Jan 09, 2018 City Council on 2018-01-09 2:00 PM

Good afternoon everybody. Welcome to this meeting of the Denton City Council. It's Tuesday, January the 9th, 2018. It is 2 p.m. We'll go ahead and get started. We do have a quorum and everybody's present. We will go ahead and get started. We have our first agenda item is citizen comments on the consent agenda items. I see no blue cards. I don't believe any have been turned in. So we'll go on to agenda item number two, which is request for clarification of agenda items listed on the agenda for January 9th, 2018, which is today. Any clarifications of agenda items? Yes, Council Member Briggs. I have one on A. I'm wondering if someone can come up. It just says various city of Denton departments. I'm looking to see if someone has a list of the departments and the items that these are used for. Are you talking about on consent agenda item A? Okay. Anybody? Oh, yes. Go ahead. Hello. Karen's the closing manager. I don't have a specific list. I mean, I can get that list, but it's mostly used by our street crews, water crews, wastewater crews, and they're using it to stabilize. I can't get all technical. I apologize. So when they cut the line, they put this in there and put the line on top of it, and then we'll cover up the line and replace it with asphalt. So it's for practical uses, not just decorative? No. Okay. All right. Thank you. And I also have... Yes. Just a clarification on E and F. Are these replacement vehicles or new vehicles? Good afternoon. Terry Kader, fleet superintendent. Item E is actually a fleet replacement. It's listed as a fleet addition, but that's inaccurate. I apologize for that. Okay. That one is a fleet replacement. Now, item F is a fleet replacement as well. It's replacing the 2008 model excavator that's going to go to auction after that. And then actually the same with E. That truck is a 2001 model, and it will be auctioned when they get the new equipment in to replace it. Okay. Thank you. And I would like to have item G pulled, please, for a vote in the regular meeting. Okay. Great. And that's if we're ready for it at that point. That's okay. Councilmember Kramer. Thank you, Mayor. On item C, I remember our discussion on this, and I'm far ... I just don't remember where we identified the money coming from to increase those budgets, and I couldn't find it in the backup. So could somebody help me with my memory on these, the three different items for increasing the budgets? Tony Pointon, the director of finance. Councilmember, the funding from the general fund was additional revenue and also lowered expenses that we had in fiscal year '16-'17. Those are still preliminary numbers. We're still working with auditors to finalize that, but we 're comfortable with that. We're going to have about $3 million more than we had anticipated as we're planning to use that in the current fiscal year to fund the traffic and also the VALA project. The projects for the TIF are coming from the fund balance that's been accumulated there, and that's the source of funding for that. Okay. Thank you very much. You're welcome. I'm going to go make a pro-tam and then we'll come back over here. Okay. Well, I just have some questions about the distribution center. I wanted to clarify that those aren't at the deck, at the new Den Energy Center, that they're just distribution center. Which... There's a couple. There's H and... I think it might just be H actually. Is it J also? Right, yeah. H and J. Okay. Yes, ma'am. Those items are stored at our distribution center and then we order them as needed for projects and they're distributed to our field personnel. Okay. So it's stocking basically? Yes, ma'am. Thanks. Yes, ma'am. Mr. Ryan. Thank you, ma'am. I'd like for item L to be pulled since that's something that we don't know if we've got a final decision on until after closed session. So we vote on that individually. Okay. Consent agenda L approving... Yes, okay. And the G was referring to the one in care. Okay. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Got you. Okay. Any other questions for clarification? All right. Seeing none, we'll move on. Workstation reports 3A, receive report and hold discussion, provide staff direction regarding parking requirements for new residential developments. Good afternoon. Richard Canone, Interim Planning Director. What I want to do this afternoon is just sort of walk through a little bit of background information and then get into some of the details that were outlined in the attached memo. Some of you may recall this item was requested back in August as part of a city council meeting specifically in relation to what we're calling single family or single room occupancy multifamily development that are mostly targeted or geared towards our student population. When we prepare these items, you try to do as much research as possible and you hear all sorts of trends of millennials and they don't have as many cars as... They don't use the cars like maybe the Baby Boomers or the Generation X or Y. But also looking at the driverless cars, the advent of Uber and Lyft and what that means. But I thought it was interesting as to a statistic from the US census where car free households of the 50 states only two saw a decrease, Texas and South Dakota, meaning more homes have cars than what's been the trend on the national average. So I think it's important to sort of keep that in context. Just looking at parking, cost of parking, sort of a rule of thumb. 20,000 usually is the cost for structured parking, 4,000 per space for surface. So as we craft these regulations, I think it's also important to look at the other side and ultimately what that means to the development community and try to strike a balance. I wanted to include this. This is from a ULI publication, Shared Parking. It just provides... I don't want to spend too much time in getting into the details. Just wanted to provide sort of the cost of parking. So they look at parking above surface, above grade and underground and sort of what it costs to own and operate 500 space parking lot or garage over a year, just to sort of put that in context. These are some older numbers, but again, I think the point 's there. So again, so in looking at these residential parking requirements, we didn't want to look at them just singularly and come up with a specific standard because there's... We've got massing and bulk that are controlled by height, setback slot coverage that also play into that. So as we see projects developing at their maximums, of course they need to park it. So it's often always called the silent regulator because regardless of what you do, you always have to provide parking. And so when we prepared this item, although it was geared originally towards multifamily, we also wanted to make sure we include single family as well. Just because there's so much interrelationship between the two. So this is sort of the order that I'll proceed in sort of going through each of these items. So the very first one, why we're here, what do we... Do we call this multifamily? It doesn't meet the definition of rooming house. And I know we kind of have struggled with this internally and what do we classify this? How do we park it? Looking around, we did research both within the state of Texas as well as nationally to see how other communities, if they've dealt with the same issue. Within the state of Texas, I think it was San Marcos is the only one that identifies a similar specific use. Nationally, what we were able to find was University of Aub urn and Auburn, Alabama and University of South Carolina in Spartanburg have also dealt with a similar issue where they have called out the specific use, whether they've called it a private dormitory, there's a number of other names. So one consideration is, do we wanna call it multifamily or do we wanna pull it out and just call it SRO, student housing and create its own specific use and then gear regulations towards that? So this was a definition that we came up, again, just a consideration. - Yes, Council Member Grady. Some of the multifamily right now that was built years ago before the phenomenon of SROs came about are now SROs and they might not always be SROs. Some of the multifamily that's being constructed today with the intention of being SROs may not always be so. So how it's used may have some impact on how it's constructed, but not necessarily. So is there an advantage of identifying a multifamily complex as an SRO when it might not always be that? - The advantage would come into play if we're gonna have a separate parking standard. So the reverse of that, if we had a multifamily that parked at, say, our existing rates and assume that the SRO student housing would be one space per bedroom, any of those that would convert would then change that classification of the use so then they would have to come up with additional parking. So that would be one to avoid the spillover parking. - So could it be to the advantage of developer, if they're looking at the different rules, for multifamily and for SRO student housing to claim it's going to be one thing and then after it's done, operated in a different way? Is there anything that would keep them from doing that? - It would be difficult again to try to police that. Of course, we'll issue a certificate of occupancy, but then it becomes an enforcement issue. - Right, and okay, thank you. - And to sort of dovetail on that, I think that's, and I've made this comment every time this comes up, but that's really the crux of the issue is it's not how it's constructed because when I read this definition, you've got two bedroom , three bedroom units that are, might have a bath in each one or a common bath in the hall. It's the business plan that is applied to the structure, i. e., is there a lease for each bedroom or is it a lease where each tenant is jointly and separately liable on the whole unit? And so I think I asked for sort of a look or a work session on this and part of the reason is, well, not part, the reason, is that in our parking standards for multifamily, and you're probably gonna go over this, but I think it's one per bedroom. If you got a one bedroom, it's X number of parking spots. If you have two bedrooms, it's less than two spots. If you have three, it's less than three. And the issue becomes we regulate the parking for these commercial projects in a way that forces people into on street parking because we literally say you cannot have more parking spaces unless you put in permeable surface. Is that right? Yeah. Correct. Correct. Yeah. More through an ADP process. Yes. Yeah. You've got, and that to me is the real crux of the matter is because I think in some ways we regulate in a way that prohibits people from putting adequate parking on their property. At the first, at the outset, and then if they want to add more, the amount of additional cost to that. And we have all seen how on street parking is a huge problem on our older streets to the point we're denying people the ability to park on certain sides of the streets because we can't get safety personnel equipment through the corridor. So yeah. So I struggle with trying to define SRL student housing or having a different standard for the very thing, especially for the very thing that Council Member Gregory pointed out, and that is especially if you're building a new construction, how do you police it and how do you say, well, you've got to build more parking when it 's already on the ground and what's parked on the street? And so it's a complicated issue. So I probably went over a lot that you're already going to go over. No, no. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's good. So I just sort of kind of pick up where you left off, sort of what are the right size standards, right? Let's, you know, what should be the parking minimums, right ? Do we reduce or tailor minimum requirements? Do we eliminate or defer to the maximums or do we increase the requirements? I mean, really those are essentially the three options. Of course, we have parking maximums. You know, there's a number of things that can be argued as to why they're good. They promote, you know, alternative transportation options. I think they're good in some instances, but to apply it citywide, I think is part of the reason we're having the problem that we're having today. And then again, you look at sort of these transportation demand strategies where you do, there's car sharing or bike parking and a number of other, a multitude of other factors that could play into this. We're going to really focus more on just sort of the minimums and the maximums. But this is sort of the perfect example of, you know, we took a sort of a hypothetical 100 three bedroom units and 75 four bedroom units. And so you've got 300, 300 bedrooms regardless, right? Looking at using our current standard, you've got either, you know, your 100 space is short if you go the more units. So same bedroom, but less parking. So the yellow is the current standard? No, it's the current standard. Okay. All right. And I just used three and four bedroom for the, for the, you know, off the top of your head, what the standard is for two bedroom? I think it's 1.75. Yeah. Yeah. And then for a one bedroom is 1.25. So it's higher. I'm sorry. 1.5 studio 1.25. Okay. So for one bedroom, it's higher. You have to have one and a half times. Correct. But for a two bedroom, you only have to have one and three quarters. It's one and three quarters. Okay. Yes. I'm sorry. Mayor Pro Tem. What was the reasoning behind this particular configuration of parking? Just to show that deficiency, what we're seeing primarily for the, a lot of the multifamily developments that are coming in, particularly the ones geared towards students, they tend to be more three, three and four bedrooms. So it goes back to that as a developer, you know, what makes sense? Do you go for a hundred three bedroom units or do you go for 75 four bedroom units? So I guess my question was a little bit broader in terms of like how we even arrive to these different, the staggered numbers for the bedrooms. And also it's interesting that you called it a deficiency because when I saw that, I immediately thought that there were really high requirements for four bedroom in comparison to three bedrooms. So I think it just depends on how you're looking at, you know, what a parking requirement is essentially. Do we know how, how many of our parking units, like our multifamily actually utilize a hundred percent of their parking? On some of the newer ones, I don't, I don't have specific, specific numbers other than just the hearing that it's been, you know, the spillover has, has been an issue. So you have heard the opposite, which is that the garage spaces don't get used. So I would be really curious to see, you know, if, if there 's spillover on some type of development and then not enough parking or over parking over supply on other developments. And one thing that's interesting with, with, with garages or covered spaces, they don't count towards the maximum, which is another sort of oddity. What do you mean by help me understand where we're basically our minimums are in maximums are the same number, but if you provide garage parking, they're not counted towards, towards that maximum number. So you could exceed the minimum number if you will, if you provide garage parking and it doesn't have to be a permeable surface. No. Okay. I'm going to go to councilor and then council member. And I think one of the issues is the minimum and maximum are the same number. Is that more of a national style trend? Is that something more local to more local? It's kind of the standard that you typically see with maximums. It's usually like you'll see a 25% maximum, no more than 25 % of the, of the minimum. But typically you'll see these maximums not applied really citywide unless it's a really urban area that has, you know, transit or, or other sort of what I would call transit rich amenities, not necessarily sort of this, this wide cast net. Okay. But I mean, we, we use the same number for both. We use the exact same number. So I think that's where a lot of developers are tied into what, you know, they can't put more than what, what's required. I think mayor touched on this earlier and that's the bigger problem is how do we allow them within our regulations to have the additional parking places if their business plan would require them to have that. Council member Housbun. Thank you. Just a thought, not for today, but kind of as we have this conversation, I'd like to see the, a look at it a little different. I don't know if there's a number somewhere, but I don't believe that all parking is the same, right? So you give me the option of parking on the street where it 's quick and easy to get away or first level versus driving in a circle at five miles per hour to get to the top at, you know, this 10 road, 10 story structure. I'm going to drive around in circles on the first floor to try to find something to avoid that. So I wish there was a way to, because I think the, the, the units I've seen people opt to park on the street because it's more convenient, faster. Now you, you know, you may get lose a river mirror on occasion, but I think it is still, I think it kind of gears towards convenience. So I don't know how to run that matrix, but I've seen in my district where there's complexes that have available parking on the private spaces, but it's just more convenient to park on the street. So I don't know if there's, if anyone nationally has looked at that, but just a, just a curiosity to see. Yeah. I mean, we could try to dig in and it might even be a matter of economics too. I don't know how they, if they're, you know, you get one space per unit and then if you charge for a second space and so folks opt to park on the, on the, on the street, there could be enough, you know, a multitude. I see another hand somewhere. Yes, I'm sorry. The current ratios that we have of 1.25 for an efficiency and 1.5 for two bedrooms, whatever. Did those come about because of some data collection on trends of actual people using apartments, living in apartments and what they need? Typically the standards are usually based off of IT Institute transportation engineers who put out parking standards. So they look at a number of projects nationwide and then they kind of come up with parking ratios. But do they, do they actually, you know, like my guess is if, if, if an efficiency apartment calls for 1.25 parking spots, that suggests to me that, that three out of four efficiency apartments have one person living there with one vehicle, but one out of four probably has two people living in it and maybe requiring two parking spots. Right. And it takes into that factor as well as the ancillary uses where you might have leasing office where you might have staff maintenance. So that usually gets kind of factored into that. That's why you'll see it more, you know, the 1.25 or the 1. 