop feed to ensure reliability phase one water loop is needed by april 2017 to keep the project on schedule uh it is a fire protection equipment issue uh it's not a we don't need a 12 you know we don't need a 12 inch line because that was one of the settling points of the units was how little water they use but you do need fire protection and so the meet code requirements we have to have this kind of the size water line phase two be completed in the fourth quarter of 2017 uh water department is elected to fund an upsizing of portion of the line from 12 inch to 16 inch for other development in the industrial park the evaluation team was chris ludrick jim maynard and robert harris team norton perkins they evaluated based on price mainly but delivery probable performance compliance with specs there were 10 qualified respondents and selected wilson contractor services there are dentin company prior contracts with city dentin extensive experience with this type of work and this is just the evaluation sheet i believe was in your backup just a map here of we're talking about phase one going from the edge of the airport and into the site then phase two would be a loop feed down jim crystal and the wastewater line our next steps if council directs to proceed would be to install phase one water we would finish design and permitting for phase two do an rfp and bring phase two back to council approval at a later date staff recommendations approved a contract uh wilson connect to city of dentin uh for an amount 530 000 45 15 which includes an upsizing charge that's funded by water department of 120 000 council member gregory thank you mayor so if a uh a private energy company had come in and built a generation facility at this location uh they would be treated like any other developer and would be required to pay for connecting infrastructure to our current system is that correct yeah any other generation provider or any other industrial customer any other kind of industrial customer correct uh and so so that's basically what's happening here correct taxpayers are not uh going to be footing the bill for this this is part of the estimation that you had when you gave us the the the cost estimations for the renewable dentin plan is this does this fall in line with what those cost estimates have been that you've given us yes sir this this actually costs less than what we originally estimated and so all of our estimates so far from the engine contracts to burns mac contracts the gas pipeline contracts all these contracts are falling in line with what we've estimated and we're still set on delivery time to provide 500 million dollars for savings to the citizens of dentin over a 20 year period right thank you council member gary can you explain the ups izing charge of 120 000 so water department has made a choice here and i'll ask tim fisher to come down to addressing other questions you have but uh water department made that decision to want to upsize it for future growth not to have to go back in the future date when the next industrial customer comes in that area to have to go back and re-dig up an area and put in a bigger line to serve that area let me go back to the map if i'm understanding you correctly it's not necessarily that the dentin energy center requires that size it's more to provide a water line for additional industrial use perhaps in the future the 12 inch line was required by dentin energy center the upsizing to 16 inch was a choice for the water department did you have a follow-up yeah council member gregory so we'd often also do this for development if we need a bigger line yes sir if we see a growing if we see a growing area and can anticipate growth in that area so if another because it's an investor earlier and another customer comes out and wants to tap into that they would normally be paying some type of a fee well that feed goes back to dme from the upsides now dme is only paying for the 12 inch size the increased 120 000 being paid by the water department thank you but that's a good question and that is we're upsizing it for additional capacity so that when we put in phase two water which i'm assuming phase two water will probably be upsized as well because if this is a closed loop system and so the the question from council member gregory is a good one that is because we're anticipating growth out there if a private industrial user wants to tap into that water line to use it for their supply don't we have sort of a way that we can get some type of proration in return from a developer in that regard oversized participations really take advantage of extra capacity at a low cost the drivers here were our master plan showed that section along tom cole to be a 16 loop 288 is going through there and the line across the airport was a 16 sometimes when we make significant oversized participation costs we can incorporate those as part of a capital expenditure in our impact fee and we can get some partial recovery through an impact fee system and we've done that in a few cases okay but that's a partial recovery there isn't a specific capacity pro rata type basis for that one okay um i might want to talk about that offline but i thought there's so there's a way that that if somebody puts in or maybe if it's a private person puts in a line and someone else taps on an off-site pro rata would be an off-site extension they could get a pro r ata agreement for that and if there were connecting frontages then they could get that recoup uh when the impact fee laws came up there was a legal interpretation many years ago that once we got into impact fees that the city wouldn't no longer collect pro radis so we phased out pro radis in part because of our migration to impact fees which occurred in the late 90s i guess and this is just for another discussion but as we move forward i do want a little bit more clarification about the money we're spending for upsizing how do we get that recovered if all that turned into private development and they're tapping into that water line developers pay for their their water infrastructure costs typically and if it's only through impact fees or they may even put in the actual infrastructure so we don't we don't need to go into that detail right now i just want to have that available for discussion uh we do did you have another question council member gary quick clarification so the cost of this is being shared by water and by electricity yes 120 000 is the city's oversized participation by the water department and then when that's in our operating budget we budget approximately 200 000 each year for that okay thank you and the the balance i think the 400 and some odd is is an expense for the 12 inch dme is paying for thank you any other questions for staff before we take public comment seeing none thank you phil mr husbeth state your name and address your time will begin for agenda item 4 r mayor and councilman my name is willy husbeth i live at 623 newton if the audience want might some of the audience might wonder why do i come up here and talk so much i'm up here all day on tuesday they start these darn they call them work sessions but it's really hide the information from the public sessions this one started at 12 they didn't finish until sometime after 4 30 i'm up here the whole time and i'm gaining information and so i have lots of questions and things that i don't agree with to answer your question mayor are we going to receive anything for upsizing that line from what i could tell no so we've spent money now if a if someone else needs more money they would pay for the upsizing of the the water so it seems to me if we pay to upsize it then when they connect to it later they need to pay for that what we did extra or just leave it and let them pay for the whole thing that makes more sense to me i just figured out dm e was up here again they don't have any blacks hired here's what i thought we could do to satisfy me and some who have the same concern as i read the paper the other day two the two or three days ago we don't have a nepotism law i don't guess because i thought you know if i want to see the council i could hire my relative and then just say oh i didn't know that they were going to get the job and and now that i know that they got the job i'm going to rec use myself hogwash so since we don't have a law i think i'll just get on council and then hire my son to do something that needs to be fixed we've talked about this naked nepotism situation for many many years and here we are at the same place they are doing the same thing so this this upgrading of this water line let me ask you something which i already know the answer to how many minority contractors do they have for bidding do is there any rule for the minority contractors to bid this did we even have any kind of shot any minority let me answer it for you because this is dentin no we didn't and we haven't had any that i can remember mayor protin thank you mayor i move approval agenda item 4r council member wasney i second we have a motion and a second for agenda item 4r let's vote on the board please motion carries five to two we'll move on now for items for individual consideration we have agenda item a which is considered approval of a resolution of the city council of the city of denton texas appointing an interim city attorney setting forth the terms of the appointment etc do we have a oh madam city attorney go ahead mayor and council it's my pleasure to lay this resolution in front of you and it would make an appointment of mr erin leal the first assistant city attorney to act as the interim city attorney in my absence so with great pleasure i do recommend passage of this resolution okay and we do have a card wishing to speak mr willy hudspeth agenda item 5a my name my name is willy hudspeth and council members i live in 623 newton this is the one i've been waiting on we had a discussion about closed session thank you council woman wasney for bringing up some of these issues i would like to recommend for anyone who can hear me look at that work session today notice who made what comment towards not having that the importance of having a a closed session that followed the law there were some who said no we're doing everything that we 're supposed to do answer this question i've been where you are on the school board i've been there here's what i understand there are some people who weren't doing what they were supposed to do under the clothes under just rules of governing and so they came up with this rule you can't do something in closed session that is not that does not fit these categories and they were very specific in the work session they talked about this this appointment was one of the examples of how things shouldn't have taken place the appointment of this attorney not the appointment itself and not the attorney the closed session that you called when it wasn't really a closed session according to me and those i don't have a law degree and i don't know the law that much let me just say according to me and what i understand you're not supposed to talk about stuff that you could talk about in the public and it wouldn't hurt anybody or any position or any of that or what they what you're trying to do part of what was discussed was who you were going to pick and and one of the issues please listen look listen to the the work session today it's you're not supposed to poll the the the members in there as far as a a a vote if you didn't do that why is it that it on the tape you came out of the closed session and no discussion was had at all if you didn't already have a poll if you hadn't already talked about things that you shouldn't have been talking about in closed session why did you walk right out here take those seats all those in favor of the recommendation raise your hand it's pretty obvious to me you talked about something other than the person's name something to do with them specifically and there were too many people in that closed session that didn 't shouldn't have been in there they shouldn't have been in the room you didn't have that much discussion that took place i'll come back later thank you mayor pro tem uh thank you mayor uh aron uh i have the full faith in you and your abilities uh and congratulations on taking uh this chance you're stepping into some big shoes uh but you 're going to do a great job so on that note i move approval council member hawkins thank you too i have great confidence in you aron so i'm looking forward to this but you're right those are some big shoes to fill so anyway i second not literally big shoes what size shoes do you wear i'm just teasing you i'm just kidding she has beautiful lawyers i'm just kidding you need obviously um okay we have a motion and a second for agenda item no we we haven't made the motion oh i thought somebody did make a motion yeah they didn't make it out yeah yeah kevin made a motion and yeah we've motioned in second anyway we've had a motion and a second for agenda item five a let's vote on the board please motion carries unanimously moving on to public hearings agenda item 6a hold a public hearing consider adoption of an ordinance designating the property located 1120 north locust street legally known as abstract 185a etc a historic landmark under section 35.7.6 of the dent development code uh before typically our process has been on public hearings i'll go ahead and open the public hearing prior to staff uh uh presentation so i will now open the public hearing you're good to go thank you mayor hello council uh i have four items mayor and i can present them all in one presentation if you're okay with that sure which which ones we do have some cards wishing to speak on each individual but which ones are they in there is uh hl 15-005c and 16-005a and 16-006a and 16-007a so these are all in order a through d yes council okay with that making the president but we'll vote on them separately we'll take public comment separately but yes you can make a presentation okay so the first one is actually the consideration of only the adoption of an ordinance because back in june of last year there was a home and through my own fault i didn't attach an ordinance to it at that time so that item you'll see it but it is to uh you did approve it you just we didn't have an ordinance attached the uh next three are to hold a public hearing consider the adoption of an ordinance for the designation of historic landmark at 717 west oak 2106 north bell avenue and 619 pearl street here's a current image of these four really wonderful wonderfully kept properties as they are today these homes were all surveyed in 1996 at that city-wide survey we held and determined at that