Feb 13, 2018 City Council on 2018-02-13 12:00 PM

I wanted to welcome everybody to this meeting of the Denton City Council on Tuesday, February 13, 2018. It is 12 o'clock noon. And we do have a quorum. We will move forward through our work session reports starting with agenda item 1A. We report whole discussion to give staff direction regarding request for resolution of support from a developer applying for a 9% housing tax credit with the state. Good afternoon, mayor and council members. I'm here today to present a 9% housing tax credit request for support. By way of quick background, just as a reminder, I know we 've been going through this recently through the last few months, but the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs administers the federal housing tax credit program in Texas , and they receive applications from developers for these housing tax credits and rank them based on a number of factors. One of those factors is if they have support from their prospective community where the project will be located. So as mentioned over the past few months, city council and staff have been working on a draft policy and application for a housing tax credit request of support. And while we've been working on this, in December, TDHCA released their 2018 timeline for the 9% requests with an application deadline of March 1st, 2018 . Due to the quick turnaround in timeframe, we decided, staff decided to use the draft application and provide that to interested developers in order to give us information on their projects and streamline the review process for council. Just as a reminder also, the 9% requests are once per year and they're on a short timeframe window from January to March, but the 4% requests can be considered year round. The 9% programs are also very competitive. At the end of January, there were over 109 million in credits requested with only 13.2 million available to allocate. So just gives you some perspective for how competitive it is to get these 9% housing tax credits. So as mentioned, we use the application process. We received two applications. The first was from Palladium USA for a multifamily development on Teasley Lane. The second project was from Sagebrook Development for a multifamily development on the southeast corner of McKinney and Mayhill. We met with both those developers on January 19th to review their information with the staff team from CMO, planning and community development. However, on February 5th, we received notice from Sagebrook Development that they were requesting to withdraw their request for support. They had reviewed TDHCA's list of everyone that had applied for the housing tax credits and just felt like their application wasn't going to be competitive enough and wanted to withdraw that request for support. Therefore, there's only one request before you today and that is from Palladium USA for the development on Teasley Lane. Real quick, when you say there's only one request before us , but the resolution of support will be on a subsequent agenda if that's the direction, is that right? Correct. Yeah. The purpose here today is staff wanted to present some information about the proposed project, see what questions you have. The developer Ryan Combs is also here to answer any questions. If Council so directs, we'll bring back a resolution of support at either one of the next council meetings in order to meet their March 1st deadline. Okay. Yes, Council Member Briggs. So I have a question for you and Mr. Combs may need to answer it. With the Palladium, I know that we did another project with them and they were very good about reaching out to the neighborhood and the community. And I just want to make sure that community meetings are planned for the future for this area. And also a question, in either the last unit, I think some units were set aside for homelessness or for other work with nonprofits. And I'm curious if the same number of units are going to be planned for this development as well. And also if as far as credit or rental history, if there's any forgiveness on any of that for the affordable units that they have marked out. Okay. I will ask him to address that maybe towards the end of the presentation. I think I'll address some of your questions as we go through in terms of community meeting and outreach. Okay. Thank you. So just by quick way of background, these maps were provided in your backup. It just shows the multifamily developments that are within the City of Denton as well as the second map showing the tax credit developments are within the City of Denton currently. So, Palladium Teasley Lane is the name of the development. It's a multifamily development located on a parcel just north of the Sprouts grocery store at Teasley and Hickory Creek Road. It would be new construction multifamily. So it is on a 6.84 acre site. It is currently zoned CMG district. So multifamily is permitted. However, with the limitation four, they would need a specific use permit since it will be all residential development. It would not have the mixed use development component. So they would have to proceed through planning and zoning to go through the further site plan review and apply for that specific use permit. It also has a L6 limitation for commercial use on the ground along any Avenue Collector or arterial street. However, our planning staff will be coming back to City Council at the next meeting recommending removal of that L6 limitation for the CMG district. So that restriction would go away if Council approves that recommendation in the future. Otherwise they would need to proceed through zoning review as well. So this is a preliminary site plan. And again, it's very preliminary. The developer is still working on how the buildings would be configured, the intersection alignment, the drive connection, some of the tree preservation and landscaping. But it's to provide an idea of how many there'd be four buildings, three stories each. There would be a clubhouse and a pool and there would be surface parking. And the current preliminary site plan has adequate surface parking per our current code requirements. Oh yes, I'm sorry. Is that a single family home directly on the property line right there? There is a single family home in the back right here. Okay. And what is that a little bit right there? I am not sure. I think that might be shed. Oh, it's part of that property. It's part of the property, same property. Okay, thank you. Did you have a question? Yes. Yeah. I think you did mention the driveway connection because I remember when the property to the south was being, came before council, the driveway that was extended up, that there was talk that it would be required when that property was developed, that there would be connection to the community pharmacy driveway as well. Is that part of what they're still working on is trying to develop that or? I'll ask the developer to address that, but yes, they're still looking at can they make those drive connections and it would be part of the planning and zoning review as well. Okay. So for clarification, this is the property that's next to the community pharmacy? Yeah. On the south side? Yeah. Okay. All right. And this home that's down here, obviously that looks like a fairly large home. Where does the entrance for that come off of? It's on Hickory Creek Road. Okay, so on the other side? Yes. Okay. All right, thanks. Okay. So there is a total of 120 units proposed. 75% of those units would be affordable and 25% of those would be market rate. And so there's a breakdown and a chart shown here of how many would be one bedroom, two bedroom and three bedroom and then also what they're trying to target for the area median income levels. The developer would provide services at this development. They would partner with nonprofits and churches to accomplish this and listed on the slide as some of the examples of programs and services that would be provided. The developer also takes an approach to community building within their apartment developments. So what they do is they hire resident retention specialists , they call them, and they actually provide an apartment for free and then they are in charge of trying to foster more community building as well as hosting programs and events within the actual development. And they call those CARES teams. Question on this chart. So when I see the estimated rent range there, we'll just take any of them. Let's just say the two bedroom. 423 to 1037, I'm assuming that the 1037 would be the rents at the market rate. I can say that for the end if we have questions for the developer. I'll do that. I'll say the questions for the end. Yes. I did not understand one thing that you were saying about the retention specialist and one free apartment. What does that mean, one free apartment? So they hire resident retention specialists and their compensation is in the terms of provided a free apartment to live in to provide those services to the community. Thank you. Sorry if I misstated that. Does that free apartment come from the market rate unit or the affordable unit? I'm going to ask Ryan to come up here since there's some questions that he can help address. I think you just keep writing them down. Yeah, yeah. Somebody, yeah. Okay. Yeah. If we could do that and we'll address them all at the end. That'd be great. Thank you. Thank you. Also wanted to note this development would pay property taxes. The developer included a sample Performa in the application and that was from their Palladium Denton development that was recently approved in December up at Sherman Drive. It was about $150,000 per year in property taxes. So Neighborhood on their TDHCA self score, they rank themselves high as being close to a large number of community assets. They're also very close to major thoroughfares and roadways for transportation. They are limited on the public transit options that are directly nearby adjacent to the property, but within close proximity to those available in downtown Denton. It's also important to note that this is within a census tract with very little poverty, 2.5%. And there's no HTC projects within this census tract or within two miles and the limited multifamily developments in the area as well. So the developer is Palladium USA, which I know City Council is familiar with. They've been a developer of rental housing for over 140 years. Their model is to be developer, owner, and manager, meaning they keep the properties and they manage them themselves with an in-house management company. And below is some projects that are listed that have recently been accomplished, including the Palladium Denton that was just approved and is scheduled to begin construction in early summer of 2018. So that's the project overview and staff is looking to receive direction if a resolution of support should be brought back for February 20th or February 27th. And I'll ask the developer to come up at this time and address any questions that you have. Any more questions for staff? Okay. >> All right. Thank you. I'm Ryan Combs with Palladium. Good to see you all again. I appreciate you allowing me to be here again and take a little bit of your time. Palladium Denton, as she said, on the north side of town, that was a great process that you allowed us to go through and we do plan to begin construction on that early summer and very excited about it. So we've entered into this process again. It's the same process as last year. There were a few questions that I wrote down. Community meeting is certainly something we're happy to do with the neighbors. We are, as I can tell, and I've driven all over the property and looked at it all over Google Earth, the one home behind it really is the only neighbor. We've got the community pharmacy to the north, the sprouts to the south, and then there's a big kind of -- I guess it's a detention pond/lake for a single-family neighborhood that's on the other side of the lake over there. But we're happy to meet with neighbors and just like we did this past time. Our unit mix is very similar to what we did up north. We've got -- can I go back to that slide? Oh, there we go. There's the arrow. Yeah. >> This one? >> That one right there. Perfect. Yes, our unit mix is very similar to what we did last time, and this is the 9% tax credit program. There's two programs, as she said, that you can use tax credits on. There's the 4% program and there's the 9% program. The 4% program is noncompetitive, however, it's half as good. You get half the equity, which means that usually there's a funding gap that you've got to make up, which means we've got to go to the city and ask for tax exemptions or soft money or, you know, if you have other home funds or other things that we can use to try to make things work. And that's the 4% program. That's not what we're asking for here. The 9% program, the good thing about it is it's -- they can stand on their own. We don't have to ask for tax exemptions or any money from the city, any substantial money from the city to make those work. And so that's the benefit. The challenge is they're very, very difficult to get. This year, the governor in December signed into the tax credit law this year that counties that within the past two years got a disaster declaration get 10 extra points, unfortunately. Well, fortunately, Denton County has not had a disaster in the past two years. Unfortunately for us, we're down 10 points from Collin County, Dallas County, Ellis County, some of these counties that were hit by a tornado a couple years ago. And so we're not as competitive as we were last year. You know, we like Denton and we had a great experience that we just went through. We want to build and be more a part of this community, and so we're trying it. Quite honestly, we would need some things to fall out for this application to get funded, but I want to be transparent about that. But we do want to try it. Our unit mix is very similar to what we did on the north side. So we will have about 25% market rate units. And Mayor, your question about the rents. So that range that the we'll just take the one bedrooms 351 . That would be for the 30% AMI. And we've only got, you know, three units at that low end price. And then the 944 is what we are anticipating market rents for the one bedroom to be. And so that's kind of the range. So, Ryan, it looks like that 50% of AMI and 60% is so let's just take the one bedroom, for instance. Right. So the 351 is at the 30%. What would be approximate costs at the 50 and 60% range on one bedroom? So it's usually usually the 60% rents are about $200 below market. So we call that, you know, 750. It's usually around $800 for the 60% rents, the 50% rents are usually 50 to $100 below that. So, you know, $700 to $800 for the 50 to 60%. And then 940, 950 for the full market rate. Entry drive. Let me go to that was one of the next questions. Is that the site plan? Here we go. So the site plan, the very first thing that has jumped out at us as we were we were in a tight time frame to get this to the city. We know that we have some blood playing up on the northwest corner that we cannot build on. So we're trying to stay away from that. We do want to try to create as much as a buffer from this one single family lot as we can. And this also tends to be the low side of the property. Oh, you need to get behind the mic. Sorry. I'm sorry. So that's why the detention pond is right here. Now this entry drive, the developer has already created a little stub out right here. So what we will do is we'll back all this up. And if we need to connect this drive up to the community pharmacy, I think it's also a community health center right there, then we can do that. That's the type of thing that we'll go through as we're going going through the full development process with the city once we feel like we do, we can get the funding in place. And there are also the challenges on this site is that there's a lot of topography, there's a big hill in the middle of the site. The other challenge on the site is there are a lot of beautiful beautiful trees. And so there's opportunities with that. But it's something we're really gonna have to study, we're going to need to do a tree survey and really study how to really maximize keeping as many the nice trees as we can. So, so this is a very preliminary site plan at this point. Our cares team. What we do with our cares teams I'm on, I am on the advisory board of it's a it's a nonprofit called apartment life and they're not us they're they're a separate nonprofit that was born out of First Baptist ULIS about 15 years ago. And what we do, they're a faith based nonprofit. And so what we do, we're doing it in in our property up north as we go to local churches, one of the big church here in Denton that's that supports apartment life is Denton Bible Church. And what we'll do is recruit recruit a married couple out of the church, give them an apartment unit, and then they become kind of live in that we call them cares teams because that's the name of the program. But what they do is they live out their faith on site. So they are out they'll do new resident move in visits, hey , you just moved in, can we help you find a grocery store place to work out where your kids go to school, you know what, all of these types of things. And so they're they're just caring about their we call them professional neighbors, and they do a number of social events on site, but then they also do a lot of things just making helping build a helping build a sense of community, which is what what churches really are trying to do anyway. And the other the other benefit to that is it helps people start building relationships into local churches, local nonprofits, they'll build relationships with YMCA and other other just local nonprofits. And so it's a way for us to really help our residents build roots into the community. Did I address all the questions? Go ahead. Do you do they live in a one of the units that were set aside for the lower income or do they live in a market rate? What both it depends if if if we find a couple sometimes young couples from churches that are not ready to buy a home this is a benefit for them. You know, a lot of times we'll get youth pastors or people that are, you know, they're not ready to afford a home and people that work at churches are typically not wealthy. And so if they can, the benefit of having market rate units and affordable units is we can put them anywhere. And so sometimes they're in market rate units. Sometimes they're in some of the affordable units, it just depends. So question I have is more of an operational one, just so that I have an understanding. You've got market and affordable apartments, right market rate and affordable housing. So someone comes in, let's say that is a family need a three bedroom, they would fit into 30 or 40% or 50% AMI. Right. As far as what income that can be verified. As far as it, are you able to provide or let's just say I mean some some apartment owners I know they, they have a policy that if someone has an ev iction, they're automatically, you know, denied because they've got an eviction in their past. I said this is just this is just anecdotally sure. But if someone so is there a criteria that you're able to apply to people who are under the affordable housing track that provides a little bit more accommodation or deep because of the fair housing laws you have to say, doesn't matter. Here's our policy. Here's our application criteria. And what we can and cannot do and notwithstanding where you fit in, in, in this affordable or market model. Right. This is our criteria. Is that is that my understanding on on on we do have to abide by fair housing laws. And so what that means is, you know, we do we do background checks on everybody. And we also do credit checks on everybody that comes in to be able to prove that they can pay rent. And so you know if somebody has a a violent crime in their background, or that shows up on shows up on a credit check or not a credit check a background check, then if we're going to deny that person fair housing my understanding of fair housing is then we have to deny everybody that has some type of felony in their background we can get and I'm not I'm not asking you to maybe go into specifics because I know that's probably not your purview. But what I'm hearing you the answer to my question is, I think what I'm hearing is we have a criteria that we apply to every tenant, notwith standing whether they are market driven, right, or whether they're affordable housing driven. And that's right now. Now on the credit side, because it is affordable, there is a little bit more leeway there. And so for example, if a family comes in and says, Okay, we want a two bedroom unit, you know, we've proven that we can pay for it. However, we do show that we had an eviction, right, you know, two, three years ago, we can look at that and we can look at the the the criteria under which that eviction happened and have they gone back and made that hole, we will not lease to them until they go back and pay what they owe type of thing. And so we've got a process to make that to make that work. But because we're, we're providing housing to an affordable component, there's a little bit more leeway on the financial side of it. So my last question for me is if, if you if you had a partnership or an arrangement with a group of nonprofits that said, Hey, you know, or if the city asked, is there a number of units that you can set aside not to have free rent, but where, you know, different organizations who do help people that are either homeless or really struggling to find a place that also provides some other type of services available that generate income. Is that something you might be open to discuss and not I mean, obviously, I'm not saying asking you to reduce your income stream. But if you've got, let's say five apartments that, okay, we 'll contract with XYZ. And you guys will, you know, with our approval place tenants, but y'all will either be paying for the rent or somehow like the either the housing authority didn't affordable housing or sure giving hope or any of these other kinds of various organizations. Because I think that's, that's the the the need that we're seeing. I mean, we certainly have a need for affordable housing. There's no question about that. But what we're also seeing is a need that people sometimes who need housing are at 20% right am I and they may have some things in their backgrounds that, you know, are generally problematic. And so we're just trying to find ways that we can create partnerships with apartment owners that not to ask them to reduce their income stream, but to partner with community organizations to help at least begin to continue to meet that need as best as we can. Sure. And that's the type of thing we would we would certainly be open to doing that. There are some guidelines. In other words, we can't lease units to organizations, they have to be that's tax credits, they have to be leased to individuals. However, you know, you mentioned the housing authority, if some if the housing authority has rad units that can travel, then that's the kind of thing that we can take because that goes with a with a potential renter. What is that? What's that rental rental assistance demonstration rad units. And I don't know exactly what the housing authority here has. But those are the types of things we'd be that's good for us to research. Okay, good. All right. Great. Any other questions? And I guess I do have a question for staff. And I want to give Danny Shaw an opportunity if there's any questions, because obviously this is her purview of affordable housing and human. So is there any question that burning question you might have that would help us? And if not, that's okay, too. I just wanted to give you an opportunity. Yes. We had the opportunity to sit down with Ryan prior to this application process in the presentation. So he was able to address many of the questions that you guys have already asked around what were the different unit rates and those kinds of things. So I think we're good there, appreciate your question about set asides and hopefully we can have some broader conversations with all of our developers about that opportunity later. Okay. Great. Thanks. Fantastic. All right. Oh, I'm sorry. Councilmember Hussbuss. So not it's down the road the question, but I guess a comment on the map, the layout there. Sorry? Yeah. No, no worries. I just think whenever it gets, assuming we get there, I don 't know how I feel about the parking spots directly in the turn in. I understand there's a right turn only lane, but I can just imagine if someone is pulling into one spots and backing up, then it kind of backs up every, that road is onerous as is. And so I'd love, again, once we get there, I think I'm going to push for something offset, not directly where they turn in so that at least they can get on the property, get off Teasley and then kind of navigate wherever they need to go. But I just fear if someone's backing up or backing in, that then backs everything up on Teasley, which we don't need any extra cars on Teasley. So that would be my concern. All right. Thank you. When we get there. And I think Councilmember Hussbuss, and that's a great point, I think if they move all that back to be able to provide ingress, egress to that development that's north there, it might be pushing all that back far enough that would really address some of your concerns. But we'll wait and see how they, but that's a very good observation. Thank you for that. Any other questions for staff on this? I guess you're, are you looking for direction as far as putting a resolution of support on the? February 20th. Okay. All right. Council's pleasure on that. Did you have a question, Councilmember? Just with the set aside conversations taking place and the community meeting being held, I'm in favor. Okay. I'm seeing nods, nods, nods, nods. Okay. Yeah, we're good. