Aug 01, 2017 City Council on 2017-08-01 1:00 PM

I wanted to welcome everybody to this meeting of the Denton City Council on Tuesday, August 1, 2017 at 1 p.m. We do have a quorum. Everybody's present. Before we start through the agenda, I just want to alert everyone to a new toy that we have here at the dais. It's a very important toy and tool of good meeting governance and so forth, but we have a little light here that can be activated from the control room if one of us, primarily myself, does not have their mic on. So if somehow this light shows up and I don't notice it, somebody just bring it to my attention because it could be either I'm the culprit or one of you are. So I want to thank Billy Matthews for this very innovative and creative solution to people running down the hall to inform me that my mic is not on. Could they turn it on right now so we could get an idea of what it looks like? I'm sure, Mr. Matthews, you're listening. There you go. Wow. Now that's cool. Yes. All right. Thank you. Okay. And for those that are, well, never mind. I'm not going to go any further with that. Okay. We will now proceed through our agenda. Item number one is citizen comments on consent agenda items . Mr. Willie Hutsmith, I've got a card from you. If you would please state your name and address and your time will begin in this light. I'm just kidding. Never mind. City council members and manager, my name is Willie Huts mith. I live at 623 Newton. I would like to request a light for when my son's saying disparaging things about me as I walk into the building. You got something for that? You know, I had that boy and dealt with him when he was seven. I knew right then it was a mistake to keep going from there . I'm sorry, Dr. Hutsmith. Anyway, IRA is the one I want to look at. I would like for you to move that one to where we can discuss it. That's a personal reason for that. The consent agenda item A. My property is on Bonnie Bray. I would like discussion. I have two properties on Bonnie Bray. I would like a discussion about that openly. I don't -- for the selection of that person who is going to be picked to determine the value of my property. For three years I've been talking about this. I've saved that -- I've had that property since 1982. Bought it, paid for it, decided to keep it as an investment . I want the value of what I could get for that property if you don't take it from me and then do whatever you want to do with it. If the city is going to take it, those legal words that you use which means we have the power and we're going to do whatever we want to do. We don't care about you. Eminent, do, do, rip you off, main. Sometimes -- now the persons whose house is on scripture I noticed, you paid them the value that I think my property is worth. That property on scripture that you just purchased to have that left turn lane. This person you're going to pick needs to be fair with all of us. Again, me specifically talking about my property. Darn. You save all that time and then someone just with a wand just like taking my trees out. We're going to do it because we're the city. I would hope that you don't do that. I'd like to just for you to discuss who this person is and how you select them, what the whole procedure is going to be or some of that if you can. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Moving on to agenda item two, request for clarification of agenda items listed on today's agenda. Clarifications? We'll start down here. Councilmember Briggs. Well, we can start by A. I'd like to pull that for a little bit more detail to the public and also item I just because the amount that it is on the consent agenda, I would just like to have a little bit more information for the public on that as well. Okay. All right. That is okay. Councilmember Ryan. Thank you, Mayor. I had A on my list as well, but item K, since that's something we're going to do, I'm going to say something we're going to be just get a closed session item. I'd like for that to be pulled from the consent agenda. And I was wondering if someone can explain on H, we sent out 302 requests for bids and only got one back. Why are we just not finding the right people or is it that small of a source? Who can address that question on item H? Looks like a competitive proposals award in the City of Denton Distribution Center. Anybody? Mr. City Manager, anybody? Nope. So, a lot of the products that we use for DME are very specialized and in this case, we've actually gone out before for this product and had multiple products, different brands. But over time, what we found is that this product actually stands out better in the weather and it's a single molded product. So. John, does that answer your question? Okay. All right. Thank you. Any other requests for clarification? Mayor Pro Tem? I'd like to pull item E. I just need to not vote on that. I'll be recusing myself. Just following up with that, I hate to bring you back up here again, but I guess I'd like a little bit of a follow up. So over time, we've received less offers because I guess I 'm just not following. On the last response as far as the single source item? Yes. Yeah. And if somebody from DME has a little bit more information about the item and I think the question was why did we send out so many bids but we only got one and there's not many companies that sell this particular item or. Yeah. Well, maybe just a clarification on the weathering part of it. Is that what makes it single source? Brent Heath, Energy Delivery. That's a secondary pedestal. It's the previous item that was talked about. That's a connection cabinet that we use that actually goes from the electric facilities as a demarcation point to the customer's electric service. And they have a lid that comes off of them. There's different types that you can actually purchase. Some are fiberglass, some are molded plastic, some are formed plastic. Some of them have the logos on them. And because of the weathering, they do get hit and run over a lot by kids on tricycles and wagons and there's just a lot of things that can impact and actually dent that. We do want to make sure it is secure to where no one can get into it. And the weather, of course we do know fiberglass does cause the fibers to come off of that. And so this just seemed to be a good product that we have had good experience with. Does that answer or can? May I put in? Any thoughts? So in the past we've had multiple offers, but now because we want a weatherized product, we have a sole source. Is that, am I following? Some of the vendors only represent and carry certain manufacturers' product. And so if we specify the product, sometimes vendors or distributors can give multiple bids on the same item. Sometimes they can't because of some licensing agreements that they have with that exact product. I understand. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Yes. Is this on the same issue? Exactly. Yes. Council Member Hosebett. Pardon my, what is a pedestal? Is there, I guess that's my thing. I would like to see an image diagram, something just so I can. There are about a 12 inch by 12 inch, sometimes 18 by 18 box that stands about three foot above the ground. It usually sits on the property line in between two residential lots right next to the sidewalk and that is where the electric cables, secondary cables go into. And then the service cables, the wires from the house also go into that same location and they get bolted or connected together at that location. So it's a connection cabinet. Yeah. Can you email me a picture? I'd be happy to do that. Outstanding. And more in a summary. I mean I get that I'm following you. Okay. I would just like to see it if you could please. Yes sir. I'd be happy to do that. Thank you. Thank you. I've got just one clarification but anybody else? Oh I'm sorry, yes. If we're moving to other items, item G, not that I want to pull it, I just have a comment. Generally I think when we get around that level or at any level, specifically that level of spending, I really would like more information local preference wise. That to me is just, I think it's important to point out there's going to be individuals coming in working, whatever that is, I just would like to see more information about, because firstly I'm looking at the contractors, not a dent in contractor which is fine, but then what is that, what comes to our community from that? And that's just my running question there. I think Jay, again not to pull it but just a general comment is I think that's a great analysis and I'd like to share that on the website or one page or something. I know we're working on some different information to go out but I think that is a great study to take a look at what we're doing and make sure we're in line with the market and that sort of thing. So I think that's a great study and I think we should share that information, whatever the city manager thinks is prudent. For me I have a question about B. Is that, I understand that settlement, is that agreed? Because I read some back and forth whether initially there wasn't an agreed number and then I wasn't sure if that settlement is now agreed to. Yes. Yes, item B is an agreed upon number. That exact item did go to the special commissioner's court and they awarded what the appraised value was. We finally two months after the commissioner's court received an appraisal from the property owner of what they expected. The range was very, very wide above and beyond what the commissioner's awarded. It was like $440,000 and the appraisal was $93,000 plus or minus. We were able to take the appraised value, go 20% above that , which is $110,000, add some damages, $2,000 per day for 10 days for 20,000 damages to the golf course because it would be unplayable. And so that's how we arrived at the $130,000. Okay. Thank you. Yes, sir. And if I may? Sure, you bet. One last thing. Yes, sir. I would just like to pull C and D, if only for staff to give a summary in our regular meeting. C and D? Yes, sir. So both the TIFFs. Okay. And that's it. Thank you. Okay. Yeah, the only one I had was A as well, but I sort of had a more specific reason. I'd like to just get some information on the pricing. As I looked at the appraisals and things such as that, I just need to understand what goes into those because being familiar with some appraisals, I understand that it seems a little on the high side. So I just want to talk about the pricing of the whole proposal and just how we came about that. But we can do that in the regular work session, in a regular council meeting. So just as a summary, make sure I've got all this correct. To pull for items for individual consideration from the consent agenda are items A, C, and D. E. Now, Mayor Pro Tem, are you wanting a presentation or that simply pulled just because you're going to need recusal and we need to vote on it individually? Just to recuse myself. Okay. And I'm going to go through these back again. So on C and D, you just want sort of a report, Council Member Hussbets, just sort of a going over of the report in the public meeting. Yes, sir. Exactly. All right. Just so that we'll have staff know what they're going to need to be presenting. So on item H, that's being pulled. Am I correct on that? No, why do I have that circled? Okay, never mind. It's probably because we were talking about it. I, we've got I being pulled and I believe, was that you, Council Member Briggs? Do you want some, what type of presentation, the scope of the presentation would you like to see? I'm just trying to give staff an idea. Just a basic idea and what the money is being spent on. Okay. All right. And then K. Who pulled K? I pulled K because it's a closed session item and there are options. I don't see a way that we could just, unless we go strictly with the preferred option, if we want to discuss it. Is there an ordinance? Okay. Yeah. Okay. So that's more, if something gets decided that's different, we just want to incorporate it, have an opportunity to. Right, right. And inform the public. Yes, since we haven't had a discussion on the item. Gotcha. So far. Okay. Great. All right. Yes. So which items will we actually be voting on, on consent? Well that's a good question. Apparently what I'm seeing is item, I'll go from the start from the top. Item B as in Baker. Item F as in Frank. G as in George. H as in Harry. And J as in Joker. I'm not sure that's the right call signal, but that's all right. Somebody can correct me. All right. We all good on that? Great. Okay. And those that are pulled will be items for individual consideration. So if anyone has a desire from the public to speak on those , they will need to fill out a blue card prior to when the item is called. Just want to make sure that we get those procedures down and continue to reinforce those. All right. Then we'll move on to our work session reports. Work session report 3A, which is receive a report from the Denton County Transportation Authority staff to include agency overview, state of the agency and bus operations and DCTA capital capital projects. Good afternoon. Mark Nelson, Director of Transportation with the City of Denton and I appreciate the opportunity to visit with you this afternoon. Mr. Mayor, I had to resist yelling goal whenever your light came on, you know, that or the hockey siren, one or the other. We'll see how well don't don't hesitate to do that. If you see it going off and I don't recognize it. So this presentation is is going to be provided to us by Jim Klein, president of DCTA. So what we'd like to do is have Denton County Transportation Authority come before you this afternoon, visit a little bit about who they are in terms of their partnership with the city of Denton and other communities here in Denton County in terms of providing public transportation and other services that they provide. So really, it's just an overview of the of the services, some of the opportunities, challenges that they they have and certainly a look at their snapshot of their strategic plan. So we do have with us Richard Huckabee, which is the treas urer or I'm sorry, secretary for DCTA board. And he is the city of Denton representative on the DCTA board. And then Jim Klein, president of DCTA and Christina Brevard , VP over planning and development. So with that, Jim. Thanks, Mark. Always a privilege to be in my favorite member city to visit with you all. So when we talk about DCTA, a couple of things that are at our forefront of what we do is making sure that it's a solid partnership between our agency and the city, in fact, all of our member cities and the communities we serve. So we're providing access to jobs and services. We bring folks, both employees that are heading south on the train, north on the train for students, people within the community. And we do we think really do a good job of that. And we provide an alternative to commuting on 35E and provide a choice. And that's really what we're aiming for is to how can we provide really a solid choice for those members of our community. Land use enhancement. What can we do with our facilities and our investment to maximize the value of land use around our stations? And that's a key thing is that we look forward to and I think the rail yard development is something that we're again, that's a good partnership that 's working well. And it's something that's again, very, very positive as we look down the road. Another land use opportunity we're thinking through is and we'll talk a little bit about Med Park station a little bit. But as we look at an area where we may have excess land, that would that be something that we try to do something in concert with the city's master plan and city's comprehensive plan to see if there's something else could be done with some of that property, education and other development, something but only hand in glove with the city. And the development of the rail trail, which is if you'll recall many years before, this was a railroad that went to rails to trail and then it went to rails plus trail. And that's the eight miles that goes down to Swisher Road. We're now at a point where we've gotten funding. In fact, our last the last piece is at Textota waiting approval of the plans to go under construction so that we'll have a continuous trail that will go from Denton all the way down to Hebron. And we're working with the council governments to get it across the Trinity to link it into Dallas into the Carrollton Frankfurt station. So all those things are we're pulling together to try to make sure we can leverage regional funds and make that happen. Now we we survey our passengers. This is a survey, some results that we had of a survey of survey recipients, survey participants self-selected. So we're working towards a scientific survey in terms of random randomizing the selection of our participants. But we wanted to talk to the people who use our system and see what do they think. And so we talked to we got responses back from a little over 2600 of our folks who ride the train. And we think gave us a pretty good report card. 82% would recommend DCTA to a friend or member friend or family member. And we're ranked highly on reliability, safety, and all these items here. So we think we're doing a pretty good job. And again, we always want to reach out to our the people we serve to see if they if we can do something to make it better. We also every other year and we're kind of looking at the frequency of that is looking at a community survey, which expands the reach beyond just those that are on our system, but those who are not using our system. And what how can we serve them better? And so let me go through a couple of things that's really specific on the community partnerships. And you'll see just also at your table, we did include a we we published a performance report every quarter. And it's got a lot of the details, the statistics in here, some project updates. And I'll be happy to answer any questions you have on that and our finances as well. But as I go back through and look at some of the things that we've we've been working towards again, service and land use enhancements here in the last year, we have upgraded the service here in Denton, gone to consistent 30 minute peak 60 minute off peak headways with the two routes that run on Bell and east west towards University of North Texas. We actually end up with during peak hour 15 minute service on route seven and eight and five and six. So really upgrading that service between the DDTC downtown and up to our summer major users. UNT, TWU and NCTC, UNT in particular, we're doing some pretty significant changes to the UNT service at the start of the school year. One of the things that the university wanted to do is take a look at safety and say, how can we take the big vehicles off of Highland Avenue on the campus? And so we worked with them and we're taking our buses off of Highland and also taking the university shuttle buses off as well. So instead of having a single drop point, about half of the routes will go to Fouts Field and half of them will be moved over to the University of Union. So it'll be a little bit different for the people on the campus, but it will again, there were about 6,000 people a day that crossed Highland. Very inefficient for us to operate safely with that many people crossing the street. Made it tough to do on time service. And so we're real pleased that that's to be working with the university to make that happen. We did do the community enhancement project along our trail at the north end of the trail where we look at it, took a historic note to look at the history of the area and particularly that portion of Denton and improve that area and upgrade it . So we're real pleased with that. We are active with the chamber, the Arts and Jazz Festival. Every one of our three financially participating member cities, we participate to some degree in a big event every year. And Highland Village is a balloon festival, it's Western Days in Louisville, and it's Arts and Jazz Festival here in Denton. And so one of the things that we'll be doing is we'd like to work with the festival to see if is there some service that we can partner with them to an example in Highland Village, we run a shuttle back and forth to parking. We've done bus service back and forth to the train station in Louisville and something of that ilk in to support the Arts and Jazz Festival in addition to our outreach at the festival itself is something that we'll, we're committed to doing and we'll make that happen. We don't provide service, we do provide service on the Friday and Saturdays and generally on Sundays we don't, I know those things run over, but that 's typically how we've done that. And then regional funding partnerships as we look to how are we doing the funding of the trail, how do we fund hopefully land acquisition to expand our services, to improve safety, and that's, those are a couple of things that we do to try to leverage the money that is provided to us from the communities, the communities money. How does the community, how can we leverage that to provide the very best service that we can to your community? We have a couple of questions. Oh yes, sorry. Yeah. Jim, thanks for the presentation. Regarding the Arts and Jazz Festival, how feasible would it be to run the train during Sunday of the festival and later hours for Friday, I guess Thursday, Friday, Saturday? One of the things that we, very little is impossible, but one of the things we run into is that Sundays the day we do our maintenance on the track. And so we, we're challenged often trying to get, to close that window for our contractor to maintain the, you know, the track, do the positive train control improvements, all the things that we're doing, that's the window that they have to do that work. So Sunday's tough. We typically try to focus on bus support for those festivals, but I'm open to working, I'd like to work with the festival folks and see if we can come up with a really good solution. We are committed to helping that event as we are in our other member cities. So that's, we'd like, again, I'd like to work with them in particular and find out how we can best serve them. Well, just from a representative standpoint, there were several requests for train service during the festival and there were so many parking issues that have grown over time as the festival's grown. So I would just encourage, you know, thinking outside the box and see what we can provide. I think my feeling is that there will be a lot of support in the community for expanded service during Arts and Jazz. Okay. All right. Couple of questions and I want to follow up on that. And there's a fairly, and I guess the data would prove it out, but that's, that's assuming to resolve the parking issue that there are a lot of people coming from out of town. And so I just don't know what that number is. So we would know if the train were running, how much riders hip we would get coming for that festival from out of town. Well, if we could utilize the Med Park parking, that would be one way to do it as well. You know, having people on the south side of town park at Med Park. Oh, and then take either train or shuttle over. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Question on the, the DCTA agency performance report. Do you have a, are you going to go over that or do you, or is it? I can cover that at the end. I can cover it now. I'm at your service. Let me cover it at the end. Yeah. Because I think it's, yeah, let me do that. Okay. And I'll try to go through these. We look at our Denton facilities. We've got the downtown Denton Transit Center, the bus on in facility, both located in Denton, two train stations, the DDTC and Med Park station. We have almost 300 bus stops, 26 shelters. And again, the rail trail that runs currently all the way down to Swisher Road, it's under construction there down to the lake. AGL will bring it across the lake. And then the project that we have funded and designed is just waiting for TxDOT to approve is the last segment that's not done from the Holland Village Station to Mill Street. And so that's within reach. And so we're hoping to break that loose out of TxDOT here in the next couple of months and be able to get that under construction. The piece from Kelton to Swisher is nearing completion. Or it's not nearing, it's underway now. So very positive. Denton service, wanted to get in a few of the numbers. Again, A train, Connect, UNT shuttle. You can see our relationship with UNT and the ridership there is huge. We've seen some overall, our ridership in total number, rail, connect and UNT shuttle is slightly up. We're a little bit down on connect and down on the rail. We think there's on the connect that some of the folks, because of the changes that we made in UNT and connect, they're actually shifted from connect onto the UNT shuttle, the students. And then we're working to, again, try to, one of the things that we're working on with the connect, I mean, I'm sorry, with the A train is how can we improve parking at the north end? And that's when we get to the strategic piece in a little bit, that's something that we're really, really focused on. We probably have the right amount of parking in Denton. We don't necessarily have it in the right spot. And so that's where, that's one of the challenges that we have as an agency. And I think that's one of the things that's, there's two things, three elements that are throttling our ridership on the A train. One is just a general, there's cheap cars and cheap gas. People have the opportunity to drive. So that's the choice they're making. I think parking at the north end. And then I-35E, while it creates congestion, which would be a good thing for rail ridership, it also makes it tough to get to some of the stations where you can park. So it's a bit of a double-edged sword on that. So that's our analysis to date on the A train. And we'll keep working on that. And again, that's something that we're really focused on, and particularly in Denton, is addressing parking at the north end of our rail line. Actually, my question was really on that portion of this brochure. So a couple of questions on that. The A train figures are, that's the average daily boardings for all the stations in Highland Village, the Louisville station. Okay. And I think under the UNT shuttle, I think in the brochure, would this be under bus contract services? Is that where it has ridership? Yes. It says bus contract services. So that's primarily UNT, is that right? Yes, sir. So you carry contract services with NCTC, Frisco, and McKin ney Urban Transit District. Okay. All right. So of the -- and I'm going to sort of draw this link, and if it's not correct, just let me know. So it seems like that the contract services provide probably more than half the budget for the bus component of DCTA. Am I somewhere close in there, or is it -- It's not quite half, but it's a whole lot of it. I mean, we get a little over $3 million a year in contract revenue from the University of North Texas. Okay. And so then the cost of just the bus system, not the rail, but just the bus component for all the services that you provide, if that's not proprietary, then what -- No, I mean, all this is -- I mean, I'm going to go off memory on that a little bit. It's about eight total. Okay. So that's about eight total, and that includes everything that we do. And so some of that -- North Texas is almost half of that figure, and then you've got the other ones. Okay. All right. And we also get -- one of the things about that ridership that's really important is that our federal formula fund revenue, much of it is based on how many riders we have. So that's directly proportional to the $5 million a year we get from the federal government in terms of formula funds. So that makes the UNT contract and the students and all these other -- obviously very important. It's very important. So help me -- help us define -- I think I know the answer to this because I've asked this -- but like on the A train, when you say annual boardings, in other words, the average daily boardings, that doesn't necessarily mean the number of people. That's how many times someone has gotten on the train. Yes. Is that correct? Okay. So every person that gets on counts as one of those board ings. So if they get on in the morning at one end and then they get on at the south end, that would be two boardings. And so that's the same with the bus. Yes, sir. So if you were riding the bus three times in the city, that 'd be three boardings. Okay. I just -- It's called -- the technical term is unlinked trips. Okay. So if you try to link a trip together, say from Charney Mills to the campus, that may actually be three boardings. Okay. Two boardings probably. Okay. All right. Good. Thank you. That's helpful. Appreciate that. Okay. Very good. A couple of things that we're looking to enhance service. When we look at the -- there's a very short trip from Med Park to downtown Denton. And one of the barriers to that is that for that very short trip, people have been hesitant, we think, hesitant to buy tickets for that distance. And we've got all of our parking down there. So one of the things we're looking at doing is at either end of our -- there would be a -- our fare enforcement would be south of Med Park and north of Hebron. So those two very short trips, we could utilize those large parking lots to access those areas. So we think that's going to be very helpful for particularly UNT students. They're changing a lot of things with parking. This gives them a chance to park at Med Park, take a short ride up to the DDTC, or ride one of the campus shuttles over to the campus. And so, again, we're trying to utilize that asset to the maximum extent possible and make it easy for people to park at Med Park and be able to use -- to park there to access downtown. So, again, leveraging that asset to try to solve some of the issues that I know the community's facing in terms of parking in downtown Denton. I already talked about the UNT shuttle modifications. Route 7 and 8 change is directly related to that. We're just moving them over to Eagle from Highland. And we're also implementing, in partnership with UNT, a more expansive vehicle tracking system so that it will incorporate the UNT buses as well as ours and the trains and look at how we get closer and closer to merging those two systems together to really expand the service throughout the community, make it easier for people to use. So, stay tuned on that when that's a -- that's happening in the next 30 to 45 days. North Texas Express, again, looking to try to improve frequency on that. That's a new service we're doing, trying to link downtown Denton to downtown Fort Worth. And we're doing that in partnership with the Fort Worth Transportation Authority. Instead of stopping at the county line or the city limit line, our bus goes all the way to Alliance, goes all the way to downtown Fort Worth. We pay for that one and back. Fort Worth has a bus that leaves Fort Worth, goes to Alliance, comes all the way to downtown Denton, and then goes all the way back. So we share those costs and it's working -- we're hoping to get more ridership on that and we're building on that, but that's a new service we're doing. So kind of the other leg of the system. >> A couple of questions. >> Yes. >> I believe Councilmember Gregory has one, then Council member Briggs. >> Thank you, Mayor. I should have asked this when you were still on the blue zone of your chart. So the Denton bus service, the fare-free zone promotion starts August the 28th? >> Yes, sir. >> And that's just for bus, that's not for the train? >> No. This is actually for the train from Med Park North to -- between DDTC and Med Park. >> Okay. And then if they were going to take the shuttle from the downtown transit center to UNT, that would be a fare? >> That would be a fare. >> If you're a UNT student, right now our contract with the University of North Texas is that you flash your ID and you get on any one of the buses, is your UNT ID is valid. >> And that starts August the 28th and it's going to be for a day or -- >> We think -- so let me step back. The piece that's -- the UNT use of the pass for UNT on the buses has been in place for several years. We think that's going to keep going. We're planning on right now the piece from Med Park up to DDTC, we think will be a permanent change. >> Okay. >> We've got to see how it works. So typically with these things, it takes a long -- it may take us a year to figure out -- to get the response, get people to respond to it. We don't want to do something for a very short period of time and then say, well, nobody showed up so it was no good. You have to have it in place for a while and make sure those things happen. >> Well, Friday when we were riding the train, they didn't check our tickets until after we were past the Med Park station anyway. >> Typically that's how -- honestly that's how when you talk to -- when I visited with conductors and our fair enforcement folks, normally they're worried -- that's where the big counts are. So they do all the counts at those locations and they get time in between. So it actually kind of works out that way anyway. >> Councilmember Briggs, do you have a question? >> Yes. I'm looking at the map. I was at the Emily Fowler Library the other day and noticed there was a sign that there wasn't going to be a stop there anymore. But I'm looking here and it looks like either seven or eight, are both of those going to not go and stop in front of the library anymore? >> I'm not sure exactly where that is. But I'd be happy to -- the Emily Fowler Library -- is that the one on campus or is it -- >> No, it's downtown. It's right over here. >> It's right over there. >> Okay. I don't know. >> Okay. >> Real quick question just so that I can have an understanding because I know we talk about contract services and buses, UNT buses, other buses. So any bus that DCTA has that's on the streets of the city of Denton, any citizen can get on it if they pay a fare? Is that correct or are there certain buses that -- go ahead , I'm sorry. >> No, that is absolutely correct. >> Okay. >> A UNT shuttle bus is DCTA service. If you pay a fare, you can ride on it. >> Okay. And so then the -- so when you say North Texas buses, what exactly do you -- what's the delineating factor for that? >> We've got -- there are some buses that the university has purchased and there are the big white ones that have -- you know, that are branded. >> Sure. >> And there are some that are DCTA branded buses. And so it depends on -- you'll see by the service on the front, they'll say Colorado Express or San Bas or Discovery Park. So it's the service that's listed on the head board or the head sign on the train -- I'm sorry, on the bus. And so that'll tell you what the service is. Think about it as just another route for DCTA. And we're partnering with the university to make sure it goes to the right spot so we can get their students into the campus. >> So when you say their bus, they purchased it, but that doesn't mean that only UNT students can ride it. >> That's correct, Mayor. >> It just means that it's -- they have a little bit probably more say in the stops and where it goes and things such as that. >> And part of what we're working with the university right now is for a long-term relationship is what makes a lot of sense is for this is for -- there's leveraging that we can do. And we found as an example that there's some of the routes that they're running are paralleling our routes, a connect route. >> Sure. >> It's all our route. So we've got a UNT shuttle route and a connect route. So maybe we could cover them with just one service and not have both. And so that's the kind of leveraging that we're trying to do now with the idea being that if we can save operating revenue, save money from operations, use that to replace the 18 buses that they bought and get the right number of buses, the right kind of vehicles, be smarter about how we do that. There's some routes even in Denton that don't necessarily need a real big bus running on it. That would help from a -- I was public works director before I took this job. If we can get big buses off streets, that helps save streets, that makes it a little bit easier to maneuver around. And so there's some -- if we can match the size of the vehicle to the demand and get that right and get that better, then we can do a -- continue to do a really good job with that ridership from the university and then really leverage it for the whole community. Because we may have buses running every 10 minutes in some areas. We wouldn't want to have people think they can't ride on those buses when they can really get fabulous service connecting different points around the state. So I think if I remember correctly, if you don't know this, that's fine, but it's my understanding North Texas does charge in their tuition a fee for the buses that their students pay that allows them to get on and flash an ID. But for the rail, they have to pay whatever the going fare is for either students or something like that. We have a discounted university pass program for the rail. And we'll work through that. That's part of our -- that will be part of our long-term negotiation with the university. >> Okay. All right. >> And we'd like to -- and we've been reaching out to -- Christina has been working a lot with Texas Women's University as well. And so we'll continue to look at both. >> Good. All right. Thank you. >> Do you have an example of the discounted rate, like what it would be normally and what -- >> For the university students? >> Yes, sir. >> Christina, do you know? >> Just -- >> Yeah, if you -- okay. >> It's -- I think it's like half. But I'd have to double check. >> We'll get that for you. >> Okay. I'd like that. >> Yeah. I think it's -- it's a significant discount, you know, for -- >> All right. Thank you. >> Yes, ma'am. And then we work with -- and we work with TWU. We don't have the same arrangement, but they buy discounted tickets from us, and then they sell them at a further discount at their office to get people to -- you know, the students to use that. And then North Central Texas College pays us. Part of their contract with us is that they use the same bus access that we have for the University of North Texas students. So we craft those agreements based on what they're willing to contribute and how the situation works. So we're really focused -- and you might tell we're really focused on education. That's something we do. >> Sure. >> And we think we do it pretty well. So -- >> Okay. >> And we talk about future commuter corridors as we look to the -- particularly to the east into the south -- or particularly to the east, the demand along 380 and the demand along 121 is really important. And you say, well, wait a minute, that's outside our area. If we look at getting people, particularly around the Legacy Park, Frisco area where we're providing some contract service, if those areas -- Gr anscape -- there's a lot of jobs and there's not a lot of people that can afford to have those -- can afford to live there and have those jobs. So we're looking at how we can bring those folks in there. And so we're working through the details of that. There's a long story and much more to be told about that. But we're working towards those things. Should we extend the A train down to Beltline, 35W, we've talked about that. And then if there ever is a future in partnership with some other cities in the other area about the BNSF going from Carrollton up to Salina. I want to say all of these things, it's very important that we remember -- we dance with who brung us, as they say in the dance halls. We are going to take care of the money that is your taxpayers' trust for us. We're custodians of those tax dollars to take care of that. So we're being very careful about not taking taxes from sales tax collected in Denton and shifting them to another area. In the A train corridor, right, so the Lewisville, Highland Village, Denton, and being very careful about that. And that's top of mind that Mr. Huckabee and the other members of the board are very careful about that. And so we're very careful about how we do our contract services so that we do take care of business with that. Our passenger amenities, we have a continuous program of working through bus stops where it's needed. Those are ranked based on boardings on the site. And then we'll go look at continuous adding locations. We talked about the rail trail. It'll be 21 miles, and again, the biggest piece here is from Highland Village Station down to Jones and Mill, that area. And it is funded, it's designed, it's just waiting on tax time. And then the regional trail component is the next step for us is to get it down to the Frankfurt Station. So we've got to cross the Trinity River, so it's nontrivial , but we think there's a way to make that happen. >> Councilmember Briggs? >> Yes, so there was an accident recently, the cyclist and the safety of the train. Do we, speaking of the rail trail and adding more trails, is there plans to add arms there for the pedestrians or? >> One of the things that we've seen is we've seen a lot more traffic. You know, good news, we've got a lot of people using the trail, and they really like it. We're taking a very comprehensive look at what, is there anything different we need to do along the trail? And that's funded now, and we're beginning that project. So to review that and make sure in this, I'm going to hold out detail about specifics of an accident, but that was thoroughly investigated. We didn't find any failure on the part of the equipment or anything like that. But that doesn't mean that we don't want to look at how to make it better and safer all the time. So the answer is we're looking for ways to make things better. >> Okay, thank you. >> Councilmember Gregory. >> Thank you. On my Friday ride on the train going south, it was interesting because as we were approaching, I believe it's where the train track crosses Colorado, the train engineers started honking the horn and didn't stop for the longest time. And he slowed the train down significantly. And so I was looking out the window to see what in the world was going on, and it was a bicyclist that was stopped very close to the train on the road, and it was an area where the original design had the trail going a mid-block crossing on Colorado, very close to the train. And our city engineers made y'all take that out. So now the bicycle riders or the pedestrians have to walk all the way down to an intersection, do a 90-degree turn, very difficult turn to make on a bicycle. You have to stop, get off. So most bicyclists just cut across the street right there next to the train track, very close to the train, very dangerous situation. And it's not DCTA's fault. So I was wondering about that particular accident that occurred if y'all had looked at the engineering to see if there was anything that could be done at that particular intersection. I know that there could be a fix for our trail there by Colorado. It's just the will on the part of our staff to make that change. We have engaged an engineer to do a comprehensive review, not just one location, but multiple locations along the trail. Again, we want to make it -- one of the kind of mantras that I've got is that -- not mantra, but just an approach -- is that we want to make -- we think we're doing a lot of things really well. We're not focused on getting better and better and better every year. And so if we can make it safer -- not that it's unsafe, but if we can make it safer, then that's how we go. And we should be looking for those things. And we've budgeted -- my recommendation to the board of directors is to -- we have safety dollars that are not necessarily spoken for a specific project, but to be able to address those things that we see could be an improvement to our safety and to the -- I mean, to the at-grade crossings to the trail for buses. I mean, we want to put cameras in our buses. And that's something we're working through as a deterrent and as a safety factor. Well, if you all have any recommendations for Denton, I would love to be aware of when those come out. I was very impressed with the engineer. He slowed the train down in a way that didn't disturb those that were riding. It made it safe for the bicyclist. I was very angry with the bicyclist for his behavior. One thing that I will point out is a quiet zone is not a mandate to the engineer. The engineer is obligated to blow the horn if there is -- to sound the horn or if there is any possibility that someone is not going to stop or if they feel there's some -- that is sole discretion of the engineer. They also will sound the horn in work zones and in areas -- and so sometimes you'll see them slow down and sound the horn in areas where you say, why did they do that? Well, there will be somebody working next to the tracks. So they sound the horn to make sure that any roadway workers are not struck by the train or endangered. So that's how that works. So transitory development, again, we want to partner with Denton if we can find a way to make that work and address the parking shortage. That is something that -- what's a very unique element of what we are working on is that parking that we provide is out of sync with what is needed for parking for downtown Denton at night. My folks come in in the morning, they go home, and then anybody that wants to come to the evening activities, those same spaces can be used for that different use. So there's a very logical path on that. And so we'll continue to work closely with city staff on developing opportunities for parking. We have those that are more executive session items to be for discussion, but we are engaged in that and have funds dedicated for that type of project in our budget. We do want to support your vision. We don't want to do something that is out of sync or is not complementary to your comprehensive plan, your zoning map, and the intent of the city council and what is good for the citizens of Denton. And then we certainly want to assist in development around our stations if we can do what we do smarter, then we'll be happy to work with that. And give you an example is that I believe some of the best transit oriented development property is in our parking lots. And so instead of saying that we'll never change anything on a parking lot, we have to meet our mission, which is to provide some parking. Can we do that in a manner that may facilitate development? And so that's a little bit of a different thought than you normally might hear from the transit folks, but that's how we -- that's the thought that we have and how to make that happen. Strategic planning, again, we want to work on addressing mobility and air quality, continue to improve service, make our service more effective. That goes to some of our agency report, how we're trying to do some of the things there, and make sure that we add value beyond transit. That speaks to the trail, it speaks to transit oriented development. What can we do to make the community better, the community enhancements we did on the trail, those are all things that we try to do to make Denton a better place to be. And commuter corridors, we've talked about these. 