5. So it's just sort of this broad approach. Others have, which we'll get to later, have a specific ratio for visitor parking, which is something that we don't have. So before we answer Mayor Pro Tem's question, I think there 's a, there's a big difference between units that are the larger units that have garage park, parkers structures. Then you see the units that have just surface parking because it's been my experience that the units that have been built with surface parking, there are smaller units, let's say under 15, 20 units, which are, we have a large amount of those types. You don't have a parking space per bedroom. Like, let's say if you got eight units and there's two bedrooms, each unit, your requirement, your maximum of impervious surface is like, I think, I'm trying to think of the thing I've got. Let's say you have 13 or 12 or something like that with one accessible space, which you can't park in or you'll get a fine. So what you have is there's not even enough spaces to handle if everybody was home in the building at night and to get calls in the middle of the night that there's no parking because you have friends. It's and then they, so I think there's a big difference in what type of units you have. If it's surface parking, garage parking, and as you just said, if you have a parking structure, you don't have a quote unquote maximum per se. So you can, you know, you're going to have that sunk cost of each floor. So it becomes a concern in that becomes a safety concern, number one, because people who want to park on site can't do it. And I know what you're saying about parking on the street. I think that's primarily also structured parking, unless their unit is right there at the street and their parking spaces, you know, down the down the way on the surface parking. But I'll just tell you over the years, and I remember when we went to this standard, I think, because it used to be one and one. I remember a long time ago, you look at some of the older projects in town, you count the parking spaces. There's one parking space for each for each bedroom, whether it's efficiency to be one. And I've just seen a tremendous amount of spillover on the on the street. And then you get people parking on the street, then people pull in to their unit at night at two o'clock in the morning. They can't find a spot because there's not enough spots. And then they can't find a spot on the street, because either there's no parking on the street, or it's full because people are parking on the street. It's just it gets to be untenable. And that's, that's the reason why I brought this up. And this is a good example of it. You've got 300 you got 300 bedrooms with 100 less parking spots. Now that's assuming well that means so many of those people won't have cars. Well, you just showed a statistic where in Texas at least that trend is, although it's it's very small, right, very small. It's sort of held held at zero, right for all intents and purposes. Okay, you had a comment. I think also along this discussion, it may have to do with where the complex is located, and to whom they're marketing, because if you have a complex that is directly across from the university, and they're marketing to university students, and it's easy to walk, and the parents are spending all the money or the student is spending all their money on tuition and housing, they may not have money for a car. So they, you know, and it's not convenient necessarily to have a car. But if you're marketing to young professionals with higher end finish outs in the apartment or to empty nesters, it's likely that every person that's living in the unit is going to have a vehicle. So it's and yet you don't know because how it's built and how it's originally intended, it may not be how it's going to be used 10 years down the road when the whole inventory of apartments has changed. So again, just sort of what we talked about with the parking maximums, typically they're appropriated in higher density areas. And what happens is when they're set particularly low, right, you get the spillover, kind of what we just talked about, and as we just discussed, in Denton, the minimums are the maximums. And the image here just gives you an example of a project here in the city that we allow pavers to be used as part of that pervious parking. So just an example of what we do now. And kind of speaking at the minimum standards, you could, you know, some cities, although we're not recommending this, eliminate minimum standards and have none and sort of let the market dictate. I wouldn't necessarily recommend that here. Parking lots are expensive. So they would not put them in. They would not put them in. And again, I just wanted to present everything because I have heard this from some folks. But again, I don't think this is -- it's appropriate here. I think, again, it goes back to looking at the community and not just sort of borrowing standards from somewhere else. And so in setting the parking requirements, you know, what do we do? We identify the land use. Is it multifamily, SRO? Do we just stick with multifamily? And how do we choose the basis for that requirement? What are some of the best practices? Let's research both trends. What are other cities doing around the country and what are surrounding municipalities doing? And then how many -- what should be our per unit of that basis? And so this is kind of where we're at as far as a discussion point. Now, this could go a number of different ways. In the gray, I think it's showing great, you'll see the current standard sort of in the strike through. So it's the 1.25, 1.5 for one bedroom and then 1.752 for a three bedroom and then one for one bedroom for four and above. And then we do not have any visitor parking. And then currently I also include for fraternity, sorority, boarding houses, dormitory, it's one per bedroom. So these are the current standards. What we thought was a potential is looking at 1.25 per bedroom. Obviously that would be quite of an increase. But it is at that same rate as a studio or one bedroom. And so that was part of the basis as well as looking at some of the surrounding municipalities and some of their standards. Another option is to include the 1 and 10 for visitor parking. Now, this could be -- this could go one or two ways. We could keep the existing standards and then provide for visitor parking or do a combination of both. So we just want to kind of present it this way but then also show you what that means to a -- again, look at 100 unit development. So under the current required, again, I just 25 one bedroom , 25 two bedrooms, 25 three and 25 four bedrooms, sort of what that -- what does that pencil out to? So you see under the current required 232 spaces, under proposed that's assuming the 1.25 per bedroom and then the 1 per 10 for visitor, you're looking at 339 spaces. So quite an increase. To give you -- sort of give you a real life example similar to this, you all may recall the retreat that was -- that we just brought forward. Now that has a mix of bedrooms. They have 189 units but 700 bedrooms. So based on our current standard, their minimum and maximum parking will be 658. So they know right now that they really need to have one space per bedroom. And so we're trying to work with them in -- through the site plan process of how do we meet that? Do you do the -- knowing that they have to have it. Now that doesn't account for -- even if they just put one per one bedroom, that doesn't account again for any visitors that are coming over, any spaces at the leasing office for prospective tenants, any maintenance. So again, that's where we -- we think one per bedroom is probably sufficient if there's -- if we provide for visitor parking. If we don't provide for visitor, then I think we need to increase that base number. And that's kind of where we're at, at least with the multif amily standard. >> I'll go. I'll jump in. If you go back to your last slide, the one -- >> I'm sorry. >> No, I'm sorry. The one that showed the scratch -- yeah, the mark-throughs. So right now, we're at two bed -- and I'm going to use a two bedroom because that's just -- a two bedroom, it's 1.75, which means we're short, 25%. The proposed is 1.25, which means now we're going over. If we're going to go over, I don't think we necessarily need to have a visitor parking requirement because I think that going over -- >> Covers it. >> Covers that. If you're going to have a one parking spot per bedroom, unless there's some studies that show, oh, if you got 700 bedrooms, at any given time, 20 or 30 of those parking spaces won't be taken because people won't be there. Because if you go back then to your examples, because some of that increases it tremendously. If you go back to the -- yeah, that one right there. So if you got 100 units that are -- what is that? That last one, 100 units, 250 bedrooms, is that -- that's just a different mix of twos and ones, I guess. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, there it is, average 2.3 unit or 1.1 bedroom. Because if you had a one per bedroom on that one, you'd have 250 plus then whatever the -- you said what, one parking spot for every 10 bedrooms? >> For every 10 bedrooms. >> So that means you'd have 25 extra on that one example. So you'd have 270 something as compared to 339 or 304. So I think there's somewhere in between there because -- and eventually -- because I will tell you, if people can build less parking, they will do that most likely because -- unless they're going to own it, because then you're going to have to deal with the headaches of people calling you. But parking, as we know from our new parking lot over here, parking lots are not cheap. They're expensive. But having people park on the streets and so anyway. I think there's somewhere in between there that I could get comfortable with. 1.25 per bedroom seems to me to be -- I've always just thought if you got one for each bedroom and then you have visitor parking and then maybe depending on how many units you have, is there a different requirement? Does it apply to an 8 unit as well as to a 200 unit? So that's something -- I'm sorry, Keely, go ahead. >> I think my answer -- I think I got my answer. This proposed requirement includes the visitor spaces? >> Correct. This includes everything. >> Okay. >> Based upon your proposal on the last slide. >> Correct. >> Okay. >> Yes, Mayor Pro Tem. >> Well, I was surprised -- I went ahead on your presentation. Just sorry. I skipped ahead. But I didn't see anything that was addressing what I thought would be a topic for discussion, which is that certain areas have access to multifamily -- or to public transit. They have better pedestrian, bikeability scores. So I'm surprised that we would have the same requirements for parking in an area that's, for instance, on the loop versus an area that's in the core part of town. We certainly don't do that for businesses. So I mean, is there some type of reasoning as far as why we would have the same uniform parking requirements? >> I start to hint to it when you go to the conclusion slides. >> I saw it at the very last. >> When we really look at infill development, one of the recommendations would be to remove the allowance for the on-street credit citywide, but really look to allow that. In the downtown area or areas identified in a special area plan. We've got a project that recently came in. The property is owned by TWU, but they're contracting out with a developer to develop the site. It's a small development, but they can't meet all of the on -site parking. In fact, they probably can't even meet the on-street parking credit. But again, that's something that currently we don't have that flexibility, but it's directly across the street from campus. So the likelihood of everyone having a car might be slim. But for this item, we didn't prepare sort of carving out specific areas. It was more of just to address kind of the SRO. >> All right. So kind of back to that with infill, because I think it's pretty important, especially in our smaller areas. If there is not room for the parking, is the process to go through to get a variance, is that what the developer would need to do? >> It would be a variance. Or less units. But probably a variance. >> Let me get you cast by Ryan. I guess one of my concerns is on existing properties, because when they change ownership, we require a CO. Part of what's listed on there is how many parking places are required. Is that going to carry over or are we going to grandfather? How are we going to handle that? >> They would be grandfathered in. >> Okay. >> How do you add more parking? Mayor Pro Tem. >> I was going to touch on the variance issue. Because variance typically, Aaron, correct me, it's a condition of the property that's intrinsic to the property, correct? That allows the variance. >> Yes. That is correct. >> So I mean, it would be very rare for any piece of land to demonstrate something intrinsic to it that doesn't allow parking. I think realistically a variance for multifamily residential is just not something real. I mean, in practice. So I go back to perhaps we need to zone or configure the parking areas or determine which parking areas are going to have different rules than what we propose here. >> To follow up with that. What I'm concerned about is if there's a development that's being considered and all of a sudden at staff level it looks like we don't think you can pull this off because of the rules. Yet there's an opportunity somewhere in the process to go to somebody and say, well, we request a variance. Do you guys take that into consideration or does it really just end? Because here's a unit that's in the core area, it's close to a university, it's designated, it's marketed for university students, it's being built that way. The likelihood of every occupant having a vehicle is very, very low. Do you all then say, yeah, let's go for a request of variation or do you just say that's up to you and you're going to have to spend a whole lot of money going through this process to maybe not have it happen? >> We certainly could suggest a variance. The problem is kind of going back. It's to prove that true hardship, that it's not self-imp osed when they could reduce the number of units. It's really tough as staff to recommend approval of that. What I have seen other municipalities do is rather than have a hardship variance or continue with a hardship variance, there's what's called sort of a practical difficulty variance. A little bit different, but sort of does it make sense and can they mitigate for creative? But it's just another way of looking at it. So variances are only triggered by a hardship and not by a reality of what it's likely to be used for. >> Correct. I don't know if Aaron wants to add. >> Yes, it's something as Mayor Pro Tem mentioned, it's something about the property that is frustrating or preventing the property be developed. It doesn't include those self-created hardships like financing or overbuilding, trying to overbuild on a piece of property. >> Okay. >> Councilmember Riggs and then Councilmember Ryan. >> So have we looked into zone parking before? Or do other cities do that? >> Other cities have done it. In the background, in the memo, we did look at other some other municipalities in the state, mostly college towns. There are quite a few that have specific areas around the university where they actually relax the parking standards within a certain proximity. That's something we certainly can look at. I know maybe as part of even the small area plan that we're looking at now, we can incorporate something like that. Certainly an option. >> Councilmember Ryan. >> Well, just kind of in rebuttal to Councilman Gregory, I don't think it's a student housing that actually has less vehicles per unit or per bedroom. It's going to be your three bedrooms that are geared towards families. >> Right. >> Where you've got a mother and two kids or three kids in the bedrooms. That's where you -- so if we start trying to do it based on student housing, you might need a little bit less. That's why these national averages work out to be pretty true and incorrect. >> Good point. >> Well, and I think, too, we're talking about very specific concepts, you know, number of units per parking space. But there's also some general policy discussions behind this. That is the policy of pedestrian traffic. Do you want to use your regulations to sort of force a certain type of transportation policy or do you -- are your regulations to accommodate what is? Because I'll just be truthful. I mean, I've had multifamily units for a long time. Very rare do I get people who actually don't have cars. I mean, you do occasionally. There's no question about that. You do. And that doesn't mean my experience is typical. It may be that there's a lot of people who have units that nobody has a car. But the biggest problem I see is that when there's not enough spaces to accommodate just the people that are there, you have some issues. You have some safety issues. You have, you know, management issues. And again, parking lots are expensive. So if a developer is given the opportunity to say, ah, I'm going to reduce the parking and I'm just going to lease it out and everybody knows that this doesn't have enough parking. If you can find a spot on the street, fine. If not -- so there's some very basic policy considerations here, too, because that's really what's driving this discussion. I mean, we talk about on-street parking. We've had to take off -- we had to put no parking on streets because of, you know, we can't get a fire truck through there or an EMT vehicle, but it's because people are parking on both sides because development has occurred that has multifamily units in the area that doesn't have enough parking on-site to accommodate them. Now, visitors will park on the street or people will park on the street if their unit is right there, which, I mean, there comes a point where you can only regulate so much. But from a higher elevation policy perspective, what are we trying to really accomplish with our parking requirements? You know, zone parking, infill parking. I would say that, you know, logic would tend to say if you have infill parking by the university, you could reduce your parking requirements because people don't have vehicles. Well, infill, especially by university, I say you probably have more pressure for on-street parking because of commuter students and the like and on infill because you don't have that much. So there's a lot of policy discussions at this, and so, I mean, and I'm okay with talking about specific changes, but I think it would be good for us to also have a conversation about what exactly are we hoping to achieve from a policy perspective with our parking requirements like we've done in downtown and some of these other places. So I just throw that out there. Yes. I think that's a great point. Because I don't know how to compute in a way that accomplishes the goal that I have. The goal that I would have is to reduce pressure for on-st reet parking. But the other goal I have is to not overbuild so that you have no permeable space, no permeable soil either around the apartments or in residential areas. So policy-wise, I would like to see adequate parking, off- street parking for the residences, whether it's commercial or residential. But I would also like to make sure that we have adequate green space. And so policy-wise, that's what I want. How to achieve that is up to you guys. And Swinney, you're not a member of this body, Council member Gregory. Yes, Mayor Pro Tem. Well, as far as the policy discussion goes, I mean, if we have a policy that encourages pedestrian or bike traffic, I think it also goes to say that we can have policies that encourage driving. A lot of why people drive is because there's really adequate parking everywhere. I mean, you go to businesses, you can go everywhere and easily find parking just about anywhere in North Texas. And that was a policy decision that somebody made that then drove behavior. So I mean, I don't see it as we engineer the part where people will use their bikes and walk, but the driving is just a natural force of nature . We've engineered that part too. So I