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you all. Thank you, Ryan. All right. We're going to sort of deviate from our agenda just a little bit. We're going to move agenda item F up to the next work session because we have a guest here from the county who's going to help us understand some of the questions and things that we're going to be looking at here on this particular agenda issue. F is received and hold a discussion giving staff direction regarding potential polling locations for May 5th, 2018 city council election. Who's handling that? Oh, there you are. Sorry. I'm just not used to you coming up, so I'm always looking over here. I'm here. I'm right eye dominated at least I guess in some part. I don't see Frank here yet, but we mentioned maybe about 1 o'clock so we could start this portion of it. Yeah, we'll probably be through by then. Go ahead. One never knows. No, don't drag it out. Not a problem. Mayor and council at your meeting last week, you were considering the ordinance calling the election and during that time you asked for some information regarding adding additional polling locations to the city council districts. In your backup, I have provided a general map of all of the districts and some proposed sites along with the current sites, some basic information on a breakdown of where those polling locations would be and the precincts that would be associated with them and some information on options. I do have several maps that I can show you, four for each of the single member districts so you can look at in depth where the current location is and the proposed location and I also have that list that was in your backup that noted proposed voting locations, precincts for each of the voting locations. So would you like to start with district one and look and see how it is or you have questions you want to start with? Is that okay? Okay. Yeah, I think district one is fantastic and there's a reason it's number one. Okay, yeah. All righty then. Here we go. I can't even comment on that. Okay, I can zoom in a little bit. All right, here's district. Here's kind of an overview of district one. Currently your voting location is here at the Martin Luther King Junior Recreation Center and Council Member Hudspeth had mentioned perhaps a downtown location which would be here we have the Senior Center, Civic Center, Emily Fowler Library and also Central Fire Station is right here. The consideration for a downtown location on May 5th is that it's Cinco de Mayo on that Saturday. While the facilities might not be rented, for example, the Civic Center, the community room is available. We may have difficulties with parking. A consideration would be to have maybe an off-duty officer hired to maintain some parking spaces at the front of the lot for people who are coming in to vote. Trying to look at any kind of city facility down in this area, down in your southern portion, there's really nothing here that's in the district. So I've centered on the request for something in the downtown area which was up further here in this area. Okay, we got questions all the way around the horn. My thought is District 1 and District 2 split at Pecan Creek down south there, elementary. As a matter of fact, it's literally the dividing between the two. Is there an opportunity to partner with the school district to potentially service that area that way? Yes, I think last year when you were considering this item, Pecan Creek Elementary School was an option. I'd have to contact the school district to see if they'd be willing to do that. Another consideration for using a school would be if the district even has to hold an election, would they be willing to open up the building in order to let the city use the facility? So I'd have to check on that. Yeah, and if I could just real quick, another option there, they have a community room because the neighborhood has a community room that may be an option as well, depending on what the HOA... Oh, in that, in Pecan Creek? Yeah, yeah, they have their own HOA which then they have a community room which may, if the school's not a good option, that may be a good plan B to service that area. Okay. Thank you. I suspect that even if there are no contested races on the school board, the city, my understanding is the city is planning, the school district is planning to hold a bond election. Oh, in May? To have a bond election presented on May the 5th. Okay. So I would think that that would probably be a pretty good option. And for me, that would be more important than MLK Center and the Civic Center because MLK Center and the Civic Center are pretty close to one another . But having a location down around Concrete Elementary School... Down here? ...Milky serves some folks. Now my concern also is, and it may be that our county representative needs to talk to us about this, if a person comes in that lives in District 2, can they vote in the same place as the people that are... if it's at Pecan Creek that's located in District 1, can we have two different districts voting in the same area or multiple precincts voting? So anyhow, that's a question pending. Currently you would have to designate specific county prec incts at the locations. In other words, you couldn't have two locations in District 1 and you could go here or you could go here. They would be assigned by your county precinct. Now I did ask a question of Mr. Phillips if one location could have the computer programmed where two of our city districts could have those precincts in there. He was checking on whether or not that could be programmed that way, so I don't know the answer and maybe he'll have that answer when he comes. But you couldn't just say, "Okay, I live in District 1 and I'm going to be down by Pecan Creek doing some stuff, so I'm going to run down there and vote on election day." Now this is just for election day. You'd have to look at what your county precinct is and then you'd have to go to that polling location. Now I want to throw out a consideration is early voting. Last year in the May election, the November election, there was approximately 27 early voting locations. And a resident voter in Denton County can vote at any polling location early voting. So if you live in Denton and you work Ponder, Argyle, Lewis ville, any of those locations, you can vote in that location. So that's a real plus for voting that for early voting you can go to any polling location in Denton County. So yeah, hopefully I'll have the answer to that when he comes. Thank you, Mayor. I think the questions I mainly had have already been answered, but I think what we really have to be looking at is where we've had growth in a population center that is a long distance from the polling place or strategically it's difficult to get there. I mean, you cannot get to Deena in District 4 without going across Thompson or leaving the district. So those are the things that I'm looking at when I'm looking at new locations is what areas have difficulty making it to the location or where can we help those people the most? Sure. Okay, Councilmember Briggs. So I would be in favor of putting a location down near Pe can Creek as well. If we could share those districts, you have mine and my district's District 2 voting in a District 1 polling location and that might be a little confusing. Fire Station 2 is Gerard's district. I think it's just on the other side, but I may. When I type it in in our thing, find your Councilmember and it keeps pulling up Gerard. So I don't know with the new station being moved, maybe it moved just two. Just enough. District. This still sounds like we need to settle this. Yeah, but I don't know. I mean, that would be, that's my, because that would mean District 1 would have three locations. Yeah, no, no, no. My perception was that I think this is Mockingbird right here and that the Fire Station, if you're looking at it, the Fire Station is on the right hand side. Yes, or right. East. Unless you're driving south. If you're looking at it, I don't do east and west very well . So it's on that side of the street. And so I believe it's there, but we can double check that for sure. I put the address in and it said Gerard. I put the old address in and McKinney and it said, but just to make sure. Yeah, we wouldn't want to do that. Right, right. And so, but really when I look at District 2, Pecan Creek, they had issues. They were asking for something closer to them. I'm okay with the North Branch Library. My concern was just having the three locations in one if that was the issue. Although it's very close to District 2, if it could be further down, that would be. So you're suggesting that if we can use Pecan Creek for 1 and 2 or find another location further down in this area for 2? Move the second location. If one, I mean, I know that Council Member Hatsbeth also wanted something lower. If we could share the one location for the two different districts, I think that would be best. So that way the people in that area aren't confused, especially if they're across the street neighbors. They're not going to just two different areas across town. And so I also have had a request to put a location near UNT . Can we take this district by district? Because I know we're still on District 1 right now. Is that okay? Yeah, because we'll get confused. I'll get confused. I don't want to project that onto you all. So as far as on District 1, Council Member Briggs, are you okay then with one further down south at Pecan Creek and either by itself with District 1 or also if it could be shared with District 2? Are you okay with that? I believe so. I believe that way it would pull in a little bit more from District 2 in that area. Okay. So it sounds like for District 1, so let me ask you, Council Member Hatsbeth, if we were to put one down there, if we could do that, and leave the one currently at MLK, the one downtown we can sort of substitute the one at Pecan Creek for the one downtown. Is that okay? Yes. Yeah. So just as a transition to two, I think Council Member Br iggs makes a good point. So if I'm, because the neighborhood's split by only a school, if I go to, if there's any way we could do it both there, because if I show up at the elementary school and I'm just by chance on the wrong side of the street, then I have to go to an entirely different place versus, okay, well you're in this building, you just got to go down this different hallway or something like that. So we can kind of manage that issue. And then also with the close proximity of the fire place, I mean, a fire station, if there's another one to kind of make it more clear. But either way, I think she raised a good point that if there's confusion, you don't have to jump back in your car. Right. So from, yes, just District 1 comment. Yes. Could you slide the map over to the right, because it's, you don't want to say east. I don't want to what? So, so I think what we're saying is, is that that if it's, if the way it works, we could say that in Pecan Creek Elementary, if the district wants to work with us, that that could be a voting site for precincts 4 0 12, 4 0 4 1 and 1 0 3 8 and 1 0 3 9. That probably would be all that we would need as far as, you know, those four precincts voting in that location. Do you do y'all think that's? I mean, yeah, that's fine. I mean, I don't know if we, I mean, do we need to start talking about precinct numbers at this point? Is that or when? Well, I'm just the only reason I'm concerned is because if you have to do it by precincts, look at 4, 4 0 1 2. Part of it is in that concrete subdivision. Right. Part of it is directly across the street from Ryan High School. So they would have a little ways to go, but I don't think it's any further than those folks driving all the way up to North Lakes. So for district one, what I'm hearing is we keep the current site and then see if we can't work with the school district concrete for 1 and 2 and then the precincts that Councilmember McGregory had sort of enumerated as those that are there. 40 12 40 41 10 38 and 10 39. Okay. All right. So I just wanted to also just throw in real quick because the election in May is an at-large election. There's not the requirement that the polling location be in an additional polling location be in the specific district. Like so if we're going to combine 1 and 2. However next year it will be single member district and those polling locations would have to be, if I understand it correctly, in the district. So you may want to think about creating more voter confusion if you combine 1 and 2 this year and then next year you're not able to. And we can confirm that with Frank when he comes to make sure that I have that correct but I believe that's a consideration also. So we're probably coming back to that. Okay so then district 2 and that's an outstanding question that you just mentioned. Oh, we just lost the map. And so Councilmember Briggs you were talking about some polling locations. Let me zoom in a little bit here. So currently you're at North Branch Library. And of course my suggestion which may be incorrect now was Fire Station 2 which is here which I was hoping to catch all these locations further south here. But like I said we can confirm but if you're okay with combining it with Concrete Elementary School I can work on that for you. But then again if I'm sorry. If Fire Station 2 is not in district 1 and we consider the confusion like next time that may be something that it's just remove Pecan Creek and move it up to that so that way there's not. Okay. I mean I don't. I can confirm that for you and let you know where exactly it is. I apologize for that. I was almost 100% sure it was there but. Can I ask a question? Not necessarily specifically about a district but when we are looking at polling locations are we looking at DCTA bus stops like are we figuring if there is a close stop nearby for those who take public transit? I did not. Okay. I was looking specifically for a city facility. Okay. That we would be able to use and then as a secondary site perhaps a school. So no I did not look at that. Okay so we're okay with two. You had a question about North Texas. Yes. I had a request about North Texas and we were talking about the downtown location. I was thinking one when the Civic Center was mentioned earlier I thought that would be really great because that would be close but that's not necessarily in three. So have we ever had a polling location on UNT campus? No. No. Well not since I've been here which is like you know a little bit after dirt was new so no. Would that would they have to how would that work with would they have to get in contact with us and talks and agree to use one of their facilities kind of like the district and ISD? Exactly. Okay. Moving on to district three. Okay. Currently district three votes at North Lakes Recreation Center right here and proposed location. Yay. Here's the master that knows everything. I proposed fire station seven which is here. Let me pull this out just a little bit so you can there we go. Get a little better. So I chose fire station seven to help the ropes and ranch people although a lot of ropes and ranch if I remember correctly like to vote early because they can go over to Argyle City Hall which I think is just a hop skip and a jump somewhere down here. So anyway we have ropes and ranch. We have these neighborhood here and we have this neighborhood here which would be accessible to the fire station. The fire station does have a community room and adequate parking. Going to go to Councilmember Duff and then I have a comment . Go ahead. Okay. Okay. I'm good with fire station seven and as a matter of fact you know if we only had one polling location I think that is probably central to everybody in the third district. So I'm good with that and you know if you put one up in the north section I'm good with that too. Yes well I'm just looking at that that little well yeah never mind. I'm just looking at how that little jut out there is for district four up there along I-35 between the two splits. Yeah I know why that's that way. Okay district three fire station seven as an additional one do we hear we have any objections on that or comments? Yes Councilmember Gregory. I don't have any objections to adding seven. I remember that the last time we had a discussion about this there was a question as to whether or not the Denia Recreation Center or the South Branch Library was more oh that's in four. That's in four. Never mind. Yeah that's where we're heading next. So fire station seven I think would be a good additional one. Yeah I'm good with that and you know if you want to go where majority of people are voting we could put one in the clubhouse at Robeson Ranch but I'm not gonna I'm not gonna push that. Thank you. I'm just kidding. Hey there Robeson Ranch is gonna vote if you if you put it in McKinney. Yeah so well and the thing that we're losing that I don't want us to lose track of and I and I appreciate trying to make voting as accessible as possible and but what we're talking about is during the day of the election whereas it 's historically been true and I think it will continue to be so that is it 60 to 70 percent of the people vote in a in early voting of course we'll get that statistic a little bit more but so all right so we're moving on to district four. And currently the voting is at can you see that? Deena. Okay there currently you're voting at Deena Recreation Center so then you have all these people down here and here which have a distance to go so I was recommending using South Branch Library which is right here. Councilmember Ryan. Let me pull this out just a little bit so you can see a little bit better. Whoops. Wrong way. There. So. Okay. So here's Deena and here is South Branch Library. Councilmember Ryan. Kind of in the middle. Yes sir. If we can work something out with the school district I think it's LA Nelson Elementary at the end of Ryan where Ryan dead ends in Atteaseley. At least there you've got a stoplight to get people in and out. South Branch Library tends to get a little congested. It's a little tough for people especially anybody that's going to try and turn left to go back north out of there that at least gives you a traffic device to help the flow and it centralizes it more with the population on that part of the district. Where is it on this map? Where Ryan Road dead ends in Atteaseley. Right by the wall. Caddy Corner from the Walmart across from the Walmart. Oh no I see I'm trying to see where it is in relation on this map I'm looking at. Where's Ryan? Don't get me lying. Ryan Road is the red line right below the four if you slide back up a little bit. Yep. Okay that one going across east to west. Yeah that's Ryan Road. So you see that little loop on the end down there that's where LA Nelson Elementary is. Right here? Other end. Other end of that red line right there. On the east. On the east side yes. On the right side yeah. But as far as centralizing it with the population and having a safety concern. It pulls it down more. Councilmember Gregory. Well I get your point I think in the long run if we wanted to have two polling locations on voting day for district four that South Branch would end up being better. People get used to going to a particular place and the likelihood of next year for example the school district having an election is really much more questionable because they have not had a lot of contested races for school board. We know that there's going to be an election this year that they're involved in. But they may not always be wanting to work on it with us on that. Councilmember Briggs. It's my understanding that there is a proposed light to go at that location at South Branch of Management. Can weigh in on that? You're correct. My guess is we're probably two to three years from that happening now. Okay. But that is one of the proposed locations. So Mr. Phillips is here. I can have him come up and you can grill him to your heart 's content on questions and he'll be able to answer some of those questions that we were. That's sort of a little bit clear direction on the district four. So one alternative is to have it at the elementary school. The other one is at the South Branch Library. I certainly understand your concerns as well, given that there may be a light there and it is on a weekend. I mean, you're right. During the weekdays, it's almost impossible. Well, the library is busier on a Saturday as well. The elementary school is vacant on Saturday. Well, I was talking about just getting in and out. I'm not necessarily talking about the foot traffic coming in. So what's council's pleasure on that? We got I mean, it's probably best if we could keep it to a city facility if we can. But I mean, obviously, concrete or not. But we just want to leave that sort of undecided until we hear from the elections administrator. Maybe we should build a fire station down here. Yes, that would be good. Or rec center down there. Rec center. Okay, well, I'm just trying to get some council members to give me some direction. I mean, all of a sudden, everybody's tongues tied. I'm going to remember that next time we have a really controversial discussion. Yes, Councilmember does. I'm going to follow John Ryan. I mean, it's his district and I'll go with what he wants to do. Okay. All right. Yes. So this year, there's a school bond election, which more than likely the district will be able to to help us out and hold the election there. By the next one, there may or may not be a light. So it would be the safety there and there will probably not be a bond. So it would be better to hold it at a city facility for that election. So just if you're okay with the confusion of moving it, then I'm okay with asking the district. I think I'd rather take the chance that the school board is going to have an election. Just I mean, I know several of the last ones that have canceled out, but there have been more. Well, we may be able to work out an agreement. The election isn't determined if it's not dispositive, whether we can use their facility or not. I mean, we are in a local agreements all the time with people. So that could be something we could work on. So I'm okay with it. Yeah. Okay. All right. Now would you like to hear from Frank? Sure. Come on up. Come on down. This is Frank Phillips, the Denton County Elections Administrator. And Frank, one of the, we're going to use the microphone. One of the questions they were asking and that you were going to check, I don't know if you have the answer yet, is if we could combine say district one and two and one polling location and set out specific precincts that would vote, but have one location for two districts. As long as you carry an entire voting precinct to the same district, you're fine. Where we'll get in trouble is you're not going to have any issues this year. I believe everyone is at large this year. Is that correct? That's right. The only issue is when you're voting by district because your districts don't follow our voter precincts and we can't split out a voter precinct to separate locations. So what you plan this year may not work for you next year. I just want you to keep that in mind. And also, if I may, one remark about the school is we use schools all the time, except they're very hesitant to let us use elementary schools. Matter of fact, we don't use any. They're all either middle schools or high schools. So that's for security reasons. That's good information. Thank you for that. So we may want to, that's going to be critical. And I think though, your information on at large we're okay by combining a voting location, but it's when we, and of course we have those every other year. So it just almost be impossible to try to tell people you go here for an at large, you go here for a single member district. That would create a lot of chaos. Yes. So is it a state rule that says that for early voting you have all of this flexibility, but on election day you don't? It is, yes sir. There are counties in Texas that are vote center counties. We're not one of those counties. Vote center county, Collins a vote center county. On election day in Collin county, a voter can vote at any site, not just their prescribed site. And to be a vote center county, there are certain requirements. And one of those that you have to be all electronic, which we're not in Denton county. I almost made it through the legislature last time that paper was allowed at vote center. I'm hopeful it will pass on the next one because I know Denton county does want to be a vote center county. So if we get there, that will eliminate all of these issues . So that's something, if I may, that we might need to put on our legislative agenda for the next time around. Please do. To work with the county. Solve a lot of headaches. Yes, council member Husspeth. So can you give me the target goal or kind of some highlights for what makes a what's required to qualify as a polling location? I mean, I understand in a perfect world, it's a city facility, but kind of if we expand that a bit and look at it, because obviously for my district, it's number one in a number of ways, but district number one, that southern part, so that's James Wood kind of area. I mean, it really is the neighborhood has grown quite a bit there. The only thing that kind of fits the current prerequisites, as I understand it, is the elementary school. And so I'm trying to think what other things are in that area that would serve or qualify to serve. They do, like I said, they do have a I'm getting the address for their community center. But what kind of when you what makes up a polling location, what are the prerequisites? The first one is that they'll let us use it. You'd be surprised how many places won't let you use their facility, especially private facilities. Even though we can use private facilities, you know, needs to have adequate parking, of course, it needs to have sufficient electricity, if it's early voting site, it needs to have Internet capabilities. And it has to be ADA compliant. But beyond that, it's really open to anybody's imagination. There are counties that use Kroger's grocery stores to vote in. Gives me a little bit of a pause to think about it. But just because of everybody that has access to where you 're standing, but really any facility that has adequate parking, ADA compliant will do. Okay, thank you. Yes, Councilmember Gregory. I think I remember you talking about using schools. Since it's a Saturday election. I don't think it would be a problem. I may make an elementary school. And I believe that I saw in the primary elections that are coming up, that there are some elementary schools that are being used for that. The parties picked those sites. So yeah, it's very possible that they did get some. And Saturday may help your cause there. You know, Tuesdays there are a little reluctant. Yes, Councilmember Briggs. So could you help us right now? We're trying to, the question about using the two districts would be for one and two down near the Concrete area. It's kind of split in half, but the elementary is in District 1. And so there's a lot of District 2 that if, I don't know if we would want two separate areas if the community center is in District 2, would that get confusing? We are actually checking on Fire Station 2 right now just to get confirmation. So I don't want to make any other. The district's not. If we could move it up. My only, my concern is with that neighborhood having two locations or one location and then two locations next year will get kind of confusing. So, but. Yeah, I mean, in all honesty, it stays confusing. And the reason is, is because cities have different needs than parties do. And both of them have different needs than the county does in November. So that's why, you know, we get complaints all the time from voters. Well, in May I voted here. Well, yes, because you live in a city and they picked your polling location. And in November we have a different one. But as best you can, it'll never be perfect. In 10 years, I don't know that I've ever kept them totally the same. You'll never find places because you're going to get. Well, if you use your own facility, they're not going to kick you out of your