Sep 12, 2017 City Council on 2017-09-12 12:00 PM

Alright, welcome everyone to this meeting of the Denton City Council. We do have a quorum. It is Tuesday, September the 12th, 2017. It is 12.03 p.m. First item on the agenda is citizen comments on consent agenda items. Mr. Willie Hutsbeth, if you can state your name and address , your time will begin at the podium. Good morning council members. My name is Willie Hutsbeth. I live at 623 Newton. It's a good idea to increase the sick leave time. You need to take care of the employees when you can. I think you ought to take that one off the consent agenda and talk about it. When you do something good, you ought to talk about it. I know they're going to look at the tape, but just in public, just say something about it. It's my recommendation. It's a good thing. You should share it with the rest of us, the rest of the people who are there tonight. F, why do you need sidewalks that large to be added? Why should they be that wide? Again, I think you need to talk about that. That's a few. You need to add to that discussion of the emergency plan something that a teacher at Geyer High School has mentioned. I mention this because I'm also mentioning the sidewalks going to Ryan. Should a kid, another kid get killed because they can't get down to that school from 288 safely? Someone should have said something about it before it happened, and hopefully you'll do something about it, but you didn't do anything about it. The other two people who got killed, I don't think you're going to do anything about it now, but I want to be on record to say you should do something about emergency plan with that gas well right next to the tennis courts at Geyer High School. Someone should have a plan as to how in the world are they going to get those kids away from that school if something happens. It has already happened at two schools already, and it could possibly happen at this one. You should have a plan for what you're going to do because you can't get those kids out of there. They will just all be lost if you don't have a plan. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Our next item on the agenda is request for clarification of agenda items. Council Member Briggs? So, on the consent agenda items, I just have two. A and E. My question is what is the major difference between those since they both have to do with generation? And then I have some specific questions on E that I like answered. So I don't know if it's best to do that here or pull them for presentations. Is there someone here that can answer that? Okay. Thanks. Hi. I'm Jessica Rogers, Energy Services Manager. I can try and answer any questions you have now, and then if you feel that you can do that. All right. Item A is specifically for generation credit rate agreements for systems over 50 KW. So the way that the current rate ordinance is written is that we have to have a special agreement in place to allow a system larger than 50 KW to be put on the distributed generation rate. So item E is simply the interconnection agreement. That is the agreement, like you approved a few weeks ago with Target, that allows a system to interconnect with the DME grid. So on the systems, since there's a rate agreement, is it possible that each system or each customer gets a different rate? It would only be a different rate for customers larger than 50 KW if that was what staff recommended. But at this time, we're recommending that these rate agreements be just putting those customers on the current distributed generation rate. Okay. So the difference is the 50 KW. So it's likely that something under 50 K would be a residential and then something over 50 KW. Yes, and we have commercial systems under 50 KW as well. Oh, okay. Okay, so it's just about the size of it that determines the different rate. Okay. And on item E, it says that we're doing this to part of the interconnection agreement. They have to get identification of the system, which is an ID number. Yes. Does that mean that all electric customers have an ID number? That's an ID number specific to the generating unit, not to the customer. And it just goes into our GIS system for tracking purposes. Okay. And I think that's it. Thank you. Oh, wait. I just want to make sure that this has nothing to do with net metering, just as a confirmation. I know that that was an issue. Just to reiterate. Okay. Thank you so much. Okay. Thank you. All right. Any other questions for clarification? Tongue twister. Clarification. I would like to, you know, the speaker brought up on agenda item. I think it was a consent agenda item with the 10 foot sidewalks. F, anybody here that can address just, is that just our normal right of way kind of street configuration or just real quickly? Mayor Mark Nelson, Director of Transportation. That is a 10 foot wide MUP multi use path. So it's the purpose of that is to allow not only pedestrians, but also bicyclists to move along that corridor. And that is a standard width on that size. I'm going to go with Councilmember Gravey in the neighborhood. And are we using that same width along Mayhill Road and Bonnie Bray? I believe that's the case. Yes, sir. And the purpose of the link that we're talking about here from Mayhill Road on University Drive down to the Greenbelt is to provide a connection from the Greenbelt all the way to Mayhill, all the way up to the rail trail along the A train. Is that correct? Correct. And then further south all the way into Lewisville. Thanks. All right. Mayor Pro Tem. Will it be marked for bicycles as well or will there be some signage or something? Yeah, there'll be appropriate signage on it. Okay. Thank you. Good. Thank you. Appreciate any other questions for Mark while we're having him on this agenda item? Thank you. Any other questions of clarification? Seeing none. All right. We'll move on to our work session reports. 3A, receive a report and hold discussion to give staff direction regarding the Energy Management Organization financial review conducted by Delo itte. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. Brian Langley, Deputy City Manager. As you may recall, we formed an energy management organization back in 2014. And we've been calculating some of the savings associated with that program. But we really wanted an independent look at that to make sure we had an independent view of what those savings were and understand the calculation methodology behind that. So we hired the firm of Deloitte to do that review. And today, the purpose of this presentation is for them to go through that overview with you of their findings and their process. So we have Steve Engler and Tim Metz are here from Deloitte . I'm going to turn it over to them to go through the presentation. So Steve. Thank you. Mayor and Council, thank you for having us today. Again, Steve Engler, I'm a Managing Director in Deloitte's Energy Risk Advisory Practice. I'm joined by my colleague, Tim Metz. I'm happy to take your questions at any point through our prepared remarks or at the end, whatever works. Please just jump right in and stop us. As was mentioned, we were engaged - I'll skip past the legal statement as we get to the agenda, what we're going to cover. As mentioned, we were engaged to perform an independent assessment of the savings calculation as reported by the EMO. We did that by completing a number of steps. First was to - first was to re-perform the calculation. Second was to dig into some of the assumptions in the calculation. And then third was to look at the cost side. So we're going to walk through each of those portions of the assessment in the agenda here. And we'll wrap up with a summary of what we found as well as some recommended next steps. So by way of background, and forgive me if this is familiar to all of you, but I felt there was helpful context to set. Starting in 2002 with the deregulation of the electric markets in Texas, the Dent Municipal Electric or DME as we refer to here in the presentation, began utilizing services from a number of different energy providers to procure any energy in excess of what could be generated to meet end user demand. Starting in 2011, rather than going to multiple counterpart ies, DME selected a single counterparty from which that excess or needed energy capacity was purchased under a contract that was from fiscal '11 to fiscal '14. As that contract was set to expire, there was discussion and a plan proposed to rather than outsource that function or that capability, to bring that in-house by forming an energy management organization with the premise being that there would be expected savings above and beyond what the expenditures were to that single third party. So that savings, once the contract expired and the EMO was launched, the savings have been calculated as a comparison to a quote that was received from that counterparty at that time. So as mentioned, we were engaged to come in and perform a review of the calculation and some of the underlying assumptions that have been reported as far as the savings by insourcing, if you will, the function to the EMO. At the time that the EMO was created, the budgeted savings were expected to be roughly 2.3 million for fiscal '15 and roughly 5 million for fiscal '16. The savings reported have been well in excess of those budgeted numbers. And by way of a little preview of the results, we did find that there were in fact savings in excess of the budgeted amounts. There are some assumptions that drive whether those savings are actually above or below those reported numbers. And I'll get into that detail. So as I mentioned, we performed the analysis in three sections. The first was essentially a re-performance of the model as used by the EMO to calculate and report on the cost savings. We did that to understand all of the inputs of the model and make sure that there were no gaps in the data or errors in the calculation. The second piece of the assessment was to dig into the underlying assumptions so we could understand and articulate through our report what's driving the savings, where they are coming from. So that could foster discussion perhaps about the appropriate use of those assumptions for future benchmark and savings reports. And the final piece of the engagement was to look at the cost side. So in other words, what are the costs incurred by the EMO to provide the energy management function and the qualified scheduling entity functions that were previously outsourced. So looking at the details or the results of the first part of the analysis, this is where we re-performed the calculation. I apologize for having a screen full of numbers, but I'll walk you through the highlights here. We broke the analysis into the two reporting periods, October 14 through September 15, and then again October 15 through September 16. In both of those periods, we calculated both the benchmark costs, that is what would have been paid to the third party service provider under the previous contract, as well as the costs to operate the EMO. And in both of those benchmark years, we found that there were some, I will say, slight modifications that we would suggest to the calculation or some different inputs to be used. But in both cases, it resulted in actually the savings being increased over what was reported. I will say that the differences are very minor given the magnitude of the numbers that we're talking about and the inputs we discussed with the EMO and talked about where we found corrections to be made. But the takeaway here is that by and large, when re-perform ing the calculation using the EMO's model and using the assumptions that were inputs to that model, we were able to re-perform the calculation with essentially the same result . Question. Yes. So let me make sure I understand what you just said. So DME has a model that they use to calculate savings. Did you all create your own model using DME assumptions? I mean, what, because I thought what I heard you say is you used DME assumptions and you came up using the same model, you came up with the same or close to similar results. So y'all didn't create your own independent model based upon data or experience or, help me understand what exactly happened. Okay. Yeah, so we followed the same methodology, meaning we combined the data kind of in the same way that they did. But we definitely did it in an independent fashion. So what we did is first we either collected independently data that is publicly available and used that in the calculation or we watched DME staff pull that data where we could verify it was coming from the appropriate source and we were getting all of that data. And then we did independently do all of the math and compared it to what was in the EMO model. So it was a, we followed the same steps that they took, but we did it with independent data and independent calculations. And before, in case I'm not getting ahead of you guys, is there going to be a slide that shows with that kind of specificity on that or if not, we'll go ahead and I'll ask the questions now. But if you've got something later on in your presentation that will answer, I don't want to be duplicitous here. I want to duplicate things. I think feel free to go ahead and ask now. So then what I'm hearing is two things primarily. One is you wanted to make sure that the data that DME used for their model was accurate. So you either watch them pull the data from the sources that they used so that you could see and verify with your own eyes that, okay, this is verified data. Or you collected data from different sources that you all are aware of. When you plugged that data into, I'm going to say the formula, whatever methodology they used, that is the formula, it was DME's formula. And so it sounds like what you were doing is just verifying the accuracy of the data and the math. Is that? In this first part of the assessment, I think that's a fair statement. Okay. Okay. Council Member Briggs? Yes. That was kind of where I was getting at. So you wanted to verify what they were using so you had something comparable to the next step to what you guys were going to do? Yes. Okay. And this was just the first step from there? Step one. Okay. Thank you. Yes. Other questions? Council Member Duff? I'm trying to process all of this. And can you tell me, okay, so the calculated savings, you know, which is pretty substantial, what is the underlying reason that those savings were accomplished? Because I, you know, I don't get anything other than the numbers here. That, yeah, agreed. And that's where we're going next. Okay. Okay. All right. Any other questions on at least what we're talking about here before they move on? And I thank the Council Member that this is kind of the starting point. That's a great way to frame it, right? Because there were reported savings of X. And so starting from that... So you're just trying to verify, okay, we're dealing with numbers that we all can sort of agree on. Exactly. And then the next two pieces of the assessment are to check the underlying assumptions and the inputs on the benchmark side. Yes. And also to check some of the assumptions and inputs on the cost side. And that's where we're going to get into whether or not there could be differences in the actual savings or what the savings might have been. Okay. Great. Another question? Do you have a question, Dalton? No. Okay. Thank you. So to get into that next part of the assessment, what we found in our experience in developing similar models, there are... What I would describe as a couple of key assumptions that have significant impact on the resulting cost savings or the cost benchmark that we're comparing to. The primary one being the heat rate. That's the underlying heat rate that was assumed or quoted in the contract renewal from the counterparty in 2014. The heat rate, just by way of background, is for lack of... To hopefully give a concise definition is a measurement of the efficiency of a unit to convert fuel to electricity. The lower the heat rate number, the more efficient the unit . So in other words, it takes less fuel to create a kilowatt of electricity. So it's a key component of the quote that was provided to the EMO in 2014. And it is probably the single biggest driver of what the savings would be in any comparison to that benchmark cost. Just the example we give here is it's basically a ratio. If it takes 10 units of natural gas to create one unit of electricity, that generation unit would have a labeled heat rate or a quoted heat rate of 10. Below 10 is becoming more efficient. Above 10 is becoming less efficient. If you look at a region or a collection of generation assets and you can calculate what we would call the implied heat rate for that region. So then the way you get your megawatt price typically is you take your heat rate times... I think it's your fuel cost. Fuel input. Yep. Yep. Okay. And for the service provider that quoted the extension of the contract, they're quoting a heat rate under which they think they can provide the electricity and still earn a profit. So that's the main driver of your comparison number. The other component is the concept of on peak versus off peak versus around the clock. And the quote from the service provider in the contract renewal was for an on peak heat rate. Now on peak is considered the hours between 6 a.m. and 10 p .m. Those periods of the day when people are using the most electricity. Off peak would be between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. And then logically around the clock is to provide power for all 24 hours in a day. The implication here being that during the on peak periods, you're going to have more generation units running and therefore the implied heat rate or the average heat rate will be higher for that period of time. At night when it's cheaper, only the more efficient units are going to be running. So let me go back to maybe a more fundamental question as we get a little deeper into this presentation. Because I think for me, and so this may be part of your presentation, when the EMO was first created, what they were using to determine the savings is as you're describing, this third party contract. The question becomes as that sort of goes, as that has gone away, and we're trying to figure out what those savings are in these latter years. I mean, we're only looking at 14 and 15 or 16. So at some point in the presentation, are we going to move away from using the third party contract as sort of the variables and then move into, well, we can't keep using that because the markets change and things change and we don't have a contract. We're going to talk about how, what methodology we're using to create those savings numbers without that third party contract. Is that part of this? That is yes and no. So it's a component of, so what we were asked to do for this piece of work was to provide an assessment of the comparison that has been used using that benchmark heat rate. Our recommended next steps are to do exactly what you're saying, which is to say what is the appropriate benchmark to use going forward. But that is not yet part of what we've done. Okay. And I'm assuming that we're in the process of doing that because that's really the only way that we can, I mean, when we're looking at the EMO and as far as what we're getting for those costs and what kind of savings, I mean, if all we're doing is verifying the numbers from the third party contract in our own calculations, I get that. But the real key is moving forward, how are we going to calculate? I agree. What we wanted to do was first go back and reconstruct the model and see what had the savings been from an independent source and they'll go through that in a little bit more detail of how they deconstructed those numbers. So we wanted to see that from the past, what had they been, and as Steve had mentioned, we are proposing a second phase where we would actually go out and look prospectively going forward, what is the right way to measure this going forward and how would we do it. That's going to require an additional scope of work and additional cost where we'll have to bring this back to the council for approval. So we wanted to share this part of the analysis with the P UB and the council first before we came back and asked for additional dollars to do that. So that will be a second phase of this project. So what we asked was the information that we received from DME about the savings. We just simply said, is that accurate? And you guys have looked at it and what I've heard you say so far is using the same assumptions that they used, pulling the data yourself, verifying the data, those assumptions were accurate. In fact, they were just slightly low. But now you're going to come and say, but probably some of those assumptions were not the right on and now you're going to tell us about the assumptions that we should have used because of the difference in the heat rate, correct? That's exactly right. All right. Yeah, so assuming the contract understanding that was using historical and that's part of the challenge here, right? You've got to quote at a point in time going forward from that, that was used as the proxy for the market so that we could calculate what we think we 've saved. The question is that appropriate going forward? And the further question to your point is even the underlying assumptions in that proxy for the market, were they the right assumptions? If I may follow up. And what you stated in your report was that that heat rate that they used of 15.75, there was a rationale for it. Yes. That it wasn't just pulled out of the air. And so you understand why that particular heat rate was used. But you're going to say that looking back, probably should have been a lower heat rate and that lowers the savings of what we would have saved by doing it ourselves as opposed to contracting it out to a third party. That's correct. The heat rate that was used in the benchmark for the market proxy was what was quoted by the counterparty at that time. So that was carried forward. So actually in the next part of the analysis, we look back. Sorry. Before we move forward, I think the city manager had a comment and then Council Member Duff. Yeah, and I think there's a couple more, I think, basic points here today. The first one is if you're going to have an EMO and a QEASY , we need to know how to measure it and what it's costing us. So our concern was is it truly saving us $13 million a year ? So that was one question because obviously if there's savings, we want to know how that's calculated, what industry standard is, and how we should be measuring it. The second thing is we're relying on a three-year-old quote that used a different methodology than we would use today if we put this on the street. So two very different points here. Again, I think it's a huge decision for the PV and the Council to bring this in-house. We want to be sure you understand how we're measuring it and we can explain it exactly what it's costing us as well to our ratepayers. So only this particular area represents a tremendous amount of responsibility. They mitigate risk for us, but we need to be able to tell their story if we're going to spend a few million dollars a year doing it. So that was the point of it if we were to try to cost it out today and bid the service against the private sector, we would use a different standard in order to get pricing from the market for you. So I think that's the point of today. It's not just that the savings were off. It's fine. There's still significant savings. I think it's something we can be proud of. But I also think that I'm not sure anybody internally could have explained and had documented the methodology by which we were measuring this unit, which is really critical given the risk this area takes on. So that was the point. And I think just kind of expanding on your point. Okay. Council Member Duff. Yeah, I'm trying to get a handle on this heat rate because, I mean, you're talking about it's based on natural gas, right? Any fuel input. Any fuel input. It's a conversion factor for any burned fuel to convert to electricity. Okay, because we're talking about probably coal and we're also renewables and everything. Yeah, so that would be the implied heat rate of an area or a region would include all generation types, all sources of generation. Okay. Okay. We'll let you get through the presentation. I'm just teasing you. That's all right. I promise to defer all the really hard questions to Mr. Met z. Okay. So just to retouch on this point, the quote that was provided in 2014 was for an on-peak heat rate even though the nature of the contract was to provide around-the-clock power. So the first thing we did to Mr. Gregory's question was check the basis or where that the premise for that quote. So we went back and did a historical analysis of forward heat rates for the years in question. And if the dotted red line represents the 15.75, which was quoted by the counterparty, the dotted blue line represents the results of our historical analysis, whereas the average heat rate was calculated to be 12.26. Now if you assume that there's some profit margin built in from the counterparty, which is logical to assume and proper to assume, then it gets back to maybe the point of what was the basis for that heat rate to be used as the benchmark. And this is it if you agree that an on-peak heat rate is the right benchmark. So the historical analysis, that figure is based upon, is that the wholesale market heat rate or is that retailer's heat rate? Which? Does anyone want to talk about the inputs to that? Yeah, so the inputs, it would be more of a wholesale view of it. Right. Yeah. So if we can go out and we can look and see what the market is quoting for power for some particular forward period, that's the data that we used when we collected that historical data and did the analysis. Okay. So if you question the assumption that an on-peak heat rate is the appropriate benchmark to use, what we then did was looked at what an around-the-clock heat rate on a forward basis would have been for those years. And that's that bottom kind of light blue line. The result of our analysis was that an around-the-clock heat rate for the years in question would have been closer to 10.1. Adding again a margin to that, so we rounded that up to 10. 25 just to kind of keep the math straight and added a 2.5 profit adder. That brought us to 12.75 as a benchmark heat rate that could be considered in terms of the analysis. I think it's important to point out that reasonable people can disagree as to what the appropriate heat rate should be for the product or the contract that you're trying to replicate. The answer is probably somewhere in between 15.75 and the 10.1. And I think to the mayor's question is going forward, agreeing on what that reasonable benchmark is, is probably the single most critical piece of the calculation that we would propose going forward. Councilmember Gregory. And you came up with the rate by looking back at what actually happened. Is that correct? It was the nuance on that. So the quote was provided in May of 2014. And so what we did is we went back and said, well, if we were in May of 2014, what data could we have collected? We collected the previous year of data and did the analysis on that previous year. And that's what informs that 10.1. Okay. Now, those two years have passed. So now you can look back and the data that you at that point where you looked back at the same time that they were doing their rate, is that accurate? The 10 point. In other words, if we were to go back and look at the historical heat rates for those years. Right. For the more recent years? Right. Hindsight. What does hindsight say about your estimate of what the heat rate should have been quoted at? So on the chart, the blue and the gray lines represent what it was in 2015, what it was in 2016, what it was in 2017. And what we see is those lines are all pretty bunched tightly. Yeah. They're all pretty, they're all bunched pretty tightly. So what we take away from that is, you know, they're very close to that 10.1. And historically, the heat rate has been very stable. Okay. What is the industry standard? What is more common, around the clock heat rate or on peak? So I think that the -- Heat rate to use in this. Yeah. What our recommendation would be or what we would typically see is the heat rate quoted by a third party service provider, an example or similar example of Denton, you would pick the heat rate that most closely matches the product that you're actually procuring. So it's not, there's not one clean answer to that question, I guess, is the best response is that the best way to do this is to look at the products that you would buy should you were being in the market to buy incremental power and match a heat rate to that. And it may be something like a weighted average. If you're buying 40% of your power off peak and 60% of your power on peak, then you can use a weighted average kind of approach to go back, use the historical analysis and arrive at a heat rate that most closely resembles what you're buying and when you're buying it. Does that answer the question? There's not one right or wrong answer to that question, I guess, is the challenge. Thank you. And looking back, had we gone to, you use a term counterparty, I've never heard that before, vendors, if we looked at other energy management vendors, we might have gotten some different quotes, some higher, some lower. And had we actually started negotiating a contract with the vendor that gave us this particular number, we might have been able to negotiate that heat rate down some. I think that's a fair statement. So it's just a number that was provided for us probably as a starting point for the discussion. Yeah and not having been part of those conversations, that 's probably a fair statement. It was the quote that you had at the time and that's been used as the proxy. So the question we raise and we raised it in our discussions is what should be the appropriate heat rate and what would the impact be or the change in the reported savings be depending on that heat rate you select, what would that be? We highlighted in yellow the rows that correspond to the 10 .25 plus the 2.5 adder and that would result in a heat rate benchmark of 12.75 with some profit margin in there. And if you agree that that's the right heat rate benchmark to use, then it would reduce the reported savings by about 7.3 million in 2015 and by about 6 million in 2016. I will say that we are not suggesting that is the right heat rate. What I am suggesting is that it's probably the heat rate that was used in the benchmark is probably high compared to when you consider the product that was actually contracted for or would have been contracted for. Councilmember Briggs. So this is more realistic is what you are saying. What we are trying to say is there is a range of outcomes, a range and changes of outcomes depending on what you all would agree would be the appropriate benchmark to use. In all of these cases I should also add that there are still savings above what was reported. The question is how much of those savings above and beyond what was reported and that largely ties back to the heat rate that is used in the calculation. So in both of these cases just continue to use the assumption that we used the 12.75 as the benchmark. So the adjusted cost savings for 15 in that scenario would be approximately 6.1 million in 2015 and approximately 6.8 million in 2016. So then the question we further asked was assuming that is the right number for the reported savings, what is driving that? And the result of our analysis shows that probably the largest driver of those residual savings are the costs paid for ancillary services and the qualified scheduling entity of the QSE costs. The quoted rates in the contract, again these are above and beyond the heat rate quote that was received was $5.25 per megawatt hour in 2015 and we ramped that up for some assumed growth rate for 2016. Looking back at the actual power procured that would result in a benchmark of $7.9 million for 15 and $8.1 million for 16. What you actually paid in those years you can see in the next row or the next column are again significantly less than those quoted contract costs. So of the 6.1 to 1 million reported savings or adjusted savings in 15 approximately 3.2 million of that would be driven by savings in ancillary service costs and QSE costs. So said another way by doing it yourselves and not outs ourcing it and paying somebody a profit margin above and beyond the actual costs you saved in our estimation 3.2 million in 15 and 3.5 million in fiscal 16. Go back to your previous slide. So what I'm hearing you say here is when you do the heat rate calculation it shows adjusted cost savings of $6.1 to 1 million. Now go to your next slide. So tell me I'm trying to figure out because the heat rate is based upon that times the fuel cost times whatever energy we're using. So here we got this 6.7 million and the contract is a separate thing saying if we're your QSE which we have to have one I guess. So if we do it it's going to cost you $8 million in 2015. The cost to us to have our own was 47,400, 205 meaning a cost savings of 3.2 million. And so you're saying then that's part that that is included in that previous slide 6.7 million. That's correct. Of that 6.1 million about that 3.2 that 3 2 3 7 is coming from the fact that you're serving as your own QSE and queasy and that you are paying actual market cost for ancillary services. Okay so then the heat rate that we're using in the contract built into that heat rate cost were there see this is what I'm almost hearing that we 've got a separate contract term for QSE services. Here's this cost. We've got a separate heat rate. Here's this cost. But when I see these two slides it seems like those costs are embedded in one another and I'm having difficulty understanding that. Does that make sense? Yeah I think it does. So let me go back a couple slides to the one with all the numbers. So if you look at the benchmark cost at the top that 46,878 million that's really comprised of two numbers. Okay. One which is the energy or the power. Yes. Which is the heat rate times the natural gas price. That's right. And then the other part of it is the the ancillary service and queasy cost estimate times how much power the counterparty delivered. So when we when we break those into two components we that 's where we get to. On this slide we can show that of the 13 and a half million or so that was reported as savings in FY 15, 6 and 6 million or sorry 7.3 million was related to the heat rate and another 3 million was related to the ancillary service and queasy. Does that make sense? No okay and and and if I'm the only one struggling with this I don't want to I don't want to get bogged down here. Now understood in your first slide where he said here's the total that in these savings is both queasy savings and heat rate savings. That's really what I'm saying. You've got your heat rate savings between 15 dollars or 15 and 12.5 or whatever y'all used 12.75. So there's some savings there and then we also have the savings from the queasy and qse services ancillary services. So to me those are two different revenue components that and so therefore there'll be two different savings components and what I'm seeing on let me look DMV cost savings heat rate bench rate adjustment. Okay let me look at this slide. Okay like on this slide here budgeted cost savings DMV calculated cost savings heat rate benchmark adjustments. That's where y'all took yours in. So the adjusted cost is 6.121 and you're saying in that number is included the savings for the qse and the yes okay. Let me try to say. Okay gotcha. So now I'm seeing it because you've got the DMV calculations of 13.4 total. Then you've taken out your heat rate savings. Now you're at 6.121 and that includes that. All right that makes sense. I just needed to what is that behavior style? I don't want to confuse. Y'all have that behavior. Remember that retreat what is that? I can't remember what that is. Annoying. Oh wow. All right. Just teasing. You will not get recognized the rest of the evening. So okay that makes sense. At the risk of complicating here's another way to think of it. That the three I'm sorry going the wrong way. The the 3.237 savings here is a component of the 13 million that was reported. What we're saying is the six point or the 7.3 that's just a change in the savings. So the three is included in both calculations. And what we were trying to do is just say that's still a big number where's it all coming from. And so that's a big component. Okay Council Member Duff. I guess the way I'm looking at this what we're talking about is going outside and having somebody control the electricity we buy. And the other is we have an in-house. And what's the difference in those two? Yes sir. Okay and and I'm not sure I get I totally get all of this. But the real savings it looks like to me is the fact that they're better controlling what they're buying energy for with the in-house. So I mean why can't the outsourcing people do as well as we do inside? What is the comparison there? Well the comparison again remember we're using that one contract quote as a market proxy. So potentially if you had more quotes there would be a different benchmark to use. And there's profit incentive on the part of a third party provider. So where they're assuming that risk on your behalf they're willing to do that at a certain margin in order to you know remove the need to have that infrastructure and those capabilities inside your organization. So they are assuming some of the some of the risk when they we have a contract with them to supply all your power. Yes sir. Yes sir. That's that's why they choose a heat rate that they they believe they can live with that includes some profit margin that they think incorporates the risk of a market moving against them. So how they derive that number you'd have to ask the third party service provider but that's generally how they would they would do it. They're assuming that risk on your behalf at a fixed price. Well