380 as it goes across, a lot happening in that corridor, a lot happening on 121. It's a ton that's accessed to people. I believe that there are a lot of people in Denton that could use -- that would be a workforce that could access into that area. And they're getting basically priced out of a lot of the ability to work in those areas, or to easily get to those areas to work. And then our five-year plan, in the next five years, strategic planning is look at downtown Denton parking, look at our commuter corridors, try to see if we can find partners in a viable plan for the BNSF and extending the A train down to Belt line in concert with Cotton Belt and/or the BNSF. It doesn't make sense to go down there unless there's another train at that location. Because -- yes, sir? >> No, no, I'm sorry. I think Councilmember Ryan had a question. >> Oh, I'm sorry. >> You might have been on the last slide. Sorry. >> On the previous slide. >> Oh. >> I apologize. >> I'm sorry. >> Because right now we have rail service tied in with DART to get to the airport. As 2499 finishes up, is that anywhere on the radar to do bus service to the airport? >> It's certainly something we consider. It's not -- we have not got that planned right now. But we'll work with the council governments that are helping us with the demand studies and to find out what could be out there. So we can answer that question. >> Yeah, because Highland Village is already a member city and I know Corinth is looking at it and that could encourage some other cities along that route to join in. >> Yes, sir. And we're trying to get -- you know, we're certainly going to be trying to get additional communities to join in either on a contract basis or on a membership basis. We talked strategic planning and greater than five years, certainly those east-west routes, are there any additional rail corridors and then certainly implementing the A train extensions. So with that, it's kind of my closing deal there. I'm sure glad I'm here. I'd like to be able to -- if you have any questions on our performance metrics, I'd be happy to do that. This is something we put together that covers a lot of ground and it talks about our mission and some of the -- on the cover, some of our goals and objectives and our vision. Before we get to the part in the middle, on the back, it goes to our finances. And one thing that I think is really important that Mr. H uckabee and the rest of the board, we focus a lot on these -- making sure these financial policies are adhered to. So we have 90 days of operating funds in the bank every year all the time. We have a 3% sales tax reserve that cushion any drops in sales tax. Keep in mind, different from the city, we are totally -- our only funding source outside of federal grants and Fairbox is sales tax. There's no ad valorem tax that goes to DCTA. Only sales tax. A bit volatile, so we have to be very careful with that. Fuel -- and instead of a fuel hedge, like we've been buying into a hedge for fuel, we set money aside to be able to, again, soften a blow if our fuel prices go up. So we budget a little bit high on fuel. And we've been coming in actually pretty low, less than $2 a gallon, that's from our diesel that we actually purchased through the city. So that's another part of our hedge is that we're using the volume purchasing between us and the city. I mean, we're bringing -- that's about 800,000 gallons of diesel fuel a year. It's added to the city numbers. So it helps us both get a better deal. So that's good. And then if you have any questions on our statistics, we do -- on the right side of the page we talk about critical projects and expansion. And then on the left side is key performance indicators. Always start with safety. That's number one in our list. And when we talk about ridership, on-time performance, customer service, outreach, and then operating cost. >> I think we had a question. Councilmember Hudspeth. >> Yes, sir. >> Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. So I have quite a few, so bear with me. I'll try to speed through. I've been taking notes. So really I'm going to start with the bus route on University and ask you to look at University and Redwood servicing the Sequoia neighborhood there. And there's the -- it's just kind of just past the bowling alley on University. >> Is that Redwood? >> Yes, sir. My understanding is from the neighborhood there, there used to be a stop there. I don't know if it was an issue with University Drive stop or kind of what facilitated that change, but I'm going to ask pretty regular if we can -- >> So if we can have a stop at Redwood? >> Redwood and University, yes. That would -- >> Okay. >> That would be a lifesaver for me. Then just self-preservation. But then -- so then I'm curious about your flexibility for NBA games, you know, so Dallas. So if someone in Denton, if there's a pocket of Denton residents, Louisville residents, et cetera, that want to go to NBA event, what is your flexibility to kind of -- I'm not -- I don't know if there's enough to generate. I just want to understand the dynamics. What needs to be in place to make that? >> What we have found is that if American Airlines events don't go into overtime, whether it's the Mavericks or the Stars, our system can work. The issue that we run into is some of our late night service gets pretty light and it becomes the economics and the efficiency of running that service too late becomes -- it just gets problematic from just us funding it and how should we use -- is an efficient use of dollars. We can certainly discuss that. We're thinking we may want to run some service later to help with the university traffic. We're not sure if that's best, if it's another train, if it 's a direct bus, a commuter bus or something. So we're working through that right now. We have not seen the demand for those really late night trips and when we did have that service it was very underutilized. >> Okay. And then on the rail trail, I think that's fantastic to have those extensions being completed what is the -- what's your take on the signage? So if I'm not familiar, I'm coming north, is there signage, are there indications that this is going to be available? Whatever is currently available. Is there -- because I don't -- living in southeast Denton I don't see a sign that says -- I mean I just see the trail and I know how far it goes but I don't know if we're doing justice in pointing people to it if they're just generally interested, want to go walk the trail, want to park south or north and kind of walk it. >> I think that's something we should work together with the Parks Department on and see how that could come together. We're focused a lot on making sure that what we provide is safe and effective. The maintenance of that is -- the trail itself is actually maintained by the City Parks Department but we'd be happy to work with them. So I've got that. >> Okay. And then looking at UNT Discovery Park, so that ridership is kicked up a lot and we have the new -- there's the new town homes going in there, there 's new apartments going across. So I see that area growing quite a bit. Have you noticed the same? Are you in conversations? I mean because my experience on the buses it's jam packed every 20 minutes from there to campus back and forth currently. >> So we're working with the university to optimize how we do that. Clearly they're putting more and more stuff out at Discovery Park. So we'll continue to work with them and see how the funding works and how we can provide the best service we can. So I'll make a note of that. >> Yes, sir. >> And then so I'm really curious about this because all your expansions are to Frisco, the south, Fort Worth, that sort of thing. But I'm curious, have you looked at one, the convention center coming online, two, what service we have going to that area and above and beyond that? And this may be out of school and that's okay. I'm just curious. Where the last major stop before people go to Oklahoma to the casinos? And what I envision is someone from Dallas riding a train to Denton and then commuting that way. I just see a lot of growth going that way and we're the last stop there and I think it should be appealing to someone to avoid I-35 to ride a train. And then if we have the charter buses available to then utilize that to go weekend trips. I just don't know if that falls in your purview but that's why I'm asking the question. >> I think that in terms of our mission, it's tough to say that we're going to go to serve up into the casinos. >> Sure. >> Could we cooperate with them? Of course. >> Okay. And then- >> And do that. And then you brought up another point about the convention center that we do talk a lot about service to the east and to the south and in different areas. We will always be looking for what we can do to improve service in Denton and in Highland Village and Louisville. So those funds that fall into the A train corridor will be, just like we did in May, I believe Christine it was May when we made the improvements, we will continue to look at those service changes. That if there's a demand at the convention center, if we need to do that, then we will adjust. We'll continue to make changes and work to improve the service here in Denton. While we also look at how we can expand our area and serve the folks in our service area as well as those outside. >> I'm going to go back to the convention center though. I think, did I hear you that you're going to take a wait to see if the demand is such that you'll have a route going? >> To me I think that's just the convention center comes online towards end of the year and whenever it's up and running there's a route in place to take those people downtown to the universities, that sort of thing. But is that- >> Let me take, we can take, well, I, Christine, I don't know if there was a- >> We work with- >> If you could- >> Yeah, I'm sorry. >> Come to the mic please, thank you. >> You're good. We work very closely with city staff anytime there's a new development coming in or something like the convention center. So that's a conversation we do need to have with the convention center staff, which we have not had yet. But looking at what do they expect their market to be that may be able to utilize public transportation. But as Jim mentioned, those are changes we make a couple times a year and we make changes to routes that we can plan for. So having a good timeline as to the process of the construction of convention center. What are those special events going to be and who does the staff think that their market could be? But we'll definitely have that conversation. Again, we have not had it yet. But we do work with your planning department. Mark is our key point person that keeps us up to date on things. We meet with all the different departments that make sense within the city. And they're always giving us different nuggets that help us make those decisions on how we make the service changes. Plus the public involvement process is very important, which we do anytime prior to doing service changes. We always take those changes to the public for feedback. But we will bring it up to convention center, very good point, not a conversation we've had. So we'll make sure we get that scheduled. >> We can do that beforehand. That's not a problem. >> Okay, yeah, I'd be very interested in that. And then, I mean, that's it for me. Did I mention university in Redwood? >> Yes, you did. I understood that one. Yes, sir. >> Thank you. >> I got that memo. >> Thank you. >> So looking here at your last point of community involvement, I'm just curious, does DCTA have any partnerships with any of our local non-profits for affordable best passes? >> We do some group sales, bulk sales to some of the different non-profit organizations in the city. So I'm not remembering right off the top of my head which ones they are, but I know we do that. We also did some things where the healthcare that's out off of route one, that's one of the, that we did that over the course of time is we've actually expanded service out there. So that's part of what we try to do is address that. Because some of the folks that use our service, this is the only way they have to get around. So can they get to the county? Can they get to healthcare? Can they get to the Walmarts? Can they get to where they need to go? So we do our best to take care of that as well. >> Okay, thanks. >> A couple of questions on the financial. The total sales tax collected between the three cities, do you know about what that is? >> We budgeted in FY 16-17, so the fiscal year that's just ending up. >> Right. >> Our budget was $25.6 million in total sales tax revenue. And- >> So that was the budgeted amount. >> And we're running about a little less than 8% over budget in revenues for sales tax. >> Do you know what the City of Denton's contribution is of that? >> All right, here's what, we get the total number from the comptroller. >> Okay. >> We also take a look at what the sales tax collections are for Lewisville, Highland, Milligen, Denton, because we've got to know kind of what's going on. And those are huge issues for us if those numbers start tanking. So we watch that closely. So I took a look at the sales tax reports from Lewisville, Highland, Milligen, Denton total that came in for each one of those communities through this point in the fiscal year to date. And that total was about $17.5 million. About 50% was from Lewisville, about 5% was from Highland Village, and about 45% was from Denton. >> Okay, Brian, do you have a more accurate, I mean, even just last year's- >> I'm not sure if the numbers that I've got- >> I'm not saying accurate from what you're talking about. >> Yeah, there's 4A, 4B, that last half cent portion. I'm not sure how much is collected. I just looked at total revenues. >> Sure. >> That's kind of where it breaks out. So it's about even between Denton and Lewisville, and High land Village is the lowest number. >> Sure. >> But that's kind of- >> 11 to 12 million. >> Yeah. >> If you up there say. >> Yes, sir. >> Thank you. >> We think Denton's share would be about 11 to 12 million. >> In this fiscal year? >> Yes, sir. >> Okay, even with our increase that our, what we think is gonna be over what our budgeted amount was? >> Yes, sir, I think we're gonna collect around 36 million is the estimate for this year, or for 17, 18. I'm trying to remember that number exactly. About, that represents one and a half percent. The DCTA component would be 0.5%, so a third of it, so roughly about 11, 12 million dollars. >> Okay, all right. >> Okay. >> So that's consistent with this- >> Sure. >> What we had? >> And the reason I bring it up is because obviously as our sales tax collections increase, it naturally increases the funding for DCTA like in all the other member cities. And the converse is true. We have a decrease. And when I look at your performance indicators and when I read your notes, it's talking about some trending, some downward trending in the rail ridership and in the fixed route. It seems like the contract services, which are primarily paid by UNT and some others. There's some miscellaneous others in there. They're probably about half a million or something like that. I don't know about how much they are. So what I see is the financial contribution continues to go up as our sales taxes increase. Of course, they could decrease. But it seems like ridership, both rail and fixed routes seem to be decreasing. That causes me a little pause for when I look at the, if I break out the number of rail riders, if I just divide it by two, in other words somebody's getting on at one place and getting on coming back. >> That's fair. >> And based on your figures, it was about 800 people per day through the three member cities. And the same maybe with the passenger, with the fix. Somehow, sometimes I think that it just seems like we've got a lot of funding. But yet our ridership seems to be decreasing. So I'm sure you guys are aware of that. What are some of the ways that we can, especially with the highway coming in, I mean the highway and the express lanes. So I just want to make sure that as we continue to spend $ 11 to $12 million that somehow outside of contract services with UNT, which is providing almost half of the contract bus service, which means the fixed route is 377 year to date and the goal is about 600,000. How do we continue to maximize that funding? Because I know you don't want to spend that anything other than the corridor. But if you have these expansion kind of opportunities that may have better ridership, better participation, I just, I mean it's a tough question. It's a tough conversation. But I mean we don't have to have it right now. But I just, it's one of those things that I want to make sure that we at least have in the forefront so we can figure out how do we get people more interested? How do we provide more ridership? Because if it stays level, or if it continues to decrease, but sales tax revenue continues to increase because we're in such a growth city, they're going in the opposite directions and at some point there's going to be some observations. This does go to our, what I'd like, let me just real quickly because it is a very, and there's a whole lot to that. >> Right. >> And your observation, I can't argue with your logic. Let me see, what we look at right now is what we've seen, and I want to separate them into two areas. Fixed route, where we've seen decreases in connect, we've seen increases in UNT shuttle. Because there's some parallels in there, parallel routing, we think that's a one to one, pretty much a one to one correlation. So it's not that we're really losing riders, actually our bus ridership is way up. When you look at the total, and we think what happened is that a lot, some of the connect riders are actually students that were not on connect, they're on the UNT shuttle. So we think that's what's happening with the connect bus. That doesn't mean we don't want to continue to look at how to make that ridership better. And we just put the new changes in to Denton in May to try to make that more predictable. The other thing we're doing is, and I'm going to talk about bus first in rail. On the bus side, putting in a more reliable and broader sc oped bus locator system. The swiftly system, which again we're rolling out this, actually hopefully into this summer. That's my plan right now, actually roll it out here right after the students go back to school. We're partnering with the university to get, we didn't have locators on the UNT buses. So now we'll have it on all of the buses, UNT and connect. Doing more efficient buses and getting to where we have those parallel routes, 7, 8, and 5, and 6. That provide the 15 minute headways on those key corridors between TW, downtown, UNT downtown, and the downtown Denton Transit Center. So that's the key area that we're looking at on the bus side. And then we'll look at other locations that we need to serve. So if we have a high value target, if the convention center turns into that, you bet. Or it appears to be so, we will do that. And then we're also looking at are there better ways for us to deliver service. We're experimenting a little bit in Highland Village with Uber. We have a contract with Lyft to try to do some different things. We're thinking that may be a part of the solution for UNT, and particularly their night service. And so we're trying some many different things in that arena. On the rail side, I think the biggest thing there that we 've identified is really two areas that we're trying to work on with that. We're still going to have to overcome cheap gas and cheap cars. So my competition is not Dart, it's not the Fort Worth T, it's the automobile. So as long as people have that as an easy option, I'm fighting against that. Now, I believe that if we can get parking downtown, if you look at where we are, the two, it's unfortunate, my two smallest parking lots are the ones that are full all the time. Which is, that's the reality of how we got there and that's what we're working on fixing. So I think parking, there's two items. One is parking in downtown Denton is a big one. And we like to, again, we're looking at how to partner with the city on that to slay a couple of dragons at one time. The other thing is how can we get more development around our stations up and down the line. Lewisville at the Highland Village Station, Tower Bay is being redone. There's a whole new development going in there. We spoke about Med Park and we're open to redevelopment opportunities at a portion of that station. We're talking to, we'd certainly open the opportunities at any location along the rail line that makes sense, that exists today, right? Existing rail service. There's a few missing pieces up and down that line that could, if we did get sales tax in some of those areas for limited amount of extra effort, we could actually be bringing more money to the table and more ridership, which is even more important. And then how can we get development around our stations? I mean, if we're seeing a lot happening with Huffines at Lewisville, and that's not Denton's issue, but again, that's part of the reason why we're looking at that fair free zone south of Hebron. Because people may be just getting in their car and driving down to Frankfurt Road rather than riding the train, even though it's right there. And so if we can eliminate that fair burden and get our ridership up, those are the areas that we're working on right now. So anyway, it is front and center, it's like in my radar screen, it's like right in the middle, right after safety. Okay, I don't know, you guys, two rules, right? That I have, no, we want to make sure safety, we want to make sure legal compliance, and then we're getting right into those. We want to make sure ridership and those things like that, so. >> One other question for Mayor Pudgin, I have. You talked about on the special events opportunities or lack thereof because of just the lack of demand. Do you have an idea to take a train from, let's say, downtown Denton up to the train to the mill station in back ? Do you all have typically a cost per trip? >> It's a couple of thousand, probably $2,000. >> $1,700, $2,000? >> Okay. >> Something like that. And times, keep in mind it's less about the cost, well cost is always important. >> Sure. >> It's how do we match that up with our maintenance schedules and our ability to take care of our maintaining the vehicles. Because when we take them out of service, we're doing the maintenance on those vehicles. >> Right. >> So. >> Okay. >> Mayor Pudgin? >> Very important things. >> Thank you, Jim. >> You said that it was 1,000 and 2,000 there and back? >> I think that's what it was, one round trip. Something on that order of magnitude. >> About 2,000 for one round trip. >> I can get you a number. >> I'd be curious to know. >> Yeah. >> Okay, so just following up with something that you mentioned about opportunities to work with the city. I'm wondering, are there any ideas about including a parking garage and DCTA's plans for that downtown Denton site? And I'm thinking of something like Mockingbird Station where they have 1,500 spots or maybe not something as large, but they do incorporate parking garages with highly used areas. So where is that as far as thoughts? I don't know. >> I'm a little hesitant to talk because we're in the middle of some things. >> Okay. >> But. >> Fair enough. >> So the answer is I'm very focused on parking in downtown Denton. >> Okay. >> I'm not going to say no to anything you said. >> All right. That's good. >> Another thing regarding the shelters that you have, you said there's 299 stops and 26 shelters. I'm assuming there's a capital plan in place for increasing the number of shelters as time goes on. Can you tell us a little bit about that? >> We find that what we try to do is look at, we base it on boardings. And so it probably won't make sense to put in 300, 299 shelters because we basically put a stop up every quarter mile along the rail. A half mile along the pass, the bus routes. Where we get, Christina is it 50 boardings a day? Is that the number? Anyway, I can get the exact number. But what we want to look at is how can we focus those at the right locations? Meaning where we have the most people waiting and that's where we've been able to do that so far. So our budget, we incorporate that into the passenger amenities into our plan every year. And so we'll be happy to look at those and we try to do that every year and look at locations. So we work with the staff. We look at our ridership. We say what makes sense. It's not hard and fast. I mean, we're not going to say it's 49. If the number was 50, 49's no go. I mean, that's not what we do. I mean, and the staff has also been very helpful in the permitting process and getting these things through the process. And so we can deliver that. >> So I guess how many, I drive by a lot of bus stations that like some of them don't have good seating and some of them don't have shelters. I can't help but think that building some of those amenities would help people help ridership. So I guess maybe just offline if you can help me understand what we're looking at in terms of what's coming up for shelters and amenities. That would be, we don't need to do it now, just offline. >> Yes ma'am. And I don't have the details right now. >> Sure. >> Thank you. >> Yes. >> Council member Ryan. >> Yes sir. >> Thank you. A couple things that it's showing the total fares are 3% of your revenue. So the doing the fare free is not going to have a huge effect if it's a short route, is my understanding. >> Well, what we're thinking is it's people that aren't riding now. >> Okay. >> So and we wanted to, there's two reasons that you, right , I mean, if you look at our, if, I'm not going to do this, but an extreme example, we said well we're going to have it charge, not charge anybody fares. You don't have any control over it. I also believe that something that has zero cost has also zero value. And we also want to make sure that we, that people who are riding it are paying some. Because otherwise you get people that ride the train all day if they don't have to pay. >> Okay, and kind of on that route, I know this may still be in place. Years ago DCTA did it, I've heard of many others throughout the nation that did this on ozone action days. That riding public transportation was free to help reduce that population. Is that anything that's been looked at? >> We could look at it. I think we've done some things in partnership with the Council of Governments and ozone free days, but we could look at that. >> And have you ever looked at, I understand the concern in downtown parking. As far as your ridership leaving from the downtown train station, what percentage come in on buses? What percentage are parking and what percentage are transit oriented that walk or back up? >> I don't know the number off my head. There's only 73 parking spaces that we have downtown right now. There's some that park at exposition. And I know that we've, there's some discussions going on about should we partner on exposition and does that make sense? We gotta kind of think about that. I know that we have a, I'll just share with you, we also have a DME is expanding an easement on our property. And wow, that would make a whole lot more sense instead of the city writing us a check for an easement. Shouldn't we maybe apply that to something, right? I'm game to have those kind of discussions. That's the kind of partnerships that I think as we go forward would be helpful, right? Because improving parking at exposition could be a very beneficial thing for us. And the flash to bang time on that is pretty short. >> Right, and I think the data of knowing what your riders hip, how they're getting to the train station would be very valuable. Because the program you've got in Highland Village with Ly ft may be something that could also help out in downtown. >> And it is a very cost effective answer. So we're perfecting it. Want to get it right. Use that as a test bed and then look and see what we could do to make that happen. So I'm very open to that. Again, I want to make sure if we're anything at DCTA, we need to be nimble and open to new ideas. We don't need to just stick to the way we've done it in the past. So we're open to that. >> Thank you. >> Yes sir. >> So any other questions? Haley, do you have a question? >> So you mentioned earlier in your presentation that you are, let's see, how do you say it? Students are your thing basically. >> Education, yes. >> Yeah, education. Do you have any plans with ridership down to market more towards families with children or older adults that are not students? Because Denton is, we are a lot of students, but there's so much more. >> One of the things that we do to make the, I think that we're happy to, and we have reduced fares for kids. We have a lot of services for the elderly. One of the things that we do with our train is that even though we've gone, we originally put in a conductor on our train because we had two car sets. And if you've seen that, but we've been running mostly single cars now because it's much more efficient. We don't have the demand and it doesn't make sense to run an extra train. But because of the evacuation requirements for FRA, we had to have a conductor on the back train. What we found is that the customer service, the safety, the you get on our trains, you don't have graffiti, we don 't have trash. We have, I mean, it's well maintained, it's good order that we have the conductor on there. But it also makes it easy for those that may feel more vulnerable to ride on the train. And so that's something that we've sustained just because of the, really for the customer service piece and the safety and the feedback we get from our customers is they love it. Someone gets on the train, they can ask the conductor and they're trained in customer service. They help people, they know how Dart works. They can tell you which train to get on coming north to make sure you don't miss your DCTA train. And that's the kind of thing that we want to keep doing. That's what we're trying to do. And if we can do something better, I believe that we're living longer. I don't think we should necessarily be driving longer. I don't meet that position. I mean, that's fact. How can we preserve independent mobility in your community from where someone lives now for a longer period of time? I think we can be a part of that equation. >> Fantastic, any other questions? No, you've had your allotment. I'm just kidding. >> No, I don't have a question after he's done. I have comments just for us. >> Sure, sure. Okay. All right. >> Thank you all for having us. We're privileged. It would be our privilege to come back any time you'd like for us to come talk. Please let us know. Mark keeps us up to speed. And we're at your back and call. >> Thank you. Appreciate it, Mr. Klein. >> Thank you. >> Council Member Hussbeth, you had some comments or discussion? >> Yes, sir. I'd like to see what that cost looks like for the two lots near the downtown station. because I think between Exposition and there on the other side of City Hall West adjacent tracks, I think it would be pretty quick and easy to light those up a little better. And now that parking, because just past the east side apartments, there's an empty lot. I think just a few lights and that makes that walkable. It's directly across from the street from the police station. And then the other is next to City Hall West. And so that opens up a lot of parking if we light those up. And then I do think that Jim makes a great point with Med Park to try to maybe entertain. That may be something because it's not as costly to maybe do some sort of small business initiative on that parking lot. Something that we could, it's not subsidized, but it's not as costly to an individual or some sort of incub ator type approach that may make sense there to try to. Because I think there is, I mean he makes a good point. So if you're on those lines, you get off, you arrive, there 's no restrooms at that stop. It would open up some doors to make it more comfortable to park there. And then as a family, take care of business and then ride down to downtown. So I think there's some interesting inter-resting avenues on those lines. Thank you. >> Okay, thank you. I believe Mr. Klein wanted to make a point of clarification . Come on. >> Yes sir. >> Mr. Crosby asked me to mention one other thing. I think it goes, it speaks to the downtown parking as if they're, we understand that there's North Central Texas College is looking at expanding their footprint. And it would be something that there might be three parties to that kind of an agreement. >> Right. >> So I throw that out there as- >> Yes sir. >> That I think we want to be, again it goes back to what I said earlier. We want to be part of the solution here in Denton. And if we can help, we would like to at least know and see what we can do to contribute to that. >> Fantastic. >> Yes sir. >> Thank you, appreciate that. Good word. Any other comments on this agenda item? We're gonna go ahead and take the next agenda item, then we 'll take a break after that, cuz it should go fairly quickly. We'll go on to the next agenda item, receive report, hold discussion, give staff direction regarding nominations to the city boards and commissions and council committees. >> Thank you, Mayor. It'll go as fast as y'all give me these nominations. So in your packets on Friday, you had a list of some nominations that some of you had already turned in to my office. During the week, we got a few more, so we have provided you with updated lists. If it's all right with you, I'll just go down through each of the separate boards. And if you have a nomination you'd like to give me, give it to me then. And then we'll have this list updated and it'll be up at your desks for the evening meeting and you'll be able to vote on those nominations at that time. >> Okay. >> Sure. >> All right. So airport advisory board, council member Hutspeth. I do not have someone for that yet. >> Okay. You can see that council member Briggs has nominated Robert Ismrett. And I have to say, some of these names I was looking through the list and if any of these people are listening, I apologize in advance because I'll probably murder some of their names, so I'm sorry. And Mayor Pro Tem Bagary has nominated Sandra Chandler. Animal Shelter Advisory Committee. Council member Duff has nominated Dr. Angela Paben or Paben , whichever. Council member Ryan. >> No, I'm still trying to get ahold of our current to see if she wants to rename. >> Okay. Mayor Watts has renominated David Hildebrand. Community Development, we don't have any nominations. Council member Hutspeth? >> Yes, so Paul Meltzer. >> Okay. Council member Briggs? >> I just learned that my girl cannot return because she moved out of the city, so I am looking for somebody. >> All right. Council member Ryan? >> Not at this time. >> Did you not do your homework? >> I'm working. >> Mayor Pro Tem? >> Fran Witte. >> I'm sorry? >> Fran, F-R-A-N. >> Fran? >> Last name Witte, W-I-T-T-E. You know, it might be Whit. Sorry. Sorry, Fran. All right, health and building standards. Council member