facility. But, you know, we get kicked out of facilities all the time . Some that will be used for years. And so, but the more stable you can keep it, the better for the voters. That's my only concern about doubling up this year and then not being able to next year. OK, so it sounds like we've got district three sort of nailed down. We've got district four with the school, you know, district one in the sense of the polling location would be at the concrete if the school allows it. So district two really is the one we've got to think about trying to find a more permanent second location. And what I'm hearing you say is that if the fire station is in district two, fire station number two, is that number two? Then you're OK with that, that one or no, or you want to find something further south? Well, I don't know that there would be anything further south. My concern is that that would be one neighborhood going to two different locations. How would we explain that to me? Help me follow that. What would give me one neighborhood going to two different locations? What do you mean? Well, split down the middle. If people are in all the concrete neighborhood area, they would assume that they would go to the same voting location. OK, you're talking. Well, you're talking about neighborhood. They're breaking it down by precinct, I believe. Is that right? Yeah. So do we will we notify individuals their their precinct location and where they will go vote? How do we get that information to our citizens? We'd have to do an ad campaign blitz probably on the website, social media and so on. Get the newspaper to publish the locations and so on so that there's a media blitz on where you're going to go. And it's on our website, a voter. Any given election that's coming up, they can put in their information and it'll tell them where they're going to vote this time. It is. It would be on our website also. We do have confirmation that the fire station is in district two. The new one is in district two. OK, so we're going to go to Councilmember Ryan and Council member Gregory. As far as the permanency, one thing to think about is in three years, all these will be redrawn. We will have new borders for our precincts, new borders for districts. OK, Councilmember Gregory. Talk a moment about mail in ballots, are those eligible for everyone or is that age restricted? There's several criteria, 65 or older, if you're disabled or if you're going to be out of the county on election day. Those are. Do you have any stats on how many people, what percentage of voters, for example, in district and precinct 4003 use mail ballots? Not off the top of my head, but I certainly have that statistic at the office I can find. I think knowing how many use mail in ballots and how many are doing early voting will be helpful. Get a lot of mail ballots from ropes and wrench, which you were talking about earlier. And the reason I was asking is I was just wondering if mail in ballots would really be a good option for folks that live in the Pecan Creek neighborhood that are so far out from the majority of the rest of their districts. Mail ballots done nothing but increase over the years. So it's a very popular way of voting if you're eligible. What was the voting percentage between early voting, in other words, either by mail or early voting? It's about 60/40, about 60 on early voting, 40% election day, roughly. So we're trying to make this decision for this upcoming May 5 election. Am I correct on that? And that all has to be decided by when? Frank would like the information by February 26th. Because they're going to have to do programming, then they have to do testing, public tests to make sure it's programmed correctly. We have to mail out our mail ballots 45 days prior to election day. So you can really back up about two or three weeks from that. So again, it sounds like District 3 and 4 were okay on with the locations. District 1 were okay as far as with the MLK and then Pecan Creek Elementary if we can use it. So District 2 is still I don't know if up in the air is correct. So are we still okay with what? Council Member Brie? Can I have three? No. No? Okay. You really want to get confusing. Yeah, that would be very confusing. And the default is if somebody obviously if they get confused and they want it, you can always well, maybe I'm not correct. You cannot always go to the one you always went to. In other words, once we change this by precinct, you're going to change where you vote. All right? Okay. For example, if you live in 1012 and you say, oh, I'd rather go to the fire station just because it's closer. But we've designated 1012 for the public library, you know, for North Branch Library. And you go over to the fire station on Election Day and it 's quarter to seven. And they go, whoa, no, you can't vote here. You have to go over to North Branch. You know, you may not make it over there in time. Should have early voted. Yeah. Well, I mean, personally, I think we're starting this too late if we're going to do it on the May 5th to make sure everybody understands. But I'm sure we can get it done. I mean, we can get the information. I'm talking about get the information out to the voters in time to say, here's what you need to do. So we've got to really make a commitment to that. So I'm going to come back to District 2 because we need to give direction. Councilmember Briggs, what are you thinking? Is there no other place in District 2 down south that we can maybe take a look at? There's no more schools there. There's no libraries. There's no -- Fire Station 2. Is there anything at the landfill? I'm looking. I don't see anything. We'll throw out -- I think I mentioned in the beginning of my presentation that Fire Station 2 does not have a community room. So -- They'll have to vote where? They would vote in maybe the Firefighter's Day room or one of the bays. I mean, we've done that before. Fire Station on Kings Row, we used to -- Sherman Drive. Sherman Drive. We used to vote in the bay. I'm not very comfortable with that. Let me recognize Councilmember Hussbett. I really do think, again, as an option, looking at per Google Maps. So that's not exact science by any stretch of imagination. But if I'm guessing right based on what I'm seeing, I think their HOA, the community room is absolutely in District 2. Is that in the school? When you say community room, is it a separate building? It's a separate building. Yeah, it's -- HOA has a community room that you can rent out. That's what it is. Okay. They have like a -- Community center, something like that. It has a swimming pool there. Clubhouse. Oh, clubhouse. Clubhouse. Thank you. And so it's -- Oh, okay. The nearest major street on your map is Sweet Gate and Lake view Boulevard. Am I in the right area? Yeah, yes. So I have my -- Sweet -- Oh, here's Sweet Gate. Yes. Da-da-da-da-da. Sweet Gate, right there. Yeah, so right there. Bishop Pine Road, right here? Yes. So it's in there. It's like a little south of here. So I don't know what your pain threshold for that is, but -- So if you want to look at the whole district, then -- So what you're saying is that -- You're really south. Well, I think you said -- What you're saying is next time when it's a divided district and we have to be in district two, there is still a location that we could possibly use if this year we do the precincts in one location at the elementary school. Is that what you're saying? No, I'm saying in lieu of combining them at the elementary school, because that's probably a few blocks down the road, and it gives you the consistency you're looking for that each this election and the next election, they'll go to the same location. And so if that's certainly plausible -- If that's available , that's something we could look at. But I guess my question becomes, which precincts are you going to send there? I know you'll send 4012. Are you going to send 1013? Yes. 1013 is all of this area. Right. And 4012, probably 1039. Yeah, I didn't see that one down there. If we can -- Something else higher a little bit, because I wasn't including 1013. But is there another location or city facility somewhere we could use that is not necessarily the fire station? Not a city facility in this area. You got Run and High over there. Waterworks Park is way out of the range this way up here. But in here, it'd have to be another school, I guess, over in this area. Okay. Well, could we -- I mean, yeah. If we could maybe take some time offline to take a look at that and see and consult with you to see what would work best. And you saying we need the information to you by February the 26th. Yes. And if Jennifer wants to contact me, I have an Arc map that basically shows any -- it's an internal map that basically shows any sites we've ever used. Okay. And if she tells me I need a place in 1013, I may be able to make some suggestions. Okay. Good. That would be great. Fantastic. All right. So bringing this back, do you want it back on next week's agenda for final approval? I believe someone mentioned confirming it with an ordinance , but that might be limiting ourselves too much if for some reason we don't have all the details worked out, say, with the HOA or whatever, because we can include it in the contract that we're going to be signing with the county for the conduction of the election. So it would be ratified through the contract that we have with the county if that's all right instead of some ordinance. Is that okay? Yes. That sounds me. Okay. Yes. Council Member Duff. If we have a runoff, are we talking about having the same location that we're having on May the 5th? That's a good question. Do you want to have the two polling locations in each district for, well, depends on where, well, no, it's a large, so you would have to have those same polling locations for any potential, we don't like to use the R word, but. I'm not sure what the. The runoff. Oh. Well, and I think, Council Member Duff, I think you bring that up historically because of I think last year, but I think that question was also more of an early voting location, if I remember correctly. It wasn't just the day of the election. It was that there was one early voting location. I think it was out at the Kimberly site. Yeah. And that's what really the question was last time was the early voting location. So are you talking about the early voting location in a run off or are you talking about also the day of election polling places? Well, I really wasn't bringing up that one. This is for this election. Well, no, but I think that's what brought, I think you're asking what about a runoff. Yeah. Because that was sort of how that came to the forefront was . Yeah. We had one place on a runoff that was in the far eastern part of the city. Got me elected too. Yeah. You got more votes than the other people. That's what got you elected. Yeah. You made my voters mad. So what are we, so are we asking for a day of election or early voting or both? What would be Frank, what would be your suggestion, Frank? Well, if you're working on it, I'd do them both at the same time, but honestly that, I mean, I tend to look at things maybe a little different. I look at it in a fiscal nature too. In a runoff, you're not going to have a whole lot of turnout, even lower than your regular election. We typically scale back on polling sites for a runoff. Yes. Well, obviously we can't have all the early voting locations that we have, but I guess if that comes up, then we need to make some kind of decision on where we're going to put those early voting and probably use the same thing as we use on the May 5th for the actual polling day. Okay. Your choice. Council Member Riggs. I would like to see if we could use Ryan High School as the second location, if possible. For District 2? Yeah. Okay. I'm looking at my, it might fit there and then we could just keep it there if possible. But I'm also going to put a message out to the district to see what they think and what they say. But I just want to give a shout out to other District 3 voters because I do know that they show up to the polls as well, not just Robeson. Okay. Well, we're about here at the end of this agenda item. So what was the decision? I just want to make sure I have clarification on your direction for the runoff locations. I think, you know, what I'm concerned about is getting Mr. Phillips the information he needs for the May 5th election. That's by the 26th. I think we can have a further conversation about the run offs. Or do you need all of that information by the 26th? No, it can wait. It can wait. Okay. Okay. Fantastic. All right. So I have District 1 will be at, if available, the Concrete Elementary School, the additional location. District 2 will be at Ryan High School, if available, if they'll let us in. District 3, Fire Station 7, and District 4, the L.A. Nelson Elementary School, if available. Okay. Council Member Gregory? And just one follow-up question. Did we hear that adding those sites, it was about $4,500 per site? Frank estimated. Go ahead. And this is always a guess, but a rough good estimate's about $3,500 a site on election day for an additional polling site. And would the cost go down if we pair with the district or? Yeah, if Denton ISD has an election, right off the bat, you 're sharing the cost with them. So you can cut that in half. Okay. Okay. Now, then one other question regarding, for example, Ryan High School. Because if we do Ryan High School for an alternative site at District 2, that means that there's going to be some sets of voters that have to go there on election day. Are we going to need to get the school district's buy-in to that? Oh, yeah. Aren't they going to have to agree to let us use the facility? Well, and also, they're going to have to agree, I would imagine, since they're helping to pay for the election, if they're having a bond election, then it's going to impact where the voters that are voting for those bond elections go also . Will they need to sign off on this? They're going to want to weigh in because, I mean, they're going to have an election at the same time. They'll be part of the same joint contract. And whatever the sites are, you're going to share it. Because what could happen is you're going to determine the site you want to use today. And I'm not picking on Denton ISD, but this is where we're at. Denton ISD said, "Hey, I love those two sites, but I'm also using this school." You're going to bite off a piece of that one, too. Okay, so. So, yeah, we need to have a conversation with them. Yes. Yeah, have a conversation with them and make sure we're all on the same page, and if not, what the differences are. Right. Okay. Yes. Council Member Hays. No, I was just trying to process that because everything they do is at large. So I don't, it would just be adding another location. But am I wrong? Their voters can vote citywide all the time. Yeah. Right. So. Well, but even in that election, we still assign voters to precincts and precincts to locations. Day of? Yes. Okay. So they still will have a specific site they have to go to. Okay. Sorry, I misunderstood. Whatever. Whatever cities, if you say these precincts have to vote at this location, it'll affect both city election and the school district election. Yeah, it just doesn't mean the same thing to the city, the school as it does to the city. Got it. So they are more at large. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Any other questions? Do you have adequate direction? I'm ready to go. Okay, good. Thank you so much for being here to answer our questions. I appreciate you taking your time out of your day to be here. Thank you, Frank. Thank you so much. All right. We're going to go ahead and it sounds like staff has direction on agenda item F. So let's take about a five or 10 minute break and we'll proceed on through our work session with agenda item 1B when we return. [PAUSE] All right. Welcome back, everyone, to this meeting of the Denton City Council on Tuesday, February 13th, 2018. It is 1 34 p.m. We're now heading back into the normal sequence of our work session agenda. Work session report 1B. We've already done 1A and 1F. So 1B is Receive Report, Hold Discussion, Give Staff Dire ction regarding current city of Denton facilities and how to proceed with planning for future space needs. Yes. Mayor, members of the council, Mario Kenizar, assistant city manager, wanted to have a conversation with you all about some facility needs that the city has, city operations have. So you can have an understanding kind of where we are. Some options that have been looked at over the last number of months to hopefully meet some of their operational needs, which in turn will provide better services for our residents. I do have a number of slides I want to show, but majority of those are pictures, so hopefully it will somewhat keep your attention. But the information that's being covered over the next number of slides really conveys this information. Again, some history of these facilities. And again, I'm not going to read these off to you all the way through, but just some of the assumptions that we used through some of the analysis. And I'll cover a little bit through the history because some of this information has been brought to previous councils in the past. And so, but also wanted to convey that we have been able to go back, review the assumptions, make some tweaks and changes, and hopefully come back to you with a better answer, some better information. So hopefully you'll agree and you'll give us direction here in the next few minutes. And then at the end, how will it improve operations, customer service, and finally the timeline if you agree with the direction which we're hoping for. The areas that we're going to be covering this afternoon is the service center operations. This is the entire campus there off of Mingo Road. It's approximately 46 acres in size. It's industrial, as I mentioned just a minute ago. It houses all of our field operations with the exception of DME, their office Spencer. But the remainder of all of our field ops, and I'll show you this slide here, some of the operations that function out of there, also houses our procurement, our purchasing and materials management where we distribute supplies and small tools to our staff through their day-to-day operations. Our fleet services is housed there as well. So all the repairs of our vehicles are conducted there along in the service center campus area. And then finally, we also have our materials area. So dirt, flex space, any time that we need that kind of material for some of our streets and parks operations. Yes, sir. Yes, go ahead. Before you go on, and I hate to interrupt you on this one. No worries, go ahead. But it is a picture. It is a picture. And I love pictures. I love, glad you do. Are we still planning to affect that outline that 46 acres by extending Roodale and having that be the railroad crossing and closing down? I can't see the name of that other street. Yes, sir. That's part of the grand plan is to do that. I did not necessarily see that in the rest of the slides. And I was just wanting to make sure that that was still on that. Yes, sir. This is just kind of existing conditions. So the alignment that you're describing certainly should help that our operations there in the future. But that is not included in the slide deck at this point. Okay, thank you. Yes, sir. Okay. So again, just to give you some history on the two areas that we're going to be discussing this afternoon. One of those is the actual service center. Again, as I mentioned, this is where all of our field operations are housed, streets, drainage parks, engineering, our procurement and distribution center, as I just mentioned a little bit before. That's a large facility. It was built in 1980. So it's been in existence nearly 40 years. It houses approximately 253 of our employees. And the other facility that we're going to be focusing on too is in the small arrow here off to I guess your right my left is the traffic operations building. And actually this facility was incorporated into the 2014 bond program. So again, just to kind of give you a progression of where we are today through this last number of months that we've been discussing these locations. A couple little deal points here about this about these locations. The service center was built in the 1980s. Traffic operations actually was built in the 1960s. It actually served as I guess two generations ago our animal shelter. And since then, our traffic operations are housed there. So any of the things that our traffic folks do when it comes to making signs for sample stop signs, they work on our traffic signals, all that is conducted in that traffic operations building. And again, other little tidbits from Denton, just as you can see the growth, we were a much smaller community certainly 1980 look at you know where we are today. And we've grown not only in size and population, but we've grown also square miles as far as what we're responsible for. So the first things first is the service center. As I mentioned, it's built in 1980. It's approximately seven little over 70,000 square feet. It's been updated over the years. It's a home base for 250 plus employees for the organization. Some of the issues that we've had at the service center over the years, it's cramped. There is really no room for growth with the existing footprint based on how it's configured at this moment. You'll see some pictures here in a moment how it's configured. Hopefully it can come across in the pictures and also in the site plan of the interior of the facility. And quite honestly, it's really not that user friendly when it comes to interacting with the public. And it's not that it is a public facility. We don't have a lot of interaction with the general public. But when it comes to working with contractors or vendors that come in to do business with our engineering folks, parks, any of our operations, it's just not the most inviting building to walk into. So hopefully you'll be able to see a little bit some of that in the slides. The thing that we've done over the last number of years is, again, the issues that we've had are we continue to grow as a staff. But we also did, we had contracted with Nelson Morgan, which is a local architect, a few years ago to do basically an entire space needs analysis, not only for the service center, but for City Hall, for City Hall West, for City Hall East. So they've been able to do a lot of analysis. Some of the focus and parts of the focus of their scope of their engagement was for the service center, knowing that we're going to be projected out as far as staff growth. One of the options that they presented, and I believe it was presented back in November of 2016, was to build a service center annex to offset some of the growth that our organization is experiencing. That location was identified off of Vintage Boulevard, I think west of Fire Station number 7. What it contemplated for was about 40,000 square feet of space, but the cost at the time was the neighborhood of $21 million. So the city at the time had not identified funding. It would have required bonds or some other methodology of funding. So at the time there was just no funding set aside for that project. So since then, over the last number of months, we changed the assumptions. We felt that we needed to move on this project quicker, be able to find a way in which we can find the existing space within the confines of the service center itself. Again, the staff continues to grow, and we need to better utilize the space in which we have. And then really when it was all said and done, some of the space that we were looking for was hiding in Plainside. And I'll show you what we were thinking when it comes to how we can work with the existing facility. These are the first and second floor. So first floor is over here, and then to your right, the second floor is over here. And again, I'm not going to read you off all these locations, but just in the different shades of color, as you look at the second floor, you see these various shades of light blue as it shows up on my screen, and more of an orange color. And these are just the smatterings of how the space is set out, and that it's not the most efficient use of space. Our operations are just scattered about, and so we're trying to find ways in which we can consolidate some of that space and kind of better utilize it. On the bottom floor, we have again, parks, drainage, water distribution, our electric communications where we have our radio operations. It's no longer under DME, it's now been transferred over to technical services, but they're the ones that are responsible for distributing radios throughout our public safety and non-public safety vehicles, also the hand-helds that are used by our staff, whether it's for public safety events or activities to our special events and activities, and all of our field crews use radios as well. But the big space that we were concentrating on and where the space was hiding in plain sight was literally materials management. And one of the things that we thought of is if there is a way to relocate this approximate 30,000 square feet plus a small portion of the administrative office space for materials management on the second floor, we believe that we could expand and relocate a lot of these operations into the existing footprint of the service center if we can find and relocate materials management. So that's kind of where we've been focusing our attention on this last number of months. So, to give you some pictures again, some council members like pictures, this is the existing conditions of our service center. And just to show you here, this is one of our bays for, I believe it's a water metering. And as you can see, we have a picnic bench or a bench area there for folks to eat their lunch or snacks or during their break time. And it is in the way of whenever vehicles can pull in. So, it's basically there on a more permanent basis. Here while it does look a little, I should say a little un kempt, this is one of our park services bay. And it's difficult to see in the picture, but if you're in person, a lot of their supplies are housed in that location. They just don't have the space. So they're utilizing one of the bays to maintain some of the supplies and equipment that they use in their field operations. Here and to my right, your left is also the park's, actually this is the park's break room. But as you can see, this is a workstation for some of the crew leaders and supervisors along here with these workstations. And it's kind of hard to tell after the distance, but this is also the kitchen area too. So you've got a stove, you've got a refrigerator, you've got sink along with the workspace. So it just makes it challenging to be able to use that space. And they've been very creative in the way they've used space, but it has been a challenge. And the spaces below here is, here's a locker room that also serves as a lunch room, that also serves as a crew meeting room area. So it's just, again, the space is being used very