you know what I got from from visiting you know the in -house is that they're purchasing electricity on like 15-minute intervals. So they're very flexible of where where they can save money . That appears to me to be where the real savings here. You know I appreciate all of this but I'm not sure I'm not getting from there to here. It may become clear as they move through their presentation . Okay. Okay. I think we covered this is trying to maybe restate what's been I think we cleared that where's that savings coming from. Okay so then if you'll recall the third part of the assessment was to look at the cost side of the equation. In other words what did it cost us to set up the Emo. What are the functions and the capabilities that we are providing in-house that were previously provided by the third party service provider the counterparty or the vendor if you will. And so what we did is we did a review of all those cost inputs and I will hasten to say that this is not a listing of things that we determined were not in place. But what we would recommend is a deeper dive into these areas to make sure that they are in fact in place at a scale that's appropriate to the level of transacting that's actually taking place at the Emo. And this is informed by our work in the industry and working with similar organizations that transact on their own behalf or hedge their positions. And we look at it in kind of through four lenses governance , people, process and technology. The governance piece of this really reflects all those the committee structure that you have to monitor and oversee the risk that's being absorbed and accepted by the organization. The policies and requirements that are in place to report and monitor and manage that risk. And it may also include some external functions around legislative regulatory compliance and legislative activities and that sort of thing. On the people side of the equation, we look at transacting organizations we break it into front middle and back office to kind of simplify the structure. The front office are the folks that are executing the transactions they are the ones in the market making the buy sell decisions of the power. The middle office is an independent risk oversight function that is there to ensure that risk is not being taken outside of the stated appetite of the organization and that they are not doing anything that they shouldn't be doing. And then the back office are the folks that are settling with vendors, settling on the accounting and the accounts payable with the ERCOT, the grid. We would, what you want to make sure is that you have an appropriate front middle and back office structure and that all of those costs are being accounted for in that comparison that's part of the benchmark. Council Member, Council Member, yes I'm sorry. Thank you Mayor. And I especially thank you for calling upon me after I made the rude comment. I'm forgiving. You are, you are indeed. You're talking about risk oversight and our appetite for risk. What are the risks? Can you enumerate those or what the major risks are? So we would look, in this type of environment we would typically see regulatory and compliance risk. So you're participating in a market that's heavily regulated and there's a great deal of oversight. So understanding all that and the changes in the regulations that typically come through. So with more regulations there's more potential that we might inadvertently do something that is outside the regulations and that puts us out of compliance in some way. That's a risk. Yep. Okay what else? We typically look at, and on the more quantifiable side we look at market and credit risk. So market risk is what would be the impact of changing prices on your position, on your exposures. So if you are, if you're short powering, you need to buy, what would happen, how much are you exposed if there's a price spike? Conversely if you have extra power and want to sell, what happens if prices are depressed and you don't recoup the full costs that it took you to generate? And does some of that have to do with purchase power agreements where you buy it at a certain price and you're gambling that that price is going to be at least overall what you would have done, the best you could have done and the price didn 't go down on you and you ended up overpaying. The other side is that you might have bought low and you know like some of the airline companies that locked in fuel prices and then they went down and then they were still paying higher prices. Yes sir. So as a risk management professional I tend to avoid the use of the word gamble but I think you're on point with the comment in that if you lock into a contract price, what you're describing is what I would maybe describe another way, the Monday morning quarterback analysis of should we have bought or sold at that price and that's an accounting or what we call a hedge loss risk where you have to recognize that we could have done better or maybe we could have done worse based on the price that we locked in. And so are there any other risks than those two major ones? Credit and counterparty I would say would be the other. So when you are in a market or transacting bilaterally or with another vendor or buyer or seller of electricity, you are either extending credit or having credit extended to you which brings along with it the possibility of default. There's the possibility in an exchange that you will be required to put up collateral so there may be some cash flow risks associated with some of the transacting that's typically a part of these organizations. Thank you. Okay. So I guess to sum this slide, we did I would say a review not a deep dive process analysis of everything that happens inside the EMO. So we would recommend and that's part of the recommended next steps as well is to gain comfort that all of these functions and capabilities are incorporated in the EMO and considered as part of that cost side of the equation. Okay. Here's the summary to recap the three pieces of the engagement and what we found. First being when we performed the calculation independently but with the similar assumptions and inputs, we found that there were no significant errors in the calculation or missing data points. We were able to re-perform the savings calculation under established that kind of starting point. In the second part of the analysis, the two main outcomes of that part of the analysis were that the main driver and changes or potential changes to that reported savings would be the heat rate that you build into the benchmark side of the cost of the benchmark side of the equation and changing that heat rate even slightly will result in a wide range and possible outcomes of the savings. And then the second piece, the second major outcome of this part of the assessment was that of those savings that you report, whatever that number ends up being, a significant portion of those savings are driven by the fact that you're paying market prices for ancillary services and you're serving as your own queasy rather than pay a vendor with profit for that. And then the third part of the assessment, we identified some areas that we would recommend you make sure are considered in the cost side of the equation including the governance. There's some technology costs that are typically involved in this. I didn't really get into but the systems that support trans acting and risk monitoring and measurement tend to be fairly complex and sometimes costly systems. So we would want to make sure that those costs are in fact reflected in the equation. - Council Member Briggs. - You're a little ahead of me and I was not quite ready for my question. - Oh, well. - So what I'm looking at and I've lost my thing here. So ultimately we thought we were saving around 13 million one year and it ended up being about three million and then the next year we thought we were saving I guess kind of the same and it ended up being around three million. So our savings were significantly less right here? - Yeah, if you look at the adjusted cost savings line, assuming that the 12.75 heat rate is the right benchmark, your resulting savings would be 6.1 and 15 and 6.8 and 16. - Oh, okay, so I was looking at the ultimate cost savings at the three. - Yeah, that's just the portion that's attributable to the ancillary services and the queasy. - So that's the separate thing that you were talking about earlier? - Yeah, I'll talk about that offline. I don't want to be called annoyed again. - Okay, all right. And so if you can go back to your slide, the three things that you would like to, the governance, the cost, those are things that may or may not have been accounted for and you would like to look in that and that could possibly reduce those savings even more if they're not accounted for. Is that what you're saying here? - That's the first statement, yep. - Okay, thank you. - May I go down? - Just to follow up on the software and other systems, so we're not sure, for instance, the SCADA system was like $800,000 all in for everything. We don't know if that's included in the assumptions. Is that what you're saying? - Yeah, we got some cost detail, but there wasn't, and maybe Timmy can speak to this, but the breakdown wasn't specific as to which systems were included in those technology costs. - Okay, so something was included in the expenses. - Yeah, that's right. What we have tried to identify is knowing, kind of given our experience in the industry, what are some of the technology costs that we would typically see, and one might be for a system that helps you quantify the risk associated with your transactions. Going to the question about market risk earlier, that's a cost that we didn't see in there. Doesn't mean it's not in there. It might just be embedded in some other element, but a deeper review of that would help understand that. - Okay, and then the second, or I guess the main question I was gonna ask had to do with slide 12 again, and following up on Council Member Briggs's comment, the $13 million savings was just for ancillary services or for a whole view? - That was all in, so that was the total reported savings, including savings on the energy portion, as well as embedded in that is the ancillary service and queasy savings. - Okay, so what other type of savings would be, I guess I don't understand what the other non-ancillary service savings are. - So I guess you're going after where's the remaining three and change million coming from, the difference between the 6.1 and the 3.2 that comes from queasy. - So it probably comes from just overall efficiencies and probably smaller components that would add up to that savings, which we didn't break that down into the detail. What we tried to find were the larger drivers. - Well, and the other piece is, remember, in the 12.75 number we talked about for the heat rate, two and a half of that 12.75 is related to profit that the counterparty likely built into that. So that's also part of this, the remaining 48% is, some of it is just profit that goes to the counterparty for assuming the risks associated with the contract and providing the city power. - Okay, so I guess my question for the manager and for council as a whole, when we reviewed the Brattle report, there was a low gas scenario that included ancillary services as a large portion of the profit and ancillary service savings was calculated in that 12 million if I'm remembering correctly. So I wanna be able to tie this back into some of our assumptions about the different scenarios that we could face with the deck because it sounds like there's some variance and understanding that it's a heat rate calculation that accounts for a large portion of that, I get that. But that's what I'd like to understand. - There is another study going on right now, enterprise risk. Actually they've done a very high level review of this and tend to agree with Deloitte's assumptions. So I think that made us feel a little bit better. But part of their task is twofold. The first one is to help formally develop the renewable debt and strategy for the council that's going to be deployed. And once we get it memorialized, that's gonna be a huge part of that. The second part of it, which is gonna take a little bit longer, is going to be the answers to your questions. It's basically a recalculation of the pro forma based upon what they're seeing in the market, the way that the deck would be used, the way that the ERCOT, I keep calling it credits, will be recalculated. Because if you recall embedded in the question you just asked is that the credits back from the ERCOT market were in theory through the purchase power were in theory offsetting the debt service payments. So that is their scope is A, we need a formal renewable debt and plan put in place with a strategy that you all sign off on and PUB signs off on, which will include diversification of renewable assets and they're working on that. And then B, once we have that plan in place, they can have a thorough discussion about how the ERCOT market works, we'll be able to revise our pro forma for you. And I would anticipate that's probably going to be first quarter or two of 2018 because there's so much up front work that needs to be done. Any other questions? Yes. So it seems to me that this whole thing was done for two reasons. To find out if, for us to better understand how we were calculating savings and if those calculations were reasonable and accurate. The second question was are we saving money, saving the rate payers money by taking the function of energy management purchases in house as opposed to contracting them out to a third party. So when I'm approached at the grocery store or the restaurant or at church and people say so, I don't understand this heat rate stuff. Is DME doing the best job they can for us in terms of purchasing power? Would it be safe for me to say that we're saving money by using right now, our past two year history says, that we did better by having this function brought in house than had we gone and hired a third party to do it for us. We saved money. Yes. So I flip back to this slide maybe to help answer that question. And the reason we wanted to come up with a range of possible outcomes was to maybe get to that question. So even using a very low assumption of the heat rate, so kind of one extreme of the calculation, by our analysis the answer to that question is yes, you're still saving money. And how much we saved really depends on what kind of factors you use to determine that. But in any reasonable set of formulas, there was some money saved, exactly how much is up for some discussion. I think that's a correct statement, but I would only add to that in the periods that we analyze. Sure. And you're going to, and you also suggested at the end that we probably, and the manager said that going forward, we probably need to, because this is old calculations now and there are probably some better calculations to use in the future. Yes sir. So I can flip to that and finish my remarks and happy to take any more questions, but we would recommend that as a next step we do exactly that. So as EMO and the council and VUP agree on what is the right benchmark to use and the inputs to that benchmark such that there's reliability in the calculator, the reported cost savings. So agreeing on what that proxy is, is what we would recommend as the critical next step. Go ahead John. Excuse me, if you can turn back to page 13. The $3 million savings is provided that all of these things were in place or are in place. Is that, would that be a fair statement that you weren't able to determine if all these items were in place? That's correct. It wasn't part of our scope to do a deep process analysis to confirm that they're in place. What we would recommend is that in order to provide comfort to the board, the council and to management that we are, we have identified the risks that we've assumed by bringing the EMO in house and that we've got the right level of infrastructure to monitor those risks. And then the cost associated would be reflected in the calculations. So the suggestion would be to make sure that all these are currently in place? Yes sir. As we move forward. Okay. Yes sir. And that would be the second of the bolded recommendations here. And then the third one, just to wrap it up, and there was the question about what risks have we introduced from Mr. Gregory and performing an analysis that would, where it's quantifiable, identify that and in other cases, they're more qualitative risks. So that would be the third potential next step. So by bringing this in house, we've mitigated some risks. What risks have we assumed in order to mitigate those risks ? Council Member Briggs? I'm in favor of all of these three as next steps. And I think that our risk assessment is extremely important going forward because 6 million difference is considerable from what we thought and what it actually could be depending on the heat rate. So I am in favor of the extra analysis and assessments. Thank you. So moving forward, the key is going to be, make sure I understand this. What we used in this analysis was the contract price for both ancillary services and heat rate. We had a number, here's the contract, boom, here it is. We had to come up with a heat rate that seemed a little more plausible based upon historical data, 12.75. That's where half of those savings were, the other half were in the ancillary services. In essence, is what I saw. So, but now that we have, and I'm assuming that part of the , well, never mind, strike that. But if we have our own generation capability with the deck, which those engines have, and I don't know what it is, and it's probably proprietary information, I don't know. They have a heat rate that's associated with them. So I would think that that would be helpful sort of from the opposite end in that we're going to have to guess at what we think a contract price would be unless we actually put out an RFP, which I don't know if I'd suggest that. We're going to have to guess what a third party provider would pay us, but as far as guessing what the market heat rate is, we have a little bit more reliable based upon if we need to generate our own power. We know what we can calculate what that heat rate is. Is that, am I understanding that correctly? Yes, sir, I think that's right. It's probably a good starting point because the deck, as I understand it, could serve some or all of the load requirements depending on the time of day, time of year. Those periods at which point you would need to go into the market for incremental power, that might change the appropriate benchmark heat rate to use, and it would maybe raise it from where the deck is generating. Okay, yes, against me. Building on what you were saying, Mayor, we now have several long-term, 10, 15-year purchase power agreements for renewable energy, and we're looking at a minimum of 70% of our energy coming from those purchase power agreements starting in 2019. We're also looking at generating our own electricity that's going to cover about 13%, maybe more, maybe less. So that means that only about 15% of our energy is going to be purchased by an EMO. So when your portfolio is only 15% that's in the more volatile market of buying at peak times or other times, does that lower your overall risk profile when so much of it is in long-term purchase power agreements and then you're generating your own? Does that reduce, while there's risk, is the risk as great as it would have been otherwise? Potentially. Some of this I would defer to the discussion that's gone going around the asset, the generation asset plan or the portfolio plan that's working on it, Mr. Heilman mentioned. I think the other part of the answer to that question might come in a risk assessment, which once that forward portfolio is better defined and the potential to be, if you're 15% or whatever the percentage is that's not addressed under long-term contracts, understanding how that could change would be essentially the outcome of that risk profile work. So understanding how much of your needs are going to be at the whims of the market and how you manage that, which would be obviously under the pur view of the EMO. I would also say that even the management of those long- term contracts and what you can do with that power is under the purview of the EMO because even though it's locked in you own that power. So that would involve in us selling that excess power that we might potentially. Okay. I think you were covering some of the things, this is going to be a whole new ballgame once we get that our own power. And the long-term contracts, those are going to be pretty tricky because one, two, three years from now we don't know what the price of electricity is going to be out there. At some point in time I still think that Texas is going to get virtually almost 100% on solar and it'll be a while. But as that solar gets out there the prices are going to come down which will drive the wind farms down too. And it's going to be a whole new ballgame starting next year. And I think our own facility here, once we get our own power on board and we've got 70% of renewables already purchased, it's already in our hands, then now we're going to be seller of electricity. And I think that's where the EMO is going to be important. Just to take away on, in essence, from the budgeted amount of savings for years 2015 and 2016, in essence, your presentation said you might have missed that by about half. I mean from 13 million down to six something for 15 and then 16 from 12.8 to about 6 million. If you agree with that being the right heat rate. Right, right. And that's really, that's really, I mean, so this isn't a science even moving forward. I mean we're still making only our best guess at what the heat rate is which as you've said is the main driver of these, this savings calculation. That's what makes it so difficult because then you have to make sure that the data you're using is somewhat reasonable to be able to make that assumption. And as far as Texas being solar, right now I think, is Jessica still in here? No. I'm doing a presentation and I think right now in Texas, what are we, anybody, is it 1500 megawatts? It's very, very small. So there's a long way to go and also the sun only shines, you know, it's about three o'clock is when those, that capacity starts diminishing. So to me the critical part is how do we measure this moving forward? Because whenever somebody says, hey, I'm going to save you money, I really anticipate we have a pretty strong idea of this is what it was going to cost us, this is what we're paying for it and here's the delta. But from what I've heard from your presentation, the this is what it would have cost us out in the market isn't necessarily, it's tight maybe to about a, what would you say, 85 to 90 percent kind of, you know, accuracy. I mean, because a heat rate, you miss that by one dollar. That's huge. I mean, if you look at your chart, I mean, go plus or minus either way. It's it can evaporate within a buck and a half or two bucks or it can just explode, go in the other direction. Okay, any other questions for, yes, Council Member Hussbett . Kind of a different take on it for Mr. City Manager. As they go forward and analyze processes, needs, that sort of thing, I would like to know and not today if you don't know, but what is the analysis to make sure we have the right team in place, right? So assuming we continue the path we're on, do we have the proper skill sets employee wise to whatever if they find additional regulation that needs to be met or that sort of thing, whatever new information comes from their next analysis, I 'd like to know what that evaluation of the current team members that we have to meet those if there's any misses, what's in place to kind of subsidize those needs. It's something we're definitely looking at as well as the forward looking strategy. And we've also been having early conversations with Enterprise Rescue that helps actually manage, queasy's manage these types of facilities for several other utilities moving forward. They're very skilled and knowledgeable about the ERCOT market and so that will be something that we definitely stand top of. It's a good point and it's an important point that that proficiency be there. Any other questions? Thank you. Thank you gentlemen. Very much appreciate the opportunity. You have one more? Sorry. Right. Is council in agreement on this going forward? All these things? I just. Yeah. For clarification on that. I think they were planning on doing that anyway. We are. Brian and I are continuing to discuss the strategy moving forward. I think one of the areas that we're concluding is that I'd probably like to have a partnership of Enterprise Risk who operates in ERCOT market and has direct experience obtaining quotes and actually pricing that service. Work with the team from Deloitte and we've really found huge value in having both of their expertise to where we're getting that secondary opinion on things. So we feel a whole lot more comfortable today than we did a few months ago. Great. I could just offer a little bit more detail on that. I think there is some potential overlap with what we're doing with Enterprise Risk on this risk profile and hedge strategy assessment component that's proposed by Deloitte. I definitely think it needs to be done but we're doing some of that with another partner now. You're going to get a presentation from them next week to talk about the status of where they are and how they've been performing and what their general observations are. So we'll come back to you with the scope of work of what we think we need to do for Deloitte and Enterprise Risk to accomplish all these objectives. I think the point is all of these things in our mind needs to be done. I think I'm hearing from the council you want to pursue that as well. Just the right mix of consultants we use to get there. So you're in agreement with that. We'll continue down that path. Yep. All right. Thank you. Any questions? All right. Thank you. We'll get it. Thank you. Thank you. Agenda item number B. Receive report, hold discussion, give staff direction regarding FY 2017-18 budget. Okay. Thank you, Mayor. I just have a brief presentation for a few changes to the budget that we continue to make as we're going along the process. I wanted to mention these and get the councils okay. We're getting near the finish line another week to go. In terms of in the electric fund, I wanted to let you know we've recommended eliminating an FTE, the external affairs manager in the public information office that individuals been transferred over to a function that covers that city wide including the electric fund. Sponsorship funding, which is I think on your agenda for next week and has gone to PUB. We're recommending reduce that from 100,000 to 50,000. The 50,000 is about what's been spent over there with the electric fund when you back out anything related to the city. So if the council's okay, we'll do those two things in the adopted budget. Also wanted to let you know that we've recommended to move the funding and supervision of a group of four employees that was in the electric fund and under that supervision to the technology services fund, the four individuals and the operating costs . So they will report to our technology services director, Ms . Kraft. Do you have a question, Councilmember Briggs? Yeah, it's did we increase our funding for the greensense rebates? This do we know? I'm just curious because if the sponsorship funding, I mean , I don't know if there's a transfer, but 100,000 to 50,000, I mean, if instead of just going away, if that money could be transferred to another area of increased funding and neither. Jessica Rogers will have a presentation, I believe it's next week. They actually increased some funding there by reallocating existing resources. So we'll be able to explain that. I can't tell you exactly which programs right now, but we 'll be able to explain that a little bit better in about a week. But the idea, I know that we are looking for areas to continue moving that, or expanding the funding, not cutting it at all. Well, yeah, I'm just curious. I mean, if it was going to be reduced and there was that money already accounted for in the budget, if there was another place that that could be increased, if you could just look at that. We will. Thanks. Okay. And so that in terms of that third bullet, there won't really be a change to the electric fund because they'll be still charged and a cost, a transfer from the technology services fund, but those individuals will be moved over and those expenses to the technology services fund. Chuck, what's the genesis of that? I think it's just like if you now there are individuals that are technology services individuals that are dedicated to the electric fund, but they're under the supervision of the technology services fund. And these four individuals handle kind of the GIS function, which is a function within technology services and just felt like they should be supervised under that direction and incorporate their skills with what's already over there in technology services. They will still remain physically where they're at, at their offices. Which just really that the supervision is going to be under technology services. So the moving of them under technology services, which has other individuals who can do GIS, there's not an opportunity to, you know, I don't want to say contract, but if you've got four people moving over into an area that's doing the same thing, you're saying that those four that the electric fund needs for GIS people with that is the your question is the is constantly being explored. So the idea is if in fact there's attrition or duplication of service, we will address that at that point. But that is that is exactly the type of rationale for moving them. There's in just to answer Councilmember Briggs question, I pulled up the green sense budget presentation from yesterday's PUB real quick and the funding has been increased from 500,000 to 600,000 for next year. 90,000 that increase for the solar rebates and 10,000 for the efficiency rebates makes up that hundred thousand dollar delta. And there is one recommended change and I'll give the detailed numbers on this in the next slide. In the general fund, we're recommending to eliminate one community improvement services officer that's become vacant, but we are recommending the addition of the EMS captain in the fire department. That was one of the supplemental packages that was not funded. I think the fire department and the city manager have had additional discussions on this as we move forward with the communications officer as we move forward with another medic unit this supervisory level is necessary in the fire department. So in terms of what that looks like in the numbers here, I 've got the two in red are the changes in terms of recommended expenditures, where we eliminate that one position, add the EMS captain, the change in fund balance is still positive. So we still have a little bit more in revenues than expenditures with that change. So the CIS position that is proposed to be eliminated is vacant. Correct. Currently, how long has that been vacant? The position has been officially vacant about three weeks. The person that was in the position has not been working the position for about three months. So we've had about three months worth of data on whether or not that position was necessary. Okay, so it's no longer necessary. Correct. We won't be losing any kind of work in the field. That was the assessment that was undertaken. We had an individual decide to retire on that position and believe that the current workload can be sustained with the level of service they have now, the level of staffing rather than they have now. Okay, thanks. Mayor Pro Tem. Going back to Councilwoman Briggs's comment about the electric fund and the change from 100,000 to 50,000, I would like to see an increase to the efficiency side of the Green Sense program. So if we could allocate those additional monies to efficiency, I would be in favor of that. So that would, I think the incremental move was from 200 to 210,000. You're saying increase it to 260,000? Yes. Okay. Are we going to have a presentation on that next week? We certainly can. Well, yeah, I just, I mean, we're talking about all these numbers. I'm not sure what they are. I mean, unless we've got a DME budget, we can go into close . We can certainly take you through a very similar overview to this for the electric fund and talk to you about what those type of changes would mean. I would like to see that. Okay. Because we got rebates, we got all kinds of things at this. So yeah, I just wanted to see. Generally, we had scheduled a pretty sizable drawdown in the balance of the electric fund. 2017-18 was the last year where we're paying off the TMPA debt. And I think, let me tell you what the drawdown was. So with these changes, even with the one position, we'll just simply have a little bit smaller drawdown in the electric fund. But what was in the proposed budget was a drawdown of about 7.361 million in the electric fund revenues to expenditure. So with that change, we just simply reduced that drawdown slightly. With what change? The $50,000? Well, also the elimination of the position. Yeah, but I think what I was saying was Mayor Pro Tem had said, hey, can we just move this $50,000 savings over to a specific part of the budget? And I was saying I'd like to be able to talk about what are some other options on that. So not to say I'm not for that, but I just don't know what other options may be available. Okay. We can put it in a very similar format that we just showed the general fund went in so you can have that conversation and what was initially proposed versus what it would look like now. Sure. The advantage you've got this one is Chuck continues to refine it every week. So, but we can show we initially showed them versus what that change would mean. Council Member Briggs. And on that with a comment with the TMPA debt, is there a closed session presentation or something with an update on that debt and the pay down of that? I'd like to. We can certainly do that the council would like. We can schedule we've had the agenda item posted each week for the DME budget and we can certainly provide you a quick overview of that as well. I'd like a refresher. Thank you. Is it? I believe we've provided some of those that debt information to the council previously. It's open information. We can certainly bring that back and it may be part of another discussion. We could certainly provide that for you. Be happy to do that. Yeah. If we can bring back the DME budget, discuss this, we can also do that. Open session. Yeah. Yes, Council Member Hutz. Thank you. I'm just gonna make my run at the transfer to downtown. The $100,000. I understand everyone's position. Just want to speak to that if I may. Is it? Yeah. Okay. I thought we had something specifically on that coming up. Okay, go ahead. I just I wasn't sure. I'm getting my agenda item next up. Yes. No. And so just while it's here in the save time later, the just of it is and my apprehension to removing that is I dug deeper into the current ordinance that outlines the steps for these monies. And I think to remove it outright for lack of a plan, it's just we'll do something else is my understanding. And I won't. Well, I will. So I've outlined 16 bullets are qualifications or steps required to fulfill that money. And it's all new projects, an existing project or a legacy projects that doesn't qualify. I think it levels the playing field when I hear this this council talk about there's only certain people, the same people downtown or it comes up in conversation. I think this is an opportunity to level the playing field and we're removing it again with no plan. And I think the one of the benefits is that it requires the applicant to expend the cost first and then be refunded that money. So they they take on all the costs, all the responsibility and I'll just go over the the community input that goes into it. So and you tell me where you where we've approved something that has this much community input. So there's the economic development program administrator that has a role in it as needed. The Texas Main Street Center architectural alliance program has a point, a role, economic development partnership board, the downtown task force, the city council city manager, the applicants are required to participate. And so I think when you're talking about all these entities and then even if you don't want to spend the money, you can you can we can say no, we ultimately have that authority. But I think to outright just remove it for the sake of nothing. When you have an ordinance that that is I rarely see anything this concise as far as steps and so I have copies available. I email staff if you'd want to take a look at it before you proceed down this road to remove it. But I'll tell you using this as weight against other decisions we've made a lot of impaling comparison and I think again to say we have a weighted document that is well structured and we're going to remove it for nothing is worrisome to me . I think if we're going to remove it, what's the point? If we're going to say hey, we're going to come up with some plan date certain, I can give you a list of things on this on the agenda today that didn't work out that way where we kick the can down the road. It's cost more. We didn't think that was going to happen. We didn't anticipate that happening. And so I think to do that here is a mistake. I think it serves the outstanding template going forward. I'd love to implement some of these things in some other programs. I mean, it is just well written. And so I just put that in place to say if there's six institutions in this city, boards, commissions, etc., that have a hand before we say yes or no , and we're going to scrap that for maybe is that that really bothers me. I mean, it just bothers me and I don't know if there's much I can do but just make the record that I think this is a poor decision because