mean, that's my take on that. And my goal would be we spend $11 million a year of sales tax money and we send it to DCTA so that we can have public transit and alternative sources of transportation, yet we provide no tangible benefit to anybody to build along public transportation routes. So to me, that seems like we're shooting ourselves in the foot. We're paying for this amenity, but we're not encouraging people to use the amenity. So that's my policy drive. Okay. Yeah, that's a, and we'll hopefully have the DCTA discussion, ongoing discussion, because I hear what you're saying. I may come at it from a little different take. I mean, there are a lot of places along the dart line that do encourage transit-oriented development and I'm not sure exactly what their parking requirements are. And I think we can achieve, Council Member Gregory, your goals because I mean, we do have lot coverage ratios for green space. And if those are tweaked, because in some ways, you can regulate these things that help you kind of also envision what it is you want for development. Like if you had 10% lot coverage ratio, you're going to have everything in the concrete or in building. Whereas here, if you want to go over your parking maximums, you have to put in either pavers or things such as that, which I've not seen the, I'm sure there's data out there about how much of the stormwater runoff that does divert, but depending on your parking space requirements and your lot coverage ratio in combination is going to define how many units you can put on that lot. I mean, it's, so I think the, and then the discussion about how do we encourage transit-oriented development, that's, I think that's a very legitimate question as far as along our quarter because what, we pay $11 to $12 million a year for the CTA, our portion, and I just would encourage people to look at the ridership of that and is that, are we getting, you know, the value for our dollar? And I'm not making a, I'm not saying we are or we are not, I'm just saying that's a legitimate question. That's a lot of money. I mean, $11 million is a lot of money a year. So I think we can look at how do we encourage transit- oriented development, I guess from a residential perspective because, and then is our public transportation such that, what do they say, the last mile, the first mile and the last mile is the most difficult, it's getting there and getting away from the station and do we have that in place at the end of DART where our DCTA eventually terminates to help facilitate that? So I'm going to go to Council Member Garragher and then Council Member Bray. And I think the curious thing, because I know that we're talking more about residential than commercial, but I think about either the city having allowed or required in some commercial development parking spaces that, I'm thinking about Golden Triangle Mall, I bet that there's some parking spaces in the Golden Triangle Mall parking lot that have never, ever, ever, ever been used in the 30-year history of that. And that if they ever were used, it was probably once or twice by somebody who had car trouble or was, you know. So to require, I just don't want to require overbuilding of that and I think you make a great point in terms of setting policy that encourages the kind of town that we're wanting for our citizens. The citizens have said that they want. Council Member Briggs? So I know that a lot of you have, don't want to separate the SRO and multifamily, but for me this is difficult because to me they're different. I think the SROs need more parking because each individual bedroom has that. And like you said, multifamily doesn't necessarily need to meet that extra parking space because it's likely that it could be a family rather than a student . So it's just, for me I think it's, it would be better to sort, to separate them. So. Okay. Council Member Ryan? And I agree that if there is a way that we can figure out a separation between the two, we should definitely go forward. If we're looking at the drainage issue, I think on a policy standpoint we could, in line with this, and I'm just kind of pulling a figure out looking at your calculations up here, if we went with the proposed number of parking spaces required, we could also say that your non-permeable cannot exceed 2.5 spaces per bedroom. You're going to discourage those four bedroom SROs by doing that because now they have to build more of the permeable parking places at that point. Okay. Yes, Council Member Housman? So I want to make sure I picked up on something. I guess with the TW location, there's no mechanism currently for you to work around, and so that's, is that my understanding? Yeah, and I mean there could be the ADP process, but then again you can't really reduce a parking standard. It's really the variance. So it's just sort of looking at the site and working with the architect and developer and trying to figure out a way that you could get it there. Right. So for me that takes precedent. For us to install a way to have reasonable conversations going forward, so we start there as we're crafting something that has more form structure, et cetera, but day one I'd like to see us be able to facilitate projects such as this and give a mechanism where there's a public input, there's conversations, there's stakeholder input, and then moving forward. So that takes priority for me. I don't share the concern of isolating SROs, this, that, and the other, because just like he so eloquently pointed out, there'll be a new name for it . You're not going to pin down a developer and a name and a set of rules because they'll just say, "Okay, well this isn't SRO, this is our SRO 8," you know, and so, "Oh, that's outside of this." You're never going to get in front of that. So I don't think, I don't have, and plus I just want it to be applied consistently because as a couple of people pointed out, they change. So just a static rule that fits everyone, that is nice, neat, clean, and doesn't lend itself to people renaming something to get around it. So that's two to me. And then I just looked it up and assuming it's right, so when you're talking about structuring habits, so it's 2011, I don't know who was on this body then, but that's Med Park, and we have, and again, if this number's right, 700 spaces out there at Med Park Rail Station trying to motivate people to park there and ride in the town, and that's not worked. So I think my approach is a more realistic, let's take people's habits and not so much shape them, but work within that versus have 700 spaces by a hospital that no one ever uses, hoping that someone will use them. And so that's where it's a delicate balance for me. It's like, "Hey, I want to motivate people to walk and kind of use what's available and preserve space." But at the same time, so you talk about Golden Triangle Mall, that's ages ago, but this body in 2011 said, "Hey, we're going to overbuild a parking spot ." Well the council, I'm assuming, was incorporated in 2011 and functioning at some degree. Well, that's a DCTA property, so I think that they... So they did it on Thomas? Yeah, I don't... I mean, I was on there in 2011. I don't recall the historical context of who has regulatory authority over the number of parking spaces at that A train site. I mean, I just don't remember. I'm not saying we do or didn't, but with it being a... But we can look into that. Yeah, I was going to say that's a real simple fix. Aaron? Yeah, yeah. Could you help me out with that historical information, please? Thank you. Okay. Okay, so it sounds like we've got a couple of things that we're going to have to come... I'm not hearing that this body's ready to say, "Hey, here's the direction for a specific proposal." Yeah, and that really wasn't... I didn't think we would get there... We're kind of at the...really at a perfect place right now. We're in the midst of updating the code. If you saw in Friday report, there's the schedule of how we 're sort of moving forward. This is part of the development standards section, which will have an initial draft for staff to look at mid-February and then out to the public mid-March. So we're about two months away. So even if we were to craft a specific... Yeah. We would probably be at that...close to that spot anyway. It's by the time we go through the public hearing phase. So it's fitting with where we are right now. So what I've heard is, first and foremost, for Council Member Hudspeth, and I think probably... I mean, it's a good suggestion. How do we, until we get this new code in place or get the public input, how do we facilitate some flexibility with the current code situation when it comes to parking? Is that what I'm hearing you say? Yes, sir. Okay. And then on a more policy...a higher level policy discussion, and maybe bring back some options or recommendations or facilitate a conversation about...on transit-oriented development. I mean, on transit routes. How do we do that, if that's feasible? And then what is our current lot coverage to parking ratio and how does that sort of play out in the development of the space and give some different scenarios if we increase the parking requirement, how do we also there correspondingly increase maybe a green space requirement to sort of balance that and offset that as we do currently? And I think that would help get us sort of started on some ...and then if there's zone parking as far as if you have infill or a certain radius or within a college or high density area, how we define it, just start the conversation about some of these type of...because this is...I mean, we don't want to keep changing this all the time. A really good comprehensive discussion I think would be helpful. Like we did in downtown, we said, "Well, you don't have any parking requirements." Well, we had to go back and tweak that because we found out what was happening, people were building without parking requirements, and we sort of took the parking spaces up that were already there and shorthanded. And we can factor into that, at least in the downtown area, as we looked at ad nauseam as far as what are the parking requirements, is there structure, partnerships available, and the like. So that's sort of a tall order, but I think that would help us try to be a little bit more strategic and comprehensive about approaching this subject, which is important. Any other comments or direction that I might have missed that you would want to have an understanding about? Yes. Just for clarification, the proposed requirement, is that what you're going to be bringing to... No, I brought that just more for discussion purposes today. That's kind of why I had it as...really as a consideration as opposed to recommendation, because there's just so many factors involved in it, but I think at least for starting the discussion, we had a great one with respect to that. It sounds like we're concluding this discussion, but there 's a whole bunch of other information. Oh, well, that's okay. Yeah. Single family. Go ahead. Okay. I think it's good to probably wrap up this part right here, but we do have some more to discuss, right? Sure. And the other is the on-street parking credit, but again, we've touched on that. The other one, we really would be remiss if we didn't include single family. Again, we're hearing the spillover, the one-car garage issues, and everyone parking on the street, and how do we address that? And there's a number of factors. Lack of minimum lot dimensions for subdivisions greater than two acres. Design standards for garages less than 10,000 square feet. The minimum and maximum, the on-street parking credits, and then minimum street width. So all of these are sort of looked at and sort of factoring together, but some also play into the issues that we're having with multifamily as well. On that, okay, you're going to go into street widths. Okay. Yeah. Go ahead. Single family lot, for developments greater than two acres, there's no minimum lot area width or depth. The only requirements are density and side yard setbacks. So it's basically whatever that density is, there is a, you basically forego the minimum lot standards. I think when this was originally conceived way back when, it was intended to really look at sort of cluster development that would create more open space. But what it has done is really the reverse of that. And so what we have now is much more intense development, particularly in the NR6 district. Go ahead, Casper. Could you go back? Yep. That slide, that's Denton. That is Denton. And when I look at that and think that before that street was put in and the homes were put in, that was all green space, all permeable space. And now it looks like maybe even not 5% is permeable. And part of that is because of all of the parking that we 're requiring them to provide. I'm staying within the posting. Oh, okay. I didn't know why you were grabbing him. I thought no one else actually had it. Well, and it's because I like him so much. Okay. I thought you all were going to have a throw down. But it, I could imagine people that are living downstream from that saying, "My house is going to get flooded." So how are we, is all of that concrete for parking in front of each one of those in order to, are those duplexes? Those are duplexes. And see, this is a great example of, see, to me, this isn't , I mean, because it looks like you've got a one-car garage or two-car garage on each one of those. Is that right? Two-car garage on each one? Correct. Yeah. So, see, it's the interplay between the parking requirement and the lot coverage ratio. When you look at those lots, I don't know what the lot coverage ratio was in that particular development, but that's why you, I mean, and that's why I'm saying, they, people will develop, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it, but they want to maximize the ability to develop their land in order to maximize the income potential. And so that's one of the policies that we have to look at, because that isn't so much the concrete as it is, you don't have a minimum lot area. In other words, so you're saying you can build on a four or five thousand, there's no minimum square footage, lot square footage? We're starting to see, in some of the preliminary meetings, you know, more folks are getting attuned to it where we're starting to see on these, some of the larger developments where they're coming in at a 40-foot wide, they haven't formally submitted, but 40-foot wide lot, which is really, it's pretty narrow. Well, I thought we had a 50-foot minimum. If it's under two acres. Oh, so if it's over, it can be, we got to, I mean, in our residential regs, we've got to, we've got to have a policy discussion of how do we, you know, how do we allow everybody, you know, everybody wants a different housing need? How do we do that in a way that avoids some very harsh unintended consequences? And I think our, the width of our streets, remember you drive around in Denton, in the old streets of Denton, Linden, Hector, I mean, some of these were, there's no way there's going to be a problem if you have someone parked on one side, someone parked on the other, you could still get to it. I mean, and I'm not saying we've got to do that, but I think we've set ourselves up because of our street width to where even in some of the new ones we developed today, you can barely get a public safety vehicle through there if they're both parked on each side of the street. So we've just got to really begin to talk about how do we envision our subdivisions and how do we meet the needs of all the different housing demands in a way that still provides for the kind of community that we want to have. Yes, Councilmember. When did we change our street requirement? I have no idea. I mean, you know, it's, it may be in the next presentation, some historical, real brief historical content, because you can see the difference. I mean, even Windsor Drive out by Woodrow Wilson and I mean , some of these larger, but I think that's a, that's a very important discussion because if people are coming in with 40 foot wide lots that you, I mean, now those may be zero lot lines or I mean, and that's certainly a product that people want. And so it's, we just need to be prepared for it. Yeah. And, and have an understanding of it, you know, what are the, some of the consequences of that? Yes. Councilmember brief. I was just going to ask, is it, is it for tiny homes? Not necessarily. It's just maximizing. Okay. They can get on the property with the density. And this is just a comparison. So it gives you the, and what I did in, in parents, again, this is so it's less than two acres. So this is where those requirements kick in. The NR4, the old code pre 2002, this was SF7, which really required a 7,000 square foot lot. The minimum width was 60 and then the depth was 120. So you see where we're now in NR4, it's 50 feet is the minimum. And then the lot depth has been reduced to 80 as well as the front yard setback. And our six was the old two F, which was really the duplex zoning. And I think that's where, that's where a lot of our problems have, has, has resulted from. And again, these are, are 50 foot by 80. Again, those are pretty, pretty tight, tight lots. Not a lot of area. So I didn't understand this slide because I thought that maybe the items in parenthesis were the proposals. I apologize. This was the old, the old code 2002. So I was sort of showing that transition. SF7 was in parenthesis. So all of the stuff in parenthesis was, was the old, got it . And so this kind of goes back to the mayor's comment of the , you know, you had these, you had these wider lots, wider streets, and it was, I'll call this kind of the seventies, you know, kind of typical suburban standards at that time. But, so this gives you, you know, gives you an example of one of the requirements. If a lot is less than 10,000 square feet, the width of the garage door is limited to 40%. And so, you know, you hear some, well, why don't we just get rid of the, you know, just get rid of the 40% requirement. But I think we need, in a way it's good. And so it's sort of, you don't want to throw everything out and end up with something like, like that. Where, you know, you might be required to have one covered spot and no other design regulations and we start seeing developments like this. Not saying it's going to happen, but again, it's those unintended consequences that I think we just need to be cognizant of whenever these, whenever these are drafted. And so what I did is, this is just a comparison to give you an idea of can you put a two car, you know, with that 40% requirement. What's the sort of the standard two car garage door? See, they're usually, you get 16 foot or 18 foot. So this just gives you the comparison. So if you look at that 1.5 acre site under the existing standards, the maximum width with the side setbacks of a house is 38 feet. And so when you put, do that multiplier 40%, you can't put a two car. It's very difficult to put a two car garage. So this plays into the, you know, some of the developments where we're seeing with one car garage is it's really a function of our code. So a side setback on that NR6 of four feet means that between houses there's eight feet. Yes. And that's, that's cool with the fire department. I can't, I can't speak for them. Cause I know that when, when the school district would set up a portable building next to a school we had, we had to be at least 10 feet away. And that was, and that was from the fire department, but here we're having houses that we're going to be able to build that are only eight feet from one another. And