time to be contributing historic resources to the city you know as you know there are 13 criteria the city established in order to qualify properties for historic landmark designation i'm going all of these properties meet several of those i'm going to present just one for each property uh the one on the screen today is the 1940 image of the 1120 north locus and uh what was interesting about that property is its proximity to twu and the development of the land around there and that it was owned at one time by hg brown who uh was what was called a city commissioner back then and then also was the manager of the um dry cleaning plant at the twu and uh that's that one the next one it was at 717 west oak this uh had also an owner that was significant in the history of the city brent jackson senior was a county judge he also had a son that went on to become a state representative and his family is here tonight the family that owns the home is here tonight and they may want to have a few words at 2106 north bell is a really significant home for its architectural typology and it's all still originally intact in the tutor style and 619 pearl street is a contributing home in the oak hickory historic district these for public notification purposes all of uh for each of these places we've sent out a notice to the 200 foot and the 500 foot uh property owners within the those two rings we had 14 favorable responses in in total uh and no unfavorable responses on any of these the historic landmark commission and the planning and zoning commission recommend approval as does staff okay all right any questions for staff before we take public comment seeing none thank you roman we've got a couple cards that we'll go through first and then it is a public hearing so uh you do not need to fill out a card in order to speak so we'll process through the cards first the first speaker is deb konte and gary hayden you want to come down i guess either one at a time or however y'all want to do it come down and state your name and address and your time will begin so if you're both speaking uh if you if you want three minutes each uh but if you're no not three minutes okay all right my name is gary hayden i live at 2106 north bell lab and i'm deb konte and i live there as well and we're married okay let me just start by saying uh it is so wonderful to come in front of this council for such a wonderful thing i have been we have been here before in front of you arguing many things this time we're not arguing at all just saying thank you for considering our item and um sharing in our joy of this beautiful old house it's a tutor revival style we won't bore you with all of the architectural details we did that with hlc i'll let gary present just a little bit of history but thank you all very much a little bit that's it okay it could have been a gas station we understand before the house was built um the land in the area seems to have been come from a land grant from governor runnels who you all know is one of the american governors between the texas republic and the csa you all know that right yeah okay um let's see judge uh boyd lived in it uh he was there about 20 years very well respected uh he was appointed to uh the bench by governor all red who you're all familiar with i'm sure and um let's see what after that oh his wife was really very uh instrumental and very high up in the women's association of texas statewide and uh i guess those are pretty much the highlights uh dr paul weathers lived there for a while somebody from tw was there uh i just say this the house about 80 years old and when you live in an old house for a while like we have what happens is you start to realize you don't own a house you're a commuter passing through and from where to what well that gets philosophical maybe but but thank you very much for your time and uh oh i think again sure it's your way to put the picture of that house back up the old picture because if was that snow on the ground that i was is that what that was from way back then okay i just wanted to see that one more time okay all right great wow it did snow back then too okay fantastic all right thank you thank you all deb thank you so much lovely home thank you so much all right uh we've got i guess that was the only blue card we had for those agenda items a through d so this is a public hearing anybody wishing to speak on these agenda items come on down state your name and address and oh is there one have i missed one oh here's some right here sorry i did open you open the public hearing as to one okay i'll open the public hearing as to a b c and d so that's good thank you so much madam cj well if you i'm not sure how these cards are set up but if you signed up come on down and and give us a shout state your name and address and your time will begin i guess that's what these are that's what these are i think i've got them here they just hello my name is rachel myer i live at 717 west oak street i am a homeschool student here today to speak both as a homeschool assignment and in favor of a historic landmark designation for 717 west oak street i will be speaking about criteria number three regarding architectural styles of architectural characteristics of the house the house's typical georgian style georgian is the name georgian style is the name given in most english-speaking countries to the set of architectural characteristics current between the years 1714 and 1830 during the reigns of king george the first through king george the fourth georgian architecture was revived in the late 19th century in the u.s as u.s colonial revival architecture georgian architecture is most recognizable by symmetry proportion and simple ornamentation as you can see in the pictures of 717 west oak street sit the front door is located in the center underneath a recessed portico porch with columns and the same number of windows on each side as well as a sorry as well as a chimney on either side which unfortunately are covered by the trees in the picture on the first floor the windows are double hung nine over three and on the second floor three over three in typical georgian style the hip roof sorry georgian roofs are typical our tip our tip are typically hip roofs with dormers and our gables the gables on the east and west sides of the house are original to the house when we were re when we were renovating the house it became necessary to add the front gable to the house to accommodate modern h back equipment other fine examples of georgian architecture can be found at 12 12 north locust street 914 west oak street and 916 west oak street as well as the twu old main building and this is why i believe that 717 west oak street should be designated as a historic landmark as as a historic landmark i thank you for your time and i appreciate your vote thank you very much appreciate that i did find the missing cards so we've got uh john morris come down state your name and address and your time will begin thank you all very much my name is john morris i reside at 918 west oak street which is two blocks up the street from 717 back in may of 2015 we finally were able to find a house close enough to mom and dad that our daughter and her family could move into so that when we get older you got a plan ahead so what we did the house had been vacant they were using it for storage years and years nobody really inhabited the house except extra mattresses furniture and everything plus a few other things but we were able to talk with the lady who was the in charge of the house we were able to buy the house and we were able to restore the house and having done this six times before we restore property we go in we take it down to the boards inside we put all new mechanical that house it's got blown in excuse me foamed in urethane foam it is like it's well insulated and we doubled done quite double but we increased the occupancy excuse me the square footage from around 1800 to a little over 2000 and something and we did discover there was a carriage house out back but when we first bought it there was a forest out back and so when we cut the forest back we found the carriage house plus we lost a couple foxes that used to live in the backyard they left after we moved in but i would encourage you to go ahead we put a lot of work and effort into it and we enjoyed it thank you thank you the next speaker well donna morse but you should have a white card wishing not to speak is that just in support all right thank you thank you donna next card is jennifer meier you're okay all right you're in support yes and jonathan meier come down state your name and address and your time will begin thank you hi my name is hi my name is jonathan meier i live at 717 west oak street and i'm here like my sister as a home school assignment as well as to give a speech on behalf of the landmark designation excuse me historic landmark designation for my house well my family's house i don't know it i'll be talking about the previous owner of the house ro bert hal jackson robert hal jackson was born january 29th 1920 and died january 19th 2008 he graduated denton high school at the excuse me in the class of 1937 after his father bought the house at the age of well his father wasn't the at the age of four he was at the age of four then he graduated unt in the class of 1941 after college he joined one of the most decorated navy air corps squadrons during world war ii he flew over 120 combat missions and took part in sinking the japanese battleship yamato which was one of the largest japanese battleships ever built in the same mission he also shot down one betty bomber and three zeeks which is japanese for zero the seeping seeping seeking sinking of the japanese battles hip yamato was one of the reasons that larger battleships are no longer considered super weapons the squadron he was part of was become would would come to be known as the skull and crossbones squadron after the war he came home having been awarded with eight air medals two distinguished flying crosses the silver star the world war ii medal as well as an asian pacific campaign campaign medal navy unit commendation try saying that one five times fast when he came home he was elected to the state legislature and where he served two terms he then followed his father's footsteps and continues his education to become a lawyer he was an excellent lawyer and he could have done very well representing corporate clients but instead he decided to enter criminal courts often even presiding providing a place for his clients to stay which could have turned out very badly for him had they turned out to be guilty how jackson lived in the house from the time he was four to the time of his death at the age of 87 after his death the denting county office of history and culture along with the denton county bar association worked in collaboration to create an exhibit in honor of the man colleagues take talked about how he was a fun loving man who cracked jokes at every turn often telling stories from his past and even tall tales to anyone who would who was lucky enough to meet him he loved the law but was not unaware of its imperfections cherishing its laughable moments he was a war hero a great man and a great lawyer his world war two service changed world naval strategy for the better and that is why i urge you to vote in favor of the historic landmark designation for 717 west oak street well that in fact that the less parent the less money my parents spend on taxes the more they can spend on me thank you that's great yes i understand that okay that's all the cards we have but this is a public hearing for agenda items a b c or d anybody wishing to speak please come down and state your name and address and your time will begin regarding these historical homes and their designation we're considering hi my name is deb ar mentar and i'm at 2003 misty wood lane i i approve of this historical designation uh for for these homes uh i happen to teach at the university of north texas in a building on hickory which runs parallel to oak street so i drive by those beautiful old historic homes on oak street almost every day going to work and so i i just wanted to say in addition to expressing my my support of this historical designation for these beautiful homes um uh i want to know if city council has considered um designating an actual historic districts to have that whole area since there are so many um beautiful historic homes in that area it seems to me that would be so advantageous uh for you know not only for the people who live there um and uh for the neighborhood but also for the city of denton it could be something that we're really proud of uh i grew up in um providence rood island with around i didn't myself live in a historic district um but we used to go trick-or-treating in this historic district and it was it was really exciting to see all these all the homes with the the um the plaques on them um and there was never any uh you know crazy unwanted things being being built there it was preserved so nicely i think something like that would fit in really nicely in one of these neighborhoods in denton so i should say i don't live in these neighborhoods so i can't speak for the neighborhood um but just as somebody who works near there i just think it'd be great to have a whole historic district thank you thanks thank you public hearing anybody else wishing to speak on any one of the agenda item six a b c or d anybody else wishing to speak if not call one more time speakers we will now close the public hearings for agenda item six a b c and d and we will consider these uh individually correct yes city attorney so we'll move forward with agenda item six a count on may pro tem rodent thank you mayor and i just want to thank everyone who applied for this i drove past your house almost every day taking my son to gonzalez school and you've been working the heck out of that house for the last couple years and looks beautiful and so all you guys thanks for your hard work i have an historic landmark house myself and it's a strange thing where you have citizens come and willingly put themselves under additional regulations on their property uh but you've done it and it 's because i like the way you put it you're a caretaker of this house you're passing by and you're one of probably several generations of folks who have done that you're leaving it better for the next generation and making our city beautiful at the same time so thank you all for doing this and thank you uh roman for shepherding this process it's great seeing the leadership you're providing to the city as it relates to this but uh we appreciate what you do so on that point i'll