we do have that oversight. If we just let it stack up, that's fine, I think it serves as a great model document for how we want to proceed involving the community and putting the responsibility on the community and having those different stakeholders as we're trying to say we want more involvement from our community. This is a great symbol of that. But then if we were to just do away with it, what kind of message does that send is my concern. Thank you. I have a couple of questions on that, if I may, because I hear two issues that you have or there's two questions that I have. One is you're talking about and I'm just going to say this fund and all these I'm assuming these are groups or something that have some kind of input or approval process within this particular fund, these six or so that you just listed or 16 or however many you got. Okay. So that's one of your concerns is or not concerns but observations. We have this downtown economic development, is it reinvest ment fund? I'm not quite sure what it's called all the time, which is funded at a certain level. So all these different organizations have some kind of touch point with this particular fund. So that's one thing I hear you saying, which I don't know if that's necessarily a bad thing, not necessarily specific to this fund but any other funds that we have out there. We have other funds that my position in this issue hasn't ever been that somehow we have a bureaucratic structure in place that analyzes this. It's that the money was specifically allocated for the downtown area. And so the whole conversation at least to my understanding has been do we want to continue that, not saying that so somehow we're saying these other people aren't important. But to me the initial question is do we want to do something different than that? And what I'm hearing you say is you don't because we don't have a if we say we're going to eliminate that funding. What are we going to do with it in the meantime? If we eliminate it, do we have a plan to do something else with it? Is what I hear one of your questions are. Question is. Okay. I just needed to make sure because I mean we'll discuss this in more detail as it comes up in the actual individual agenda item I think because we 've got one today don't we? Yes. Okay. So I just wanted to make sure that I understood because I see it as two different observations from you. One is do we want to eliminate the fund? And then part of that maybe underneath it is why do we want to eliminate the fund when we have so many of these other people who have a touch point and we don't have the plan moving forward? Is that somewhat? Yes, sir. So that that component though I would capture it as stakeholder and community input. So even if you give it's it's it's gives them a small say so and what goes on downtown because there's different people that make up those boards. And so in downtown it's it's pretty a pretty good space. But so yes that's how we characterize it is we're inviting more activity and not. Extinguishing that or saying we're going to to recall that is how I would capture it. And and the the other point other points kind of is is not so much. I say the area but it's not the area is of size. It's not as small as one would think. But I also think what I'm trying to hit it is there's a lack of diverse business owners downtown and you look at the brewing company that had to they requested funds because they had some some trouble getting going. So I think there's and I say different names. So the new the new restaurant going into is the same restaurant of this of that. And so I think that it's a small number but I'll tell you so I pulled up this article and so from the palm tree they say it helped them get their son on their show. So I think when you're talking about different trying to get different ownership in our in the general downtown area I don't I'm not going to tell you twenty five thousand dollars bankrolls an entire business. But I think if you're if you're lean it helps. And I think I'm trying those that aren't lean don't need to help. And I guess these are all good questions. This we have a specific agenda item for this and I know Caroline is about to pop up out of her chair. So I really want to take up this more specific discussion when we hit that agenda item because I mean we could do it now. But Caroline I think I don't know if you have a presentation or not. I just yes go ahead. I've brought up the agenda item because really it's an it's an accounting rule that the council has to pass an ordinance to so it has nothing to do what he 's discussing. No it is that item. Oh that item it's the downtown reinvestment fund and there 's an item on your regular agenda that would eliminate the hundred thousand dollar contribution annually to that fund. So we don't have a work session on that. It's just an action item out there. It's an action item. Okay fair enough. I thought we had a work session on so we can we can discuss that now. Yes because it's part of the budget. Yes go ahead. Yes. What I'm hearing council member Hudspeth talk about is the program itself. The downtown reinvestment grant program and the structure and the process that is involved with that and that's something that you think is solid the program itself. So what you all are talking about is how the program is funded and whether or not to continue to dedicate those specific funds for the program. Now if you don't have funding at all you don't have a program. But I think the funding issue that Chuck is addressing with you all as an accounting issue is one thing but the existence of the program itself is something else and there are some alternative mechanisms that have been discussed to fund it should you choose not to fund it the way it's being funded currently. Does that help? Sure and there is still funding in the fund balance. Yes. If we don't budget the hundred thousand dollars. So that's a very good that I appreciate that that comment. That helps me understand that it's not so much also the funding it's the program. In other words we're not saying this this budget item out in the city council meeting is not saying we're doing away with the program. We're saying we're going to not fund it from the general fund and then we have other discussions that we've already identified that may provide funding for that program through either the TIF or some other things such as that. Yes. Okay. Thank you. Is that helpful? Yes very much. And but I still think it sends a bad message to not fund it as it's been going because I like like she said the structure is phenomenal. If you've had not revisited I suggest you do so. It's a great read. It's easy read but it is it's a it's a true meritocracy. You've got to earn what you keep. You got to keep it for a year. You can't change it. You get I mean it really does hold this the applicant's feet to the fire and allows them but says if you do what you say you're going to do we'll participate. So I think having it come from the general fund as it has sends a great message but I understand. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. I appreciate that. That's very helps me clarify that. So any other questions or comments about what Councilmember Hussbett brought up as far as that this issue this particular issue. Yes Councilmember. And then we'll go to Councilmember. My plan this this evening when the item comes up is to move to postpone a vote to have no transfer of general funds to the downtown fund because I don't want to cut off funding until I know that there is another funding source that has been agreed upon because if we cut off the funding from from this source and then we cannot come up to an agreement on something else then then we have killed the fund. And so so so my my intention this evening is to either move or to second or to vote for postponing a decision on that to tonight's meeting because I'm not going to vote for that until I know that there's another funding source that 's agreed upon. All right. Customer. Well if I remember right from our previous conversation on it there's currently a balance of about one hundred and six thousand in that fund and I'm not sure if we even funded it last year. I think it was even skipped last year. So you had carryover for quite some time and I believe the discussion was about moving it under the TIF so that that would free up one hundred thousand dollars worth of general fund money that eventually could be used more for potentially a police officer dedicated to downtown or something like that. It's very difficult to fund out of the TIF things that we might think about funding out of TIF that are are difficult or would require rewriting the ordinance that this could automatically get funded from TIF and allow us to fund other things with that the general fund revenue. So if it requires moving the ordinance that that explains how to get those funds and in goes through all the steps maybe that's something that needs to be worked back into the TIF for special fund right there. But right now one hundred thousand a year's I believe the maximum that we do in payouts and we really have it funded for the next year. Yes. No. And Council member Ryan touches on the very essence right. So we're we're opting to remove something with structure the reinvestment. We're going to remove that because it has structure not because but it does and take that money to the TIF which has no structure no buy in and and less processes in place less accountability. And so that to me is is backwards thinking. I mean it again I guess you should probably read it to understand it. I wasn't here last year so I couldn't really speak to what the decisions made then. But I think for me it I would I think it's a having reviewed it it is a great tool. It just is. And I can I'm happy to stand alone on that. But this in this instance the rare occasion in Councilman Gregory agree I mean it comes it swings around so it's outstanding. But I think for me though I think it it it absolutely is to to take something from a system with structure and move it to a system that's haphaz ard at best that we've all kind of had our own concerns about the TIF funds. It just seems counterintuitive to me. I mean it just but again I'm willing to be in a minority on that but that I don't think that changes the facts at hand. And again I'd welcome you to read the document. So thank you. Okay so and this is where I'm getting confused about what you're saying. So I envision here's the program. All right. Now the program is getting a hundred thousand dollars coming from the general fund. All right. To me the question isn't if we change the funding source the program is still the program. Let's say the funding source changes from from the general fund is no longer sourcing it or the mixed beverage tax to the general fund. The TIF funds it. Now you're just it's just money. It's just the funding. The program is still there. It's just where is the source coming from and what Council member Gregory is saying well I don't want to agree to anything because we haven't established this other leg yet of funding. So if we take away the funding it's sort of left there with a hundred thousand dollars in it in the fund balance which we can fund it for a year and then Councilmember Gregory doesn't want to do it but then do you decide later on to fund it somewhere else. So the program at least to my understanding and I don't care how the vote goes tonight. I'm just trying to say that I know I don't think the vote tonight is saying we're doing away with the program. It's not changing the funding source or removing this particular funding source in my mind is not saying we're going to eliminate the program altogether. We're saying OK we're changing where that money may come from because I've always argued why are we still putting money in downtown. We still have a TIF. We still have it at the same level. So why are we using general fund money that can go to other places in our community outside of that line when we can use the money to fund that. So to me it's just a funding issue. It's not a do we want the program to go away. It's do we fund it here because the TIF it just puts the money in there so that whole organizational structure you're talking about that you're really impressed with that stays intact. That's not going anywhere. It's still there. So that's but so the real question for the council is whether it's tonight or next week or next month is is where is it funded from. Now if it doesn't get funded from anywhere then you're you 're right. Then the program got it. And thank you. So that clears it up a bit. But for me again I think I do if I if I understand it right we're the only one participating in the in the TIF. So I mean there's some additional revenues in there obviously. But I think all that comes from the general fund and then the growth as well. So it all is we're talking about generally the general fund across the board. No no not from the TIF. The TIF money that is above the base level all that tax increment has to be spent within that circle of the detail or whatever we're calling that the downtown TIF area. So that's I mean the general fund for the base amount the general fund is still getting all of that. That's whatever that was. Rightly so because we have a ton of expenses outside of this little downtown circle to pay for. But anything above that stays sequestered love that word stays sequestered within that particular area. So that's one of the discussion points of why do we even have a TIF because it's all our own money. So but that's I mean we're not here to necessarily decide on a TIF. But yeah but I understand what you're saying. Yes sir. I have a question about this discussion since there seems to be people who don't want to vote on this thing tonight and that's a hundred thousand dollars we're actually counting on right here. And I see that to fund an EMS captain is a hundred and sixty five thousand dollars. So if that transfer to downtown tonight item is not voted on is that a hundred thousand dollars that we have to eliminate so we will not get a new captain. Like I'm just trying to relate this back to the budget presentation. Is it built into the is it built into this budget this this line here. So the thirty two thousand dollar change in fund balance includes the additional hundred thousand from the there it is right there. OK. Yeah. Yeah. Which means the fund balance then you'd be drawn down the fund balance about sixty eight thousand bucks. Correct. OK. So we'd still have the if council decided on we'd still have the EMS captain and the elimination of the CIS position. But instead of the change in fund balance being positive it would be a negative sixty eight thousand bucks or something like that. OK. Thank you. Yes. May I pretend I'm sorry. And if we were to fund the fire captain position out of the reserve wouldn't we be funding a recurring position out of essentially a non recurring amount of money. If it were that one but there's some other one time expenditures included within the total general fund. So if you wanted me to look at what's the total one time expenditures at the general fund there's some others even a portion of that is a one time expenditure. OK. Any questions. Because we don't know what's going to happen tonight. So yeah. Yeah. I just wanted to clarify that whatever we do does affect our conversation right now in some way later on. It does affect that bottom line that change in fund balance . Yes. Yes. OK. A couple other items just to bring the council up to speed. As you remember some of the one time money from the current year was budgeted for three new signals that are listed there. We've had some discussions with text out and we believe that they're going to fund a significant portion approximately half of that eight hundred and forty thousand dollars. Once that funding is finalized from text out we'll probably come back during the year after the budget's adopted and have some additional discussions if they'd like to reallocate whatever savings we have from text out doing that toward one of several other programs. But wanted to make the council aware of that. How long will that official decision. How long would it take to hear officially whether they're funding that or not. Mean ballpark six weeks eight weeks. I'm looking at one of the individuals that's visited with them to do that ballpark. We within six months and I think we'll be in the first quarter of next next calendar year. They move quickly. We would like to. I'm just. He didn't. Yes. I said that's quick. Come on. Yeah. That's quick. Next steps on the budget tonight. There's two public hearings one on the tax rate and the regular public hearing on the budget September 19th. Next Wednesday we'll come back with four budget items that are listed there and we'll also come back with an amendment for the 1617 budget for the general fund to allow for the extra revenues that we've had for those one time expenditures and just let you know the electric fund as we stated in the quarterly report will come back with an amendment for the electric fund when it was budgeted last year. It was budgeted based on the sale of the TMPA plant occurring which did not occur. So we have more TMPA debt service than was initially budget ed. So there'll be an amendment for expenditures of the electric fund. Any other questions? With that I'll look forward to this evening's discussions. Good. Thank you Chuck. I'm not sure what that means but thank you Chuck. Hey let's we've been going for almost two hours let's go ahead and take about a five or ten minute break. All right wanted to welcome everybody back to this meeting of the Denton City Council on Tuesday September 12th 2017 it is 2 o 2. Moving on through our work session reports we'll move on to work session 3C. Receive report hold discussion give staff direction on the design schedule for the proposed reconstruction of Fire Station 3. My name is Mark Nelson director of transportation I have under other responsibilities I do have facilities management so we work with various client or customers throughout the organization and I'm here before you this this afternoon to kind of tag team a project and that is the Fire Station 3. I'll be working with Chief Palsgrove to bring you forward some information and before I get started I did want to indicate or introduce a couple of the team members with us here this afternoon. We have before let me make an announcement first we did have to Councilmember Briggs did file the proper paperwork for recusal so I apologize Mark for that I missed that. Thank you. Very well. So with us this afternoon we have Chief Hedges Assistant Chief Hedges on the design team with the fire department Herman Lawson our facility and our facilities management he's project manager and then we have David Robinson with Kirk patrick Studios who and he has a number of his design team members with us this afternoon. So again what we wanted to do is bring back this particular project and information design status where we are place and time we brought information to you back in April and essentially wanted to allow the council the opportunity to weigh in at various stages of the design level as well as weigh in on some of the costs associated with particular design elements. So what we're doing this afternoon is Chief Palsgrove will kind of walk through a little bit about the initial design plan and service level for station three and then I'll pick it back up walking through some of the construction elements and design elements associated with that and cost elements associated with that and then we'll provide an opportunity for you to weigh in on almost different options and again the costs associated with that. So with that Chief Palsgrove. Thank you Mark and thank you Mayor and Council we appreciate your interest in this and we're anxious to partner on a project that we can all support and feel terrific about going forward. In 2013 and 2014 as the fire department began working with the citizens bond review committee and with the council in preparation for the 2014 bond election we prioritized the replacement of two existing stations fire station three on McCormick and fire station four on Sherman and Kings Row. Now that was largely in some ways based on the condition of those facilities both were almost 50 years old and one of the stations station three had significant structural issues with the slab and affecting some of the structural wall components but one of the other reasons that they were prioritized was for utility reasons. You'll recall that in years past station four had to have a renovation done to the doors such that it could accommodate new fire engines. Station three is a very small station at capacity so you had an allocation of existing emergency resources that wasn't based on a professional data analysis of changing and dynamic demand but it was an allocation of resources based on what facility could hold an apparatus and where could you house the staff. In fact there was ample justification to propose a medic four at station four in years past but the existing station couldn't accommodate it. But when we went to work with that citizens bond committee and with council at that time on new station facilities that would also be in existence for another 50 years we did a reasonable projection of where we'd be going in the future. So we proposed and our council and council approved and our citizens approved a scope for station four that included housing for medic four even though in 2014 medic four had not been proposed or funded. And the same is true with the scope of station three we identified the need for an additional aerial ladder apparatus in our city. We have a single elevated master stream appliance rescue appliance a ladder truck. That's been identified as a significant resource issue for us and that was validated recently independently by the insurance services ISO study of our emergency services. Now while it's identified as an efficiency we've worked together on establishing priorities. So you haven't seen it as a proposal over the last three years we've been focused on the most cost effective way that we could address response time in our emergency medical growing call volume area of our business. But when we were talking about designing a facility for the next 50 years it was absolutely appropriate in our view that what we present to the citizens bond committee what we present to council and what ultimately went to voters was a scope of a station that would accommodate a second truck company. So that's what you're seeing in that design. And so what we proposed was a larger facility that would house not just the existing units but would also house an aerial ladder apparatus. And we've also proposed a police department office at the front of this station. This is the site as it exists today. And what you're looking at here is the if you follow the pointer this is the existing station. Over here is the site that used to be the taco cabana. We don't own this property. Our property begins in this location here and this was the old Royal Inn hotel that we purchased. This gas station will stay on site until the second phase of the IH35 expansion. What we're proposing and have proposed through this design is a station that would that would in which we would close down this section of McCormick and extend our property across here. And I've got another slide that I'll show you that that proposes and shows you how that would lay out on that property. I wanted to mention at this point that the decision that we made to purchase this Royal Inn property has had an impact certainly on our overall budget. And we'll have a discussion of that that Mark will present as he talks about where the dollars have been allocated so far. But this is something some of you may recall and others perhaps not. It was a purchase that we made in May of 2016 and we had several discussions about it in months before that. Because it was real estate acquisition those discussions were in closed session. But one of the things discussed because this was a significant purchase of 1.7 million out of the total project budget. And that's something that we had a lot of a lot of varying views and ultimately decision that we made with council to go ahead and make that purchase. There's obviously some some very very good points made about about taking a piece of property that's a very in a great location that's a very valuable piece of developable property and potentially taking it off the tax rolls and using it for city purpose. In this particular case after evaluating a number of contingencies and a number of different options what we presented to council was our strong conviction that it was absolutely critical that we not leave this site so close to the University of North Texas one of our absolute target hazards that we also needed to be close to IH 35 that that represents for us a man-made barrier with limited number of access and egress points. But from this location we could do north and south access on IH 35 East and we could also get around to IH 35 West. So that became very very critical. The points I made at that time that I want to stress right now is is that while it's absolutely important to be respectful of of the taxpayer resources that exist because of our our bond election that those are one-time dollar expenditures the significant cost of this fire station and any fire station is going to be our staff and that is the cost that is our operating costs that exists every single year and usually escalates. So while it is my strong view that taking that staff and housing them in an area where they have limited access and limited utility with an impact on response time represents a false savings even if it saves us money in the short term on the initial purchase of land. Those are the points we made in the discussion and council ultimately decided to make that purchase but that significant purchase of property the 1.7 million has had an impact on our budget. This is how the the proposed project lays out. What you're looking at here with the blue line is the piece of property that we I'm sorry the red line. The red line is the piece of property that we acquired. The blue line represents TechStats proposed phase two right away. That's the phase two project that would eliminate that gas station from that site in the future and it would also encroach on some of the property that we 've already purchased. As this lays out it lays out over the existing piece that we propose to close with McCormick. You've got a front side here. In the back side you have gated secure parking for staff and over here and you can see it underneath the shaded portion. This is an area where our current station three exists. This is an area for guest parking for our police department parking for their office. It is also an area of disability parking with disability access through here and all the way up to the front door. Yes, Councilmember Griggs. Could you point out again is it the blue line that is the right of way for phase two for I-35? Yes, it is and the red line is the piece of property that we purchased. Gotcha. Thank you. As I indicated the original scope that we presented to the bond committee, to council and to our voters anticipated a station large enough to accommodate the aerial ladder truck. But it is not currently funded. So what we wanted to do was prepare some options, some sc opes for you that talked about other ways that potentially we could accomplish this. One was of course to build the additional scope. Others include phasing this project for a short term initial savings. Chief, if I could make sure I understood what you just said . The budget that was in the bond program was not the one that included the space for the aerial. Is that what I heard you say? Or it was? It was. It was, but you said something is not funded. I thought you said it was. The ladder truck in the staff is not funded. Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay. But what was proposed to voters was a station scope that would accommodate the ladder truck. Okay. Thank you, sir. And do you have a slide that shows the ingress/egress from the station or would it be off of this slide? I think we can get an idea of that here. Okay. So your ingress is through the front here? Oh, I meant to McCormick Street or to the highway. I mean sort of. But if you got another slide. Yeah. So where is the road? Where is McCormick? I know it's okay. You've got a -- That's the road you're closing. Yes. Right here is the road that we're closing, the small piece. And down here you access off to the larger piece. Gotcha. Okay. So if I take you back one more slide, you get a better -- I can show you better. So here in this area here is where we would be coming out. So you're going across to the main McCormick Street. To the main McCormick. Just cutting across where the current drive is. Yes. Somewhere over in there. Okay. All right. Thank you. So scope one is scoped as it was originally proposed so that it could accommodate the aerial ladder. However, I want to point out that this is not the square footage that was initially proposed to the bond review committee. One of the things we've done after our initial experience with our staff now having worked a few months in fire station two on McKinney is that our fire department design team has come back to us with recommendations of where, in fact, we could effectively reduce or reallocate square footage and still have a very safe and functional fire station. It's hard to do that from a drawing, but they're living in it right now. And they've given us suggestions that reduce square footage in the day room, which is also the training room. They've identified savings of reducing some square footage in the fitness room and also in the officer's quarters. We've maintained the kitchen at the same size as in station two and in station four because the projection would have twice as many staff members. So that's not an area where we thought it would be appropriate. But what we proposed here in scope one does accommodate the aerial ladder truck in the future, but it also incorporates the areas in which our fire department design team has said we could make some reductions. Now the cost that you see up at the top, the $5,875,000, that has been produced by an independent estimator, not within the city and not within our architectural firm, but hired by the architectural firm as a part of our contract. And it's a very independent estimate. It comes in just under $365 a foot. Now this is an estimator that we've used before with a great deal of confidence. And so it represents a starting point for us to do evaluation of the different options up and down that we'll be talking about today and we'll be talking about the next time we come before you. I think it's important for us to point out at this time my non-expert view as we went through the station four process that it wasn't simply a question of the important points that you raised, Mayor and other council members, about whether it was appropriately designed or over designed or whether there were areas in which it could be appropriately reduced. One of the things we went up against, in my view, was just the competitive market. We did not have a competitive group of bidders. So as we go through this process together and talk about relative ways in which your choices can have an impact on the ultimate cost of the project, we won't know the ultimate cost of that project until we go out for bid. We also know that we're facing some unusual situations with our hurricanes that may impact the availability or cost of certain products and supplies and certainly may also impact the competitive availability of contractors. But this is a third-party estimate that gives us a starting point to make our comparisons of our scope discussion. Scope number two assumes that we would have a station in the future that would accommodate a truck company, but it gives us the short-term savings of phasing this project. So what you're seeing here in the shaded areas are those areas that would be added in a future phase, but you've got a station that would currently accommodate existing equipment. It would require the second phase in order to accommodate the truck company. Now, that's a timing issue for us because as I pointed out earlier, had Station 4 been able to accommodate Medic 4, we collectively would have determined to put Medic 4 in sooner. So making a construction project that may have to be bond- funded coincide with a unit allocation is an inexact science, but it absolutely can be done to provide the short-term savings that we propose here. We're showing about 1,875 square feet as what would take place in a second phase of construction. Now, I want to point out that phase two and phase three that I'll point out to you have not been evaluated by the independent estimator. He worked with us on phase one, the full project. So we're using that $365 square feet to give you a relative comparison. Of course, there are economies of scale as you get larger, and every square foot in a project wouldn't be the same. We can make an assumption that a square foot in the truck room would be a different savings than a finished out section of the facility. But this gives us a way to make relative comparisons of the choices that you have in front of you of the value of doing a phase project versus the complete project. Question. Yes, sir. You mentioned a phase three. A scope three, the next slide. Okay. Is there additional square footage in scope three? No, there is not. Okay. So I'm going to stay here. Okay. So if I remember correctly, the last slide, if it was the full station, full configuration, was it 16,100? What was it? 16,100. 