I don't know if there's, you know, with openings and firewall, I don't know, I would, I would defer to. Sure. We can get some clarification. I'd be curious about that. Yeah, we can get some clarification on that. And again, so these are just some, some considerations. Do we, do we go back to the old standard of the 60 foot wide lot by 120 or do we, do we require the five, the five foot set, you know, a five foot setback and, and keep it at 50 feet. So again, these are sort of that, those policy decisions and, and you know, where do, where do we want to be? I mean, we're, we're, we're seeing a lot of, of development coming in from some of the large acreage that we've annexed in the past. And so those are kind of coming down, coming down the line. And so it's one of those where, how do we want to, you know , how do we want to grow in the very near future? And so that's where, you know, we just want to start to present, present this, these ideas to you as well for consideration. Going back to garage, you know, the garages, do we require a two car garage? There's some background, some information in the background where some, some municipalities within the Metroplex do require that they require a two car garage or they require four parking spaces to must be in the garage and they can't be tandem. So they have to have the side by side two car garage. Again, that's just another item to consider, to consider. But again, we wanted to at least present everything in relation to residential parking, particularly where we are right now with the, with, with the code rew rites. I apologize for throwing so much, so much at you right now. Again, on street parking credit, we don't feel that it's probably appropriate. I don't know if we've ever seen it in a single family residential neighborhood where they've asked for the credit. But again, it's probably not appropriate for on street credit, particularly in a brand new single family subdivision. But again, it's more of a policy, policy discussion. And then going back to minimum street widths without getting into a lot of the details because I know we have, because this plays into it as well in some of the residential lanes where they are, they are narrow and you have, you have smaller parking lane widths of six feet, I think we allow in some, in some areas. That's all changing. Actually, we've been working pretty closely with, with engineering in both our land development code and looking at what they're doing with context sensitive corridors. So that kind of plays back into, into the TODs and mapping our new districts with respect to the mobility plan. So starting to try to tie all this together, but I do know that that these standards are changing. And my understanding is they've, they're actually increasing the minimum widths, but that's part of the transportation design criteria manual. So I know, I know that is being currently addressed and I think it's out now. Just wanted to break it because they're all, you know, they 're all sort of interrelated. Especially with what you said as far as with the large tr acts of land that we've recently annexed people are coming in for development. The sooner we get, if we want, if we're wanting, if the policymakers are wanting to increase the width of just sort of a normal residential street to accommodate public safety and first responders, that needs to be done sooner than later, or we 're going to have a lot of developments that are, you know, going to continue to exacerbate this problem. And there's got to be a healthy compromise. And because that directly affects how a property is developed, which affects its value. It's better to have that on the books sooner than later to provide predictability for developers and for the market because it does affect the market. I mean, if you've got to add a, you know, 25% more street, that means you've got less land for development, which means, yeah, that means number of units are less and price is less. Well, that's just the way it is. I mean, that's not us setting the market, it's saying this is what we think is in the best interest of the development of our city, certain residential areas, and let the market be as it may, just like it's done over the last hundred years with all the changes we made. So I think probably the best thing to do as we move forward with this is because we're going to have to have a policy discussion about the residential component and a policy discussion about the multifamily SRO kind of commercial parking requirements. Those obviously will need to be separate because they're going to be fairly comprehensive and it might be a little bit overwhelming if they're all in one discussion. So I'm not trying to cut down the presentation, but just want to sort of get that direction. Yeah. Did you have a comment, Council Member Briggs? Well, just a request, but if we're still on our presentation, we can keep going. Just want to wrap up a couple of just other considerations. Again, looking at creating special parking minimums, minimum reductions for small scale infill. We haven't defined that again. Looking at providing parking on small lot projects, we kind of talked about that already. And then looking at how someone can have more flexibility. Some of the smaller developers, it might be a financial burden for them to go through variance. It does require quite a bit. And again, I just like to show sort of bad examples. This is where multifamily dwellings were required to have one covered parking space and this was a result of what's commonly called the ding bad apartments in Los Angeles. And so you just have this sort of sea of parking. Not that I want to go that way, but I think it's just one of those. We need to be very cognizant in what we bring forward. This was just a not saying to go this route, but again, this is another option that kind of plays into what we talked about with providing additional open space and having that flexibility. Right now we don't, you'll see a lot of codes will allow for a two foot overhang. Our parking spaces are nine feet by 18. Sometimes they'll allow those lengths to be reduced to 16 feet with what's called a two foot overhang. Our code right now does not allow for that. So this is just an example of providing parking, reducing the stalls for a certain number of, I wouldn't want to say every spot in the lot, but there could be a threshold where we could allow for compact parking. We could allow for parking overhangs provided. Maybe they put in a sawtooth curb that the drainage now incorporated into that. Good example, Razor Ranch is doing that with their project. So I think it's looking at this in totality and sort of bringing all of this back. Again, the great part of it is we're kind of in the midst of it right now with the code update. We actually had talked about parking lots with a certain requirements in the committee on the environment a while ago, and I think it's great for the parking lot. So my request would just be that when we come back and have our single family discussions, that we have a spot in there to talk about tiny homes. We did get a staff report on it a while ago, but nothing has been presented to the public in a while. So just, I get a lot of questions about that. So thank you. And again, just in conclusion, obviously it's multifaceted and we'll probably warrant many more discussions on policy-related items. With that, I'll be happy to answer. Any other questions? Yes, Councilmember Hutsworth. Not a question, just a comment. Great presentation. I appreciate the pictures and kind of in conjunction with the dense wording, et cetera. It just helps kind of put it all together and some of the consensus, that sort of thing really help follow when you're so much at stake. So thank you. Thank you. All right, thanks. Appreciate it. Good presentation. Thank you. Very comprehensive. I appreciate that. Thanks. Let's just take a real quick five-minute break before we get started on the next one, just so we aren't going too far. Welcome back to this meeting of the Denton City Council, Tuesday, January the 9th, 2018. It is 3 37. We're moving on to our next item on the work session reports, agenda item 3B, receive an informal -- I'm sorry, excuse me, receive an informational report regarding the Denton Municipal Electric Program for underground electric lines. Good afternoon, Mayor, Councilmembers. Good afternoon. A question was raised at a recent council meeting about underground electric distribution system here in Denton. A presentation has been put together to discuss that and provide some data. And we gave this presentation yesterday to our public utilities board, so we wanted to bring that to you today. We're going to, in this presentation, just briefly touch on a few of the differences and a few of the comparisons between overhead and underground electric utilities. We're going to review some of the criteria that's considered whenever we look at projects that are existing overhead and we want to try to convert those to underground and talk about some of those associated costs. We do follow several guidelines and ordinances and criteria when we install electric systems and maintain electric systems. One of the governance policies that we follow is the City Municipal Code, Section 34-122. The very first item on the underground electric utility policy is it's the basic policy to encourage the installation of underground electric utilities in all residential and commercial developments that are going in new. So we apply that. There are several other topics on there and you're welcome to look through those. Another criteria planning guide that we use is the Denton Plan 2000, which is the previous version now. It's the 2000 and 2030 plan and the 9.5 section says install underground electric distribution facilities wherever practical. The item on the bottom left-hand side of the screen, I put a box around that, 9.5.3. It says fund the conversion of existing overhead facilities to underground on a fiscally responsible basis. There are several budgetary category codes that we use for electric utility installation. There's category codes 28, categories code 19, categories 25, but there's one specific budgetary category code that's strictly designated just for if there's no other reason, but we want to go out and convert overhead to underground, what would that be? So presently in this current fiscal year, that's funded with $350,000 and we anticipate that to increase each of the upcoming future years. The majority of our overhead to underground conversion work is actually done not in this category code with these funds. We actually try when possible to work with new customers, residential, commercial, revenue projects to try to convert existing facilities to accommodate those customers. So they would come out of some different bonding and fund sources. One of the things I do want to point out is the electric service standards is the policy and guidelines available on the City of Denton website that has the criteria associated with how do we govern and install electric facilities, whether they be overhead or underground. That's on the City of Denton website. And it does say that developers are responsible for installing all the civil work, which is digging all the ditches and putting in all the conduit system. Here's a map that's kind of an interesting map just to see how much overhead and how much underground do we have in the City of Denton. Over on your left-hand side is the amount of overhead in blue, which shows that we're at 43%. Over on the right-hand side in green is the amount of underground that we have in our system, which is 57% distribution. So it's not just scattered in one portion of town. It's actually across the whole City of Denton where we have overhead and underground. So the next logical question is, well, if we're 57% underground, how does that compare to other cities? Well, I'm glad that you asked that question. That actually, Mayor was asked in a previous council meeting, so I thought we'd bring that up. We're actually ranked third best in the state of Texas out of 72 municipal electric cities as far as the most amount of underground on a percentage basis. And this was on the 2016 report, which is 56.218%. If you go back with the Texas Public Power Association directory in 2001, less than two decades ago, it showed that we were at 36%. So we're steadily increasing the amount of underground that we have. >> Council Member Briggs. Is there a correlation between a high underground percentage and low blackouts? Not blackouts, but outages? >> Just reading your mind, I have a slide and two slides that's coming up that I think will directly address that. >> Real quick question, Brent. On new development, either residential or commercial, I'll say residential subdivisions, those are required to be underground, is that correct? >> Right. Any new subdivision that's going in, if it's in an underground area, we put all of those in underground. But the developer still does the silver work to put in the ditch in the conduit system. If it's an existing overhead area that a new subdivision is going in, everything around this whole site is overhead, the developer would -- it would go in overhead unless he wanted it underground, and we would put that in underground . But according to the electric service standards, there would be the cost difference between overhead and underground would be considered aid and construction. The developer would fund that. >> So of this increase of over 20% since 2001 of underground, any idea -- I mean, would you say that most of that is due to just the inherent growth, the sort of organic growth of the city and the requirement to put that underground or how much are we actually -- any idea -- and you might have a slide on it -- converted from here was overhead, we're doing something different, we're going to bring it from overhead to underground. >> Yes, sir, I think you're entirely correct on the first statement. We've had an enormous amount of growth in the city of Dent on over the last two decades. So I think that in itself with all the new subdivisions and development that's gone in contributes to that growth in the amount of underground. This is an interesting slide just to show a graphic of the downtown courthouse square. And that's right dab in the middle. The dash lines, if you can see that on the screen, the different colors are different circuits. But the dash lines are underground and the solid lines are overhead. So everything contained within this gold boundary, this strange looking polygon, everything inside of that is underground. Several blocks all the way around the square in every direction. Okay, this is the slide that the second slide where it talks about reliability, Councilmember Briggs. And it's a very busy slide. We won't touch every cell in this slide when we talk about it, but I will give just a couple of outlines on it. It does talk about overhead versus underground reliability. So we looked at over 100 different feeders, circuits that we have in the city of Denton, how many of those are 80% or greater overhead versus how many of those feeders are 80%? Or greater underground? So if you look on the left-hand side, the overhead circuits that have 80% of the entire length is overhead. There's 12 circuits out of 100. If you look at underground circuits that have 80% or more is underground, there's 26 circuits. So there's over twice as many underground circuits that are 80% greater of underground than there are overhead. Interesting. And so these are the substations that are listed here in the feeders. We talk about the percent overhead they are. The SATI is the system duration of outages that occur on that particular circuit. The CATI is customer average duration of outage that occurs on that circuit. The SAFE is system average frequency. How frequent, how often do they occur? We also put in here a squirrel. We all know that we have squirrel issues. That's a squirrely topic. But we're trying to protect them. We are trying to protect them. We do have the number of squirrel events. And you might notice here on overhead we had nine different -- on these particular circuits nine different events on these circuits, whereas on underground we actually even had some events on underground circuits. That's because maybe all the circuits are not 100% underground, as you can tell some of them are 82%, 84%. So there's some overhead even on a lot of underground circuits. And so we have squirrel events. And they also get down into the risers that convert transition from overhead to underground. They have a tendency to want to chew on insulation. And so, yes, we do have squirrel events on underground circuits as well. >> Councilmember Briggs, do you have a question? >> Yes. I'm aware of the squirrel events from our neighborhood. And you have mentioned that -- and I know that DME is purchasing these -- I forget what they're called. >> Wildlife protection. >> Wildlife protection. >> We want to protect them. >> To prevent that. And how frequently do those need to be replaced? I mean, is that just a one-time purchase? Because I'm trying to figure in if we did convert to underground, if that purchase would be continuous or how that would affect. >> Very good question. That would typically be a one-time purchase per circuit to put those on. We have done what we call feeder sweeps on two or three of the circuits across town. A couple of them are in your district. And I think we have seen some positive benefits from that. It doesn't completely stop it. The events from happening. But it has dramatically decreased the number of events. And so once you put them up there, unless they get damaged or something, they should last quite a while. We've had very good success with this style of wildlife protection. Something to take away from this, with all of these numbers , if you look at an average of overhead customer durations of outages, this is like 26 minutes on these circuits. Each customer on those circuits would experience average across the entire year a 26 minutes worth of outage. On underground circuits, they would experience 31.84 on these circuits. And so I think the thing to note is that on underground circuits, there typically are less frequent outages. But when they do occur, the duration, the time to find the problem, since you can't visually see it, you have to go locate it, it does take longer to restore those power outages. And you can see that on 126 minutes here, 188 minutes, some of these different things. And you don't really see those numbers quite as large on the overhead circuits. And so because of that, the average system availability when you look at the total number of years, hours per year that's available to have electricity to your house, it's essentially the same for overhead and underground customers. This slide. I'm sorry, Mr. Council Member Housbett, go ahead. Just to, I'd just be curious about that process because I never thought about that point you just made about versus under. What is the, what is the process to pinpoint an outage underground? Is there a technology reading or something, is there a way that gets you in the area of the issue? How's that managed? On the underground risers that I mentioned earlier, that's where the transition from overhead to underground, they have fuses on each of those riser poles. And so when a squirrel or a fault or something occurs behind the fuse, that fuse will blow. And so we can find that fuse that blew because it's overhead very easily. So you know exactly which section of cable, but you don't know how far down the