move approval of agenda item six a councilman mcgregory and i second and i believe uh three of the four uh properties uh are actually in historic district or or historic conservation zones i think the only one that's not right now is 1120 north locust so i second uh for 6a all right we have a motion and a second for agenda item 6a let's vote on the board please motion carries unanimously moving on to agenda item 6b council member hawkins i move approval of 6b we have a motion oh oh yeah council member gary second all right i have a motion and a second for agenda item 6b let's vote on the board please motion carries seven zero moving on to agenda item 6c council member wasney i make a motion all right we have a motion for agenda item 6c council member hawkins i second we have a motion and a second let's vote on the board please for agenda item 6c motion carries seven zero and then uh lastly agenda item 6d count council member gregory move approval of 6d council member wasney i second we're sort of having a interesting fun game up here uh all right we have a motion and a second on 6d let's vote on the board please motion carries seven zero thank you all very much and thank you so much for your report it's very fascinating to see the history of those houses thank you all so much now we do have a sort of an administrative item we need to do we need to switch agenda item 6e and f simply because we have to hear the rezoning before we hear the specific use permit so i'm going to call agenda item 6f which is hold a public hearing and consider adoption of an ordinance to rezone approximately 12.97 acres from a residential center commercial downtown to a neighborhood residential mixed use district and this will this is a public hearing so prior to staff presentation i will now open the public hearing for agenda item 6f thank you may members of the council child city manager i wanted to go ahead and take the opportunity to present this zoning case that we have before you it is a request for a public hearing to rezone property from regional center commercial downtown district to a nrmu neighborhood residential mixed use district as well as consider adoption of the associated ordinance through the request be approved tonight just to give you a description of this property it is located on the northwest corner of reiney road and elm street and just to give you a little more bearing it is approximately 2 000 feet east of bonnie bray and just to give you a little more perspective to give you an idea of what's around the area we have the unt discovery part to the north you have the north lakes part to the south there is a development that's under construction for town homes referred to as vista del royo to the south and then we also have property that's currently plotted for townhome development as well so when we look at the area we have a mix of residential uses as well as institutional uses that are memorialized in the area again the request is to rezone request a rezoning to nrmu manal yes just a quick question if you could go back to the map just so i can get my bearings is that where you see the two blue lines coming in to to show vista del arroyo and brentwood place is that bonnie bray that's that correct to the west yes yes that is correct that is bonnie bray i appreciate that the reason why i used this slide was to give you a better perspective of the surrounding zoning we've already discussed the surrounding land use pattern the existing land uses in the area but what this slide depicts for you is the existing zoning that is established there and if you look at that you have nrmu 12 to the south and basically you have the nrm family nrmu family to the south and do that to the to the west to the east a little bit but then you also have the rccd zoning which is the subject property zoning as well which has institutional uses as well as residential uses so the the analysis that staff conducted at this point was to discern what is is it appropriate is it an appropriate zoning designation or category at this point and it is an nrmu family there is adjacency associated with that and then we visited the future land use plan as associated with the comp plan to discern um what what it requires which is primary residential in nature it encourages mix of residential housing types as well as densities and also has the retail and commercial component associated with it to support those residential uses therefore based on our land use analysis we do believe that the request is a logical extension of the nr family as i like to call it as it relates to the zoning districts the request is consistent with the future land use map that we have proved as part of the dented plan 2030 i wanted to give you a synopsis of when we talk about these two zoning districts where are the discrep differences associated with it and primarily when you look at density is where that category comes in as it relates to density again the request is to resume this property to ultimately hopefully the intention is to develop the site with multi- family development but then again i'll dive into that once we get to that request we've already talked a little bit about is this a logical extension is the request a logical extension of the existing land use pattern the surrounding zoning as well and it is staff's recommendation that it is we did send out public notification per our requirements of 200 and 500 feet and we sit to this date we've only received one application back in favor of staff is recommending approval of the request as did the planning and zoning commission at their meeting when it was heard at public hearing and i'd be happy to field any questions should you have any any questions for staff before we take public comment seeing none thank you manal this is a public hearing and it is open public hearing so anybody wishing to speak on this agenda item please come down and state your name and address and your time will begin my name is Willie Hutchworth I live in 623 Newton would you put the the first slide up showing where what the blue arrows was in there no the next there i'm trying to get a bearing where it's associated with my property where's bonnie bray what is that that's the unit okay that's the park right there yes it is right next to my property where's bonnie bray again can you point to this this go to it i'll show you and where's ryan road yeah i didn't get a notification and i am right the stuff always going on around my property for some reason that is where my property is right there and i didn't get notification for that i should have been notified now i'm going to see what i can do about this situation shouldn't be able to just come out there and do whatever you want and you're not notified the citizens i've had problems with you putting you put something over here let's see and something here and it's just all around my property and i'm not being notified that's not right uh so i'll see what i can do about that thank you since the public hearing anybody wishing to speak please come down state your name and address good evening i'm paul milzer 1914 west oak street uh i we've had a kind of a tour of some of the real jewels of of dendin today the historic districts are certainly part of that and and our parks as well especially north lakes park and i really just have a question that i hope can be addressed which is what the impact would be on the vistas in north lakes park if this were developed in accordance with what's proposed i would hate to you know overly compromise the experience of that great amenity thank you thank you public hearing anybody else wishing to speak please come down state your name and address one more call anybody wishing to speak before we close the public hearing on agenda item 6f okay we will now close the public hearing manal could you on the notification map does that does that give any kind of street references or anything like that or i just want to see that i'm hopeful it will give us some perspective today um if you look at the 500 foot buffer that's the blue line and i think it might just be a tad shy but i will go back sure and double check our jia system to ensure that we didn't compromise any of our notifications okay any other questions for staff seeing none councilmember gary move to approve councilmember wasme i second we have a motion and a second for agenda item 6f let's vote on the board please motion carries seven zero moving now to agenda item 6e call that right quick hold a public hearing considered option of an ordinance for a specific use permit to allow multifamily development on approximately 12.97 acres this agenda item 6e public hearing i will now open the public hearing and hear staff presentation thank you mayor members of the council city manager the request before you is for approval of a specific use permit for a multifamily use on the subject property that's just been rezoned to nrmu it was just the discussion earlier was from rccd to nrmu the applicant is intending to develop the approximately 13 acre site primarily with multifamily uses and to leave the hard corner at riney and elm for potential retail development of course this is the intent thus far so tonight we're going to evaluate the specific use permit that's before us the future land use designation does recommend neighborhood mixed use for the property and therefore this proposed specific use permit is in keeping with um as discussed at the specific use permit was pending approval of the rezoning that we've just heard the use itself is consistent with the flop or the future land use designation of neighborhood mixed use and the surrounding land use pattern also reflects a mixed use residential component and institutional use the park use as well as well as some homes that you've realized that was seen on the map that being said i wanted to talk a little bit about the specific use permit because the request is for that the nrmu district does require approval of a specific use permit for multifamily development and the proposed specific use permit would be tied would be tied by ordinance as it relates to this i'm going to walk you through the site plan tonight we have two lots that are highlighted in the blue bold area there lots one and two that reflect multifamily development you can see that the lots are pretty much bifurcated by a boulevard or an access point a common access easement through the property that's highlighted in red or bolded in red lot one which is on the left of your screens and you can see that there would comprise of a of four story buildings with 89 one bedroom units and 62 two bedroom units and then we have lot two which would comprise three story three three story buildings 86 one bedroom units and 48 two bedroom units as part of the buffer requirements the applicant would be required to buffer against the residential uses to the west and that's why when you look at the west property line you see a 10 foot wide landscape buffer which includes five trees and 30 shrubs for every 100 linear feet of frontage or adjacency and they will be maintaining an existing tree line as well lot two to the south where it fronts rhynie road would require for the parking in front of the road to be screened and the applicant is proposing shrub shrub row as well as a wrought iron fence the building elevations and the reason why there's so many elevations in there there's several types there's a's b's and c's associated with that but what i wanted to hone in on was with the building materials the applicant is proposing brick manufactured stone and stucco with cementious siding as their primary masonry product of which it would be a minimum of 50 percent i'm going to zoom through these because you have them in your packet too and this is just for the benefit of the audience again the notification would be similar to what was sent out earlier as it relates to the public hearing staff is recommending an approval of the proposed request the proposed development would comply with the attached site plan landscape plan and elevation plan that i just presented to you tonight and the development of the site would have to comply with all the city requirements pertaining to right of way access curbs curb cuts and site access the pnz also recommended favor ably and i'd be happy to address any questions that you may have council member thank you mayor uh with nrmu the reason this is an sup request is because they're going for multifamily right then the zoning category is what it says it's meant to be mixed use correct what aside from requiring sup to get multifamily which would i guess default encourage more commercial development what other tools do we have in an area like this that's growing there's going to be more things added you've got a university satellite across the street not a lot of walkable neighborhood type services in that entire north area of town but you would want that eventually especially as this grows out apart from that little section that might be developed that sometime in the future i mean i get it if i'm developing it there's not a lot there what tools do we have to encourage that kind of stuff currently the tools that are available are based on the zoning districts and their associated uses and their limitations so if we look at the original zoning designation on this property which was rccd that in order to develop the multif amily product you would have to have a mixed use component with it however the caveat and the flexibility if you want to call it that associated with the ddc is that um if you choose if you have an nrmu district which is also your mixed use component your mixed use residential component you could purely request approval of a specific use permit and attach that to that which would eliminate the requirement for having your ground story commercial and retail development so in a way your limitations can be offset with that now it goes back to your zoning districts and the argument is you've got the rcc district yet you've got the nrmu district and then you've got your future land use map and how do they talk to each other and do they speak the same language or are the same you know same types of criteria being used associated with that and in this case if you look at the surrounding land use pattern it's really more of an nrm family given also the built-out environment and that's the argument that staff used when we when it was analyzed was you know you've got that nrmu family there already you've got the town home product you've got the multi so it's primarily a mixed use residential program opposed to a real mixed use product which now goes back to how do we actually achieve that and that