16,100. So you've got about a 800 -- 1875. Okay. But what I'm saying is if you add the 1875 to the 13 -- you 're at 15,332 square feet. So there's a difference there from that first slide of about 800 square feet. So where is that 800 square feet? Yes, sir. You're saying we need to -- No, I need to come up to the microphone. Yes. Mr. Mayor, I'm David Robinson with Kirkpatrick. That 800 square feet, when we did scope two and scope three , we did take some additional square footage out of the watch and the lobby. When you do a phased floor plan, you're never quite sure when that phase is going to be built. So we used some of the visons to reduce some square foot ages there in the back vestibule that we could easily add back in to scope two and three. So this is my question. If we go back to the first -- this is the aspiration, which is the first slide. All right? Yes, sir. Which is 16,100 square feet at $360 a foot, 5/8 something. First of all, to do the phase work, that's not worth it. I mean, if you look at the cost per foot to add that additional 1,800 feet, it's a million bucks. You're talking about $100 or less a foot. So to me, it's okay. Personally, I'm okay with this one. So my question is, on this one, if you -- the other one showed 15,333. This one shows 16,100. The other one got us to this configuration, except less 800 square feet. So if you were to take 800 square feet out of this to get it sort of similar, would it have come out of those same spots? Yes, I will say between scope one and scope two and three, we did move in offices quarters to the end of the hall, which is not ideal. In scope one, the more centrally located, which I believe did add some square footed. Okay. So -- okay. All right. That's helpful. I just wanted to -- go ahead. Yes, there is some square footage we think we could reduce out of scope one. I'm not sure what that is. That's this one right here, scope one, 16. Is this scope one? Yes. Yes. So I believe there is some square footage there, but it's not -- It's de minimis. Right. Yes. So, I mean, it'd be silly to build the smaller one and then go add it later, which is always more expensive. Always, always, always more expensive. We know that without -- there's no way for us to project at an unidentified time in the future when we build it what it would cost, but there's no question that phase one plus phase two would be much more expensive than constructing it now. And you get the same -- you're paying less per foot because you're not paying $365 a square foot just to add additional concrete or to do the things that we would do in the expansion when you do it all at once. So, you know, I would not be -- I would not be for breaking this up into different phases. If we're going to build it, let's just build it. And we can maybe figure out on some of the costs later on. Yes, Councilmember. Just -- thank you, Mayor. Just a couple of questions on -- that you have there. I see some rooms, and it looks like maybe overnight sleeping accommodations. There's several for the firefighters, but down at the end of the hall, there's one called Ride Along. What's that? There is one small space that is not equipped in the same way as our firefighter quarters. Part of our partnership of maintaining our paramedic cert ifications and part of the way in which we do our continuing education requirements is that we have a partnership with some of our education facilities. As part of that, we allow -- we allow their students to be a part of our medical program. It's a very beneficial partnership for us. Sort of like an internship. Yes, sir. In an internship. Okay. I see a captain's bunk in the captain's office and then a chief's bunk in the chief's office. Is the chief -- is that a battalion chief? Yes, it is. And how many battalion chiefs do we have at each shift? We have one on each shift. So you're -- and currently, the battalion shift chief -- wow, I better be careful how I say that. Careful. The battalion guy is housed where? Housed at station one. And so where you're proposing, moving the person from station one to station three? No. No. We're projecting that as this station is built for the future, that this will house our second battalion chief and our second aerial ladder truck. It doesn't impact the truck room bay. It simply impacts the addition of the office. Okay. When do you project -- is filling a position like that, is that five years out, ten years out, three? I would project five to ten. Based on our discussions collectively, I have always prioritized the significant need that we have for direct contact resources, which have been our medical units, which would be additional engines as we've talked about, land banking for stations. So that will be our priority over the next several years. But the station, as we indicated, is being designed for 50 to 60 years. And can you explain to me what the use of the vestibule is up there in the dormitory space? It's north of the captain's office. It's by the price tag. Oh, here. There you go. What happens in there? So as these plans have been developed, I think in scope two and three, we've refined that space. It's a transition space where you often have radio chargers , our clipboards. That serve the base. And it serves as a thermo break and a break for pollutant control from the populations that these guys serve and the places they go. It's a place to knock stuff off their boots and to control those aspects. Okay. Thank you. Quickly, then, I will show you the third scope that provided the greatest initial phase one savings. It is exactly the same as what you saw in scope number two, with the exception of the fact that we have reduced from four bays to three. Thank you. This is exactly the same as the previous slide, but we've reduced it from four bays to three. Now that's significant when we talk about the phase two because we cannot go back and add a fourth bay in between these two structures. Now it is possible with the three bays to accommodate the existing units and to accommodate the additional aerial ladder truck. It does require the stacking of first line apparatus, which is not recommended for response time and safety purposes. We stack apparatus in a number of our stations that you will see as you drive by, but what you are seeing stacked is a front line unit in front and a reserve apparatus being stored at that station behind. This configuration of reducing from four bays to three to produce the greatest amount of phase one savings and the phase two savings, because you would eliminate it completely, would require stacking of front line apparatus, but it could accommodate not just in phase two, it could accommodate the additional truck company. So make sure I understand this slide. Total square footage of 14,000, I'm just going to say 14, 000. So most of, but this is including, like if we were to take phase one, the big thing. Looks like you're taking, if you eliminate that other bay, that's how much square footage? That bay is 18 feet wide by 75 foot clear, so say 78 feet. 80 times 18, 64, 6, about 1500 feet on the high side. I'm an architect, not a mathematician. Somebody do 80 feet. Yeah, I think that's about right. But that's primarily concrete. Right, it is the least expensive of your. Yeah, you just have that little extra for your trusses, for your roof, but it's primarily concrete. Right. Okay, all right. Well, if you have no further questions for me on scope, then Mark is going to talk a little bit about the design elements and some of the choices we have available there. Thank you. I do have a question for you, Chief. So, on this particular slide, when you say stacking is not ideal, on scope one, go back to scope one. So, here we're not stacking. No. So, we have, what are those, medic units there that are sort of ones facing one direction, ones facing the other? Yes, these are representative. One would be an unstaffed brush truck or an unstaffed unit. In this particular case, the unstaffed aircraft fire rescue vehicle. But it is not staffed, so you wouldn't have two staffed front line units stacking. Okay. So then, if you go to the scope three, I'm just trying to understand the stacking. If you go to scope three, then you're saying that if you had additional apparatuses that weren't, as you call them, front line, let's say another truck, it would have to be put behind one of these, and you're saying that reduces response time for the front line or for the reserve or what, help me understand how that. If you have two front line apparatus that are staffed. Gotcha. And they're stacked. Okay. And the alarm is for the rear unit. Or because one of the things that we're working to do to also impact response time is to introduce a tiered system into our EMS unit where some low acuity type calls could be responded to by one fire apparatus instead of two. So if the alarm came in and was designated for the unit that was behind as opposed to the unit in front, the stacking works well when all units respond as a task force. It's a response time issue and can be a safety issue if you 're stacking front line apparatus. It can be done. Okay. Well, and so I guess my question is in not knowing fire operations, you're going to roll your eyes and go, this guy obviously doesn't know what he's talking about. So it looks like you have a front, an exit for them and an entrance when they return. And I believe on, yeah, they show them here on this fire station too. The bi-fold doors, which were the ones where you go out, and I think you had the big overhead doors because you don't need that extra, you know, that fast response time to come back in. So if you had things that were quote unquote stacked, you still need to go out one way. And I mean, like if somebody went out one way and when they 're coming back, if they had to back in, I guess is there never a protocol where you basically can go out either way sort of on an initial call? Yes, there is. Yes, there is. And it is again, it does depend on the bay room doors. It also depends on what your access points are, whether you 're moving more into the neighborhood coming because our rear entrance here is through a street area that we've just recently been able to stop parking because it's been such a hazardous way for us to get into the station that way. So, that is the point at which we believe we can safely use for non-emergent slow traffic entrance, not for high speed traffic exit. So we see in this particular case all emergent response coming from this direction. Okay, great. Yeah. All right. Thank you. Very helpful. Thank you. Any other questions for the chief while we have him up here ? All right. Thank you. So now we get to talk a little bit about brick and mortar and systems and structural items. So essentially what you're looking at here, and this could be applied to each of the different scopes if I understand correctly. We're focusing on scope one from on each of these. So this gives you an idea of a more traditional brick or m asonry approach. And this is actually included in this base bid on the 5.875 . What was our bond package budget for the -- 8.62. But that included the land, I guess? Yes. Correct. And Mark has some slides. Okay. All right. Go. And so this is more of a contemporary design here. A little more glass and iron. It does have some masonry to it. This has an increased cost to the base bid of about 270,000 . What I would tell you is the design team from the fire department, they were more in favor with the traditional masonry. This is more in line with what you see at station two, what will be the final product at station four. This again, the reason we wanted to take a look at an option like this is that maybe it ties in a little more with some of the more contemporary structures that are being built on University of North Texas campus since this is in that particular neighborhood. Mark, could you go back to elevation A? Yes, sir. So this is the, whatever color that is, the color that's at the top, the sort of, not the Wayne's coat, but the other. There? No, the side panels. The orange or the red or yeah, that. Is that stucco brick or is that concrete block that's painted? It's brick. One of the, it is synchro sees of the soft, the soft software is on that plane where you see those three side windows. It gets too tight and so it doesn't show the lines, but it 's all that pumpkin brick that you see, see at U, U, U and D. Okay. Thank you. Oh, Mary Pro Tem. I don't know where I got this thought, but I thought that for fire station three, there was going to be some type of incorporation of the UNT logo or UNT colors because of how close it is to UNT. I don't, I could just be imagining things. Sorry. I'm sorry. I don't, I don't know why I'm thinking of it. There were some talks of when this first began outside side of us about that, that I don't think quite. Got it. But I will say we were tasked to use the university as our president. And so when they said we kind of want to tie with the school, that's why we've got two distinct looks because we said, which one? I mean, we're going to ignore the stuff in the eighties and the concrete stuff, but the old stuff is beautiful and the new stuff's great. And so we chose to kind of have two distinct looks that you guys could choose from. Yeah. To me, that very much looks like the architectural vern acular that you would see. I don't know where I came up with that word. In the main building and in Matthews Hall and a number of the buildings that were built, I suppose in the fifties and sixties. So to me, it fits with a lot of the campus. Anyway, I was hoping for something more along the lines of look of McDonald's, but I don't know. Council member Duff. Yeah, we do have tornadoes in this part of the world. And if I look at that second one, I kind of wonder, there might be some safety issues that may appear. That was part of the discussion that the design staff had along with some of the operational concerns associated with the cleaning of the windows, so on and so forth. But obviously it'd be tempered. But again, this is one of the reasons why, as I understand, this is a recommended elevation name. So the next item is really where we get into a little bit more technical discussion here where we talk a bit about foundation. We took a look at three different options and really kind of were at a position where we would really throw out option two, which is off, which we believe that there just might be a little bit too much movement associated with that. So really focusing on option 1A and 1B. Essentially where 1A comes into play, where the slab would actually be on the ground. And so there would be some level of opportunity for grounds well to manipulate that foundation nominally. But we think it's within acceptable or tolerable limits. Because the option 1B is preferred by the architect and certainly it's a much stronger, more robust foundation. So with that, those are really the two different options that we were looking at to move forward. The option one -- I'm sorry. I'm surprised that we're being given those two options, just given that it -- my understanding was it basically depends on what the soil tests show. I think they already did that. Have we already done the soil test? Yes. And the soil test say option two is not recommended because of the amount of contrast that will be between dry and wet? So being good engineers, they won't say recommended or not. But what they will say is the amount of risk with that, of movement with that structural system is really beyond the norms that you would see with this type of structure. And does option 1A include any kind of soil amendments of going in and taking it out and layering it in? Yes. So option 1A is dependent. One I want to say maybe two feet of fill. I'd have to check the report. But it's then dependent on the compaction of that fill. But it's still basically resting on the piers that are going down. The slab is on the soil. The structural components, the walls that support the roof, that's all on piers that are great beams on piers. So the structural components, the load bearing walls, the cot columns, those all go down to the piers. How many piers on the option 1A? I mean -- A bunch. He's not a mathematician. What you're saying is this is my understanding. You've got your slab developed. This is a slab on grade, at least option 1, with some piers . So you've got your exterior beams and then you have your beams running through the middle. And then at each intersection of those points you have a pier that's -- I don't know how far deep they're going down. The bedrock's I think 25 to 34 feet on this side. So the slab is -- I mean, yes, you have some of the slab that is maybe got ground level under it as compared to option 1B, which is the -- what is it, box void or something like that. Yes, the void. But I mean, most of that as far as either settling, if it's going to settle, you're depending on those piers that are down to bedrock supporting at each one of those beam intersections. I mean, it's the heaving that the piers won't prevent. And I've got an engineer here who can speak to that a little bit more. So is this vertical movement up or down? Yeah, if you'll come to the -- Yeah. The typical interior slab would not have pier and grade beam under it in the areas -- the picture up there -- in the areas where the offices are, the bedroom area, sleeping areas. That would just be grade supported slab typically. But okay, well, I know you don't -- I know you've got your grade beams on your exteriors. Correct. Under the masonry. But you've got also grade beam -- you don't have any grade beams going through the -- I mean, you just have grade beams on the exterior perimeter of that? Typically like on this type of job, if it's a grade supported slab, yes, it's just the pad prep, over excavation, moisture condition soil is going to support the interior slab. That really stuns me because even when I build duplexes, we have grade beams going through the middle and grade beams going with piers underneath it. So I may be misunderstanding what you're saying. Well, when you say you're talking great duplexes, you're talking about very light structures, residential type structures. In the piers you're talking about, maybe go down 10 feet, which really don't do anything to support any uplift. And for vertical load, you're still relying on the soil to support most of that structure. This is not residential type construction. So there's no grade beams on the -- how thick is the slab? Four to five inches for a typical office area. The apparatus bay areas would be a thicker slab. Sure. I think there's a bit of confusion. Yes. There would be grade beams if it was on studations two and four. That's a metal stud construction. Those walls were load bearing. There was one mid span. And so under that, there was a grade beam on piers. Right. Okay. I'm sorry. Yeah. If it's a great load bearing wall, it supports roof structure, yes, there'd be a pier. If there's a column coming down, there would be a pier under that. When you say there's just not a pattern of ribs -- That's what I was asking. So even underneath the bay area, it's just a solid slab with no -- If there's no column on it, if there's no load bearing wall , it's just a slab. Okay. All right. Okay. Good. Thank you. That's helpful. Any additional questions on foundation? Oh, I'm sorry. Yes. Well, just so I can be up to speed, what is that fire station for? That's the -- That's the new one. That's McCormick, right? Say 1 or 8. 1B. 1B. Yeah, I think they've all been 1B so far. Yes. Is that right? Set seven. Oh, behind the mic. And station seven, two, and four have all been structural slab. So this takes you through some of the different costs associated. We've talked a little bit about the base bin showing at 58 75 with the 1A and then the elevation, which was the recommended. Moving down, the other -- one of the other options would be on lead certification. Really what that would be, there'd be -- there's a design component associated with that to the tune of about 86,000. What that really dials into is actually doing all the certification work, being there to record each of the components associated with lead certification. What I would tell you is that the 2015 energy code, which is what we're using right now, will essentially -- well, it actually does -- it exceeds the lead standards. We just don't get the certification of being bronze. But also in part of lead certification, you have recycling type of parameters you have to hit. And so there's some construction component costs, I believe , associated with lead. About another two -- one and a half to three percent. So if you average that out at two percent, you're looking at maybe, you know, each percent based on 5875, you're looking at roughly 60,000 per percent . So 117, 120,000. Okay. All right. In addition to this, we know that this is a fixed on the design component. So yeah. So you're saying there'd be 102 percent of 6 million is what? 120,000? Is that it? 2 percent of 6 million? Correct. So it'd be 200,000 for lead certification. Correct. Okay. So here we are. This really just kind of walks through the different expenditures today and the estimated costs. Again, using that as we roll down to that baseline cost, again, looking at the 16,100 square foot scope one with the recommended or the acceptable 1A foundation along with the elevation A, which would be the brick or masonry. So one of the things that on the station four and burn tower transfer, you may recall that there was financially backstopped station four. There was a transfer of roughly 1.1 million to that particular project. And then to advance the burn tower, there was another transfer of 172,000. Of what? Of 172,000. So we took money from the burn transfer, burn tower fund to backstop station four overages? We took funding from the station three bond amount and back stop construction of station four and then the burn tower. And so what we do have right now in the current budget, proposed in the current budget, is the sale or the reimbursement, the sale of the COs to reimburse that 1.175 million. Okay. Are you ready for recommendations or do you have some other ? Well, here just looking at the policy questions here on the left side. If we could, I have a question still back on that slide, the financial component. So what I'm seeing is if this is, this is the total is 9.8 million with the land acquisition design costs. Station number four burned, in other words, we're putting that in somewhere. I'm trying to figure out what is the actual cost for this project. Do we take out the 1.27 million from the 9.8 and that's what the actual building plus the land is costing us? Correct. Yes, my apologies. That's unclear, but that is correct. So that's, what is that? 8.6? 8.6. Okay. And what was the, what was the bond issued for? That's that number here, top right, 8.62 million. Okay, so we're on budget with these assumptions for station three. For station three, notwithstanding what the market will bear. Okay. Once we get out to, once we do final design and start the bid process. Okay. Okay, I'm sorry. Go ahead, Dalton. Well, he needs to do an understanding. Yes. Okay, so here again to your question, I think, Dalton, we 're looking at policy questions which would be scope one, scope two, scope three along the left side, and then the elevation or facade in our, with our design team and staff is looking at scope one being a recommended scope under elevation. Certainly the masonry is what we talked about earlier. Again looking at peers and structural, which would be that 1A and then depending on the approach with the lead, we believe that going with the existing building code with the 2015 energy code, we could meet or exceed the lead standard and certification on that. I think the only question I have is scope one is at 16,100 square feet. Scope two was with the delayed addition of the other thing, we were able to get it in for about 800 square feet less. 15,300. Is it possible to do scope one and find a way to save some square footage that we found in the savings in scope? Yes, it is. We'll continue to refine that with the architect and we'll do everything we can to do that. What I would recommend is that we look at basically scope one to see if we can trim some square feet that like we did, we're able to do with that finished out scope two. Use the masonry exterior and use the preferred peer, peers with structural slab for the additional $190,000. The only way I'm going to go with that is we take off the lead, which is $86,000, and we take the $120,000 that's extra, the construction process , which is $200,000. That basically gets us our structural foundation. So I'd much rather put $200,000 into the building than put it into a piece of paper. I'm with you. Okay. All right. I wasn't here before and so I solicit your input. I'm okay with a number. The vacillation worries me and the fact that we just went through, I've not heard anyone speak to what caused the delays at three. So I guess that's my chief concern is to give me a number and then say six, eight months later, oh, by the way, it gives me more pause than I've not heard anyone touch on what happened at station four, the delays, and then also what assurances are we able to have with the going forward? I know there's no such thing as guarantees, right? But what guarantees do we have in place, right? So if we have the new construction model, we just built this station, so I would think we have some measurables to hold someone accountable and say when we send this out for RFP, here's our expectations, here's the number of days you have because we just did this, right? So it's a great, to me, a great lab rat for here's our new process and here's how we're going to bid it and hold people accountable. That's the biggest thing for me. I just don't want to go into something blindly, not understanding that life happens and not -- there needs to be some buy-in from whoever is awarded this project that they're going to -- you know, we're all going to kind of weather any bumps in the road together. That's just my thought. >> Understood. So very quickly, if I may, I think the question may be -- I thought I heard the delays on station four, but were you referencing station two? >> Yes. >> Okay. >> Two, forgive me. Sorry. >> Back to your comment about life happens, part of that was with the extreme wet spring that we had in 2015, that really undermined the -- from the very beginning, as we tried to move forward with drilling the piers, no sooner would you get it dried out, we'd get another inch to two inches of rain. So essentially what that did is it undermined the schedule from the very beginning and then it created issues with the contractor with his subs subsequent to that. And so clearly there were some management issues associated with the contractor moving that forward quicker, which we would have liked to see move quicker, but nonetheless the undermining issue was the weather associated with that. And so that's why I need some insight, right, because my -- I'll plead ignorant to that process, but, you know, and I'll just -- I'll make -- this probably is way too unsophisticated, but so you go to Walmart and you buy milk, and milk -- they don't say, hey, the cow was slow this week, so we had to -- I mean, it takes something extreme. You know, weather I think gets factored in. I just want some -- I don't know if we can get it, but I just want some buy-in, right? I just want some -- we all suffer from weather, but the city shouldn't have to -- if we're writing the almost $10 million check, we shouldn't also be holding all the responsibility on our end. I think there needs to be some buy-in, some motivation for the construction company to say, hey, we have deadlines we need to hit. We've got to -- I need some incentives built in. Personally, I would like that they then feel the pressure as well. If weather's a factor, then they shouldn't be comfortable saying, hey, it was just the weather. I think there needs to be some additional buy-in. So inherent incentives and penalties potentially? I'd like it, yes. You'd have to -- Well, my understanding is right now that in terms of a deadline of getting the new station done, we're going to be operating out of the old station until the new station is finished. Is that correct? That's correct. We do have another slide that has a schedule. So I think that we don't have quite the same kind of issue of if the station doesn't get built by such and such a date that we're going to lose revenue all summer from whatever like we did with the water park. I'll tell you when you're talking about life happening, given the level of rebuilding that is going to be happening in South Texas and the level of rebuilding that is going to be happening in Florida, Louisiana, there's for sure no guarantees because you're going to have some issues with getting subcontractors. You're going to have issues with material cost because of supply and demand issues. So this is -- given those two natural disasters that have happened, you know, this is not the best time to be embarking on a big building project, but it's what it is because of the circumstances that we're dealing with. So all of us remember that when we open the bid prices because it's likely that we're going to have fewer companies bidding on it than we did when we had the original station two bid and it's likely that the prices may be higher because of all those factors that we're dealing with. And I think that's the key, I think, to one of your concerns is first of all it's going to go out to bid. You're taking LEED certification off of it. I think you will see you might get more bidders because I 've heard that people just -- I mean, contractors almost have to hire additional personnel to help with LEED certified construction. So we'll have at least a bid. Now the key will be when that bid comes over, that's really where our discussions are going to happen. It's not like -- that's why we went through this process because the process before it was just brought to us about here's the cost, here's what we've done, and we sort of were -- didn't really have a whole lot of maneuvering room. Here we'll get some bids and they will factor in all the issues that you're talking about. We talked about a policy for liquidated damages on certain contracts just a month or so ago that I think that will be something that would probably be part of the RFP. I mean, I think we're going to try to include that in different contracts. Who was the contractor for Fire Station 2? Was that Smoltz? Smoltz. Okay. And they were the contractor for I believe also the wave pool and the concession stand. Okay. All right. So anyway, we'll probably get I think additional bids and we'll just have to deal with those as they come in. But the good thing is we'll have the bids. We're not committed. We just have to as a council make some policy decisions. If they're way over, what do we do then? So what we're looking at -- I understand you've had an opportunity to take a look at this, really just keying in on a couple of items here. In December we hope to bring back roughly a 90 percent. In your backup material I indicated we were about at 20 percent because we looked at some of these additional floor plans were really closer to a 40 percent range right now. So you'll see a 90 percent roughly is what we bring back in the December time frame and then finalize that out based on some additional direction or input from council and then move forward with at this point in time a targeted date of March for building permit which then followed through that process would put us in an initiate construction in September/October time frame. So a couple questions on that. Because I know last time when we had the -- which was the fire station where we sort of changed this process? Was it four? Was it four? Where it came and it was -- okay, it was fire station four. Because I know on fire station two I think there was six- inch concrete almost throughout the whole thing, if not five or -- and whether it was full concrete block construction or whether it was metal studs and I don't know all the -- and those affect the cost. So I'm not quite sure when you had them -- when we had this bid price, I know we've got 190,000 for the structural slab which I believe is the -- is that where you put the boxes in and you have the void and -- okay. And then I heard that the concrete in the -- so when you have a structural slab your concrete is thicker throughout the whole thing. Is that correct? All right. So is it a base bid concrete filled cinder block or I mean on some of it and then brick on the rest or is it metal studs? Is it -- what are the -- Yes, the base bid of the elevation A are both. The bays are the 12-inch C-mu block that we use both for its durability and its structural strength and then in the living quarters probably it's going to be a steel structure with metal stud in fill. And then so the exterior and the office structure is not the bay area. Those exterior walls would be metal -- would be steel framed and then you just do the brick or however you connect the brick. Exactly. Okay. All right. Good. So that concludes the information that the staff has to present at this point in time if there's additional questions. I'll certainly be happy to do that. But again, I feel like we've got a level of direction at this point in time to look at scope one. Try to reduce that as we move through the process using the preferred -- the architect preferred foundation on that on elevation A which is the m asonry. Bring that back in the December time frame. Find another opportunity for council review and consideration. And then again, removing the lead component out of that. So when you come back, if you're able to mitigate some of the square footage as Councilmember Gregory had asked, then we would also have -- are we going to get a renewed base bid for that? Okay. All right. Any questions? All right. Thank you very much. Great presentation. Thank you all. Very good presentation. Very good process. If someone could grab Councilmember Briggs. Okay. All right. Let's see. When did we -- when did we take a break at that, too? Okay. All right. We'll go on to agenda item 3D which is Receive Report, Hold Discussion, Give Staff Direction Regarding the Vela Soccer Complex. Good afternoon. Emerson World Director of Parks and Recreation. Because I'm with Parks and Recreation, I come with a set of prints, not an entourage. So -- That's what he's saying. Do you really want me to say that out loud? Sure. I'm going to take every risk. We never seem to wind up with quite as big a budget as FIRE does. There, I've said it. Okay? What I'd like to do is talk to you today about the Vela Soc cer Complex, talk to you a little bit about the history, the hurdles, and some potential solutions for this project to get construction started on this one. One of the things that we've seen in Parks and Recreation is that to date, we're okay with the number of fields that we have for youth, whether that be baseball or soccer, where we have traditionally been lacking, and it goes back even to this concept in 2005. We don't have enough lighted adult fields. Adults, obviously, or most of them are working during the day. They need lighted fields so they can play in the afternoons or in the evenings. This concept goes back to 2005 in the CIP. The original plan was to purchase 16 acres from DISD out there adjacent to the C.H. Collins Stadium, put in three lighted fields, put in a soccer -- sorry, put in a restroom concession building. The thought was that we could use the parking out there that had already been constructed, save some construction costs. Pretty quickly realized that that site was actually the detention area for that parking lot and that property, and vertical construction was not going to work in that area. Oh, yes. So was the plan abandoned after we purchased the acreage or before? We never purchased the acreage. That was the plan and never came to fruition. Well, I saw 16 acres purchased in past tense. I'm sorry. That was typo. So we walked away from that plan and started looking for additional property. In 2008, we had a request from some of the folks on council at that time to look at some additional property at North Lakes and to pool our resources with the police department. And I'll use the cursor here, I hope, right here. All right. So we're looking at this parcel of property right here. Let's see. Just to get everybody oriented, that's Highway 77. The McNatt Animal Adoption Facility sits right here. We pooled our dollars and bought this piece of property together. This is dedicated park property down here. This is dedicated municipal property. That was strategically done because if it's municipal property, it can be used for anything. It can be used for parks or for PD. If it's park property, it can only be used for park purposes. So that's why the dividing line wound up where it was. Councilmember Briggs has a question. So the red arrow down there says future park expansion. Is that the proposed dog park? Actually the dog park would be more up in this area here. Okay, so we own all the way down into there? Yes. The city between the city and parks, we own all of this property. And of course, this is all existing North Lakes. So the idea at that point was that we would share a driveway here and we would build soccer fields or athletic fields in this area. I'm having just the dickens of a time with this mouse. This area would become soccer fields in order to get the size, the dimension that we needed. They would come down just slightly below this tree line, south of this tree line. So this tree line would be eliminated. There were several proposals that were drawn up. One of them had parking here and a road that did this. Came over to this side of the fields. Came over. These are the football fields. These are the soccer fields. That road would come down and get south of the soccer fields and cut over to where there's a partially constructed traffic circle down there, if you 're familiar with North Lakes Park at the moment. Had two or three different plans drawn up, concept plans drawn up. Took them to the park board, took them to the public and they were not well received at all. Our public told us that they wanted all of this area preserved as a natural area. They did not want soccer fields in there. So we went back to the drawing board again, quite literally . That gets us to there. So in 2012, we had the opportunity from the Razors to buy this piece of property up north. That's a 26 acre piece of property. So again, just to orient, there's Linda McNatt right there. Rainey Road at the top, Highway 77 over here. We had the opportunity to purchase this piece of property for a million dollars. Council approved it and we bought that property specifically with the intent of building soccer fields or athletic fields up here. That allowed us to preserve all of this area for a natural area. The original design intent, we signed a contract with Duna way to do the design on this. The original intent was to, I'm going to go back up to that slide, build four fields. Typically you orient soccer fields north and south as they play north and south. That we would exit right out onto Rainey Road, minimize the amount of roadway that we would have to build. In discussions with the traffic engineers, that would have afforded us the opportunity to build all of Rainey Road. They also didn't like the idea of traffic entering and exiting here where there's no gap in the median. So the traffic engineers said, we want you to come down and share this entrance road with the Linda McDat. As part of the trail project that's wrapping up right now, this will actually become a fully signalized intersection. So once that direction was given, this is a drainage channel that leads down to the lake. Then we had to perform, had to have done a CLOMAR conditional letter of map amendment that would allow us to cross that channel. It's another six month, six to eight month process to deal with FEMA. We have since accomplished that as well. So at this point, we have, we have, I'm sorry, go ahead. Back up. No, I'm just curious, the study you had to do with FEMA, did they do that for free or did you have to, was that? Oh no, we afforded the opportunity to pay for that as well. Okay. Is that included here and will that be an item that we see the cost of that? It's in the dollars that have already been expended in with all the design dollars because the design team takes that on at an additional charge. Okay, thanks. So the point that we're at now is I have a stack of construction drawings on the table in front of you, just in case you think this is a simple project to design. That's what the construction drawings for this project look like. Now all of the numbers that we're dealing with now are the engineer's estimate of probable cost, okay? Their estimate is five one, including a 10% contingency on the construction of this. There's an additional $530,000 that at the moment, a significant portion of that is the pro rata. As the developer of that piece of property, we had to build water and sewer up Highway 77 and east to west across Riney Road. That was actually taken on by some folks who are developing just to the west of our property and they're very anxious for us to start our project so that we can tap the lines and pay them the pro rata that we owe them at this point. So they've already put the water line in. The water line and sewer line are both in. And then there's the standard impact and tap fees. So the estimated cost of this project is $5.6 million. The current available funding that we have available to us is three one. You can see there where we've come up with that funding. The numbers that you see up there are 100% turnkey. That's bidding the whole project out. Director comes in, builds four fields, builds restroom con cession, builds parking lot, does all of the required planting, irrigation, fencing, athletic field lighting. So you can see that lousy number at the bottom is a funding gap of $2.5 million for us to build this project out. What we would suggest, what we'd like to talk with you all about today is there in the 2014 fund there is $1,500,000 allocated, approved in there to purchase new park property. A few of those dollars have been spoken for already. But we'd like to request to take $945,000 of that to help offset all of the property that we've already had to purchase out there at North Lakes . The