Hutspeth? >> No, I do not have anyone. >> You didn't do your homework either. >> I did. >> I'm going to have to speak to your father. >> I'm rattling cages. >> Council member Duff has nominated Matthew Gendusa. Okay. Council member Gregory has nominated Greg Coward. Mayor Pro Tem Begarry? No. Mayor Watts? Ginger Kane? I'll have her get an application to you. >> And that's Kate. >> C-A-I-M. >> C-A-I-M. >> Yes. All right, historic landmark commission. Council member Hutspeth? >> Yes, the search is ongoing. >> You know why she does this, don't you? I mean, I've been the most notorious about this. This is, yes. This is sort of a de facto kind of public shaming. I'm just teasing. >> I'm just going back to my school days. >> I'm just kidding. I felt the stare many a time. >> Yeah. >> Okay. >> Sorry. >> Council member Duff has renominated Peggy Riddle. Council member Ryan? >> I'm currently working on something. >> Council member Gregory has renominated Helen Bailey. Mayor Pro Tem? >> Nothing. >> We're not looking at you. And for the opposition, council member Gregory is renominating Alyssa Stevenson. Human Services? Should I just skip you on all these? >> No. I'm rethinking the D1 thing. That should be D3, so at least it doesn't come up first. No. So I don't have anyone for that position. I pick back up at planning and zoning when you get there. >> All right. Council member Duff is renominating Stephen Coffey. Council member Gregory is nominating Meredith. >> Bowie. >> Bowie. I never would have gotten that Bowie. Mayor Pro Tem? >> I've requested to see if the person wants to be renom inated. I'm just waiting. >> Mayor Watts? >> No. Yeah, I'm real close, but no. >> There's two all positions, and I'm sorry I missed this one. Pamela Barnes, someone renominated. Ryan, okay, council member Ryan renominated Pamela Barnes and council member Gregory is renominating Christy Wood. Library board, we'll skip council member Hudseth. Council member Briggs is having a new member, Kate Margul ies. Is that right? Okay. Council member Duff has a new nomination of Sherry DeBoerdy . >> DeBoerdy. >> DeBoerdy, okay. All right, got it. Council member Gregory, Amy Taylor. >> Yes. >> New nomination. >> And by the way, if I may, those suggestions that I had given for the all positions for Historic Landmark Commission and Human Service Advisory Commission. I just did that those folks were both serving. I've known both of those folks and seen how they were working. If there's someone else on the council that wants to suggest something else, I'm not opposed to that, I'm just trying to move it forward . >> Thank you. And for the library board, Mayor Pro Tem is nominating a new person. >> Sashanka Lopez. >> I was going to say Lopez. For Parks and Rec, we'll skip council member Hutzpah. Council member Duff is nominating Elena Presley Taylor, she 's new. Council member Gregory is nominating Phil Galavan, new. Mayor Pro Tem is nominating Ben Hutish, new. And Mayor Watts is renaming Francis Punch. Planning and zoning. Council member Hutzpah. >> Back. That's going to be Alfredo Sanchez. >> Alfredo. Okay. Council member Briggs is renaming Larry Beck. I don't know why there's a space. Council member Ryan is renominated Andrew Rozelle. And Mayor Watts is nominating a new person, Tim Smith. Public art committee. Council member Hutzpah. >> Monet Franklin. >> Can you spell that for me so I get it right tonight? >> M-O-N-E-T. >> Franklin? >> Yes. >> Just Plano Franklin, got it. Thank you. Council member Ryan. >> Not at this time. >> Council member Gregory is renominating Brian Wheeler and Mayor Pro Tem is renominating Ed Steele. Public utility board. Mayor Pro Tem is nominating Deb Armentor. Traffic safety commission. Council member Duff is renominating Nancy DeMarco. Council member Ryan is renominating Jim Owen. Council member Gregory is nominating Courtney Cross, new. And Mayor Watts is renominating Patrice Like. Zoning board of adjustment. Council member Hutzpah. >> No, I don't have an oppose for that. >> Council member Duff is renominating David Higgins. Council member Ryan is nominating Jason Cole as a new person. Mayor Pro Tem. >> Renominating Greg Sacco. >> Greg Sacco. >> Also have a suggestion for alternate when we get there. >> Okay. Mayor Watts is renominating Connie Baker and the alternate. >> I'd like to suggest Karen Devaney. >> Okay. All right, and at this time we've also added our downtown Denton Tiff Reinvestment Zone number one board. >> I have a question about that. So I noticed on our forms there wasn't an option to select for the Tiff board. And additionally, I emailed you Jennifer to look at the ordinance and it appears that the ordinance doesn't allow for chamber members to be nominated for the chamber position. It's only chamber board members. And I guess I'd like to have a discussion about maybe expanding the scope of who we can nominate to the Tiff board because that's a really limited number of people for two seats. >> Okay. Well first of all, are we imposing to do that? >> If she's raising it as a future item to be discussed, then that would be okay. We can't go into discussion about that since we're just making nominations. >> Okay. Does that make sense? >> Would you like to just hold this one then at this time? Or you want to go ahead and if there's the two council members that are interested, do you want to go ahead and confirm those two? So you'd have those. >> I mean, I can't suggest that I confirm myself, correct? >> I think we should move forward with the nominations that we have. >> Okay. >> And deciding those and then we can take up at a later time the discussion about membership and maybe expanding the scope of it, yeah. >> All right. >> So the two council members that are being nominated for the TIF board are Mayor Pro Tem and Council Member Hutsbeth . >> Correct. >> Okay. >> There's none others. None others. My mother is rolling in her grave with that English. >> [LAUGH] >> There are no others. Then we will update this list and have it upstairs. If for some reason we don't have an application on file, I'll get in touch with you and ask you to, Tim did send me his. >> Okay, good. >> I will ask you to get me some basic information so we can get hold of them so we can check them to make sure they meet the qualifications for the particular board they've been nominated to. >> Okay. >> All right. >> All right. Any other questions on this agenda item? >> Thank you. >> And if you have any other names even before the council meeting? >> I forgot to mention. Yes, if you have any more before, we can stick those on there. If for some reason somebody gets in touch with you between now and upstairs. And also we'll be placing this back then on your August 15 th agenda for those of you who have some vacancies yet. And I know that will be the last time that we'll have to put that on the agenda. >> [LAUGH] >> Thank you. >> Hey, I've been one of the worst culprits, so I totally understand. Thank you. I was waiting for somebody to give me a little affirmation here, but I can't get any respect. >> [LAUGH] >> Okay, let's go ahead and take about a five or ten minute break. It is 2.40, or I'm sorry, 2.50. I want to revisit agenda item B, because I think we've got something that's going to be helpful as far as moving the TIP nominations forward. So I want to call again agenda item number B. Is that okay, Mr. City Attorney, for me to do that? >> Yes, Mayor. >> Okay, thank you. I'm going to reopen agenda item 3B. Receive a report, hold discussion, give staff direction regarding nominations. I believe, Mayor Pro Tem, did you have a modification to the nominations for the TIF board? >> Right, so I was made aware of some changes that could be made that would then facilitate being able to have a meeting sooner rather than waiting for the full council discussion about changing the parameters ordinance. And what I would suggest is that Melissa Lennenberg is in the qualified voter spot. She can be moved to the property owner spot because she's also a property owner. My understanding is that this would not affect her total years, so the number of years that she can serve is the same regardless of the seat that she's in. >> Okay. >> That would replace Bob Moses, and then that leaves Marty Rivers' position, which is either a Chamber of Commerce board member or a business owner in the zone open. And then that would create an opening in the qualified voter, so that could be anybody. >> Okay, so there's gonna be two positions left open and that would be the position vacated by Marty Rivers because he's termed out, and then the qualified voter position. >> Correct. >> All right, okay, so we'll make that change, and I appreciate that being brought to our attention, so that 'll help facilitate that. So that'll be on the updated list. >> I have a nomination for the qualified voter, and I don't know if anybody wants to nominate for the, I'll open it up to, I mean I don't know that they, kind of speaking in circles here, I apologize. I don't know how the process works for getting to the four names that we had in our backup, but for the qualified voter position, I'd like to nominate Paul Meltzer. And for the open position, Marty Rivers is positioned on Chamber of Commerce. There are two options that we have as of right now, I believe Ben Easley and John Lenz would be the two that qualify for that seat. >> Councilmember Gregory. >> I think I heard Mr. Meltzer's name being submitted for another position, and typically, I don't know if it's me to get an opinion, I don't know if it's a rule or if it's just our practice that we only put a citizen on one advisory board or commission and not more than that, so that we spread those around. So do we have that as a rule or is that just a custom? >> We did some research on this a few weeks ago and there is not an actual rule, per se, with exception of anybody who's on P and Z cannot serve in any other city office. Other than that, I think it has been a practice of this council to try to limit each board or commission position to one person only. I mean, they would not be able to serve on multiple boards. That's been your practice, not necessarily the rule. >> And just bring that up. And I think Councilmember Hutsbeth has something he'd like to add as well. Councilmember? >> Yeah, I think at the next break we can discuss it, but community development advisory board, it's a truncated period for those federal dollars. And then it's not a year round thing. And understanding there's no rule against it. I just want to have that conversation, but that was, the preference was the TIP board, but there wasn't an avenue for that, so just need to explore that during the break. >> Yes. >> And I think the reason why is that we always have more applications, more people that want to serve on boards, than we have places for people to serve. And the idea being, I think the reason for the custom is to not put some people in a position of having a lot of influence and a lot of different boards. And then other people just getting shut out that want to get involved. And I think Mr. Melcher is a great guy, and he'd probably be great on every board that we have. >> So that's- >> Go ahead. I'm just trying to understand if, are you- >> We can talk about it at the break instead of on the fly, it would be on preference. And I understand that that's one opinion that, hey, that's not good, and I get it, and that's well received, but I think there's no rule against it. And I just need to have a conversation. >> With Mr. Melcher, is that what you're saying? >> Yes. >> Okay, all right, so you may come back and, all right, I'm sorry. >> No, I was just going to say, the only rule that prohib its dual service is found in the DDC, where anybody appointed to the Planning and Zoning Commission cannot serve on any other city board. And that's the only rule that prohibits a person from serving more than two boards. >> So Mayor Pro Tem, who is the other nominee for the business owner? >> There were two options. One was Ben Easley and the other is John Lentz. >> And your nomination was for who? >> I didn't make a nomination, I just- >> Okay. >> Let everybody know that those are the two names that we had received that qualified for that position. And I just wanted to clarify, I did speak with Mr. Melcher and we can talk with him again after break. But I believe his preference is for the TIFF board. >> Yeah, we'll let y'all work it out and then we'll talk about it. We'll have to talk about it when we get up to the regular session agenda item. >> Pull them in those spots and then we can- >> Okay. >> Take them off. >> Great, but we did move the one, Melissa- >> Lennonburg. >> Lennonburg, you're right. And then made that other nomination, so. >> All right. >> Fantastic. Any other questions, comments on this agenda item? Thank you, I appreciate it. Look forward to hearing from you after the break. All right, we'll go on to agenda item 3D. Receive a report, hold discussion, receive departmental presentations in preparation for FY 2017-18 proposed budget. Who's up? Okay, which ones are we hearing today? >> Electric, streets, and traffic. >> Okay. >> Okay, good afternoon, Mayor and Council, Brian Langley, Deputy City Manager. I wanna walk you through the DME budget. I know we've been having some discussions on this in recent weeks, but I'll try to highlight a few of the departmental activities for you. First of all, in terms of the FTEs, I've listed all of the different major business units that we have in DME. I want to highlight a couple of things for you. The Denton Energy Center is one where we're showing an increase in FTEs from 1617 to 1718, as we staff up to eventually open and operate that facility . And also wanted to comment on the engineering division. We made a decision to outsource some of those operations. We had some vacancies in that operation. We outsourced some of those activities to keep projects moving and to reduce that number of FTEs. Overall, we're showing an increase from budget to budget of seven FTEs after all those changes. Here is our organizational chart. We do have a few vacancies, as you know about. I'm serving as the interim general manager currently. We do have a process underway to hire a new general manager for the electric utility. We expect that to be completed in the October timeframe to have that position selected. And then we're going to allow that person to make a decision of how they want to structure this operation going forward. So we have some folks who are out. We have some folks who may be serving in interim roles for us in these other positions. But rather than restructure that at the current time, I wanted to give the new general manager their ability to get their team in place and structure operations as they saw fit. >> Just a few highlights for you on some of the accomplishments and goals for the coming year. In this current fiscal year, I wanted to point out just a couple of these. I won't read all of them for you. But we expect to achieve 42 to 48% renewable energy. That's going to be depending on how many megawatt hours we use this year and some of the weather factors that we're looking at. But we definitely think we're going to be over that 40% range for this fiscal year. >> Is that actual physical renewable energy? >> Yes, it is. >> Okay, thanks. >> Great question. Miss, item number three, we've paid off approximately $33 million in TNPA related debt over the last two years with no overall rate increase. We think that's a good accomplishment as I know that we've had some discussions with you about the DME budget. I will be bringing back to you later this week all of the T NPA debt and all of the debt for the electric utility in general. I'll show you that information. But just wanted to point that out for you. Couple of things in terms of the goals for next year I wanted to mention to you. Obviously we're looking at maximizing the use of renewable energy going forward. We're going to be bringing in some independent consultants to look at those assumptions that we had for the Denton Energy Center, our renewable portfolio. How we can increase that to as best we can in keeping rates low. We started some of that conversation with you back in the April time frame looking to see where we would be in the 2018, 2019 period. We hope we can maintain that or even improve that going forward. So we'll be bringing back some options for you to consider as we move forward through that. And the last point is something I wanted to emphasize as a goal for us going forward in this next year. We want to increase the transparency of DME, the fiscal accountability of the department. We've been making a lot of strides in this area. One of the things we're going to be doing is launching some publicity for DME to showcase some of the things that our operations are doing. We had a tour with the Denton Rec and Chronicle, the energy management organization just this last week. We have some short videos of those operations, some short videos that are going out for all of the different operations that are taking place in the department. We have lots of folks doing lots of great things every day. We don't always tell that story very well and we want to try to get out and make sure that we tell that to the community very well. In terms of performance measures, there's a number of these that we have listed here for you. Just to highlight a couple of these that may be of interest to you. Number five is the percentage of underground cables installed on the distribution system. That's something that we continue to monitor and try to increase. As you know, we have a very large percentage of those currently underground and we think that's a very good metric to look at. Then number eight is renewable energy. The percentage of renewable energy will obviously continue to track that. We have a very aggressive agenda to try to increase that over time. We'll continue to monitor that. And then the energy management organization savings. We've talked about this previously, but we're bringing in Deloitte consulting to help us validate what the savings are for that organization. We'll be bringing that report back to you to show what we think that organization has achieved in terms of performance and savings over the past couple of fiscal years. And we'll bring that for you, hopefully, in the next few weeks. >> And Brian, just briefly, I guess I have a comment. And really what you're trying to say is, because in the past when this was first created, the thought was we can save money above using this organization than if we had gone out there and contracted with a PPA agreement or something like that. And they were using, at that time, a contract that we had had in order to use as a benchmark. And what I'm hearing you say is, we're having a consultant come in to say, okay, we're not sure what the benchmark is now. How do we measure what the savings are? In other words, if you're going to say we're saving money using this type of structure, you've got to know what it would have cost you otherwise to see if you're saving money. Is that what I'm understanding? >> Yes, sir, I think there's two things. So in the first fiscal year that we had the new organization up and running, we did use an existing contract as the benchmark to measure those savings. So we'll have that information, but we also want to go back and look independently of that. What do we think we would have been able to achieve if we'd been doing it on our own, independent of that contract? And then going forward for 16, 17, and 17, 18 going forward , what do we think is the right benchmark to use and how do we measure that and evaluate it? We've done some work internally to look at that and try to measure what we think that is. We want some validation of is this the right benchmark? Are we looking at it the right way and calculating that correctly? And so we want to bring that forward as a very independent kind of look on that operation to say, here's what we think is an independent view of those savings that we have. So we can show you that. >> And we're doing that to validate that to continue to have that particular, the energy management organization. Do the savings justify the expense and maybe the convenience or ability to move quickly and sort of the independence and we're sort of control it locally. So that's really what your point is. The expense, the risk of the operation, the types of risks that we're taking on. Is all of that validated and worth that in terms of the savings that we're achieving and that's the type of look we want to bring back to you. >> So just one more question. So the people that we're using to evaluate that, they've had experience in evaluating other types of operations for this type of analysis? >> Yes, Deloitte has, we looked at several different farms to do this kind of work. Deloitte has an energy division. They have some very experienced professionals in that area that can do this kind of analysis for us. And so it's not just a typical kind of accounting type of assignment. It's very specific energy work that we think they've got a good skill set for us to help us do that with. >> Okay, Council Member Riggs. >> So is it important for us to have an energy management organization with the Dent Energy Center? Do they go hand in hand or can we have one without the other? >> I think you can have one without the others. >> Apparently we do have one without, but we've had given. So do you have to have that generation? >> I think there's some advantages potentially of doing that. I think one of the things we'll hopefully be able to validate through this process is how much of an advantage really is it to have our own in-house EMO operation. Certainly there are other arrangements that you could have. You could outsource that function. You could have a contract with the PPA, as the mayor was talking about. You could have another provider provide that kind of functionality for us. You need to have someone doing that scheduling activity for you. Whether or not we outsource that or keep that in-house is really kind of the question. And it's really, really good. In our mind, it goes back to the value proposition. Is there a value of keeping it in-house? >> Is this, oops, sorry. >> No question. >> So this report will be looking at the EMO and the Dent Energy Center together? >> Really, we're just looking at the EMO. >> So the first two components that we wanted to do was go back and validate the savings for fiscal year 14-15 and then 15-16 to see what did we actually save. And then if we saved what we think we have, then figure out what's the right model going forward to look at that. And I can certainly look at adding as additional scope to that work to see what types of connections are there to the Denton Energy Center and benefits or potential risk of having it together. We can certainly look at that. We didn't really consider that, but we can certainly look at that. >> Thank you. >> Not in the scope currently. >> Councilmember Gregory. >> Thank you, Mayor. One other question that I think comes along with that. We learned recently that the city of Georgetown has contracted the EMO for the city of Garland to do their energy management. So I think one of the other questions as we're looking at maybe contracting hours out there is to also see if there are any advantages to us doing work for other organizations, other cities or whatever that may want our services where we could actually recover some of our cost. Don't want to add cost. Want to make sure that if we have a contract like that, we 're certainly. >> We'll be glad to look at that. >> Yeah, if you would do that, please. >> Yes, sir. And I do think there are probably some of those opportunities out there. >> Councilmember Duff. >> John, I know that you're contracting long term with solar and wind, right? And what I'm curious about is how are those contracts structured? Because you know in the future, I know that you probably have not done that much in solar simply because solar is going down in price. So I'm wondering how are you structuring that because you know that's going to happen. And is there something you can tie it to as the prices go down, you can come down with them? >> I don't have a great answer for that question. I'll take a look at that and see. I think most of those contracts have been fixed fee type contracts. I'll have to look at the scheduling of those and I'll get a report to you and the council on that. >> Yeah, that's kind of what I'm concerned about, a fixed fee. You know, if it goes out 20 years, that's okay. >> I understand. >> One of the additional studies that we'll be performing and we'll be bringing back to the council sometime the next quarter is a renewable integration plan. So we'll be able to have just those discussions in terms of what is the appropriate timing out there. You know, how would we potentially increase the diversity of that renewable load and what does that really mean in terms of backup that might be necessary ? So the idea would be to gather that information, put together some suggestions and actually have that conversation with the PUB and the council sometime probably before October I'm hoping. And we'll also, and then there will be another discussion at some point in terms of how the actual energy center is used, you know, when it runs, how it runs, who orders it to run, that sort of thing. So we've got a couple of different studies moving forward to enable the council to have those policy discussions. >> Yes, Council Member Duff. >> Yeah, and I've stated this before, but you know, from my knowledge is that solar is, in the future is going to be the dominant supplier of electricity in Texas. And I base that basically on, it is a semiconductor product and it's going to go down in value. It's going to be on a lot of houses. And I suspect that when the wind farms get out to where those turbines need to be replaced, they can't afford to. >> Okay. [ Pause ] >> Some of the department efforts I wanted to mention to you, we have several of these listed here. I wanted to mention item number two, we did eliminate a couple of different management positions. As you know, Galen Gillum has transferred over from DME, is now the director of capital projects. So with that change, we were able to restructure some operations in DME and eliminate a couple of different positions. Item number five, I wanted to also mention to you that we have developed some internal software packages to help us automate some of our operations, some of the day -to-day processes that we have across DME. So we've been very successful in doing that to help us control cost. And then item number six, we have implemented a workforce management system to help us move to a paperless environment. So this is essentially a work order system, taking work orders electronically, transmitting those to trucks and crews out in the field so they can get those work orders completed. And then for them to actually work those processes electronically rather than having to pass a lot of paper in between. So that's been very helpful. Yes, sir. On number four, first of all, that's noteworthy. That's in a year. You're saying $1.2 million of savings in one year for reduced debt service because of lower rates. Now, was that because of a refi from a bond refund, excuse me, from revenue bonds to COs, which then that savings goes into the street maintenance fund, or is this just briefly, what is that from? It's looking at what we modeled for interest rates and what we actually are able to achieve in the market. So not necessarily a refunding, but we had assumed a higher rate of interest that we were going to pay for just our normal capital program, exclusive of the DEC. And the interest rates were lower than what we thought, so we were able to reduce that cost for '17-'18. OK. That's a good thing, absolutely. It certainly helps. So more of a budget issue, not so much a hard savings from previous years. That's right. As we were building the budget for '17-'18, it actually came in lower than what we thought it was going to be. Great. All right. Thank you. So we've had a number of different completed projects over the past year. You guys may know about the mydme.com website. We've pleaded to report that's been accessed over 20,000 times as of June of 2017. So we're very proud of that project. Number three, I did want to mention to you as well, we have put in some RFID equipment on some of our equipment around in DME. This is radio frequency identification devices to help monitor the location of that. So that's been an improvement. And some of the future projects that we're going to be doing, try to keep our costs low, again, with this fiscal accountability emphasis that we have. We want to utilize temporary interns and programmers to supplement staff whenever possible to keep our personnel costs down. We're looking at converting one of our existing positions into the energy trading and risk management analyst position. This is our software program that we're going to be talking to you about, actually, on the 15th trading platform that we have. And looking at replacing that system with a more robust system. So we've been having a lot of discussions about trying to make that the best system that we can. And again, we'll be talking to you more about that in mid-A ugust. Brian, real quick. I don't see it. Have we converted now all meters to smart meters? I believe that's correct, yes. So one thing I would like for us to take a look at is I know before we had smart meters, we had to send someone out to turn on and turn off the meters. And now I believe those can be done remotely. Yes. And I think-- and so I'd like to see the sort of cost breakdown and sort of the financial analysis of-- so now that we're not having to pay for that to occur, I think we're still charging the same connect fee. So just how much were the smart meters? How much time is it going to take us to recoup that? And if there's an opportunity to reduce the connect fee-- I mean, that's the one reason we did it was to save costs, but also to accumulate data, to gather data, and to make it more efficient, and to provide customers an opportunity to better manage their electrical usage. So I just want to see a comparison of that because sometimes when I see it's the same charge when-- so maybe there's some cost associated with that other than the price of the meters themselves and installation, but we 'll want to see that as well. Just a comparison of-- you know, this is now automated, and we're charging the same amount as when it was more manual. See some justification. OK. I'd be glad to prepare that for you, get that to the council. OK. So here are the numbers. I know that Chuck went through these with you, I believe, last week. Just a high-level overview of some of the financials for D ME, as you can see. DME is different than some of the other departments in that cost of personnel services is about 10% of the budget versus the general fund, which is about 75%. Purchase power and fuel is the largest item that we have. We've talked at length about how the purchase power cost as we were looking at that five-year plan. We expect those to drop. You'll see an increase in debt service over time. But those are the major elements that we have as part of the budget. Mayor Pro Tem. Yes. Where can we find the $167,000 that's provided to the Chamber of Commerce? Which line item would that be? That would be in operations. And I can give you the detail. I don't believe all of that's in DME. I'm trying to remember-- Well, it's $235,000 total and then $68,000 from the general fund. So that leaves $167,000. Is that right? Some is in water and wastewater. Which is the other components. If you'd like, I'll get you the breakdown for the whole $2 35,000 to show you that component. Thank you. But that would be in the operations and maintenance account . Cancel my break. She had a question? More of a, I guess, an observation. So as the purchase power and fuel now is for, like, is that the PPAs or what we spend purchasing power off the market? Yes, it would include that plus the TNPA contract. Plus the TNPA. OK, so as the years go on and the energy center, like this is just the ideal, that will decrease. That amount will decrease significantly. Yes. But the debt service, will that keep increasing? We do have a schedule, yes. We have a five-year plan that I can get back to you. I don't remember those figures off the top of my head. But yes, it will go down. And the debt will level out at some point as we have all the debt that is in place. That debt service will level out as we go out to the five- year plan. But I can provide that to you and show you those figures. Thank you. That's the idea. OK. That's it. He had a-- Oh, yes, sir. --summoned up. Do we have estimates of what the power is going to cost in the debt system? We do. And I can provide that to you. And how that compares to some of the general goals. That's probably almost something that is not for general consumption. Because I understand that. Yes, sir. Some of that could be competitive information. But we'll look at it. Absolutely it is. Yeah, I understand. Sure. I'll look at getting that to you in the council. OK. That's it. That's all I had for you on DME. Next up is Galen. Are you doing streets or transportation? Thank you for your time. They're right there. Thank you. Good afternoon, mayor and council members. I'm Galen Gillum, the director of capital projects for the city of Denton. Brief overview of the street department. And just as a reminder, I requested and was granted a work session item to come next week and give you an update on capital projects. I will mention a project or two in here as an example. But much more thorough update on actual projects next week. So keep you excited and have you come back, right? And make sure you come back, Dalton. No, not next week. Oh, OK. OK, so the staffing chart. And what this shows is that we've had some growth in staffing of crews. We've added a couple of different crews that perform some functions for us. I can show you that in a little more detail coming up. And one staff growth on the administrative level. It's really just a movement of the manager, Keith Gabbard, into this budget from-- formally he was paid out of the drainage budget. So that's just a transfer. It's not a net increase of city staffing. It's just moving in from one place to the other. And then the other numbers show the growth that we've added a couple of crews over the last few years to get more and more streets work done. Here's some detail of the actual structure of the department. You see the manager is at the top, Keith Gabbard. Robin Weber works for Keith and gets really most of the work done under Keith's leadership. And you see we're divided into three larger groups and then two crews within each group. And you see the field service workers and the equipment operators that make up the crews that are out there repairing and building the streets that you drive on every day. I haven't seen this in the other ones. So the big long number underneath each person's name and position, is that a grading-- what is that? That's the position code number. OK. So it's-- Position code number is the big long number under everyone 's name. OK. Right? Yeah. Yep. Some goals and accomplishments. One, we've been working hard on reducing the backlog of streets that are in the reconstruction category. 14 lane miles were done, 36 segments. We've increased preventative maintenance programs. And it's important to do that. And we haven't had to sell the council on this every year. But $0.70 spent on maintenance equates to saving $4 in actual rebuild of the street. So it's a much more-- it's like a five times multiplier of cost effectiveness, performing maintenance on a street. And those types of things are crack seals, which are those weird little black squiggly lines you see on the street. And you wonder, why did they do that? Well, it's to seal a little crack that's running down the line to keep water out of that crack, because water is the enemy of streets. And so if water sits in one little place, it begins to cause more and more damage. So we go out and do crack seal. We do something called micro seal, which looks like a brand new street when we're finished with that. It's kind of a thick, slurry paint type product that they put on streets. And it helps resurface the streets and protect the street underneath. You can see the numbers that have gone up. Crack seal, we've done about five times as much lane miles this year as we did last year. Micro seal, we've done significantly more than last year. And actual asphalt overlay, where you see the asphalt machines laying the asphalt thickness on top of a street. We've done more of that as well than we did last year. Council Member Briggs, you had a question? So is that the order of the preventive maintenance they go in? So like say, there's a section in Nottingham. It's just completely crack sealed all over. Would the next step be to come in and micro seal that? Or is that how the process goes? That sort of is for those two processes. Before you'd want to do the micro seal, you want to go in and seal the cracks first. It doesn't really kind of flow necessarily. Asphalt overlay is more of almost like a serious repair. But definitely those first two processes of crack seal and micro seal work together just like you said. You do the crack seal first. And then you come back sometime later and do the micro seal . Do you-- and I think I'd asked for this a while back. But because I know that we're doing a lot of reconstruction and new construction, both with outside contractors and I believe in-house staff. Yes. Are we keeping track of what type of maintenance we're having to go back and do on these new streets? In other words, I want to make sure that when we do a street-- let's say we reconstruct a street. If we're keeping data on, well, we've got to go back out there and now crack seal a little bit of it after a year. Or we've got to do that. Then it gives us an indication of is that average as far as with the quality of street construction or-- I just-- I mean, these statistics are good. But what I'm also would like to know is when we do new streets, when are we beginning to see some deterioration of that? And when do these sort of preventative maintenance programs kick in when we have new construction? Oh, you can come up to the mic. Yeah, you'll need to come up to the mic. Here's Robin Weber, and he'll talk to you a little bit more detail about that technical question. Yeah, just briefly, because I-- but we can talk offline as well. But yeah, that's-- thank you. Appreciate it, Robert. Well, we go back and re-inspect the street after one year and see what the condition of the street is. Crack seal may be three years out, maybe five years out at all. Depends on the weather, related drought, rainfall, everything. So it varies. But we do go back and check the streets the following year to see what condition they're in. So you can tell basically there's some kind of knowledge that if we've redone a street and within a certain amount of time, certain problems appear. That's either something that happens in the normal course of just the lifecycle of a road, or certain things can happen where you go, OK, we got a major problem maybe with the original construction . So you're able to tell the differences on those. And keep in mind when we go back and reconstruct a roadway, we're going from 2 and 1/2 inches to 7 now with asphalt and line. That's the reconstruction process. And with the mill and overlay process, we're going back with-- we're going to-- used to go with the 2 to 3 inch mill off in the overlay. Now we're going to 4 and 5 inches to prevent those issues from happening. Trying to do it better the first time so that we're not having to do as much prevent-- get a longer life out of the street. Yeah, and the preventative maintenance part is the key part for spending a lot of money on what we're doing right now. Great. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you for that information. Very helpful. And there may be another example related to what you said. Because Keith had informed me, hey, we're finished with the micro seal program for this year. And I noticed they were out micro sealing another street. And I said, well, what's that about? And he said, well, it's warranty work. So we go back and check. And if something doesn't give us the service that we expect for what we pay, then we have it redone or we have some extra work done to make up for that. So we do keep tabs on that as best we can. And one final question, at least, on this is because I know we were in a situation where we had some major failure of some roads that were done in a subdivision that because of different various actions, we couldn't really do much about it. In other words, inspections or things such as that. So we've resolved those issues, I presume, that got us into that. Do you know what I'm referring to? I think it's the West Wind. It's before your time. I don't know the specific example that you're talking about. Yeah. That's all been resolved, right? Yeah. Yeah. To the best of my knowledge, yes. It's the Wind River where we had new construction. And somehow the roads really deteriorated. And we tried to initiate an action. And for various reasons, we wound up settling it. So the key is new construction, really a very rigorous inspection process. Not even just on outside contractors, but I'm assuming we inspect our own work. We send out inspectors on our own work. Yes, we do. OK. Thank you. So some of the goals for 17-18, obviously, we want to do the best we can at increasing these preventive maintenance activities, because it's much cheaper than waiting for the road to fail and spending up to five times the amount in rebuilding it. So we push hard to try to get as much of those activities, as much paying for the buck as we can with those dollars, using outside contractors where we can to expedite things, using roadway impact studies to make sure we're trying to get funding levels appropriate as well . Council Member Gray. Before you leave that side, thank you, Mayor. Back up to the accomplishments, I just want to point out the numbers that you've given in comparison to last year. That's great that so much more is being done, so much more maintenance is-- when we keep putting in more money in that budget for road repairs, it's good to see that it's being spent and that we're seeing a lot for it. So thanks very much for that. Thank you. Some current performance measures-- square yards, square yards of asphalt, roadway reconstructed, square yards of overlay, square yards of micro seal. So those are some current measurements. But another way to think about things in our proposal is lane miles. And so people are more familiar with the concept of lane miles. So lane miles of concrete replaced or asphalt reconstruct, overlay, et cetera. So we're going to be using those as performance measures going forward, including miles of sidewalks and numbers of ADA specification ramps that we put in at crosswalks. And a lane mile is one lane of traffic or a street just per -- Right. Is it 10 feet? Is it 12 feet? Well, 10 feet in general is the no reuse for this, yes. Some of the cost containment strategies-- well, one thing we did find out with concrete demolition work where it needed to be done is that it seemed like it was very expensive. And we were able to put together a crew to do that same type of work at a savings of 40% compared to outsourcing it. The basis for that is really several factors that kind of come into play that contribute to that. Some of it has to do with just we're here and we don't have to have a mobilization cost to go out and do the work. We're already here. Our crew is already here ready to go do the work. We send them out to do the work. So we save on mobilization costs every time we send them out. And then we have some advantages for disposing of the product at the end of the process, et cetera. And we do a close analysis of resources. If you think of a project made up entirely of different modules of work, whether that's done through our in-house crews and resources or it's outsourced, we compare on an ongoing basis. We do an analysis based on who's available to do that work because conditions do change. As Robin mentioned, weather changes, and it changes rapidly here in Texas certain times of the year. We may need to make some modifications to our project based on things like that or other projects that are in the area. We obviously always want to compare cost, right? A cost containment strategy, we want to compare costs of the different methods for getting something done. What's the cheapest? And who has the ability to keep the project on schedule? Because sometimes you may be willing to pay a little bit more money to try to keep your project on schedule. So we make that analysis really project-wide going into a project, but sometimes even within the project for the specific pieces of the project. That analysis is done on an ongoing basis. So not just up front and then just go with it, but even piece by piece during the project. OK. Some of the improvements, a stabilization mixer. OK. Keith Gabbard took me out to a job site, and we watched the stabilization mixer start at one end of a block and go down to the other. And he said, man, look at that. Wasn't that awesome? And I said, I don't know. I don't have anything to compare that to. He said, yeah, the old machine used to take about 30 minutes to do that same thing, and this one did it in 5 and 1/2. So we've got some new equipment, basically, that's faster and more robust than some of the older equipment that we had. We've got a milling machine that's a similar upgrade. So that machine that kind of digs or scrapes off the top layer off of the streets, it's up to six times faster than the old machine that we had. And we recycle asphalt millings. What does that mean? Well, as we mill off the surface, it's not just piled away somewhere. And it's a pretty decent product for doing some different things with. It definitely doesn't go to the landfill. It's crushed back up and made back into asphalt again to redo the road. So basically, you're tearing the road up, recycling what you tore off, and putting some of that right back down to rebuild the road. So it's a much more efficient process as far as creating a waste product. So huge, huge upgrades and improvements in equipment over the years. The three and four kind of tie together. We work closely with some folks over here at City Hall that are in public information and helping us get the word out, try to develop some better templates, some better ways to get the information out to let people know what's going on, things like the map online that you can click on and see where the projects are, et cetera, information sheets, project maps, things like that that we're working on, really, to try to get the word out about where we're working. We want to always review contracts, look for are we getting the performance that we expect, do we need to develop new specifications, et cetera. And then even bundling, maybe bundling several smaller projects into a package that's more attractive to a larger supplier, a larger contractor that might want to come in and do that particular project. Question, Council Member Briggs. I was going to let you finish the number three, but utility coordination, the word coordination, stick out in my mind right now. Because I'm wondering if you guys talk to or communicate with Denton ISD, because school is about to start, and one of the major thoroughfares, Emerson, is getting shut down for the first couple of weeks that people bike and walk and drive to. So is that something that you can maybe-- I'll look into that specific example. We'll look into that. Sure, I can look into that specific example. If that would have just been pushed up a couple of weeks, there wouldn't have been an issue. I mean, we're going to work through it, but just communication with-- On the Emerson project-- Oh, if you could come to the podium. Because they just can't hear you on TV. I'm sorry. And I don't really need to get into specifics. I'm just going to talk about communication. OK. On the Emerson project, the reason it was delayed is because they could not locate the gas lines, the wire, the tracing wire that could not locate them. So we had to postpone it another week. So that pushed it out. And with the weather, upcoming weather, we're going to push it out even further. So this is a couple block project where we're going to take the whole street out and stabilize it and pave it. We tried to get in front of every school during the summer, but we ran out of time. So yes, we do communicate with the schools as much as we can. OK. All right? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Robert. Thanks, Robert. A little more specificity on some process changes or improvements, we work with Jago Public quite a bit. They're one of our main contractors that do a lot of projects. They've added an additional construction crew. They're working on adding a third crew to work on our projects. So that obviously widens the bandwidth and helps us get more done in less time. The asphalt bids split up between different providers. I mentioned earlier bundling some different projects together so all three can be bid out at the same time. And then we talked about coordination a little bit here. And some of it's internal coordination, some of it's other utility coordination, but also coordinating with other groups impacted by our projects as well. Question, yes, Council Member Briggs. You wait till the end. Say that? I'll wait till the end. OK. Budget highlights. Excuse me. On this chart here, you can see the personal services has gone up. And that was indicated by some of the staffing increase we've had over the last couple of years. It's not going up from '16, '17 to '17, '18. You can see some at the very bottom line down there, capital projects, some money is swept into capital projects if it's left over for maintenance. If we don't get to that and get to spend that money on maintenance, we can sweep it into capital projects and apply it to projects to keep them moving or to patch little gaps where a project may not have had quite enough money to get something done that we were trying to get done. Council Member Gregory. This chart was confusing to me because the debt service line in 2014, '15 is zero. And then all of a sudden it's there. And then the cost of service seems to vary wildly. A lot. Can you enlighten us on those two lines? It looks like you're getting some help. There we go. This fund bought some equipment in '15, '16, some of those pieces of equipment that he was talking about that are much quicker. So some of that they funded through debt. So they began paying debt service. That's why it was zero. And then it's gone up. But it stayed pretty steady just for that equipment. That's all they bought. In terms of the cost of service, in terms of that, included in that is a transfer to capital projects. I think in '15, '16, some of that probably should have been classified in capital projects. But because we've closed that accounting period, that's where the auditors wanted us to show that. So a good portion of that cost of service is really a transfer to capital in '14, '15 compared to the other, where you see that other cost of service is really their general fund cost of service in '15, '16, '16, '17, and '17, '18 proposed. It still-- even when you look at cost of service and capital projects lines together, the variation seems pretty dramatic. So if there's a-- maybe not here now, but at some other point, you could sit down and help me understand that a little better. We'll just send you-- we'll put a question in the next budget memo and send you some information to break down on that. OK, thank you. OK. Thank you, Chuck. Appreciate it. Way better answer than I could have given. Other questions? OK, Council Member Riggs, you had, I think, some questions. Sure. Did I hear you say you're going to come back and talk about more specifics regarding streets? Yes, projects including streets and other capital projects next week. So please come back. I can hold my question for that. Thank you. OK. It's more about traffic calming devices, which is not necessarily budget. OK. Council Member Gregory. Thank you, Mayor. And my comment about next week is I would love to be here. I could. But I have a previous engagement with my granddaughter and my daughter to be backpacking along the Piedra River in Colorado. So I'm sorry. Rough duty. Is that on the-- what is that? The 8th? Yeah. I actually will not be here. May I ask my question? Sure. Well, going back to Emerson, before it was redone the last time, it actually had speed bumps on it. And a big issue with people calling me or emailing and within our city generally is speeding through residential areas. And that's the one question I get the most. Can you put speed bumps on our street? Or can you reinsert the speed bumps that you took out? I know that that is not an option. But can you give the public some more options or what necessarily for traffic calming? Or you can bring that into your presentation next week and just allow that-- We can address this some while you're here. We just haven't have the traffic engineer. I understand. I think the city attorney has advised that-- It might be off topic. --maybe a report. Yeah, a report would be-- from a budget perspective, yeah, this is more of it. So we heard it. We'll put something together. Just if it can be in the live presentation, though not in the staff report for the citizens. But then you could see it as well, because it's going to be in the backup. Yeah. OK. Thank you. Yeah. All right. Thank you. Any other questions for streets? Seeing none. OK. We'll move on to traffic operations then. Here are the staffing numbers for traffic operations, not changing over the years. 12 folks form that department. And here's the folks that make up the department without the numbers at the bottom of the boxes. Scott Wilson is the manager. We'll get some leadership provided by Keith Gabbard to make sure streets and traffic are coordinated. And there's the folks that do the work, signal techs and marking techs. Some accomplishments. Installed 415,000 feet of pavement markings. 440 pavement symbols. 43 painted medians. Traffic signals at five locations. One of those was new at 380 Mosh Branch. Four replacements. 380 Bonnie Bray, 380 at I-35, Carol at Crescent, and Carol at Parkway. So those are new signals-- or replacement signals, one of the two. Compiled with AASHTO, American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, standards. You'll notice 2013 standards and guidelines there. So that's an accomplishment. We're looking at complying with 2015 standards going forward. So they've changed their standards and updated them. So some of the goals-- installation and reconstruction of 13 signalized intersections. Continued compliance with the sign markings, the federal highway markings, et cetera. And begin collecting the database on the markings reflectivity. So as those markings fade over time and they don't do the job we need them to do, to delineate where the roads are for people driving at night, we're going to track that and be ready to deal with that. Councilman Ryan has a question. Thank you, Mayor. On the nighttime reflectivity, do we have any control over any of the tech stock roads where we intersect with them? I think, in particular, about Kerr Boulevard at Fort Worth Drive, where the lanes are a different width than where the concrete is cut. Those tend to get worn down quick. We try to work very hard to cooperate with tech stock and get a cooperative agreement with them. But we don't have control over them. But obviously, they can hear our concerns and we take those concerns to them. They can't be at every road all the time. So they don't know when things are needed to be done. So part of what we need to do is gather that information. And when there is a bad intersection or a bad place where they need to fix the paint, we need to tell them. So that's really the answer. We can't control them. We can't make them go do it. But we can take them the information and request that they do it. OK. I'll send an email. Absolutely. Yes, sir. Other questions? So one of the current performance measures is number of signalized intersections retimed. So obviously, as someone drives down the road and intersections are lined up, you want to try to be able to keep your pace of speed and go through them. In the future, some of the things we're talking about adding are how many intersection-- signalized intersections are serviced, linear feed of pavement markings, how many traffic signs are serviced, et cetera. So just performance measures really to measure quantity of work, of how much work's being done. So you can see how much you're getting for the money we're spending, how much work's being done for the money we're spending. Some cost containment strategies. Being sure we've got the proper manpower and equipment to serve and provide the high level of service. And then technology. Over the years, a lot of technological improvements have come in to play for the traffic department. Things like smart tour intersections and things like fiber and interconnectivity and central monitoring and things like that. So we're working hard to advance those different types of concepts in the system to take full use of technology to try to help contain costs. To monitor things remotely, for example, you don't have to have people out in the field monitoring them. Less expensive alternative. Some completed projects. Developed exclusive standards and requests for proposals for traffic signal construction, hardware, traffic signs, et cetera. Converting 135 watt traffic signal bulbs to 8 watt LEDs. That's a huge amount of difference in how much power a light bulb uses. Obviously, the more power the light bulb uses, the more electricity it's using, the more the cost to run that light bulb. So those changes have been done, put in place, and then there's some more on that for street lights under item two under future projects. So we want to try to work hard to synchronize traffic signals and their timings to reduce idling and stopping and starting, which reduces emissions and fuel consumption and delays, et cetera. And we want to capitalize on grant opportunities and places where we can have money flow into our system to help us with projects that the city wants to do. Some of the budget highlights. You see personal services is relatively flat. There is a kind of a difference in the cost of service at the bottom. In an asterisk bullet point right here explains that. The bike fund is transferred to transportation, so it's taken out of the traffic operations budget. Relatively stable numbers over the years. What questions do you have? Councilmember Gregory and then Mayor Patent. Thank you, Mayor. I was surprised to see the personnel services actually down a little bit given the fact that we're having the same number of FTEs and we're looking at an average of 3% merit raises. How would we be able to lower our personnel services? That's a very good question. In terms of that, some of that's just due to turnover in terms of the seniority of the positions. And if we have turnover, then they tend to-- some of it tends to be in terms of turnover of those positions. And then on the cost of service, the way I was reading that , I was expecting to see 200,000 more in cost of service. But what you're saying is it was pulled out of traffic. It was just moved. It was in traffic before, and now it's over in transportation. Because we have a separate report on that. OK, thank you. I understand that now. Thanks. Mayor Pro Tem? Regarding the cost savings from the LED light conversions, where would we find that on the line item? And how much are we looking at in terms of when we convert a signal? I can give you some specific answers on that. It's in the streets budget. Oh, it's in streets? OK, got it. Well, for electricity for street lights, for example, it's in the streets budget. So we can highlight that for you. And look at the difference over the years. That would be interesting to see. Thank you. Any other questions? I think there was-- any other questions? All right, I think that concludes our budget presentations. I was telling the city manager, I'm not going to do it. But I was going to turn my mic off and start talking just to see if my light would come on. So if they're listening, I just-- sorry, anyway. Sorry, just being silly. OK, we're going to move on to our next agenda item, which is agenda item E, which is receive a report, hold discussion, and give staff direction regarding the charter review committee recommendations. OK, Mayor and Councilman Brian Langley, Deputy City Manager . I want to continue our conversation of the charter amendments that we've been discussing with you over the last several weeks. Just as a reminder, the council did form a charter review committee back in October of 2016. This was a 21-person citizen committee. That committee worked from December 2016 through May of 2017 to develop a series of recommendations for you on seven different charges. The report was presented to the council on June 27 by Chairman Mulroy. And then we discussed it with you on July 18 and 25. And after all those discussions, council agreed with the recommendations of the charter review committee on all but one item. And I'll show you that in just a moment. So here were the seven different charges. On the first two districts and terms, there were no recommended revisions to the charter by the committee or the council. On our district residency recall percentage, the city auditor and the stipend, the council had a lot of discussion about those and ultimately agreed with all the charter review committee recommendations. You did have some discussion and some changes for ethics. This is the changes to the ethics language that we discussed with you last week. I have a red line for you here. So now we're proceeding now to getting this on an election for November, a detailed ordinance will be required to put all of this language together, all the red line changes that we've been proposing for you for the charter amendments. That will include as part of that the ballot language. So the purpose of today's presentation is review for you the draft ballot language. This is very high level types of language that we use. Those of you who've seen the bond packages that we've had in the past, there's very detailed project list that we come up with for the bond packages. But the actual ballot language is very simple. It might say something to the effect of approved street improvements of $20 million, where there may be lots of different projects that are listed. So what we've done for that in the past and what we're proposing to do for this is develop an educational brochure, which will show all the detailed changes that will be there for the voters. We'll have that on our website. We'll have those printed so the voters will have that information. But the ballot language will be very simple language, up or down kind of decisions from the citizens on where they want to do that. And we'll publish all of this information. Notices will be published in the newspaper according to the Texas law. So here is the ballot language that we've developed. We've developed this partially in-house and partially using some outside counsel. Bob Heath is an attorney we've used in the past. We've also worked with Trey Landsford and Erin Leal on developing this language. Proposition A would be shell section 2.02 of the city charter be amended to clarify that council member residency qualifications apply to the council member's domicile, and in parentheses, principal residence, where the council member must have resided for at least one year prior to the election. So that's the domicile language that we've been talking about. Yes, sir. So I have a question. I'm just going to mention it here because it's going to apply to each one of these. So we have these propositions for these-- I forgot how many-- changes. But what we went over last week was specific language from the charter review committee. So is that the language that will appear in the-- let's say this passes. Go to the corresponding detailed language that we had for this proposition. Do you have that file? Yes, sir. I do. Because I'm just trying to-- I'm going to ask this on this one because it will then tell me what I'm wanting to know for all the others. So when you presented to us last week, those-- It may take me a second here. OK. Well, sorry I did-- There it is right there. Yeah. So what I'm understanding is we can associate the charge with the redlined language. That's what's going to actually appear in the charter if the ballot language for that particular proposition gets approved. And it will be appearing in the ordinance, too, that you approve on the 15th. That's what we'll ask you to approve, is the ordinance, which will be this language and the ballot language all at the same time. So all being the same-- And that will be in the educational material saying, OK, if you approve this, this is what's-- instead of placing this actual detailed language on the ballot. That's correct. The ballot language is meant to be high level, easily understood of what the question is. But this will be in the educational brochure that I was referencing for you. Councilmember Gregory. To follow up. So the actual-- in the educational materials, both the brochure and, I would suppose, on the website. Yes, sir. People will see what the ballot language is and then see that specific language right there. Yes, sir. That's what we'll-- And that would be the case for each one of those. We'll include the ordinance that's been adopted by the council calling for the election, all those changes, all of the information for the Charter Review Committee, that all their work has been done, all their minutes, all that will be on the website as well. Thank you. That's a complete record of all of that discussion. I'm sorry. You can go back to the language. I just wanted to get that out of the way. So now we understand. Great question. I think that's-- Councilmember Riggs, do you have a question before we move on? OK. So that's the district residency language that's being proposed. I'll move on to the next one. The recall percentage. This would be Proposition B. Shall Section 4.13 of the city charter be amended to increase the percentage of petition ers required to trigger a recall election from 25% to 35%. Yes, Councilmember Riggs. Is there a way to actually put the number in as well as writing it? I'm sure we could do that. I'm sure we could do that. It just looks a little bit easier. Sure. We could put in parentheses 25%-- yes. I think so. We can make that change. Proposition C. This is related to the internal auditor position. Shall Section 6.04 of the city charter be amended to clarify that the internal city auditor shall be a permanent full-time position and clarify his responsibilities. There was two different components to the language that we looked at, responsibilities, and whether it was a permanent full-time position. And clarify his responsibilities. Could we either his, her, or make that-- I mean-- Sure. Make it gender neutral. Yes, sir. Or-- yeah. Yes, sir. How about clarify the responsibilities? OK. We can do that? Absolutely. All right. Yes, sir. That's why we're bringing them here. Proposition D. This is ethics. Shall Sections 14.04 and 14.05 of the city charter be repealed and replaced with a provision requiring the adoption of an ethics ordinance by the city council in accordance with Texas law and adheres to certain minimum standards. Again, going back to our language that we had on the ethics piece, there's requirement of a city ordinance, a city ordinance, for city ethics ordinance. And then it shall include those minimum criteria that we had set out in that language. Does that make sense? Council member Briggs. So if we do not approve an ordinance that goes with that, the charter would just be this, right? And then the minimum standards that are listed. You're saying if it's not approved by the voters, is that the question? Well, no, no. If the charter language is approved and there's not an extra ordinance that has all the details in it that we're talking of approved or written in a certain amount of time, but this passes, this will be what we will go by, right? It's in the charter. Right. So the-- Do you understand what I'm saying? Like the timing. If it's approved by the voters in November, then the next step will be for this council to start-- or to direct city staff with your input to start drafting the ethics ordinance for your review and approval, ultimate approval. And so that process would begin immediately after the approval. But you need the ordinance. Whatever is adopted in the charter is the commandment to this council to pass the ordinance. My intention would be if the charter amendment was passed, is to bring a work session back in December and provide some options to the council of how you could proceed with the ordinance, to get direction of how you wanted to do that. Councilmember Grady. And maybe what you're asking is during the interim, then the minimum requirements are the ones that are in place until we follow our responsibilities and put them in your-- Yeah. OK. OK. So that's that ballot language. Proposition E is this is related to stipends. Shall a section be added to the city charter providing for council members to receive an initial monthly stipend of $750 and the mayor to receive an initial monthly stipend of $1,000 to their respective terms of office and providing for restrictions on subsequent increases to the stipend amount. This is the 3% limit that was proposed by the Charter Review Committee. Yes, sir. I'm not sure why I haven't asked this question before. Is this W-2 income or contract income? I mean, what is-- That's going to be $10.99. It's $10.99? Yes, sir. OK. It will not be W-2 income. It will not be an employee of the city. OK. OK. All right. Thank you. OK. That's it for the terms of the proposition language. Looking for, again, direction on this, any changes that you'd like to see, any questions that you have. We will be drafting that ordinance with all the red line changes that I mentioned to you, plus the proposition language, the ballot language, excuse me. We'll bring that forward to you on the 15th. As soon as we get a draft of that ordinance, we'll try to send that to you in advance, because I know there's a lot of information there, a lot of discussion that we've had. So we'll give that to you in advance so you can see it. And we'll bring this forward to you on the 15th for your consideration. Any other questions for this portion of the posting? Because I know the additional portion of the posting is what Mayor Pro Tem had brought up last time. Any other questions on this? The direction is I move forward, I guess, here, unless I hear numerous objections to override the consensus that was gathered last week. OK. We'll do that. All right. And then did you have any slides for-- I guess, or Mayor Pro Tem, the floor is yours as far as those two additional things that you wanted to discuss. Sure. I had just requested that we have a discussion about potentially putting to the voters a change in the public utility board member terms, from four years to two years, like our other boards, or some other number that council may want to put to the voters. And the other item that I wanted to see if council would like to put to the voters is the date of municipal elections, changing that to the general election date in November. The reason I wanted to bring this up-- and I know that the Charter Review Committee didn't bring-- well, they did discuss the municipal election date, but not as a part of their charge. I thought it would be an opportunity, since we can only do charter amendments once every two years, to have that go ahead and be considered by the public at large without the necessity of later on having another charter election. So that was my offer. I sort of shared my position on this. I don't think I would be in favor of including that, just sort of on a unilateral basis on this council, given that we had a charter charge. First of all, is the Public Utility Board in the charter? It is. I didn't know if it was a charter or an ordinance. And they discussed it for-- so at this point, I wouldn't be in favor of-- I'm not saying those aren't good questions, I think, though, just given the timing. And we're right on the cusp of presenting this. That's my main objection to that. And we've already had a Charter Review Committee look at some of these things, given the charge. Thank you. I would be in favor of allowing the public to actually vote on it. The charter is just a few people. The committee was only a few people. Allowing the public to vote on these would be fine. I think that having the PUB from four years to two years is great. And when I found out that it was in the-- when I realized it was in the charter, I was a little surprised as well. All right. Anybody else? I go along with you, Mayor, that there's a process on this that I think it's something we can recommend in two years. Charter Review Committee looks at this. But at this point, we've moved so far down the road that to try and draft language to put on a ballot is-- I think we're a little past that point. Anybody else? Yes. I would concur with Mr. Ryan, the new mayor. Unless we have a-- OK. All right. Well, it looks like we've got a consensus as far as maybe putting this on the radar for the next time. And because I'm not wanting to be in this process is not saying I don't want the voters to be able to decide on it. It's me saying that we've had a pretty well-established process in the past for this. And I would like to stick with that, at least at this particular point, especially this far down the road in this particular process. Yes, and then I want to go to Mayor Perkins. I will say that in the beginning, when we were talking about items for the Charter Committee to review, the PUB was one that I brought up for discussion at the time. And the current council said they didn't want it to go on there. So it's not something that's just being thrown in. OK. I mean, it was something on my radar at the beginning of the Charter Review Committee. It just wasn't voted in for discussion. So what I'm hearing you say is the previous council-- it was considered by the previous council, and they decided let's just move forward. OK. So then that decision was made at that time. All right. Thank you. Yes. And I just wanted to clarify. I guess maybe I wasn't clear on the purpose of the Charter Review Committee. My understanding was that the Charter Review Committee is there to discuss issues that are complicated enough that it would take up our entire work session for months going into the details of it. And so I didn't think to bring up items that I thought were pretty simple in terms of an election date or term limits. My thought going into the Charter Review process was, hey, Charter Review is for very complicated items. So what I would just suggest in the future-- I don't know who I'm speaking to, but in the future, if you're going to have a Charter Review Board or committee called, I would make it very clear that every item that you want on the Charter Election should be in front of the Charter Review Committee, because I don't think that that was made clear to us. It was presented to us in the context of ethics. That was the discussion that we're having. Ethics is very complicated. It's a meaty topic. Let's have more people discuss it. Yeah, I hear what you're saying. I'm not sure I totally agree, especially knowing that the council did consider the PUB issue. And I believe also the term limits from a council perspective, term limits for council members , I think, was looked at in this current Charter Review Committee. Now, nobody brought up the actual PUB term limits. So I understand. So yeah, I understand. And so it's a lesson learned that maybe moving forward, need to make sure that every council member has a clear understanding of what the purpose of that is. So I appreciate that. Yes, Council Member Gregory. Thanks. I think one of the values of the Charter Committee and really getting that is because sometimes we get so much additional information. We study it so much more intently because we're having to vote on it. And sometimes it's helpful to get that committee that has a different perspective from what we do. And I value very much their input. Same thing with bond committees. We kind of give them some charges and directions. In the last time we had a bond committee, we had suggested strongly to them that they bring back a proposal package to us that did not increase the tax rate for bonds. And they completely ignored us and said, no, we need to get a lot more of this work done and we need to get it done now. And we're sensing the public will approve this. And indeed, they did. So I think that that process is really important to use these special committees where we have some input into selecting them, but give them a latitude to make recommendations to us and then pay attention to those. And even something that might appear as simple as changing the date of the election, I think it has significant ramifications for the impact on the city. Not all of which are positive. And we saw part of that discussion in the minutes of those meetings. So I think that's a significant change that I would especially want vetted by a review committee. So it doesn't prohibit it from coming up in the future. And I'm sorry that you entered our discussions with the understanding that we weren't limiting the charter changes to what was given to the committee as a charge. OK, any other comments? Questions? OK. Thank you for your time. Thank you. You have direction, I presume? All right. Last work session is agenda item F, 3F, which is receive, report, and hold discussion to give staff direction regarding solicitation and contracting incentives used to expedite public works projects. Hello, my name is Karen Smith. I'm the purchasing manager. So today we're going to talk about incentives for public works contracts. So we've done a lot of research. We've worked with engineering and legal. So we've kind of worked together to develop the document that's in your backup. So I'm going to go at a high level today. So the goals of the program is to speed up project delivery , to reduce the impacts of the local community and economy, to reward contractors for early project completion, and disincentivize contractors for not meeting their time limits. We're going to talk about three types today. We're going to talk about cost plus time, or A plus B proposals. I'll refer to it as A plus B as we go forward. We're going to talk about incentives and disincentives. So in A plus B, we've developed some criteria to help us choose, to make sure we're choosing a proper project to use this for. So you must meet one of the following. Must have a significant impact to the local economy. It must be a rehabilitation project for high traffic corridors, a project that adds capacity, or we're looking for a contractor that has specific expertise and looking for efficient solutions. So you're going to choose one of those. It's a two-step process. So in the second step, you must meet all of the following. So we're going to have road user costs that are greater than $1,000. So a road user cost is a travel delay that we calculate using very sophisticated software. It's an Excel spreadsheet. So we use that to help us calculate that with our traffic engineer. So I'm going to help us with that. The project must be relatively free of utility conflicts. And we must have adequate staff available to limit delays outside the contractor's control. So the last two are very important, because we don't want to be the reason for a delay. So if any of these aren't met, then the capital improvements director can, granted exception. So here's a sample evaluation and A plus B proposals. So in here, the bidder would give us the base price listed here as A. And they would provide the working days to complete the project. We, the city, would provide the road user costs. So what we're saying is it costs-- every day that the road is not being at full capacity, it's costing us this for our traveling public. Yeah, I'm sorry. How in the world do you make that calculation? Which one? The road user cost? The road user cost per day. Oh, yes. Well, I'm glad that I brought-- Or the time cost factor. OK. The time cost factor is actually the working days here times the road user cost. So that's how we're calculating the B portion of the A plus B. So this is just a simple multiplication here. So what we do in A plus B is we're taking their base proposal, this B factor, the time cost factor, and we're giving an evaluated cost. And that would be the evaluated cost for it. So in this instance, you can see that the highest bidder, base bidder, had the lowest working days and through the calculation would actually be awarded the contract because of the lowest evaluated costs to the public because it lessens the disruption of the road way. But the number of $11,000 per day is determined how? Yes. Actually, I need to get-- is Poocham here? He's supposed to be here. We have our traffic engineer here, and he can help talk about that because it's way out of my league. Is it OK to-- Sure. Go on, and then we can get it. Because this is probably in each one of them. Yeah, we're going to talk a little bit about some more as well. --usual cost per day. So yeah, let's just move forward until he comes in. All right, so it's very important that this road-- we tell bidders up front that this is the method that we're going to use and what the road user cost is and how they're going to be evaluated. So it's very clear to them that this is the method. It is not simply a low bid meeting specifications. We're going to use an evaluated cost. Are there any questions on that kind of evaluation? This would be included in the-- oh, here we go. OK, yes. Question. Yes. You can finish your-- [INTERPOSING VOICES] --washing hands. [INTERPOSING VOICES] OK. Pretend they have a question about how you come up with road user costs. So if you want to go all the way to the back. Yeah, OK. While I'm chewing