would be through refining your code yeah i guess i we're speaking philosophically a bit here but i'm always going to be a fan and we've had a lot of philosophical discussions about apartments to me you build density where you have the opportunity for kind of more walkable more kind of new urban type environments and that necessitates some sort of neighborhood services that those folks can walk to otherwise they're getting in their car and they go to the big box stores on the corner of bony moraine university which isn't an ideal neighborhood living situation especially where you get more density so i just wonder moving forward as we see this area that's going to be populated you already said what the future planning is for those spots none of that includes any commercial and what can we do as a city besides just approving more and more residential uh to get that moving in that direction sure and not to dev iate from topic and please correct me if i am deviating from topic because that it's very easy when you start talking my interest in conversation approval this exactly it goes back to identifying through sector planning and i'm using this term very broadly to through identifying through sector planning what your needs are and what your mission or your vision is associated with that and that's why you have to do a deeper dive into your you have to create sections or subdivide your community or your city into those sections to discern through your neighborhood planning or your small area planning elements on what it is that you need to provide for that community because that's when you can hone in and create more specificity depending on what product you want and then what type of district and what type of development criteria you need to establish or implement in that location so if you were talking about a more pedestrian oriented type area then you have to make sure that your amenities as it relates to foot traffic or pedestrian traffic your pedestrian connectivity and then your building construction as it relates to adjoining uses what's in the area how do you want that to impact or not impact what's in that area as well as your infrastructure program as well so are you going to go up how does that implicate or how does that relate to what's in and around the area it's not complicated definitely not but then you've also got your infill component that would come in to play as well so it warrants creation of those sector plans in a nutshell thank you and i dvd thank you council member hawkins mayor i was uh council member breaks i'm not working over here um so you you've showed a picture of the height and you said was it three stories of the so what is the consistent um the height requirement in the area is there is there one and also the town homes how are they two story are they one story i'm trying to get to the we have a table in here that would clearly articulate the requirements and i and i cannot find it in terms of of the density bear with me one second i think i know where my table is so that i can address all your questions here we go when we speak of the nrmu district we've got two issues going on one of the development criteria associated with that the multif amily development criteria associated with the request that's before you tonight as well as the use is permitted in this case we're talking about two things you asked about the town homes if i'm not mistaken there's some are two story if i'm not mistaken i'm not 100 confident on what their building permit plans look like but i do believe some are two story in there the maximum building height in rccd is 100 100 feet because you've got nrmu zoning you've got rccd zoning and you've got the nrmu 12 zoning the nrmu height maximum building height is 65 feet okay so that's the tallest that they that's the tallest that they can go from finish floor elevation up yes yeah that's pretty tall and isn't there a in the area isn't there a park trail that's going to come through talking about um do you know is that come through there it goes around i know there is a trail but i don't know the impact on this subject site to be honest with you i'd have to verify that okay just just member gary and we're still in staff discussion okay was there a place where there's potential commercial development on this plot or did were you saying that there's not going to be commercial development the request before you right now is for a specific use permit for multifamily development and the site plan that's presented to you is purely for the multifamily development as an aside there is potential if you look at the corner of elm and riney there's a small area that's not reflected for multifamily use can you point to the corner that you're referring to because there's several you mean the very bottom this very bottom okay all right um the other thing i wanted to point out was that well i live in this neighborhood so i'll be able to see this once it's built from my house um also use that trail that's on the north lakes park area and i don't believe you'll be able to see it unless the extension goes that far out haven't been on the extension yet um this particular area is really lacking in housing for engineering students who are almost entirely at discovery center and so a lot of the engineering students are living in the residential homes in that neighborhood over there and there really isn't a lot of opportunity for them to live in newer homes that perhaps their parents would want them to live at the other thing um it's very well serv iced by buses there's a lot of unt bus traffic that goes through there so while i'm cognizant of pedestrian concerns this is a transit oriented development in my mind because of discovery center and because of how much traffic there is between students going from discovery park to their homes wherever they may be that's all that's my wasny and this piggybacks on council man rodin's comment and i circle back and i know that council hears me bring this up over and over with a small area plan and instead of having development in kind of a hit or miss projectile the small area plans allow for that plan to allow goods and services to come into and surround a neighborhood like this and as it is right now it's why we're rewriting our dent in development code because it's been around for a long time and to bring it up to speed and a new development code along with these small area plans i think will equip the city with such valuable tools that again when developers come forward and take a look they can see exactly what the city would like to see in certain areas and the city i think will get away from a lot of the hit or miss development that you know we've seen repeated over and over again so just keep on those small area plans thank you couple questions and and i maybe i'm not reading this right but when you go to the what slide is this it's oh let me find it now it's this it's the site it's the elevations yes okay i'm going to say it's on page 12 okay yeah we'll go with this one for now it says that these are three story buildings correct um so i may have not known how to count these things in my 55 years of life so am i is that what there's two that are four story buildings and there's two that are three story buildings so okay gotcha okay yes there's two product mixes so leave that leave that on the the slide there along elm street there doesn't look like there's a whole lot of offset in these elevations it just looks like it's going to be one big long line three or four stories tall of building on that side so my first question is what is the what is the distance between either the right of way or the sidewalk and the built like on eagle drive we've got that four story on eagle drive so i'm trying to get an idea of what's the space between the street and the edge of those buildings i can't quite read that um to be honest mayor my eyes are failing me too so my because it looks like in terms of let's talk about a little bit about you the building offset that's the building relief from a bird's eye view you can see that there is relief there there is also if i'm not mistaken a um minimum 15 foot pedestrian and utility easement there too and based on if if i can read that correctly and what i'm going to do is um once discussion picks up i'll look at the hard copies to discern what that what that is okay and then so when i see the road whatever that road's called it's hitting out on uh the middle of uh elm street and then it looks like it's on the other side is another street reiney road no it's go go up through the complex head right then i go across the road but no no go across highway 377 right here right there there's is that another street that is we can verify with the that's an internal street to access to um it's a private drive to the uh institutional use discovery park so that's across the street okay correct it's it's an access point into discovery park okay all right um so is that one of the main entrance i guess my thought was you're going to have a lot of traffic most likely coming out of that particular ingress egress point which is directly across from that other access point so have we checked warrants to see if that's i mean i don't know if the students mainly use that or are they going to have to require a traffic study before we we have um in terms of review of this sup the specific use permit and the associated use it did go through a drc initial review and that's why if you look at the conditions just as a fail safe we've required that all curb cuts and median openings be fully vetted through the building permit review process as well okay when you say fully v etted what do you mean you mean in terms of we've already the drc team the development review committee has already reviewed this and they don't appear to be any disconnects associated with ingress and egress to the site and impact on associated development and that will be double checked at when built when plans are submitted for building permit okay um let's see yeah i see the offset you're talking about but they're they're fairly minor um honestly i mean that's a so a question i have on the building material schematic because i can't if you go to slide uh this is 11 out of 17 it's the building type a elevation it's sort of the larger yes is that you got it there no that's yeah is it i don't think right there when you see now my computer just died on me okay we'll go up here all right you see in the middle where you sort of have those darker sort of horizontal lines what exactly these ones yes what what material is that because they show hardy plant they show cement fiberboard up at the very top right siding and then they show brick and stone do we know what that is i i believe that's great but the applicant i believe is here and we'll be able to answer that for us all right i'm going to double check this let's see if we can get anything now we'll double check okay well we'll ask uh councillor mcgregory and then we'll take public comment mayor i i went in the backup to exhibit nine yes and i did my fingers you blew it up a little bit it appears that there's a five feet from the curb to the sidewalk that the sidewalk or the pedestrian and sidewalk easement is seven and a half feet and then on the other side of that is a building so it looks like at least 12 and a half feet between the curb and the building wow i'm answering your question no no i appreciate that having looked it up no i appreciate that that that seems along ryanney road the the sidewalk is the public sidewalk is eight feet wide yeah yeah that i mean 12 feet sounds like a lot but when you're going up i don't know four story is uh i don't know what the plate line is but it's probably 40 i mean to the top of the gable or the top of the picture the roof is going to be 45 50 feet it's just going to look like a okay all right okay um all right any other staff comments for staff before we open up public hearing okay we will now open up the public hearing anybody wishing to speak come on down and and if the applicant is here got a couple questions for them but you know if they so desire is is the applicant wishing yeah and i think the applicant is allowed is it what is it 10 minutes 15 minutes i can't remember 10 okay if come on down state your name and address hello my name is charlie musa and i'm with any development we are at 865 north cowan in lewisville texas just to give you quite a brief background we've been in the area our entire lives we appreciate the opportunity to be here and we're excited to be a part of this and to integrate this project into the city we really hope that it provides a positive atmosphere to answer your question uh that was a particular material is brick with the horizontal lines going across okay so that is brick yes okay and part of the just to comment on that portion about how close it is to the property line that was part of the requirements that the uh that the staff had for us sure we're supposed to be within a certain distance of the property line right yeah and yes and okay that's helpful any other questions for the applicant why they are here okay thank you very much i appreciate that thank you okay paul state your name and address your time will begin my name is paul miltser i live at 1914 west oak street um i find myself in agreement with uh with uh my incumbent council member uh that there seems to be a bit of cart horse uh in wrong sequence issue small area plan uh you know as council member rodin uh referred as well seems to make a lot of sense before we find our way piecemeal ending up with a you know a hodgepodge um by the time you know we kind of get around to it bit by bit it'll be done uh you know and then uh we may well end up with something neither beautiful nor useful so i think uh the idea of considering all the components that make up a you know successful portion of the city before making such a large commitment just seems to make sense um i you know i do see merit to much of what's been said there are 475 full-time engineering students at unt and i count 355 beds there so i i suspect the economics are there but you know is it fully thought through beyond the property line including impact on other public amenities like like north lakes park you know just i i it's not clear to me to what extent there's been any thought given to uh the transition between parkland and and this high-rise development so uh thank you thank you public hearing anybody else wishing to speak is that your name and address your time begin i'm kurt stog sdale i live at 2103 ryanney road and uh i've been in there 35 years the uh they're doing development already on the east side of me uh