downside of that is that means we have no acquisition funds left in the CIP until the next CIP rolls around. Any other dirt that we buy is going to have to come out of park dedication funds. There is $1,255,000 in the 214 bond program to develop the master plan for the Southwest Park. Southwest Park to jog everybody's memory is a 200 acre piece of property down at Bonnie Bray and Allred Road. That's behind Fire 7 maybe as a reference for folks. In the bond we received approval for funding to start the master planning and some surveying and some planning on that piece of property with the thought that we would start developing or at least start designing that piece of property. Some of the development down there in the Southwest part of town hasn't taken place quite as quickly as we anticipated. One of the things that we had hoped for was that we would take some of those dollars that the master plan maybe wouldn't take all that money and we could do some phase one construction drawings so when the next CIP came around we could actually have some drawings prepared that we could have good numbers for when we came in to ask for additional CIP funding to start construction of that property. Instead of that we will still move forward with the master plan but we'd like to take a million dollars out of that and apply that toward the V ella project. If we take both of those, if we're allowed to take both of those funds, use those funds out at North Lakes, that still leaves us as you can see with about $544,000. Again in the engineer's estimate of probable cost, it leaves us short that much. What our proposal is is send this out for bid. There are a number of, I just lost the word, adults that are available in that contract type of things that fall easily within the scope that our park maintenance staff can do whether that be install fencing, planting, we can buy site amenities, bleachers, trash cans, drinking fountains outside of the scope of the contract, not pay the contractors markup on those things. We can assemble them, we can install them using in-house labor and reduce those costs. If there's a need, again similar to what we're experiencing with the fire stations, curious to get this out on the streets, get hard bids, see what the numbers look like. If unfortunately these numbers come back way higher than we 're expecting, then we're either going to come back to council and seek some additional funding. At the same time, we will come back with a proposal to reduce the scope of this project. That's a very possible thing to do with this, especially the way it's designed. We could build part of the parking lot, we could build two fields instead of four fields. It doesn't make sense building an odd number set of fields at this point because of the way the lighting sets up and the costs associated with that . Point being we have a number of options with this project to either make up a small delta or to make up a large delta if we're unfortunate and the numbers come in too strong. That's what we're asking for today. That's where the project stands. Ready to take your questions. Mayor Potem. Is any of the property that's on the front, is fronting Highway 77, is that developable land at all or is it all floodplain land? On 77? Yes. Is it all developable? Where the McNatt shelter is, just so I'm clear? Yeah. Yeah, that's all the, well. Well, can you go back to the map? Can you throw the map back up? Yeah. Yeah, because. So the frontage part of the property. There is some floodplain in here. Oh, so yeah. So I don't think that this is going to be developable property, if that's what you're looking at. Yeah, I'm just thinking of ways to make up the difference that we have and one of those ways could be to plait off some of the property and sell it . The only, the most convenient piece to plait off would be this area over here. This is now dedicated park property. So it's going to have to go to a vote of the citizens to divest. This is municipal property. It could happen here, but this is where we're in final stages of trying to build the dog park just as a reference. But that's like what 20 acres right there. Yeah. The municipal property. Yeah. Okay. Council member Gregory. What did I did not see in any of the presentation anticipated timeline. Well, at this point, we're waiting to see what we can fund. Okay. But it's approximately 12 months from the time we signed contract. I wonder, have you spoken with anybody in the family regarding the possibility of only building two fields rather than four? I haven't had that specific conversation. No, I think they would be delighted to see anything built with the doctor's name on it at this point. Okay. Council member Briggs. So I'm confused. I want to walk back just a little bit for soccer fields. I think I heard $5.6 million. That is correct. Okay. And then the 1 million that's already been spent, so 6.6. So when I think of a soccer field, I think grass. I mean, I could be wrong. So can you explain to me what is going to cost so much money here in this project? I'm just trying because I didn't see an itemization. Is it the parking lot? Is it the paying back the developer? I do believe there's an itemization in your backup. Okay, sorry. But there's a big chunk of this is concrete for the road in and the parking lots. The lighting alone is about $775,000 to do athletic field lighting at this level. That's for four fields. There's a restroom concession building in there that's $700 ,000 in itself. And it's all masonry and it's on grade beams, no piers. I just might as well get that cleared up right now. I don't know why I said $700,000. And it's fenced, it's irrigated. Like I say, there's almost a half million dollars in just the prorata fees that we owe to the developers to put in the water and sewer lines and then the tap fees that will be required to pay tap and impact fees. So it seems like it should be a whole lot cheaper than that . And unfortunately, it doesn't work out that way. Thank you. Yes, Councilmember Hatsbeth. So I guess my question goes to the difference between what you're proposing to build and what's at North Lakes there to the south. Can you help me understand the difference in, I mean, are those smaller soccer fields? I just don't, I know there's a lot of them down there. I just don't know the differences. The fields are actually, for the most part, they start out at about the same size. When the youth come out and play on those fields, they set those fields up for youth depending on the age. They'll actually turn the fields 90 degrees. So if it's little guys playing soccer, they're playing across the field. So you might have three soccer fields on one adult-sized field. Or you might have two. If you build them nice flat area, then it allows the soccer 's organizations to orient them to their need, if you will. This will be set up for adult use. As it's drawn at the moment, it's four full-size adult fields long enough that rugby could be played on those fields. So the current fields are not that, is there a size difference between the two fields? Between rugby and soccer? No, sir. Between the fields that currently exist at North Lakes and what you're proposing to build here? These fields will be a little bit bigger than the ones at North Lakes. Okay, so is it an option to maybe borrow one of North Lakes ' current fields to enhance while we're sourcing and funding? Because I agree with you. I don't know how long it's been in the works, but it's long enough that I know it's been in the works a while. Yes, sir. So I'm just trying to look at options so that we can show tangible progress, get it rolling, and that sort of thing. I'm not sure I understand your question. As far as getting folks, getting them fields, getting adult fields to play on, one of the things that we did a couple of years ago is actually got a grant that allowed us to light the soccer field at Mack Park. So that allowed that field to be used for adults, but that 's the only real lighted adult field that we have. I guess my question would be, can we borrow one of the fields at, make enhancements to one of the existing fields at North Lakes? Because it has a concession stand, it has the parking. Okay, the issue, I'm sorry, the issue that we're going to run into is usage. Those fields for the most part are filled with youth now. The kiddos are on those fields. Either it's either football is out there or soccer is out there, youth soccer. There's a little bit of adult soccer already out there, not much. And we like to say those fields get loved to death if we add too much more to them. Okay, thank you. Yes. We're going to go Ryan and then Briggs. Okay. Two questions. One, is there any revenue that would be generated from this ? Do we charge for that? Most certainly. And would that just cover the future maintenance or would there be any recoupable? It would apply to the future maintenance. It will not cover. This will be a subsidized program. And then the second question is, I believe that there was a , in the legislature this year, a change made to where hot funds could be used for certain sports facilities. Would any of this fall under that? Actually not because the way that that wound up being written was that we had to demonstrate a certain number. And I believe the number is 10. Ten tournaments a year already played on that field. So it will be great to do significant enhancements once we get them built, but they're not going to help us out right now. Okay. Councilmember Briggs. That was actually both of my questions. One about the like tournaments. Would it be kind of like how Evers is when you have a league that would rent it out? Yes ma'am. Pretty consistently? Yes ma'am. Okay. And then the other one was the hot funds. And so there's not a way to prove heads and beds or anything like that, even with tournaments, maybe. Not yet. Down the line. Down the line to do improvements? Yes. Okay. Thank you. Emerson, a couple of questions. I know in your presentation you were talking about realloc ating some bond funds from different bond packages. Do we have a practice? I thought we had bond advisory committees that also give those recommendations. Have we gone through that process yet? We have not gone through that process. We're starting with council. And what exactly are the, I mean, part of the urgency of this is you've also, you've mentioned the TAP fee for the developer. Yes sir. It's a residential development somewhere out there I believe. Yes, it's just to the west of our property. And so those, they had to pay park dedication fees I presume when they developed that? That is correct. Okay. And we're probably using some of that money to help fund some of this? That is also correct. Okay. So what I'm hearing you say is that given your proposal to finance it, that that remaining half million dollars or so, that might could be absorbed in some of the city doing some of those jobs in the bid that we're able to do. Yes sir. Okay. Could you go back to that atomization of the funding? Because I mean, I remember when we had the groundbreaking for this. And so the bond funds, the two million dollars, that was back in 2005? It was some in five and then there was some in 14. The restroom concession was funded in the 2014 bond. Okay. So we, I mean, this just, we're just way over no matter when it was, whether it's 2005 or 2014 or whatever. Okay. So, oh I'm sorry, go to the next slide where your proposal to make up that difference. I'm sorry. That's what I meant. Okay right here. So the, so in the 2014 we had 1.25 million for the Southwest Park and you're saying take a million of that. Yes sir. And then that, and then using remaining funds, which is 255 with Park General Fund dollars to complete the Southwest Master Plan if needed, if we're far enough along. If we need to find some more funds, we'll look at our general fund. Use of these funds for serving, but no, okay, all right. Then on the top one, you're saying of a million dollars basically that were in 2014 for a new parkland. Yes sir. We're saying take 945,000 of that. And then if we wanted to buy additional parkland, that would have to come out of the Park Dedication Fund. Yes sir. And how much, what's the fund balance of the park? Any idea? Well, I'm always cautious. First off, I don't remember what the number is at the moment, but remember that it's got that geography working against us. Fair enough. Yeah. Okay. It's a big number. It's a big number. It's a standalone number. It's a big number. But that's segregated into different areas within, I think it's either a half mile or a mile. A mile. Okay, all right. Okay, Council Member Gregory. Regarding the Park Dedication Funds, have you analyzed if there are any Park Dedication Funds that are within the radius that could be applied to this particular park? Park Development Funds of 355,337. So we can use that money? Yes sir. I would say that we move ahead with the recommendations that you have, especially depending on those alternate add-on bids, and then take this quickly to the Bond Oversight Committees to get their input on that so that we could go on. And then we could also look at the possibility, if necessary, of phasing at a Phase I, Phase II, we would get a lot of the cost in Phase I because the T AP fees, the water, most of the infrastructure, the roads going in. Yes sir. And if we had to delay two of the fields, that's going to be a, a lot of the infrastructure will have been done. I would say let's move forward and I appreciate the alternatives that you've given us for filling that funding gap. Council Member Hatsbett. I think I too am in favor of moving forward, but I think Mayor Pro Tem has a great point as I look at the map, I think to bring those, that part of property that's just east of the animal shelter into play to maybe put that on the market, you're, I mean, you're, you're, I don't know the mileage, but you're just down the street from Discovery Park, you're just down the street from all the new residential coming in and I think to, to offset whatever those costs are down the road. So we get started, you have the money to get started, but I , and I also would suggest two fields versus four initially to, to proceed down that. So I would say two fields versus four initially and I would say Mayor Pro Tem has a pretty good idea because there's, houses aren't going to go there. I understand a dog park, it's not going to fill up 23 acres . No sir. Yeah, and so I think there's some, just some natural commercial fits there to service even the people that volunteer work at the animal shelter. Where are they going to get snacks, food, this, that or other? You have that, they have that gas station just down the bit and then other than that you have to go all the way to university or there's not much there that existing. I think you would find some people that would be interested and it could be to the benefit of our, of the people that are working or, or you have a soccer tournament, they stop there for gas, you know, or not gas, whatever, snacks, ice, et cetera. So I think there's a natural fit for that there and it helps because I don't like the idea of depleting every pocket of funds we have when you have something that could potentially help you avoid that and leave those things at bay. I mean again, it's, it's, it's, we, I just think that department, we owe it to help them out where we can because it's tough to come by as is. So, that's what I thought. Okay. Councilmember Briggs. Can I go back to the, the funding, the funds? One of my questions is, does that deplete most of the gas well fund? Is that all of that money? So you're depleting? Those are all the gas well funds that we have available. Okay. And the park system fund, is that? Yeah, that's going back through all of our accounts, all of our project accounts that had, you know, the projects are finished and there was a little bit of money left in them. And that's what that represents. Okay. And the park developments, that's maxed out from that area that you can get there? Geographically, yes. Okay. So, has the park board seen this? Is this something that was shown to the park board? Not yet. Not yet. Okay. And next, I just wanted to say that there is a Dollar General there on the corner and a Roman's Pizza that somebody could use in that area if they needed to. I would not be in favor of selling that property, I'd much prefer to hold onto it and use it as a dog park in an open area if that's part of this discussion. And I would also prefer to see a smaller version of this implemented first to get the ball rolling and to get the people back the pro rata fees that we owe them. Yes, ma'am. Thank you. I mean, I'm okay with, but I want to see a bid for the whole thing and I want to see a bid for the half because if the bid for the half is 75% of the bid for the whole, I'm not going to go for that. I mean, unless it's just a matter of you got all your infrastructure and the only thing you got left is grass. So I certainly want to be able to see the scope of those two projects because to go back and redo it in the future could be even more money as we saw with the fire station conversation. We'll make sure that the bids are set up that way so that we can go back and evaluate it either way. All right. Fantastic. Yes, Mayor Pro Tem. So the funding gap of 2.5, that includes the 1.2 million of bid alternates? No. 1.2. If I'm understanding your question correctly. No, there is a gap, a 100% construction gap of $2.5 million . Okay, so not even including any of the bid alternates? Correct. The bid alternates are all included in that 2.5, I guess is what I'm... Oh, they are. They are. So you could save money off of that. So the worst case is 2.5. Okay. All right. That's what I'm trying to understand. Yes, we could save, hopefully we could save money off of that. Yes, I think you could because I hate to blow this up for you, but each tree costs $1,375 to plant under the bid alternates. Okay. Again, it's engineers estimate of probable cost. Okay. So I think that there's probably going to be some savings. We agree. Is what I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah. As far as... I believe you have your direction. Yes, sir. Council member Husspard, were you saying that unless we were willing to sell that, that... I mean, are you just saying go ahead and proceed forward and then if we're able to do that, if council can come to a separate decision on that, were you trying to tie that decision into this? No. Yeah, it's separate, but I think we need to... It's apparent we need to have a conversation about how big that use is. I mean, we need to get in front of that because I'm not on the same page. Okay. All right. So once we get moving, at what point do we... Is it the time we tap into the waterline physically is when we pay? Yes, sir. So that's... That could be... Very soon. Oh, very soon. I thought it'd be a little bit... Okay. All right. Got you. Okay. We just... We don't... I mean, we could set the taps and it could be several months until we use them. What we didn't wanna do was set the taps... And not do it at all. And then have council say, "Shelve this project." Right, right. Yeah. Well, this is an important project. I mean, Dr. Vella, obviously the namesake of the park is a longstanding professor here, and we need adult parks, lighted adult parks, so... Yes, sir. I mean, it certainly, I think, would be used regularly. And this is just one of those things where it was gonna be done originally in 2005, something happened, costs have gotten up, and so... I mean, this is just what we're dealing with. So I believe the direction is move forward with your recommendations, see how much we can save from the add-ons, and if there's any developing stories, we'll hear those... Yes, sir. ...when they crop up. Okay. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Moving on to agenda item. I believe it's E. Yes. I'm trying to look at the time. We've got how many closed session items? One, two, three, four. Four closed session items and two more work session items, which the work sessions will probably go fairly quickly. So anyway, agenda item three E. Receive report, hold discussion, provide direction regarding staff proposed perimeter street paving guidelines being developed pursuant to the city's road way impact fee ordinance. Hello, Mayor, Council members. I'm Galen Gillum, Director of Capital Projects. This item before you is, as the Mayor announced, it's about perimeter street paving guidelines as part of the city's roadway impact fee ordinance program. We've got a couple of folks here to answer questions for you. The City Engineer Todd Estes is here, our project manager for updating our design criteria manuals. John Davis is here as well. But most importantly, we've got a consultant from Kimley-H orn. Jeff Whitaker is here. Jeff has a lot of experience on this topic. He's worked with over 40 cities in Texas. And in fact, he looked at us with a straight face and said this is one of his favorite things to work on. So you're in for a treat. Let me turn it over to Jeff Whitaker from Kimley-Horn. This is going to be real short. Well good afternoon, Mayor and Council. So today the purpose of the day was just to give you a briefing on the implementation of impact fees and the impact it had on the street perimeter paving requirements that you currently have in your DDC. So it's kind of the goal and objective that I'm hoping to answer for you today. And just because this has sort of become an issue, I mean the reason we're having this is there was sort of some ambiguity and people thought that some of the perimeter street paving was included in an impact fee. So that's really what we're here to hopefully to get some direction on. Is that correct? Yes. So a quick history in ordinance adoption. I think we got some new faces on council that may not be quite as familiar with the process we went through. So very quick on that. And then a little bit of how they work. And then the Denton specific examples. So hopefully, Mayor, we answer your questions on some actually specific examples of how that's been applied right now. So the history, they were adopted on June 21, 2016 with the ordinance effective on July 5, 2016. There's a legally one-year grace period before properties that were previously paved had to pay an impact fee. So all the properties that were currently prided in the city didn't, did not, weren't subject to the impact fee until July 5, 2017. So relatively recently was when most of the properties in the city didn't have been assessed this fee. Just a quick reminder, the city is divided into five different areas. And basically these are areas are treated like independent study areas. So there's five areas. When you collect funds in these areas, you have to spend funds in these areas. So I just wanted to kind of bring that up. So as you start thinking about revenue that's being brought in, they have to be spent with in these geographic areas. So a little bit of history, the adoptive fee was as follows . The residential impact fee was 2000 per home. That's what council chose to adopt it, which that comes out to $408.12 per vehicle mile. That's actually what your ordinance says that you adopted, but it's 2000 per home. And on shopping center, our commercial, there was a 25% discount given. There was some recognition of council that retail development shopping centers generate other revenue sources. So they gave them a discount. So that comes out to about $2,100 per 1,000 square feet on a commercial development on a shopping center. And industrial was important to cap that at a warehouse rate. So if you think about trips on roadway, warehouses do not generate much trip. So we capped all industrial properties at the warehouse rate. What that came out to is when the council made the decision , the rate that was adopted was roughly between 19% and 32% of the actual rate that was actually calculated through the study. If you recall the reason there's a range there, there's five different service areas. So depending on what service you're in, you're in a different percentage. So roughly adopted a rough 19% to 32% of the actual rate. So the rate that we calculate through the study was called the maximum accessible rate, which we kind of deem as the proportional rate. So if development was to pay for growth for growth, that would be the 100% rate. However, there's an ordinance adoption to adopt somewhere between 19% and 32%. So this is a pie chart to kind of illustrate what that is. This is just an example of your service area D. The total impact fee, ten year needs in that service area was 38.3 million. The projected revenue at the rate at which you adopted was 6.9 million. The cost of meeting existing needs, because there are existing needs throughout the city of Denton, was calculated about 10.6 million. The remaining source, the 20.7 million, that's to come from future bond issuance, future debt service, all the roads don't get built one or the other. So there would be the gap of $20.7 million based on the collected fee. Just to give you some history of how the decision was made, we looked at some of your surrounding cities and cities that had done the studies versus what rate they adopted. This is a list of five of the cities. This is the exact same slide we presented to you in 2016. As you can see, Denton went with a roughly 20%. That's the 19 to 32% for the service area that comes out to 20%. Other cities shown above. And we also looked at the whole Metroplex to see what they were charging on general for the single family home. And really what we came into with the council's discussion is it was between 2000 and 3000 seemed to be that sweet spot in the Metroplex of where most of the cities were charging. And as I mentioned, Denton went with the 2000. Something to note, I did update this slide. There has been several cities that have updated their fee since, most notably probably to the city of Denton, as Corinth updated their fees. They actually matched the city of Denton's fees. Before they were lower. Now they're basically equal to your fees now. They recently updated in 2016, kind of right after you all finished your studying. So how do impact fees work? This is when I'll start tying into kind of the process that a development would go through. So the first question the development asks, what is required by the code? What is required by DDC? That is your subdivision rules and regulations. That hasn't changed. The fees did not change. What was required by development through a perimeter street fee or a traffic study? And then the second question that is asked is, are the requirements asked by the code fair? Are they proportional? So the first code in the city of Denton, as I'll go through , is in 2005, state law passed a saying says, if you're requiring something from a developer, it has to be fair. So in 2005, the city of Denton initiated a rough proportion ality policy. And that's been in place in Denton since about 2006. So they've always been doing number two. So number three, is there impact fee credits? This is a question that basically says, if a developer is building something, they shouldn't build something and not get credit for it. So really what we added with the impact fee ordinance was the ability to give credits towards these fees otherwise due. So the first step, what is required by the code? There's really two things from a roadway perspective that are required by the code. One is improvements that are outlined in a TIA. And that looks at site improvements versus system improvements. And you may ask what that is. A site improvement is something that benefits the development. For example, if a developer was to come in, build a driveway, and for some reason needs a right turn lane to their driveway, that would be considered a site roadway. They don't receive any credit. That's just what they need towards their site. If they come in and have to build two lanes of an arterial facility, that's a system improvement. That benefits the greater general city of Denton. So we look at the TIA improvements. The second is the perimeter street improvements. What we were looking at when the impact ordinance was coming is to provide flexibility and another funding source for partnerships. So previously, before impact fees were in, the code says if you have a perimeter street, you improve your perimeter street as long as it's proportional. With the impact fees, because we have the ability to charge a fee, we were looking at providing some flexibility in the cases where the road does not need to be improved. So perimeter streets, they've always been required with the impact fee ordinance, we want to provide flexibility. One is it makes sense to build the roadway versus collecting the fee. One to make an educated decision of, one is the best interest of the city to collect the fee versus building the road. And then also, there's the city of impact fee funds to partnership. Many cities, when a developer comes in and they see the road, they realize the development can build about, say, 75% of the road, but they need to close that funding source. So the idea was the impact fees pot could be another funding source to close that gap. And those would be an example of that in the specific examples I showed you. And so that, really, they adopted 19 to 32% of the actual calculated development. >> Got a question. Councilmember Riggs. >> Okay. Well, you may be about to go into your next one, because I know that some of the confusion in the emails that we have received were regarding the perimeter street and the impact fee and one being there and the other one not being there. >> I think, yeah, I'm getting into that. >> You're getting into that? Okay. >> The question that you've been heard is that, in short, that the impact fees would replace the perimeter street fee. >> Right. >> And the cases that they were trying to build the processes that it complements the perimeter street fee, it doesn't necessarily replace it. And I'll kind of go over that. >> Okay. >> I think this slide is probably going to answer what you 're having. So go back to this. The perimeter street requirements is actually in the development design code. So for as long as I've worked with for the city of Denton, it's been required. When the impact fees came in, we were looking for a way to better utilize those funds if it made sense. So and there's some cases across the city when you drive around, there's some of the roadways. Why did we make the developer build that roadway? It probably didn't make sense because it was built in the middle of nowhere. It didn't hide anything. So we want to be able to utilize the flexibility of maybe there's cases when the perimeter street did not get to build. And so when should perimeter streets be considered? These were the guidelines that were developed that staff was trying to utilize. When should we consider this? One is when it was required based on the TIA. That basically says a traffic study comes back and says the road is over capacity, improvements need to be done. So that's when it would be required. The second one was when a roadway is substantially unimpro ved or very poor condition. The city of Denton has a pavement management index. It basically tells you when roads are in very poor shape. That means they're about to fall apart. So we thought if a road is about to fall apart, we don't want to put a development on a road that's about to fall apart. Our safety for roadways too narrow. Fire has certain standards for how wide our roads need to be. We didn't want to not improve a road that was too narrow. So these were kind of the three guidelines. Before impact fees, the street perimeter fee would always been required. And unless it wasn't proportional, it would have been required. What they were trying to do is come up with some guidelines that would say it's not always required, but here are the cases that were required. You could think of it in the opposite aspect. Street perimeter streets are always required unless, it's the exact opposite of what I just said. Street perimeter is required unless a TIA shows that there 's adequate service, roadway is in condition, safety is not a concern, a city funded project is already planned. So that's kind of one of the, number four is the added case . You wouldn't want a developer to build a project and know when a city project is coming right behind it. Just good planning. So both of these say the exact same thing with a different twist. Is one saying that street perimeter fees are required when, the other one saying street perimeter is always required unless. So basically the same issue. And so are there any cities where the impact fees take over the perimeter street requirements? Most cities do not. And the reason that most cities have not taken over is because the philosophy that most city has is before impact fees were in place, some people built roadways, other folks didn't do anything when impact fees came in, they adopted a rate. So the new, the people who were building roadways continued to build the roadways and got credited towards their fees otherwise due. And the ones that weren't building roadways are now paying a fee that helps partnerships with the roadways that are being built. So it's normal to have both? It's normal to have both. There are a handful, there's only one city I can think of that is in southeast Dallas County that doesn't require perimeter street fees, doesn't require perimeter roads because they chose as a city to build the roads themselves. But around the area except for that one? Right. There's both. Okay, thank you. So, and we have some research and I think it's in the backup too that kind of outlines all the cities that we researched. We call this the kind of the common sense check. It's the rough proportionality check. The TI identifies when permits are needed to support. The perimeter street is now required only when it meets certain criteria. So it was more of trying to give flexibility when it was a road that doesn't make sense to be built. And it's based on the maximum allowable fee as opposed to the collected rate. I think that that's probably one of the questions that has been brought up is when is it fair to require a road to be built as a perimeter fee versus the rate that were adopted. As I mentioned, there was a decision of council to adopt a rate, a fee that was less than the actual impact of a development. So when that development was requested to build a road as a condition of development approval as opposed to the perimeter street fee or TIA that we were using proportionality as opposed to what is the real impact of that development on the system as opposed to the fee that's being collected. So that may be the confusion. There's a fee that's calculated that's 19% to 32% of the rate. However, the impact of the development is higher than that. So we were using that to determine that fairness check, the proportionality check. I have two examples I can run through. These are I think examples that John may have to chime in a little bit more on that he knows more of the details on. But these are two ongoing examples. One is the village of Carmel, Edwards Road, perimeter street. This is in the impact fee CIP. If you look at the road, if you think about those criteria I just mentioned to you, is the road too narrow? It's 20 feet wide. Most people would say that that's too narrow for two lanes of travel. It probably needs to be at least 24, 25 feet wide. It's poor paving condition. It falls below the standard that city didn't have, has. It needs improvements on the side of the street. So the section we're talking about is the extension there and there's an image view. So what actually came out of this? If you think about it, there's 175 homes as part of the village of Carmel. If you take 175 homes and multiply that by $2,000 a home, that's what the city would collect in impact fees. So there's $350,000 collected in impact fees. The estimated cost of this road is roughly $475,000. So you see there's $125,000 gap between the impact fees that you were going to collect versus the roadway cost. What the city decided to do in the agreement is the developer is going to contribute $400,000. So he's contributing $50,000 more than his impact fees that he would do. And the city is going to contribute roughly $75,000. The developer is also going to dedicate his right of way. So the total developer contribution value was $594,500. It's important to note the developer on this case will not pay an impact fee. This is part of the negotiation of having impact fees. He's getting credited for that $350,000 impact fee. He will not pay an impact fee. One thing to note is that $75,000, the city would contribute the $75,000 if the city had an impact fee funds. Like I mentioned, the impact fee has only been around since roughly July 5th, 2017. So it's not much of a fund balance. Had they had impact fees in place, they could have pulled that fund from a different, you know, from that fund balance. So the proportionality check, this is. Do you have a question? Yeah. Yeah. So who agreed, I mean, who did this? Like is it the engineering department? Yeah, it would be the engineering department. I mean, I'm just, I mean, we're planning. I'm just trying to see. And does everybody get the same type? Actually, this is a proposed development agreement that we 've negotiated with the developer there. Okay. And that was an example that we had available. The developers agreed to this agreement and once he exec utes, once we've had the final documents ready for you, we will bring it to the council for approval or consideration. Oh, okay. So it has not been, okay. Thank you. It has not. It is not a cut deal, if you will. I get it. It's a proposed deal. This is just an example of how it could work. Okay. And the next example will be a possibility also. It's not a done deal or anything either. We chose this example because it was a fairly good example that showed roughly what their impact fee was, at $350,000, you know, got you to close to the $475,000 to show that what it was. The last step in everything that we do is if you remember the first step, the