what's in my mouth, let me get things uploaded. Just in case you need it. [LAUGHTER] Just in case you need it. Thank you so much. [LAUGHTER] I've had stuff more than once with a penis. [LAUGHTER] All right. No. OK, it's a road user cost. It's a straightforward process that developed by Texas Transportation Institute back in the early '90s. And I think they've worked with TechStop to come up with how to actually calculate that. And I'll show you a spreadsheet at the end of the slide. But it primarily consists of time value. They assign value to everyone's time. And it's per vehicle. Typically, vehicles, they're assuming 1.25 occupancy, which is a little over one passenger car. And every year, TechStop updates their value for passenger cars as well as trucks. I think they assign more value for trucks just because the amount of time it takes for them to actually traverse even a smaller segment, especially in a construction zone. And then it depends on how many cars are traveling on that particular street that will be under construction. And also, it takes into account the percentage of trucks that are involved. It also depends on speed limits. So for example, the speed limit on the street segment is 30 miles an hour. When it is under construction, it will definitely drop five or 10, depending on what type of closures you have. And based on that, if the speed goes down, the user cost goes up. And then obviously, it has an associated traffic study that you look at. And that's why it needs to be approved by the traffic engineer. So here's a spreadsheet, fairly straightforward. And I created this for Mayhill Road. It's one of the projects that we have bid out recently. And it will be under construction. Let me-- so this is where it looks at the non-construction conditions. So Mayhill has a posted speed limit of 35 miles an hour. And the total length of the project that's bid out for construction currently is 3.75 miles from US 380 all the way close to Colorado at the south. And based on this little calculation, this is the mileage divided by the posted speed limit divided by 60 minutes an hour. These are the number of minutes assigned to one vehicle. Now during the construction, that same 3.75 mile section, the speed is typically going to drop anywhere between 5 and 10 miles. This was considered a drop of 10 miles if there are clos ures. If that's considered, then the total travel time would be nine minutes. Based on the difference in that time, that time gets multiplied by the cost per day or vehicle-- cost per vehicle of delay. And based on that, they come up with a total amount of 5, 600 on a daily basis. So that's the amount of value that's lost by the number of cars or people that are traveling on that particular section. And this road user cost is then used in the A plus B method . So this is how they are developed. And it's pretty straightforward. Good. Sort of some objective criteria used from somebody else, basically. Yes, OK. Does that answer your question, Councilmember Gregory? Mayor Pro Tem? I just have a comment, which is I like this, by the way. I really liked seeing the whole calculation. What's interesting is the effect on air quality isn't included either. And so maybe Dr. Banks could do his own calculation for us. And then we could really get into-- You're out of order. That's for concluding-- But I would want to know. That's for concluding items. I would want to know. We'll save that for the concluding items. So that's how you would calculate the $11,000. [LAUGHTER] Yes. I see why you deferred. Yes, absolutely. So that was A plus B. Were there any questions about A plus B? I apologize. So I'm moving quickly through that. But what I heard was key was that when you send out the RF Ps, all this information is known up front by each individual bidder that this is the formula. These are the numbers we're looking at. And we've got this road user cost per day, time cost. And that's going to be part of the evaluation process. Right. And when we would provide the sheet, they would simply fill in their base price and the days. And it will calculate out for them. So they'll see what their total evaluated cost to the public is and how we're going to evaluate them. OK. We'll be very clear about that. Councilmember Utzbeth. Thank you. And at the same time, I'm assuming we let them know the punitive effect so that they don't cook the books? You're stealing my thunder. But yes, we're going to talk about that. With an incentive is a disincentive. So we'll talk about that. The next is incentives. They're used to motivate the contractors for early completion. We have a comparable disincentive. If you have an incentive, you must have a disincentive, as included in the contract. And we, the city, must set the maximum days allowed to complete the project. And the city must set the maximum days allowed as an incentive. So what we're trying to do is make sure that people aren't kind of sandbagging or adding a bunch of days so that they can make sure that they're getting an incentive. So we're going to have to do some work on our end to make sure that we understand what the standard length of time is. And the incentive should not exceed the evaluated road user cost for the specific roadway. And I can get Preetem up here to talk about road user cost, if they're interested in that. We got that covered, so we'll move on. So disincentives. So we have two types. The one that you're probably most familiar with are liquidated damages. So those are pre-agreed charges to the contractor if certain criteria or completion dates aren't met. The amount is determined before we solicit. So we sit down with the departments to help us understand what the true cost to the city is, the actual damages if the contractor doesn't perform. And the amount varies by specific, it could, it's definitely gonna vary by project, but it could be for specific phases or portions of the project. For instance, we did a project that had a railroad closure. That portion had higher liquidated damages just for that phase. - We had a question, I believe Council Member Briggs. - All right. - So I believe when we were mentioning this, or talking about it a while ago, somebody messaged me and brought up the fact that it's how do you keep a contractor from overbidding to account for these things? And so in actuality, the city ends up paying for the damages. - I'm sorry, so that we're not, so that they're not overestimating their time so they can get an incentive. - Right. - Right. And that kind of goes back to the prior slide, is that we need to understand the maximum days is allowed to complete the project so that we have that. And then we're also setting an incentive time frame. We're only gonna pay an incentive for X number of days. So even if you overestimate the days, the incentive is only for only these days. And then also, I'm sorry here, is that we get the benefit of seeing all the days that are across the board from the other proposers to see if it truly is a good kind of timeline based on the market. - Okay, so we have things built in to protect that. - Right. - Okay. - So disincentives, we were talking about liquidated damages. So it's important that we're covering all the costs so that, so we might have outside consultants that are involved in the oversight of that. So we wanna make sure that we're including that into the liquidated damages cost. And that we're communicating that. So it is communicated in the solicitation and it will be in the contract. The second type of disincentive is the road user cost. So we talked a little bit about that. And that value would be placed in again and to the solicitation so that they understand what that disincentive was. And it's very clear and provided to everybody. So we have two types, liquidated damages we mostly use and then we would possibly use the road user cost. 'Cause sometimes that can be quite higher. - Are there any questions about that? - Just move, Gregory. - Well, it seems like when we had had a discussion several months ago, it was opined that liquidated damages in the contract was not easily enforced and that there had been times when it was, in fact, it was difficult for cities to enforce it. Is that because they weren't using a particular calculation provided by an engineer that nobody would ever argue with? - Well, I think that the issue is who is causing the delay. - Okay. - Right. And so you have to make sure that we are documenting the notice, any delays, anything like that. That's why some of the criteria was to make sure that we had adequate staff to do the inspections and provide those things is that we can't be the cause of the delay. And so sometimes it comes to finger pointing as to who is responsible for the delay. - So and that could include, if it's a roadway, the cost of the utility move like your first slide or permitting issues like that. - Correct. And so if those are, we are in charge of that and providing that and we cause a delay, then it gets a little bit challenging in the end to say you owe us for liquidated damages. - Right, thank you. - Council Member Deff. - I didn't see anything in there with weather delays 'cause I would assume that there are occasions where, I mean, they can't work. - Right. - Right. - Our contract terms and conditions have provisions for weather delay and that is usually, it's in coordination with the project manager, they're on site and understand what the delay is and that they're documented. So back to the point of we need to make sure that we're documenting the weather delay and that we're doing a change order for adding delays sometimes. A change order doesn't have to involve dollars, it can involve days that we're documenting it. - Any other question? - Thank you, Mayor. Well, then regarding giving staff direction, I would be interested in us applying one of these scenarios and I have no idea which one would be the best, but I think it would be interesting to apply one of these scenarios in an upcoming project just to get a feel for it, see if it, and it would be interesting to do it and compare it with a similar scope of a project on another road to see how it impacts the bidding process so that we could have some comparisons and then see how it works out. That would be my advice for direction. - Thank you. - Any other comments? I mean, obviously we need to sort of do a beta test on it. I think what's gonna be difficult is when, especially on the road user costs, when we're looking at projects, if we're using this type of methodology and we have something that comes in, a bid comes in as far as the actual bid, much lower than some of the others and then this other evaluative criteria is applied and so then it maybe switches things. Some people will look at that and go, okay, wait a minute, you're assigning this, it's not an arbitrary value, but it's one that Text.us for this value. So it's not really a hard number, even though it is, it's not, it's basically valuing the time and things such as that and some people, they can understand that in a bid process. So it'll be interesting to see the observations if we move forward in this area consistently, how that, and it may be that they're really not that far off. I mean, it may be these numbers come in a lot closer than what we might think, but we'll have Council Member Hussbuss then Council Member Briggs. - Thank you. When I was reviewing it, I'm excited to move forward with it and I think, next project up, for me, because I think one of the key things outside looking in is are we doing our due diligence upfront? Are we planning the project so that we can hit the ground running so we don't have surprises? And I think this forces us to be extra prepared because we have to set those markers in advance. So we have to do that due diligence upfront versus the other way where we may do it, but it's not as punitive on us. And so I think it puts an extra responsibility on each department to kind of do that evaluation in advance and the same thing for the contractor. If they're gonna make an argument that our number's off, they've then gotta do some due diligence and say, hey, we say we need more time because. So it forces a lot of conversations upfront that you get into on the back end when it's like, hey, we bumped into this pipe and now we need more time this, that, or the other. So I really am excited about it because, again, it holds everyone accountable and it kinda, when we're talking wave pool type situations, we have an answer. Hey, here's what we agreed to. It's not this, hey, we don't have a reason why it's behind. It's just behind and sorry. So that, for me, I'm excited to T1 up and get it rolling. And I think that's, to your point, I think it's important those conversations we had upfront. Everyone kinda knows. And then if you go kicking and screaming afterwards, at least you knew. - Sure. - So that's my thought. - Thank you. - Yes, Council Member Briggs. - Yeah, I'm okay moving forward with this and giving it a test run. Regarding road delays, as we heard earlier, a lot of the time it's moving utilities. And so how would that factor in to something like this? With the utilities? - When you implement it. - We'll let Todd talk about that. (laughing) I mean, that's a pretty big significant delay. - Hi. - Hi. - Todd asked to city engineer. Road delays due to franchise utilities that comes back into the planning piece. As we start managing the projects, I don't always have control over what those franchise utilities do in the form and fashion they move, but we can do a really good job of trying to get with them up through the planning phase of here's when we anticipate being there and being very diligent about being on site when we say we're gonna be on site. The more we're accountable that way, the more the franchise utilities take notice that we're gonna be there when we say we are and they start working with us a little better. But when it comes to franchise utilities, they do tend to be their own entity, they own their own infrastructure. There's not a lot of recourse that we have to force them to get out of the way. - Okay, thank you. - Council Member Ryan. - Yeah, I definitely am looking forward to a test project on the A plus B because if I'm not mistaken, it takes into effect the volume that is on that road. So a lower volume road is not going to have as much of an effect from that B ratio that a high volume would. So the high volume streets are the ones we wanna push and get done quicker, and that's where that's gonna have that stronger effect. Is that correct on that assumption? - Do you wanna answer that? - No. - A plus B definitely has a priority on the time, and that's why you're intending to use the A plus B is to say this project has a value for the time and it has a higher value than other projects like you're saying. So that's where it really comes in to be a benefit. We're putting that on us on the contractor to then say, if I'm gonna give you an incentive or a disincentive, you set the date. You have to meet that date. You told me you could meet that date, and that's why we agreed on these incentives and disincent ives. If you can't deliver on that date, you better have really good explanation why. - Okay, any other questions? Staff have direction? Have your direction? All right, fantastic. Thank you all very much. That concludes our work session portion of the agenda. Council will now convene in closed session at 429 PM on August the 1st, 2017. We will convene and deliberate regarding real property, consultation with attorneys under Texas Government Code section 551.071 and deliberations regarding real property under Texas Government Code section 551.072. So if we could... (silence) (silence) (upbeat music) - Good evening, wanted to welcome everyone to this regular meeting at the City of Denton City Council. It's 6.30 PM. We do have a quorum. I do call this meeting to order if you would. Stand with me as we pledge allegiance to the US and the Texas flag. - I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. On the Texas flag, I pledge allegiance to the Texas flag of the United States of America, one nation under God, indivisible. (silence) - Okay, we've got a proclamation. The Dent Citizens Academy, so Sarah, if you'll come down and all those who were participating, come on down and Sarah, if you would just give us a, once they get down here, a little explanation and briefing of what the Denton Citizens Academy is and then just have everybody introduce themselves. Thank you all. - Thank you. This is the first ever City of Denton Citizens Academy. We're excited to come before you tonight to announce the completion of this program. We'd like to recognize the graduates of this program, all their hard work and sticking it out. Just a little bit about the program. It's a volunteer program for the citizens of Denton to register and come get a feel of what it takes to run the city. They're separated by five sessions at this time. We spent Saturdays, hot Saturdays together from nine a.m. to approximately three. And the categories were separated into, they learned about the form of government, the public safety, development and growth, utilities and quality of life. And in those sessions, we learned about the budget. We toured the police training facility, fire, the emergency management system, a tour of the fire station one, where they gave a demonstration. And as you can see on the pictures, we got to experience firsthand some of the equipment that they use and get to know a little bit about what they do every day. In addition, we learned about planning, economic development, our capital projects, Denton Municipal Electric, water, wastewater. On this day, we toured the water and wastewater treatment plants. That was a great time. That same day, we also toured solid waste, the home chemical collection center, the recycling center, and we got to go out on top of the landfill. So that was a great day as well. We wrapped it up with the parks and recreation that included a very extensive tour of all the parks, the recreation centers, the ball fields, just all the different parks that city has to offer. We also dipped our toes in Waterworks Park and got to see the new wave pool. We also talked about sustainability and visited the Clear Creek Heritage Center. And we wrapped up the day with the libraries and the tour of North Branch Library. So it was a lot of fun. And now I'd like our students to introduce themselves and share any comments they may have. - My name is Stephanie Gates. And just enjoyed the opportunity to get to learn a lot more about our city and how everything operates. And just thankful for all of your hard work. - Rebecca Jackson. And I was very impressed with how organized this was being especially the first class. So I look forward to coming back again and learning more as it's expanded a bit. - Val Morgan. And I really enjoyed the organization of the Citizens Academy and the idea of knowing now that Denton City operation is the best kept secret in Denton. - Norma Hutchins. And I also love the organization. Thank you, Sarah and Sarah. And I love learning that Denton's commitment to the environment that was very insightful and great learning experience overall. - Hello, my name is Sandra Hardy. And I was very impressed with all the elected officials and department heads, lending their time to talk to us. - Hello, my name is Ernestina Lopez. And I just wanted to say, I agree with all these ladies. So thank you, Sarah one and Sarah two for this opportunity. It was great. - Pat Smith. I was just impressed by the innovation across city departments. And there's a lot of things going on that say that you never hear about that you really need to get out and learn about. - The great elected officials that came and talked to you, right? Yes. Thank you. Well, thank you all so much for being a part of the inaugural class. I hope it was fun as well as learning experience. I know that there's a lot about the city that we do. And a lot of our citizens aren't necessarily aware of the depth of the difference in the departments and being a full service city with our own utilities, our own landfill, water and sewer departments is quite a monumental task. So thank you for committing your time and energy to learn more about our city. I think that's very important. So I thank you very much for that. And I have a proclamation that I wanna read for you guys. Proclamation by the mayor of the city of Denton, whereas the Denton Citizens Academy is a volunteer educational program offered through the different departments of the city of Denton, consisting of five sessions which encompass public safety, development and growth, utilities and quality of life, providing tours through many of the departments within these areas. And whereas the Denton Citizens Academy objective is to give citizens an opportunity to acquire a better understanding of their city government and services through interactive sessions. And whereas the program helps provide a better understanding of how our leaders make decisions and deliver these services that affect our everyday lives. And whereas the Denton Citizens Academy helps to create a cadre of informed citizens and provide the tools to become involved in the citizens' boards, commissions and committees to help shape the future of the city of Denton. And whereas the program obtains feedback and new perspectives from these citizens regarding governmental programs and services and opens the line of communication and transparency. Now therefore I, Chris Watts, Mayor of the city of Denton, Texas do hereby recognize the first ever 2017 graduating class of 12 citizens from the Denton Citizens Academy and applaud the commitment to Denton's betterment and all the benefits it brings to our community. So thank you all so much for being the inaugural class. (audience applauding) - Proclamation for each one of you. - I would love to get a selfie. One more selfie if you don't mind, if you wanna come a little closer to the center. - Sure. - Here. I'm gonna get the council if you wouldn't mind. - Perfect. - Come on, Sarah. - All right, one, two, three. Great, thank you very much. - Fantastic, thank y'all so much. (audience applauding) (audience laughing) - Thank you. - Thank you. - Thank y'all very much, thank you. - Our next item on the agenda is presentation from members of the public. If we could review procedures for addressing the city council. - 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. - Okay, I'm going to call on the city secretary to speak to the council. I'm going to call on the city secretary to speak to the council. I'm going to call on the city secretary to speak to the council. I'm going to call on the city secretary to speak to the council. I'm going to call on the city secretary to speak to the council. I'm going to call on the city secretary to speak to the council. I'm going to call on the city secretary to speak to the council. I'm going to call on the city secretary to speak to the council. I'm going to call on the city secretary to speak to the council. I'm going to call on the city secretary to speak to the council. I'm going to call on the city secretary to speak to the council. - Okay, hi, my name's Ron Seifert. I live at 2210 Westwood Avenue. I'm going to move through this kind of quick. My purpose here is not to rehash the whole RDP debate, but since those that were most responsible for bringing it to us have been fired for lying about their work, I just want to point out some notable differences in what we were told before the plan was approved compared to what we know now. Beginning first with just this idea of reliability, of course we were told ad nauseam that we needed these gas plants for when the sun don't shine and the wind don't blow. In fact, this is a picture from the original renewabledenton.com website. The very first paragraph says we need to secure reliable source of dispatchable on-demand power, implying the physical nature is what's required or what's connoted by reliability. Where in fact last week in council, Phil Williams told y' all, which is quoted here at the bottom, that actually physically the gas plants have nothing to do with reliability. It's all about financial reliability. So all those talking points that we heard over and over again about the sun don't shine, the wind don't blow have absolutely nothing to do with the reliability notion, these gas plants. In that same meeting you can see here a chart of the original forecast for our renewable portfolio in the RDP versus what we actually got. It's great, we got a lot more, 11% more renewables. However, it's also shocking that a model that was designed less than a year out would be so statistically significantly off. 11% deviation from the expectation, 77%, is pretty meaningful, especially if I go forward here. This is a chart from the Brattle report where DME and Brattle are trying to convince us that we need nine instead of 12 units because as our load and population grow over time, nine units would not be able to maintain the 70% renewable penetration that we were promised, where if you actually run the same rate of depreciation, beginning at the 88% we got instead of the 77.9, you can see we would have been just fine with nine engines until at least 2031 or 2032. So y'all got bamboozled into at least 25% more gas engines than you actually needed if you actually thought you needed any of them at all. So why was that model so bad, or if there was an upper limit that showed 88% was possible , why was that not transparently shared with council or with the public? Here's a map from 2017 of DME's planned substations. So these are all things, 13 of them coming down the pike in the next few years. Each one estimated cost between 10 to $25 million plus land acquisition costs. So you're looking at at least 150 to 200 to $300 million of estimated upcoming costs that DME knew about and never chose to enter into the discussion when weighing whether to spend $265 million on these gas plants. So knowing that there were already expected hundreds of million dollars of upcoming costs and obfuscating those known costs is intentionally misleading. These five that I've circled here are, seem to me to only be necessary because of the gas plants, especially number nine, which is called the Denton Energy Center substation. Obviously that is part of the cost of the RDP and it was never brought up in the calculus to clearly a tactic to artificially lower the price tag of what's expected. All five of these circled things are for exporting power from the deck and they should have been considered as necessary costs and they were invisibilized. There's 100 extra million dollars, 100 million extra. Here's an article from last week about Gibbons Creek. You can see here that we have absolutely no prayer of selling these gas plants. Everything that had to do with the RDP was predicated on getting out of Gibbons Creek and we never had a meaningful discussion about what that might cost. We were told it would be sold, no big deal. That's not gonna happen. So either we're gonna be stuck with those emissions, which undermines the whole plan, or we're gonna pay extra tens of millions of dollars to close this plant, which were never considered. And finally, this is a graph from the very first open house that shows how artificially low the RDP plan emissions are. You can see if you take, you average out the 100 renewable plan plus a proposed 70% plan plus 30% ERCOT to get a plan that would be 83% renewables plus 17% ERCOT versus the RDP, which is 70% renewables and the same 17% ERCOT. It appears that these folks are telling us that a plan that has two gas plants plus the same 17% of the market is gonna emit less than 80. - Mr. Seifert, Mr. Seifert, just wrap up your comment real briefly. - That's what I'm doing, yeah. - Okay. - Would emit less than 83% renewables and that same 17% from ERCOT. This is obviously an intentionally low reflection of the emissions of the RDP. - Okay, all right. - I can't, my screen's not. - See no questions, thank you very much, appreciate it. - Next speaker is Ginger Cain regarding the use and or sale of property located on the north side of West Windsor Drive. - I'm Ginger Cain, 1600 Churchill Drive, Denton, Texas. And I'm here to speak on behalf of the property owner, Bill Harvey. Mr. Harvey purchased this land back in the mid '60s, so he's been paying taxes on this property. It is 10 acres that this is Windsor, over here is Bonnie Bray, and his acreage is 10 acres and it runs back that way. So he's been paying taxes for over 50 years on this property. Recently, Mr. Harvey looked into selling his property. He said that in 1974, the city approached him about putting an easement in on his property. I don't have those documents, but I could get access to those in which, as you can see here, the back part of the property had like some ravines and was in low in the city. In exchange for the easements, had made the promise that they would clean that out, bring in dirt, raise it above the floodplain, and create a drainage for the water to drain off. After making that deal, they did not follow through on their promises, and nothing happened, and what they decided to do instead was to make this area an ESA, so you can see where the blue hits here on his property. That's a big chunk of the property. Later, with the gas wells that are here, and I don't know if this is a fact or not, but I'd like for you to look into it, whether or not the city has an interest in those gas wells. That might be fake news. I didn't have a chance to check that out, but that was my understanding, that the city does have an interest in that, and so the city got another easement to be able to access, to service the well, which was in the middle of the property, so these brown circles are restrictions due to the gas wells, and the blue one is restrictions due to the environmental service area. So as you can see, his property is pretty much worthless. He can't do anything with it, and I do applaud city staff. There were three or four realtors that went out there with him, and they did have city staff come out and did speak with staff, and they were very honest to say that there's not anything you can do with your property. So I feel Mr. Harvey is like 82 years old, and his property is being assessed at appraisal of $200,000 that he's paying taxes on, and he can't do anything with it, and I know that this council was not in place. I don't think any of you were. I'm not 1974, but I'm asking you, since the city was the ones that came in and put these restrictions on the property, that you as a council look for a fair remedy for Mr. Harvey and assist this man and help him out at the age of 82. I feel like that he deserves that, and we pretty much ask for you guys to do something for him . Thank you. - Question, Mayor Pro Tem? - Ms. Cain, can you please go back to the street map? I just wanna make sure that I understand where this property is. - Okay, all right. - I think I know where it is, but I wanna be sure. - This is, to this side would be Bonnie Bray. Over here on the side would be the North Lakes Park and the fire station. - Okay, all right, perfect. - This road coming out here is coming out north of the Catholic Church. - Now, okay, so I drive by this. I live in that neighborhood that's to the left. The property that's circled, that is a gas staging area. Is it not, there's not any gas pad sites over there. There's no wells there to my knowledge, if I'm correct or not, I don't know. - Well, I don't know about that for sure, but I know that this was the restrictions that he was told that he could not do anything with this property. - Okay, so then my other question is, is Mr. Harvey aware of TCEQ regulations surrounding property that surrounds gas well appurtenances? - If you are aware of it, he may want to look it up. I don't know if he's aware of it or not. There are limits to what can be placed around any type of gas well appurtenance. - Yeah, right. And that's part of my point of why his land is pretty little worthless, because to the property owner, he's getting nothing from that. - So I guess I'm not real clear on what the city has to do with the TCEQ regulations. - Well, my point is that the back part of this, the city made promises to help him get the back part of his property out of the flood plain to clear the area and create a drainage. - They did not follow through with that. When they asked for an easement, that was what they did for an exchange and what they promised him. And they didn't follow through with that. So then the city did ask for an easement here to access the wells. And so I guess partly I'm wondering why the easement, you didn't ask for the road to come further, closer to the side, so there's more area there in front to possible use there. So-- - Council Member Gary, did Mayor Pro Tem have any more questions or-- - No, I just wanted to clarify that, we are all on the same page, that there's actually gas well appurtenances there and there are TCEQ regulations that prohibit development on that side that don't have anything to do with the city. That was my question. - Council Member Gregory. - If you can find the documents where the city made some agreements with him and present them to the city manager, I think that would be very helpful. - Okay, yes, I'll all get with Mr. Harvey and get those to you. - Thank you. - Thank you. - Appreciate it. Thank you. Next speaker will be Deb Armatarr regarding gas plant contracts. State your name and address and your time will begin. - Deb Armatarr, 2003, Misty Wood Lane. Thank you, Council, for finally investigating the shenanigans at DME regarding the gas plant. The next logical step is to turn your focus to the gas plant contractors, Wartsilla and Burns-McDonald, and to call for an investigation into their inexplicable claims of minor source level emissions for the gas plant. Investigators need to answer the question of how the contractors can truthfully claim minor source emission levels in a non-attainment zone when the exact same model of Wartsilla 12 engine quick start gas plant down to the model number with the same emissions controls in Edenburg, Texas emits two to three times more pollutants per hour and qualifies as a major source under similar emissions requirements. If it turns out that the companies lied about the gas plant being a minor source in a non-attainment zone, then the false emissions information submitted by Burns-McDonald in the TCEQ air permit will lead to an unlawful violation of the minor source air permit when the gas plant is completed and goes online next summer. The gas plant would be forced to shut down and the city of Denton would be, as I understand it, would be liable for that violation. And I wanted to read with you, read for you. This is from the TCEQ air permit form. It says, Title 30 Texas Administrative Code, Section 116.116A states, this is not the whole thing, but this is a part of it, it shall be unlawful for any person to vary from such representation or permit provision if the change will cause a change in the method of control of emissions, the character of the emissions, or will result in an increase in the discharge of the various emissions unless application is made to the executive director to amend the permit. In that regard, and such amendment is approved by the executive director or commission. And as far as I found, there are no amendations to that permit that I could find. A friend of mine recently told me that he spoke with Phil Williams and was asking Phil Williams how he, Phil, from formerly of DME, could justify redacting the emissions figures from the published contract. And he said that DME had pressed the vendor, so this is a paraphrase of what Phil told this person, that DME had pressed the vendor for better than usual emissions performance, and that this came at a cost to Wurzilla that they would not want others to assume they could get. The strange thing about that is if you compare the DEC gas plant to the Edenburg one, it seems to have the same emissions controls. Definitely in the, or at least as far as I can understand, and other eyes have looked at this too, on the TCEQ permit, it looks exactly the same. So this could be a big liability problem for the city, which of course comes with economic costs as well. So my ask of you today is this, you owe it to rate payers to consult legal, environmental, and financial experts, especially the legal and financial experts, to calculate the ensuing risks to rate payers, taxpayers, bond buyers, the general budget, and our municipal credit rating, and to recommend possible legal actions against the two companies. Experts must explore the option of an emissions fraud and contract rescission suit against Wurzilla and Burns McDonald as a possible way to get the city reimbursed, the contracts rescinded, and the bonds paid off without damaging rate payers, our credit rating, and our relationship with present and future bond buyers. If we take legal action before the gas plan goes online, instead of after, then we do so without the legally and financially grim consequences involved in knowingly breaking the law and holding ourselves rather than the two companies accountable. Although all options come with some degree of risk and uncertainty, moving forward as planned without investigating the apparent emissions fraud could turn out to be the greatest legal and financial risk of all. Please, I beg of you, please investigate this matter. - Thank you. - Thank you. Thank you. Okay, we'll move on to our agenda item three, B3, C, I'm sorry, additional citizens reports. This section of the agenda permits any person not registered for a citizen report to make comments regarding public business on items not listed on the agenda . This is limited to two speakers, which we do have two speakers, with each speaker allowed a maximum of four minutes. So our first speaker will be Mr. Willie Hussbuth. If you'll come down, state your name and address, your time will begin. (clears throat) - Mayor and city council, my name is Willie Hussbuth, I live at 623 Newton. I plan to talk about some racial problems, things that you just questions about hiring, but I'm really disturbed by these, the two, what the two speakers had to say about the electric problem and what was quoted. I noticed how you all reacted. I was thinking about, well, is Mr. Seifer saying anything that's true? Or is he just making that stuff up? Is there any truth to that? Now listen, if there's some truth to what he's saying, and the numbers that have been batted around, banded about, talked about, as far as what we are spending for this polluting, polluted system, I think you need to stop looking at whatever's in front of you down with your eyes down there, and someone needs to say, Mr. Seifer, would you come and meet with us and let us see what you're talking about and where you got this from? Or would someone meet with someone instead of hoping that, put the time up there so I can see how much time I have. Hoping that my two minutes and 40 something seconds are over with, that's what you're doing. Then, Ms. Armentor, what she said, is she just making that up? I tell you what we're gonna do, get ready for this. I am so sick and tired of my electric bill being so darn high. It's high as heck. When I leave here, I'll use some other adjectives to talk about it, some that God can't hear me say. Listen, and you're looking at your papers, what the heck are you looking at up there? Your eyes should be on, oh well, I don't know which eyes should be on, but my goodness, you mean we are paying for something that we didn't need? Sounds like it's so confusing to me, heck, I don't know who to believe now. We're paying for something that we didn't need? And we're paying too much for it? Oh yeah, you need to get your eyes off of whatever you're looking at, and then start looking into this. Now, granted, you have people you're paying to tell you what's supposed to be done, but you're responsible to follow through and figure out, well, who's saying what, and can we get out of this? Can we recoup some of the money that we're losing with this electrical situation? And lastly, again, I was gonna talk about the fire department, but I'll just wait for another time. If you are doing what this young lady said you're doing, and it says 82 year old man, shame on you, shame on somebody. Well, you're saying you're going to look into that and get this paperwork, but I've heard that before. So I'm retired, I've already decided that, okay, this is my next frontier, the electric problem. And I know some people over here who sound like they know what they're talking about. I don't know whether they know what they're talking about or not, but they sound good. And we are going to start working. We're gonna start working it. We're gonna work this out. Now, granted, you don't know, well, now there's somebody on this board, on this council that was here when all this was decided. Some of you weren't, but still, if some of what they're saying is true, you need to get busy and figure this thing out. And if you're doing it in closed session, well, good, okay. Then I don't know anything about that. But something needs to be done to take care of the fact if we're spending too much money and we're using