on on ryanney road and they're putting in uh town homes and condominiums in there and uh one of the problems that i see with this development that we're talking about here is on the on the uh east end of ryanney road where it goes into elm street then that's a bad curve it's hard to turn in off of off of um uh elm street going south onto ryanney road and there's a median there too so there's no there used to be a a ryanney road went across uh elm street and it stayed on r yanney road but they've changed that all up they've put a median in there and you can't do that anymore so that needs to be fixed um i know development is going to be here so we like i say i've been out there 35 years and uh i live uh just north of where willie pointed out where his property is okay great thank you thank you very much this is a public hearing by wishing to speak state your name and address your time will begin my name is willie esfeth i live with 623 newton and he's a bad neighbor by the way i hope he knows i'm kidding uh when i moved here in 1970 i finally was able to build a home not no it took me a while to get out of apartment and get into a house and then i moved to bonnie bray that is when my struggle with the city of denton began at a hundred year old tree in the front of my house and they decided to widen bonnie bray i fought that as much as i could to try to save my tree 100 year old tree the city council was like you that didn't change much we are looking for the good of the city i said you're supposed to be a tree friendly city why don't you do something to help me save my tree and they told me just like you're telling me now that was in 1970 here's what you're telling me we were supposed to give you a notification we didn't tough we're going to put three story buildings right near your house and there is nothing you can do about it that's true right now there's nothing i can do about it but just like when you also destroyed my seven 100 year old pecan trees to widen the creek that has now been silted back to where it was before before you took out my trees you said there's nothing you can do about that either and you wasn't you took them i'm going to show you a film of that one by the way now here we go again what are the rules i'm supposed to be notified i think those are the rules and i try to abide by the rules i like them but i abide by them i don't like this but i don't i don't want to just be in a vacuum and not say let development develop when it's appropriate you didn't let me know you didn't let me know and you didn 't that's not right 1970 here you are again got those looks on your faces like hurry up and finish you got how many more ministers you have we're going to go ahead and go and do what we want to do because we can we have the power that's the same thing you do when you're in closed session which you do illegal things in closed session same thing well i want to stay for the record i'm going to take what i have to take uh nothing to do about it right now but i'm going to be planning to make sure that others don't have to go through what i'm having to go through now and that what you have done wrong is going to be addressed you didn't notify me you go out there and start walking around that property as much as you want i know where my property is and i know what this development is and i should have been notified and you won't find anywhere in your records where i was and i've owned that property for over 20 years you're not going to find anything in your records where you notified me and you should have council member hawkins oh council member griggs briggs excuse me griggs so before we take a vote i just wanted to say that i agree that we're still in the public here yeah yeah um is there um uh any more comments public hearings public hearing anybody wishing to speak come on down and share your name and address one more time all right we'll not close the public hearing apologize for that council member briggs so i i agree that we need housing in that area um i'm just having a hard time with the height and um in the prod in this project in the space that it's in um for right now so okay thank you and i have a question for staff because i really and and i i mean i understand about apartment development um when the applicants i guess for this area for this area which is unlike what some would say is the pedestrian area oriented area density around the university the two universities i really struggle with you got 12 feet from the curb to the building and the building i mean how tall are these ceilings these are probably 20 30 i mean you're going to have it's going to be much taller than this and it's just going to look like so help me understand is that a code requirement is that is that a code requirement the building set back so i just verified i looked at a larger site plan it's 30 feet it's 30 feet three zero from property line to building is 30 feet the building is set back 30 feet from the property line so it's so it's so um reduced that that's why it looks okay so i just want to make sure so on on this plan yes it's the 30 feet from the property line which the pedestrian easement is not on the is that still on the property line is that included in that 30 feet i believe so yes okay so okay all right oh would you be able to provide me that site plan so i can speak for to it please and that's helpful yes that's a big difference my eyes right yeah super so the pedestrian there's an existing 20 foot utility easement a seven and a half foot pedestrian and sidewalk easement and then the property sidewalk there's a five property five foot uh the setback then equates to about 30 feet so the property line the property the building is set by 30 feet from the property line and is the property line on the edge of the curb with the with the street or is it on the right away and the right away set off from the curb sign believe it's on the edge of the curb okay and earl is here to address that if there are any future plans to accommodate that as well okay so it's only at platting where we ask for right of way correct okay all right okay so it's 30 feet and those buildings i was trying to look on that it's hard to see it are those so they're both four and three story along that road are they both the four story is it a mixture of both three and four stories i believe lot one is the only one the one to the one that is to the west of discovery boulevard the proposed right of way this is lot one right here and that is the only one that's proposing two four story buildings so the other two in lot two are three three story buildings okay yes okay and i i well the i've closed the public hearing do you know what the height of these proposed buildings are at the at the top of the roof pitch or no i don't i do know that the maximum building height is capped in the district but i'm but it's 65 feet and these are i mean these are not 65 because if they're eight or ten foot plate lines correct you got three stories it's 30 feet plus okay i'd say about 45 okay all right okay all right thank you all right any other questions for staff and so this sup the plans we have here the site plan the elev ations those are all incorporated into the the ordinance therefore if there's any deviation from it it has to come back through the normal process the public hearing process to amend the sup correct councilmember graver well mayor hopefully when we make the motion it will include the conditions as recommended by p and z and those conditions you might put those back up on the screen because that that says that they will basically substantially follow the landscaping plans and there they are the site plans yeah okay all right thank you thank you thank you okay councilmember gary i just want to remind everybody that we had a presentation work session today that identified a 98.5 percent rental occupancy rate in the city of denton and i kind of feel like a broken record at this point the need for rental housing in this city is so great all of these students are paying exorbitant rents because we can't seem to approve multi-family housing i there i said it that's my belief we just need to approve some multi-family especially with as good of a development and as good of a location as this is i say that as somebody who's going to be able to see this from my house i can see discovery center from my house i understand the effect that it's going to have on the landscape let's go ahead and build it it's right by discovery park motion to approve with the conditions from p and z councilmember gravery second uh i will say that you're right uh there is a very high occupancy rate and uh rents are at least historically not like anything i've ever seen um the interesting thing is as fast as you build them they get full so anyway it's an interesting dynamic we live in right now in city dent real estate wise we have a motion and a second for agenda item 6e let's vote on oh dalton did you have something else to say okay let's vote on the board motion carries six to one we'll move on now to public hearing item 6g which is hold a public hearing considered option of an ordinance to rezone approximately 15.5 acres from neighborhood residential to nr2 district to a neighborhood residential three nr3 and we will now open the public hearing for agenda item 6g thank you mayor members of the council city manager the request before you is to consolidate a zoning to nr3 on the subject property there are two zoning districts on that area that's highlighted in yellow which is nr4 and nr2 there are all together when you look at the parcel maps there are four parcels of land and the properties on the east side of country club road as reflected there you can see it's south of regency and it's adjacent to a number of residential developments well-established residential developments the lay of the land if you look at it there in terms of topography there is a tributary of hick ory creek that runs almost bifurcates the property and you have larger homes such as regency oaks to the north and you have bent creek estates to the west and alpaceo addition to the east a little more perspective about the subject property if you look at the map that's before you we have two shades of yellow and of course that's the residential neighborhood residential category where approximately 20 acres is actually currently zoned nr4 which is neighborhood residential four district and the remaining 15 15 and a half acres is actually zoned nr2 district the request before you is to consolidate that zoning category or the zoning on the subject property the zonings on the subject property to nr3 the neighborhood our three residential district the denton plan does recommend that the low density single-family residential areas with a density of up to four units per acre be accommodated on this site which thereby encourages single-family residential development and of course compatibility with the surrounding land use pattern or the surrounding low density residential pattern and it also gives you the opportunity to provide a variety of housing stock as it relates to your lot sizes for example and that would be your numerical value attached to the neighborhood residential districts the request is not inconsistent with the surrounding zoning pattern and just to walk you through that again to the west across we have country club road and the property there is developed with nr3 district we have nr4 and we have built out nr2 district as well again multi-family and duplex uses are not permitted on this property the nr3 district is also compatible with the future land use designation the request would decrease in zoning intensity for the when you look at what's happening out there the decrease in zoning intensity for 20 out of 36 acres or 56 percent from nr4 to nr3 so you are actually with the request reducing the density on the properties nr3 is an intermediate zoning district or zoning classification between the existing districts the nr2 and the nr4 and thereby the request would be a logical transition i have tried to give you a comparison of the nr family as it relates to the neighborhood residential districts when we talk about density in the nr4 and the nr2 we're talking four dwelling units per acre and two dwelling units per acre respectively however the nr3 district is 3.5 units per acre which is below the cap of the comp plan yes sir no no no i'm sorry yeah no yeah i'm sorry i made a noise i apologize i'm sorry that's my fault and when you look at the minimum lot coverage and the landscaping requirements it's um it it falls in the middle of the nr2 and the nr4 district of course the maximum building height for residential zoning district is 40 feet and that's commens urate throughout the district i deliberately reflected this slide to show to you the environmentally sensitive area on the property and this is where the density and the developability of the area would come into play if we were to assume that the site could be developed then it could accommodate up to 111 lots i beg your pardon up to 124 lots however because of the isa constraints or the physical constraints on the site the lot count would drop significantly and it would come to about 80 lots and of course that would ultimately depend on what the mitigation measures if any would be as it relates to that environmentally sensitive area again i bring that up because we know that there is that physical constraint on the site yet when it comes time to develop a plot the property that would have to be evaluated so the request before you tonight and the charge in front of the planning division was to discern if the change in zoning was indeed appropriate or is appropriate public notifications were sent out within the 500 foot buffer and the 200 foot buffer that being said 46 46 notices were sent within 200 feet 126 within the 500 foot buffer we did receive two oppositions and one in favor and two were neutral just to provide some edification as it relates to the planning and zoning commission meeting there were some members who were present and in opposition of the request but not in writing at that point that being said staff does recommend approval of the request it is compatible with the surrounding uses and the surrounding zoning and it is also consistent with the goals and objectives of denton plan and the pnz also recommended favorably councilmember hawkins thank you mayor so manal i think i heard you say this but taking the 20 acres that are going to go nr4 to nr3 if this is approved and the 15 acres that go from nr2 to nr3 taking that overall average of that look decreases the density of the overall property okay thank you and further