step that this development we're required to do would have been to build Edwards Ranch Road. That's what the code says. The code says, "Edwards Ranch Roads needs to be built." The second part, "Is that fair?" And that's where we're going to step seven. It comes out to $3,397 per home. So our check in this area is that the actual impact of the development of building the roads is about $10,000. So someone, that's about what it costs to build the infrastructure and didn't per home in this area. So when we compared the $3,397 versus the $10,000, we said, "That seems fair." The third check would be, "Is our credits due?" Which he's owed $350,000 credit. He won't pay the impact fee. In this case, his street perimeter fee is his obligation. In this case, the development agreement has been proposed where the city's going to potentially participate $75,000 in it, and then this is what it's going to be. But this is just an example of how it's working right now. I'll show you another example, Moss Branch Road Industrial. Very similar, a little bit different circumstance. Poor pavement condition and there's adjacent improvements. And sometimes this is important to note is you can see that Moss Branch has been approved farther to the north. So the question is, does this development continue that improvement farther south to making continuous improvement as you go? This is an 82,500 square feet warehouse. It's got a potential impact fee of $48,489.41. The estimated cost of that street is about $300,000. So in this case, there's probably a much bigger gap than what you've seen before. The developer also is going to contribute the right of way of $70,893.90. So the total cost of the roadway will be the $375,000. So we have the impact fees he has and we have the total cost of the roadway infrastructure. Right of way because the developer is dedicating the right of way. He will not pay an impact fee because his fee is lower than the right of way contribution. The proportionality check, this is when the development agreement has to go. Is it fair to request the developer to build the perimeter fee? So if you go back to the three step approach which I mentioned before, what does code say? Code says that he builds a perimeter street. The second one, is that fair or is that not fair? Going back to the guidelines, the second step would be going to the guidelines to say does he need to build this or not? If you look at the guidelines, it's in poor payment conditions and adjacent improvements. So the guidelines says the code says it. It meets the draft guidelines right now. And then the third and the next step would be is this proportional to that? And actually if you look at this one, the actual impact on our system and our study says it's $345,000. So it's saying that we can't require them all. We're going to have to chip in something. The total is $370,000. The proportional checks $345,000. So in this case, we couldn't require them to build the whole roadway. We would have to actually kick in some amount of money. If it's $30,000 or if it's another agreement, the bottom starting point would be the $48,000. The max would be this $345,000 that you can request of a development. Good question. So this is one of my questions when we were looking at this recently. Typically if you're doing some type of construction, let's use this one for example. Okay. So if you have to plat it, there was a rule or there is a rule, used to you couldn't get a plat unless you dedicated right away. I mean, if I'm incorrect in that, somebody correct me on that. You had to dedicate right away or you couldn't get it. I had a real problem with that because, and so when this came along, that was my question was, okay, this was one of those examples where let's say we didn't have road impact fees, he would have to dedicate the right of way. And in addition, probably have to do some kind of perimeter street improvements. So here what you did is you figured out what are the impact fees based upon the schedule in this area for 82,500 square feet. He got the credit for the right of way, which he wouldn't have gotten before. So now before he would have had to have done more perimeter street paving in addition to the dedication. So the only contribution is the right of way dedication on this. In other words, the city is going to be paying the $300,000 to build the actual street. No, according to the processes is the requirement that the city currently has in the code was he would dedicate right away at plat and he would look at building the perimeter street. So he would have had to pay, I'm sorry, go ahead. I interrupted you. The total amount that the city can request of this development to do anything is $345,000. Okay. That's the maximum he can request. Yep. So the right of way is valued at $70,000. So you have to take that out of the total request. He's getting the credit for that right of way. So the most he can do is whatever the $345,000 minus. Okay, so he or she is going to still have a $275,000 additional cost for the perimeter street. According to the way the ordinance is written right now. Currently. Currently, correct. Okay. Yes. How do we determine the credit for the right of way? I'm sure there's some kind of square foot calculation and cost per square foot, but my experience in when we are purchasing property for right of ways for street expansions is that our estimate of what the value is and the owner's estimate tend to be wide apart. And that's pretty common occurrence across the Metroplex and a lot of some cities have written in that it'll be based on the like county appraisal district estimate the time of purchase. And I believe that's what you did on this one. So as opposed to future value estimates, which is usually the difference between what the value is now versus potentially future value with improvements on it. We use it what the appraisal district value is at the time of purchase. So we look at it didn't county appraisal district free out of per square foot process land. That's what that value is. Okay. Go ahead. Yeah. Any other questions? Thank you. Oh, is that it? This was the last slide. So I was wondering if you could just give me a minute. We went through two examples. We shipped it. No, I'm looking at give direction. So what direction are you looking for? I think the two things that staff and John time is the two things in direction is, you know, one of the things that we were looking for is the guidelines for flexibility of when almost when should a primitive street not be required versus when it should be required today to give a little bit flexibility for the developers so that you don't build a roadway in a place that may not make sense. So the little bit of flexibility because currently the transportation criteria manual is being updated and they would like to somewhat codify with those those guidelines are so that is clear and apparent to the development community of what those guidelines that we're looking for are. Keely. Question. Well, trying to find that I'm not forcing you. You just pulled them not microphones. Well, yeah, I mean, a concern a concern in our city is affordable housing and the more fees that you attach to any kind of development, the higher it's going to transfer into a single family home, it's going to raise the cost. So that's just one of my concerns here. So I don't know if there's a way when in your flexibility or council discussion, we can add in if somebody is building affordable units or I don't know if that's too specific or anything like that as far as the fees or flexibility are concerned. And let me back up just a little bit. What we've come to you today is give you the historical perspective of roadway impact fees that roadway impact the ordinance indicated that we would adopt guidelines or develop and adopt guidelines to implement parts of it, which included the perimeter street paving in your package. We have exhibit three, which are the proposed guidelines that staff has developed along with legal management and discussion with the development community. We're not totally in agreement right now yet. But we've developed these proposed guidelines and brought those to you to see if you had any direction along that such as the affordable housing. And one of the guidelines in there at the bottom of page two indicates the city reserves the right to participate in the cost of improving the remainder of a perimeter street if applicable with its discretion, which gives you the which gives staff and management the flexibility to negotiate in the cases of affordable housing, or in this case here, where the impact fees and the proportionality would not cover the total cost of that perimeter. If we this if the city if you the council decides that you really want to complete that last section of Marsh branch on down to Jim Crystal Road there, then you have that discretion to be able to if we can find funding for it to participate in that cost and make it happen. What would happen is you don't need to take any action other than give us direction such as you've given there on any way that you would like to see these modified, if you would like to see these proposals modified. We will then take those through the criteria manual amendment process, which means we take them to the planning and zoning commission and present them to them and get their input. We publish those for 30 days for public comment to receive public comment. And then we staff under the manager's discretion and direction have to work to resolve those issues. If we can resolve those issues, then those amendments can be adopted to the transportation criteria manual administratively. And then any developer or consultant that comes along will have those guidelines in the criteria manual and see when they will be required to perform perimeter paving there. That's the bottom line of our ask for you, Mr. Mayor. Do you have a question, Council Member Goodwin? So you're asking for us to give you input on exhibit three? Yes, sir. That's correct. I don't, I can't do it because I don't understand, for example, what it means when you say for any proposed developments that would generate enough traffic to reduce the level of service below LOS D5. I don't know what that means. Yes, sir. Level of service is the method that we use in engineering to describe the traffic flow. Level of service D is a very congested traffic level and that's the standard the city has developed and set as its standard for traffic flow in the city. Jeff's a traffic engineer. He can probably describe it better than I can. So what does it mean to reduce the level below D? That means if you were, for whatever reason, you had a road with a head-to traffic on today, say 10 vehicles and some reason this development is going to come in and put in another 1,000 vehicles on that roadway. So does that reduce it? It would reduce it. That means it goes from a good level of service to a poor level of service. So that means it's basically, if you think of a letter grade, A means really good. D is not good. So if it goes from level service C to D, then we would want to see if the developer can participate. So if it's in the grade, the road of worst level grade is what we're looking at. But only if it goes below D. Yes, the guideline would be if it goes below D. So if it's C right now and it goes to D, we're okay with that. Yes. Really. According to the current, that matches your TA ordinance in the current DDC. So these were presented to the development community, these specific guidelines? Yes, sir. Okay. I was looking through the backup. Do we have, I mean, I think they've sent us comments, but they're not included in this. What are the concerns in the development community? The biggest concern is that some of a segment of the development community feels that when you passed roadway impact fees, that Bremeter Street paving was totally going away. And that's what Jeff has tried to outline to you today that no, it didn't. The impact fees did not affect Bremeter Street paving requirements. Okay. So what I'm hearing you say is, now let's go to requirement 2B, where it gives an example. If you've got a street that's 22 feet wide with an overall OCI of 40, and it's not scheduled to be reconstructed, if somebody comes in and wants to put a development on that, they're going to be looking at paying a road impact fee in addition to repaving the entire street. At least that's what it says, that is in front of there. It says, "Then the development will be required to reconstruct the entire 25 feet width of the perimeter street to current city standards, which include curb and gutter and the ultimate location with approximate transitions to the existing pavement." Obviously, the only thing that's in front of their development, but am I reading that correctly? Yes, sir, you are. However, the total cost of that perimeter street paving that would be required under this would be credited to their roadway impact fees. And the total cost of that roadway impact fee could not exceed the proportionality, the maximum assessable amount. So if you take the Moss Branch example we just talked about , that case, it meets this specific where the pavement requires below 40, they wouldn 't pay an impact fee. They would improve Moss Branch, but they wouldn't pay an impact fee. So in this case, they would improve the roadway. They would get credited whatever dollars they spend. If that dollar exceeds what their impact fees do, they would not pay an impact fee. Well, sure, they're still basically rebuilding the entire street. Correct. In essence. So they would not pay the impact fee and rebuild the street most likely. Right, okay. Yes. So let's say for round numbers, the impact fee for the project was half a million dollars. But to rebuild this whole street because we let the OCI dip very low, the impact, the cost of rebuilding the street was a million dollars. So they don't have to pay the impact fee because they're spending, that's half a million dollars. But they would have to spend another half a million dollars to upgrade the street anyway. Yes, sir. If that is below the total proportionality or maximum accessible amount to the development there. And the reason for that is because if you have a development of that size that's going to have an impact fee of $500,000, then that's going to be a very large development with a lot of homes or a lot of traffic. I was just using some. I understand. Sure. Simple numbers. So the proportionality test, that's, I'm going to say old system is pre-impact fees, new system is impact fees. So old system, you still had to do a proportionality calculation. All right, so let's say Mosh Branch. They're doing a proportionality calculation and it's $345, 000. So what I'm hearing you say is that currently all the regulations regarding perimeter street paving are the same as they were before. What we have now is this added kind of level of regulation that says, separately we're going to calculate you a road impact fee. We're going to calculate what the road impact fee is for your particular development. And if it's requiring some perimeter street improvements, then we have another step. So let's say it doesn't require perimeter street improvements. Apartment comes in, plops down a unit on a street that doesn't need improvement. The width is fine. What was it per unit on multifamily? Is it? >> 1,200. >> 1,200. So they got 200 units. They're going to pay $240,000 road impact fee, write the check, but they don't have to do any perimeter street improvements. Which really is a plus for the city because in the past that was not occurring. You would not get that. So let's just make sure we all understand. Whereas that's the new component. If they required perimeter street paving, let's say it's on a street that needs some work. They've got this $240,000 in impact fees, but let's say the proportionality of what they've got to pay is $240,000. That's what it's going to cost them on the proportionality formula. Then you're saying that if you have any kind of proportion ality cost, you do that calculation under our old system. If that cost exceeds or is equal to or exceeds your road impact fee, then you will not be paying a road impact fee? It's being used as a credit or no? >> That's correct. Yes, sir. If you perform the street perimeter street paving that costs that amount above, if you perform perimeter street paving that costs more than your roadway impact fee and you're required to do that under these three situations, then you won't pay a roadway impact fee. >> So under the old system, you're going to have to calculate a proportionality for you going to have to pay this much for your street. Under the new system, you're still going to have to pay that, but we're also going to calculate a road impact fee. If the road impact fee is equal to or less than your proportionality calculation, you don't pay the road impact fee. If your road impact fee is greater than that, is it the difference? >> Yes, sir. >> Okay. So $200,000 proportionality, 250 road impact fee, $50,000. >> Correct. >> Okay. All right. So the confusion has been in the development community that road impact fees were meant to replace the proportionality construction costs for perimeter streets. Is that the basic gist of what I'm hearing? >> Yes, sir. I believe that's the basic gist. They felt like a large segment of the community, development community, felt like roadway impact fees would replace perimeter street paving requirements, and there would be no perimeter street paving requirements. Now there's one slight difference in how you described it. You described it very well there. Under the proposed guidelines, if we go through the process and adopt these, the development community would only perform perimeter street paving in these situations. Prior to this, or under the old system, and currently really since the requirements haven't been changed, they would perform perimeter street paving any time they had an unimproved street adjacent to their roadway. >> So then the exceptions that you're saying are the new -- >> Proposed guidelines. >> And they are these here? >> Basically those. >> These are the three summarized in like two words. Level of service on a TIA, poor condition and safety improvements. These are the three. If you take your exhibit three and put it in -- >> So if these are not present, they don't need to do perimeter street paving? Is that what I'm hearing? >> Correct. >> Okay. So let's say you're not required to do a TIA study. You pass that one. You don't have to do it. >> If you're above level of service D. >> If you're above level of service D. Okay. You don't have to do it. If the roadway is substantially improved or is in -- if it 's above 40. >> Right. >> Yes, sir. >> And it's more than 22 feet wide. >> That's right. Then you don't have to do it. And safety -- >> That's the width of the road. >> That's the width. >> 22 feet wide, yes, sir. >> So the 40 OCI, at what level are we saying that the city , if we have an OCI level of X, we need to reconstruct the street? >> It's above a 40, but our standard that you've been budgeting towards has been trying to get every street in the city at an average of 40. So we use that same standard for this guideline. The average OCI of every street. >> No, no, I get that. But that's a very different number. I mean, the average is a very different number. So if you look at a street -- because I thought I understood that we would like to -- we're trying to get OCI's up to -- I don't think it was an average of 40. I thought it was like 60 or 65 or 70 or something like that . >> We're trying to get them to a 60 plus, approximately 60. But what we've been working towards is incremental, a 40 first and then move on up to a 60. >> What OCI level is when -- if you were to -- somebody said to you, here's an OCI level, forget the perimeter paving, forget all this. At what level of OCI do we make the decision that we need to replace the street? Do we know that? Do we have that in a policy anywhere? Or is it just -- I mean, are we just sort of figuring out -- >> No, so they use a guideline, and I'm sorry I don't have that specific -- >> Because 40 to me seems very low. >> I mean, 40 to me seems like the street's already basically in very, very, very poor condition. >> It's in poor condition. I wouldn't say very, very bad. >> Yeah. Before I can really give direction totally on that, I really would like to know at what OCI level do we as a city believe from our engineering perspective and from streets or whoever's in charge of doing that, that we need to put that on a bond program or a street reconstruction program? Because if it's higher than that, if it's 45 or 50, and so that's one. And second, it says if it's at 40 or below and we don't have it scheduled for reconstruction, then you have to do it. At what year interval does that have to be reconstructed? I mean, is it like if we're not going to reconstruct within two years, one year? >> The guideline is written to say that if it's scheduled for reconstruction, which means if it's on our CIP to be reconstructed -- >> So it could be one year or 10 years. >> It could be one year or six years. >> Okay. All right. Okay. So that's the one that was sold to reconstruct those. >> And so how did we -- how did we come up with the -- you said the 40 OCI was derived just simply because there's a policy or we've given direction that we want to get our average of all of our streets to an OCI of 40. >> Yes, sir. That was the standard that we've done -- that the city has adopted so far to work towards first. >> Okay. Yeah. Which means we're probably replacing streets that are a lot lower than that or higher than that. I don't know. How would that intuitive work? >> Lower. I think both the examples we showed were on the 20 range. The lost branch. >> They didn't look that bad, I guess. >> Edwards Road I think was 26, 28. >> And OCI doesn't have to do with width or safety. It's the actual condition of the road. >> Pavement and the base. >> Okay. >> And the subgrade. >> Okay. Council Member Briggs? >> Just for comparison here, what OCI is Hinkle? I'm just trying to figure out like 40% -- like just give me a road to compare it to. I mean, is it like a 2? I mean -- >> It's very -- >> So you're saying Hinkle is probably below 40? >> It is, yep. >> Okay. All right. Okay. All right. Thanks. >> Okay. Yes, Council Member Briggs. >> My question would be obviously this -- I mean, because I remember on planning and zoning we were talking about this, so I'm curious, where's the miss, right? So it was rolled out. There was conversations had, and for it to be an issue, there's a miscommunication somewhere in that process, right? I mean, because I know you visited with the stakeholders before, and so I'd like to -- it doesn't have to be today, but I think wherever we go, we need to pin that down first, because if we don't, then we're going to make a change, make the same mistake, or miscommunication, and then we'll be having this conversation again. I think we need to nail that -- whatever that misstep was or where we weren't clear in the rollout, that needs to be nailed down so that we don't repeat that -- this process again. >> All right. Was there something over here? Council Member Briggs. >> On that note, just to clarify, there will be -- we are going to have more conversations and more public input before this comes back in the future, right? On these -- will it just be on these three items? I mean, on this exhibit? >> Councilwoman, the process for amending the criteria manuals would not bring this issue back to you for any action unless we could not resolve this issue with the public and all of these issues here, including the one about road impact fees, replacing perimeter street paving. If we're able to resolve those, then these would just go through an administrative process and be adopted administratively. If we are not able to resolve those, they would take the route of a rezoning which would go public hearing before the PNC, recommendation from PNC to you, a public hearing by you, and then your action. >> So currently, the way it's set up is these exceptions are not present. These three exceptions, these three -- in other words, when are perimeter streets considered? Right now, you got to do it. Even if it's above 40, even if it's service level B, even if it's in good condition and it's not too narrow. Whatever is required, you've got to do it. >> Technically, yes, sir. >> And in addition to that, pay the road impact fees and then there might be a credit depending on the proportionality. So I think some of the confusion was -- I mean, I don't know if -- I mean, I was here during this whole discussion. I don't think I ever heard that the road impact fees were going to replace perimeter paving requirements. What I did hear and what I specifically brought up was will road impact fees be a credit or somehow instead of now taking right of way as a prere quisite to platting and basically the city is paying no value for it. Now at least developers are getting a value for right of way dedication, whereas in the past you just gave it up if you wanted to do your project. And that was not a good situation, I don't think. But I don't ever recall -- so -- and of course the developer -- and we want to be pro-development, but we also have to be -- we can't -- the city can't go spend $340,000 improving Moss Branch Road and the impact fee only be -- road impact fee only be $70,000. Now if you want to get a bunch of developers in town coming in Denton, you just do that and I guarantee you, they'll be flying in here like we won 't have any problem with contractors. But so your point is well taken, Council Member Hutzbuth, and that is how do we clearly communicate very succinctly these rules and this ordinance to where there's no misunderstanding, but there's a difference between somebody having a misunderstanding and somebody having an aspiration of well, this is what I'd like it to be. Well, I didn't really understand that's what it was. So this is pretty -- I mean, I sort of understand it much better now. So this was a good presentation, I appreciate it. And I'm okay giving -- because what you're saying is we're trying to give some flexibility to where they don't have to spend all this money even if it 's service level -- if it doesn't meet these criteria, they're okay. And these are ORs. This is an OR. Yes, sir. One, or two, or three. Okay. And one thing that we don't put on here just to be clear for your comment is in the case they don't have to improve the road and they dedicate the right of way, they would get credit in that case. So they would get credit towards what? Towards the impact fees, do. Yeah. So in the case they don't have to build a perimeter street, they dedicate the right of way. So what would happen if the right of way value is more than their road impact fee? They would not pay an impact fee in that case. So we still get the delta? Okay. Well, so much for that. I can't imagine that would happen. Yeah. Well, you never know. I mean, but yeah. If it's raw land that's being developed and you're using the tax rolls. Okay. Any other -- well, first of all, I guess you need direction . Dalton, you had mentioned -- I understand that. I'm ready. Okay. Yeah. I think that's right. Any other questions? So I thought what I heard you say to Council Member Briggs was you're going to take this out to the community, the developer community, or take it to the criteria manual process to change the criteria manual. Yes, sir. First, we would take it to the Planning and Zoning Commission, present it to them, receive any input from them that they might have, publish it for public notice 30 days, and then attempt to resolve any of the issues. But that's at the P&Z level. Yes, sir. So let's say you resolve those issues. It gets done there. The process is over. If you don't resolve those issues, is that when it comes to us? It would come back to the P&Z for public hearing. They would make a recommendation. It would come to you for a public hearing, and then you would take final action. Well, how -- On those specific issues that we're not able to resolve. So how then would you -- okay, you're in the criteria manual process. In other words, P&Z, public input, can we agree or not agree? I don't think you're going to have 100% agreement. Who makes a determination of, well, we've got agreement, and we just need to change the criteria manual? How do you gauge that? We staff, along with management, and with the legal department, would make that decision. If it's a substantial difference in opinion there, then it 's going to go back through the process. Is that substantial difference of opinion as presented at the actual P&Z hearing, or is it through a series of sort of community meetings? I mean, this process is sort of foreign to me. Public comment back to us. Either through the P&Z public process, or just somebody writing you a letter saying, hey, I don't agree with this? Through the public comment process. For the P&Z hearing, or just in general? In general. Okay. We would go to the P&Z for just a presentation, work session, like we have with you here. After that, we would publish it for 30 days of public comment. And then those comments are what we, by ordinance, have to resolve there. That's your answer. Yes. That's your answer as far as where could the disconnect be? Because if what I'm hearing is a 30-day advertisement in the paper, and that whatever comments you receive off of that will be the basis for the decision that management and staff and everybody's going to make, that's where I think there could be a trip up. Because how many people read the legal notices? No disrespect to the paper or anything, but that's, you know. We go a step further than just the legal notice. It's the published notice on our website, of course. But we take and we send it to the development community through the eTrack-it system. Anybody that's applied for a permit with the City of Denton gets an email from that. We also email the local development community associations and say, "Hey, this notice is out here. It's out here for 30 days." Do you think it would be possible through all those different methods of communication that you could use that to also set up an actual town hall or an actual time when staff could meet and people could come in, sit in a chair? So yeah, I'm going to go ahead and recommend Councilmember Rutter. And to your point, and you know this, but what I experienced when this was before us is it depends on what type of development you're doing and no one wants to commit to a procedure for fear of affecting someone else doing a different type of development. So I think we had 15 people and I point blanked each one and each one would not engage because for fear of setting a precedent. So it is outlining that process. I don't see that working. It may be the process is the process to quote a great man, but I don't know that that will get us where we want to be. If we're trying to build a consensus, no one wants to be the one. So there's a lot of ambiguity in the answers you get. It's well, this and that depends. I just could never find a straight answer. So I think it needs to be, it may be more, we need to take more ownership and say, "Here's how we're positioning ourselves and here's the defensible information." But I think to try to get someone to be the lead person to then set a precedent is going to be difficult. And so I'm going to make a suggestion and ask the council what they think about this. So I don't know if it's law or if it's just policy about the, you have this two step process about criteria manual, you go to PNZ, get the public comment. If you don't agree, then come to the council. I think we just need to do it to where it's going to come to council because it seems like when it comes to council, there's a lot of public awareness . I mean, people watch the agendas and if, you know, I just, I would just assume skip that first step and just have you go through the PNZ process, come before council. Then you got two public avenues, public hearing avenues and things like that. We may need to hear if it's even allowable for that to happen. We did include in 2012 when we drafted this provision, a legislative amendment opportunity for the council. So nothing prevents the council from just substituting its ability to amend this rather than going using the administrative procedure. So we can do it. Yes. Okay. All right. Is council okay with that? Okay. Great. Okay. Fantastic. Great presentation. Thank you so much. It definitely has helped me understand exactly this whole process. And so as people call me and ask me questions, I think I'll be able to give them a little bit more accurate answer. Thank you. Thank you very much. Great. All right. Moving on to agenda item three F, receive report and hold discussion, give staff direction regarding the transition plan for Stoke. And I believe we have a recusal. Council member Gregory will be recusing himself. And let's see, we've got 420, three closed session items. What are you saying, Mr. Mayor? I'm just keeping a surprise. I'm summarizing our agenda. Giving us a status update. Yes. Okay. Let's see. Oh, getting ahead of myself. Good afternoon, mayor and council members. I'm Caroline Booth, the director of economic development. And I'm going to be giving you an update on the Stoke transition. I'm going to be talking to you about parallel tracks that we're going down here. One track is the transition plan from management by the deck to management by the city. And then the one over here is issuing an RFP to see what kind of responses we might get regarding options for management. And then I'm going to receive your direction about both of those things. So when you say options for management, are you saying options for the same kind of structure that we just said we wanted? The RFP is written in a very broad way for people to provide a selection of the services that are necessary or to provide a turnkey solution. Sure. I'm sure you'll get to that. Yeah. So everything is on the table. So for background, our top priority at this point in time when we're transitioning from the deck to the city management is to ensure continuity of service for the 38 existing members and their 60 employees that work in the space. And in order to make sure that we're communicating with the people who are already there, we've set three member meetings. Two of them have already been held. And the things that we are communicating to the members during those meetings are that all current members can remain in Stoke because one of the big concerns that we heard was that people were going to be made to leave if they didn't fit a certain profile of member. We are also reassuring them that under city management, the pricing structure and the operating hours are going to remain the same. We've let them know that an RFP will be issued for options for new management. And should any of those proposals meet the criteria set forth by the evaluation committee and be acceptable to council, a new manager might be coming onto the scene in the next few months. And then we're having the final member meeting before the transition is going to be on September 22nd. Question. Yes, sir. Let me find it in the backup. And you might if you get to it later than just that's fine on all current members can remain in Stoke. So let's say let's just say for the sake of discussion, nothing changed on the management contract that the deck was still in the place of management . So a few months back, we gave I don't even know when it was . When did we give direction to try to get this thing back on track? March. In March. So what I read in the backup was that it's correct me if I 'm wrong, because I might have misunderstood the percentages, but it looked like it said 38% of the businesses were tech or somehow tech related. Right now, 45% are tech or tech enabled. And so there's and how many are there 38 total 38. Yes. And 45% of those are tech or tech related, which is sort of the direction we gave back in March. So let's say the deck is still managing the Stoke. If we were going to continue to try to meet our criteria, I mean, and I don't know how else to say this, but would I mean if these leases are coming up for renewal automatically that don't meet our criteria, I thought it was some of our direction back in March to say we need to start beginning to make sure that so. Help me understand. Okay, so that that was the direction was to focus on tech and tech enabled. But we had the conversation at the time about actually making people leave the space or not not renewing the leases and comments from Council at that time were Council members were uncomfortable with the concept of making people leave or non renewing the leases. So what what we are doing is when these people leave by att rition, they it's time for them to go. They've made that decision for their business. Those who are in the non tech fields are we're letting them go and we're focusing on the new ones being in the tech or tech enabled fields as per Council direction. Okay, so there's only three of us, at least in this room, who were here during that conversation. Is that the is that how y'all. I mean, I know there was some discussion about we weren't going to kick anybody out right then or but and I'm not saying it wasn't about at least I'm not saying that at all. I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just trying to recall and I don't. Yes, Mayor pro tem. I remember people being uncomfortable about kicking anybody out specifically. And I also remember, I think I remember the attrition conversation, but it's not perfectly clear in my mind. And it came up in the I thought in the context of graduation rates. So we want people to go on to the next thing. But that's basically my recollection. Okay, customer Braves, do you have a I remember not wanting to kick people out, but forcing people to leave and and not renewing the lease, I think are two separate things. I thought that when a lease was up or expired, I wasn't sure I'm that it wasn't going to be renewed. But I remember those two