it to buy something we don't need. (bell ringing) - Thank you, sir. Mr. Zach Youngblood is our next speaker for the agenda item three C. State your name and address. Your time will begin. (paper rustling) - Hi, my name is Zach Youngblood, 836 Hawes Drive, Copper Canyon. I'd like to speak to y'all really quick about the energy center emissions. So from the TCEQ permit for DEC, we have hourly emissions rates for NOx, 1.33 pounds per hour for each engine. Carbon monoxide, 4.96 pounds per hour. Volatile organic compounds, 2.07 pounds per hour. And with the hourly operation limits, gives us these annual tons of emissions, which is extremely close to major source qualification, just as is. CEO of over 100 tons per year would put it as a major source, which would require obtaining a Title V Clean Air Act EPA operating permit. And here we have emission rates from the Red Gate plant in Edenburg, which is same plant, same control technologies. And we have significantly higher emissions rates for these three pollutants. Here we have, according to the best available control technology for the Red Gate permit, this is from EPA. Have some more numbers here. This one's a great chart. This is the new source performance standards for a gas-fired reciprocating engine of greater than 500 horsepower, which these represent. These are 25,000 horsepower engines. And you can see that it is an emission rate based on gram per horsepower calculation. So right here is the hourly emissions for volatile organic compounds. Nitrous oxides and carbon monoxide. We have the Denton Energy Center permit, the Red Gate as permitted, the best available control technology levels, and the new source performance standard. And if you review the RDP frequently asked questions, if you have spoken to members of PUB, I know that that is what is guaranteed by the manufacturer is that number under NSPS. So that is all y'all can expect from them. And I'm certain that that will be passed. I'm sure that the emission rates will be much lower than what is allowed, but not whenever you're actually talking about the source itself. And you are looking at some possible issues here. All right, any questions y'all? - Any questions? - I wanna ask city attorney. We can't obviously have a dialogue, but can we ask for information that was presented? No, I just mean a copy of the information. - Yes. - I'll make sure it's on that to y'all. - All right, thank you. All right, that concludes our agenda item number three. We'll move on to consent agenda. Council member Ryan. - Thank you mayor. I move approval of agenda items for BFG80. - H and J. - So council member Gregory. - Second. - All right, so all the ones that are not, you did not list will be pulled. - It was shorter to list the ones that we're going to. - And they'll be handled under items for individual consideration. - Yeah, all other items will be under individual consideration. - Okay, we have a motion and a second for the agenda items for the motion. Let's vote on the board please under consent agenda. Motion carries seven zero. Okay, we'll go through these one at a time on the consent agenda items that have now been moved to items for individual consideration. Our first one on the list is agenda item four A, which is considered option of an ordinance of the city of Denton, Texas, authorizing the city manager to execute a professional services agreement with Stephen J. Kunkel and Associates Inc. for land appraisal and land rights acquisition. Yes, Paul. And we do have a card for public comment as well. (audience applauding) - Good evening, Mayor, City Council members, Paul Williamson, real estate manager. Before you tonight is an ordinance authorizing the engagement of Stephen Kunkel and Associates to perform the land rights procurement necessary for the phases of the project, limits for the Bonnie Bray widening and improvements project slated from interstate 35 to the south all the way up to University Drive. And I'll answer any questions y'all might have about that. - I've got a couple of questions. I thought I saw somebody pop up. Council member Ryan. - Thank you, Mayor. I've got a couple of questions. When was this project last presented to council? Do you have any ideas of been? - I believe it was in 2015. - 2015. And was there any neighborhood meetings involving this project? - Yes, we did have two meetings in May of 2015. One was for the portion from just a little bit north of Scripture down to I-35. And so the property owners along that portion of the route were notified and we had a meeting for that. And then we also had a second meeting a couple of weeks later for the northern leg from basically from McKenna Park north to 380. - Okay, and based on this realignment, we basically would be using what's known as old Bonnie Bray . - Yes, a significant portion of old Bonnie Bray would be incorporated into the new alignment. - Would there still be parking for McKenna Park or would that disappear as well? - The parking that's there now in old Bonnie Bray would need to be mitigated either with some parking pads up further in the park or along Scripture itself. So there's a couple of solutions in play for that. - Okay, all right. Well, that's it for questions. - I've got a couple. Any other questions from? Yes, Mayor Pro Tem. - Why was it determined that new Bonnie Bray couldn't be used for the expansion? So as opposed to using old Bonnie Bray, expanding the actual current path of Bonnie Bray as it is right now? - Well, you're talking about like the curve at the intersection of Scripture. Yes, a couple of things. One is just the design criteria for such a curve like that from a speed issue of the road, the design of the road. So it doesn't fit our current design criteria for a road of this designation. So it's a best practices design of a four-way intersection for that street section. - If I understand you correctly, because there's a curve in the road, it's not considered best practice to expand it with the curve in the road? - Well, it just depends on what the radius of the curve is. And this curve is outside of the parameters of what would be best practices and our current code of street design. - So does that mean that we can't expand it with the curve? - That may be something that could be explored, but as it is now through the schematic phase, which has occurred in the design, and then now they're going into full-blown cross-section design of this road, that wasn't a consideration necessarily to fit that portion of that curvature over there. - Okay, thank you. (audience laughing) Any other questions? Sort of have a follow-up to Mayor Pro Tem. So understanding the best practices and so forth and where the project, how far the project has come to this point, are you saying that if there was a desire to do something differently, and we've got an email today, you might have gotten a copy of it. - I have consumed it. - Yeah, and about some homes and some historical context of those homes. So as far as if there was a desire to look at, even just explore it, not necessarily make it, but to see what would it cost, what would that entail, how long would it put the project back, would it put the project back? Are you saying that it's past that point pretty much or? - It's not past the point. I mean, certainly, our desire is to go ahead and get this firm engaged so we can go ahead and start getting the appraisals done and making offers to affected property owners. The project's been really on the books now for several years, and there's an anticipation of the folks that, especially the people who have houses along that route to get something going. But as far as any kind of exploration of the intersection or something like that, we can certainly visit that. - All right. Any other questions, at least, on that particular topic? - I guess my questions are more about the statement of fees, Paul. As I look through here, and not knowing, I couldn't find an itemized list of the parcel numbers and what they really were as far as if it was just a single-family home or were we taking most of it or none of it or all of it, if there's gonna be damages. But when I look at the appraisal amounts for each one, having been in the real estate business and looked at appraisals and having been condemned myself and having seen those appraisals, I struggle with this amount because probably most of the base appraisal information, once you get one done with all of the sort of underlying appraisal data, comps, remainder kind of damages, you get sort of an idea that you can apply generally to each parcel. There's obviously some exceptions if it's commercial. I struggle with that because there's no appraisal on here that's under $3,500 and my hunch is those parcel numbers are probably primarily residential. And residential appraisals, if they're just straight appraisals on mortgage property that somebody's buying to live in, I think they're probably about 400 to 500 bucks or 700 bucks or something like that. So it seems like these fees are, I struggle with that. And on the basic services, we've got basically total per parcel fees of 126,000, project administration, negotiation, title and closing. I'm not really quite sure, I mean, I know what negotiating is, it's basically they're passing along the information that the city's given and they're passing to the city information, doing some kind of education component. I struggle with this amount, so help me understand, 'cause this didn't really have to, I don't think this went out to bid per se. - It's professional services, the appraisal components are of this engagement. - So that means? - It means we negotiate with the firm. - Just with them specifically and not with anybody, you don't have to negotiate with anybody else at the time. - Correct, and Mayor, just reflecting on this particular engagement, there's some, this is a worst case scenario engagement, we're presuming that we don't have a lot of success and we're having to litigate a lot of these tracks, so that's one thing is that it could very well be that we may not spend 275,000 or 300,000 to get all the land rights we need with this firm. So, and then there's another distinction, one is with these , with all the appraisals, especially in a project that has necessity to it, where we have to have these tracks, these appraisals are complex, even a residential appraisal is a complex assignment in a scenario where governmental entities approaching a landowner for rights. Beyond, I mean, we've gotten residential appraisals of late, and you're right, there's 700, $800, and those can be performed within a week. The type of work that we're talking about here is usually two or three weeks, and it involves a lot more diligence in making sure that all the comparables that you find, you need to talk to the broker, so there's a lot more behind the scenes work, because you may be, that appraiser may be sworn to testimony someday, did you call this broker and confirm that, so there's a lot of behind the scenes elements that are associated with that. - Well, when you say that we might not incur these kind of fees, this is what the appraisals are gonna cost. I mean, this is what they're saying. - Well, there's support, there's relocation is a component of this, this firm will be helping us with the relocation services for the residents that are being displaced. So this is not just appraisal work, this is actually relocation advisory services, so for each home that has either a tenant or an owner-occupant, there is a service associated, you know, an entitlement for those people, and this firm has the capabilities of following the law and doing all the things necessary to carry out that work. - Right, but that's not included in the appraisal price. I mean, because it says here, statement of fees will be charged on an hourly basis, relocation manager, $200 an hour, senior relocation agent, $85 an hour, relocation agent, 70 expenses at cost. Now, I understand what you're saying, and they do have sort of a unique characteristic to them, I guess. - On some occasion, I mean, especially we have eight tracks that are partial acquisitions, where the right-of-way track designation maybe consume half of a residential lot. So there's really, I mean, technically there's three appraisals that are performed for that track. The part taken, the whole, the part taken, and then the value of the remainder. So there's, like I said, there's a technical. And these prices are consistent with what we've been experienced on basically all of our other projects. - Well, I'm not saying, I'm not singling out this firm. I'm just saying this is a pretty, probably lucrative business for people who want to be in as far as, because again, having been through one myself, it's not something, so anyway, I just have a concern with that, and I'll just have to vote how I see fit on that . Council Member Gregory. - Thank you, Mayor. Did we just a week or so ago authorize a purchase for one of the properties that will be part of this? - It was taken out of this. - Okay, and that was at the corner of? - It was one house removed. It was the house just to the east of the Hudnall Track on the corner. - Okay. How does this professional services agreement compare with the one that we did, that we authorized for the Mayhill Road project? - Well, for that project, the professional services associated with the appraisal work and the land rights procurement was within the engagement with the firm of Fries and Nichols, the engineering firm that was selected for that project. - And so the firm that's doing this one is separate from that? - It's Graham and Associates. - Okay, and at this particular point, if there are property owners that have property along Bonnie Bray or any part of this that are curious about how this might affect their personal property that they own, business property, whatever, are engineering documents available for them to come and look and see what the proposal is for the right of way and how it may or may not encroach upon their property. - At this point, the development of the plans are still in a preliminary, the final plans are a percentage completion. I think they're like right now about 45% complete. And so you've got the alignment and then now there's contour questions of how far up in somebody's yard will you put a retaining wall or will you need slopes? So the cross sections are being calculated now. And when it will take this firm, presuming that it's approved tonight, they will not be, we will not be extending any offers or anything probably until the first part of October. They'll be doing a lot of the background legwork on the, once the surveys are perfected. We know the tracks that are affected, we just don't know the exact location of that line, but we'll have that information in the very near term. - So in the very near term then, if a person wanted to look at those documents, they could look at that. - Yes, and the preliminary schematic is available. - Oh, it's available there. Okay, thank you. - Thank you, Council Member Briggs. - So I'm not ready to pass this tonight. I would prefer to table this until other options can be looked at and mostly also until Roman can be consulted on the historical and design aspect of some of the homes that are gonna be removed. So that's where I'm coming from right now. - Council Member Hudspeth. - Thank you. I think understanding the neighborhood a little bit, for me, some similar questions regarding the fees and maybe a lack of a breakout. So for example, one person, Bertie, owns everything. So you have 316, 318, let's say, and then everything to the end is all one person. So I don't think he's gonna take those individually, but the fees don't reflect that specificity. So can you, I'm not okay with the general, you know, it's not, it's not. So if I use the map on here and just counting spaces, 13 homes, legitimately that's maybe four homeowners, that, but there's that big swap that's one person. And I don't see that reflected. And so can you kind of follow me through that? Because I need something that says, that accounts for the fact that it's one individual there to the end. - Yeah, and maybe not withstanding this particular individual, but just in general, when we're acquiring properties on a project, there may be a property owner, a person, a single individual or an entity that owns multiple tracks on a route. They may be touching each other or they may be discreet along a corridor. We don't really have a way of combining all those tracks into one case or one action, because at any given period, they may sell that one tract. And if you've had that in one case, then you would be going back to a different place in your acquisition schedule. And so what you do is the best practices are, each piece of land is its own piece of land, unless, I mean, there's some special exceptions that you could consider if it's an assemblage and there's some points of decision-making that have to go on on a case-by-case basis. But best practices are, if there's not a unity of use, then you treat those as separate, discreet tracks. - Yes, sir. - So I'm gonna plead ignorance, but here's what I'm gonna assume. I'm gonna assume that the city of Denton's not gonna go out of their way to vacillate, because then you do yourself harm, right? So if the price vacillates on one end to a peak, that then peaks everything else or gives a reference point to say, well, if this particular property is worth X, then this adjacent property, we need to begin at X. Is that-- - That's not the approach. We hire an appraiser to come in and look, and they look at a piece of property, a tract. How's this tract comparing to other tracts in the marketplace? And so however we might go through a project and have the individual negotiations with property owners, those are discreet transactions or interactions between the city and that property owner. - Okay. Another day. - Oh, okay. Mayor Pro Tem. - Is the witness testimony line item for just special commissioners, or is it also going through trial? - Just special commissioners. - Okay, so by my calculation, $30,000 up to $30,000 for witness testimony only for condemnation, and using just the lowest price, I guess state certified appraiser at 150, we could also use project manager at 250, I'm sorry, 200. That's almost nine hours of testimony per property. - Well, usually when we have a hearing, we'll have a pre-hearing conference. You know, we'll go over all the elements of the case. So there's time on task outside of just the actual special commissioner's hearing. - Okay. I mean, granted I've only sat on one special commissioner's court, but I can't imagine that there would be nine hours of testimony in any context. And this also doesn't take into consideration the fact that, well, anyway, I don't wanna go into all of the line items, but it doesn't seem like it's passing the smell test for me . So I won't be voting for it. - Council member Ryan. - Thank you, mayor. Yeah, I'm in agreement with some of what I've heard from other council people up here. And I think I'd like to table this. I mean, if it was 2015 was the last time this was heard by council, the majority of this council was not here at the time, at least four of us were not here. And I'd like to have some notes from the neighborhood meeting included in a presentation to council, a statement from parks, since they're losing the parking that goes with one of their major parks. A little bit of a lot identification 'cause we're being told 28 lots along this yellow line that are involved in this. And we don't really know how far up does that go, how far down does that go. And I'd also like Roman from our historic specialist to also do some presentation in that to council. And so I guess I'll go ahead and do that in a form of a motion to table until that presentation is done to council or postpone until that presentation is made to council. - Yeah, before I recognize that, I'm gonna call for any other, I've got a couple of questions and we have public comment. So before I recognize the motion, we'll hear that. And let me say, there's a couple of things happening here. This is an agenda item simply for selecting a vendor for appraisal services. What I'm hearing up here is just some questions about the project in general, as far as alignment so forth. So we've got two different issues going up here, which really we're posting is for the other one, but obviously this information we need to get back as far as where are we, what's the timeline? How would that affect? 'Cause I know there's funds that have been made available to us, is there any kind of time limit on those funds? But you had mentioned that, well, informal value estimates for, I forgot how many parcels that is, but it says 500 each, what is that? - Well, there are several tracks and we can't get a strip map that can really detail out where these, but some of these tracks are corner clips or they're very narrow strips where the value may, the cost of an actual appraisal may eclipse the, or at least compete with the value of the offer. - Mr. Hussbuth, you're gonna be up in just a second, I just wanna let you know that. Okay, yep. - So we're adopting a way of basically kind of trying to cost control measure of let's go and do a kind of an informal finding of some kind of value. - So they're not your typical track, they're a stranded track or something like that that really doesn't require that formal appraisal process. Okay, fair enough. And you had mentioned about the assembling together for appraisals, 'cause there's one of them parcels four, five and six that shows a $7,000 for one appraisal. So we are lumping some together, I think is, so you're saying there's some kind of circumstances that exist that you don't need to go into this. - And it's really a finding, I mean, it's really a legal direction of how you might approach something like that. - Okay, I don't have any more questions. I'm going to go ahead and call the speaker, Mr. Hussbuth. If you could come and state your name and address, your time will begin. Yes, yes sir, you're up. - Mayor and Council Member name, Willie Hussbuth. I know the process that you were discussing tonight is just trying to determine who is going to, you're going to hire to do this, whatever they're going to do. But already I can hear what's happened in the past and what's looking to happen now. There is no way Mayor, and I know you have done this as much as I have, that you can't simplify what Council Member Hussbuth said. If there is a partial here and they're right next to each other, whether they're on, whether it's one to two, three or however many, I don't see why you can't then deduce. If the partial's here, it's on the street, the street's going to encroach on all of them to here, you can come up with a pretty close guesstimate that would be uniform with all of those parcels. That's one thing. Secondly, yes, they did start having these meetings in 2015 . I made all of them. But here's what they did in the meetings. Very, put the time up there, would you please? Very generally, we're going to widen Bonnie Bray. We don't know how wide, we don't know what it's going to look like, we don't know when it's going to start. These are where the discussions in the three that I attended, we don't know much of anything. When will you know something, we all asked, those of us who've made an investment in our properties here. We don't know. Well, when will you know? We don't know. Now that's 2015, here we're at 2017 right now. Whoever made that suggestion that we ought to have more community meetings, that's a good suggestion. 'Cause a lot of the problems that you're creating by just saying we don't know, and then all of a sudden you say, this is where we're gonna go, that's why you're having problems with that curve. Somebody just decided that wherever they were and decided we need this curve cut. And I noticed the words were spoken very carefully. It's the, whatever practices, that word, that adjective that they had on there, most common practices or adverb, whatever that word or speech is. But then when the council person asked, what can we change it? Even though that's the practice that has been employed in the future. Very carefully not answering that question. The mayor asked again though in a way to say, can we do it? Then the answer came, yes, we can do it. (bell ringing) All right, seeing, having no more blue cards, let me get my screen back up so I can see. Any more questions on agenda item 4A? All right, council member Ryan. - Thank you, mayor. I understand the difference and I'm just looking at, if we move forward on hiring someone to do the appraisal before we're 100% with what this project is as a council, that that's a mistake that would require change orders in the contract that can be more costly to the city. And that's the reason that I'm asking for this to be making a motion to postpone until we have this presented to council, including the items I listed earlier, notes from a neighborhood meeting, some input from parks, identification of the lots and some information from on the historic value of these homes from our staff personnel. - Okay, and clarification for city attorney. I get really confused between motion to postpone, table, continue, so once again, educate me on that. - Motion to table signifies that the item is being put, rested on the table, so to speak, and if it's not picked up at the end of the meeting, then that item dies for not having been passed or addressed . Motion to postpone allows you to take an item that's currently on your agenda and postpone it to some date certain or event certain, at which time, when that event or date is triggered, then it'll come back before you. - So Council Member Rangel, sort of a clarification on your motion. Is that to an event certain as far as gathering of information, do you wanna set a date by which this information needs to be obtained by? - Just to an event certain of a work session for council on this item. - All right, Mayor Pro Tem. - I'll second that motion to postpone to a date certain, event certain, but I would also add that the reason I'm making this second is because I would like to see another proposal from a different service. I realize this is a professional services agreement, so you don't have to take multiple bids, but at the very least, if we could get some comparisons, even if it's just to past contracts that we've had for this type of service so that we can see a side by side of what we're typically paying for things like witness fees or initial appraisals. - All right, we have a motion and a second to postpone to an event certain. Council Member Hudspeth. - Just as discussion, I wanna kind of echo Mayor Pro Tem's point. I'd like to see, it just seems a little high level for almost half a million dollars. For me, so again, that could just be me, ignorance, and not understanding how these things flow, but I'd like to see a level of specificity to Councilman Ryan's point, which lots are we talking about? We're grouping for legal reasons, we're not grouping for individual consideration reasons. I just, I need to be at peace with kinda how it's, organized and it seems to be a little high level, just hey, here it is. And for me, that kinda gives me pause because it just leaves room for a gotcha down the road, or oh, that was in there, and I wanna try to ferret all that out. - Okay, all right, thank you. All right, we have a motion and a second. I've stated the motion. Let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries seven, zero. We'll move on to now agenda item four C, which is consider approval of a resolution approving the 2016 tax increment reinvestment zone number two, annual report declaring effective date. West Park Tourism Board approves eight, zero. So I think it's just a basic preliminary report, is that right? And we do have a public comment on this as well. - Okay, so let me find my quick presentation. Good evening, Mayor and Council. I'm Caroline Booth, the Director of Economic Development, and I am going to quickly go over the contents of the annual report for the West Park Tours. Under state statute, we are obligated to submit an annual report to the State Comptroller's Office, detailing the previous year's activities for each of our tax increment reinvestment zones. The code requires some very specific things in the report, and that's what I'm gonna cover for you here. The first thing that's asked for is the base value. So this is the value that's set after the zone is established and serves as the base through the entire existence of the zone. And in this case, that was slightly over $119,000. The 2016 appraised value was $2.4 million, and that is due to the fact that the state has set a base value of $2.4 million, and that is due to the partial valuation of the improvements to the Wynco property within the West Park Tours, not a full valuation at this point. Then we have the revenue in the tax increment fund from the participating taxing entities, and I wanna remind you all that the West Park Tours does have the participation of both the city and Denton County at a rate of 40% in the revenue. So a little over $8,500 in revenue was captured for 2016, and that includes both city and county revenue. That brings the fund total to about $9,800. We have not had any expenditures out of this Tours fund, so that one is not applicable at this point, and there's not any outstanding bonded indebtedness for this Tours either. So it's pretty straightforward at this point, and I'm glad to answer any questions that y'all have. - Just sort of a historical context, because the Wynco is out there, there was some major improvements to Western Boulevard with infrastructure paving, and that was accomplished outside of the Tours with a 380 agreement in order to help facilitate the expediting that project. That's why you see, is that-- - That's correct. So Wynco, as part of their agreement with the city, took responsibility for implementing phase one of this Tours plan. There are four phases currently. So the improvements under phase one have been done, but the reimbursement is occurring through another mechanism, as you described. Correct. - Okay. All right. Thank you. Any questions before we have public comment? All right, we have a, oh, Council Member Gregory. - So before us tonight is simply adopting a resolution that accepts the 2016 annual report. - Yes, sir. - That's it. Okay, thanks. - We have a speaker, Mr. Willie Hudspeth. No, okay. Mr. Hudspeth waves his, or doesn't wanna speak at this time . So Council Member Briggs. - I move to approve. - Council Member Hudspeth. - Second. - We have a motion and a second. Let's vote on the board, please. - Motion carries seven, zero. Agenda item 4D, consider approval of a resolution approving the 2016 tax increment reinvestment zone number one, annual report. - Good evening, Mayor and Council Members. - Good evening. - This is gonna look very much like what you just saw. I am Julie Glover, Economic Development Program Administrator. So this is the number one TIF, TIRS, they're kind of interchangeable things that we use there for downtown. This is also the annual report. We are also required to do the exact same thing that you just heard. We needed the base and appraised value, so 79.3 million was the base value, 150 million was the 2016 appraised value. The revenue in the TIF from participating taxing entities, which is only the city, is 458,739 for 2016. There's about 1.3 million in the total right now. 76,000 has been expended in 2016 as the first payment to a 380 agreement to the rail yard transit oriented development. And we also in this one do not have any outstanding bonded indebted bits of our interest. - Mayor Pro Tem. - Just a little question and a comment for both of these items. A lot of cities have these reports on the website for the economic development section. So maybe I'm missing where it's at on ours. Go ahead, yeah, yeah, of course. - There were some things that disappeared in the city's website redesign, and we have put in a request with our public communications office to reinstate the information that you're talking about. So that is being taken care of right now. - Great, thank you. - And it will also include the minutes from all of the meetings. - Did you have any, you had a question and a comment? Okay, all right. No more questions. We do have a blue card, Mr. Hussbett. All right, thank you, sir. Council Member Briggs. - I move approval. - Council Member Ryan. - I will second. - We have a motion and a second. Let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries seven zero. We'll now take up agenda item four E. Consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton Tech's approving consent to collateral assignment and airport lease. I believe Mayor Pro Tem will be recusing herself from discussion and vote on this particular item. You may proceed. - Mr. Mayor, members of the council, Scott Gray, airport manager. The item this evening is the collateral assignment of leases, which is a follow-up item to the assignment of the lease from Business Air to Sykes-Bond Investment that the council took action on on the June 20th meeting. Normally this action would have come hand in hand with that item. Unfortunately, we didn't have that request by the lessee at the time. So here we are as a subsequent action. The purpose of the collateral assignment of leases is to secure the lien for the bank for the financing for the acquisition. As you can see here on the graphic, terminal building being located here and the rest of the items that were in red were already assigned to Sykes-Bond at that 20th meeting. I'd be happy to answer any questions that you may have on this item. - Any questions? We do have a card, Mr. Hespeth. I'd like to speak on this agenda item. The airport. Mr. Hespeth. Mr. Hespeth. Agenda item four. Okay, all right, thank you. All right, seeing no more speakers and no more questions. Council Member Gregory. - I move approval. - Council Member Hespeth. - Second. - We have a motion to second. Let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries six zero. We'll now move on to, if somebody could please ask Mayor Pro Tem to return. I think she might be on her way. And if I miss one that we pulled, be sure somebody remind me. I have the next one as agenda item four, aye, which is considered option of Nortis accepting competitive proposals and awarding a contract for the supply of Okanagan Underground distribution cables. (murmuring) - Good evening, Mayor, Council. This is a standard warehouse item that they stock. It's for underground cables from a company called Okanite. I was asked to come up and talk about how we utilize these cables. This is the insulated underground cables that we use on the primary distribution and service conductors and also some multi conductor cables for substations. All of the projects that we do are approved budgeted projects in the city budget. Some of the projects that we anticipate do not fulfill, but other projects fill their place, but it's all within budgeted monies. As a reminder, 57% of all of our distribution system is underground here in Texas. We have a total of 750 miles of overhead and underground distribution lines, and of those, 426 miles of that are underground, so that puts us at 57%. And if you look on the evaluation sheet in your packet on this particular item, there's 17 different line items. I brought one of those line items to show you tonight, and the total per year is 462,000 for a total of three years of the 1.4. And this is the tabulation of the bid sheet. And the one item that I brought is the most expensive item on the sheet. It's item number one. - Oh, this is show and tell. - This is show and tell. I'd be happy to give this to city secretary and let her pass this around. This is a lot of copper and copper shield. One foot of this is $14.20. That takes three of these per foot for three-phase service. And I stand for any questions. - Any questions? Mr. Hussbuth, you wanna speak to this item? Council Member Briggs. - So on the bid sheet, it looks like the, is it the Okanite company won the award, but the manufacturer, the other companies bid the Okanite product. Is that right? Is that, am I seeing that right? - There were three different bidders for this one particular item, yes. And we select and recommended the lowest bidder. - Right, okay. - I may need to keep this up here. - That's inappropriate. - Okay. Council Member Ryan. - Thank you Mayor, I move approval. - Council Member Gregory. - Second. - We have a motion to second for agenda item four, aye, let's vote on the board please. - Jesus, that's heavy. (laughing) That's heavy. - Let's vote on the board. Motion carries, seven zero. All right, we'll go to agenda item 4K. Consider adoption and ordinance of the city of Denton, Texas amending the provisions of chapter 16 relating to licenses, permits, and business regulations by amending section 17-73 to change the hours for home solicitation. I think we had a presentation on this. - Yes. - Good evening, Mayor and Council. On your agenda is an amendment for the home solicitation ordinance. It is found in section 1673, the section we are looking at. We have recently received notice that there's possibility that our ordinance curfew for home solicitation is vulnerable and subject to constitutional challenge. Our current ordinance has a 6 p.m. curfew. The case law has supported a 9 p.m. curfew, have been found to be valid. And in the backup, there is an ordinance with a 9 p.m. curfew legal challenges under the first amendment. Of this type, it can be particularly expensive and difficult to win because we have to justify the restriction. We have to justify a public purpose and it needs to be nearly tailored in order to justify restricting first amendment rights. And so those can be very expensive. If a plaintiff prevails, they can receive attorney's fees if they get any amount of settlement. If we prevail, it would be unlikely that we could recoup any attorney's fees. The cases that have been litigated have found curfews at six, seven, and eight to be invalid and again, our curfew is currently six. Locally, the city of Colleyville fought this type of case and they ended up changing their 430 curfew after a fight and settling in paying $125,000. They did change their curfew to 9 p.m. The city of Frisco changed their curfew to dusk or 9 p.m., whichever is earlier, and they chose to go with that route. You have that alternative ordinance as another consideration. There are not cases either invalidating or supporting the curfew that is dusk or 9 p.m., whichever is earlier, but we believe that the argument could be made that there is a sufficient public purpose in deterring crime and having that curfew as the earlier of dusk or 9 p.m. - You got a question. Did we receive a demand letter on this? - We received a letter from a Dallas lawyer saying that they were willing to, if we would not change our ordinance, yes, file suit. - And did it state a client that they were representing? - Yes, the client is Aptiva Pest Control, door-to-door pest control company. - Say that one more time. - Aptiv, A-P-T-I-V-E, I'm not sure of pronunciation. - Okay, all right. Council Member Gregory. Oh, any questions? Council Member Hudson, I think you had a, any questions for staff? We do have a, all right. Council Member Gregory. - I'm gonna move approval of the ordinance as substituted, the ordinance that limits the time to dusk or 9 p.m. Monday through Friday, whichever comes first, and dusk being defined as 30 minutes after sunset. - Okay, Council Member Ryan. - I will second. - We have a motion and a second. Let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries, seven, zero. Move on to agenda items five A, consider adoption of an ordinance of the City of Denton finding that a public use of necessity exists to acquire fee simple title to a .697 acre track of land and two, a .018 acre track of land, both situated in the Alexander Hill survey. a little technical issue here. - It had a lot of images in it. - No, it had a lot of images. - Let's just try this. - What was this one right there? - This one? - Yes. - Thank you. - Absolutely. - Got the subject matter expert up here. Good evening, Mayor and Council Members. Again, I'm Brent Heath, Executive Manager for Energy Delivery. I'm here this evening to discuss a property related to 138 KV transmission line conversion, conversion from Spencer to Locus substations. The executive summary, just to give you a little recap on the project is we have done engineering analysis and indicates that Denton has a growth and agent infrastructure problem. We have a responsibility, both regulatory and reliability to resolve that problem. We utilize a public involvement process with open house meetings to solicit citizen input, take their ideas, go back and evaluate those, which we have done. We consider all those options that we hear and that we look at, and we recommend moving forward with the most feasible and economic option that impacts the least amount of the public. Speaking of the regulation, there are several entities in the electric utility industry that we have to deal with and meet requirements. These are some acronyms just to remind you what they are. You may hear the word FERC, F-E-R-C, that stands for Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. We do file annual reports, FERC 715 studies with them each year to analyze and study the system and find these deficiencies. NERC is the North American Electric Reliability Corporation and they enforce the standards that FERC sets. Here in Texas, there's the Texas Reliability Entity, the TRE, and they have the authority delegated by NERC to ensure that every utility in Texas is NERC compliant. The Public Utility Commission of Texas reviews and approves rates for transmission lines, and ERCOT, Electric Reliability Council of Texas manages the flow of power to the ERCOT customers. A little bit about this project. The green inner circle is the 69KV line that went around town that is being converted to 138KV. You may be able to notice it's a little hard to see, but on the eastern portion of that green circle in the northern portion that is a darker green, that section has already been converted to 138KV, and the section that we're talking about tonight is in the blue circle around Locust Substation. The history of this project is we had a public involvement out on June the 27th, 2016. That was at the Greater Denton Arts Center, which is formerly known as the Visual Arts Center on Belle and East Hickory. Public Utilities Board held a public hearing and recommended a transmission line route August the 16th. The specific property in question was appraised at $75,000. A location map shows that this particular subject property is in between Dallas Drive and Fort Worth, shown in the red box. And just a little bit closer of this particular red box property, it's near Smith Street and Johnson Street. And so I believe this is the point that I say after discussion that you all may have, and upon favorable motion by council, I will proceed and show the legal description of the property. OK, we do have a card, a public blue card. I should speak, Mr. Hesbuth. Mr. Hesbuth, would you like to speak on this item? OK. OK, I'm sorry. Go ahead. Sorry. Oh, go ahead. Council Member Gregory. Thank you, Mayor. I move that the city of Denton, after having made the offers required by state law, use the power of eminent domain if needed to acquire fee simple to one, a 0.697 acre tract of land, and two, a 0.018 acre tract of land, both situated in the Alexander Hill Survey, abstract number 623, city of Denton, Denton County, Texas, and more particularly described on exhibits A, A1, and B1 to the ordinance now under consideration, and on the overhead screen being now displayed to the audience, all of which is for a valid public use necessary to provide the expansion, construction, maintenance, and improvement of electrical transmission lines, facilities, and structures, including substations to serve the public and citizens of the city of Denton, Texas. Just tell me when-- because he's got to display that sufficient time? All right. We need a second for the motion. Council Member Ryan. I will second. We have a motion and a second for agenda item 5A. Let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries 7-0. Moving on to agenda item 5B, consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton, finding that a public use and necessity exists to acquire an easement covering 0.339 acre tract of land situated in the Martin Austin survey. Good evening, Mayor, Council, again. This is a different project for the new view property related to some easements required for the 138KV transmission line that goes to Spencer and Woodrow substations. Once again, it's the same executive summary as we just talked about. We do have still the same problems on the electric transmission system. This was a project that was identified also by the FERC 715 study that we submitted to FERC. And we did have a public involvement process, and we considered all options and choose to pick the option that impacts the public the least. And these are just a reminder of the definitions we saw a few minutes ago. On this particular project, this is located just directly north of the DME offices in the water treatment plant. This is the new view property. You may also recognize that by the radioisotopes. It's on the southeast corner of that property. We had a public open house on this project back in September the 30th, 2013 that was held at the Denton Regional Medical Center professional office lobby, which is now Medical City Denton. We had a public utility board public hearing and approval of the site and the associated transmission lines in January 25, 2016. And city council had a public hearing and approval of the site February the 16th, 2016. The property was appraised at $35,590. After we had the appraisal, the initial offer was made for $33,590. No, that's not a typo. It was what they call a Scribner's error. And when we went back for the final offer in July the 25th, that was back at the appraised amount of $35,590. The location of this property is shown by the red box directly north of the water treatment plant on the radioisotope of the new property in the southeast corner. And to show a visual arrow how that lays, it's in that southeast corner. So after discussion and upon a favorable motion by council, I will proceed and show the legal description of the property. We do have a card. Mr. Hespeth, would you like to speak on this item? You've filled out a blue card. Mr. Hespeth? OK, thank you. All right, who's got the motion? Mayor Pro Tem. I'll move for approval of item A. Oh, you got to read the whole-- Oh, he said after motion that he would read it. Well, I think the motion is-- who's got this? The motion actually specifies the wording to use. I'm sorry. I was confused. I apologize. Here we go. She's got it. I move that the city of Denton, after having made the offers required by state law, use the power of eminent domain, if needed, to acquire fee simple to I, a 0.697-- am I on the right one or wrong one? I think there's a different one. 17-753 should be the second one. OK. I'm on 689. 