so because of the physical constraints on the site as it relates to the environmentally sensitive area councilman breaks on the um alternative alternative esa that's not actually what we're talking about but it's pretty significant when you look at the picture and that is currently under review now is that no the request before you tonight is purely for a change in zoning right however we also wanted to identify to bring to your um knowledge that there were some physical constraints on the site and that could potentially impact the develop ability or the full density developable density of the area as it relates to that if there any development criteria related to mitigation measures or altering the existing esa that would still come before you through public hearing as an alternative so we'll cross that bridge down the road a little bit this is just specifically for the zoning right and the zoning in itself is compatible with the existing land use pattern and the established zoning districts thanks councilman wasney and i would caution staff to really study as we move forward developing this piece of property with that creek bed and the esa area that it's it's respected and uh recognized you know for what it is so just a word of caution thanks councilmember graver thank you so my guess is that the developer is requesting the nr3 because of the area that they cannot develop and therefore they're going to have to have smaller lot sizes or can you can you explain that again because when you talk about only 78 you're grinning like no i'm smiling okay is that a question i should be asking no i think i do understand your question the reason why i highlighted to you the actual develop ability of the area was to show that even if the entire property is zoned to the nr3 zoning district the full density would probably not be realized as a result of the physical constraints on the site so if we were to just do a simple mathematical equation we would come out to about 120 units however because of the implications of the existing creek right there that reduces the number of lots that you can actually provide on the site which would shrink then the density so would it be if you'd go back to that other slide that was up there when i started asking the question which one this one yeah what i'm curious about is the existing zoning taking out the esa at nr2 and the existing zoning taking out the esa for for nr3 when you when you have to consider that those sure that that's not there because that's really what we're talking about the difference not not 110 lots and 124 it's 73 to something else you're absolutely right i i think i do understand and let me try and iterate what you what you've stated then should the existing zoning remain in place the nr2 and the nr4 regardless there is the impact of the environmentally sensitive area and therefore that density would be reduced as well associated with that what i was trying to show here and i and i should have done i believe a better job was to explain how that impact would have been with the existing zoning so i was trying to show full you know if we were to build out well i i get it i don't i mean that's helpful it's helpful it would just be another step to make it a little more helpful to see the actual right exactly and the applicant is here and i'm sure they'll be able to do a quick analysis for us too any other questions for public input and just to give everybody heads up i meant to take a break last time but we'll take a break after this after this agenda item okay any more questions for staff seeing none thank you this is a public hearing we have a couple of cards one of them is mr lee all ison who's the applicant so mr allison you got 10 minutes if you want to take them and state your name and address and your time will begin good evening lee allison with allison engineering group in denton texas laurence holdover project manager is with me the applicant kent key could not make it tonight hope his trust in me is warranted but we'll find out in a few minutes i guess don't really have a presentation i'd like to respond to a few of the things that have been pointed out and requested and discussed we do have a concept plan for this and we've actually submitted a alternative environmentally sensitive area application as well as a preliminary plant manal has alluded to those and those will be coming through later they're in process right now we believe that we've respected the the entities the the situation the esa's that are out there but we'll discover later manal could i help get this back on the screen i didn 't bring slides and oh somebody else is there this one in particular over on the east end there is a neighbor who has reported some drainage concerns those are really not related to our neighborhood but there's a piece of this land here that drains that direction towards those homes as we go in to develop that we'll be able to do some grading modifications to help make sure we do not aggravate that situation situation in any way i expect we could provide a little bit of relief i do not expect that we'll be able to solve their problem for them because it comes from another location related to this with the current zoning it allows 111 lots and actually we can put 111 lots on there even with the environmental situation and the way we do that is we put tiny homes out there the code does not put minimum lot sizes or dimensions when your site is greater than two acres those go away so technically we can do that i do want to emphasize technically because practically what we do is what manal has been related to or discussing from a practical perspective if we can recapture part of the flood plain area not the stream buffer esa our concept plan has about 73 lots on it we might go as high as 78 but that would be the maximum and i know those aren't for consideration this evening i did want to find the zoning map to your question mr gregory this is an awkward zoning maybe even weird because the darker area is where the nr4 is the lighter is where the nr2 you'd think the nr4 would be up against country club road not away from it like that we could put four units per acre in the darker area and two units per acre in the lighter area but by going to the whole site is nr3 we don't have to patchwork this light and that's the real reason for the zoning change we didn't know if we were going to go to nr2 nr3 or nr4 in the request the nr3 gives us enough room to get the density we're looking for in that 73 to 78 and i might add when the alternate esa comes through because it requires concessionary items at that point in time we will be able to put a maximum lot number on the request then even though you can't do it now i'm getting ahead of myself i'm getting ahead of the game here and i apologize but sure that's kind of a summary but thank you mr allison so what i'm hearing you say and i thank you for pointing that out because i that didn't register with me so for the people who live on regency whose homes backyards back out to that property right now most of them their backyards are backing up to nr 4 yes and you're proposing to take it down to nr3 yes so so you're proposing to actually for for the impact of those homes lower the density correct okay and then through the alternate esa process we'll be able to put a cap on there that lowers it even more so we'll work from there apologize it's late i'm trying to be quick no no no brief my fault can i help i think i remember this i think i remember a few years back there was an attempt to because this has all the houses that are on country club road the little houses in the front and they were trying to they came before and we're trying to get an nr4 nr6 some kind of really high density and they were using density transfers because of the esa and and things such as that so my question then is you've said several times 73 to 78 lots concept plan do you have an issue with us tying that concept plan to the approval of this rezoning in other words because you i mean this isn't about you but you could say that but if somehow there's not a condition on that that could change somewhere down the line and we just it seems like there's been a lot of conversation about the density uh like you said we could put a hundred and i forgot how many lots you said you could get on that so is there any kind of resistance to that being a condition that you know we we incorporate your concept plan or we incorporate some kind of maximum lot size because that's important to me the density because one thing we've been asking for and with on council for several years is how do we get you know sort of larger lot sizes with some larger homes instead of packing everything in real real tightly in our residential subdivision so is that is that something that y'all would be willing to consider simple answer is yes okay i'd like to see at this point in time if we could put it at 78 or 80 okay since we haven't gone through our planning process give us your wiggle room okay our understanding is that would be similar to an overlay restriction in fact we might have offered that up we just didn't think we could do that anymore on zoning cases that's helpful thank you very much any other questions for the applicant all right thank you appreciate it appreciate you we do have a card uh is it donna mcloughlin come down state your name and address and your time will begin donna's list go mcloughlin at 3300 belmont street thank you for the opportunity for my husband rob and myself to restate our concerns regarding the proposed rezoning z16 0025 our concerns were explained at that december 14th planning and zoning meeting at this meeting a topographic map exhibited by the engineering firm showed a bridge line running north and south water from the eastern side of the ridge drains toward belmont street and these properties on the western side of belmont street the drainage has caused significant flooding to our property in the past and we asked the city and the developer for assurances that steps will be taken to address this drainage pattern one of the things which has probably helped mitigate flooding on our property are the number of trees on the property we expect that protection of these trees will be a priority lastly we are concerned that the city and developer may not be aware that there is a fresh water supply line running directly under our property the water line connects to the existing farmhouse that is on the property being rezoned in other words the farmhouse farmhouses private water line is under our property we want assurances from the city and the developer that this water line will be properly kept and abandoned we appreciate your serious consideration for these concerns the reason i'm here being a squeaky wheel is because of what's been stated we've lived here in denton long enough to recognize that m ishaps and changes do occur in development projects and plans and we want to be on record of being having this concern sure okay any questions all right thank you appreciate that this is a public hearing that's the only card we have but anybody else wishing to speak yes sir please come down state your name and address and your time will begin my name is robert mcglofflin i live at 3300 belmont street we attended the planning and zoning meeting and expressed our concerns about the designation of this property at the time we were told that if this shows up here that this nr3 area here to the west of country club drive was what made sense to the p and z group to designate this area in question as an nr3 as well i would ask the council to look at how much of this property is nr2 which would only allow for the development of about 60 homes in this area and i felt like the nr2 designation was a much more consistent uh designation for this overall area than to kind of cherry pick an nr3 and work with this with this group one of the p and z commissioners did pose the question to the engineering firm why this had not been brought to their attention as an nr2 and if you'll read the minutes of that meeting i believe the answer was it was basically a financial consideration that the developer didn 't feel that they were going to make enough money on their project if this was an nr2 but as we as you spoke a few minutes ago if we could get some sort of assurance that there will be a maximum number of homes in this area because there's a wide variance between 60 homes in an nr2 designation and the maximum of 124 if this is approved at an nr3 council member griggory but hi rob you do realize that right behind your house that's n r4 yes i do okay so this is actually going down for you yes yes okay right right which is a bit of a mystery how this is an nr4 because it's really one farm back there that we've kind of had to kind of kind of work with when we bought our property we found that the water line that donna spoke of was just there it's not on a plat it's not on easement it's not on our survey it's just there so we we had to actually flip the entire design of our house north to south to leave an open area over that water line and so yeah it's a problematic piece of property we get that and we always knew it was going to be developed that's that's not a question we just like it to be developed more in a way that's consistent with the rest of the nr2 area that surrounds it okay council member wasley do you have question for the speaker i do and i think for clarification purposes the 122 is one number but when you put in the esa which is the creek bed it reduces that number substantially and it's what the mayor was talking about to cap that number at 78 or 80 so that's 40 houses 45 houses less than that 122 and it's the reason i talked about the esa as a real important piece of this property because it is going to determine what can be done and how many houses can be built legally so i think to help lay some of your concerns the 122 that would only be if we didn't have a creek there but we do have a creek there and i know that drainage is an issue and staff is going to have to plan accordingly and staff is also going to have to take a look at that water line that comes through your property and up into that farmhouse yes yes i entirely agree with you that the esa is a huge factor here i think it's partly a case of expectations that when we brought our property 10 years ago we were told that this would be developed consistent with the neighborhood that was being developed there so in our heads we always thought that there would be 60 houses it's so you're i agree with your point that there's going to be less than could be but it's about 20 more than we were expecting i appreciate you coming