things didn't seem to be the same thing. Okay, so the member agreements run month to month, unless their office spaces, which are typically six month agreements. And I'm going to say right now, and when the city takes over management, these are not these are member agreements, they are in no way leases. That's not the way they're set up now. And that's definitely not the way they're going to be set up in the future. But just to clarify what this current situation is. Okay, and that. Go ahead. Yeah, that's different. That's different than I didn't realize that. That's different than what I month to month, I guess I I guess I just assume that it was an agreement was a lease. No, no, ma'am. Okay, then I think and so that makes sense on that we weren 't going to kick anybody out because that means we only have to do we only have to give 30 day notice. If it's what I don't even know what the lease usually is a lease and it can even be month to month, but it's still a lease. You're telling me this is not a lease at all. This is just an agreement. You can occupy this space for 30 days. And you get these same terms every 30 days. Is that I mean, you turned your mic on Mr. City attorney. It's more of a license, not a lease. Okay, all right. So and we don't necessarily need to have this conversation now because since it is month to month or it is a six month that provides us a little time and flexibility. But I think we need to somewhere down the road. Maybe it's when looking at these RFPs, people who don't meet that criteria. Right. How much time do we give for this transition because they could stay there for another two or three years. Yeah, so I hear you and I think that's absolutely correct. I'm okay with that. I'm okay with that conversation. So what I'm really describing to you right now is sort of our triage. Sure. The situation because we've got to ensure the continuity of the operation. Totally agree. I'm in total agreement. Council member Hudson. Yeah, I was going to reshape the conversation. First, again, down the road, right? So where we are today is not where we're going to be. I get it. I think the conversation to shift those that conversation, I think it needs to be either percentage of tech companies that we want to occupy the spaces or if you want to just because the center portions are just desk, I don't know that that matters as much as the exterior offices. But I think also it's a matter of having a conversation about I guess percentage is the easiest way or what happens when we're full. Again, planning on success, we're full and someone wants you have a tech company that wants to move in and you have maybe a non-tech company that 's occupying space. What happens in those scenarios? So I think again, going forward, if we're full and a non- tech company is there and we want a new and there's a new tech company wants in, what do we do? And that may not come up during our watch, but that's kind of how I see it. And I think you do have to separate the center desk rentals because that could be day, that could be month, that kind of vacillates, but the exterior offices is a different thing. When we bring back the RFP or whatever we're doing here, when we come back to get an update, let's go ahead and incorporate in that conversation what we 're talking about. Sure. And I feel like I need to share a couple of things from the members when we've been having these meetings, just some of the common themes that have come up. There is a lot of conversation around how that's going to roll out. What is it going to look like, tech versus tech enabled versus non-tech? So that's definitely a big concern that we've been hearing. And one thing that has been really helpful to me that we have gotten from them as feedback is three things that the members of Stoke and the larger startup community in Denton think are necessary for a successful startup community in general. And they list those things as being programming, education, and mentors is one big category that's important to have. Then access to capital and funding is another thing that's critical, along with a space to be entrepreneurs, preferably in a collaborative environment that's open to people in diverse fields. And this is just feedback from the members and people in that community. And I wanted to share it with you also that you would know what we're hearing at the staff level on the ground from the folks in the space. I can appreciate that. I guess, though, again, we're going to have to revisit the conversation that we had in March because we've got new people. But this was originally designed by ordinance to be tech and tech related. That was the whole genesis, the whole foundation of that. So I hear what everybody's saying because there's a mixture out there. There's people who are tech or tech related, and there's some who have nothing to do with that whatsoever. And I can understand the concern. So we need to revisit that conversation because you just read the ordinance, that's what it says. And that's why we had the meeting in March. And I'm glad you brought up the terms because I'm sure that you all saw included with your backup is a listing of some common terms and definitions that get thrown around when we have these conversations. And this is for everybody who's involved with it, me, the transition staff, the evaluation team for the RFP. So we're trying to do some leveling to make sure that everybody's on the same page. I get it. Yeah. Okay. So we'll move on. But I've definitely made a note of needing to include that in the upcoming conversations. So the transition team who is working on this project right now, I'm serving as the kind of general coordinator and oversight of all aspects of the transition and working with the DEC and relevant city departments. Paul Deshardin from tech services is working with us on all technology related items. And he's also going to be one of the people who's providing onsite coverage in the space. Jamie Lindsay is our assistant manager in customer service and she's going to be helping out on customer service related items and space coverage. And finally, Carrie Montz, who's the assistant branch manager at the North Branch Library and the business liaison, or I'm sorry, business outreach librarian from libraries is going to be working on programming and events and space coverage too. Melissa Craft and Tiffany Thompson are serving in kind of a consultant role to the team for customer service and technology items. And then my staff members, Michelle Coughlin and Julie Glo ver are providing support around paying bills and interacting with the landlord and the city facilities department and taking over the social media accounts for Stoke during city management time. Larry Collister and Jennifer Descartes are both helping out with the legal aspects of what needs to get done. And then Chuck Springer and Tony Puente and Dan Galizia from finance have also been assisting with our questions and things we need to get in place to make the transition. So we do have those legal considerations and our deputy city attorneys are helping by drafting documents such as the fee ordinance that has to be passed before the city can charge fees to members in the space, membership agreement and ordinance that we will enter into with the folks who choose to stay in the space. And then also a special ordinance and agreement for space rental if people want to have events there. So they're working on that and all of those things are going to come to you next week for your review and vote. In terms of fiscal considerations, we're revising the financial reporting structure to provide more accountability on both the revenue and expenditure side and we're putting together a detailed operating budget for STOKE for the coming fiscal year. Oops, getting ahead of myself again. The operational considerations are really where we're having to spend most of our time, daily management of the space, existing and upcoming programming and events, marketing efforts, recruitment, the mentor program which has more than 20 mentors in it, website, social media, space management, platform transfer. These are all of the little details that cannot slip through the cracks in order to make sure that we're continuing to serve the people who are there in the way that they're used to. So everyone has really pulled together and just said we'll do what needs to be done to make this happen and so I just want to recognize all of those folks whose names were up here. I really appreciate all of their help. So what I'm hearing is contrary to what's been out there, the council direction was not to discontinue STOKE. No, that's definitely not what the direction was. I just want to make sure. I wouldn't have been spending all this time on it if it weren't for them. There's been some, you know. I know, I know. And no, that's absolutely not what the direction was. Yes. And that's another reason why it's good to have these member meetings so that we can reiterate that. Obviously the direction was to continue it. Okay, so that's a quick overview of the transition that's happening. Now on to the RFP. The RFP actually went out today around 11 o'clock so it's out there on the streets for people to review and choose to respond to. I would be glad to forward that to you guys. It wasn't ready on Friday when your packets needed to go out so that's why it wasn't included in the backup. But as I said before, this RFP is going to allow for a wide range of proposals that can range from everything from supplementing with a couple of management services to a sublease of the space to an assignment of the lease. We're open for all proposals. The common thread that's going to run through acceptable proposals is fiscal or financial stability of the organization that's putting the proposal forward and also a solid business plan and operating model that includes metrics and deliver ables that are very clear that we can all agree on, get on the same page about it and move forward. Again, reiterating that the proposals are going to be reviewed on the business model as a whole, not just on price. And we've built that into the evaluation criteria. And we think that this process is going to give us some insights into what the market will bear and what the market will bring forward on a space like this. So we're looking forward to seeing what kind of proposals we get back to review and then hopefully bring forward to you all for your review. The evaluation committee, this is the dream team evaluation committee of all time. So you can see that we have the highest levels of folks reviewing these potential proposals that are going to come in. And if we receive viable proposals from organizations that we think can get the job done, we will vet them out through the committee or the evaluation team and bring them forward to council for your discussion. And if we find just that perfect one, and you guys think it 's also perfect, our goal would be to have the new manager take over whatever role they're going to take on in December of this year, which we know is an aggressive timeline, but we're holding ourselves to getting things done. So based upon that statement and what you just said, it sounds like to me that you there's either a goal or there's an impression or an aspiration that there will be some kind of third party standing in some shoe. How many of those shoes? We don't know. Okay. I just want to make sure because I know that we did give that direction. We wanted to see that. But what I'm hearing you say is that we're going to have that in one form or the other, most likely unless something really just doesn't come through. I think we're going to get back some proposals that we might want to work with. I don't think that it's the city's core business to run a co-working space. I don't think we have the expertise to do the best job at it. We're going to do the very best we can. But if we have the opportunity to work with another provider who can get us to where we want to be with that, I think we need to leave ourselves open to that possibility. That's my take on that. Yeah. I just want to reiterate, no one's made up their mind. We've been approached by individuals that are interested in turnkeying this, taking it off the city's hands. We've been interested in folks that are willing to come in and run it. We have seen no real specifics yet. This process is set up. The idea would be to try to put some kind of a matrix together for the council and say, "Okay, here's what we think are the most viable few ideas out there." Not any one business proposal or business model, but few ideas, what do you think? But it's very possible that if we can't validate prior experience, financial backing, that sort of thing, that we would bring those forward. But we were not going to enter into one-off conversations with folks. We felt like we needed to give everybody a shot to put their idea on the table for you. Okay. Yeah. Council Member Hutsbeth? Real quick. Yes. How quickly do you think or do you plan to get the programs up and running? I think they were having a monthly. Is that something we could get a program scheduled pretty quick? We're planning to continue doing everything that's occurring on a monthly basis. If the people who are providing that programming want to continue, we're inviting them to keep doing that. I've been working very closely with Heather and other people on the city staff and the transition team to identify what's already there, who we need to get in contact with to keep going forward. The idea really is a seamless transition to continue doing the things that are working well and to make improvements in areas that need improvement. Okay. And then, if I may. Yes. The agreement conclusion date is when? September 30th. 30th. Okay. My only ask in the RFP process is that we have some waiting for local preference. I just think, you know, I just don't want to ... I don't see how it didn't end up local in the first place, but I definitely ... I think even no matter how it transitions, if it's just management or totally a transition, I think it just ... I think it needs to be weighted that way because at some point you kind of relinqu ish that control and you want to at least have a favorable look on it because ... because Nitten's kind of a niche market. It's unique that way. And so someone that would understand that and I think they 'd have a better chance of success and that lessens the chance of the questions, "Hey, why did you hand it off to XYZ?" That's just my thought. One of the evaluation criteria says demonstrate your understanding of Denton's unique startup community. So we're ... and how ... what's your company's involvement in Denton's startup community currently? So we're tracking along with you as far as trying to get people who are keyed in to what we have going on here that's different from other places. Okay. And you could ... if you would put me on the list, I would like to see it. Okay. I'll send it to everybody. Thanks. Okay. So key points. We're focusing on continuity of service for our existing members at this point in time. We have a transition team in place that spans multiple departments and we're going to be ... we already have issued an RFP to test the market. And so we're seeking your direction, which you've been giving as we've been going through the presentation about the transition plan and the RFP. Sounds good. I mean, sounds like you're going down two tracks and RFPs do win. It will close on October 3rd. Okay. So ... Okay. Any questions, comments? Keely? Councilmember Briggs? You look like you want to say something. Well, my question was more about the management. You mentioned Ms. Gregory working with you and I know that that position was hired through DEC and is that something that this new ... maybe you can get with me offline about how that is all going to transition and work out because I didn't see that in this plan. Okay. I'd be glad to. Thank you. That's my ride. I'm looking at the transition team. It's a great group, but I'd be interested to know and I'm not asking for this to be put out as just kind of one of those questions in my mind is how much are we spending timewise city resources on this transition and what is in the interim between September 30th and December or whenever we do find someone else to take over, how much city resources, who is planned to have to be involved in the actual day-to-day running? And I ask that from a standpoint of is there anything we can do in that interim? Is there ... I know the rest of council was all wanting to get rid of DEC, but could we do a month-to-month with DEC? Is that something that we would consider just to make it simpler or is that not even a possibility? I think they've told us that they're not interested in continuing their relationship past September 30th, is that right? Yes. Okay. We're making a significant investment of staff resources to do this and we're being as efficient as we can, but we have to cast a wide net because we don't have one or two people that have all of the skill sets that are necessary to just step in and make this happen. And there were just a lot more considerations that I was unaware of at the time that I've come to find out and we've had to pull in legal on more things than I anticipated. So it's been a learning process and I think not all of those people are going to be devoting all of their work days to doing this, but it's going to take up a significant amount of staff time, at least it has since the decision was made and then it will continue to until we kind of get our feet under us and have a month of doing it under our belts. And I commend you all for what you're doing to make the transition smooth for everybody that's there because it's like when you build a new house and you sell the old house before the new one's done and you got to move into that apartment, even though they're not moving there, they're dealing with different groups of people and so the easier you can make that the better. Yes, we're trying. Council Member Briggs. You may have mentioned this, but when are the RFPs due back ? October 3rd is when they close, is when it closes. Yes, ma'am. Thank you. Any other questions, comments? All in once, twice? Yes, Council Member Duff. Just a comment. I really wish this thing could just go away, but it can't. Okay. We'll make that note. I commend you for the effort you're putting out because I know that's a lot of time and effort. Okay. Anybody else? All right. That concludes that particular agenda item. And so somebody could grab Council Member Gregory. That concludes our work session items. We will now convene the closed session at 5.05. We'll move into our executive session. We will consider the following items. Consultation with attorneys under Texas Government Code Section 551.071. Deliberations regarding real property under Texas Government Code Section 551.072. Deliberations regarding personal matters, personnel matters , under Texas Government Code Section 551.074. And then lastly, deliberations regarding certain public power utilities, competitive matters under Texas Government Code Section 551.086. And I believe also our dinner is out there. So if y'all want to just take a few minutes and grab dinner , and we'll go ahead and call the first closed session item once we get back in. Good evening, everyone. Wanted to welcome you to this special call meeting of the City of Denton City Council. It's 645. I appreciate you being patient with us. We were running a little late this evening. If you could, then are you able, please stand with me as we pledge allegiance to the U.S. 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. I pledge allegiance to the Texas one state under God, one and indivisible. Okay, we got several proclamations. We'll just Constitution Week. Who's here for Constitution Week? Come on down. Good evening. If y'all wouldn't mind introducing yourselves, yeah, just tell us about -- oh, you can do it with this mic. Yes. Hi. I'm Kathy Strauss. I'm the Benjamin Lyon chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution here in Denton. And this is -- I'm Laura Douglas. And I'm Diana Mason, newsletter editor. Thank you. Got a proclamation here for you. Proclamation by the mayor of the City of Denton. Whereas our founding fathers, in order to secure the blessings of liberty for themselves and their posterity, did ordain and establish a Constitution for the United States of America. And where it is of the greatest importance that all citizens fully understand the provisions and principles contained in the Constitution in order to effectively support, preserve, and defend it against all enemies. And whereas the 230th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution provides an historic opportunity for all Americans to remember the achievements of the fram ers of the Constitution and the rights, privileges, and responsibilities they afford us in this unique document. And whereas it is the privilege and duty of all Americans to commemorate the 230th anniversary of the ratification and convention of the Constitution of the United States of America with appropriate ceremonies and activities. Now therefore, I, Chris Watts, mayor of the City of Denton, Texas, do hereby proclaim the week of September the 17th through September the 23rd, 2017, as Constitution Week and urge all citizens to study the Constitution and reflect on the privilege of being an American with all the rights and responsibilities which that privilege involves and further to vigilantly protect the freedoms guaranteed to us through the guardians of our liberty. So thank you very much. [Applause] >> Okay. I would like to on Constitution Day is on at the beginning of next week on Sunday at the Golden Triangle Mall at Center Court at 2 o'clock. We will be reading the Constitution in its entirety. If any of you, we would like to invite any of you who will be out there just to come and listen with us at 3 o'clock. We ring bells because that at that time is when the Constitution was ratified. So we would like to see you all there. Thank you. >> Thank you. [Applause] >> Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Denton Public Library Summer Reading Challenge. Anyone here to accept that? Come down and introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about the reading challenge. >> Thank you. My name is Jennifer Becker. I'm the director of libraries here at the City of Denton. And every year we have a wonderful summer reading program to make sure that kids keep up with their reading to keep them at least at the same level when they left school in May when they returned back in the fall. And also to help adults improve their cognitive skills and keep us fresh so we don't start to decline in our older ages. And this year we had a fabulous successful program. >> Thank you. All right. This is a proclamation by the mayor of the City of Denton. Whereas the Denton Public Library designs a program each summer to promote literacy and lifelong learning and prevent a decline of reading and cognitive skills in children and in adults. Whereas the 2017 Summer Reading Challenge was a challenge issued by the Denton Public Library to bring the Denton community together for a common goal. Read for a collective 1 million minutes over the summer. That was the goal. 1 million minutes. Whereas a total of 6,805 people registered for the program, that's a lot. Reading for a total of, I just hope, you know, sometimes when you have to say large numbers in math, it's just 2,301,300 minutes between June 1st. Yes. Yes. Between June 1st and July 31st of 2017. So that's almost, that's over double your goal. Yes. Whereas the completion rate for this year's summer reading program was the library's highest to date. 53.52% of those who signed up completed the program. That means about 3,400 people completed the program. Reading for at least 5 hours over the summer. In addition, 33.17% of participants completed 10 or more hours of reading this summer. The Denton community rose to the challenge and worked hard to read 229% over our original goal of 1 million minutes. Now therefore, I, Chris Watts, Mayor of the City of Denton, Texas, do hereby and proclaim the summer of September 2017 as the Denton Public Library Summer Reading Challenge and proclaim that the City of Denton is a city of readers who support literacy. Thank you so much for the program and congratulations on exceeding your goal by such a large amount. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you. You bet. That's great. That's fabulous. Thank you. Live United Month. Introduce yourselves and someone tell us a little bit about Live United Month. Thank you, Mayor. I'm Gary Henderson, CEO of United Way of Denton County. Ellen Painter, Board Member. Debbie Smatresk, Board Member. Mary Curtis, Board Member. And Teddy Ann, Director of Marketing and Outreach. We just want to say thank you, Mayor, and to the City Council, City Manager Howman, for the support you give us at United Way of Denton County. I remember in 2012 when we shared our first needs assessment with the City Council and the school district in a joint meeting, all we asked was that you let us be at the table to help solve some of these complex community problems and you've been nothing but gracious to allow us to be one of your trusted partners in that process. So we look forward to continuing this partnership and so thank you so much for your support. Yes. Proclamation by the Mayor of the City of Denton. Whereas United Way of Denton County achieves its mission to improve lives in Denton County by mobilizing community resources and building partnerships that help children, families, veterans, people experiencing homelessness, and people affected by mental illness. And whereas United Way of Denton County and its partners help more than 80,000 Denton County residents each year by assessing community needs, developing collaborative solutions, and measuring results. And whereas United Way of Denton County seeks to reduce duplication of efforts through increased coordination of activities by providing backbone support to collective impact initiatives that address complex community problems. And whereas locally led by 46 community and business leaders, the Board of Directors of United Way of Denton County continues to find innovative ways to serve people of all ages in our community who need a helping hand. Now therefore, I, Chris Watts, Mayor of the City of Denton, Texas, do hereby declare and proclaim the month of September 2017 as Live United Month and joins United Way of Denton County donors, volunteers, and community partners in calling all residents to live united. Thank you, Gary, and the board for all y'all do for our community and our county. Blood Cancer Awareness Month. Who's here to? Hello. I'm Kate Johnson, and I'm an 11 year survivor of leukemia. And we just appreciate all the research and all that's done with the leukemia and the blood cancer awareness. Thank you. Thank you so much. The proclamation by the mayor of the City of Denton. Whereas in the United States, an estimated 1,237,824 people are living with or are in remission from leukemia, lymphoma, melanoma, or other form of blood cancer with an estimated 171,550,000 new cases expected to be diagnosed in 2017. Okay. Got that wrong. Whereas leukemia, lymphoma, and myeloma, excuse me, I made a mistake before, and other blood cancers will kill an estimated 58,320 people in the United States this year alone. And whereas the leukemia and lymphoma society exists to find cures and ensure access to treatment for blood cancer patients. And whereas LLS maintains an office in North Texas to help improve the quality of life for blood cancer patients and their families in the state of Texas. And in the state of Texas is similarly committed to the eradication of these diseases and supports the treatment of blood cancer patients and their families. And whereas the state of Texas encourages private efforts to enhance research funding and education programs that are saving lives, not someday, but today. Now therefore, I, Chris Watts, mayor of the City of Denton, Texas, do hereby declare and proclaim the month of September, 2017 as Blood Cancer Aware ness Month and joins with LLS in educating our citizens about the need for finding cures and creating access to treatments for all types of blood cancer. To get involved with LLS from participating in fundraising campaigns to making donation or volunteering and to find life-saving research to advance breakthrough therapies for blood cancer patients. Thank you so much for bringing that to life. Just wanted to say thank you for your help and all that you do. Thank you. Thank you so much. Yes ma'am. Thank you. [applause] All right, we'll move on now to the portion of our presentation. The agenda item three, which is presentation from the 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. Next item is Agenda 3B1, Bob Clifton regarding eradicating parking and pollution. Mr. Clifton, as you'll come down and state your name and address, your time will begin. Okay, now you want to know where I live and all the other stuff and who I am? Need to know your name and address. Yes, sir. It's Bob Clifton and I'm about to get the roof on my RV and as soon as I do that I'll probably be over in Wal-Mart's parking lot because they let you stay for the night for free you see. I need to get to the computer and I think I can remember how to do it, but I'm just going to show you what I've got and then we'll go from there. All right, I've got to go here and do this and go to this and I just had to click it. There we go. Now, then I have to go to the... There we go. All right. There's your answer. Any questions? Nope. There's the answer. This will eradicate downtown parking. It gives a nice new terminal home to what is now known as City Hall West. The waiting room will be those two wonderful arches that used to house the fire equipment. That's that. I've got some other little cute ones I'll show if I think he said I just right click it. Nope. That's right. Okay. Let's get to the map. All right. That's enough of that. This, by the way, is in San Francisco and this color combination, which was the cream and red, is what the old Dallas street rails had. And of course, what you see here is out in the middle of the street where you get on and get off and that really slows down traffic because people are riding the street cars. Okay. Now, let's get to the next one. I guess we get out of this, get into this. Okay. Is that up? Yes. All right. What this street rails are going to do for Denton is we're going to connect the dots. Start up there at Razor Ranch on the top, left hand North Lakes Park. Come down, got Presbyterian Hospital. Come on down, you got North Texas. Come on down, you got Dena. Come on around, you got Golden Triangle Mall. Then you go down, you've got Regional Hospital. Go back up, you've got the county offices. Come back in, you've got MLK. Come back in again to the A train terminal and a little dot in the blue is the courthouse and then north of that is TWU. Now the blue is included in there because that's in the 2030, whatever it is, downtown deal. Why they didn't include all this, I don't know. Anyway, with street rails, you should be able to get from Razor Ranch to Regional Hospital in less than 15 minutes. Not bad. Okay. We're working on it. It's probably going to take a year or so. It's going to take some charter amendments, which we're more than happy to present you with so that you'll be able to properly place them there. It's going to be a team effort. We're going to need city council. We're going to need everybody. Some people probably detest me, but I will gladly talk to them because this has got to be a city involvement, but it can be done. Portland, Oregon has done it. They get like 14,000 riders a day. It's unbelievable. All these cities are going back to them. Milwaukee is building one, if they haven't already got it up. Tampa has finally caught up with them. San Francisco, of course, is putting them back in, even with BART out there. The people up above, BART say put the street cars back in, which they've done. I think it's on Folsom Street. It's everywhere. Dallas is now getting on board with DART. I'm very excited about this. Y'all can deflect me off into a project that I really like, and I won't be down here on your case all the time. Any questions? We do have a request for Council Member Briggs. I have a couple of questions. Did Denton used to have a street car a long time ago? I think so. Yes. That's correct. Are you proposing that the routes are the same as they used to be? Is that just kind of bringing back the old street car, or is this something different? It depends. This is not my project. This is because Denton is my hometown, has been for 72 years. We've got to get the cars off the streets. This inside map that I show you here in the white is basically what I call, I had them title it as the inner city. There's another phase that comes into this that we'll address later, which is that area of Denton is deteriorating, and it needs help. But back to your answer, to answer your question, yes. The original trolley line started at the old Katy Depot, which is kind of catty cornered from where the train terminal is now for the A train. It's kind of across the railroad tracks, and it was north of Hickory Street. The original street rail cars ran up Hickory Street, took a ride on Locust, went north on Locust, from Hickory to Oak Street, made a left on Oak Street, went out Oak Street to Fry Street, and made a left on Fry, went to Hickory Street, there at Dykes Corner, which is now the copy pro, whatever it's called out there, and made a right, and then it went down to Mill Street, which is no longer there, and ended up at the car barns out there, which was, most of y'all remember, the old duck pond out there, the golf course, and that was that route. Then they came back, I think about five years later, and put a route in from the same thing, except when they got to the square, somehow, and Dr. Brid ges, who's pretty much the authority on this area. We also have one other question for you too as well, just need to, yeah, because we can't really... The only states that the streetcar, street rail, went out to T.W.U., and the curve in Oakland was some kind of a turnaround or something, and that's why Oakland is curved out there, but they also had all those dormitories out there. - Okay, so yeah, we've got a question from Council Member Gary, Mayor Pro Tem. - Yes, ma'am. - Yeah. - If you could answer this one question, have you spoken to DCTA yet? - No. - No. - Well, I did talk to them today, as a matter of fact, when he told me they have 30 buses running from six in the morning until about six in the evening around Denton streets, and it's all burning diesel, 30 of them. This will coordinate with them, whatever. We gotta get there first. First of all, we gotta get organized. - Okay. - Okay. All right. Thank you very much. - Is that it? - That's it. Yes, sir. - Okay. - I'm putting up with my... Let's see which books I got. Oh, Wartzilla Book Club sent me their selection. - Yeah, if you'll just... Anything you'd like to distribute, if you have, you would just... Thank you very much. The next speaker will be Mr. Willie Hutzpeth regarding the Confederate monument on the downtown Denton Square. - How many minutes do I get? How many minutes? - Three or four? Four. - Four. Okay. How about five? Can I get five? Can I get five? - Yeah, you can get four. - No, no, I don't want anymore. I want to time it, so... Oh, you'll have that time. Okay. My name is Willie Hutzpeth. I live at 623 East. I'm a Confederate. I'm a Confederate. I'm 623 Newton. Someone said to me when I was out and about talking about the Confederate monument, said, "You don't ever have anything good to say." And I thought about that. He's right. I don't. I'm going to try to have something good. I don't have anything good to say tonight. But anyway, I thought about... I've been out there talking about the Confederate monument out there, Denton County representative to them and voice in my opinion. And someone said, "What about the city? It's in the city of Denton. Why don't they have anything to say about the monument?" And I wondered about that. Why don't you have something to say? What is your stance on that as a council or as an individual? What do you think about that? The Confederate monument, what are your thoughts? I sure would like to know. Secondly, maybe you're like the county. They don't talk when I go up there and bring up issues with them. And I don't know why, but I wonder about you when it comes to the fire department. I've talked to a lot of you about that, about the fire department and why don't they have African Americans at the fire department? Now you all look very nice about it and you shake your heads and you do this stuff you do, which means how many more minutes does he have so we can move on to something else? I get it. But I want to know... You know the thing that I think about when I think about why you don't have firemen? You know what I automatically go to? Racism. That's what I go to. And I don't really know that that's the case. I don't really know, but that's what I think about. One of your council members said, "You know, you can help with this problem and I'm going to try to help with the problem." But I didn't create the problem. Councils created the problem intentionally. Now we have the mess where it's really hard to get out of it. So what I'm going to say to you is I'm going to keep talking about it. I don't really know why because you're giving me that look, which is how many more minutes does he have? That's what you do. But I'm going to keep talking. Every week I'm going to be asking you, "Why don't we have African American firefighters in this city?" One. We have one token. One. And that's it. Why is that? And secondly, I'm going to keep mentioning this too because I just have a premonition about it. I keep thinking it's going to happen. We ... No, no. You need to have something for those kids to walk on so they're not in the street going to Ryan High School. Should one of them get hit again and killed or injured, I will be right back here saying to you, "I told you to do something about that. Why didn't you?" You say, "Well, who are you to tell me to do anything?" Let's see how that sounds when someone gets hit again. All you have to do is put something on the ground out there . It doesn't cost that much. So those two things you'll be hearing from me quite a bit. One. Why, when my little granddaughter asked me why can't ... I want to be a fireman, fireperson. And didn't I ask you? And didn't? Then I'll have to answer. They don't hire black people in Denton in those areas. It is true, isn't it? Thank you. - Mr. Asper, Council Member Briggs has a question regarding ... I'm hoping it's what's posted. - Yes. - Actually, it was a comment on something other than what he was supposed to speak about. - Go ahead. We got a little off posting there, so a little attitude, but go ahead. - Okay. In regards to the fire issue, I've been asking around other cities, and it doesn't seem to be just a city of Denton issue. It's other departments as well. So I think there's a bigger question here to explore and lots of work to do. So just to that comment. Thank you. - Thank you. Appreciate that. Thank you, Mr. Asper. - Well, I appreciate you checking. At least you, not the other six. - Okay. Our next speaker is Valerie Martinez. Is it Ebers? I'm sorry if I mispronounced that. Okay. Thank you. Regarding Senate Bill 4. - Good evening. My name is Valerie Martinez Ebers. I live at 121 Copperwood Drive in Lakeside, Texas, but I'm a professor of political science at the University of North Texas, and my area of special ization is the politics of race and ethnicity. And I especially study the political behavior of Latinos or Hispanics. I use both words interchangeably. And for that reason, I wanted to talk to you about SB4. The Latino voter population is growing in our city, just as it's growing across the state. At the same time, this rigorous debate and litigation is continuing about SB4, or sanctuary cities as we refer to them. And I just wanted to take this opportunity to give you a political lesson that we learned from California about what happens when you have strong anti-immigrant legislation. In 1988, California was a Republican stronghold. The governorship and both houses of the legislature were controlled by Republicans. By 1996, the Democratic Party has a lock on the state and has continued until this day. I would mention that it's well established now in both political science research and real world campaign politics that the explanation for this change in partisanship has to do with that Proposition 187, which was the turning point in the political behavior of Latinos. After that legislation was passed, Latinos started natural izing, registering, and voting in record numbers, numbers that far exceeded the growth in their population. And because of the sentiment that was expressed by that legislation, Latinos who do not have a strong voter identification went into the Democratic Party because it was perceived as being more friendly to immigrants. I foresee that this is going to happen in our state. Please mark my words. SB4 is to Texas Latinos what Proposition 187 was to the Latinos in California. If good citizens with big hearts like yourself don't take a position on this very emotional, most important policy issue for Latinos, you can expect similar behavior. Now you may be happy with that fact. It's great to see people involved. And it may not matter to you because of course your counsel is nonpartisan. But they do know elected officials who are perceived as pro -immigrant and anti-immigrant. And I wouldn't want you to be on anything but the most positive side. The other thing that I would point out to you is that Latinos are the fastest growing segment of the student population at both of our universities. Now many of those students cannot vote, but they can protest and they can make your lives miserable and they might. And finally I might say they might end up voting with their feet, which means they would leave our city if they perceive it as not being friendly to Latinos. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. The next speaker is Lilian Prado Carrillo. This brings us to our portion of the agenda which is item. Oh, I'm sorry. No, no, I've got open mic. So yes, right. We've got one open mic and it's, I think it's Ayanna Carr illo. Yes, and we'll give you just a moment to get set up. And you will have four minutes to speak. Hi. My name is Ayanna Catalina Carrillo. I'm eight years old. I was born here in Denton to my parents, Albert Carrillo, California, by way of Chilean and Mexican parents, and my mom, Lilian Prado Carrillo, born in Guatemala City, Guatemala. She was brought to Denton, Texas at four years old. She was raised here in Denton. She went to school here in Denton and worked hard in Denton with her dad, Juan Luis Prado. I am talking my mom, I'm taking my mom's spot today because she was invited to speak to students and staff at A&M and College Station. Tonight, she will speak to them about love, courage, unity, compassion, and intentionality. That means doing something on purpose. She will call on them. Make a call to occasion to unite love and protect our community. I call on you tonight, too. When I hear the word protect, my parents come to mind. I have a four-year-old sister named Camila, and she is afraid of tornadoes. Although the threat is not always real, her fear is real every time she feels it. You see, my mom and dad's job are her parents, her guidance , is to make her feel secure, protected, and safe. That in case the tornado does actually come, Camila would know she is safe with my parents by her side, knowing that they have done what they would now that she is safe with my parents by her side. All they can do to protect her in advice. She is supported, and because of that support, she is happier and healthier. My family and I expect that same dedication from you. My mom has taught me that to serve in public office comes with a lot of responsibility. Why I would hope that is elected. Social guarders of our city, guardians of our safety and the safety of our neighbors, you would feel the same kind of responsibility to serve, protect, and assure fair, respectful treatment in the threat of any kind of harm or injustice to any resident. The visuals of our color, of our skin, our accent when we talk of the geographical organ of our last name. I join my mom and call on your courage, you human compassion for you to take into consideration that the very real fear of our community is feeling right now. As before, like a tornado is a very real threat. But unlike a tornado who develops and hits certain places by chance, as before is going to certainly hit the state of Texas as a whole. And unlike a tornado who doesn't discriminate, who it hits as before is directly targeting one group of people. It's not just illegal immigrants because illegal immigrants come in all shapes and colors from many countries. Those whose residents may have a better chance of mixing in with others in Texas, residents -- what? Residents. Residents. With lighter skin. With lighter skin. You can finish up if you have just a couple of sentences left, that's fine. My mom's story ended well, but the fight continues for others. My mom tells me we cannot and must not forget where we came from. Not only the country we came from, but the humble beginnings we had. The sacrifices of our families made the difference only in the year they took place. We are all God's children and we all deserve a life free from fear. Where our hard work pays off and we can love one another not just with words, but with actions others can see. Be a good example. Protect those who need you. Join the -- Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. We'll move on to the next item on our agenda, which is the consent agenda. Councilmember Gregory. Thanks, Mayor. What a personal privilege. I'm former elementary principal and a teacher and I've heard a lot of eight-year-olds read and none quite as good as what I just heard. That was impressive. Thank you. I am moved. I move approval of all of the items on the consent agenda. Councilmember Briggs. I second. All right, we have a motion and a second for the consent agenda, items four. What is that, A through G? Let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries unanimously. Moving on to agenda items five, which are items for individual consideration. We have agenda item 5A, considered option of an ordinance of the City Council of the City of Denton amending the establishment of the Downtown Reinvestment Fund, defining and removing the commitment of certain revenues of the city , committing the fund balance remaining the fund, providing separability clause, et cetera. Thank you, Mayor. Chuck Springer, Director of Finance. I don't have a formal presentation, but I wanted to highlight a few things in terms of this item. This would amend the Downtown Reinvestment Fund. Normally the ordinance calls for $100,000 that's dedicated to mixed beverage taxes from the general fund to be committed to this special revenue fund. This ordinance would change that, so it would remove that commitment, but it would also keep any unspent balances within the fund for this purpose until it becomes kind of a de minimis amount, a small amount, and then the fund would be closed. Based on this, just to give council an idea, there's currently about $131,000 in this fund. Wait a minute. Yeah. Yeah. Just hold on just a second. Okay. Go ahead. There's currently $131,000 in this fund as of today. There's only one commitment in which the council's agreed to an incentive for the Monroe-Pearson Event Center. Those incentives aren't paid until they complete the improvements. That's for $25,000. So after that would be paid, there'd be about $106,000 remaining in this fund for future commitments. Okay. Any questions for staff? Councilmember Gregory? Thank you, Mayor. I move that we postpone action on this item until an event 's certain. I'd rather not vote to remove the funding source until we have identified another funding source, and so the event would be that this would be brought back when we have agreed upon another funding source to replace the general funds that were going for this purpose. Councilmember Hussbuth? Second. Got a question for staff. If this is postponed, do we make that transfer? What's the status of the $100,000? If the existing ordinance remains in effect, the $100,000 will be transferred by the end of this fiscal year, September 30th. So it would add an additional $100,000 in this fund. Councilmember Gregory? Got a question for staff. My understanding is that our current ordinance says that we are only allotted to spend how much a year. Well that's through the budget process. In other words, we budget funds in terms of the expenditure . This year, if you remember, we amended the budget. We originally had it at $100,000. We had another project come in, so we amended it for $120, 000 in the current year. Next fiscal year in the proposed budget, it's budgeted at $ 100,000 in terms of expenditures. I thought we had spending limits for each year, that there were limits of no more than $25,000 per project and no more than $100,000 to be spent in a year. Is that not correct? Well, this ordinance just establishes the special revenues and the special revenue fund and the amount that's contributed into it for accounting purposes. I think there's a separate ordinance that the council may adopt to kind of the rules on allocating those and that's separate. But it may have, I think it has $125,000 per incentive, but I don't think it sets the annual budget amount. Okay, thank you. Yeah, and I, because of that, I won't be supporting the postponement simply because what you're saying is we would transfer that money to that fund. And I know last year, I think we had frozen the transfer, I believe, and that's how the fund balance got drawn down to the current level. Is that correct? Well, last year you directed this year to just budget the fund balance and the council would make a decision on the $100,000 transfer. So during the current fiscal year, that's why we have not made that transfer and that's why I'm kind of bringing this back before the end of the fiscal year so we can have a final decision. Okay, so what I'm hearing you say is that council made the decision to let the fund balance fund it this year, that we would later make another decision about transferring it into this fund somewhere before the end of the fiscal year. Correct. And this is the decision. Correct. Okay, all right. Council Member Hudspeth. Yeah, just want to repeat what I said. In work session to create a record and also even highlight what Chuck had pointed out. He said there's a project pending but they have to complete the project and submit the receipts and have that work inspected to then recover funds . So that's a rare type of accountability that we are practicing here and I'm disappointed if we don't move forward with that because I challenge other council members to point out another funding mechanism that is structured as rigorous as this is that puts so much responsibility on the applicant. Currently I listed the five, six, seven stakeholders. There's I count 16 different requirements or workings between different institutions to fulfill the project. It has stakeholder input. It has board member input. It has city council has ultimate right of refusal. And so again, that to me is the perfect example that we should be leading with is a situation where the individual requesting funds from the city council has to complete the work, have it inspected, go through all the processes and before they receive the money. We'll vote on a number of things from this dais and none of them, we don't ask them to complete the street and then we'll pay you once we inspect the work. So I think this is outstanding and we'll just see how the vote turns out. But I wanted to have a clear record. So thank you. >> Thank you. Councilmember Riggs. >> I mean, yes, Councilmember Riggs. >> So I also wanted to say I support this program, but we 're not actually voting to get rid of the program for clarification for everyone. This program is going to stay in place even after this vote if it passes. It's just about where the money is going to come from. And we need to make sure that the funds come from somewhere and I would like to have a work session on that as soon as possible. But I don't want to postpone the budget discussion anymore. I will go on record and say that the difference people see in downtown are because of these grants. They actually do make a difference. And so funding it is important, but that's not what this is about to me tonight. Thank you. >> Councilmember Gregory. >> Thank you, Mayor. Another question for staff. If this postponement resulted in a delay past the budget going into effect and money from the general fund did go into that fund. Would it be possible at a later date if another funding source was approved to move those funds back to the general fund? >> In a future fiscal year, yes. Council could make that direction or pass an ordinance to have us move some of those funds out of this special revenue fund and back to the general fund. But in the future, the next fiscal year, that would occur. >> We have a motion and a second for postponement. Is that to a date certain or what is that? >> To an event certain. >> Okay. In the event is to bring it back when we have agreed upon another funding source to replace this. A yes vote postpones it, a no vote means we still have an action to consider on the agenda as it was posted. Let's vote on the board, please. Motion for postponement fails 5-2. Mayor Pro Tem. >> I move to adopt this ordinance. >> Councilmember Ryan. >> I will second. >> All right. We have a motion and a second to adopt the ordinance as presented. Let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries 5-2. Moving on to items for consideration agenda item 5B. Your nominations, appointments to the city boards and commissions. >> Mayor and council. >> Madam City Secretary. >> I'm sorry. Mayor and council, you have just a few nominations left to make for this year's process. On the community development advisory committee, council member Briggs has nominated Jane Piper Lundt and councilmember Ryan has a nomination. >> I almost got it but not quite. >> Thank you. And on traffic safety commission, mayor Pro Tem Bagary has nominated Karen DeVine. Council is able to vote on those nominations this evening and proceed from there. >> Okay. All right. Chair would entertain action on agenda item 5B. Nominations. Councilmember Ryan. >> Thank you, mayor. I will move approval. >> Councilmember Gregory. >> Second. >> So on the board, please. Motion carries 7-0. >> Mayor, I just wanted to mention that we won't put this item back on the agenda until councilmember Ryan has a nomination. So we don't pressure him. >> No. We're going to put this on the agenda every week until councilmember Ryan has a nomination. >> No, he doesn't get out of the -- I'm just teasing, obviously. All right. Thank you. Agenda item 5C, consider appointments to council committees . Who's handling that? >> I can't or -- okay. >> Yes, mayor Pro Tem. >> I was hoping some people could help me out with my over burdened council committee schedule. So if there is interest, I would like for other people to step up. Otherwise I'll stay on my committees. It's fine. >> Okay. Councilmember Gregory, I'm trying to pull up the agenda so we can look at what committees you're talking about. >> If you're -- >> I can help you. I have those if you like, mayor. >> Which ones is she on? >> She's on audit -- excuse me, on agenda committee but has to remain there because it's part of the ordinance. Not finance, if someone's interested in that. Committee on the environment, CAPER committee. Let's see. Development code review committee. Council employee benefit committee which might be going away. And the downtown TIF. >> You're saying you're on too many -- come on. That's nothing. >> All right. And before -- is this the agenda item 2? I thought I'd seen where we were going to address the ad hoc employee benefit committee. Is this -- are we posted to -- I thought there was some recommendation or something to go ahead and dissolve that. >> Not yet. >> Okay. Never mind. Sorry. I read that somewhere else. >> So audit finance? >> Audit finance. Then go through the line. Councilmember Ryan. >> Thank you, mayor. Unless someone else wants to volunteer for them, I'd be willing to serve on the CAPER committee and I know we do as a separate vote but the downtown TIF. >> What do you mean it's a separate vote, separate agenda? >> My understanding from the posting was that we would have to vote for the TIF board separately. >> Under this posting, though? >> No, I think they're doing -- >> Separate one. >> -- separate. >> Okay. Never mind. Under this particular action, you're talking about the CAP ER committee. >> Yes. >> Okay. All right. Councilmember Gregory. >> And I'm also interested in -- I would be willing to fill that downtown TIF board. >> Okay. All right. So that's for a different day. >> Audit finance? >> Okay. I'm already on the audit committee. Anybody else? So the ones that we have that you're still on is the audit, committee on the environment, code review, and -- >> The ad hoc. >> The ad hoc, which we can't consider, and then the TIF board. >> All right. >> Is that -- was that it? >> Yes. >> Okay. All right. So we've got for this agenda item, anybody interested in filling in on the audit, environmental, or code review committee? >> Nobody. >> Well, all right. All right. So we have one. Councilmember Ryan would be glad to sit on the CAPER committee. Is that correct, Councilmember Ryan? >> That's correct. I mean, if -- I'd also be willing to do committee on environment. I thought that that would be a popular committee. >> Okay. All right. So you're willing to take the environment -- committee on environment and the CAPER committee? >> Correct. >> Which only leaves audit and code review. Okay. Any other? Anybody else? Okay. Mayor Pro Tem? >> Well, I just wanted to suggest maybe that if you have an outdated code of the week -- >> You're wanting to say the trifecta? >> -- maybe like the Denton Development Code Committee. >> Boy, that's what happens when you -- >> Well, I'm already on that one. >> Are you? >> That's the problem is I'm on all the other ones with you . >> Okay. Well, we got you down to -- and we can keep putting this forward? >> It's okay. Like I said, it's not a huge deal. I just thought out of my eight maybe somebody would like one of my eight committees. >> And there sounds like there's some interest in the TIF board as well. >> Right. >> So we'll put that on a future -- all right. So we have -- Councilmember Ryan would be willing to serve on the committee on the environment and the CAPER committee. I believe that's -- can he -- do we need a nomination in a second or we just need a nomination? >> Anybody? >> I'll put you on the phone. >> A nomination in a second. Okay. Somebody want to nominate? Councilmember Gregory? >> Councilmember Briggs has something to say. >> Oh, Councilmember Briggs? >> I just have a question. I'm on 10 of these. Is this -- can we just start like getting -- like vacating? Like -- >> Well, if -- >> That's your prerogative. >> Okay. >> It's not for the posting, so -- >> Okay. I'll look over them. >> Okay. Councilmember Gregory? >> I move that we add Councilmember Ryan to -- which one? >> The environment and -- >> CAPER and the committee on the environment. >> Okay. We have a motion for Councilmember Ryan to replace Mayor Pro Tem on the committee on the environment and the CAPER committee. Councilmember Hussbeth? >> Second. >> We have a motion and a second. Can I have this vote on the board, please? Motion carries 7-0. That's what happens when you are asking to be removed from having the nominations for the boards and commissions not posted every week. You get to serve on two committees, two additional committees. Thank you, Councilmember Ryan. I appreciate that. Appreciate your considerations. Very kind of you. Agenda item 5D is consider approval of -- boy, I cannot -- resolution specifying the intent of the city of Denton, Texas to exercise or not exercise an option to purchase a certain 18.96-acre track located in the David -- is it Hough survey? Or Hue survey? Hough, okay. >> Good evening, Mayor and Council. I'm Trey Lansford, Deputy City Attorney. Tonight you have before you a resolution or a choice of resolution to either show your intent to exercise or not exercise an option to purchase real property. Just for kind of background, the property we're talking about is roughly 18.696 acres along Mayhill Road on the south side of town. Here on the location map you see the property outlined in yellow on the west side. That's Mayhill Road coming down and it makes the corner at Colorado. Here's a closer look at the property. Just as general background, back in September of 1997 the City Council approved an option contract with Mr. Robert Donnelly through ordinance number 97292 for the certain track that we just looked at on the maps along Mayhill Road. In May earlier this year Mr. Donnelly indicated that he had received an offer for that property and in July of 2017 the city filed a lawsuit against Mr. Donnelly seeking a declaration of rights under that option contract from 1997. In August of this year myself and Erin Leal were allowed to review a copy of the purchase agreement Mr. Donnelly had received and we were able to confirm the terms of that offer and agreement that he has. Since that time city staff has done their due diligence on the property and Mr. Donnelly's offer and have presented that to you as the council earlier today in a closed session. So what we have before you tonight is an action item for council to either show its intent to exercise the option to purchase Mr. Donnelly's property under the 97 agreement for $4,001,000 or in the alternative to choose not to exercise that option . Any questions for staff? Seeing none, Council Member Gregory. I move that we approve the resolution to exercise the option as found in Exhibit 3 of the backup. Okay, Mayor Pro Tem. Second. Alright, let's vote on the board. We have a motion and a second to approve. Oh, I'm sorry. Is there a card? Oh, yes there is, I'm sorry. There is a card. There's a card, Mr. Willie Hutsbeth. And then, oh yeah. Let's see, wishing not to speak, is that correct, Mr. Don nelly? Okay, he's in opposition to the exercise of the option to purchase. Okay. Alright, so we have a motion and a second for Exhibit 3, which is to exercise the option to purchase. Is that correct? Okay. Alright, let's vote on the board, please. Okay. Motion carries 6-1. Moving on to the public hearing portion of our agenda, which is agenda item 6, agenda item 6A, hold a public hearing on proposal to adopt the tax rate of .637856. Thank you, Mayor. Chuck Springer, Director of Finance. I have a brief presentation covering both of the public hearings. We'll still have to open them up separately, but I just tried to combine the presentation. Here's the proposed tax rate for this upcoming year, .6378 56. It's equal to what's called the effective tax rate calculated under state law, and then we also have to calculate a rollback tax rate, which is the .6896 tax rate. You can see that our certified values this year were up very strongly, about 13.3%. I won't go through all of these, but these are the budget priorities that have been identified by the council during this year's budget, starting off with reducing inefficiencies, cost and duplication, and cost containment. In terms of cost containment, the next two tables kind of show some elimination of positions which have been achieved during this budget process. This is in the general fund and other funds for a total of about 22.8 positions. In terms of breakdowns for the general fund, this shows the proposed breakdown for the upcoming year with ad valorem and sales taxes being about two-thirds of the city's general fund revenues. On the expenditure side, fire community improvement, the police, animal services, and parks and recreation are the top three expenditure categories. I did want to cover utility funds briefly. The operating expenditures currently budgeted for electric, water, wastewater, and solid waste are shown there, as well as what is proposed for rates for utility funds. You can see a slight decrease of about 1% for this is the average residential customer and electric. No rate changes are planned for water, wastewater, and solid waste. So you can see the average customer has a slight decrease in their proposed rates for the upcoming year. This is the budget for all funds across the city. The capital is kind of broken out between currently available funding and the planned funding in the new year, which makes up almost half of that budget. This is just kind of a breakdown of that total city budget. Some of it is in programs and funds that are internal service funds. So when we back out kind of those inter-fund transfers and between funds, the net proposed budget is about $929 million. The next steps after the two public hearings is budget adoption before items for Council's consideration at their meeting next Tuesday. With that, I'm available for any questions. >> Any comments before we open the public hearing? All right. I guess I have one, Chuck. I know that when -- I don't think -- were you here during the recession, 2008, 2009? >> I've been here five years. >> Okay. So just missed it. But if you have a negative valuation, I guess my point is I can't think of the last time when we've been in a positive increase in assessed values where we've just adopted the effective tax rate. I mean, I don't think it's been since you've been here. It certainly hasn't been since I've been here. Now, during the recession, we collected less taxes than the effective rate because of the reduction in assessed value. But I really want to thank staff, you, Chuck, your staff, the city manager for, you know, really scrubbing of the budget that provides us to be able to hold the taxes, hold the line on taxes, but also continue to provide the level of services that everybody's come to enjoy that provides the quality of life that we have for our citizens. So thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Allman, for that. All right. Any questions for staff? This is a public hearing then. I will now open the public hearing for agenda item 6A. No card is required to speak. So if you want to come down, state your name and address. Your time will begin. For comments on agenda item 6A. Yes. My name is Jennifer Lane. I live at 1526 Willowwood Street. Happy to see this. However, I would like just to remind the council that we nearly had the opportunity to do this for perhaps more years in a row. When I lived in New York City, we had a common occurrence when a building would go from rental to condo and a large document would be sent to the prospective buyers who already lived there and this document was called the red herring. And it was called the red herring because it wasn't the best deal. Never is the first deal the best deal. What this applies to is the hard work that a number of us did during the month of May, April and May and before to try to explain to the citizens of Denton that the first deal isn't the best deal when it comes to taxes and that what we really need and what we have lost at this time is at least in the immediate future the possibility of raising the senior dollar exemption because of the tax freeze for seniors. Because that occurred, the median income seniors and lower income seniors would not be seeing this coming from council in the next few years, an additional dollar amount presented over the $50,000 that exists now. $75,000 was something that was tossed around, even $100,000 dollar amount of senior exemption was tossed around. And I just want to bring this forward today, not because I think that you shouldn't pass this but that because I think that the seniors in the city of Denton got not the best deal. They got the first deal that they saw as a possibility not the best deal despite much effort to try to educate them. Thanks. Thank you. Anybody else wishing to speak on the tax rate for agenda item 6A? Anybody else wishing to speak? Public hearing. Seeing none, we will now close the public hearing. Chair would entertain a motion or action on this agenda item 6A. Do we have to? There's no action? Oh, public hearing. Okay. There you go. Yeah. I got it together. Item 6B, hold a public hearing and receive input on the FY 2017 proposed budget and there's no action on that either. That's correct. All right. Thank you. Is there a staff presentation on this? No. Okay. So we do, I will now open the public hearing for public input on the FY 2017-18 proposed budget. Any public input? Any public input? All right. No, I will now close the public hearing and we can still make comments, correct? Yes. I just want to make a comment that, you know, there was a tremendous amount of time and energy spent down at the Texas legislature to advocate for or against certain bills that would cap the effective tax rate calculation. And much of that was centered around the notion that, you know, the public didn't have a right to talk about the budget, to have any input in how the tax dollars were spent or how they were derived. So I just really want to emphasize that we did have a public hearing, two of them, one on the tax rate and one on the budget. We had one person speaking on the tax rate and zero speaking on the budget. So thank you all very much for that. All right. Item, agenda item number seven is concluding items. Councilmembers? Councilmember Ryan? Thank you, Mayor. I've got a couple of items. One I wanted to announce that my next town hall will be on October 16th. It's a Monday and it will be at the Denny Rek Center. And then I wanted to also make sure everybody knows that the Blues Fest is this weekend. I will be at the Serve Denton booth on Saturday for part of the day. And before that, remember that Thursday is North Texas Day of Giving and there's a large event scheduled on the square for that. A couple of other items. I'd like to have the council get a few more updates or more frequent updates or an update on the DDC progression. I don't want this to end up being something that we don't see it until it's gone through all the public and then we're trying to make changes and we don't know what the public talked about. Let them have an opportunity to look at it after we do as well. And I know we talk a lot about the sidewalks on McKinney Street out by Ryan High, but when I was driving down McKinney the other day, I noticed that there's only a few spots on Old McKinney. One is at the railroad tracks, so as we look at doing the quiet zones, since we'll be doing work near the railroad at that point to see if we can possibly get the sidewalk to go over the railroad tracks there. And then the other spots are all in front of city facilities. In front of Mack Park there's no sidewalk and in front of the new DME substation there's no sidewalk. Other than that you have almost continuous sidewalk on one side or the other most of the way down to Loop 288. So if we can kind of look into that. I think, oh I do want to bring forth looking at funding for replacing that $100,000 whether we're doing it through the TIF or how we look at our options on that in the future. That's all I got. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I have a few here. There was a video or news story circulating on Facebook about the red light cameras and someone tagged me and asked me the question. It was Texas transportation code section 707.003. It allowed the city to install the red light cameras if it performs a traffic engineering study. And it also required cities to look for other adjustments that could be made to reduce crashes before installing the red light camera. And so I would like for staff to send us in our backup or staff report the results of those engineering studies for each of the intersections that we have the red light cameras so I could review the other options we explored. So if we could as a council and staff come up with a plan to replace the 753 trees that will be removed for the mayhill widening, that is a lot of trees we currently count on right now to help clean our air and if we could just brainstorm and see about how we could minimize some of the loss we're going to have there. Also I'd ask for some backup on the SB4 and we did receive that in our legal report but I would also like a council work session on that on the way that it will impact our community and just an update on the lawsuit and the litigation that's going on right now. A work session on the funding for the downtown reinvestment grant as soon as we could. I would really like to get that on. I know that a lot of council members are nervous about that . Just two more. This one I would I would like council to consider an ordinance to not allow any buildings with a determined distance from the courthouse go over a certain height if we could do that. I know that some downtowns do that to protect their skyline and we're going to be having quite a bit of development if that's possible. I know that it needs a 360 protected degree view just to protect that. That is our I think something special that we consider here . And then last this Sunday is my district two meeting from two to four at North Branch Library and we will be talking about homelessness here in Denton and the steps that we have taken with the leadership team and review the pick count that was recently taken. So hope to see you there. Councilmember Hatsbeth. Thank you sir. I wanted to touch on a couple things. One we had our walk around the TURS area this past weekend and that was that was very insightful for me personally. I had a couple of a few folks make it out with and to council member Ryan's point even extending that sidewalk across the railroad and then getting there to Chicken Express. There's a rise right there at that corner and you can't continue to walk without entering their parking lot to get to the corner because there's a rise there. There's some absolute ADA questions about that slope and so I think that entire stretch and I'll be bringing forward some other things we identified and I want to thank Chief Howe. He kept me legal. I had plans to have transportation that would have gotten me a ticket so he was nice enough to warn me in advance so I appreciate him. And then I think the other thing I would like to see come forward is a conversation on that property there at North Lakes. I think that's if we learned anything from our council sessions I want to be clearly wrong early. And so I think that's important to lay out those lines and have those conversations well in advance. I'd like to wherever that fits I would just like to have that conversation sooner than later. Which property you talk so that's the the property that ab uts Highway 77 there about animal animal shelter how we're going to parse it out and that sort of thing. Okay thank you. Please and thank you. You bet. Council member Duff. Yeah I'd like to request we have in the next work session to at least have a discussion on the McDonald SUP. I don't know where everybody is and I'd like to find out. I'm not sure help me understand or give staff some direction on what is it that you're actually wanting in the work session. What do you what do you. We had a session on it. I understand but you know you know some things have changed and I don't know where the rest of the council stands and you know you can't go around and talk to everybody. So I just like have a brief discussion of it and see where everybody stands. Okay okay. All right I'm not sure exactly what's still what you're asking for other than but we'll let's we'll just let staff. Just an opportunity to express our opinions. Okay all right. Okay anybody else. Anybody else. All right good deal. We adjourn at 8 0 2.