5B. 5A? No, 5B. 5B. Yeah, the board is showing 5A as far as the-- OK. --on the voter board. Got it. Apologize again. Item ID 17-753? Yes. I move that the city of Denton, after having made the offers required by state law, use the power of eminent domain, if needed, to acquire easement interests covering a 0.339 acre tract of land being situated in the Mary L. Austin survey, abstract number four, city of Denton, Denton County, Texas, and more particularly described on exhibits A and B to the ordinance now under consideration and on the overhead screen being now displayed to the audience, all of which is for a valid public use necessary to provide the expansion, construction, maintenance, operation, and improvement of electric transmission lines, facilities, and structures, including substations to serve the public and citizens of the city of Denton, Texas. All right. Mayor Pro Tem, if you wouldn't mind just pressing your mover again because we've got the right caption up on the board now. Thank you. And I think we've had enough time. Enough time has passed for the display of the survey. So Council Member Ryan? I will second. We have a motion to second for agenda item 5B. Let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries 7-0. Agenda item 5C, consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton finding that a public use and necessity exists to acquire easements covering one, a 0.057 acre track of land and two, a 0.141 acre track of land. Tonight? Good evening again. This is a property on Stella Street. It's on the Hickory to Locust transmission line. And this is a property just directly west of North Texas Boulevard. Once again, the same executive summary applies to where we have a problem that we have identified, has been submitted through the proper federal paperwork. And we need to resolve that regulatory issue for reliability's sake. We did have a public meeting solicited citizen input and looking for all practical options. Once again, the same regulatory agencies have been involved in this process. This particular line, Locust to Hickory, is in the southwest corner of the green 69KV line. The portion is up in the-- Stella in North Texas is right here in this very top portion of the cloud, the clouded blue area. The history on this project is we are rebuilding the 69KV line in place and converting it to 138KV. This section of line is only three blocks. It's straight. It was existing on the south side of Stella. So the plan is to rebuild that in place. We did a legal brief into city council back on September the 16th of 2016. We did have the property appraised for $48,471. There's been a couple counter offers going back and forth. But at this point, we're still about $90,000 apart. The location is on the south side of Stella Street, west of North Texas Boulevard. And the site map will show that this is in front of an existing apartment complex that has the existing 69KV line there. We're needing to widen it just slightly because we're going up from 69KV to 138KV. And once again, after any discussion or questions that you may have and upon a favorable motion by council, I will proceed to show the legal description of this property. We have a card. Mr. Esmere, your speaker. Mayor Pro Tem. I'll move for approval. And I'm going to read 5C. I move that the city of Denton, having made the offers required by state law, use the power of eminent domain if needed to acquire easement interest covering I, a 0.057 acre tract of land, and II, a 0.141 acre tract of land, both being situated in the Eugene Puchalsky survey . Abstract number 996, city of Denton, Denton County, Texas. And more particularly described on exhibits A1, B1, A2, and B2 to the ordinance now under consideration and on the overhead screen being now displayed to the audience, all of which is for a valid public use necessary to provide the expansion, construction, maintenance, operation, and improvement of electric transmission lines, facilities, and structures, including substations, to serve the public and citizens of the city of Denton, Texas. All right, I believe sufficient time has the survey has been displayed. Council Member Gregory? Second. We have a motion and a second for agenda item 5C. Let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries unanimously. Move on to agenda item 6A. Consider nomination appointees to city boards and commissions. You just want to do it from there, Jennifer? OK. Mayor and council, at your desks are a revised sheet showing your nominations that were considered or presented during the work session. I do have several other ones to add. So if you want to add these on your sheet this time. Council Member Hudspeth is nominating to the airport advisory board, Gary Steele. To the Parks and Recreation and Beautification Board, Gary Barber. And he previously had made a nomination to community development advisory committee of Paul Meltzer, and he's retracting that nomination. Council Member Ryan is making a nomination to the Public Art Committee, Michelle Lin. And to the Historic Landmark Commission, Roy Anderson. Which one was that? Historic Landmark Commission. And then in terms of the downtown TIF, Melissa Lenneberg, who was moved from her current spot to her-- let's see, she's being moved to the property owner category . However, her term does not expire until next year, so she wouldn't be up for reappointment or a nomination. So she'll be moved to that spot, which will leave the vacancy that you wanted. We just don't have to nominate-- vote on her for that change. Then Mr. Meltzer was nominated as qualified voter. He'll fall into that category. And then we have the two council member positions. I believe you were also given some vials of two individuals who were proactive in seeking a nomination to this board. Ben Easley and John Lenz-- Lenz or Lenz-- they would be under the category of business owner seats. So if you wanted to add those two, if anyone wanted to nominate those two, we could do that and complete this board this evening. OK. Council Member Hudsbeth. Thank you. Yes. Receiving a note for both, specifically the position for downtown TIF. Receiving these notes. Both guys are great, John and Ben, but I'm going to move this evening for Ben Easley. So he's the owner of the bearded monk there. And so I would nominate him to fill that last positions business owner on the TIF board. There's two available nominations. Oh. Is there one or two? I'm getting conflicting information. Mayor Pro Tem, you said there's only one? Yeah, my understanding is that by moving Michelle-- I'm sorry, Melissa Lennonberg-- into one of the vacant seats, that there would only be one opening in the business category. OK. To be honest, I don't deal with this board as I do the other boards. And I thought maybe Caroline would still be here, but she's gone. I mean, you can do one, and we can always fill the other one in at the next meeting. That's probably the best thing to do. So we want to go-- I'm sorry, could you repeat your name again? Councilman Hussbett. Yes, Ben Easley is a business owner in the TIF area. OK. So that's to fill one of the business owner seats. Yes. We either have-- there's only one, or we may have two, but one for sure, and you're nominating Ben Easley. My apologies for not being clear on that. Oh, no, that's fine. OK. All right. Councilmember Riggs? Oh, I was also going to recommend Ben as well for that position. Councilmember Ryan? Thank you, Mayor. On just a point of clarification on the Community Development Advisory Committee, Fran Witt is down next to my name, and I believe that was Mayor Pro Tempigari's nomination. Oh, OK. All right. Thank you for that. It just got shifted in the-- No problem. It just got shifted in the transcript. When you took out Meltzer, yes. We got it in there. OK. OK. Any other comments on nominations? I see Mr. Hussbut, did you fill out a card for that? I believe you did. 6A? Would you wish to speak? No. OK. All right. Councilmember Gregory? Thank you, Mayor. I move approval of the nominations list as corrected and updated in our previous discussion. Councilmember Ryan? I will second. Let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries 7-0. All right, we've got agenda item 6B, item for individual consideration, considered option of an ordinance of the city of Denton authorizing the city manager to execute a professional services agreement for professional planning services related to the development of the Sector 1 South Neighborhood Small Area Plan. What's that? Oh, all right. Let me recall agenda item 6A just to get some clarification on the nominations, if you don't mind. Thank you, Ron. I'll call agenda item 6A, consider nominations. We will reopen that agenda item to get some clarification on how many nominations we still have available for the downtown TURS. Hello. Caroline Booth. The primary question is we move Melissa Lenigan, I believe, up to the business owner slot, which left qualified voter open, which nominated Paul Melzer for that. And Ben Easley was nominated for the other business owner slot. Do we have any other business owner slots available? No. OK. So let me back up for just a second. So Melissa Linenberg has moved into a property owner spot. I'm sorry, yes. Right. And so that left the spot for Mr. Melzer. That's squared away. And then we had the spot for Ben Easley. OK, so we only had one business. We had two new nominees, Mr. Melzer and Mr. Easley now. So y'all are good. OK, so we only have one other spot open? Or are they all-- There are going to be two more spots open in January. OK, all right. So y'all are good for right now. We will fill the ones that are available today. That's correct. OK, fantastic. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you all for that indulgence. Agenda item 6B, we'll recall that. Consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton authorizing the city manager to execute professional services agreement. Thank you, Mayor, members of council, city manager, members of staff. Brought forward to you today is a consideration for a contract for professional services to start work on a small area plan for the area surrounding University of North Texas. Just to give you a background, the Dent Plan 2030 calls out the establishments of small area plans. In fact, one of the areas identified is the Fry Street area. In addition to that, as we evaluated the area as part of development that had been proposed for the area, we looked at the Fry Street small area plan and the overlay district and really got to understand the need for this small area plan for not just the small area plan for Fry Street, but surrounding areas as well. This map here illustrates the existing small area plan for Fry Street. We initially expanded that to reflect what's shown here in red. However, we realized that the broader development pressure expands much further than this red boundary. And now the boundary that's shown in the black is the scope of the subject small area plan. The project scope includes the following task or deliver ables. Of course, there'll be a public outreach plan. We hope to obtain as much input as possible from the community. There will be a parcel assessment of all properties that include single family, multi-family, retail, commercial, and other uses as well. It will also include an urban design site analysis and strategy to address the issues that we are-- or concerns that we have in the area related to a development adjacent to established neighborhoods. There will be a transportation and public realm and parking analysis. Another concern that we've heard is, of course, the parking and how that will be addressed. The public realm area, adding streetscape and the like to help soften the transportation system. Also, housing analysis. We've also heard about our student housing population and other multi-family developments in the area. That will be also addressed. Looking at an alternative land use scenario for the area, and ultimately a preferred land use plan ultimately for the area as well. There will be before and after visualizations. And lastly, an implementation strategy which will tie everything together and give us direction on how to proceed with the recommendations that we bring forward. As far as the timeline, we hope to kick this off, if approved, this month. Moving back from there to an inventory and database development, which our consultants will be working on. But really importantly, I think the important thing here is that we are going to also begin the community assessment and analysis in September through December. And this is in line with the UNT and student enrollment. So that's going to work well as far as our schedule. We hope to then also start our visioning process and alternative scenarios in the month of October through March, finalizing what we are going to be bringing forward to you all in drafting the small area plan and implementation strategy . That will occur between March and August of next year. Request for qualifications. The SOQ went out to 96 prospective respondents. We received six that met the minimum qualifications. Friganese Associates and Tharp Planning Group was the group or team that was selected for their experience in small area planning. Their team of professionals included parking, transportation and urban design professionals. And they also have a proposal that would include meaningful public engagement, which is key to the small plan process. So what's the next step? Again, if approved, we would kick this project off in August, establish a steering committee, start our stakeholder interviews and meet with our technical advisory committees. And then again, begin our community assessment analysis in the timeframe so that we can get as much information while students are in class as soon as possible. That concludes my presentation. I'll be happy to answer any questions. >> Any questions for Stan? >> Customer Ryan. >> What was the reason for the change in the size because we're taking in UNT basically on this as well and that concerns me with the-- >> The-- >> What kind of input they may have on what may happen in the neighborhood well outside their realm. >> Well, they're just one stakeholder. We show UNT property but the property that we would be obviously implementing would not include UNT property, it would just be the properties outside of the campus. >> And I'm-- there's quite a bit of diversity in this. I'm still kind of questioning why we're trying to take in such a large portion in one swath. How many acres does this involve? >> Roughly 1200 acres. >> Roughly 1200. Denia neighborhood is what? Do you remember how many-- >> I'm not-- I don't know the answer to that but it's obviously significant. >> I'm sure it's at least twice the size of Denia. >> OK. >> And again, if we look at-- again, Councilman Ryan, we're looking at obviously the areas to the north of the university. This is primarily the-- initiation of what we're looking at. However, we also recognize that there's also some development pressure in this area and as well as south of the university. So, we just drew a boundary that we felt that would be roughly walking distance from the university and impacted by the university and this is the boundary that we came up with. >> OK. Thank you. >> Councilmember Hatsbeth. >> Thank you, Mayor. I have a-- the size is noteworthy but my comments, I'm going to kind of direct to my personal experience with similar boards and serving in a capacity on planning and zoning which is one of the best feeder boards to this council I believe. But-- so my point is I think we need to have the consultant and/or staff, someone kind of set some hard boundaries because in my experience before , we had spirited conversations about an apartment complex going directly across the street from the university property, right? So, I think there needs to be some kind of guidelines based on reality if we're going to have some level of success and you're talking about just, you know, you've seen the-- the proposals that have come down for that Fry Street area specifically. I just think we need to have some hard and fast kind of stipulated if you're going to participate on this board and if we're going to go-- move forward with actionable items, I don't think-- I think there's some certain exceptions we can make or that if someone is going to serve on the board, they need to be at peace with, you're right across the street from the university, here's what's going to go here. Can you consider that? If not, then-- and this is just me-- just my personal opinion because I just don't think you can draw hard and fast line directly across the university and say, "Hey, this is where the neighborhood starts to transition." I think we need to have some give in those people having those conversations or that make up that board. So, how I see that plan out is almost like a qualification or application process betting of those that would serve on the board. Can you entertain this in this area and if not, then I think we end up with something that's not going to be able to move forward because we have so much strife, so much emotion with that that I think there needs to be-- and that's either the consultant staff, I don't know, but my suggestion is that we have some tough discussions up front and then you're talking about moving forward after that, you know, with everyone on the same page. I think if you have those-- I understand diverse opinions but fraction just won't work and that's just my two cents worth. >> Understood. >> Okay, any other questions for staff before we have public comment? Seeing none, thank you. First speaker, Deb Armitar, come down and state your name and address, your time will begin please. >> Deb Armitar, 2003 Mistywood Lane. I just want to say I'm really excited about this small area plan. This looks to me like good city planning and the kind of city planning that we haven't seen in this city, at least since I've been living here in-- since 2002. I really like what it's trying to do. It's protecting a very special area that I heard a number of you talk about or at least a couple of you talk about downtown being the heart of Denton and this is an area that is right next to our downtown center where we have a lot of historic homes and there have been some projects proposed by developers that have-- that people who live and work in the area have been really opposed to. This is a plan that instead of addressing these issues piecemeal when they come up has-- seems to have a really terrific overview. So I just wanted to say that as a citizen who doesn't live within that area but I happen to work within that area, I frequent businesses in that area and have friends who have homes in that area. I support this small area plan and I look forward to hearing the discussions about it and I would just urge those of you who value our historic neighborhoods and our local businesses to embrace something like this. I know it seems a little unusual because we haven't had this kind of specific useful city planning in the recent past. Instead we get this great big 2030 plan. I like this because of its specificity and I applaud it. That's pretty much all I have to say. So thank you. >> Thank you. Mr. Espeth, state your name and address and your time will begin. [ Pause ] >> Mayor and City Council, my name is Willie Hatz, I live at 623 Newton. I echo-- I want to echo what has been said about this. It seems-- or the plan itself and the-- how the staff looked at one area then moved out to another area and then decided, well, this needs to be there. It's going to be difficult to bring it together if you don't get the right people that's pulling it together. We did something like this on that committee that you started with the-- trying to work with the police and Mr. Smith got all of us together in there and I would suggest having him somewhere in here because he would pull this together. Here's the one-- couple of areas in this area that you're working with that I think is going to be difficult but could be managed and turned out to be something that's very good for the whole area. I don't see anyone yet in the historical area. I think Mr. Salty would be good as I think about it and the attorney-- I can't think his name now. They might bridge the historical commission with Cement City. And those of you that don't know what-- where Cement City is and the name of that place, that's where the low income people live. It's where all the older-- some of the older apartments are and it's a large area and they're very low income people or individuals in that area. Just think with me for a moment, if you can mesh those two together so that one of the big things if you can pull it together would be very good for that area is to clean it up, to make it look better but still keep it affordable. Now you mesh-- Mitch, let's see, you mesh that with the historical area then I think you'll be moving in the right direction. Then you got the smaller homes with the more-- the larger homes and you put those-- all those ingredients together and they are working together. I don't see how you can do it but while you-- it's not that I don't see how you're going to do it, you can do it. As I said at the beginning, if you just get the right people, someone who I think is very good at doing things like this is-- he's new here, came from Austin. Still up there hiding? No, he's gone. The historical person that you hired, he would be good for something like this. So I guess basically what I'm saying, it sure does sound like it's a good idea, Mayor and Council , that you're trying to do something here. If you can just bring it together, I think it will turn out to be bring it together, meaning get someone in who can pull the different factions together, then you're going to wind up with an area that's going to be very good for the city of Denton. Thank you. All right. Having no more cards, any more discussion? Council Member Briggs. I move approval. Council Member Gregory. Second. We have a motion and a second. I remember when we discussed this before, I'm going to be voting against this, because I think I voted against it before, about the size. I'm for the small area plan, but we talked about the size, I believe, at one point. And when you look at how it goes all the way down to 35 and comes almost down to 377, the origin of this was some of the SROs that were proposed in the neighborhoods that were north of Oak Street and Hickory Street, which I totally understand that, as far as preserving, protecting, to have some kind of overlay district, some kind of small area plan. But when you start moving south, many of those parcels are already developed into commercial properties. Many of them are already-- and you get a parcel this large to try to find a set of codes that will benefit the entire diversity of that area. I think two things happen. One is I think you dilute the protection that it was originally intended for the smaller neighborhoods. And I think in some ways you extend it maybe beyond what you want to in others. So if we could-- and maybe I'm misunderstanding or not remembering our discussion about this the last time, but I thought we talked about the size was sort of concerning to some of us. Obviously, we got a motion in a second. So that's the only reason I'm voting against it, is not because I'm against the small area plan. But I think the scope of it, I just don't have an understanding clearly of what's going to happen with it. And we don't have any kind of proposals as far as how to address the diversity of that neighborhood . Because what you have where the Fry Street, that little gray area, which is the current Fry Street small area plan, everything north of that, you certainly, that's a very, very different neighborhood or collection of parcels. When you move further down south, especially along I-35 and 377, to me it's just-- we could, I think, segment it into a couple of small area plans that would be a little bit more tailored to the specific needs of the different neighborhood types. So that's-- it's not voting against the concept. It's just the scope of it. So anyway, Council Member Ryan. Thank you, Mayor. I'm in complete agreement with you. Looked up in Fry Street small area plan is 12.42 acres. So we're looking at 100 times the land area. And that's why I would-- I feel like I have to vote against this, because this should be broken into several small area plans . There's no way you can tie all of this together. Council Member Gregory. One question for staff regarding that, because while this is a large area, there are already two historic districts within the area. And in the small area plan, a large small area plan, it's sort of like Lyle Levitt's and his big band. So the big small area plan. This doesn't prohibit the idea of transitional zones within the plan, does it? Or do you anticipate that that would actually be part of what comes out of this? The small area plan is a guiding document. It's not established standards that the developers would have to comply with. Those would be covered under either an overlay district or a code amendment or a zoning change on the ground. This is a study. And that's why we broadened the area, because we felt that it's not just one area that we're seeing the same issues. We're seeing it in a larger area. So we're comprehensively looking at this area as a whole. The standards that I think, Mayor, you're referring to, will be recommended from the small area plan, but they will be part of an overlay district. And those can be several, if that's the case-- and that's a recommendation from the consultants-- several overlay districts within the small area plan. Councilmember Briggs. So if I recall, we put off two votes regarding parking and bike lanes because we were going to wait for results from this plan. And so it includes a lot of different things that some other stuff is hinging on. So that's why I motioned to approve, and I continue with that. Sure. Councilmember Hudspeth. Thank you. Just briefly, I want to agree with Ron in his assessment of the versatility in those plans and in that area. But again, I would ask you to, if you explore any multif amily development that's come before us, it could be as far out as Unicorn Lake, and their pitch is it's walkable to UNT. I mean, that's everyone's. And so while that area looks big, I'm trying to tell you, if they can put any multifamily anywhere in that area, their pitch is it's walkable to UNT. And so that area outside looks-- I mean, it is massive, but it is so apropos to get that nailed down because it kind of reels that those talking points in and shapes it accordingly, I think. So the large area is a bit daunting, but I'll tell you, having seen the proposals lately, I mean, everyone, that general area, they're trying to get in that area, and they're trying to sell you on these buzzwords. And so to get that nailed down and get some structure around that is very appealing. And I just have one comment to staff. What you said was the reason we increased the scope was because we've dealt with similar issues that we dealt with within that red area, the outline red area, and other areas of this sort of large small area plan. I must have-- I don't recall necessarily those coming to the council at some level as far as people trying to put apartments down in the south east corner or along I-35. So I certainly am aware of the problems that have been associated with the couple of apartment buildings that have come before us that are in the middle or between two historic districts and all the different kind of hoops that would need to be jumped through in that regard. And to council's credit, I mean, whether we had the small area plan or not, we were able to do what we thought was in the best interest of the neighborhood and the city in general. So I have a full amount of confidence in this council's ability to do that. My only concern is that this is awful large, and it's just me. So that's just my own personal thought on that. Don't disagree with anything that's been said. That's just-- those are just my observations and thoughts. If I could, Mayor, before you take a vote, I think to articulate a little bit for both you and Councilmember Ryan, one of the reasons that we probably disagree a little bit in terms of the size of this not being appropriate, this really-- this scope was really created out of an opportunity to work with UNT in terms of their own master planning. They have gone through an exercise for their own transportation planning in this area that wasn't necessarily synced up with the cities. There was some concern that-- there were requests to potentially consider road closures, that sort of thing. Obviously, we wanted the ability to integrate what if scenarios, if you did change traffic patterns, what happens on the outskirts of these neighborhoods, and what development pressures, how would it affect the basic quality of life of these residents who might have traffic options closed down in development in Kers. So this was really an opportunity after meeting with the UNT administration to sync up our traffic studies, sync up what if scenarios for the surrounding community, and also deal with some of the issues that Council's been struggling with in terms of permit parking and that sort of thing. So typically, I would agree that why would you include UNT? I think the reason that we've included so much of that area is they've reached out and basically asked to be included in this study. And we've told them we wouldn't necessarily consider their requests for road closures and that sort of thing without them participating with us in the planning process. And so we had some idea on how it might impact our residents and adjacent neighbors. So I think there is some rational basis for drawing this. I know it's large, but it's not often you have the opportunity to work with your local university who doesn't necessarily always have to work with you to jointly plan. And also, we have the ability of using one traffic consultant, which is a real advantage in this particular case. So just something else to consider. Oh, yeah. In no way am I saying there wasn't a rational basis for it. I think with the university, even if you just included just the university property, all the things in green, which is primarily-- that's way outside the scope of just the footprint of the university itself, you're still at about half of what that is right now. So it's just a philosophical difference. So I'm not-- this isn't something that I've got a bunch of heartburn over. It's just my own personal thoughts about it. OK, so we have a motion and a second on the board. Let's please vote. Motion carries 5 to 2. We'll move on to public hearings. 7A is hold a public hearing and consider adoption of an ordinance for a specific use permit to allow for a multifamily use on approximately 0.9 acres. The property is generally located on the north side of the Riney Road and Riney Court intersection. And before we take staff presentation, I will go ahead and open the public hearing. So we'll be clear on that. The public hearing is now open. Good evening, members of the council, city manager. The request is for a specific use permit for multifamily development on a 0.9 acre track that is bounded by Riney Court, Riney Road, and Elm Street. The property is zoned NRMU 12 district, which does require approval of an SUP if you're just doing standalone or constructing standalone multifamily development. Wanted to discuss the site plan a little bit, because this is a specific use permit. It gives us an opportunity to tie this site plan to the ordinance. You can see there is building one and building two. These are two buildings, which have five units each. All the units are three bedrooms with 2 and 1/2 bath. And then they have a fenced in yard as well. There's a red area on this site plan that is a storage building. The applicant is proposing to install 23 parking spaces. The Denton Development Code requires 20 parking spaces. They are proposing three additional parking spaces that would be pervious cover. When we look at what's surrounding this property, you can tell that to the northwest, so to speak, there's a residential structure abutting this site. And the applicant is going to provide a tight B buffer, which is a 10-foot wide landscape buffer, which would require tree plantings, and then shrubs per 100 linear feet. Based on the distance of that width, the applicant would be required to provide five trees and 30 shrubs. That accommodates the code. However, the applicant has had a neighborhood meeting and has also proposed to add additional privacy, an 8-foot seed defense that would be provided or installed at the perimeter of that site. There is an existing tree stand along Riney Court, which would remain. And that's highlighted in dark green over there. 