tonight thank you appreciate it thank you you bet thank you sir this is a public hearing anybody else wishing to speak anybody else wishing to speak i do have a question i guess why it's still in the public hearing um well i'll talk about it when i close the public hearing um anybody else wishing to speak we will now close the public hearing staff as far as the if you could get with the mcgoughlands and if they haven't already but obviously there's certain rules and regulations regarding additional water flow from whether it's the natural flow of water that you can't add i mean if you could just maybe provide them if they haven't been provided provide them with some information on some of those rules and regs for for water drainage both state and local that'd be great sure you bet council member gregory and the additional question would be about that water line that's going to the farmhouse it it i had already noted that to verify you know was it by a separate instrument what was the concern certainly that's not going to be the main water line to the whole subdiv ision it's out well yeah we'll look at all the infrastructure existing and the velocity and surrounding properties and impact on that all right any other questions for staff council member gary move approval council member hawkins i second have a motion and a second for agenda item 6g let's vote on the board please seven zero uh approval let's take about a five or ten minute break okay we want to welcome everybody back to our meeting of the density council it is 15 till 10 i apologize for taking my jacket off we got a little hot so i'm not trying to be too informal but council member hawkins was giving me a hard time so we'll move on to our next agenda item is agenda item 6h which is hold a public hearing and consider adoption of an ordinance to rezone approximately 7.95 acres from a regional center commercial neighborhood to a regional center commercial downtown and this is a public hearing so we will now open the public hearing good evening thank you mayor members of the council city manager the request before you tonight is for a adoption of an ordinance for a rezoning request from regional center commercial neighborhood which is the rccn zoning district to a regional center commercial downtown district which is the rccd district and you've heard me tonight use the word family of districts and in this case we are talking about a similar district in terms of family or the tree the property in question the subject property is located on the frontage of i of in i-35 it's on the southbound service road between loop 288 and 380 and the triangular piece of property has approximately 1600 feet of frontage along 35 to give you a better idea of what's what zoning categories are in the area you will notice that there's several the area especially to the west of i-35 is littered with several zoning categories but the primary zoning category is rccn and which is the current zoning on the property and we also have the rccd zoning district and if we were to attach a color to that we're talking about the fuchsia and the purple just north of this property we have some rccd zoning district and then one parcel removed we also have rcc district surrounding this property we have undeveloped agricultural land which is also zoned in the rccn we have the denton education center which is zoned rccn and we've got some undeveloped property as well that being said i wanted to talk a little bit about the future land use plan as it relates to this subject property and if you notice it says business innovation business innovation is a for the lack of a better word a category or a a phrase that was used to attract office research and development with light manufacturing uses large-scale office and employment parks with the support function of your retail hotel and and potentially higher density residential uses however when we look at the surrounding land use pattern and especially when you look at the frontage the rccn zoning district actually doesn't lend itself to being along that frontage rezoning to the rccd district would in fact be a far more logical transition or logical zoning for this site because one it belongs to the regional mixed use district family or centers family of for those zoning districts in the area to the northwest and south and even though the rcc district does not conform to the future land use designation which i just discussed of business innovation because of primarily the built-out environment along 35 and what you envision to see along major highways such as these the types of uses that you envision to see they're more intense and that's why the rcc district is far more suited to that the commercial or regional mixed use designation would be more appropriate in that case than what the future land use plan says which is business innovation style zoning district designation and most of your auto and rv sales and commercial uses in the area actually populate themselves along that frontage the request for rezoning is actually to accommodate agricultural equipment such as tractors and trailers and have a workshop associated with that which is a use that we've seen along interstate highways that being said the recommendation ultimately at this point staff is recommending favorably as it relates to changing the zoning district given the proposed use given the nature of uses along these types of frontage corridors and given that you would rather have a more intense district adjacent to the highway opposed to being less intense and that's why the business innovation component does not suit this site and in the future as we start looking and revisiting our comp plan these are elements that we're going to have to revise but in the meantime to accommodate the relevant development and to have a cohesive development pattern along that 35 corridor it would be in staff's recommendation to rezone the subject site to the requested zoning district we did send out public notification per our protocol only one was received in favor the planning and zoning commission did hear this in public hearing and recommended favorably and as did staff and is recommending now too councilmember haw kins i know it's late so i i in favor of this tonight but i think you addressed it that we're going to be looking at the future land use in that area to just reevaluate okay yes thank you okay any other questions for staff before we open the public hearing well yeah i didn't open it so did i open it i don't think did i i did okay all right okay any other questions all right this is a public hearing that has been opened if anybody wishing to speak please come down state your name and address and your time will begin i'm panning the audience to see if anybody wishes to speak on this public hearing i see none all right we will now close the public hearing councilmember gregory move approval of item h councilmember hawkins i second let's vote on the board please motion carries six zero move on to agenda item six i hold a public hearing consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of dinden tex as amending specific use permit approved by ordinance number 2002-260 in the downtown commercial general zoning district thank you members of the council and our city manager i am actually going to speak to this request using the site plans within our presentations today just to explain what is going on with the request the request is to have a public hearing and consider approval of a request by quick trip to amend their existing sup ordinance and to modify their site plan the request is to add 16 additional parking spaces on site that being said we're all familiar with the location of this site i think at carroll and eagle subject property is zone dcg in 2002 the city council approved a 5 000 square foot retail building which contained 12 fueling pumps pump islands 26 parking spaces and 58 500 square feet of impervious surface as well as 25 594 square feet of new tree canopy and i mentioned i would speak from the site plan we have this i beg your pardon this is the approved site plan this was approved in 2002 and this is what's on the ground now you have your fueling stations located along here you have carroll boulevard along here and this is eagle you have the 5 000 square foot building which is here the request before you tonight is to actually amend this sup and associated landscape plan to accommodate some modifications to the site the reason why this is before you here being heard by you tonight is because it's an approved ordinance it's an sup a specific use permit and a modification is being proposed to it thus the requirement for a public hearing this slide here speaks specifically to what is being proposed the pump islands will remain the size of building will remain the applicant is proposing to add an existing and a new entryway into this building to add 16 more parking spaces to this site to screen the parking from carroll boulevard with a screening wall masonry screening wall along here to provide pedestrian connectivity a an area showing pedestrian connectivity and also to provide an inlet filter along here to capture into a bucket and a specific system to treat water that being said yes sir go ahead i think you're going to answer my question i'm going to go back to that slide in order to accommodate and provide this new parking area the applicant would be removing existing trees that are located along here and are proposing to plant for the four trees that would be impacted along here to plant them here there is also impact on trees existing trees there's a cluster of trees here that through recommendation of planning and zoning commission and staff that those be mitigated as well one of the features that the applicant is providing is and i reflected that on the previous slide which is right here it's an existing filter right here and the applicant will be installing this filter which is basically a bucket-like feature where the photograph has been provided and the intent is to capture runoff water that is created through rain events it would enter that curved inlet that existing inlet and the water that that flows into the bucket would pass through a filtering process which would remove pollutants that are deposited on the site we feel that this is a value add to this development as they are proposing more parking they're enhancing the site with that but we felt that they could do a little more and that's why they're proposing this we've asked that the trees that i mentioned to you along here be relocated and they have agreed to relocate those in addition to the trees that are being compromised here we are recommending through staff recommendation and i believe pnz to go ahead and relocate those trees too although the with the expansion of adding 16 new parking spaces the overall tree canopy will be reduced on the site it still complies with the 20 requirement of the development code so it is still in keeping with our development code and it is higher than the minimum requirement public notification was sent one was received in neutral as i indicated the proposal before you tonight is purely a modification of an approved site plan and the request would allow the applicant or enable the development to renovate an existing commercial development that is doing really well it's a viable development the use will not affect the existing scale or surrounding land use pattern it is all internal to the site and the use is permitted by right the proposed inlet filter would reduce some environmental impact associated with the additional parking and the site complies with the criteria of the ddc dentin development code as the existing use is compatible with the surrounding land use pattern and surrounding developments the pnz planning and zoning commission recommended approval subject to some specific conditions as did staff and i'm going to go through those slowly the recommendation is that the proposed development must substantially conform to the attached site plan landscape plan and grading plan as submitted and it's included in your packet a five foot rem triton curb inlet filter which i just showed to you with a replaceable and of course this is all terminology that is specific to that inlet feature um shall be installed and maintained in the north west corner of the site as depicted on the attached site plan the applicant will be required to submit three reports per calendar year to the planning division demonstrating that this curb inlet filter system has been inspected it's been maintained at a minimum of three times per year and if debris is accumulated in there it reaches 80 percent of filter capacity the reports shall provide confirmation that the replaceable media has to be replaced at least once per year or when the media pack is 50 coded with contaminants the proposed development as indicated must conform to the plan submitted a marked pedestrian connection must be installed to connect the sidewalk on north carroll boulevard with the retail building that was that red area i showed you four existing trees that are currently planted in the new parking area shall be relocated on the site as depicted in the attached landscape plan in addition to that four more two inch caliber large canopy trees from the landscape plant list must be planted on site in accordance with the landscape and tree canopy requirements as outlined in the dentin development code that was pnz and staff recommendation the applicant is amen able to i believe all of the conditions and is as far as the third condition to add four additional two inch caliber trees the applicant has not indicated whether they're amenable to that or not but it is staff and pnz recommendation okay mayor protein thank you mayor you know usually with an sop sup when we're adding conditions it's like part of a site plan or specific materials or things like that this one is kind of like a long-term keeping tabs on them three times a year these reports this does your department have like an investigation division or enforcement division i mean how how do we long term keep track of that um i'm really glad you asked that question no we do not have the zoning enforcement arm that stems from our department to make sure that approved site plans actually conform to what's on the ground that being said the the filter system that we discussed that i discussed before you tonight was actually vetted with our environmental services team as well and they frequently require reports when there is pervious cover or there are any types of inlets from other developments that come to them for review as it relates to the regular maintenance or manufacturer