line that that actual outage occurred at. And so the typical process that you're referring to is we will go halfway down the circuit, we will open up a transformer, an open point, refuse the fuse, close it in, see if it holds. If it holds and it doesn't blow again, that section of cable up to that point is good. And so then you have to then, so the lights will come back on for those people, but we still don't know where the problem is at. And so then we have to go halfway from that point, maybe toward the end of the circuit, find another spot, open it up, and we'll make sure that that fuse doesn't blow. If the fuse does blow, you found that the fault is in that section and you then have to go pinpoint it, isolate it, get everybody back on. But that process does cause several blinks to those customers that the lights have come on temporarily. Oh good, the lights are back on. Then all of a sudden they go right back out again. And so that's part of the process to do that. Okay, very helpful. Thank you. Okay, you're welcome. This slide talks about some of the differences between overhead and underground. And a few of the significant differences are appearance, cost, and system flexibility. Underground conversions, they're just complex to do. We do them, but they are complex. There's several bullet points here you can look at. But a couple of points that you may want to take away from this is you've probably seen across town, even when we do some conversions along main roadways or whatever, that we get the electric system buried, but yet there's still poles out there. The telephone companies, the cable TV companies, there's not a lot of incentive for them to get off of those poles. And so we top them or cut them off. And that's a situation that we're trying to remedy through a new joint pole attachment agreement that y'all have looked at and approved here within the past year. We're trying to get those signed and get those other utility companies on board. And so it does take a lot of cooperation and coordination with those joint attachers. And a lot of times they're saying, this may be an investment you want to make on the electric system, but we're fine with the investment on the communication systems. And so there might have to be some incentives to help ent ice them to also remove their facilities and bury it. So there is cooperation and coordination needed on underground facilities. And an incentive wouldn't be just getting a chainsaw and cutting the pole down? That has been thought about, but we have yet to actually do that. That would put the communication lines on the ground. Council Member Brie. I specifically am thinking of Dallas Drive, as you say that , because that is something that I brought up and we had a staff report regarding that. And that was one of my notes to mention that you mentioned it as well, that it's not just us, it's other utilities. It is. And any time that they're willing to do it, we're more than willing to work with them to make that happen. So I think the close working relationship, the coordination , and letting them know about the upcoming projects, that can all help improve that situation. A second major thing that's pretty significant you need to be aware of, and it's not always thought about on this complex conversion from overhead to underground, is this is a homeowner impact. The meter base is a device that's mounted on the side of a home or a business that the meter actually gets plugged into. The meter base is actually installed by the builder or the developer whenever the facility is constructed. So it's owned by the customer. And so when that meter base has a mast that goes up, goes through the roof, has conduit and overhead wires tied to that, if you go underground, that all has to be removed. And we have to be able to allow that meter base to accept underground lines to come into that. And so electrician would have to be hired. That's not something that the electric utility company can do because that would have to be a private electrician and be reviewed and inspected by building inspections before it can be hooked back up. And so that would be a cost that the homeowner would see on that. They also would have to repair the hole in the roof and any type of damage to the side of the wall, siding or anything else that occurs. And so just be aware that that could be several thousand dollars to do that. But it can be done and has been done. Here's some cost examples of some projects that we've recently done just to kind of show you the order of magnitude of underground facilities. The very first one is on Western Boulevard. We had a large industrial customer come in town here a couple of years ago. We built 1.2 miles of underground utilities to serve the customer as well as to get system built out for the rest of that area. Multiple circuits were needed. And so easements were acquired and this was greenfield, which means there was no obstructions in the way at all. It was just vacant dirt along Western. And it cost $436 per foot to install this underground system or $2.78 million. Another one that we did down here southeast of the square is the Hickory Grand Street Project from Austin Street down to Bell Street. Very short section of line, 1,090 feet. When we did that, we put a lot of things underground because we didn't want to be digging that street up again. And that was $647 a foot to do that. Nearly three quarters of a million dollars. But we have put some extra capacity in that street for future. We also have added some boxes for festivals, for food vendors, booths, things that can hook up on the street. So provisions were thought about and installed along that. We also have looked at a rare lot overhead residential subdivisions. One in particular that we've looked at that we were wanting to see what would the cost be if we did consider to bury a section of overhead and put it underground in the backyards of some homes. It was a very well established and built out area that we looked at serves 23 different homes. And that cost was estimated to be about $550 a foot or $1.3 million just to get a couple blocks buried underground. And of course, that still doesn't account for the cooperation that would be needed from the telephone company and the cable company. We presently have several active underground projects going on in the city of Denton right now. From these three projects are on the UNT campus. Two related to text dot projects are along text dot roads. And five of these are presently in construction with the remainders left to be done this spring and this coming fall. So in summary, DME does have an ongoing underground program . Our fiscal budget only to convert existing overhead to underground that there's no other way to do that. We do have dedicated $350,000. Currently over 56%, which is based on the 2016 TPPA study, it's 57 actually, is underground. We do rank third out of 72 municipals in the state of Texas . Overhead does have a lower installation cost. It's easier to find problems when they occur and to repair those problems and get them done quicker. Underground does have an improved appearance. So it's definitely real tangible benefit there. And it does have some less outages. But whenever outages do occur, it does take longer to restore those outages. And it does have significantly higher capital and operating cost. So that was just a quick rundown of overhead versus underground. And some of the things that we look at and I Jerry filter or engineering division manager and George Morrow or general manager, we'd all be happy to stand for any questions. Any questions? Yes, Councilmember. You know, I heard a story about a city manager in another city that kind of got some street cred because there was an area of town where the cable company was not providing service. He works a magic and made that happen. I wonder if that kind of engineering could be done on the other hand with a city manager that knows how to work with cable companies to make that happen. He just miles quietly. We can't let they go. Once we tame atmas, they'll be next. So we have to cooperate first. Thank you. I'd be curious to see and I don't know Mr. City Manager how this would work, but I'd like to see the city maybe work with a vendor to help curb that or make that cost static to the homeowners for that conversion. If there's a way to line up the, you know, a electrician, a roofer that says that then normalizes that cost and we can approach them in advance. I just think about me if all of a sudden my home's getting converted and, you know, I want to participate but I've got to come up with $1,000 that I didn't budget for to participate in that or what that would be like if we could one, maybe by group lower that cost and two, normalize it or at least have some predictability to it. You're looking at this neighborhood kind of forecasting and here's what it's going to cost next year or here's a vendor that is agreed to, a preferred vendor if you will. I don't know what that looks like but that's kind of my thought and I'll leave you to kind of let me know your thoughts or how you see it. Okay. We can certainly look at that. I think it would probably take a real specific example or two. I think as Brett is correctly acknowledging every project's going to be different. You know, the age of the services are all going to be different. The repair of them are all going to be different and I'm not sure that you're going to find a standardized way of approaching that throughout the city. Could the city go out and help, you know, stabilize pricing if you had an area that wanted to do a special service area or something like that. That's probably something we need to work out with legal to see what the parameters on that but we've certainly done similar projects in other places with different services primarily like engineering services and that sort of thing. So thank you. So on the first bullet point, we do have a budget of 350, 000 for next year or this year. And so how do we choose what to add into that program? What projects? How do we prioritize what projects are going to be done? With as much work as we've had going on, we have looked to incorporate those with new revenue projects that bring new customers, new electric load to the system. And then we wouldn't even touch this 350,000 dollars. It would only be if a certain area says, hey, we would really like to consider doing this right now, that we would specifically look at that case and see how much can we do for strictly this budgetary amount. So we have a very small area. Okay. We so we have a budget and we have a program, but we aren't doing anything. We mainly trying to serve new customers and keep them going . Okay. We're gonna go customer right now. Over in Pecan Creek, I know there's a neighborhood that has service in the rear. Do we do that anymore? We don't we're not doing easements behind houses. Yeah, we really on all the underground facilities trying to do front lot line rather than the rear lot line. You may recall a few years ago, we had a very large project to replace underground facilities in the Southridge area that had direct buried cable. It was not in conduit systems. It was some of the first underground put in in the city of Denton. It was starting to fail at a very increasingly frequent rate. And so we went through the entire area, put in conduit systems and put new cable in that conduit system. So in the future, it'll be much less impactful. That was a three year project. And in on that particular area, when the builder built it, he built the fence between on the easement, right in the homeowners came back, what do we do in those areas where the transformer is located in someone's backyard? Do we request access? Do we? We did have to we had a very active and I think a very good program to notify and work with each of the customers prior to us ever coming on their property, we would give them advanced notice of when that was going to be in the schedule of this three year program. We would tell them what days would be there a contractor would do the work. As hard as you try, there's always some damages that occur fences that have to be relocated temporarily or maybe even replaced because they're about to fall down. And so we worked with each of those homeowners on mitig ating those damages. Well, and I'm talking about if there had been an outage in that area where it was supposed to be an easement that got fenced over. What is our means of accessing that? We know where those are in the backyard and it's very difficult. So we've actually have maps in our system. We know which gate to go in to get access to the transformer. Our GIS system has all of that infrastructure mapped and we even on those areas know how to access and get to it the easiest way. And so we have to use small backyard machines. We did replace all the pad man of transformers in the backs of those yards. They were old technology called live front units with some of the newer a little bit safer technology called dead front units where there's not as many exposed parts if the doors get opened. So we did take advantage of doing all that. Councilmember Duff. When you're doing the conversion on you have to physically bring the bring the line up to the to the meter. Who pays for that going you know you because you're basically digging the yard and coming up right now on the overhead service. It's the utility has the overhead service drop to the weather head. Yeah, of that which goes through the roof down to the meter . Right. So when that gets converted to a meter base we will still have the meter at the same location and a new converted meter base. And so there'll be conduit from either the transformer or a pedestal depending where it's at from the secondary system to get up to that house. And so and so you pay for that though. Well, or does it or is that that who pays who pays to we will put that in first because if it's a conversion project we will put that in but anytime in the future that fails it is the customer's responsibility to replace that. Now there are times to where we will have extreme wind damage or different things and that cable will maybe burn up. We work with the customers we try to that may be days before they can get an electrician out there for that get that size underground cable. We will lay some temporary overhead wire on the ground. We don't do that very long term because it's really not the safest thing to do but it has been done. We try to work with the customers. One of the reasons why I asked for this was a good presentation great overview of what what the programs are and and what I'm taking from it is that I mean obviously underground has its advantages and disadvantages to overhead. To me it's primarily static from from an operational perspective you'd probably prefer overhead just simply because it's a lot easier to work on it's a lot easier to install but what I'm hearing and seeing is that the only time we're really converting overhead to underground or on our major sort of construction projects like Hickory Grand Street and the maybe Hickory Street I don't know if they're overhead you know coming from the university in other words things that were already we're not going in and converting residential neighborhoods that are overhead to underground. I mean I mean like you said Southridge was already underground you just had to put it in contact. Right you're right we haven't been doing that aggressively we have worked with some of the text up projects up there on 380 across from TWU some of the problems that we just discussed with the meter bases being converted to underground those homeowners did not want to go through all that process and have that expense and damage. So if you look over there there are several of those homes that have poles and there's some concrete poles set right next to where the meter is and so the underground comes from the street from 380 up to the pole goes up the pole and then drops with 15-20 foot piece of overhead to that meter and the homeowners didn't have to be involved but there's a pole there so if it was to get rid of poles we had to set some poles to do that. Sure. Okay. So that's all on the presentation. All right thank you very much. Okay thank you. Thank you very much very helpful. All right our next agenda item is receive a report agenda item 3C excuse me receive a report hold discussion and give staff direction regarding the design and construction of LED street lighting along US Highway 380. All right afternoon mayor and council this is an item that was requested back in the falls a question asking about how do we improve the safety and the visibility of the 380 University Drive corridor. Staff has been working through this item specifically with Preetam Dishmukh our city traffic engineer and Katie Welch they put in an awful lot of effort to bring forward some of the upfront items to better understand what it would take to get that quarter better lit. So really we as we started looking at 380 corridor we looked at what were the primary uses. Obviously when you go west back over west of I-35 or 380 intersects and then east of 288 it's very urban it's a very much less urbanized area more rural section so there's quite a bit less lighting nor the demand for it so the area that we did focus our primary efforts in looking at what it would take is the urban area between I-35 and 288 so really coming all the way across the razor ranch area through and by Carroll Boulevard and on all the way over 288. Now we focus primarily on the cost for LED we did look at multiple avenues are historically we've used other types of streetlights such as metal halide , sodium vapor so those kinds of things are what you typically see out there you don't see a lot of LED lights in the city of Denton but you do see the majority of communities transferring their time and energy over into LEDs long term it's where the markets going I think we've all seen that part of what we're seeing now is that you're also seeing the availability of more traditional streetlight fixtures really get harder to find. You can't find the same number or broad spectrum of what they look like it's just all going to LEDs we really did focus our cost on the LED spectrum. Councilmember Briggs. I can wait. You sure? Okay. So as we said we focused primarily on that more urban area of the segment of town if you look at what it would take to light up I-380 we took the more conservative approach and said where would you put those streetlights there are medians along that stretch but there's limited in the space and we thought we would take a more conservative number in the total number of streetlights you'd have to put out which would give us a better idea of what the maximum cost really would be. So if we were to go put in LED streetlights at a minimum of about 200 foot spacing from 35 all the way to 88 you're looking about a two million dollar price tag. That would be design that'd be installation of all the fi xtures turnkey ready to go. Now obviously if we broke that into segments like in front of Razor Ranch or brought it all the way over to Keller Boulevard or even segmentalize that a little bit more we could bring that down further and do this in limited patches where it made the most sense. Give you an idea of what it would take just to go from the western limits of the city all the way to the eastern limits you are going to bump that number up if we lit it continuously much like TxDOT does along the interstate systems if we lit that continuously you'd be looking at about a five point six million dollar price tag. As far as