efficiently, but it's not necessarily the best use of space. The lobby area as you walk in, there's not a whole lot of wasted space, but what you don't have is anybody greeting you. So anytime someone walks in that needs directions as to where to go, they either have to know where they're going, find someone in the hall, or just look around and find the space. And then last and not least is this is the downstairs rest rooms. And if you walk into the lobby, again, behind this wall here, you walk into the restrooms, and the public restrooms also have shower facilities. So again, it's just one of those environments where do you really want to have shower facilities facing where the public may use the restroom. So just to kind of give you some visual understanding of the conditions of the service center. So what we were contemplating is, as I mentioned, is if we could move purchasing materials management to 651 Mayhill. Many of you are familiar with that space. It's a space that's owned by Solid Waste. It's a former Department of Defense warehouse. It's approximately 81,000 square feet of space. It's mostly vacant. There are some trash and recycling bins that Solid Waste has located there to keep them out of the elements. DME also has some of their equipment located inside. But we believe that if we can move 30,000 square feet of office space, or excuse me, 30,000 square feet of space into 651 Mayhill, because it's basically open shell space. It's a blank canvas. It really allows a lot of opportunities at the service center. So I'm going to show you, again, a visual of what it might look like. And again, that visual is just kind of an overview. So what we were thinking is this space here, if we could expand materials management in 61,000 of that square foot of that square footage into that space, and you ask, well, why are they doubling in space? Part of the reason is doing so is we would like to be able to move some of the equipment and materials, whether it's through DME, spools of cable, other type of equipment that's currently covered by an awning, it would be preferred to move it indoors. And so hence the need for the expanded space that we're looking for. So that would assume 61,000 square feet, also add some additional parking spaces needed for that operation, and a lay down yard where we would still have some equipment and materials outside on a paved or graveled environment, but it allows that space to be available for materials outdoors. Could you orient us where Mayhill Road is? Mayhill Road is, I'm going to go back because it's Mayhill Road is right here. Okay, so it's on the west side. Yes, sir. West side, to the left. My left, your right. No, that's our left. My left. So yes, Mayhill Road is on the west side. Inside joke for those watching. Move on? Yeah, sure. So cost to do that gives you some of our breakdown costs. These are all estimated costs. These are again planning level estimates provided by Nelson Morgan, approximately 1,600,000 to convert the 651 Mayhill into that warehouse space. It would require some additional concrete work with the lay down yard and parking as I described earlier for those spaces. It would require some additional fixtures and furniture. More than likely the majority of that could be the racks that are needed, the shelf space that's needed for materials management. I've incorporated the design fees there, approximately 10.5 % of the hard cost and development fees that would be incurred through the process. In total, just a little over $3.3 million is what's contemplated there for that move to materials management. And then to your left is some potential funding sources that have been identified working with the finance department to make that happen. Quick question. Yes, sir. Okay, so I'm probably looking at this wrong. So I see estimated costs for materials management and this is moving from the space over here off Mingo to this space over here on Mayhill. That's the slide we're looking at. So when it says moving the materials... I'm just operations themselves. Okay, so it says move materials management to this is $1.6 million. And then it says site improvements. So the site improvements are above and beyond the $1.6 million. Correct. So the estimated cost for materials management, I'm seeing $3.3 million, but that's not including the $1.6 million, is that correct? It is. I mean, the way it is, and my mouse is working here, is $1. 6 million for the actual interior renovation retrofit. There's some concrete work. Oh, never mind. The $2.5 million is a subtotal. Never mind. Okay, got you. All right. Yep. Okay. Councilman Gregory, do you have a question? Okay. And so again, those are the funding sources that have been identified for this transaction to occur. So if we do that, what does that get us at the service center? You know, I've shown you earlier a slide that had the first and second floor. This is a slide that shows the first floor with materials management out of the equation and then with the expansion of these operations into that space that's been left. So again, as you can see, and that's why I provided a table here to show the current conditions, current meaning the existing amount of square footage that these operations are in right now versus what would be proposed with the expansion into this space that was just under 30 and allow this additional space to be used for these operations and allow just over 18,000 on the first floor, 18,000 square feet on the first floor for future expansion. Do you have a question? Yes, ma'am. I may have been out of the room when you talked about it, but the electric communications and utility safety training, is that something that's currently being done on Spencer? I mean, DMV has their own compound out there, their own building. Yes, ma'am. They do. In this slide, and the reason it's labeled this, this is the picture that was used from well over a year ago, but electric communications, it's really, it's been transferred, that operation has been transferred with tech services. So electric communications is no longer the title. It's just, it's our radio communications function. So it's the handhelds, the radios that are in the police vehicles that are in some of our field operations that we use at all of our different special events and city operations. So that is where all of those handheld radios, batteries, support for that, it's functioned out of there. It's just what's titled electric communication. This is an old title. And then as far as utility safety and training, it's a training room. That's just the name of the conference room in which it's being used for. Okay. Thank you. If you could go back one slide. Sure. We're using some solid waste funds for this. You're blinking or something. No, I'm looking at my finance arm. Okay. And so I'm assuming that if we're using solid waste funds, that this new location on Mayhill Road is going to be serving solid waste in some way? Well, this new facility at no, it would be serving the entire city of Denton, but Tony Puente can explain the use of the funds and- I need the justification for why we would take solid waste funds. Sure. Or a purpose other than solid waste. Council Member Tony Puente, Director of Finance. These COs are going to be used to renovate this facility that is a solid waste facility. And what's going to happen, what we're going to propose to do is materials management and traffic, the general fund, would pay back to solid waste and offsetting revenue to offset that debt service. But again, because that is a solid waste asset, that's the way we're going to propose to handle this. I mean, we could easily transfer the asset, but I think that makes it a little too, from an accounting standpoint, makes it a little more difficult. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Any questions on the proposed, as far as for floor one? Floor two, again, a little bit smaller footprint, but as you can see, in very similar fashion, the current conditions that the operations are in versus the proposed, and it still allows for a little bit of future expansion, a little over 2,700 square feet for future expansion on the second level, if needed, down the road. So service center, to get that, the cost of the service center to make this happen, just for the renovation expansion of the existing service center , a little over $5.8 million. And then as described earlier, there's some lay down, excuse me, lay down yard side improvements, a little over 300,000, it's being estimated, for a total hard cost of $6.7 million. And then you have the other costs associated with furniture fixtures and equipment of $1.3 million, some design fees that need to be factored in, and development fees for a total of just, right at $8.9 million for that process, for that program. And then the other portion of the slide is to show the funding mechanisms and how to make that happen. Go ahead. Okay, again, a question on the funding sources, where it says use of fund balance for electric, I'm assuming that's DME. Correct. So is DME using any of the service center? That's a good question. They are not. Okay. Then just go back to the funding. I'm just concerned that, of course, as we do any of this, that we're certain that funding, that there's a connection between the fund balance. And I think transferring the fund balance from electric, from DME to the other, and that might be justified, but there was also an assumption that some of that fund balance would either be used to pay down the debt quicker on the energy center or to reduce rates. So I'm not sure. Well, just go back to your question on the electric piece. Electric communication, while that's somewhat of a misnomer , they're still providing services to the electric department. And so in the service they provide to the electric department, that's the pro rata share that they would potentially pay, DME would pay into this particular project. Again, these are still planning level estimates, so we'll have to continue to refine it to make sure that we understand what that group of folks is actually doing for DME. But DME will have a share of the pro rata cost to this improvement of the service center. And then if you could explain, you know, folks are thinking that when they're paying their charge for drainage, that it's going to clean out the cree ks and stuff so that the water flows. So is the drainage offices or their support going to be at the service center? Yes. And in the wastewater fund where that drainage operation is housed, we do have a reserve that's meant for drainage and we could potentially draw down on that. Again, still planning level estimates, got to make sure that we understand what's set up the reserve so that we can understand if that's an appropriate use for that money. But theoretically now, that's what we would probably draw down for the drainage component. Because there is the drainage operation that works on keeping the stormwater areas clean is going to be located in the service center? Yes, correct. Okay, thank you. And in a bigger space, but yes. Okay. All right. Okay. So to recap, at least for the service center building and renovation and expansion, again, the whole premise is that purchasing materials management moves out of that location, out of the space off of Mingo over to 651, allows us to utilize the vacated space at the service center to move some of these operations into that space. We believe that just from the standpoint of, you know, we 're short on space allows us to utilize existing space. It is a blank canvas over at 651 is scalable allows us to grow into it meets our future needs as a city continues to grow. It would meet code requirements when it comes to over at the service center because of just a number of restrooms will be added along the way to accommodate the growth that we've had because the number of restrooms we've had today, still have been maintained over the last number of years. So we do need to add some additional restrooms to accommodate our staff. And quite honestly, it just provides a better a better experience and only for our staff but also for the for the for the visiting public that does come into the service center. So before I move into the next slide, kind of the next steps really we're not looking at spending all that construct those construction dollars at the moment, we still have a lot of work to do and really, we need to design these elements and get a little bit further into to design and if there's any engineer required into these facilities. So what we're looking at what we're asking here today is your permission to work with the architectural firm or firms to begin to refine the 651 project for the service for the materials management move and then also initiated a request for for qualifications for architectural services to work on the actual service center space. So again, just wanted to kind of lay that out as as as part of the effort with with this this portion of the presentation. And if if if everything goes according to plan, we should be able to initiate construction over at the Mayhill site later later later this year. So just procedural question. I see up there next steps timeline work with architect singular on final layout for purchasing material management and term and timeline initial construction. Then I see develop RFQ for architectural services to begin planning designing explanation for service center. So did we already have a did we already select the current architect on that that we've been talking about here with in an RFQ process which says work with an architect. Have we already gotten one chosen? No, sir, we have not. Okay, so that's part of that RFQ process. Well, let me back up. We have not chosen an architect. We do have a recommendation to bring forward if we want to do it a pretty aggressive timeline. We would want to be able to go and seek out an architect to go ahead and help us with the service center, excuse me, with the Mayhill project because it's it's and again, the slides aren't shown yet but the transportation building and materials management are going into the same space at 651. So it'd be great it'd be not ideal to be able to work with one architect to be able to do both of these functions in the same space. So we're not so we're coordinated through the whole process . So an architect has not been chosen, but we would like to be able to work quickly with an architect to get this project off off the ground. Okay, so it's in my understanding that what you're asking is, in that particular phase of this project or this move that you want to select an architect. I don't want to say outside of the RFQ because that makes it sounds like we're doing something we shouldn't but in other words not go through an RFQ for that particular part of this and go for it to through an RFQ for the service center reservation. Is that what? Yes, sir, we would and only if we again if we want to keep with an aggressive timeline of getting that that that 651 completed and open up for operation by middle of next year. So my understanding is this all came out of a conversation and you may if you're going to address this and subsequent slides just let me know. Because under a bond program we had the voters had approved or something to that effect a new service center or some kind of new construction of a facility on different location or at the southern end of this this campus. So is is this sort of taking the place of that because it's more efficient, it's less expensive. All right. And so the timeline for the bond issue that we're substit uting this for. In other words, we're taking the bond issue of a new new facility and we're trying to say we can do better if we do what we're doing here. Is that well, we don't have bond authority because it hasn 't gone to the voters. But in essence, we were able to forego the need to authority already did know. So the only thing that's been approved so far is just attract the transportation building at a million and a half dollars. Okay, that's what I'm thinking about. Okay. All right. So next all that then. All right, go ahead. I'm just going to go back to the beginning of the conversation. So I'll move on. So the next one is a track to transportation operations building. That's again, I don't want to go back to the various slide, but that's that small building there on in the service center campus that houses all of our traffic and operations function there where all of our signs and signals. That's the location as you drive up into the approach of the service center. It's the first building you see on the left when you when you pull in to that site. Again it was built in the 1960s. It was the original animal shelter facility. Two generations ago, it's been used by traffic since the mid 80s. Again some other numbers and other metrics about the size of Denton back in 1980 to the present and the size of square miles as far as to the now to the present, but about just under 10 employees work there. And as you know, we've made some operational changes here recently with moving track the transportation function under the traffic engineer. So that is not inclusive of the traffic engineer and the other traffic engineer that we're in the process of recruiting for. So in essence, that operation is more like 11 or 10, 11 folks that could potentially working out of here. It's very cramped. There is no it's not really designed for technology. The way it's configured because of the size and the limitations in which it has. So it just really limits the options that we have as our community continues to grow as we continue to make large investments in updating all our traffic signals throughout the community. So again, some visuals of the traffic ops facility. There's the bay, which not really a bay. It's more of a garage area where there's way stored some of the equipment. This is the work area here. And this is an essence of some other traffic operations area. But again, the space is so limited that you really just can 't have a full blown traffic operations center. And to be able to visualize what that might mean, if you think of more of an emergency operations center where you have multiple panels and be able to see different intersections throughout the community and be able to work remotely, so you're not having to go on site to the traffic signal. If there's ever an issue, you can work directly from the location in a central place and be able to manipulate and change the traffic patterns as you see fit based on the need at the time. As you mentioned earlier, Mayor, about the previous bond program, the voters back in 2014 approved a million and a half dollars to actually build a traffic operations facility there on the service center campus. And Councilmember Gregor, you'd mentioned about the Roodale realignment that contemplated that whole program coming to fruition. And as you mentioned, it has not happened. So as we progress further down the road back then, as far as implementing this program, that million and a half dollars is contemplated between 7, 500 and 10,000 square foot facility. Back in 2016, some estimates were conducted through preliminary design. It came in at $2.2 million. We had 1.5 million authorized, but it did not include any furniture fixtures or equipment or the lay down yard. It just incorporated the building itself and the parking lot. In addition, we had not realigned Roodale. We had not done any of the other interior side improvements as far as streets for Pertain and Latimore to the existing service center location. So if this facility would have been built back then at $2.2 million, it would have been where it is or where it was planned. But as far as the circulation for our staff would have been limited because, again, we have not -- we're in the process of designing Roodale, but we haven't constructed it yet. So anyway, in essence, the project was put on hold. And that's where we are today. >> Okay. So I guess a question, and it may be in a subsequent slide. So if we're not going to do this, and I know that Roodale wasn't just for this, but because Roodale was -- I think it was what? Three or four or five million dollars, I think. I can't remember. It was pretty expensive. And that was one of the ones I really struggled with. So I really want to understand the implication of if we don 't do this, why that's still needed and why we're spending that money. >> While Roodale was needed. >> We don't have to do that right now. >> Okay. >> We don't have to do that right now. >> Okay. >> But I still want to hear -- I do want to hear some of that. >> Okay. We'll follow up for that for sure. >> Okay. Yeah. >> So again, so as in essence, because the project came in over budget or over anticipated project costs, it was placed on hold. And so, again, fast forward to the present. That's why we're working through these issues and trying to find a space where we can actually place our employees in adequate facilities. So again, going back to this alternative option is moving that operation over into 651. Again, if you incorporate the space that I just mentioned about materials management, there's plenty of space left over to be able to move those traffic operations into this facility and be able to function. As I mentioned, you're able to incorporate that million five retrofit, the interior of 651 Mayhill. This information was just not the information about the service center, but the information specific to the traffic operations facility was covered with the bond oversight committee back at the end of January and explained the history behind it and they recommended approval 50. So again, if we were to do so, it would look like this. So again, materials management occupying the 61,000 square feet. We have a little bit of room for a future expansion for another operation that may be needed and then traffic ops or traffic control would, or transportation operations would function in this 10,000 square feet. And we would have to add some additional parking for vehicles and vendors and folks that come in and out of that function. So again, to make this happen, the cost, we would be able to incorporate the million five from bonds and also includes the cost of that includes installation and some additional parking that's needed. We would incorporate some additional costs for furniture and fixtures. So in essence, all the way through that whole project's estimated at just under $2.2 million to make that happen. So again, very similar to the cost before, but based on our estimation, you get everything within the site for the money that you had that was for the project costs that came in before without all the side improvements that was not included previously. Question just in general, undesigned fees, 10 and a half percent of costs. Is that just a budgetary estimate or is that what we get charged for architectural services and things such as that? It's a range mayor. Okay. So it's a placeholder. So just depending on the complexity of the project, maybe more and maybe less. Okay. And again, on the right or my right, your left are the funding sources in which we believe we can make this happen. So again, it fulfills a bond commitment made to the community, get the project off that center so we can move our staff into that facility and they can begin operating more effectively and efficiently. It allows us to utilize existing space. Again, it could be scalable because you're not making any type of improvements as foundation. So depending on what bids may come in, if it's something that is too expensive based on construction or interior innovation, the facility could expand a little bit or it could reduce a little bit. It just depends on what kind of buy in power we have if we can incorporate some economies of scale. Again, from the benefits perspective, it gets us a state of the art facility with all the interior improvements that are needed to operate our traffic signal. Traffic signals, it centralizes operations and we believe that we can incorporate some efficiencies through this investment. As I mentioned before, it was approved 5-0 by the Bond O versight Committee. Again, if we can work with an architect to go ahead and begin that process and start incorporating not only this operation here but also the relocation of materials management into one project, again, we believe we can get economies of scale and plus just a better coordination between two different projects. It's basically one project over a large span of a facility. In summary, we're asking do you believe that this is a good use of space that we have already to relocate these operations and if so, allow us to move forward? Then I guess the second piece is do you believe that expanding and renovating the service center makes sense based on what was covered on these previous slides? In essence, what we're looking for is some direction to allow staff to begin negotiating with an architect to do the 651 Mayhill component to move in traffic operations and materials management into that location and begin through that process pretty quickly and then doing an RFQ, request for qualifications for the service center renovations. Total design costs for that based on our estimation is $1, 150,000. Okay, some questions Council Member Gregory, then Council Member Briggs. Well, I think you have presented some very good ideas. I'm really pleased that you've taken this to the Bond Overs ight Committee. I think it makes sense but I can only say I think because it's hard to make a final decision about if this makes sense without putting it in the context of the full facilities master plan that we've been talking about. So I'm somewhat reluctant to give a green light to spending $14.4 million on this right now especially because when I agreed to approve the contract for rental space to move planning and development over to the old Dattco administration building on West Hickory Street, we were paying I think $400,000 a year rent. I said I want to pledge that within a year we start planning, we get a plan in place for moving them to a better location where we're not spending that rent. And I know a lot has happened since we made that deal. But I'm really quite anxious that we would be approving this money before we know that we have an exit plan for getting planning and development out of that space downtown and out of that expensive rent. So I'm not saying I'm against this, but I'm kind of reluctant until I know if we have a plan in place and if we're going to be hearing about that in a week or two, then that's going to be good. I think I can answer a couple of questions. I would sort of reframe this last slide here. We're really asking permission to get moving on traffic operations and purchasing really the use of 651 Mayhill and bringing an architect on board to give us some decent planning estimates. One of the things that I'm concerned about the 2014 bond package is there's been so little planning and implementation, the purchasing power continues to erode. And so really what drove 651 Mayhill was really the traffic operations building, moving that over, trying to leverage as much