48% landscape area is provided when we aggregate all the landscaping proposed on the site. The code does require a minimum of 40%. Although these elevations aren't in color, it does shed some light as to what building materials are proposed for these two buildings. You can tell that there is at least 68% brick on most of these buildings. And then some of the left and right elevations are at 76% brick as well. So the majority or the primary building material is brick. And same thing for building two that you can see right there. The Denton Development Code requires a 45% minimum masonry requirement. They exceed that. When it comes to approving or reviewing or conducting an analysis for a specific use permit, there are specific criteria that are outlined in the Denton Development Code. Primarily, is it consistent with the zoning regulations? Does it comply with the Denton Plan 2030? What is the cohesiveness as it relates to surrounding land use pattern as well? The scale, the buildings, the uses, and what have you. Based on our analysis and what we've conducted as it relates to surrounding properties, the use does comply with those criteria. And as we're talking about scale and those elements, you can tell that the minimum lot area is 3,500 square feet . The density is capped at 12 units per acre with a maximum lot coverage of 60% and the building height is 40 feet. If we were to provide a 200-foot radius around the subject site, you can discern what those immediate uses are as well as the associated zoning districts. To the north, so to speak, is single family and is developed with single family uses. And then the rest of the area that surrounds this site is NRMU 12 district, which has open space, park area, and then single family homes. If we were to zoom in a little bit and increase that radius to 500 feet, then you can see that the NRMU 12 district does prevail with the northern area being single family NR2 district. This is a good snapshot of what is around the area as it relates to the park area, North Lakes Park, as I mentioned, the UNT Discovery Park, and then the built-out pattern of this area, which is really a mix of NRMU 12, single family zoning, and what have you. I discussed the future land use map. Primarily, residential areas with a mix of housing types is preferred along with supporting retail and service uses. Moderate residential is a component of that which promotes protection and development of residential uses ranging between 4 and 12 units per acre . So the proposed use does fall within that. And it also applies to areas of single family, low rise, multi-family, and town homes. The use is consistent. The intent of the SUP is to verify what the surrounding land use pattern is and the compatibility of this proposed use. North Elm Street is a tech start roadway or right of way. It's built at a four-lane divided roadway. Riney Court and Riney Road are two-lane undivided roadways. And I tried to highlight those in orange and red for you. This is just a snapshot of the subject property, the vacant area, and then that residential structure and the privacy fence, if you can envision that, that would be located along there. I want you to point out that the applicant did hold a neighborhood meeting. It is my understanding that 11 attended the neighborhood meeting. When notices were sent out within 200-foot radius, there was a response of 34% opposition. Therefore, a supermajority is required for approval of this request. Staff does recommend approval of the request as submitted. The planning and zoning recommended a 6-0 vote and approved the request, this proposed SUP. However, they added a second condition to that the site plan shall include bicycle parking at a ratio of one bicycle parking stall for every 10 vehicle parking spaces provided. And with that, I'd be happy to try and answer any questions that you have. Council Member Gregory. Thank you, Mayor. I thought I heard you say that the staff recommended approval as presented, but according to the backup, you recommend approval with one condition, that the proposed development shall substantially comply with the site plan. Correct. So as I discussed, the site plan, landscape, and elevation plan would be incorporated as part of the SUP. OK. Yes. And the P&Z recommended that condition in one other condition. In addition to the bicycle racks. Yes, sir. OK. Couple questions. How many vehicles are at the parking spots, are there? They're proposing 23 stalls, and they are required to provide 20. So the three extra would be pervious. So that would mean you said one bicycle for every 10 parking spots? OK, so two bicycle-- Racks. Racks. Yes. Two bicycle racks. Yes. So are there bike lanes on any of those adjoining roads? To my knowledge, no. When I drove it, I did not recall seeing any, but I can verify that. I do not believe there are any. OK. All right. I knew I was going to get a response from you. I'm just asking a question. How many is? Go ahead. Yes. Thank you, Mayor. There's a large bike lane connection going through North Lakes Park. And it goes down part of Elm Street, right in that area. It goes down Riney Road to the west, and it connects to Discovery Park. It goes up to Hercules along Nicosia, and then all the way down the Cooper Creek. No, I'm asking from this parcel. And I'm not saying that there shouldn't be bicycle layers or bike racks. I'm just trying to understand the rationale. I think that there's a bicycle lane within about 200 or 300 feet. Down Riney Road. Bicycle path. Down Riney Road. OK. Is that your understanding? I think it might be just a little more than that, but I believe so. There is connectivity. However, there's no specific connectivity with the site to those. OK. Well, if there's connectivity via Riney Road, that's fine. But I mean, is that Elm Street there going out? Yes. That's a pretty-- if I understand, that's a pretty heavily trafficked road. That's the road that the adoption center is on, too. Is that correct? I'm just trying to understand that as a frame of reference. OK. All right. Good. I appreciate that. That's helpful. And also, could you go back to the site plan? Sure. OK. So the homes are on that sort of short, straight leg right there. Where are the dumpsters on this property? Right here. OK. And is that both a trash receptacle and also a recycling revetment, or is that just-- is there just going to be one dumpster there, or two? And once I'd have to check on that, I do know that it's an option at this point, but I'll double check that and verify. And the only reason I ask that is because that butts up against-- and so the trucks coming down through there-- I'm not sure what time-- those are scheduled to come down through there. But they come down through there. And so they're going to be at the closest point of those residential homes. You know what that distance is from that dumpster to the property line? I would say-- let's see. And I'll ask the applicant that when they come up as well. Sure. I don't know the exact distance. OK. And one of the intents of that privacy fence was to protect the light, should it be in the early hours. OK. Yeah, I guess the light is not what I'm necessarily concerned about. It's when those things open up and it sounds like there's a very large bang. Council Member Briggs. Yeah, that's pretty noisy. I would think that the bicycles were probably requested because it's so close to Discovery Park, which they're probably thinking the people that live there will ride their bicycles. Maybe that's the assumption. So my question is about the neighborhood meeting. And you did say that the fence was put up in response to that meeting. Is that correct? Or was that just-- When the applicant was having discussion with staff, there was, I believe, an resident that did call in and say this is abutting my residential home and I do oppose it. And as a mitigation measure, the applicant is proposing. In addition, they're required to provide the 10-foot wide landscape buffer. But in addition to that, they're providing a privacy fence as well. OK. Thank you. OK, Council Member Ryan. Thank you, Mayor. I'm still a little confused on the bike parking. How many bikes do you fit in a stall? Is a stall the size of a parking space? What is meant by one stall per 10 parking places? Well, I think she said one bike rack. Yeah, but a bike rack can be a bike rack for one bike. It can be a bike rack for 20 bikes. Absolutely. Again, the recommendation from P&Z was to install the bike rack and count it towards that. So we can double check with the applicant if they've provided it. But to my knowledge, that's all that was part of the recommendation. OK. All right. Great. OK. Any other questions for staff before we open to the public hearing? We do have a card, the applicant wishing to speak. And this is also a public hearing. So anybody who hasn't filled out a card is also available to speak, has an opportunity to speak. Mr. Brad Andrews, if you want to come down, state your name and address. Your time will begin. And this says group request to speak on an agenda item. How many minutes does the applicant get, Madam City Secretary? The applicant gets a total of 10 minutes per speaker, total of 20 minutes for all speakers representing the applicant. Uh-oh. We won't need that long. No. Just state your name and address. Your time will begin. I'm Brad Andrews, one of the property owners. I live at 8855 FM 1173 in Crum. I appreciate your time and your consideration this item this evening. My brother Brock and I purchased this property about two years ago with the design and plan to build an assisted living, a small assisted living complex on this property. We were planning to partner with a lady out of Sanger that owned a couple of facilities already and very unfortunate circumstances. We couldn't comply with that partnership, that plan partnership. So we, at that point, kind of looked, OK, well, what are our options here? We weren't going to operate an assisted living facility. She was kind of the operator, and we didn't know how to do that. So we looked at what other options were available to us in the zoning. And what I do for a living is commercial real estate. So I looked at, OK, with some office, a developed office and some small retail type facilities. Would that make sense here? Really didn't make sense. Didn't feel like the best use for the property or the right fit in this area. So looked at other available uses and really duplexes where townhomes are kind of what struck a chord with us. And we sat down with initially Julie Wyatt, the planner, working with her on, in my architect, different schematics and coming up with a design to fit townhomes or duplexes, either one I was open to looking at. This lot is triangular and odd shaped. It's got straight street frontage on three sides. You probably know what it looks like. But anyway, it really did not lend itself to doing either townhome or duplexes because of the way that the lots would have to be platted and have a public access to them and have to be platted. So at that point, really, at the recommendation, Julie, she said, you might think about an SUP on this one. So what I've done is tried to create a plan here that would look like a use that would be allowed by right, which would be a townhome. And so these are quote unquote apartments. But I've tried to design them in a way that they would look like and feel like townhomes, which would be an approved use if I were able to lay that out on the site. So we do have the two buildings, five units apiece. We've exceeded the landscape requirements, not only in that percentage of landscaped area from 40% to 48%, but also our tree canopy is quite a bit increased from what is required. We did have the neighborhood meeting, listened to the neighborhoods. One of their concerns was parking that might happen in the street if there weren't enough parking in the complex itself. So we went back to the drawing board, added three additional parking spaces, which, of course, exceed what's allowed or required. So they are pervious. The fence also along that west side there was added at the suggestion of the neighborhood there. The neighbors were very interested in keeping that natural treeed area on what is the southern, the Riney Court side. We're interested in that as well. So we're going to do our best to do that. We've got some drainage work to assess in that area. But we're going to absolutely do our best to leave all of that. The plan is to leave it. The bike, I think you're right, Ms. Briggs, they thought about Discovery Park when that was kind of recommended. I was thinking it was one parking space, one bike space, part 10 parking. But I don't know that-- maybe I'm not clear on that either. So I would love a little more definitive answer as to what that might be if we get approval on my talking about three racks of how many bike spaces and that kind of thing. But certainly open to that, like the idea. I have no objections to that. I'd field any other questions you might have for me. On the question I had about the dumpster-- Yes. I know that's probably the only place that you can really put that thing, understanding-- It really is. So I met with Jim Jenks and looked at other options. Is there somewhere else on this site that we could do that? And ultimately, really there wasn't. I mean, the site constrained us to it going there. You know, one thing-- and this isn't necessarily-- we've talked about this before. But what I don't really understand is-- and this isn't about your project, only in the solid waste component-- in that you've got two separate five-unit buildings. And I think that if you were to have those five-unit building on separate parcels somewhere, depending on the configuration, you might could negotiate a cart system with that. Whereas-- so instead, we're going to bring a big truck up. But if we're bringing a big truck up to dump a dumpster, why can't we bring a truck up to just dump individual carts that are still on private property? So I really think we need to start really looking at that. Because you know what happens, Brad, when dumpsters are there? Sure. They're a magnet. In fact, my guy had to spend half a day today hauling up all the trash that was around the dumpster because the dump trucks couldn't get to it. But that's here and there on this project. So did the residents in the neighborhood meeting-- first of all, did they know that, OK, here's where the dumpster's going to be? And we understand that maybe one day out of the week, early in the morning or something, we may hear something, just like the residents will. It was addressed. They knew exactly where it was going to be. It really affects primarily the one on the west side. They have-- and they're, of course, not here tonight-- but they did put down that they were opposed to this project. In that meeting and subsequent discussions with them, their primary concern is that somebody's going to park along Riney Court and block in their RV. I mean, that's their concern. They understand where the dumpster is. They like the fence. They like the landscaping thing that we've done there. But they weren't overly concerned about that. I mean, nobody really addressed that as being a major concern. I understand what you're saying, though, that would be-- if it were a townhome project, that's what we would have, is the cans out in front. Well, as long as it sounds like you discussed that, that that was part of the neighborhood meeting and that they understand that's just part of it, but also some people registered opposition. Go ahead. If I may, Mr. Royce, I'm sorry. I forgot to mention a few other points. The fence, again, trying to design something that would look like a townhome, we've put those fenced in yards. They are wrought iron, but kind of with that some privacy, some little yard for each resident in mind. That storage building was a discussion point at the neighborhood meeting as well. We could have squeezed in a few more parking spaces or maybe done the double dumpster. And the idea with the storage building that will be accessed from one exterior door of that building and kind of have an indoor corridor, almost like a self-storage little complex, but basically give somebody a little place, a closet, you know, to store some stuff. The residents. It's for the residents to store stuff that might not fit in their unit or rather than having them on the back porch, just some junk, so to speak. You know, they've got a little place to put that. And after we discussed that with the neighbors, they wanted that over maybe some initial parking. OK, a couple of questions from other council members. Council member Briggs. So would you have a car limit per unit? Because I'm thinking if there's three bedrooms, and that's maybe 15 if it's individual, like people who live there, which could mean over around 30 cars rather than 23. So I'm just curious if there's going to be-- because of the on-street parking, if that is allowed in that area, I'm not really sure. I mean, it could be an issue. Right. That's a good question. So we will manage these ourselves. We also manage properties. We have over 100 multifamily units under management at this time. So we'll manage those. We address those kinds of things as needed. So the plan right now is to not put that type of restriction in place, but certainly we'll keep an eye on it. We recognize the concern, and we would want all of that to be contained within the facility. So as needed, we would start putting those kinds of restrictions in the leases. Council member Hudspeth. Thank you, Mayor. So two questions. Well, one comment. I think I'm not worried about the parking on the street because it takes care of itself. If you're silly enough to park on that narrow road, then it just doesn't lend itself to that problem, I don't think. You're safer to park where you're supposed to, and it's not any faster to get exit, that sort of thing. It's not onerous to park on the lots provided. So I'm not so much worried about that. My only question is, as other people are talking, I'd love to know, can you give me an address for one of your other projects that I could look up and just kind of get a feel for your work? Sure. The properties that I own are primarily in Crum. They're in Crum. We manage several in the Denton area. The one in Crum is fine. It doesn't matter where it is. I just want to get a feel for it. So in Crum, I've got the property at-- well, they're primarily houses in Crum is what they are. So I don't know if that's helpful. No. No. I'm sorry, I don't know that I own a property that would be similar enough in nature to show you what you're looking for. OK, what answer? Thank you. Any other questions for the applicant? Seeing none, thank you. If I may, Mr. Swartz, obviously, I'm requesting your support in this request. This will take a super majority given the fact that the opposition in the area, I really appreciate working with staff and their help. This has been at least a year in process. And again, really wouldn't be here if they hadn't kind of initiated this idea. This might be the best direction for you. And as we've tried to work together with staff and with the neighborhood, we feel like this will be a good project for the city and for the area. I appreciate your time. Great. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you, Brad. This is a public hearing. Anybody else wishing to speak? Please come down and state your name and address, and your time will begin. Mayor and city council, my name is Willie Hatch with the Louis 623 Newton. I'm trying to get a feel for where this is with my property that's out near Riney. I need to see where the substation is. Manal, can you help me with that? Do we have a map of just the-- could you put just the map back up of the site, and then we maybe can get some-- That might show the substation, electrical substation. Let's try the 1,000 foot. Yeah. The-- Where's Bonnebray? It's way out there. Way out west. Bonnebray is west. Where's the Adderall shelter? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What's that, Mayor Perthame? Go ahead. So there's two Riney roads. There's the short Riney road and the long Riney road. The long one is where the substation is, and it's adjacent to Bonnebray. This is the short Riney road that connects to North Lake Park and over by Hinkle. So it's not-- Yeah. That's over. Thank you. Any other-- anyone wishing to speak at this public hearing? Give the call one more time. Councilman Ryan, you want to speak during the public hearing? You want to wait until after? I'll wait until after. It's a question for staff. All right. One more call. Anybody wishing to speak? We'll now close the public hearing. Councilmember Ryan. Thank you, Mayor. When I look at the landscape plan, I'm seeing two handicapped parking places, and my question is, if he has no one who lives there, no residents who are handicapped, what happens? Do those spaces get unused? How are they-- are you actually down to now 21 with the-- because he added three? I know that's probably a federal restriction to put in those two spaces, but-- There's specific ADA requirements that need to be met with the site. So based on their requirements, they need to provide those two slots. So if there's no one that lives there that is handicapped, then those will remain vacant spaces or illegally parked spaces? From experience-- not my own personal experience, but some of my tenants-- on an occasion, one of them did park there overnight one time, and it just happened that law enforcement went through there for some reason. There was some question, and they got a ticket. I mean, so yes, they will go unused. So into-- yes, that's to answer your question. Or become illegally parked. That's correct. And that leads me back to the discussion we've had many, many times that I think our parking requirements sometimes-- I don't know how many times we've said this, that we have not really come back with any tangible-- we are always shorting developments on parking spaces because of this pervious parking requirement. We've got to have a work session on that for this council to give direction. Because even when you have 23 parking spaces, even some of them pervious, based upon your unit type and the parking requirement, there's still not enough parking. And until we fix that, we're never going to address our street parking problem, especially around the university. So that's something that I think we've got to get on the agenda to look at. Because if we continue to require less parking than the number of cars that can be there just with the type of units-- and it's not even a little bit. I mean, how many bedrooms are in this development? 10 times 330. 30. So the requirement that-- the only requirement the city has is 21-- how many spaces? 20. 20. And two of those are handicapped. Is that correct? Or is it 20 plus 2? I believe it's 2R. So then you only have 18 spaces that people have unrestricted parking, which leaves 12 vehicles if everyone has a vehicle. And that's not what we're here to talk about. But that certainly, I think, is part of this posting. It brings up this issue of the concern the neighbors had. And so if someone could remind this council, apparently there is a super majority required. So either staff or city attorney just describe to us what that is and what that means. Under the SUP provisions, we've bootstrapped the general zoning amendment provisions, which also includes the opportunity for a property owner protest to be submitted by those people that live within 200 feet radius from outward from the property going out. And so we, according to the IAS, we've received enough property owner oppositions that total 34%, which triggers the super majority requirement. So that means that you need-- it's a 3/4 requirement. And based on the seven council members, you need six to vote in favor of the project, at least six, if you want to approve the SUP. I guess one of my concerns is not necessarily about the project, but there's ambiguity in the recommendation from planning and zoning. With a bike spot, I mean, I thought it meant one bike's parking spot. So we don't know what that requirement is, and we certainly haven't seen where those would fit on the site plan. Was there testimony regarding that request at P&Z? I didn't get a chance to look through the minutes. I do have the minutes. I'd have to peruse them really quickly. We can also-- No, it's OK. I just-- it's all right. I mean, I just was curious. I mean, I don't think it's a big deal. The applicant themselves aren't sure what the scope of that is, whether it's a 10-bike rack, a five-back rack, or something like that. Sure. I'll actually listen to the minutes opposed to reading the transcript and discern what that is. And if there's no objection-- if the applicant has no objection tonight to comply with whatever the minutes do disclose as it relates to racks or number of stalls, so to speak, and if they-- I believe they have sufficient area on the site. There's sufficient testimony in the minutes. I mean, there's sufficient testimony on the record to maybe give some clarity on that particular issue. OK. All right. It would be a minor accommodation. Sure. No, I agree. Council Member Briggs. Can we go back to the property map, what it looks like? The site plan? Yeah, the site plan. So I guess the entrance and exit is on Riney Road only. That's the way in and the way out? Correct. So if cars are parked on both sides, is there room for a fire truck to get in there? Councilperson Briggs, first of all, parking on a street is only provided if there's sufficient right of way. And these are two-lane undivided roadways, so it's highly unlikely that parking would be permitted on these right of ways anyway, or along these right of ways anyway. And the minimum fire truck requirement, I believe 24 feet, that would be addressed. So there wouldn't be. Even if there were permitted and those vehicles were obstructing, they wouldn't be permitted within the right of way. Well, I mean, within the parking lot itself, I just wanted to make sure that all-- The fire truck itself? Yes, there's sufficient radius and room. Thank you. Mayor Fulton. Ms. Smolledod, can you remind me on the last map that we were on, the compatibility analysis map? I believe we probably, a couple months ago, I don't know, time is fading. A couple years ago, whenever it was, we approved a multifamily really close to this development. It was like less than a block up, I want to say. And it had a similar type of layout. It was like way more than 10 units. It was more than 10 units. The lot wasn't triangular or as irregularly shaped because they actually had the ability to bifurcate it a little bit, but very similar situation. Do you remember how many units it was? I don't recall, I'm sorry. I'm trying to recall kind of where, I believe it was just right above that yellow triangle. It was on Elm Street, if I remember correctly. And it kind of within this walkability to Discovery Center. The reason I'm trying to refresh my memory is because this project is so similar in style and the population that it serves and the layout as well. The elevation is very similar. And the neighborhoods that it abuts to, also it's very similar to that. I regularly bike and walk around this area, so I'm really sympathetic to the neighbors not wanting multifamily in their neighborhood. However, it's a really good place for this type of use. And unfortunately, we have demand for it. Fortunately or unfortunately, we have demand for it. This seems to be a very thoughtful approach to higher density. And I think we're probably lucky that we have somebody that took the time and provided the history that they provided to actually go through the effort to provide this type of product on the market. So for that reason and for the fact that it was approved 6.0 on PNZ, I'd really encourage people to go ahead and approve it. I'm gonna have motion to approve it. - Question on this. We were talking about parking on the street. So I see Riney Road, which is coming off of Elm Street. And you're saying that you don't think that that has to fit, that's just a two lane? - It is a two lane undivided right of way. - So then you have Riney Court. - Which is? - Which is what? - Two lane undivided. - So I mean, number one, people can't park in the, so there's no way anybody can park on either one of these streets. - Correct. - So where are the rest of the people gonna park? - It goes back to your concern related to parking ratio requirements stipulated in the code. - Well, no, that's sort of an issue in the future to try. I'm talking about on this specific one. If you've got 30, if you got 28 vehicles and you've got really not 23 spots, but 21 spots that could be occupied unrestricted. Where are they? I mean, maybe I'm missing something. They can't park on any of the roads that are adjacent to this property line outside of Elm Street. They can't park on Elm Street, obviously. So, okay. The applicant may be able to answer that question. You're counting. - I was just double checking and making sure the count was as reflected on the. So I wanna make sure I'm very clear before, 'cause the applicant seems to have some information on this . So I'm gonna let him speak. But I wanna make sure that from at least staff's perspective and the two adjacent roads, Rhiney Court and Rhiney Road, don't have any, like on a regular neighborhood residential streets you've got, what is it, 24, 36 foot of right away. So if people park on the curbs on each side, you still have enough room to satisfy the requirements of either fire personnel or emergency personnel services. Here, there is nothing. I mean, parking there would be parking in the lane of traffic. Is that my understanding? - That is my understanding, yes. And we can actually verify that should we need to. But I can double check with transportation. - With council's indulgence, I'd like to have the applicant address that, if that's okay. All right. Yeah, if you'd just come up and address that specific sort of question or observation. - Thank you, Mr. Mayor. It's not that I can really address your specific concern about the number of parking spots on there, except to say that I wanna be clear that we designed this and intend for this to be family living. So it's not intended for student housing. I'm just not sure whether anybody's thinking about that or questioning what is this for, but it's not intended that we'll have three residents per unit. I mean, we intend, I mean, there may be a family of three or four or five, but two adults. Could there be a third driver in the family? Sure, that happens. But it's intended to be, and quite possibly, in a lot of the, and I'm thinking of, kinda as I mentioned earlier, more of what I own being single family homes, a lot of even single parent households that live there. And this being priced in that kind of price range for families and sometimes even single parent families. - Okay. - And again, it's not to say that we wouldn't have an issue , but we will, through management, control that parking issue. - Okay. - I mean, it'll be on us, through management, to control the parking issue, and we'll do that. - No, no, and I get that, and this isn't anything about the project, I just know, when you're that close to the university, I mean, obviously, as you're aware, you can't restrict it. I mean, you have fair housing laws as far as you can't restrict it to any particular. And depending on the economics and the rents that are paid by students or non-students, so if you get over that many vehicles, I mean, there's really no option. I mean, many times you'll have places where they'll park on the street, either in front or around the corner and walk or... Okay, well, that's interesting. That'd be a tough thing to manage. I mean, for guests, I mean, 'cause then you have guest parking, what do you do with the guests and things such as that? So, all right. Council Member Duff. - Have you actually considered assigned parking? I know that can be, I've lived in places where we had assigned parking. - Well, the problem with that is, it depends how you assign them. I mean, if you're gonna assign with only two cars per unit, then if somebody's got three, I mean, it's a tough haul. Staff, I think you had a question, one address, and then we'll go to the board. - As an option, one thing that we could do is revisit Riney Road, perhaps, or Riney Court. I would recommend Riney Road and see if we can look at one side of the street and see if there's any option or opportunity available for parking. - Okay, yeah. - Because Riney Court just called the sex. - Okay, I've got another question about that, but yes, you could do that. Mayor Pro Tem, I believe, had a question. - Well, just a comment that, you know, yes, these are good questions about parking, but the fact is our code allows this type of parking and this type of density, so I don't know. I mean, if we deny it based on parking, our code allows it. I'm not sure that, I guess that's a legal question. All of my thoughts always end up in a legal question. - Why is that? - I don't know. - Is that a question to city attorney? - Yes. - Okay. - Although very rarely done, it is possible to deny an SUP, and it's when, after you look at all the different types of adverse impacts that this use would create, in this case, parking, if there isn't a condition that you can apply to this that would remedy that, then there would be, this particular SUP would be ripe for a denial, but it's very rarely that we ever get to a situation where it meets that standard. - So I guess my question, and that partially answers it, but how could we have a code provision that stipulates a certain criteria and then use that same criteria for a denial of an SUP? - That's correct, that's a good point. - Oh, that seems patently unfair. - Council Member Briggs. - May I ask the applicant a question? - Sure. - Okay. - Well, what's your question? - About the rent, may I, I'm just curious, you mentioned families, you were catering to families, and I was curious about rents, I know affordable rents are very important to us in our community, especially for families, so I don't know if that's allowed or if that's even on topic, but I'm just curious if he had an idea. - Can you repeat the question again? - What the plan is to charge for the three bedroom units? - That's not related to the SUP, I mean-- - Okay, okay. - Council Member Gregory. - Thank you, Mayor. - You know, I think on the topic of denying the SUP, when our code requires 20 parking spaces and they're providing 23 parking spaces, I would be very uncomfortable with that being the basis for , I mean, I understand the concern, the other concern, but we're not, this is not contracts by the bedroom, and my only question for Mayor Pro Tem, when she made the motion, the backup says that staff is recommending a single condition that the development substantially comply with the site plan. P and Z had two conditions, are you making your motion with either one of those conditions in mind, sets of conditions? - I was gonna make it with both conditions. - Both of the conditions, okay. Well, Mayor, if you'll call me, I'll second her motion. - Sure, any other, well, just making sure we've completed discussion. Staff. - I have some clarification on the bike racks as it relates to P and Z's recommendation and they recommended favorably for the proposed request and to add bike parking to a one bike to 10 car ratio. So it is basically-- - Two bikes. - Two bikes. - Okay, fair enough. Good, thank you for that clarification. Okay, any other questions for staff? And I'll be supporting this primarily on the strength of the argument of the parking being a requirement by the city and that we don't allow street spots to be used in the parking calculation. So this is just another prime example of how we need to really focus in on this and get some clarity on it because it would not be, even if it wasn't an SUP, if this was by some other thing and they were needing something else, it wouldn't be fair. So Mayor Pro Tem, I appreciate that and I will call for you for your motion. - I move for approval of item A with the addition of the requirements for compliance with the site plan as stipulated by staff and the P and Z requirement for parking as described by P and Z. - And the bike racks? - I'm sorry, bike parking is what I meant, I apologize. - Council Member Gregory. - Second. - All right, we have a motion and a second. Any questions or discussion? Let's vote on the board, please. (murmuring) Motion carries six to one, so it does carry, is that correct? - Correct. - All right, motion carries six to one under super majority rules. All right, we'll move on then to agenda item number eight, which are concluding items. Council Member Briggs. - So I have, I would like to request for our budget presentation Thursday, a slide or some discussion on the water park fees and attendance review since the wave pool has opened and that during that presentation, we can talk about the price increase and maybe reconsider that if possible. So just water park data basically. - Council Member Hussbett. - Thank you. One thing I want to ask or add, not so much a work item, just a note. As we get ready, again, driving by and touring the embassy convention hotel, getting wrapped up, almost closed in, and I'm sure our inspectors are gonna go in. Not that we've done it often where we have these high rise inspections, but make sure we're up to speed on that in advance so that that project can continue to move forward and that we can be, our inspectors can be prepared for whatever those requirements are, whatever brushing up takes, we just don't see it a lot. So I wanna make sure we're on top of any issues that would arise from that. Two, I'd like to have a presentation on what staff or what city management would propose for some sort of rewards program. Again, a parallel to a 380 agreement where we have these small, medium-sized businesses that are bringing high paying jobs to the community. They may not be buying a building, but they're renting and bringing people in. And again, I keep using the example of society. They'll bring in CEOs of different companies and their significant contributors. So if there's businesses like that in our community that we can partner with them to help them grow, I'd like to explore what's available to us to participate in that. And then lastly, I don't know if you all have seen it, but on the square, you have the deliveries of these 18-wheelers. And so you have a two-lane road through there and they'll stop in the middle of the day. And so I'd like to see something on a presentation of when we can kind of restrict that or have them park around on that backside and wheel it around. That's uphill, so I don't know what that timeframe looks like and what those stakeholders feel, but as a citizen, it's tough enough to back out of there. And so we need some kind of window where they can get that done and take care of business. And so I'd like to see something from staff on a way to manage that. Thank you. - And I do appreciate that 'cause I've asked for that on a couple of occasions, so I'll appreciate the additional momentum. Thank you. Mayor Pro Tem. - I've also asked for that. I'll send you my email that I got in response. So I had requested an informal staff report during the parks presentation regarding the Parks Foundation fundraising for the year. And I was hoping that I could get that before our budget workshop because it would be helpful. Additionally, I just wanted to know if there was any way to get an annual report because that particular nonprofit doesn't have any of their reports up, at least not publicly, so I was hoping to look at those. On 718, I requested a commercial recycling work session that was assigned to Ethan Cox. Was hoping to add to that the issue of recycling for multifamily, which came up today during our discussion. Just what are our requirements for multifamily recycling? What can we do to improve that status? So if we could just roll it into the commercial recycling conversation. I would like a work session pretty soon here on TCEQ permits. I know that we've had citizens bring up the issue of the permitting process. Specifically, the permits that Burns Mac did for the Red Gate facility in South Texas. The weight assigned to the various emissions were different than the weights assigned to our same emissions at our facility. And I have, I mean math is not my forte and I don't do EPA permits, I don't do TCEQ permits. But every single way that I have tried to calculate the VOCs, we're at over 100 tons. And I must be doing it wrong, but I would just, I would really like somebody to explain why the Red Gate numbers are the way that they are. Why our numbers are the way that they are. And I don't, I'll just say this too, it doesn't have to do with the total number of hours, it has to do with emissions is how things are permitted. I mean, hours plays into it as well, but mostly it's the emissions. So if we could do that sooner rather than later, and if we need to set it for a work closed session with the attorneys, that's fine also. - Okay, Council Member Ryan. - Thank you, Mayor. I think this can be handled through an informal staff report. How TxDOT handles sound walls. I know that they've put some in along the new stretch of 2499, there's some that they're putting in the colony along 423 and trying to find out if that's something that could be used along 35 for some of our neighborhoods where the widening has encroached into the neighborhoods to help protect them. That's all. - Okay, all right. Council Member Gregory. - Thanks, I'm so pleased that two of my colleagues have talked about delivery trucks on the square. I received a very angry text this afternoon during our meeting from one of the most influential citizens in Denton. And my wife said that she was stuck in her parking spot for over 20 minutes. And when the truck finally moved, it was not only her, but six other cars that had been waiting to get out. And she almost missed an appointment because of it. So yeah, the notion of seeing if we can legally restrict the hours in which those trucks do their deliveries or recommend another location, it's been a burning issue in my house for a long time. And I could score some real points if we got this worked out. - Well, and I would echo all those sentiments and I know we've received emails about the challenges with that, but we, I mean about with temporary delivery, but I think it's time. I mean, we've all talked about the square. We've all talked about how important it is to Denton. And I've seen them stopped out there in the middle of lunch hour rush traffic. So I really would urge the city manager to help us find some options in that regard. And I wanted to just sort of remind everyone, let me get my notes up here, that just to sort of give you a heads up, it's a little ways down the road, but wanted to sort of give a little shout out that the 100th anniversary of the Boy Scouts of Denton is coming up next year. And around sometime in March, March the second or so, the exact date is to be determined, but they're gonna be doing a celebration out at the old historic Scouting Hut, which is there off of Evers and I think it's Windsor Drive. So just sort of stick that in the back of your head and more information will be forthcoming, but wanted to sort of put that out there and begin to, just to alert everybody to that upcoming celebration. Any others? I don't see any. Trying to think if I have any others. I echo Mayor Pro Tem's request for analysis of the air permits. I don't know that much about it, but I know we've got people competent enough either in house or outside to do that. Seeing none, we will adjourn at 9.37 p.m.