maintenance goes we did provide a little bit of a maintenance cost just so you could see on an annual basis what the expectation is and that that is with us looking into what the costs are in some of our surrounding communities. One that we focused a lot of time looking on looking at with is the both with DME but also with Fort Worth. Yes sir. You might have it on the slide. Are these costs with a single pole in the medium with two heads or two a pole on each side of the street? This was taking the more conservative approach of a pole on each side of the street just so that you get an idea of what the maximum cost would be. Obviously if we went forward we'd be looking to consolidate where we could but there is an impact and we would need to know where all the existing utilities lay things like that. So okay go ahead I'll save my question for the end. As I was saying we did do a lot of the we had a lot of conversation with the City of Fort Worth and some other providers that maintain their own LED or street light systems. Fort Worth is in the middle of converting their system over to LED and they have a pretty good track record of what that maintenance cost really looks like what the total time they're responding to outages and knockdowns things like that. So our maintenance costs we've included here is based on that conversation with them. If we were to go forward our recommendation as a staff would be that we engage a consultant to help us determine what the overall cost of this project would be. It would be a photometric analysis, it'd be identifying where the underground risks potential you know other franchise utilities, water and sewer, any obstructions that come from signs or landscaping. That would give us a better idea of how many street light poles we're actually talking about what the actual fixtures look like. It would give us an idea of what kind of levels of illum ination be looking at and if you really want to expand beyond just a transportation safety element and get into pedestrian level street lighting as well that could be branched off of that. So just to give you a night yes ma'am. Yeah well yeah go ahead and finish it with Councilmember Br iggs, Councilmember Gregory. Yeah all right. So just give me an idea if we go forward from this step we 're given authorization to move forward we are currently selecting consultants off an RFQ that would be available to do this type of work. They would give us our initial estimate of what this overall project would look like, refine that cost a little better as well as give us an idea of what the construction schedule might look like moving forward. We would be prepared to initiate in that contract in February of this year as early as February of this year. They would start as quickly as that approval came about and we negotiated the contract and then come back to Council with results of that by mid- year. Councilmember Briggs. So about a year ago maybe a little over the committee on the environment had a presentation about LED lighting and it was my understanding that the city was already doing something some sort of study regarding lights testing lights which ones were the best and we had done we had done something similar I thought with the with the amount that it covers. Are you familiar with what I'm talking about? Yes we've actually been working with DME on that. Okay. They have an ongoing study on different types of fixtures. There's a lot more that goes into that than you would think normally. It's fairly easy to identify and I don't want to put words in Jerry's mouth but it's fairly easy to start identifying which fixtures give you the best coverage. Yeah. There's another thing to start talking about the other things the consistency of the light color how reliable is the fixture itself how easy is it to both install and then maintain. There's a lot of items that go into that. Jerry do you want to step in there? Good afternoon. My name is Jerry. I'm the division engineering manager over distribution for DME and you're correct it's almost it was it's a little over a year ago that we actually talked to you guys about that that study is in place now and it is operational. We've had over 25 different lights based upon 100 watt 200 watt 50 watts and 400 watt equivalents supplied to us and those are now operational they're all out on the DME facility out there and they're in a very controlled environment. They come on it's 5 15 in the afternoon they turn off at 7 15 at night they all come on and turn off within 10 minutes of each other. We are seeing already some marked differences in the amount of energy the different vendors supply and I think that's going to be significant when you look at the total cost of what an LED actually will cost to operate in the future. Before we develop the criteria for choosing the vendors and choosing which lights we are that certainly needs to be one of those is how much is it actually going to cost us because it either uses a lot more energy or it doesn't use a lot more energy and again we're seeing a pretty marked significant delta between the different brands of lights. I believe in February we're going to come back to you guys the committee on the environment I'm going to give you an update on that and I can give you a lot more information but right now we really haven't come up with for a 400 watt which is what these would possibly be our 250 watt this is the bulb we like this is the vendor we like. So yes I mean at that point we can continue we're going to continue working with city engineering and pre-chem and I talk and try to come up with the standard and say okay so eventually these are the ones we're going to come up with on that part of it. The lights have actually only been operational for probably four months right now there was a little bit of an issue of getting the actual poles in place not in place but getting them purchased and getting them here on that part of it that was during the hurricane season and so a lot of the poles that we needed were rerouted to the locations but it is an operational study right now and it is going and again we're going to come to you guys next month give you an update on it but I'd be more than happy to show you guys anytime you want to come out there what this study is and how it is it's pretty neat from my standpoint. Thank you yeah I thank you yeah I just wanted to make sure that you guys were working together because it was it was similar and so if this we did agree to the study then that necessarily wouldn't tell us what vendors or what lights to use okay. Councilmember Gregory. Thank you. Yeah I appreciate this presentation I think that we ought to move forward with hiring the consultant I think that we ought to consider expanding that urban area just a little bit to the east to go not just to loop 288 but to Mayhill Road given the fact that we're looking at within a couple of years Mayhill Road being a six lane road that's connected into University Drive so I think we ought to just expand it I don't think it's going to be significant cost in terms of percentage. Would the consultant tell us or is it a different study that would that would suggest where we need to have a pedestrian level of lighting or is that more of a policy decision I mean can we look at where pedestrians are really using the road now any surveys like we've done for bike surveys to make that determination and how much different lighting are we talking about needing for pedestrian level. That's definitely something that could be added to this study one of the things when we get into the more current types of photometric analysis our glorious engineered term for let's see how the lights work is they give us a nice 3D model where we can vary the amount of illumination out there and we can say okay well what would it look like if we did this more in a pedestrian scale so looking at that from the standpoint of how do I vary that and and what would that entail is not that much of an additional cost it's something that could potentially be absorbed in that seventy five thousand it's obviously something we were talking to them about making sure that we had that level of flexibility in their study whoever we end up using we've just visited with a few folks what do you think it'd be what would run is if we got into this it's definitely within the scope of work that could be done fairly cheaply and inexpensively in this current or in this future contract. Councilman Wright. Thank you mayor based on the word photometric is this does that mean that they will look at what the current lighting is from existing area. Yes that's existing area because I know the hill by TWU is has been dark for a long time and that's been something that's been complained about but you get out by razor and you've got a lot of parking lot lights that are yes there are you know what they actually what they will do as a part of this study is they will survey what's currently out there what are the limits of both the buildings the structures that are in the way of everything signs landscaping existing poles anything you can imagine that's potentially going to impact the cast of light from these poles and then give us ultimately a 3d rendering so that we can see what those things would actually look like down that corridor. Yes Councilmember Briggs. Can you refresh my memory this is a discussion we had where a text dot was going to be paying for some part of the lights. No the reason that. How is that different. Yes he's correct. Yeah the reason this came up is the text dot refused to pay for lighting on a university and so we were asked to bring back some ideas on what it would cost and some scope to the council for discussion. I remember thank you. Okay so council direction is to proceed with the consultation study together with potential pedestrian aspect and then Councilmember Hudson. Yeah I was gonna say I think Councilmember Gregory makes a good point to extend that to Mayhill just kind of makes sense. Okay yeah all right fantastic. Any other comments questions. Thank you very much appreciate it. Okay that concludes our work session reports. In following this work session the City Council will now convene in closed meeting to consider it's at 411 deliberations regarding certain public power utility competitive matters under Texas Government Code section 551.086 consultation with attorneys under Texas Government Code section 551.071 and deliberations regarding personnel matters under Texas Government Code section 551.074. All right welcome everybody to this meeting of the Denton City Council on January the 9th 2018. We do have a quorum and I'll call this meeting to order our first item on the agenda is to pledge the US and Texas flag so please stand with me if you 're able. I pledge allegiance to 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all. I put the hashtag in. And to support and learn about DISD's IB program and its students. So thank you all very much for participating in the program and thank you all out here participating as well. And thanks, DISD, for also continuing to promote this program. So thank you all very much. 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Before you tonight is a real estate exchange and abandon ment agreement, a proposed one between the City of Denton and Marsam, which is Risco Tires. It's a track located at the northwest corner of Elm and Eagle. It's for the Eagle Drive Drainage Phase 2 project. Just a little background on the drainage project itself. Several years ago we finished up Phase 1, which was underground drainage project, the limits of which shown on the screen from Elm Street over to Wainwright, where we have the existing outfall. We buried that in underground storm drainage. Phase 2 is the last segment of Eagle project, where we'll be building construction boxes. There's some existing boxes that were put in for the quick trip on the south side of Eagle, and we'll be connecting those boxes to the boxes that were terminated for the Phase 1. What this will do is help mitigate some of the localized flooding that occurs. This area is somewhat in a bowl. We've got a lot of topography in this area, and this is where it all collects, the storm water. This is a site map of the transaction that we're proposing tonight. We've got several tracks in play here. The tracks that are necessary for the project are in blue and pink. The blue tract is a right-of-way tract, a street right-of-way tract for Myrtle. The boxes themselves are going to be basically centered up on what is now where the curb line is on Myrtle. We've got some big boxes going in there, and they'll traverse along the north side through here and connect them to the boxes that are terminated here. We'll be proposing to get a street right-of-way tract in blue and a drainage easement in the magenta or red. As part of this, we're suggesting or proposing that we exchange some land rights for these tracks that we're going to be acquiring. In 2016, the city purchased this house lot from the San Miguel's as part of this project, kind of an advance purchase in anticipation of this work. The house has been razed, and it's cleared. When we approached the MARSAM folks, Duane Waters with Briscoe Tire , it came to be that we may be able to come to some sort of agreement of some exchange here. The proposal is that the city will convey the panhandled- shaped track, the green shaded. Also, there's a small little margin track that's just to the south of that that kind of fell off the land rules. We did a lot of research on that and found that it actually should have traded with the San Miguel tract. The city conveying those and reserving these drainage and utilities is in those tracks. Once the project's finished, where the existing drainage channel is now, these yellow cross-statched areas, we would release those to MARSAM. There's a table kind of rolling up all the different acre ages, and it's a very small tract altogether. The whole MARS AM tract is a little over half an acre. So here's really the points. MARSAM will convey the tracks we need for the project. We'll reserve drainage and utilities in the tracks that we would be conveying, the fee tracks. As far as there's a payment in the contract that allows for a $5,000 payment to MARSAM, there's a couple of trailers that they use for storage that kind of straddle the existing channel right now, and to incentivize them to move those trailers ahead of the project, if they do that, we'll make that payment. If they like not to, we'll just take them out as part of the project. And then the city to release the easements once the project 's finished, where the existing drainage is now. So what's in it for MARSAM? They get a little bit extra land surface area use. They can't build on it, but it's something they could use for something associated with their business. I think more so than anything, they get a lot of tractor trailer deliveries to their property, and it would help them to get their tire deliveries in a better way, some little logistics. For the city, we're bidding for this project really soon, in a couple of months, once we get these land rights lined up. Another benefit for the city is that otherwise, where the Panhandle Track or the San Miguel Track, that would be on the maintenance rolls for the drainage department going forward. And in this sense, it gets actually put back on the tax rolls. And we have a cooperative landowner, so we don't have to pursue anything other than this transaction. I stand for any questions. Paul, will this take – this is to remove some of the property out of the floodplain, is that correct? In this particular segment – and we have Noreen House right here, so you can come in, and maybe if there's any more specific questions, but my understanding, this is an unmapped area, so it's really – it's going to take care of the localized drainage, but there's presently no 100-year storm in this area. Okay, gotcha. Okay. So it's not designated as a floodplain? Correct. It's still floods. Okay. All right. Any questions for staff? Seeing none, thank you. Mayor Pro Tem? And we have no cards wishing to speak either. Okay. We need to approve an ordinance, though. Am I understanding that correctly? We need to take action? Yes, I believe so. Motion to approve. Councilmember Ryan? I second. All right. We have a motion and a second for Agenda Item 5A . Let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries 7-0. Thank you. Thank you. Agenda Item 5B, conduct the second of two readings of an ordinance of the City of Denton for voluntary annexation of approximately 73.47 acres of land. And so this does not require any action, Mr. City Attorney, is that right? Since it's a second reading, or does it? It's a second reading and adoption of an ordinance. Okay. All right. Thank you. Oh, yeah. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Good evening. Richard Canone, interim planning director. Just to briefly recap, this is the second and final reading . This is a 73-acre site just north of Long Road and west of Sherman. They are looking at doing a single-family development, so after this annexation, they do have a pending rezoning application that will ultimately come in front of you. Again, this is just sort of the schedule that we went through, and I do know, I believe the ordinance title has to be read into the record. Is that correct? Yes. Yep. That's correct. Do you? I can read it if you'd like. Sure. Yes. Go ahead. An ordinance of the city of Denton, Texas, voluntarily annexing approximately 73.47 acres of land, generally located north of Long Road and west of FM 428 by the city of Denton, Denton County, Texas. More specifically described in Exhibit A and illustrated in Exhibit B, providing for correction to the city map to include the annexed lands, providing for a savings clause and an effective date. All right. Fantastic. Thank you. Any questions for staff? Seeing no blue cards wishing to speak. Councilmember Gregory? Thank you, Mayor. I move approval of the ordinance for voluntary annexation. Councilmember Briggs? I'll second. We have a motion and a second for agenda item 5B. Let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries 7-0. Agenda item 5C. Consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton, Texas, setting a date, time and place for two public hearings on the proposed voluntary annexation of certain property generally located on the east side of Old Alton Road. Just to give you a point of reference for this property, as you may recall, back in October, the property just to the north, we went through rezoning. This is Pioneer Automotive . They are releasing a facility and purchased this land and are building a new garage. There's this little sliver that, for whatever reason, was never incorporated into the city, just under a half acre. So that's essentially what the parcel is. And so the schedule for the annexation is as shown here on the screen. Okay. Any action on this? It says it's got a draft ordinance. Yes, there is an action item. It's adoption of the ordinance setting the time and date. Okay, so that's what the ordinance is. Okay. All right. Any questions for staff? Councilmember Gregory. Thank you, Mayor. I move approval of the ordinance setting time and date for the public hearings on this voluntary annexation. Councilmember Riggs. I'll second. We have a motion to second for agenda item 5C. I have no blue cards wishing to speak on this item for individual consideration. Let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries 7-0. Agenda item 5D. Consider adoption of an ordinance accepting competitive bids and awarding a contract for the supply of parkland maintenance products, including but not limited to landscape and turf fertilizer, insecticides, herbicides, mulch, and peat moss. Good evening, Mayor and Councilmembers. My name is Laura Behrens and I'm the Assistant Director for Parks and Recre ation. A little bit of information for you tonight on this item. The contracts that you have before you this evening, the most recent contract that we had expired in October of this past year. We continue to operate under an extension that ended at the end of December. We put the bid out for invitation with 129 suppliers and we posted it on the website. We received six proposals and this evening you've got six contracts in front of you that represent the lowest responsible bidder meeting specifications for each line item. The contracts are for three years for a total amount not to exceed a little over $196,000. All the products that were included in the bid and are reflected in the contracts are in compliance with the department's integrated pest management program, otherwise known as IPM. They are EPA approved and all the products are applied by our licensed park staff under the Texas Department of Agriculture. This certification does require continuing education hours and all applications are documented in accordance with law and subject to audit. A little bit about the usage. These products are used at various locations throughout the city, primarily city property, public buildings, parks, right aways, landscape beds, and also also our athletic fields. They are vital in maintaining the health and the total landscape of our properties, and they're essential in controlling unwanted weeds and insect infestation. Some of the more common complaints that we get and pest management issues that we see are fire ants, cinch bugs, and army worms, sandbirds, dandelion, and goose and crabgrass. These products are used in annual seasonal applications. We do have a schedule that lists the products and locations for each product, and it is per our IPM Park classification plan. We have two broadcast of pre-emergence a year and one broadcast of post-emergent a year. These broadcast applications are performed after hours. We do have a 72 hour signage for public notification and spot treatments using these products are applied with a blue die for visibility. Not all of these products are used annually. They are used as needed. They're based on an assessment of targeted pest control, and that is dependent on the identification of the pest, the evaluation of the situation that we have currently there, how bad the infestation is, and also the location. Based on that information, a selection of product is made. The products are rotated to reduce resistance so that that also helps us with long-term pest management control. The products are also evaluated on a regular basis for changes in the recommended use and notifications from the manufacturer and regulatory agencies. So our staff recommendation for this evening is to approve the contracts for the continuation of our current operations and maintenance of property. Again, you've got six vendors contracts before you. Our IPM program was originally implemented in 2001, knowing that it is due for review and update. We're also recommending that we form a committee to review that IPM program and come back with updates and a recommendation for council review and approval. Okay. Any questions for staff before we take public comment ? Thank you. And we do have a couple of blue cards wishing to speak. Mr. Ed Self, if you'll come down and state your name and address, your time will begin. Councilmember Briggs, did you want to ask your question after the public? Okay. My name is Ed Self. I live at 1620 Victoria Drive, pardon me, in Denton. Good evening and happy new year. I've already sent you some information, primarily about the emerging, pardon me, health, environmental and legal implications of the use of glyphosate or it's commonly called Roundup. I hope you had a chance to look at that. The University of California at Davis, their department of entomology and nematology, which is basically bugs and worms, is a leader in IPM research and strategies. Their plan states that in IPM's least toxic pesticides must meet these criteria. Their criteria are, number one, the product contains no known, likely or probable carcinogens. Number two, the product contains no reproductive toxicants. Number three, the product contains no ingredients as known, probable or suspect endocrine disruptors. Number four, the active ingredients has soil life, or pardon me, soil half-life of 30 days or less. And number five, the product is labeled as not toxic to fish, birds, bees, wildlife or domestic animals. None of the herbicides that the Parks Department wishes to purchase for what is now an outdated and poorly publicized IPM program meet those criteria. The UC Davis plan also goes on to list what can be used as least toxic pesticides. And those are boric acid, silica gels, diametaceous earth, non-volatile insect and rodent baits in tamper-proof containers, microbe-based pesticides, pesticides made with essential oils without toxic synerg ists, which I don't know what that means yet. And last, materials for which the inert ingredients are non -toxic and disclosed. Again, none of those substances are being purchased by the Parks Department. In addition, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has a lengthy list of active ingredients eligible for minimum- risk pesticide products. And that's this, which you can get off the website. None of those are included in the purchase agreement. So I hope that you will consider it both prudent and responsible to fast-track the revision and updating of Dent on's existing plan, as was just mentioned to you, but fast-track it and to use these funds to purchase truly least toxic alternatives for use in a robust, proactive and protective IPM. It is a waste of money to buy these risk-laden chemicals, and it is a public health hazard to use them. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate that. Councilmember Briggs, did you have a comment for Mr. So for the staff? Okay, for staff. Thank you. Thank you. Our next speaker is Carol Sofe. Come down and state your name and address. Your time will begin. Good evening. My name is Carol Sofe. I live at 1620 Victoria Drive, Dent on. Before I became pregnant with our son Stephen 39 years ago, I smoked cigarettes. When I became pregnant, I quit. There was some evidence at the time that smoking affected a developing fetus. I didn't switch to a safer cigarette with a better filter or cut down on the number I smoked each day. I quit. There was mixed data on the possible dangers. I didn't weigh the percentages of risk. I avoided risk altogether, and I quit. It has been 17 years since our IPM program was implemented. During that time, we know that certain chemicals deemed safe 17 years ago have been proven through scientific study to be unsafe to unborn children, children, and people with compromised immune systems. We should not buy or use these chemicals at all while we find safer alternatives to use, because a safe application or low risk factor does not change the fact that the product is dangerous and risky to use. Just like they said with cigarettes, we may find out that these safety applications and risk factors were not enough to protect the public. Thank you. Thank you. Having no more blue cards, I'm wishing to speak. Councilmember Briggs, you had a question for staff? Yes, a few. So is it possible to approve this and ask the person that is in charge not to use a certain chemical? Or if we approve this, everything within that, like including the known carcogens, will be used? The passage of the contracts, they do list the specific products that would be allowed for purchase. And so the use of them is determined on the pest management , again, the extent of the infestation that we're trying to either eliminate or control, and then also the site. So it could be that in some cases we would use certain products, and in other cases we might have a similar pest or the same pest and use a different product. It'll be based on that situation. So I'll tell you what I find disturbing is that we spray the known carcinogens on our community garden. I discovered that recently, my mom uses that area, and our citizens plant their herbs and vegetables there as a healthy alternative, and we are going in and spraying chemicals on that. So that's one issue that I have with that. But I was curious because I know that some of the pesticides, some of the stuff is okay, but I'm not okay with everything that is listed on here. So I didn't know if there were exceptions that we could say , okay, well, we'll approve this if we choose not to use this and this. But you're telling me that if it's approved, anything on the list is game. If it's approved, then it will be approved for usage. Now in that particular situation, it would definitely be a possibility to have a conversation to look at some specific sites, like where food is being grown, and look at some different options for that site. So we can talk to the users of the garden, talk to them maybe about the types of pests that we're seeing, the types of pests that they're seeing, how to manage that, and then come together with a plan for that. But just the approval of the contracts doesn't mean that we have to use them. They're just, they're available for us to purchase to mitigate any pest management issues. I have a question about the, some of these, I'm assuming since we use them in the parks that they're sprayed near our creeks or ponds. And do we do any water testing after the applications of any of these near those areas? The Parks Department doesn't do any water testing, but the products that we use in and around those areas are approved for aquatic use. So they're going to be different than some of our other products that are not approved for that use. So we do have products specific for that aquatic use. Councilmember Gregory. Can you confirm when the last time the integrated pest management program was reviewed and developed? It was, well, it was originally implemented in 2001. I don 't have any information of any, any ongoing or regular review after that. Do you have any knowledge of how long it would take to do a thorough review and update of the plan, of the program? I would anticipate a couple of months. One of the things that we would like to do is to create a community focus group, similar to the focus group that was created and the process that was done during the original implementation. So that would include, you know, having members of our community sit on that committee review the document, do some evaluation and some research on some of the recommendations and potential options that are available to us and then formulate a new IPM plan. I'm inclined to move to postpone action on this item until we have an update on the integrated pest management program . I have to look down because I don't use that term a lot. Will there be any significant harm to, for example, children or adults that are using our softball fields or soccer fields if we delayed for two to three months? It will definitely impact the standard of our current park maintenance system only because in the beginning in January , we're already planning for our next maintenance program. And so some of our broadcasts are done between now and March, depending on weather conditions. So depending on the temperature, the type of winter that we 're having, delaying that could increase the potential for some pest management issues in the early spring. Well, what I'm thinking about when you're talking about pest management, you're talking about everything from fire ants to crabgrass. Correct. Yes, sir. Okay. I don't think kids get hurt if some crabgrass is growing on the fields. They could get hurt seriously if they got caught up in a mound of fire ants. Do you have any advice on us as far as those kinds of pests that could cause a significant immediate injury to people using parks and athletic facilities? You're correct. If the fire ants is probably going to be the, you know, that would be probably the most harmful. Obviously, some of the other grubs and worms that affect the turf primarily, you know, aren't anything that are impacting our visitors. But the condition of the turf, specifically on the athletic fields, would be a concern. The condition of the turf throughout the park system, not only with just crabgrass, but some of the sandburs, stickers, and those other types of weed control that we need to start preparing for in addition to some of the insect management. Okay. Thank you. Mayor Pro Tem. Has the Parks Department ever worked with the IRLIFE extension in terms of creating a plan for maintenance and I guess we call it IPM, so integrated pest management? Not that I'm aware of. Okay. Is there, would there be any opposition to work? Because the reason I bring up the IRLIFE extension is because it's a state funded program that's already in place . The county uses them. I'd hate for us to go through kind of a whole process of committees and all this when there's actually experts in our midst who are, you know, fully employed to do these types of things. Correct. Part of the review, one of the things that we were looking at is reaching out to some of the other agencies. DISD, I understand, has a fairly recent IPM program learning, you know, from their process and also their current IPM program and then also other agencies, governmental agencies, but also some community groups as well. Well, I certainly would like to see an update to the IPM program because I tend to agree with Mr. Stouff that IPM really is the least invasive method of doing things and it 's more about building up the soil system so that you don't have to use all of the chemicals and just in a position where I can't vote for endocrine disruptors. So I'm unfortunately not going to be able to vote for this one, but, you know, certainly open to going forward. If there's a different type of plan put forward, I would very much be in favor of that. That's my Ryan. Are your presentation wasn't in our backup and I'm trying to recall, did you say our current contract expired in in October, in October, we were operating under an extension that expired in December. Is it possible that we could do a three month extension to this, as opposed to going into a three year contract to give us time to to update the IPM would that be an acceptable way to handle this and we wouldn't fall behind in our park system. And that's something that I'd have to consult with our purchasing department to see if we can do an extension under the current contract. Yeah, I mean I, I think we obviously need to have an update to the program. It doesn't sound like that it's too onerous , and that it's not very time consuming. I would hesitate to say stop everything until we figure that out because I don't know all the implications of that and I understand some of the concerns but I think if we've got a couple months where we can maybe get something else in place, especially at this time of the season. And as far as what Councilmember Ryan said, as far as getting some extension, I can't vote for a three year contract if we're going to update it we may exclude some of those we still would be responsible for paying for them. So I think that's pretty well settled that we're not going to enter into that I don't think we're going to be willing to enter into a three year contract. If we're going to update it to where many of those or some of them may be removed from the list so I appreciate you bringing that recommendation to us and I appreciate you working with people in the community to understand the concerns and see what kind of alternatives we can, we can bring to bear that will have the same effect. As far as what we're trying to achieve but won't have some of the negative effects and and certainly would encourage the conversation with the community garden I didn't know that in a community garden that we spray for stuff and I don't know what we spray I don't know what it does but obviously if there's some concern people, you know, we need to be aware of that. Because we don't, you know, want to do that for sure. Councilmember Gregory. I move to postpone action on item D, until to an event certain which is hearing and you. Looking for the words again, integrated pest management program. Councilmember breaks. I will second. We have a motion and a second does that does, I guess, just question for the movement, and maybe for staff, city attorney, because I know that if we got an expired contract which I'm understanding that means we have. There's no ability to purchase things that we might need here in the next couple months, if that's a correct statement. How do we do we have to bring bring something back to us or in this motion is or something I guess I'm just trying to understand what we have as far as a lot of it's going to depend on what the extension we have in the prior agreement with Council's more and more extensions I don't I have not seen the original agreement with extensions maybe the purchasing manager may know that. So, so the. Does the purchasing manager. Yes ma'am. All right. Thank you. You have a question as well. I don't know the terms of the contract, but their expenditures are pretty small so we can keep them in business for a little while under 50,000 by seeking quotes. Okay. And if we if the terms of the contract to allow us to extend it we can do that as well for a little while buy them some time. Okay. All right. Thank you. Mayor protein. Yeah, I was I was just gonna see if we could I mean I don't have a problem with mulch mulch is great so I was just gonna see if we could kind of parse it out a little bit but if it sounds like if you can get what you need through smaller purchases for the time being then that should be okay and I appreciate that this is probably annoying from the perspective of having gone through the whole process of, you know, trying to comply with this program that's been in place for 11 years so just wanted to acknowledge that I understand that. Absolutely. Okay, any other questions we do have a motion and a second fridge into item five. What is the council member Hudson. I'm sorry. Just want to. Before we move forward, I was going to ask a question of Mr self that's okay. Is that already closed. Yeah, that's, that's been counseling. No, no, I'll get one of my phone. Okay. Okay, motion in a second for five D. To postpone. Yes, most phone to invent certain as foot forth on the record, let's vote on the board please. Motion carries six to one. Moving on to agenda item he considered option of Nordic accepting competitive bids and awarding a contract for the supply of word Zilla gas engine lubrication oil. Good evening Mayor council members I'm Chris Lutrick I'm one of the project managers for the dead energy center and I know we're nearing the finish line so this is a very brief presentation to kind of summarize the bids ever received for these, these two products, and then use a time to answer any questions you may have. So we're going to go over just internal combustion engine overview in case anybody wants to know what's going on in there in their automobile engine we'll go through that very quickly. The bid summaries recommendations and questions. So it's kind of jazz it up kind of have some animation here . So the two items we're bringing to you this evening are the engine oil. The deck engines, very similar to the engine in your, in your