of the $1.5 million as possible. And then that led to the discussion of materials management . I'm concerned about the budget planning estimates and really that's where we're wanting to head with the architect is making sure that we can refine those numbers. They're right now so high level. I think the service center can wait and we can have that discussion in concert with the city hall, potential aggregation of city departments. That will be to you probably in about a month where we can talk about eliminating, hopefully getting out of that rental situation that we're in and providing you a revised space needs analysis. The building space needs have changed a little bit so we wanted to be sure that we felt comfortable with where the departments would be housed before we brought that to you. But I don't really see a need to get moving right away on the service center. I think there's more of a need on the 651 building and getting our planning refined. I totally hear you in terms of the service center and how the dollars are used. But that's kind of where we are at this point. And I guess the only other correction I would make is there would be no intention to go out and just hire an architect. We would definitely put the traffic operations and materials management, bundle that together and bring one architect into a process in order to help us with that. But that really is the main priority today, service center and then the eventual being out of the former DATCU facilities is the next set of discussions over the next month or so. Yes. All right. That was helpful because your point that the 2014 bond money, the buying power continues to erode is a very good point. And so moving traffic operations to the Mayhill site and maybe preparing the Mayhill site for the materials. I think gives me a little bit, I'm not as reluctant to move forward and authorize that. I just want to make sure that it's a top shelf planning issue to come back and share with us the longer range plans for the rest of the facilities and particularly us moving on from the West Hickory location. That will be in March. Councilmember Briggs, I think you had a comment. That answered several of my questions. I appreciate that. I was trying to go through and think about the master plan conversation that we had and see how that aligned with this discussion. So when we looked at our city council complex, that's going to come back to us. That was really large and where some of these departments that we're planning on putting into the service center, not going to go into the council complex now allowing that to be a much smaller scale doable project. It has been the city hall based on our, based on direction that we've received from city manager's office has been scaled down based on just the staff is not going to grow as was contemplated in the previous study. Secondly, it is very possible that some of the facilities, some of the employees at the service center, for example, engineering, some of the engineering staff may be coming over to the city hall complex because what we're trying to do is create a one stop shop. So any type of development type function, whether it's reviewing of plans and things of that nature, what we're trying to do is when the developer or the community comes in, needing to have that kind of level of review, they're not having to send them to two different locations. We want to be able to keep them at one location, whether it 's on the single campus, the same floor, two different floors, but at least on the same location to be able to do their business and not be sending them all over the community. So it's very possible that some of the engineering staff may be coming over to city hall, which would then allow again, additional expansions, not expansion, but just reallocation of existing office space for the streets function over at the service center. The divisions that were contemplated to move to 651, though , were not at all contemplated in the complex. Okay. Thank you. In general, I'm good with the first two for sure. I do have a couple of questions that you may have the answer to and you may have to get back with us on it, but on both of them, they say use of available CIP funds. And whenever you're using CIP funds, it means you're taking away from another project or another project's been canceled out. So I'd like to kind of know what that is. The amount for traffic of use of fund balance, general fund , doesn't bother me too bad, but I want to know how much of a drawdown that's going to actually happen on the service center, because that's a pretty large portion of that to kind of know the effect and what that does to our overall percentage of fund balance. Council members, over the last few months, we've been working with the city manager's office going through the entire city's CIP. We've been closing out projects, looking for savings, looking for projects that haven't been closed out, that should be closed out. As we've been doing that, we've been aggregating those dollars. Generally speaking, those dollars have been revenue funded capital cash that has come over from the general fund into a CIP project that either never got done or it was closed out. And so any savings that came from that, we've aggregated them. And so we have this pot of money now that we're suggesting to utilize in this particular fashion. In order to do that, we would come back to you to amend that CIP budget to make sure that we have the authority to do that. And so we would clarify that at that point. Okay. I mean, if we're talking about savings, I'm fine with that. That's correct. If we're talking about a project that never got done, what was the reason it didn't get done and because... No, in some cases there were dollars that were supposed to go to a project and that project was funded a different way. And so that just wasn't cleaned up. So we've been cleaning that up. Okay. Any other comments? I've got a couple. Go ahead, Council Member. So I want to take a look at, or I ask you to speak to what this project does to Mayhill, how you see those two kind of coexisting. I don't know what kind of traffic comes in and out of those buildings, but now we're adding those two. Is that more trucks? Is that more cars? Mayhill does it have that capacity? Obviously we're widening it. What is that timing? Will the road be finished? It's a year out or so. So will the road be finished by the time we're there and then what kind of additional traffic? Have you looked into that? Well, this engineer can speak to the timing of the Mayhill project, but yes, it will add more traffic to Mayhill because of the operations there. There will be deliveries that are made at materials management like they are today. So there should be fewer deliveries. There won't be any deliveries, much of any deliveries made over at the service center to be pushed over to 651 Mayhill. So there will be some additional deliveries made there. There will be some additional truck traffic because of just the operations that are happening at 651. As far as the timing, I believe Todd, they should run an almost, depending on when we get started at 651, we're looking at 651 being completed by middle of next year, maybe towards the middle to end of next year, 2019. So Mayhill Road construction will be going on for the next realistically two years. I mean, it's about a year and a half out before construction is completed. The ultimate configuration of Mayhill, absolutely this doesn't compromise what we're doing with Mayhill. Mayhill has been designed in such a way that it has capacity for the next 30 years to 40 years before we really have to do anything. And should we need to, there's a wider median in the middle that we could come back and add two lanes when traffic volumes increase to that point. This won't push it to that point. It will be a much better scenario once we get the DCTA bridge crossing put in place where we extend Mayhill from 35 up to this connection. When that gets in place, then the truck traffic makes a lot more sense because it's not impacting that little piece of Edwards Road in Mayhill that's the 90 off of Colorado. This makes way more sense. It's a lot more flexible, easier for trucks and vehicles to make deliveries and then they get right back to the highway and go where they need to go. So they can go to university, take 380 back out east of town or they can get down to 35 very quickly. Okay, thank you. And if I may? Sure. So, I think overall I'm comfortable-ish exploring and looking and nailing down details. I think the miss for me, if I had to ask that wasn't touched on, I'd really like to see some sort of community space. I know you have the training center there, but I think it just opens the door for someone like me that doesn't understand those departments and/or doesn't interact with those departments or you have your specific training facility but there's a board, a committee meeting, something like that. I just think we need to start folding those in. I mean, you see the advantages that the police stations community room has and so I think incrementally if we begin to build those in and open, I understand the sensitivity to those areas and I don't know how those two coincide, but I just think we need to focus on those because when I look at the presentation, even if you, I mean I understand you're saying 1980-ish or so, some of those buildings, this, that and the other, but it's been that long since we've built a recreation center as well. So that, there's a lot to be said for, a lot got done. There's a lot that has not been done to keep up, but I think overarching thing is some sort of space that is open to the community that can utilize it or just come in and learn what our departments are doing and it could serve as a breakout space if someone's doing business there. I just think it kind of is a need so that our citizens can understand what department does what, how that interacts with their daily lives and is welcoming, not saying, hey, wait out here. You're welcome to this space when it's not being utilized otherwise. Okay, thank you. Thanks. Okay, a couple of questions. On this slide, I'm assuming the $1.15 million in design fees is for the entire three projects that are listed there. Yes, sir. Which means some of that will be with a single architect outside of an RFQ process and the remaining would be whatever is the amount at least as proposed under the service center. So what I really want to understand and I want to use these and maybe some of the ones we've got coming up, because I know architectural firms charge either percentage or I want to know how this all breaks down because I want to know how many hours people are working on this in an architectural firm. I want to know if that's how they figure it and it just comes out to be that way normally and naturally. That's okay. I just don't understand how you've got $1.2 million worth of design fees. So if somebody's spending $200, $250 an hour, whatever that is, the number of hours, I want to understand this process because if we're contracting with these firms outside of it, RFQs are not bid processes, but we need to start talking about that. Not bidding necessarily, but what are we getting charged for fees, how do they break down, and to have an understanding of that because that's just a lot of money and it's very well probably worth it. I just don't understand how we get to those numbers and I'd like to have a better understanding of that. Of course. As far as I want to make sure I understood what you said, Mr. Hollman, I'll call you Mr. Hollman since we're in a meeting. The movements that we're doing here were not necessarily contemplated as people who would be moved into the new municipal facility, at least per our current study. Now you said things have scaled down a little bit because we don't anticipate the employee growth, but given if we still had the same plan, these particular employees for these divisions were not contemplated to be in, let's say, this large city complex next door or wherever we decide to put it. Am I understanding that correctly? That's correct. Okay. So that's really outside. Right. I mean, the master plan, yes, we want to understand that and I think Council Member Gregory brought it up because of the development staff being over at $400, 000 a year rent rental space. And I believe our lease over there is... 2023. So seven years. All right. So there's 2.8 million bucks right there at least. So on this, I don't have an issue with the concept here because what I'm understanding is you're trying to take space that right now is going un utilized for the City of Denton. And how do we create more space that are requiring expansion now and in the future? And how do we do that? Well, this is a creative way to do it. I just have a couple of questions on some of the specific details. Okay. Or observations and comments. So on the service centers, primarily because it looks like on purchasing material management, use of fund balances from material management, use of excess COs, solid waste. I'm assuming that's what we just talked about, about projects that for some reason got funded somewhere else or we deemed were not viable or we killed projects that we thought were viable that weren't viable. And so we have the funding there. And available CIP funds is that same kind of concept just with other projects. So that funding is pretty much self-contained. On the service center, the big one there that I have a comment about or observation is general fund slash use of available cash or future certificates of obligation. I cannot support grabbing $4.4 million of cash out of the fund balance because that's going to -- I think we can find a way to -- if this is an expansion, this is a capital expansion, this is capital improvement per se. And so typically we've -- I mean, if we're going to start funding capital improvements out of cash from the general fund, I think that's a policy discussion that we certainly can have. That's a lot of money to pull out of there. So if we can find a way, especially right now, interest rates are still low. They're not going to be in the near future for bond financing. It's already started going up. So that's my only question there is that $4.4 million, as Councilmember Ryan I think had said, is if we can, you know, find a way to finance that with the favorable rate structure that we have right now, because I think that would take us way below or get us real close to our policy and our fund balance. And then on traffic operations, use of GEO bonds. Okay, so we have the $1.5 million. And then -- so we're saying we're going to use the general fund there for $331,000. I'm okay with that, but we've spent that much for the wr ought iron fences around the two cemeteries. So I mean, that's a more manageable kind of expense to say, okay, we're short a little bit. I think we did it with the Vela project, soccer fields. I'm just hoping that we can -- because this was my thought. We're spending $2.178 million on that. And I think you said if we built the traffic operations building as was originally designed in the 2014 bond program, it's $2.2 million. Unless I'm -- okay, it did not include FFE and lay down yard. So we've got a little bit of difference there. So we're almost at the -- I mean, we're almost at the same -- I mean, so I know we were a little short there, but we could have made it up just like we're making it up here. It's just -- it's in staff's opinion that it's better served instead of building a new facility there, preserving that site possibly for future expansion, moving it over to the 651 that seemed to be more consistent with having groups together that sort of share either the same kind of functions or things such as that. So I'm okay with this. My fear is that like most other things it seems like recently -- well, not recently, over many years -- what we think is going to cost us to build it is not what it costs us to build it. That's how we've sort of gotten into this place, this situation in the first place about not finishing bond programs, construction costs are going up. So when will we know -- because even with architectural -- they make an estimate, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's what it's going to be. When will we know a more definitive, hard estimate? Is that only when we set it out to bid and get back our b ids? We will -- as we move forward, I want to reiterate one other thing. We are going to be going through an RFP process or an RFQ process. I wouldn't feel comfortable just hiring an architect even though we own the building. I mean, we really need to put a process behind it. One of the things that we're doing to address your point is trying to ensure that we hire our own external cost estimators. So not only do you have the architect's estimate, but you 've also got a cost estimator who specializes in that industry and works for us. So we're hoping that they tend to be a little bit more knowledgeable about the market, what's going on out there, having worked in recent projects. So we're going to be going down both those paths, trying to get as solid of an estimate as possible. And so I just wanted to clear up the process. My guess is probably April or May we'll be able to get back with you with an update on where we are with all of this. And in terms of the budget processes, it's very difficult to have the conversations with council without at least providing some kind of a funding plan to put you at ease. So if you want to change any of this or alter, that's fine. My main concern in just kind of assessing the city facilities around here is we tended to, you know, had a tendency to underestimate some of these costs and rather than come and talk to the council about it, they got shelved. And that just means you're making up even more of a cost deficit down the road. So it's really important to get these things moving if we possibly can, because we've got so many needs right now, both in our own bond program, CIP, as well as the city facilities that we've got to start making some decisions or the hole gets bigger. So that's kind of where we are at this point. And we'll be back to you in a month on the city hall. And I would think the service center, Councilman Gregory brought up a good point. And in terms of the engineering function in particular, we are still kicking around the reason we didn't have that today is because I knew you couldn't look at 50 slides, but we didn't know if we could handle what we were going to be doing with the with the engineering department and how that affects these other buildings. So we need another month or so to keep refining that so we can give you a better answer. Is the engineering department in these particular facilities? Yes, they're at the service center. And there's a real discussion whether that should be located with the planning department as well versus what there so we need to work our way through that. And let's assume that and to go with your your assumption. But how many people are we talking about? As far as engineers? Yeah, that's right. Then in other words, if we're saying if we're saying we were hesitant to sort of move forward on the service center concept, because we think that some of those people are going to be considered to be relocating to the more larger municipal complex. Yes. How much are we how many people are we talking about? How much space are we talking about? Currently from an engineering standpoint, we're talking about 20 current with potential expansion to five more to expand our ability to do and serve the city and future CIPs as well as everything else that we're doing. Okay, my point. So you're 25 folks. And the space for those people is what? A couple thousand square feet, three, four, five thousand square feet. Yeah, Mark, we're looking at 160 square foot per person or was it more than that? Yeah, so if yeah, I don't need a specific point being that I think I'm okay with moving forward with it because the amount of Delta that we're talking about, I mean, if we make that shift, we're still going to want to have that space for the expansion of something else. So if we're going to get moved out, that's a very minor part of the service center. If I'm understanding that correctly, if I'm wrong, somebody just tell me because I know there's understanding Councilmember Gregory's point, I agree with it. There's always there's already spatial problems with that whole second floor, just we're running out of space. And we have people coming in to help us continue to improve our efficiency delivering projects, meet the needs of the public in general and what their questions and putting projects through on the development side. So it's already an issue. Worst case, if we go with this plan, they stay there and it 's built like this. Worst other case scenario is we build this, they get moved out to a new facility somewhere down the road. I mean, that's gonna be a long way down the road. And that space is already configured. It's already built out. Then you can actually expand into that with some other either department or expand the departments that are existing. Right. Okay, I'm okay with moving forward with that. Yes, Councilmember. Could you go to the last slide, Mr. Cunard? Yes. That one? Yeah. Mayor, I'm okay with green lighting, the traffic operations at 2.1 and the purchasing material management at 3.3. But putting a yellow light, let's hold, on the service center at 8.8. Actually, it looks more like 8.9 to me. Until we hear back in a month about the rest of the master plan. And I can agree to that. I think what I'm saying is even if we green lighted it, by the time the month comes, I mean, in a month, the service center aspect, we won't even have the architect probably picked by then. That's correct. So I think whichever path we go, we wind up at the same point. So I'm okay with that. The only thing I would say, though, is if we're not going to go out for an RFQ except for service center, if that delays us a month, I don't care about delay in a month. To me, it's just -- We are going out to an RFQ for everything. So what we'd like your permission to do today based on what we've gotten back is go out for an RFQ for an architect for the traffic operations and purchasing materials management facility. We're perfectly okay holding off on the service center until we get your feedback on -- I don't think you should exclude that from the RFQ. Because by the time it gets out, we're going to have this discussion in a month. And then if we have to send out another one, and if there's an architectural firm looking at all three of these, I mean, from a timing perspective, that's why I understand. But even if we weren't going to hear the conversation in six months, I'm okay with moving forward because it's not going to make that much difference if we move 20 people out of that building. So we just differ in that regard. Well, my only question is if we do a request, is it an RFQ or RFP? RFQ. All right. If we do an RFQ for all three and in a month, we decide that we want to hold on the service center, then are we stuck with that? Now what we would do is basically put it out to the market that we're moving forward with the first two buildings for sure, and then we want an optional price. If we include the service center, what does that do to the pricing? And then we will also get the mayor's questions answered in terms of justifying their fees, how they come up with those. So where are the rest of the council members on? The green light or the yellow light for the service center? I'm a green light, so I don't mind moving forward. I mean, Dalton and I are talking about this, but I want to hear what everybody else is thinking. Yeah, I'm definitely a green light on it. I think we're a little behind in our facilities and we need to catch up. Okay. I'm a green light as an alternate. As the city manager stated, I think that's the best route to take. Okay. I'm not sure I understand that. We'll include that as an add-on. As an add-on? Scope of work. Okay. Who else? You're okay with which one, Kate? Council Member Riggs? Yes, I'm okay with the first two. And the service center, I would like to see it as well with the larger facility plan, but I'm okay going ahead and adding it because I think the timing is going to work out. And eventually we're going to do it because we're not going to do the one we discussed doing out further. Right. Council Member Hussie? Yeah, I'm good with all three. Going out. Okay. We'll just go with the added as an add-on. Okay. Yeah. All right. Okay. Thank you. That direction? Yes, sir. All right. You bet. Thanks. Okay. I tell you what. The next one we've got is probably going to be a little bit of a presentation in time, so let's just take a little quick five or 10 minutes so that, you know, we're not taking breaks right in the middle of it. All right. Going back to this meeting of the Denton City Council on Tuesday, February 13th, 2018. It is now 2.52 p.m. We're moving on to our work session report, item 1C, receive report, hold discussion. You have staff direction regarding an overview of homelessness initiatives and research on tent encampments. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council Members. In November, staff was asked by council to conduct research on tent cities. We have conducted some preliminary research, and that paper was included as part of your backup. We are going to touch on that today during this presentation, but before we kind of pull that one piece of the puzzle out and address tent encamp ments and emergency housing, we really wanted to provide you with a comprehensive overall update on homeless initiatives and the progress that has been made throughout the last year. As you can see from this graphic, and I'm not going to go through it, homelessness is a very complex problem that requires very complex solutions and a lot of collaboration amongst many entities. I'd really like to turn it over to Gary Henderson at this point. He's the executive director of the United Way. The United Way has led an effort over the last two years to really take a collective impact approach to addressing homelessness and bringing forth a coordinated entry system, which Denton County and our community did not have before. So I'll turn it over to Gary, and he'll start by giving some brief history of that initiative and overview, and then it will turn it over to Danny Shaw, who is our human services coordinator, to take us through a little bit more about what the city's contribution has been and also address some of the highlights of the research that we found. Thank you, Mayor and Council. First, I just want to give some credit where credit is due. Perhaps your leadership dating back to 2015 and launching the Mayor's Homelessness and Housing Task Force, really, you took the lead as a community. You jumped in front of the Commissioner's Corps, Denton County, other municipalities, and you said in our community, even though this is a regional issue, we're going to take the leadership role, and if it were not for Mayor Watt's personal leadership in that task force, we would not be at the place we are today able to talk in very specific level about needs and data. So Mayor Watt, thank you from all of us at United Way of Denton County and the community at large. Really the approach to collective impact for a problem as complex as this is the only way to approach this issue, this issue. So when we talk about a homelessness leadership team, with your help as a funding partner, United Way has joined in the City of Denton to fund the Denton County Homelessness Leadership Team. You enabled us to bring the following bodies into one room on a regular basis. Commissioner's Court, City of Denton, City of Lewisville, Christian Community Action in Lewisville, City of Sanger, Sanger ISD, Serve Denton, Giving Hope, Denton County Friends of the Family, Monsignor King Outreach Center, Salvation Army Denton and Lewisville, Denton Regional Medical Center, Denton Community Health Clinic was at the table originally, Denton County Health Department, Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital of Denton, Health Services of North Texas, North Central Texas College, the Denton Chamber of Commerce, the Lewisville Chamber of Commerce, and then representatives from United Way of Denton County. Among you, you have Councilperson Briggs, Mayor Watts, and then from the United Way Board Chief Lee Howe serving on this leadership team. So you can feel from the breadth of the organizations represented in that room every time they meet, we're attempting to attack this regional issue in just the way it should be attacked. This is not only a City of Denton issue. So when that group began to meet in 2016, in addition to charter and bylaws, they began to work on the mission purpose vision, and this is the way they articulated their vision. Every person in Denton County has a place to call home that is safe, affordable, accessible, and supported by community resources. That's supported by community resources is just as important as the brick and mortar that we endeavor to put people into. The needs are so profound among some of these citizens that we're endeavoring to help to simply house them without services wrapped around them would be completely inadequate and we would be setting our members, our clients, and our community up to fail. Then the mission that this broad set of leaders articulated was fostering an effective and coordinated system, underscore that word, of homelessness prevention and intervention, both resulting in homelessness that is rare, brief, and non recurring. But through these four important points, and I think it will drive home as you're talking about a single aspect of this homelessness issue, community awareness and connection, data-driven, evidence-based, fiscally responsible recommendations, innovative solutions around affordable housing, access to primary and behavioral health care services, adequate income levels and coordinated services, and then finally mobilizing, advocating, and empowering public-private community-wide collaboration. So that group as it began to meet, the first accomplishment was an unanticipated accomplishment. Our communities, and I say Denton County as a whole, faced the loss of our Emergency Solutions Grant, which was an annual $600,000 grant award from the feds through the state to this community to four service providers in Denton County that was a critical foundation for homelessness intervention and prevention, funding and services in Denton County. As a review, those four organizations that that grant? Christian Community Action on the Prevention Space, Sal vation Army Denton, Friends of the Family, and Giving Hope. Thank you Mayor Watts. So those four organizations with the help of the city, Danny Shaw, as well as the Denton County Homelessness Leadership Team, those appointees that you heard before, they began very quick and hurried work around how can we strengthen as a community our proposal to the state for these funds. And their work over months not only resulted in securing that fund on an annual basis, they re-secured that funding over a two year period so we have not $600,000 for only one year but $1.2 million for two years. So that really, if you will, rallied the leadership team around the strength of communities working together in collaboration. Again, a very complex social problem but when those folks walk into that room they drop all of their missional agendas at the door and they're focused on one thing, making homelessness rare, brief, and non-recurring for our citizens of Denton County. So the next major endeavor, and I'm credited with giving the most amazing pep talk in the world, I said this could not happen, that group began to attack a coordinated entry system or process or workflow so that when we discover people at risk of homelessness or experiencing homelessness we would capture them into the Homeless Management Information System, HMIS, and that we would assess their needs knowing from the person most close to death in Denton County today to the person who frankly with a little bit of resources, maybe some elimination of barriers, maybe redirecting them back into a family member's home but with some small resources to help offset costs. We knew from top to bottom what our homelessness population and situation looked like. And to underscore how dramatically different that was for this county, never before did we have a working system where the folks on the ground could tell us person by person, not in the hundreds as identified by an annual homeless census count, the point in time count, but in the over a thousand households who the people were in need and how they scored and how they ranked. That was groundbreaking and just a few months ago we were recognized by the state of Texas as a community for having achieved that coordinated entry process status which only strengthens our ability to retain funding sources like the ESG $1.2 million grant. So as you look at this one aspect of the problem today, what you need to know is you have a leadership team behind you ready to take direction from you , a leadership team that wouldn't exist were it not for this council, this body, the mayor's task force in 2015, your financial support, United Way of Denton County's financial support and those organizations that appointed leaders to be in that room on a regular basis to make this a priority. I can tell you that United Way organizations across the state and across the country do not enjoy the level of support this community has given us as a social service community but also citizens who really desire to make homelessness rare, brief and non-recurring. So Danny will step up here in a second and talk to you about the data but really this coordinated entry system has given us the ability for her to tell you the people experiencing or at risk of experiencing homelessness, prevention of homelessness wherever possible, immediate access to coordinated entry. There's no wrong front door. We want to capture people where they are and assess them and then quickly connecting people who are experiencing homelessness to housing assistance and or services. So I want to continue them in that spaghetti diagram that Sarah laid out for you. It really is just that complicated but it really is as simple as meeting people one at a time, getting them housed but providing case management, supportive services and some of the individuals we're housing and we're serving have some very profound and complex needs. It's not as simple and it's not a cheap solution. So with that, Danny. So I get to talk about the data a lot because I find it very, very important and what Gary didn't convey to you though, he did a very good job of explaining what coordinated entry is, is telling you how important this data is for us understanding the complexity of the problem, really taking this information and saying before we had ten different databases tracking information about the same group of people and now we have one where we're able to see all of that information together, that those organizations are aligned and working towards common goals, that a really, really important part of this data is answering those questions that we need to answer now and this is where we are in our next steps. So as a result, we have the exact numbers for what is the demand in our system right now. So as Gary mentioned, we had the point time count that was sort of giving us a nice snapshot of what was happening on any given day but now we can truly see the demand and we can compare that to the resources we have and see what those gaps are in our system so that we can answer some important questions about what we need to add to the system now. And then we have a really better understanding of what barriers people are facing. We knew that it was hard to get people housed but until we were implementing this coordinated process and our agencies were communicating with each other , did we fully understand what types of barriers those were and then looking at strategies for how we can attach those with new programs. So for me, data is only as good as what you do with it and so we're at the next phase of what we decide how we're going to use it. And so let's show you a little bit about what coordinated entry looks like right now. We have assessed over 600 and almost 700 people currently in our coordinated entry system. When we do this assessment, it tells us their vulnerability , their risk, how high their risk is for dying on the street. Now you can score low on that and that puts us in a situation where we understand that you just need a little bit of assistance and that we call that diversion. That's just a small cost effective solution that we can divert you from homelessness very quickly, keep you housed. It's a very cost effective solution for us. So right now we have 156 people who are scoring low enough to just be eligible for diversion, small, cheap intervention. Now we have another 380 people who are scoring in the mid- range of our coordinated assessment system. That's just some short-term assistance, rental assistance, three to six months to provide some stability to help people stay housed after they've been homeless. And then we have another 155 folks who have long-term assistance needs. These are folks who probably will never be able to live independently. So anything that is expended here would be an annual cost for these folks. Real quick question. Go ahead. I've got one. So in the rapid rehousing, the 380, you said it's short- term rental assistance that they've already become homeless. Right. To be eligible for rapid rehousing, you have to qualify as literally homeless. So currently there's somewhat, and that could take over two months or three months. It's rapid rehousing, but that doesn't necessarily mean- It's rapid. It's rapid. That's correct. Because there's clients that we're working with that have been homeless waiting for this for over three months. So when you say short-term and long-term, do you have more specific time periods for that? Well, the short-term assistance is really directed to specific the rental assistance. So it's three to six months of rental assistance. It doesn't really qualify how long it might take someone to get into a housing solution. What we're talking about here is when they're in the housing solution, how long of that assistance will occur. And again, with the long-term, we're talking about probably the lifetime of the individual with the permanent support of housing. So let's give you an example. So you were actually talking about something really specific about the length of time it's taking us to get people in housing. Well, Council Member Gregory had a question. Oh, I'm sorry. Let her finish that explanation because I have a question about it different. Okay. Yeah, great. So we have 380 people on the rapid rehousing list in our housing priority list that say that's the intervention they need. Right now, the ESG grant will only cover 84 units. So right there, we have the gap of 296 units that we have to fill that we don't have either housing units for or the money to pay for housing units for . So this is why the data is so much, so important. And we can also estimate some figures on what that might look like. So to make sure we cover that gap, that's probably between $1.1 and $2.1 million, depending on how long the assistance happens. It's also another almost $600,000 in case management, we'd have to add in order to support those folks because in every one of these situations, there 's going to need to be some sort of wraparound services, supportive services happening here. Did you stop your question? Did you have a follow up on that? Can she let her go and ask a follow up? Yeah, go ahead. Okay. And so on that, just to follow up, so on the 380, with the ESG grant 80, you said 290 something, people who need the rapid rehousing, can we just assume that they're in shelters or on the street? Well, I think that's where we're talking about the rest of our presentation is that is actually the two different choices. If they're in shelter, if there's enough beds, or are they resulting in living in the streets or in shelter because of that gap. Okay. Yes, go ahead, Council Member. Thank you, Mayor. What is, describe more of what you mean by diversion. Sure. I know it's a confusing term. Some cities would call it a bus ticket, but we don't. We actually, we talk about a more intentional intervention, which means someone's house may be their couchsurfing. They're not necessarily stably housed. They might be living on a friend's couch or living with their parents, and they're about to be evicted in that situation. We might be coming in and doing some sort of small financial assistance or mediation with that family to try to keep that person housed. Again, it's not a permanent solution, but it's better than letting those folks become homeless. But it might be reuniting them with other family members somewhere else. There's a lot of opportunity within diversion. The goal there is to just make sure people stay housed rather than become homeless. So when you say it's not just a bus ticket, it may be a bus ticket to Aunt Mabel over in Oklahoma who has a spare bedroom. Yes, it would be intentional. It would be case managed and to make sure that there's truly a housing solution on the other end of that. It happens a lot with domestic violence victims. I was assuming, so help me out if you have a different number for those that are extremely vulnerable. That's the 155. The number of people in permanent supportive housing, that number there, those are the people who are scoring the highest on the acuity, which means they're most at risk. They have some sort of, well, a combination of chronic homelessness as well as a chronic illness or some sort of substance abuse issue that is chronic, that is preventing them from being able to live, and they'll live with that long term. So it just limits their ability to work or to gain the income that they need in order to be stably housed or their physical ailment just makes it impossible for them to be able to live independently. Do we have any notion among our population of how many people are just one health crisis or transportation crisis away from being homeless? Do we have any notion? Yeah, the census data gives us a little bit of information. I don't have to know the exact numbers, but we can look at those that are what we call cost burden, their living cost burden. So any crisis could move them into homelessness because they have to make the choice between their housing and some other item for their family. So yeah, the numbers are in the census data, at least to give us that notion. Overall, in the city, sorry, Gary. Across Denton County, there are roughly 42,000 households that are at or below the poverty level. So that was going to be my question. These figures, this is this countywide? Yes. Okay, so this isn't just the city of Denton. This is no, but we can break with with the database, we can break that information out much more easily than we could have ever before. And also on the just we glossed over it a little bit because we talked about it in two different ways. And I want to make sure that we hear exactly what you said. Okay. The first is on the rapid rehousing of 380. You put a cost to that of what it would take theoretically to try to solve that at this time period doesn't mean that then we might have another 3 80 next year, but just just in this immediate time presence, that ESG and all of the fundings that you can identify to help with rapid rehousing provides funding for up to 86 of those of that number 86 of those Yeah, about 84, about seven a month. But you said it's got the funding for 84. But that's also if you have the units, that's correct, to put it in. So in some cases, we have the money. What we don't have is is where to locate them. No, and I appreciate that point, because even the 84 that we can fund, you're exactly right. That doesn't necessarily mean there's a housing unit. That's right. And so I think a little bit more commentary on that. Okay, fantastic. Yeah. But if you have other questions. We'll go to Councilmember Duff. Those were my questions. Do you also track how many veterans there are in this? Yes, sir. Absolutely. That's very important. In fact, we're prioritizing veterans and chronically homeless in our system right now because we know we can't address all of those. And is it the opportunity to look at those veteran numbers? So what is it about 60? 65 in the list right now? Yeah, just around 65 right now that are currently in the list. Now looking at these numbers, we still have some data cleaning up to do. But we're at a really good point here. Thank you. Yes, sir. And again, because I know this is an important presentation . The emergency services grant of $600,000, which we were def unded or didn't receive allocation 2016, I guess. Yeah, not defunded. We just didn't score high enough to get it. We didn't score high enough. We didn't do anything wrong. Okay, yes, I agree. Yeah, that's why I changed it. But the point being, they're operating under a certain model of housing first and these kind of things that the federal government has sort of mandated. And a lot of those parameters are what's used to score grant applications to determine funding. And so is that -- Can I correct one thing? Yes. Really only permanent supportive housing right now is forced to utilize the housing first model. The emergency solutions grant does have parameters to make sure that we're actually putting people in permanent solutions, which is why we weren't successful in obtaining the grant. Because that was the component that they were missing. Right. We just weren't transitioning enough people from emergency situations to permanent. We're still in that. We're still in that for the reasons that you laid out as well as the funding issues. But more importantly, the four organizations who received that funding worked together collaboratively to see how they could change or modify some of the procedures in order to increase the possibility and opportunity to meet that component. And according to the application grant, we were able to get that funding reestablished for two years and not just one year. Correct. Well, we didn't do anything to get the two years. They just changed the grant cycle to two years. Great. Well, we can take that. I'd love to take credit for that. But that's good. So we've got it for two years and now we have to make sure that we have the metrics available to show that, yes, the changes we put in place have met those particular components that we were lacking in the last grant application. Right. And you, again, to make that point home, we're still in a place where we may not meet those metrics that we proposed because of the housing shortage. Right. Okay. All right. So any other questions around just the data itself? Because really, this is the gap conversation is an important part of what's moving us forward and what's moving us next in the next case. So when we're looking at innovative solutions to try to address this situation, of course, we started with coordinated entry because that created this foundational support. But now we're looking at how do we increase the housing stock and how do we make sure that the funding is overcoming some of the issues that we 're learning. And so one of those we've introduced is the Barriers Fund. We looked at some of our neighboring communities and said, "How are you guys addressing barriers in your housing systems that typical funding doesn't cover ?" And so we saw a lot of great opportunities to model some of the things they're doing. So we're introducing the Barriers Fund. It's a new project. It's gonna give us three tools at our disposal. The first is client assistance, much like the diversion that we talked about. But it's that little bit of funding that federal dollars typically won't pay for or restricted. This will give us unrestricted dollars to help overcome just some small issue, whether it's somebody needs a little bit of an extra deposit to encourage them to open the door to this person who's experiencing homelessness or some small thing like they need an ID because they don't have it because they're on the street and they 've lost it. Those small dollar amounts will help us just overcome a small barrier and get people into housing. So that's one piece of it. The second piece of it, which is the biggest one, some of the we're calling doors for Denton County, is actually looking to encourage landlords to open more doors. So we're utilizing that fund or want to utilize that fund to do two things, which is encourage landlords by just giving them opportunities to ask for a little bit more money to lower some of those barriers, some of the questions you asked the developer earlier, those types of things. But also risk mitigation because the other thing that landlords care about is making sure to protect their asset. So by giving them an opportunity to access a larger pool of funds if there's damages that happen to the unit because they lowered barriers, that 's a tool that we can use to negotiate with them to say, "Hey, here's a little bit of money for you. We'll pay you double deposits. We'll pay you something just to help us get someone who's really in need in and we'll protect your asset on the back end." I said asset, excuse me. I heard that. I like, wait, I did say it, right? Excuse me. Made myself flush. Yeah. And then the third piece is really some of our outreach that we haven't been able to do. For those of you don't know, the Denton County Homeless Coalition is not a 501(c)(3). So it doesn't have the ability to raise funds for things like the point in time count to help us sort of give some extra resources. And there's some other outreach efforts that the community needs to do through that mechanism. So a third part of that is some of that funding just help us to do better outreach. And then of course, the other moving forward pieces that are really important is the homeless leadership team has now established an ad hoc committee that's really looking at what are the next steps in housing solutions. That group has just started meeting, but we're really looking at what are the policies and what are the housing development needs communities have, and not just Denton, but our surrounding communities because we have to have partners at the table. We can't be the only solution. And then one of the other creative solutions that we've actually brought forward to Council and talked about before is the housing navigator. So case managements are very specialized in what they do. They have a very intentional focus at helping people navigate a system for assistance, but they don't always have the time for the housing navigation that's needed. So if we need to communicate with those landlords and build those relationships like programs with the doors for Denton County, a housing navigator is going to be that tool. Courtney talks about it like the unicorn, which is someone who isn't necessarily just a case manager, but is also a real estate professional or has that knowledge to really talk to landlords on that level and have a better understanding, but then also work with the case managers to keep people housed. I want to talk about something just real briefly. I'm talking about the Barriers Fund. Because it's new. And that's a result of United Way staff, myself, and others visiting different communities to try to get an understanding of what's working for them. So I want to give you a specific real life example, obviously no names or anything like that, about what the problems are that we're facing. Because if you're not involved in this on a day to day basis and you don't understand all the data and all the information, it's real easy to look at it from the outside and have a lot of questions and raise some eyebrows and all that. So here we go. So you've got a family, let's say, of six people. Two adults and four children. And they're homeless. They're living in a car. They're living in a shelter. And so they've got to find housing. So you may find housing out there. You may find a landlord with a house. But for the emergency services grant, if I misstate anything, please correct me. Because I'm not sure on all these formulas, but I've become very educated in the last week. So let's say you've got somebody that's asking $1,250 a month for a three bedroom, two bath house that's probably market rent here in the city of Dent on. And so this family goes to one of our organizations says we need some help. That organization says we got some ESG funding. We can help you. However, because of the tables with the federal government and the parameters, they state that the fair market value or fair market rental value for a house of this type and this zip code is I'm going to just say it's $1,250. But that includes utility. So what happens is they go and they figure out, well, the utilities are going to cost you $200. So we've got to subtract that from the fair market rental value of $1,250. That means the rent can only be $1,050. Well, how many landlords are going to take $200 off? Not very many. So I think what we're seeing is that things such as the barrier fund can come in and some implement temporarily that delta and make the landlord whole per se. Am I correct on this? You have been trained well, sir. Yes. And so. Yeah, absolutely. The federal funds cannot be used on any kind of rent that is above the FMR or doesn't meet rent reasonableness, which means you have to do this weird comparing it to three units nearby to make sure they're all comparable. And you can't use any other federal money to make up that delta. But you can use sort of private party, whether it be a for profit or an individual or a nonprofit to say, hey, you're not you're not restricted in that. Right. As long as the lease is lower than FMR, the time that person is placed in there, we can use the federal funds. So this to the mayor's point. Yes. And the mayor is very well the situation we are to a private donor has come forward. They're