specification maintenance and so we leaned on them to verify how this would work and we will work in concert and in conjunction with them to ensure these reports are submitted they do this for other developments as well so but back up to that that page though because it seems so you'll still be kind of the gatekeeper gatekeeper so it's going to go through you you work with yes absolutely and so the onus does fall upon the planning division absolutely right thank you council member riggs so the i think the applicant is here is it possible to ask them if number three is is okay absolutely once yeah i've got a couple of things before we hear from the public um could you put the site plan back up thank you and this was approved when originally 2002 okay and at that time do you recall i i think our pervious versus non-pervious parking pavement regulations probably weren't the same they are now back then my hunch are we speaking about lock coverage or just pervious and impervious percentage if they came to do this new today there's probably different levels of concrete coverage correct as pervious as per absolutely correct okay i i mean i'm going to just tell you from my perspective i'm probably not going to vote for this simply because i've to add more parking number one to add more parking there and i know that's already concrete that's already concrete i believe you've got a major fire lane that comes down through there coming off of carol boulevard and so off of carol down here at the other side right there the to have more parking activity this is i mean first of all this is a very successful store yes very very very successful i mean to the point you have to really be careful when you're walking from your gas pumps to the store because there are just so many cars in and out and so if you add more parking and another entrance on that end it's going to be very interesting with the with the ingress and egress of traffic nothing against quick trip nothing against staff it's just i think we're even though it meets the it exceeds the current standards i'm almost probably certain when they came to get this originally a lot of these things that were probably mitigated back then were part of the motivation for council to consider this so that's really the only reason that i'm probably going to it's not because i don't think it's simply because i think it makes it just too much right there at that main entrance off of carol boulevard and when you start putting parking there that means you've got more people walking around milling around there and especially with that new entrance off the side so it's nothing against the business it's nothing it's just i don't think that that would really it's going to provide an opportunity for them to increase obviously traffic and things such as that understand that motivation but based on at least my experience there it's it is it's maxed out i mean as far as at least in my in my thought so nothing against staff that's just that's sort of my thought that's why it's here before you as a public hearing item yes so any more questions for staff will we hear from the applicant thank you we do have a this is a public hearing so i guess you guys are the applicants okay and i believe they get 10 minutes we're just going to set up that oh no that's no problem i'm sorry i was going to start singing but i won't yeah i've got some good songs coming up too and karaoke thanks next good evening council or good night my name is john pimentel address is 3708 beatrice drive denton and i'm a project manager for quick trip good and i wanted to offer some visuals she already did a great job of explaining what our project is essentially this is the current site this will be the overall proposed site plan kind of a close i'm sorry could you go back to that that photograph yeah right there yes sir so where you're proposing parking is currently some landscape some grass and things such as that is that am i seeing that right yes it appear yeah okay all right so it's not already some of those parking spaces that are proposed are not currently concrete yes sir correct okay all right again this is a site plan this would be a kind of just a closer look at the site plan our landscape plan colored site plan and just kind of perspectives of how we will how we'll appear here from eagle or carol rather i'm sorry but i would like to address your concern you're absolutely correct it is maxed out and that's partly why we want to do this project one of the big concerns is i don't know if you see any of our new gen 3 locations we don't have any in denton currently i think the closest one would be on north lake or maybe lowelm but currently that store has four entrances and parking all around it and it's actually been safer from a circulation standpoint for customers coming in a lot problem is we do have customers that come in just especially a store like this that has a lot of walk-up traffic and they'll have to compete with the people getting gas over here this would be ideal because they'll park at the side or back of the store and be able to go in and get their product or make any purchase that they need and not have to compete with the traffic that's a you're competing with on the gas front okay customer hawkins yeah what kind of what's the construction going on in the northwest corner is that sorry it's a diesel y'all putting in diesel tanks yes yes diesel tanks okay yeah thanks most of our stores in dfw are now going back to the older sites are 2000 and 2008 9 and putting in some diesel tanks there okay so if you could go back to the photograph again yes the first slide because this is my question about pervious versus non-pervious versus uh that i that i asked for so it's my understanding that most of that landscaping as you come in the fire lane off a carol that little buffer from the sidewalk towards your towards the building that's going to all be pavement behind the building where those trees are are those the ones you're talking about mitigating are those the ones that are coming out the is this a current photo yes okay so all that'll be gone and that'll be parking even along the back side where there's that little parking i don't know what that is there looks like a little space uh paved space there okay that just helps me understand what's on the ground and what it's going to be okay all right thank you council member hoggins do you have a question any other questions for staff i mean you have additional time for for presentation if you want or you yes i'm sorry council member brings on the um she said there was the item number three which you guys haven't seen or agreed to and i'm just wondering is that something you're okay with the the mitigation of the trees right yeah yes okay yes with the uh mitigation she kind of touched on it but i believe the uh quota was 20 with the proposed site plan it would have been 25 percent and with the addition of staff recommendation we'd be at 30 for lot coverage on the trees okay all right okay any other questions for staff not staff i'm sorry for the applicant any other questions all right thank you very much appreciate it thank you for time this is a public hearing anybody else wishing to speak come down take a state your name and address and your time will begin as well as with i live at 623 newton i just have a couple of questions just clarify in my mind what he's proposing the the wall going to be here that you that that was talked about is this the wall if it is what is it made out of and uh how tall is it yeah so you kind of get here yes sir all right and let's see there's one other thing where's the the tanks that they're putting in right now are here so that'll be parking so the tanks are under yes sir correct yes thank you i should have touched on that i know she did but it would be a three foot high masonry wall to block this yeah thank you and your air your air thing your air supply and water thing still going to be there yes sir yes sir i'm just curious we we actually get a lot of compliments on that no it's yeah it's always crowded there's a waiting line there you're still gonna have donuts yeah no that's all right council member gregory is that air still free it is still free i appreciate that yeah i mean my comments in no way reflect i mean i frequent that store quite often so uh it's it certainly is uh very popular in our community so yes it's a great store for us i mean it just in dent alone it's it's not even we have two other stores better than that even um you know mayho and doing on 380 which will probably come back here in a couple months to discuss as well um but so okay thank you thank you any other comments public hearing not too many people have to talk at the public hearing okay seeing none we will now close the public hearing council member wasney i move to approve item six i with all conditions council member hawkins i second thanks for staying up with us here okay all right let's vote on the board please okay uh no we'll take it we'll take a hand vote on this if we don't have a if we don't have it oh you got it okay all right okay motion carries five to one all right we're now down to concluding items thank you gentlemen appreciate that five to one uh we've got concluding items agenda item seven council member rodin thank you mayor uh three three items one is um we have a upcoming discussion uh relating to this the st oke co-working site i just want to check into the feasibility if during that same time if it would be possible to do a session out at that site uh maybe do it come back uh to conclude our work session to just look into the possibility on the 21st i also would like to get an update or discussion if there's been any movement along the line of tackling uh the internet digital divide in our city uh i know there's been some talk between the tech department dentin ids and whatnot and i think there's possibilities there i'd like to bring back to the table and finally it's been a while since i think we've had a comprehensive discussion on what's our economic development strategies moving forward and i know we've got a new person at the helm there uh and to revisit that uh to see where we're at to maybe have a comprehensive discussion council member gregory thank you mayor uh either on february 14 or 21 i'd like to see before the council in both a workshop and an action item the ordinance and an ordinance uh communicating the authority of our city auditor okay we've talked about that in past meetings but i think it's time to let's get that in place before before he's on duty okay council member hawkins oh council member breaks okay so i have i have a few here um i would like to ask for an evaluation of street repairs or resurfacing um kind of what is the normal length of life for a street and what has our street's life been there is one in in my district that was repaved a month or so ago and it already has a hole in it so i'm just kind of curious and i would also like to ask for a staff report on what it would take to establish an arts district in our city um several months back we had a staff report on paid maternity leave for our employees and i'd like for council to review that or revisit the data and discuss it if it was something that we would possibly be interested in um i would like to request a report on 2016 expenses for outside consultants and professional services uh we had a staff report in 2015 and that was pretty useful um and finally i would like for this council to consider passing a resolution that the city of denton recognizes our diversity and we welcome all forms of religion joey do you have one okay well so you want to end on a silly note a couple uh want to get a um either a work session or informal staff report on who we send to our international code as an international code delegate um that sort of represents the city in approving or dispro ving or looking at amendments to these international codes that we eventually very often adopt especially the energy code and i'd like to if we can and if not i'll figure out a different way to do it but if staff could somehow um if we had someone who had a development that conformed to the energy code for 2012 we're now under new energy code 2015 to see exactly what additional amendments or different construction methodology would be required because i'm hearing that 2015 is very very tough uh and so i really want a really comprehensive overview and understanding of how we're choosing the codes we're choosing what kind of possibilities do we have for amendments um and then lastly i mentioned this when we were talking about eagle drive and the striping of eagle drive with the two bike lanes on each side and then the single lanes with the turn lane in the middle we're going to have to revisit that uh there's been times uh and north texas is doing some development out there putting up a new residence residential dorm and some other amenities there's been times and we can say that it's in peak times but when traffic literally is backed up from carroll boulevard all the way back to avenue c at the chicken express and i i want to revisit that configuration because i'm not so sure and every i drive that road every day and i hardly ever see anybody utilizing those bike lanes so i want to see how can we take a traffic count of that and because that's going to that is our major east west thoroughfare in the northern core or southern core of our city especially on the university side and it is insane you know in the middle of the night it's not obviously but during school um and then what happens is it backs up traffic in the neighborhoods because people turn off to get into the neighborhood so i mentioned that when we talked about this when we were doing the repaving and people said well we can take another look at it and so i'd like to do whatever kind of imperial study that's required to take a second look at that because it's going to get worse as they continue to develop the university right there on eagle drive and central okay mr silly man it's up to you all right we're sending off an ita tonight yes so i forgot to say something about that and we're welcoming tod so mayor i want to put you on the spot i want to hear your matthew mcc onaughey come on man all right all right all right nita it has been a pleasure for you to serve on the left side and even though people have said what is the city manager and the city attorney doing up here next to the mayor uh thank you so much for for all that you've done for the city and for me sitting right here for the last couple years you guys are awesome thank you so much thank you all right any other comments concluding items will stand adjourned