automobile. This oil is probably the most critical fluid that will have at the plant, other than the gas, it keeps the, the internal rotating parts lubricated and also provides cooling. The second item we have is the glycol, which is coolant slash antifreeze. So in this, this example here in the head part of the engine, this cooling fluid is circulated, takes the heat out of the engine and allows it to maintain a constant temperature, and on the, the dual duty is, unlike your car which has a radiator right in front, the whole compartment stays very warm. The radiators at the plant are behind the plant, so they're exposed. So in North Texas we're kind of on the threshold where we had weather like we had a couple of, or last week, where we have freezing temperatures, you know at about 50 to 60 hours, we 'd start to see some water freezing in the radiator. So in that end, the glycol will lower the freezing point of the cooling fluid down to 15 to 20 degrees. So we put this into, into one bid, suppliers, distributors, they're two pretty common products, they go hand in hand. So we put out, it's an IFB, was the, the purchasing method we used for this transaction. We received a total of seven bids for the lube oil and seven bids for the MPG. MPG is monopropylene glycol, that's the type of coolant fluid that we selected. The old bids ranged from $5.79 per gallon to about $7.39 per gallon. As you saw on your backup, Wordzilla has some validated oils, they have very tight specifications on the oil. There's 11 manufacturers around the world, there's three of them that are in the United States, they're the big three, we receive quotes for all three of them. The, the glycol bids range from $79,953 to about $173,000. And this value is given as a total because there's different molecular formulas of glycol. So in our bid, we told the, the bidders that we had about 51,000 gallon system, and we needed enough of their product to lower that freezing point to about 15 degrees Fahrenheit so that the volumes varied on the amount of glycol they will supply to us. And so we awarded on the total price. Just to note, this isn't a contract, this is a single purchase. The plan is very efficient on water. So there is some extra glycol here for make up water and the oil purchase of 57,000 gallons, that will fill all 12 engines. That's about 48,000 gallons of oil will be in the engines. We have a maintenance tank, so the maintenance, this will also fill the filling system and the maintenance tank, so we don't see a next year coming back for an additional oil purchase. This oil should be the maintenance amount for a couple of years. So with that the staff recommends for the engine lubric ation, the lowest cost bid was submitted by reader distrib utors out of Fort Worth, Texas, for an amount not to exceed $330,030 and for the glycol. The lowest cost bid was submitted by a road distributors also a Fort Worth, Texas, in an amount not to exceed $79,95 3. Councilmember Berry. With engine oils, different oils have different life expectancies for automobiles, they measure it in miles. My guess is for these engines they measure it in hours. All of the oils that we looked at, do they have about the same amount of life expectancy in terms of hours of engine time? Yes sir, they're all, if you look in there, they're all like a type one base oil. These are virgin stock oils, they're not recycled oils, they're first rate, but a little different than your automobile, these oils will be tested, so they're selected, they have an item called condemning factors. So there's very specific chemical parameters of the oil that you get day one. So kind of like some modern vehicles have a life expectancy of your oil. In the plants case, part of the routine maintenance will be that oil is sampled and it's shipped off to a lab, and the lab is going to come back and say, yes, your oil is still above your condemning levels. So that's how you determine when you're going to change your oil. That oil will stay in an engine until it drops below a condemning factor. So our plant manager who's worked with Warzilla engines, each engine is going to kind of develop its own personality . So you drive your personal vehicle, you know all its quir ks if it's an older vehicle. Well, he's going to have 12 of those on his hands. So say you develop a small leak in a head gasket or a gas leak or something along those lines, that oil in that engine will degrade faster than an oil that's not. So there'll be a continually an oil monitoring program due to the cost that you won't have to say, you know, at 3000 hours we'll have to come back to you and get this cost again. And another thing about these engines is your engine in your truck, if you when you go in and get your oil change and they put in six quarts, when they get your oil change, it's not six quarts anymore because all engines burn oil. So these these will be the same. So there's a very minute amount of oil that's burned. But when you're running over multiple hours that adds up. So the maintenance tank will allow the staff to keep that level of ultimate levels. So basically you're always adding oil and burning a little bit of oil. So, but as soon as it's very important, but as soon as any any major thing comes up any maintenance issues that oil will be tested. And if it doesn't meet spec, the plant has the ability to take that oil out to a separate tank, bring in new oil to that to that engine and keep everything going. Thank you. Yes, sir. Could you go back to this previous slide. So I can do it. Okay, so the oil and the glycol these two purchases you said that will both of these last about two years. Yes, ma'am. Yes. Okay. And so can we expect that around every two years 410,000 for this for maintenance. Is it is it kind of like that. No, ma'am. The so the bulk of this purchase. So that's a 57,000 gallon oil purchase. The engines hold roughly 4000 a piece. So out of that 57,000 48,000 is going to be in the engines. So that leaves us our our our lube oil tank I believe is 11 ,000 gallons. We're going to end up with about 9000 gallons in that. So as that maintenance level that that that level is going to come down in that tank, then that the next purchase next maintenance purchase would be say 5000 gallons. It wouldn't be of this magnitude. So when thinking about being very cost conscious. We thought about going out and get like a three year contract or something that we do on our other on our other items. It's very difficult in the oil industry with the prices going up and down. So we saw that we can make a one time purchase and kind of maximize our our clout there to buy that oil and fill that tank up as opposed to having a supplier have to put in some uncertainty not knowing exactly what the market's going to be in the future. So, so, okay, that makes sense. Does the oil have a guarantee, like for the certain amount of time period because two year oil seems no man does not guarantee. So it won't go bad. I mean, will it go bad? No, ma'am. It will not go bad. So the there's a couple things in our storage tank that the key component to the deck is it's warm all the time. So in the engine halls, the actual engines, even if they don't run or kept at 150 degrees, which is beneficial. So that oil is not going to see all of these temperature swings that you normally see. So if you drive your car, it 's hot. You park it at night. It cools off. So those temperature swings or or detrimental to an engine and detrimental to an engine oil. Actually, the storage tank is kept at a constant temperature as well. So it's sealed off. It's there. There 's lots of filters. So you have one one oil filter usually on your car. This oil goes through multiple oil filters that are changed at a regular regular interval. So there's not a lot of waste. And this this another thing about this, this oil is it does have some value to. So we also have a used oil tank. So say an oil fails its test. It's condemned. We can take it out to an used oil tank. And then there the plant will set up a service where a vendor will come pick up that oil and pay for it. So there will be some recycled value where the city will the plant will get some money back for recycling that oil after its useful life. Yes, ma'am. Gregor, you had a question. Yes, sir. Thank you , Mayor. The the backup says the public utility board considered this item on January the eighth. What what did they say? Sir. But what was the it's a backup says P you be considered this item was an action. I believe it was unanimous. Okay. They unanimously endorsed it. Okay. They like my little animation things. So I got it. It's cool. Councilmember has been sorry if I missed it. But you touched on your buying the bulk in advance. And but when you change the oil, so let's say you send it out for a test and it drops to where you have to put. Is it where you leave the bulk of the oil in the engine and then you just supplement it with new oil? How does that? No, sir. There's no I don't what I'm trying to understand is how you reconcile. You don't have to make this large purchase again. But at the same time, I'm assuming you have to dump a percentage of that to then infuse the new oil. And forgive me if you touched on it. I'm sorry. I don't think I was clear in that method. So you can think of this as it's a system, but you have 12 engines. So each engine, once the oil is contained in that, then that engine, say engine number one, they're all independent . So you're not mixing the oils from any of the other 12 engines. So the system has a storage tank where it can take , for instance, when we get if we if this is approved and we get this oil, the oil is going to come into a storage tank. They're going to open some valves and transfer it to engine number one, fill the tank up and transfer it to so and so through the 12 engines. So say engine 11 has a water leak, a head gasket blows or something, and that oil becomes contaminated. At that point, you'd have to remove all 4000 gallons into the used oil tank, get your engine repairs, get everything cleaned up, and you would take 4000 new gallons from the maintenance tank and you would fill that engine so that it 's back in service. But that wouldn't affect the oil and the other engines. I got you. Okay, everything is independent. So they'll each get their own personality. An engine that doesn't have any water leaks, any gas leaks, you know that oil, as long as it's it's it's wear and tear is good, then it'll keep running. Got it. So in essence, you're saying you don't you only have to fill all 12 at the same time. One time. Yes, sir. I'm with you. This is called the initial fill. Okay. I'll probably should have been a little more clear on that. Thank you. I do just have one question of curiosity. You said the engine room is maintained at 150 degrees. Yes, sir. Somebody working in there. The engine block. So each engine block is 150 degrees. So the room itself is not. The lower design or the lower ambient temperature is going to be about 90 degrees all the time. That's a great working environment. I'm talking about somebody having to work in there. Okay, good. Any other questions? Councilmember Gregory. I move approval of item E. All right. We have a motion to approve. Councilmember Ryan. I will second. We have a motion and a second. Let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries five to two. Move on to agenda item F considered option of Nordens of the city of Denton, Texas amending sections. Various sections of the utility code. Good evening. Happy New Year. Tiffany Thompson, customer service manager. I'm here tonight to go over the credit collection policy revisions. A little bit of background in November of 2010 was the last time this ordinance was updated in regards to the credit collection policies that customer service adheres to our last couple of months. We've had several discussions with the public utilities board and council to gain direction on how we can change those policies and add additional programs to assist our customers. The first change that we made was updating the plus one program. We're increasing funds from 100 to 125 thousand dollars. Funds are going to be allowed to be allocated towards security deposits and we're going to update specific guidelines and criteria within the contract, specifically being able to help customers more than once in a 12 month period, regardless of tenure and address and then also getting richer data in regards to what barriers our customers are facing and getting that data captured on a monthly basis from the vendor. All of these changes with the plus one program are contract ual changes and we are doing a solicitation process right now and we'll be bringing forth the public utilities board and council with the contract for the vendor to approve in the next couple of months. We've added a homelessness deposit waiver to be able to address a specific community need for those individuals and families that are facing homelessness and are working with an agency to be able to find permanent rehousing. We have already crafted the documents that are needed to do the verification process for those agencies and also the form the customer will provide customer service to waive the deposit. So we're ready to go on that once we get approval with that . I wanted to note the additional ways that customers can have their deposit waived is with a letter of credit, a co- signer form and also if they sign up for auto draft. Council member Ryan pointed out a great point with the ordinance didn't have in there the language about the auto draft so we have also added that in there as well for you to consider. We've updated the credit and collection parameters specifically with the overdue interest points, the rating scale, the points recruit and the associated deposits required. For overdue interest the points are going from 100 to 0 and our credit ratings we are eliminating the F customer rating and then the scale for the C and D ratings or changes and then the required deposits for that as well. The disconnection process that we follow in customer service it's been an internal policy so we wanted to take this time to make sure that that was captured in ordinance how we disconnect during times of holidays, weekends and also during extreme weather. And so we do not do disconnections on holidays or the weekends, the days before or after these are city observed holidays and also for extreme weather we do not disconnect if it's below 32, 100 or above and we also added language in there. If there's been a heat advisory issued for Denton County that we would not issue any type of disconnection and then in red up there is what the public utilities board suggested yesterday that we make sure to clarify city observed holidays and then we struck out a sentence about personnel being available to take payment reconnect services. So I just wanted to show you what was changed yesterday and that's included with the ordinance that was handed out before the meeting. The implementation timeline for this on the plus one changes again we're going out and doing this solicitation process right now that will be brought forth for your approval in the next couple months with that new contract going in place July of 2018. The homelessness deposit everything's ready to go for that as soon as we get your approval we'll be able to execute that immediately. And for the credit and collection policies we do need to partner with our customer information system to get those changes implemented that'll be done as soon as the first week of February potentially sooner as soon as we get approval we can get all of those changes made. And with that I just wanted to thank you for the feedback over the last couple months months and the direction that was provided to us so I'd be happy to answer any questions. Any questions. Thank you so much for your help in helping us analyze this problem and the data that you provide I think the data was critical and helping us craft I think a solution that will be helpful moving forward so thank you again and your staff for helping us do that. Our pleasure. Count Mayor pro tem. I'll move for approval and just also echo the thanks for all the hard work and effort and I'm really interested to see how this process works out and you know we may need to change it in the future but for now I'm really interested to see what happens. Councilman breaks. Yes, I will, I will second to the motion and also second what Mayor pro tem said. I'm really excited about the work that we're doing with the staff and council as well working on this and I look forward to seeing in a year. The data and see how many citizens that helped and if not you know we can go back and work on it again. So thank you. Can we have a motion and a second for agenda item. Six F five F excuse me. Motion carries unanimously seven zero. Thank you all concluding items. Me, we're going to start making you go last. Councilmember, you just went off the board. I got kicked off Councilmember breaks. Go ahead. Okay. Are you ready to work session on hot funds. I'd like to request an update on the sign ordinance. Feels like it's been a while and I know that there's people waiting for that to come out or if we can see where that's landed and an update on where we are regarding the cultural district. I think I mentioned that a while back. Work session on our permitting and parades and festival processes. I'd like to know how like just walk us through how somebody would do that and the processes for that. Create a committee to update our integrated pesticides management plan. I know that we talked about that earlier but I know if I needed to request that under new business to get that started. And last, a suggestion for next year is to put an easily found notification on our website regarding Christmas tree pickup. I know there was some stuff going on and I know that it was on a few Facebook pages from the city but when I looked online to figure out when they would stop collecting or if they were going to collect I couldn't find it. Okay, that's it. Councilman Gregory I think you had. Three other people's to yes, customer. Councilmember Ryan. Thank you, Mayor. As I'm sure most of us are aware from many emails we have several people in town who are not in favor of our red light cameras. And through talks with with several of them. It would be amenable to a compromise of adding one second to the yellow light. Above the normal standard. While we are waiting for the contracts to run out. And so I 'd like for the council to to look into that and see what that what that may do. It's still safe, but it, it also lets them know that we're not looking at trying to collect revenue by increasing the yellow light time. Okay, so, are you wanting a work session because I mean, I guess yes it probably be a work session. To start with traffic safety or public safety or whoever. Yeah, yeah, just yeah probably between traffic and police and okay, etc. Great, would be involved in that. Fantastic. Anything else. Any other. Oh, I see. Okay. Yeah, so I just looked I was checking in before we come back on Monday there's an event for Martin Luther King day. So I'd encourage everyone to come out to the Martin Luther King Center and to the Fred Moore Park. There's a march that evening, kind of starts at UNT goes through southeast Denton on to MLK Center there's a football game. It starts around 10 or so that morning at our new field so just. There's a lot of updates online but that's generally the rest of the day. Great. Thank you. Any others. Okay, seeing none, we will stand adjourned at almost eight o'clock at seven 57.