not willing to be named at this point, but they've created a match challenge of $7,500 to the barriers fund. If the community will match that $7,500, he'll release those funds to the barriers fund. That's really our first early opportunity to start to see the barriers fund with some real money. Well, and the reason I say this is because that's and you 're going to show it in the data. The problem we've got organizations for the wraparound sort . We've got people willing to do it. We don't have the units. The reasons we don't have the units is we're in a very high market, which the government look at the Housing Authority vouchers. They barely can come up to what the market is. So now you've got this fund that's available to help in all kinds of situations that will actually start putting people in housing units that are most likely in the hands of private investors, private individuals, because they, you know, they get the economic return they want. You also can assure them that, hey, they're helping someone out. They're not necessarily taking a risk economically. And then you've got some other parts of the barrier fund that if somebody, you know, destroys a unit, then there may be some assistance on a case by case basis there. So this is one of the this is one of the innovations that has come out of this team that I think can have a direct immediate impact on this particular situation. As some of us have experienced in trying to help certain people that are in this exact situation. So I don't want to gloss over this. And y'all might have wanted to cover it later on. But this is I mean, there's a lot behind what I'm trying to say is we see a slide up here. We see barriers fund, we see housing solutions, we see dashboard, the amount of data and the amount of time and energy and creativity that's gone in. There's so much behind. That's the tip of the iceberg. What you're seeing on these slides is the tip of the iceberg. So if you have any questions outside of this presentation, please seek somebody out because there's so much more that we're that that is there than what we have to we could spend a whole afternoon. Right. Yes, Councilmember. Well, the question on the barriers fund. If somebody if somebody may be watching this on on TV, or live streaming or they may be viewing this later, and they may say, hmm, $7500. I think I can get a couple of people and we can match that and get that money out there. Who do they talk to? Who do they give it to? And are they giving it to an organization that is a 501 c three? Right. So the donations are going to go to the United Way of Dent on County. And that's right up on their website under the homeless. And I think the United Way is probably those donations are tax deductible. Yes. Maybe they are they aren't I don't know about the new tax code. Good answer, Councilman Gary at United Way Denton dot org. If you have that $7500 donor, they can email me right now. Yeah. And to your point, the questions you were asking earlier when the developer was doing their presentation as well. We learned from our presentation from the palm tree group and from from hearing from that developer, I think you're hearing that consistent message that if we can lower the debt or lower the risk for the folks who might be eligible to house folks , and those are really positive solutions and this various fund is the first way we can do that. Yeah. And the third thing is to make sure that we have a dashboard available so that people it's public facing so people can actually see over time how we're doing to improve the situations around homelessness in the community. So in addition to our own internal city goal of reducing homelessness by 20 percent by 2020, we actually had adopted through the homeless leadership team, just seven core of system performance measures that we're working towards that I think just just so you understand what they look like. So it's not just reducing the number of homelessness, but a couple of important best practices like reducing the length of time people are experiencing homelessness because the longer people stay homeless, the more barriers they get and it's harder to house them. Also reducing the number of people who are first time homeless. I'll talk a little bit about that in a minute. But getting that number down, keeping people houses and much more cost effective solution than it is letting them get homeless. Councilmember has no question. So using Mayor Watts example, I'm, I'm very linear in my thoughts. So I need help using his example, can, because I think it's important to speak to and those that are watching, I think it's important to speak to almost the business side of the business. So using his example, if I'm a, if I'm a property owner and I can get market rates or I can partner with the group and get below market rates to help out, is it, is it incumbent upon us to find owners that are apartment property owners that are willing to help out or is there a financial incentive that I'm missing? So there's two options. So yes, part of the work of the housing navigator will be to identify landlords who are willing to do something that is public service oriented. That's going to help this particular population. But the second part of that is the barriers fund or funds like that, which will allow us to come to them with a financial incentive to lower those barriers and help people get housed. So we have two tools, I think. If I may. Sure. I agree. But if they're not, if they don't have a heart for that, right, if they're, if they're not passionate about being civic minded, the, the assumption is that could be a higher risk rental, right? I mean, if I'm, if I'm looking, if I'm putting on my black hat, there's, there's a, there's a chance there's a higher, that's a higher risk rental. So as an owner, is there another incentive other than, because if I have a moderate risk and a high risk, what makes me lean towards the high risk if I'm not civically minded? And that's the second part of the fund that we talked about , the landlord or the risk mitigation. So the outreach would be actually things like buy down. So you'd still get market rate. We would just buy down, we would pay you a one time advance fee to reduce that. So in the mayor's scenario where he was saying it was, we needed to get that rent down to $1,100, we might give you that $200 difference over a 12 month period. So you're actually getting market rate. But then when we sign the lease for that individual and that individual is in that home, that rate is below fair market and we can utilize the federal funds for it. So that's one example of how you're still getting market rate. And then you have access to the risk mitigation fund on the back end that says if there's damages, it's not going to come out of your pocket. Someone's protecting your asset. Okay. And the case managers also. Oh yeah. And the other incentive for this is that with all of these subsidized or supported housing programs, there's case management support. So the landlord isn't having to deal with the additional issues that might come up with a client with higher needs. Okay. So you're getting the additional help of having someone communicate with that tenant for you. Got it. I'm tracking with you. One more. Yes. Okay. And so then my other question would be take the financial aspect and set that aside. I'm with you. But there's also a social aspect and a concern there that will all my tenants play well together? Right. And so how do you, what is your, how do you address that? I mean, again, I just, I'm trying to look at the other side of the equation. I understand the helpful side of it. I'm trying to say if someone speaks to me about, I don't know if there's, if my community would welcome, you know, or be want to enter that risk or neighbors are upset or just, I mean, it's no different than, you know, an apartment complex next to the jail or something. You know, it's like there's a concern there generally. And how do you address that? How do you speak to those that would say the family care specialist can only be around at certain times? Right. And so there may be a concern and how do you speak to those in the neighborhood that may have a concern about that? So I think that's just part of the relationship building with the landlords and trying to overcome some of that thought process by things like case management support, being around that person, the understanding that not everyone's coming to you with the issues that you're making assumptions about. So I think it's just educating those folks to the clientele , making sure there's a better understanding of who they might be helping. So there's a difference between someone who's in a longterm need of permanent supportive housing versus someone in a rapid rehousing program. So it's easy enough to say for the housing navigator, if that position were available, for that person to come in and say, I've got a family of three who just lost his job, she's not working right now, and we just need to get them housed so they can get stable and with three months of support and then they'll be your good tenant beyond that. So it's a difference in looking at the different clientele and there might be a different appetite between different landlords for the different service needs as well. So those are all pieces of which we can navigate through the doors for Denton County program. Okay. Yeah. And then Gary and then Councilmember Briggs has a question. I just want to underscore what Danny is saying, Councilman Hussbett, you're absolutely on track. That is the key role of the housing navigator who really understands the landlords and the property managers as well as the case manager knows the clients and making sure that when a case manager is reaching out for housing, the housing navigator understands the needs and the expectations of the property owner in such a way that they create a good fit on that side. I mean, that's critically important. Yeah, no, I really like- Matching is really important, right? I really like what you said towards the end because I think it's one thing, if I'm coming into the mindset, if I have a negative mindset, just mere, "Hey, it's going to be okay," may not patch it up. But what you said there towards the end is, "Here's the scenario I'm bringing to you. Here's the end goal." And so now if I'm concerned, I'm put at ease because you're not just plugging people in. And you've taken the time to assess and then find a good fit. And now I'm plugging in someone that fits. I think it's encouraging. It's an encouraging message to say, "Okay, well, you understand the family that's getting our individual that's being placed and here's what we're trying to do." And so it shows more of a buy-in and I think that communic ates well. Yeah. And the two other points of being able to navigate with each individual landlord is that you may lower one or two barriers and there might be a landlord that'll lower five or six of them. Right? So and then as the pilots go through, then you'll also have other advocates. So the mayor could be an advocate for us. He's had folks like that who he's accepted in housing to talk to other landlords and landlords can speak to each other and sort of help us with that as well. Yes, ma'am. So a couple of comments. I'm really glad we're having this conversation because if we have those two things in place, like a list of friendly landlords, the barriers fund there, that could definitely cut down on the amount of time that these families or individuals are waiting on rapid rehousing. Absolutely. Currently family discussion has been homeless for about three months waiting on this and you're right, Council Member Hutsbeth. There are landlords out there who don't have to rent to high risk because they can rent to other people. They're waiting at the door because our housing stock is so low. But this family, hypothetically, has everything. They've done everything right. They have all the information. One of them is working. They have the funds available, but the landlords just aren 't willing to take that risk. So that is happening. And so we need to do all that we can to cut down on that time. Which is probably why the housing navigator piece, which we don't have yet, is going to be equally important to add to just to have someone. We saw the success of having a homeless coordinator. We've seen the success of having someone to really be that ringleader to support these services. And so I think there's proof that there's value in having that coordination. I was speaking just finally to the data dashboard to just make sure you understood the different things that we're working on. It's not just reducing the number, but also those reducing the barriers and increasing income and those kinds of things. So those are all things that we'll be measuring in the data dashboard as well that will be public facing. And then we'll also look at communicating with you on a more frequent basis as we move forward so that you have more of this data on an ongoing basis as well. This is really just to show what the current commitment is from the city towards some of these initiatives, either through direct funding or pass through funding with the federal government. Wasn't really going to go into in depth in this, but if you had some specific questions about any of those. The FY7, last year, this is this year, but last year, the 200,000 that we committed to the ESG, this is just what we normally budget. I mean, I say normally. General fund. Right. You're seeing a reflection of both. So you can see the 200,000 under the emergencies. Okay. Is this right here? That was what's contributed. That was in 1617. This is 1718. Now we're over here. It's the 925. Right, which is the 600,000 here. Yeah. Okay. Council Member Briggs. So I just want to take this moment because it is listed here. The Employee to Empower program from Serp Denton, they are no longer carrying that program. Right. So it wasn't necessarily Serp Denton's program. Serp Denton provided the fiscal agency for that program, but yes, Serp Denton was the contracted entity and they did ask, and we sent it out in the last Friday report, they requested that our contract be terminated for this program. It wasn't working efficiently at the time that they asked for that request. They wanted to go back to the drawing board and figure out how they might reorganize and restructure to see if there's something new they could bring forward. Did you have some specific questions about? Well, yeah. I just wanted to bring that to the attention to the public because that was in the staff report and it wasn't well known. And I know that there was a lot of community support for that. And I just want to draw attention to it, that it doesn't go away and that it comes back in some form or another, but also because it's on the budget, the $21,000 there, and does that mean that's going to come back into? So we only gave them the 21,000 for fiscal year '16-'17. We hadn't actually written the check for '17-'18, and they did just submit the return of the remaining amount balance of the 21,000. So we got a check back for '14-'49, just today, in fact, from them for the balance. They only expended about $6,500 of the first initial 21,000 of the allocation. For '17-'18? For '16-'17, actually. So the timing, unfortunately, it took them a while to get off the ground. So it didn't actually kick off until the end of September of '16-'17. So we wrote them the check in August in the last fiscal year. They started operating in September and then operated through truly the end of December, and there was one employee through January. So less than six months, and they wanted to cancel it? Right. There was a real difficulty. I don't know if you saw the report, but just to give you kind of a scale of it, they took in 50 applications of people interested in the program, but by the time it got to the interview process, there were down to 17 applicants. And then they made 15 offers out of the 17, and only nine completed the drug test, and then it dropped down to four who actually showed up for work. So there was a real disconnect with the incentives to the program and trying to get people interested in doing it. It could have been the short-term nature. It could have been -- Well, and I understand that's important, and if we need to have a more in-depth workshop on that, because I think my understanding is they're going back and trying to figure out how we can -- they can rework the program. And with some of the data we're getting now and some of the ideas, that's certainly a conversation we can go more in-depth. And I'm not trying to cut you off. I just know we could talk about this for a long time, but I think what -- I appreciate you bringing it up in this public forum so that the public knows about it. I think what happened was they just -- they didn't get the turnout and the commitment to the program from the clientele that they had anticipated , and so they're trying to figure out how to rework that in order to increase that. So if we need to come back again to talk about that in more depth, be glad to do that. Is there anything more pressing that -- yeah, go ahead. Well, no, just when we do, we need to set goals, because I do know out of those four, two actually have jobs now. They're functioning. They have jobs. They're back in. So we just need to set what goals and what we consider success, because to me that's -- Yeah, that's a good point. I appreciate you bringing that up, and it is. I mean, it's two people that might not otherwise be in that situation, but for that program. Absolutely. Any other questions on how the funding is allocated currently? I know we have a few different sources of funding that's coming in. So let me look here. So Christian Community -- the 925, does that include the Christian Community Action of 145? It does, because we're a pass-through for that grant. We actually do fund Christian Community Action. Some of it may serve people -- The majority does. Right. So it's Christian Community Action. You can see they have $145,000 of that funding for homeless prevention and rapid rehousing in Louisville. And again, it's not our funding. It's passed through to us so we can support programs outside of this. Now one thing I don't see up there, because it's an in-kind , is the lease for the Monsignor King. Right. We actually saw it on the next slide. Oh, you do? Okay. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Yeah, no, it's okay. Thank you for moving us forward. Fine. Let's go. Let's fly right through. Okay. So some of the other city contributions that we have is providing for that shelter for Monsignor King, which ultimately now has added 90 beds. And that was really an immediate result of the Mayor's Task Force. One of the first things that the Council took action on was to increase the number of emergency shelter beds in the community. And so by offering up this lease until 2025, there are now additional shelter beds that we didn't have before. And then of course, there's human resources that are dedicated to this, including the Mayor and Councilmember Briggs, who are serving on the Hom eless Leadership Team, to staff in public affairs and community development helping out with these initiatives. And then our public safety are also involved on this on a day-to-day basis through police and fire responses to. So I want to emphasize this again. So not well, the Mayor's Homelessness Task Force, they had several recommendations. Three or four. Three. Right. Which was homeless coordinator, increased shelter beds. Right. What was the third one? I can't remember. The third was actually to look at affordable housing. One of the projects on the table at the time was the project by Denton Affordable Housing Corp on Hinkle. That project has since not made. Okay. But that was the third recommendation. But so. The priorities were three very specific ones though, is to increase funding and resources, to increase affordable housing, and to look at systems change. So those were the priorities that were set by that group, which resulted in those three recommendations. And so we, we, the City Council took that task force recommendation. Correct. To heart and executed the lease with Monsignor King to provide, and they spent three or $400,000, $300,000 I think in renovations. Yes. And then where we had zero additional capacity for emergency shelter, because they lost or they were moved or whatever, they didn't have the available space that they had before. Correct. We now have, you know, they served up to 90 people during inclement weather just recently. So we went from zero to 90 within a span of about a year, or however it took them. A year and two months, yeah. So it started out with 40 beds, and then they were able to expand to just at the end of 16 to the 90 beds. And it's, they're open actually Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, as well as inclement weather. So every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday they're also open. It's not full time. It's not 24 hours, but it is. It's certainly more than what we had. Absolutely. Okay. So the question is with all of this investment, why are people still experiencing homelessness? And it's an important question to ask every time. Gratefully you've made the case for a lot of that. So let's talk about what this is. We have. Yeah, right. I'm just teasing. We have a housing crisis response system that looks as complicated as the first graphic. So I simplified it to kind of help give you a visual of what's happening. So on the left hand side, you're seeing how people are experiencing homelessness commonly in our community. They're in a shelter, they're staying in their car, they're sleeping in tents, or they're staying in something that might have a roof, but is really considered uninhabitable. And every person we're doing outreach to, to make sure they get into our coordinated entry system, the triage, so that we are counting every single person who's experiencing homelessness. That's the goal. So, and the goal is then to move them into a permanent solution. However, when you move to the right, you can see there's a number of barriers to those permanent solutions that we've already covered pretty well today. But just to highlight it, there's not enough subsidy for enough rehousing based on the numbers that we have. We don't have enough permanent supportive housing beds. They're currently all full. We don't have any kind of affordable housing available on the scale that it's necessary to get people housed. And then, of course, the housing choice vouchers are what you know as Section 8. They don't have any, there's a wait list. So all of those represent barriers to getting people permanently housed. So on the top section, you'll see we still then have people who are in temporary shelters or who are living unsheltered. I think Council Member Huffman had a question or observation. I have a question regarding, because it cuts both ways, right? Affordable housing, is there, I mean, I think I like the term lower barrier housing. I don't know, there's got to be a better word for that, right? Because affordable housing, I think, it cuts both ways. So people are shocked at what a new house costs and didn't just because the market is what it is. And I think instantly that gives people an impression, right? So if you say affordable housing and the current rate, let 's say it's $240,000, $250,000 for a new home and didn't. That shocks people that have lived here for a while to understand that it costs that much. But that is the entry level, right? And so then it becomes a matter of, so I think it's just, that's a challenge for me is I think when you start a conversation talking about affordable housing and you start plus 200,000, I mean, it sets everybody in different mindsets if you're not plugged into it. If you're not watching it, it's shocking. You drive by the cupboard and I don't see $1 million property, but that property on the tax rolls is $1 million. And so I think people just don't, if you're not tracking with it, you don't understand how the markets transitioned. And so now if I'm having a conversation with someone, I'm automatically almost affecting how it's going to go due to my vernacular. So I don't know if there's a better word or I would just kind of leave you with that thought. And maybe it's me, maybe I need to be educated. But I'm trying to tell you when I'm telling someone, no, no , no, 240,000, that's where you start. That's your world. I've heard that off a neighbor that's been saying affordable housing. Yeah, now I get it. Some people use terminology like workforce housing. I like to utilize kind of a broader based terminology that 's accessible, available and affordable, sort of just kind of putting it all together to say there are different ways in which people are facing this issue. But the truth is, if you have someone on Social Security who's making $773 a month and your rent is supposed to only be 30% of your income, that's a $ 200 unit. That's what we're talking about is affordable. How does that person live independently and be able to afford something that doesn't put them at cost burden, which is 30% or 50%. So that's just, and it's how we talk about it, but you're absolutely right. Finding a better word would be excellent. No, no, if I may. So that what you, because you cranked that out like it was, I mean, you have it, right? Yes, sir. And so that's what I'm soliciting from you, right? Yes. If I have a one page that does that math that you just touched on, right? And so I think that then frames it for people, right? If I had a one pager that explains that here's how much someone, if they're working for this wage, here's how much they make, here's how much they can afford. If I had like a sample budget or something like that, it just helps frame it for me because I don't deal with it every day as far as an understanding, right? And when I'm trying to communicate a point or just myself understand it better, that would help me a ton because now I'm absolutely tracking with you. Where are you going to find an apartment for $200? So it helps me, it really helps me a lot to kind of have those tools that get past the buzzwords, right? Let's get down to, because most of the people I would encounter, I think, even if they're assuming, because if they're willing to help, then I don't have to present a lot of information to them. But if they're not willing to help, those are the ones I'm trying to turn and those are the ones that just merely saying, no, no, it's a need may not flip the switch. But if I go with tangible data with information of one p ager that kind of lays that out, now they're saying, okay, now I get it, hopefully. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of great resources that are already existing, like the National Low-Income Housing Tax Initiative has a ton of great information even on the county level. So we don't have to recreate that. So if that's something you're interested in, we can put some context. Yeah, get him some information. It's like a chart and one page, right? So, I mean, you can cut out the, just pictures. I can talk about it. I know, I thought, I obviously didn't have enough pictures in here. Mario, set the standard, I think. But I did draw my own, so there you go. Okay, thank you. So, I'm going to go ahead and put that in the chat. So, I'm going to go ahead and put that in the chat. So, I'm going to go ahead and put that in the chat. So, I'm going to go ahead and put that in the chat. Any other questions? Any questions, at least up to this point? I know you got a couple more slides left. Right. I did want to make the case, too, at the bottom of this particular image. There's also, and Gary gave you those numbers, 42,000 people in Denton County who are, you know, at the poverty level. So, we have a lot of people living at risk and our job equally has to be preventing those people from becoming homeless. And I know I mentioned it earlier, but it is so much cheaper to give someone three months of housing subsidy to keep them in their house than it is to try to work with them once they become homeless. So, it's much more cost-effective solution. So, we have to find ways to invest in this more as well. So, all this being said, it just means that people are still living in shelter while they're waiting or they're living on the streets while they're waiting for a permanent housing solution. We just don't have the stock. So, the question before us now, I think, is how do we balance that need for the safe and secure shelter relief to meet the needs of the current homeless population while still focusing our limited resources on long-term permanent solutions like those that are being worked on with the Homeless Leadership Team and the Denton County Homeless Coalition and a number of other great agencies who are looking at trying to combat this issue. For me, it comes down to that there are three major issues that we still have to deal with and that's we still have to address this emergency issue, some way or some form. We have to prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place and we have to expand our housing capacity. And so, the way that we're looking at this now is to say how can we use this data to start making some informed decisions about where to best allocate our existing resources to make sure we're using it in the best way, but also to look at where we need additional investment. And what, from you, are the priority areas that you want to see that investment made in and then decide where we want to increase funding and assets to meet the current need. But as the Mayor said earlier, we're going to grow and with a growth in population, there's going to be a growth in homelessness. So, we have to be able to match that future need as well. So this brings us to the conversation about TIT and CAM and so the research that you asked us to do. We did a lot of research and analysis. Some of it happened prior to your questions because we did actually visit four different communities over the course of the last year or so. And so, we learned a lot from the villages of Hickory Creek in Dallas about how they're addressing permanent supportive housing for, in tiny homes. A contingent of us went to Austin and talked with their Mayor and their staff about how they're coordinating together to work on this issue. They have about $14 million to do it, but that's, you know, a little jealous. And then a group went to Boulder to also look at what they were doing. And then after this conversation, we also went down to San Antonio and visited Haven for Hope, which is a comprehensive look at how they saw homelessness and sort of sheltering in a unique way. It's actually a really large operation. >> Councilmember Briggs had a question. >> Did you visit any current tent cities in any of the places that you went to? >> I did not, no. We have a street outreach team of our nonprofits as well as our public safety and a couple of other groups who come, like the veterans groups that go out with those to visit the tent cities and build those relationships. But directly, as far as this research, we did not. >> Oh, yeah. Yeah, I didn't mean in Denton. I meant in the other cities when you went to talk to their, if they had -- >> I can't speak to Boulder. I don't know if that was a part of the conversation there. Okay. Okay. So when we were at Haven for Hope, we were actually looking at a system that showed us how they were addressing that really low barrier. I mean, it's a gate with a canvas cover and people can come in and sleep whenever they want to. Or if you're willing to then work on some initial services, then you get moved into really what is shelter in a different way. So they had a lot of different varieties of shelter options too, which is another thing that we don't have. So they had shelter for men, shelter for women, shelter for families, shelter for single moms. So there was a lot of different ways in which they were providing shelter there too. So it was all sort of a step process. Here if you don't want to do anything but you just need a place to sleep that's safe, there's the courtyard. Here if you want sheltering, there's this option for sheltering. If you want to move and you've gone through the process, you've done some work, you're improved, you're ready to live independently, then there's even affordable housing complex with about 100 units there. So it was a pretty interesting operation to visit. >> Can I have a follow-up? >> Sure. >> In the first level, where if they just wanted to place to sleep, was there a time limit? Like okay, well you can come here and you can be -- >> No. They could be there 24/7 if they wanted. >> Oh, I -- >> And it's long-term. They could stay -- >> Long-term, I guess, is the time limit. >> No, there was no time limitations on when they could stay and it was open during the day, which was I think a big piece of -- >> Okay. Councilmember Gregory. >> I visited there also. >> Oh. >> One of the things that I was concerned about and I think that we're all concerned about is even in those areas, are they taking care of basic health and basic safety? And one of the things that I noted in terms of safety was there was a police officer on duty -- >> Correct. >> All the time. So there was -- >> Multiple hits, right. Yeah. >> And they had access to restrooms, to showers, and to places to wash their clothes. >> Right. And food. >> And folks that were not willing to commit to any kind of programs to earn their way into higher quality housing, IE a bed and maybe heating and air conditioning, they still had a place to stay where there was some thing to address safety and security. >> Right. Exactly. >> And health. >> Yeah. >> And then there was also a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> Yeah. >> And then there was a lot of other things that we were concerned about. >> No, I would ask, not today, but again, just kind of food for thought. In our backup at Tuts Dawn, and I heard about it in Charlotte when we were there for a conference. And so I'd be interested to understand kind of the group's take on the, I think it was the ACLU's lawsuit for clearing out a camp, because I'll tell you, that to me is more, my question is, would the group be willing to, the homeless coordination group, would they be willing to speak against that behavior? Because to me, that is not helpful. I understand the rights side of it. I understand that argument. But the other side of that is to protect the city, then I'm almost like, let's not allow them to congregate, because it 's a lawsuit if we do. And so I think when you're talking about coexisting, I'm curious where the group stands on the city getting sued for clearing out encampments. And so I think that's just something to kick around, because specifically the site you cleared out, when you're talking propane tanks and a child's nursery right in front of that, that to me is difficult, right? Well, it's not difficult, but it's a difficult decision to make. But I think when you're talking about working together, I'm curious where, kind of just down the road, where if you can process that. The homeless leadership team specifically, or just any other groups? Yes, because I'll tell you, that's going to be an important issue for me. So if the homeless leadership team is like, we think the ACLU is right and we think there should be rights associated with that clearing out, then I need help understanding that. And when I put on my city hat, then to protect the city, I need to start clearing them out early before I get into legal issues. And so it's one of those things where it has to work together. And so one group has to be sensitive to the other so that we can all coexist. But if we're supporting lawsuits, then I need to know that. Sure. I don't want to get too sidetracked on this specific issue, but it's something we need to talk about both in the leadership team and its conversation. We need to have. I mean, the council with the input from our public service and so I think that's a great point that requires a lot of research and data gathering. So I appreciate you bringing that up. And so let's make sure we get that on the agenda. I was going to say, we'll make sure we vote the agenda of the homeless leadership team and this agenda, because it's good point. And I'm not really familiar with what you're talking about as far as Charlotte or a lawsuit and all that. So I can't really speak to that, but I certainly can do some research. Sure. Yeah, that National Law Center on Homeless and Pover ty report is has significant information about the legal information and trade provided us some guidance to just about what things we might consider. One of the things I mentioned earlier was the shelter. People aren't choosing shelter. The shelter beds aren't meeting their needs. And there's a couple of reasons for that. The biggest one, of course, that we've already mentioned is there's just not enough supply for the demand. But just thinking about why people don't choose shelter, it 's really not always the most appropriate option. So when I talked about it earlier, our homeless shelters currently, one serves domestic violent victims only and the other one, the other one serve folks who are single. So if there is a family who's experiencing homelessness, there's not really an option for them without some accommodations. And so you can imagine you and your family experiencing and being under stress and then being forced to split up if you go into a shelter or not being able to stay together and how much additional stress that is. There's always a length of stay restrictions right now in our particular shelter, so you can't stay long enough to really obtain stability. And we have to work on that. There's long wait time. So if you're working, because we found out in our point in time count, more than half of our folks are actually employed. So if you're working, you can't take off of your job to go stand in line and hope you get a bed in the shelter that night. And then the bigger one, too, for us is they can't bring in their personal belongings. So you have to choose between a bed and keeping the things that are most important to you. You're probably going to choose those things that are most important to you. Who is the "us" when you said the bigger one for us when you're talking about, are you talking about the homeless? In our community, what we learned from our mayor's task force. You're talking about the challenges. I just want to make sure I understand the context. None of our shelters are open for the day. There's no place to store things. And so oftentimes that's why people choose encampments for the simple reason of just being able to keep their stuff together. And then the rules themselves make it hard to get a job. So if you have to come in at a certain time, you have to leave at a certain time. You can't have some flexibility in that. That really creates a detriment. So it's not all the reasons why you think people choose homelessness. There is a small group of people who probably that's true for. For the majority of folks, they're just facing a choice that is just untenable for them. Do you have a question? Well, yeah, I mean, that I hear all of those things and I saw in the backup that the there's only 22 percent need for emergency shelter being met. If we take the full list of six hundred ninety one people, really, those beds only mean about 20 percent. Changes on a given day. And, you know, that number is not a perfect number, but it 's just giving an idea of how limited. We have the shelters. They're only open certain days and certain times. And so my question and one of the reasons I called for this is this work session. What do we do? I mean, we've got to do something. Right. But that's that's the next slide, I think, is the what role does the city take? I'm sure the question you're asking. I mean, this is I mean, you say, what do we do? There's several components to that. There's a community. What does the city do as a bureaucracy, as an administration? So, of course, this body only can make the decision on that particular one. So that's what I'm understanding that you're asking. Is that what I'd probably say? Maybe there's two. But the first is really determining what the city wants to do as far as policy and procedure with this particular issue and understanding what those best practices are. The other is sort of advocating for a dramatic increase in housing, whatever that looks like, if it's emergency or if it's permanent. We are in a position to advocate for that for everyone in the community to benefit from. And then there's a third component of just educating the public about the issue so that we can overcome some of those things that council member has sort of alluded to that there is resistance in the community for this population because of stereotypes or because of misconceptions. So understanding how to advocate for that and to share that information with our community so that they are more supportive when we are coming forward with policies or initiatives is important. There's a lot that's unknown. So if we're considering what we might do in this space, we don't know what the current cost is specifically well enough to be able to say, is there a cost benefit? Would it save us money under an organized environment or not? We don't really understand what the level of community acceptance is overall. What there might be in far as legal and regulatory issues, if you came forward with any sort of policy recommendations , we'd have to get those reviewed to make sure it would address any of those issues that council member has brought forward. We don't understand what the insurance cost might be depending on who's operating it, whether it's us or someone else. What those basic services might need to be within that space if we were to offer something. What would be included? Who would pay for it? Who are the right partners at the table? This is a really important question. It can't just be the city initiative. So who are the right people to talk to? What capital assets are even available? Are there city properties available? Are there private property available that would address this issue? And then what would the ownership really look like of this type of project? Would it be -- and do we even have an organization that's capable of sustaining it, has the capacity to do something like this? And there's some cons to what we learned from the research that I don't want to kind of address. I want to address everything that was in the research tool, but I do want to kind of talk about those. Not many communities are sanctioning it of their research. In one of them, they surveyed 187 cities, and only 10 have some explicit -- or have explicitly permitted that activity . Only 10 out of 187 cities. It's pretty small. And then it really focuses really vital resources on temporary rather than permanent solutions. And the goal to getting people out of homelessness is to get them housed. We have to be looking at those permanent solutions. And of course, there will be new issues that will emerge. I mean, who's going to want a tent city in their neighborhood? The attractive nuisance of it. Some of our citizens feel like if we build it, they will come, meaning we'll increase our homeless population just because there's something available to us. And we don't really understand the risk and liability that could happen. We've seen it in at least one instance, but those are kind of the biggest ones. The overall community resistance. Yes, sir? I don't know. Did you have a question? No, I'm going to wait until she's -- Oh, okay. And then there's just, again, the resource limitations that I spoke to earlier. Who has the capacity to really do something like this? And then of course, there's some pros, too. What is already happening will be regulated, a little bit more controlled. It will increase immediately the access to the number of safe places to sleep. There is some detail in the research that says that it can lead to empowerment of folks who are experiencing homelessness to provide solutions for themselves so that they can be a partner in that process. There are currently unopened city properties that might be available. And then I spoke to this earlier in a different context, but building that trust, so having police and fire in those spaces to make sure there's opportunities to build those relationships is one tool to help us look at permanent solutions. One of the other options that we wanted to make sure that you heard that while this temporary solution is out there is that there's a way in which the homeless leadership team can be a tool to help advocate with shelters to change how they're operating. But I think it needs to be explored to give those folks different options that are lowering barriers even more. The USICH has a great paper on how to strategically end homelessness using shelter. I think it has a lot of great recommendations in it that could be vital here. Just making sure shelter rules are more inclusive, maybe being open more. And then some of the other things in the research that we learned about were some other ideas like LA was providing trailers. We, of course, visited San Antonio and saw their courtyard as an option. But those day shelters and those places to store belongings come up time and time again as possible solutions to help increase people's willingness to access shelter beds that are available when they're available. So we're at kind of our final slide, which is what are our next steps and recommendations for you today is to continue to participate with the homeless leadership team. We're going to be working with the state and the state ad hoc and the data and housing work groups that are really looking to advance permanent options and solutions. We are about to launch a city homeless leadership team, which is our homeless team with our, you know, city departments to make sure we're communicating better across departments for all the different agencies in this organization that are dealing with this issue. And then we're going to be working with the public safety piece of and collect a little bit more data so that we have a little bit more information about what the direct impact is to the city's resources. And then to help do some development of some communication tools so we can sort of make the case to the public. Why we need to be doing more. So, I think a couple of other next steps. That I don't think that we have the information for yet is, if you look countywide and it can. How much are we spending right now. When you talk about all the social service agencies that are spending money for temporary shelters. The, the ancillary services that we're also providing for how much money the county is ending up paying for folks that are that are because they're homeless because they're so social funds are using the ER is their primary source for medical services. I think it would be important to know just exactly county wide. Because it might be that if we took all of that money and put it in one pot together we would, we would be able to do a whole lot more than, than we are currently doing. I know that they've done that in some other cities. They've spent all that money and they put it into to homes first program. And they gave all those folks stability because they had a place to go every night and they have a place to keep their things every night. And then they were able to to better care of themselves, medically, they were able to. Another thing to know is, are there some cities in the area or counties in the area that they're doing some things that that would be appropriate for us to copy to emulate. And I, and I, when I went down to San Antonio to see that program. Haven for hope. It was, it was eye opening and I got a big long tour I spent over four hours there, going through all different aspects of it. And, but people had to earn their way into more stable permanent housing. And that may be that may be the best model but it may be you know using a Salt Lake City model of housing first is a better model. But, but that takes a lot of funding to make that happen. And cooperation. So anyway, if we could get that kind of information but I think one of the important things for everybody in the community to know is when somebody makes a comment that the city of Denton is not doing anything for the homeless, that that's just a plain and accurate statement. We may not be doing enough. But, but there are a lot of things that we're doing to address those needs, including diversion. For some people are in some crisis situations and we're, we 're supporting some of those agencies that help them out of those crisis, so that they don't become homeless and as you said, keeping them in a home is a whole lot cheaper, cheaper than putting them back in one. Absolutely. Thank you for those recommendations will certainly the two of them will take to the homeless leadership team to see how we can get some more detail on that. So I think what you were talking about or discussing was the housing first versus housing readiness, which I think the temp encampments do they prepare or can prepare if you have the certain programs in there for housing readiness to advance out into a different. So I would like to see because status quo isn't working and we have to do something and some of these things are going to take a lot longer than others. Personally, I would really like to see us focus on a shelter for families because I know that is something we don't have in our community, but I know that it's not something immediate. Funding a housing navigator. That's something that we can do. Working with the shelters that we have to make sure they're open more frequently all day. I assumed and I thought that the Monsignor King was going to go open longer than three days, but that was the plan for the future. But I haven't ever gotten that confirmed I think maybe I just I thought that but that would be really great if we could work with them to extend their hours and days. And I would also I would also like to not give up on the tent village. Because I, sorry. Someone brought the land behind the Monsignor King, because I think that is still city owned property. Actually sure of that. It's in the flight plan for sure but I don't as an option to start like a pilot and only allow a certain number of people in there and you can you can set a max and it answers the question where are you going to go today. When we don't have that answer right now for anybody when they ask. You can provide tent searches, you can have boundaries, and what I would really like to hear from is either officer Pad gett or the chief on what they think of tent villages, or the ones that we currently have in our city, if the council doesn't mind. Go ahead. There's a lot of different aspects of a tent city. And mostly from a public safety standpoint it's what happens outside the density in the surrounding neighborhood . Okay, if you look at Monsignor King Center now. Its neighbors aren't very happy that it's there. So that's what you have to deal with wherever you put us any, you know, not in my backyard, as Danny said, so no matter what we do or where we do it, that's kind of what you're going to have to deal with. Maybe these people have a place to go. And that's great. But what do they do when they're not there. You know, also, we've got people in town that are not homeless that exhibit the same behaviors as somebody that is homeless that create that that not my backyard feeling. So, does that answer your question at all. I don't think that's the answer she was looking for. You asked what kind of what I thought but right yeah yeah no I understand that. So an area though that is there all day. So, my question is so if there are tent cities around currently, or there are encampments I guess because they're smaller currently in Denton. And so they don't stay there all day leave their encamp ments and come and come out into. Okay, to access services. So, if there were an encampment with services nearby. Do you think that would eliminate any issues that we currently have. I don't know that it would eliminate the issues. If we had a place that had the, you know, giving hope was nearby and food was nearby, you know, it might confine it to a smaller area or a different area. You know, most of our services are in the downtown area. You know, that's six square blocks or so, so that's where most of the activity happens and, and, you know, they can access those services. But then when they're not accessing those services when we get the issues of, hey this guy's asking me for change on the square, and that sort of thing. So, that's what we have to address from, from a public safety standpoint is what happens around wherever the campus. Okay, you're right, whether we sanction camps or not we're going to have camps. So, from my standpoint, whether they're sanctioned or not, I still have to deal with those issues around wherever the campus. Do you feel like if we had shelters open during the day, and more frequently that that would that would help some of the issues that we see around town. I think it would would help in that somebody would have a place to go. You know now it's here at the library or the park. During the day, they'd have a place to store their property. So they could go look for a job or go look, you know, do whatever they needed to do to better themselves. They have a place to put that property and be safe because even at Monsignor King they don't they can't leave it there when they leave. Okay, thank you. I'm good. I'll have questions for you per se. Just a couple of comments. Councilmember Riggs I have to respectfully disagree. I don 't believe we're in the status quo. I think what's the most frustrating thing about this conversation for me is three or four years ago, nobody was having this conversation. We didn't have Monsignor King. We didn't have a homelessness coordinator. We didn't have a homelessness leadership team. Now is it time for us to start doing something that continues to move us forward? Yes, I don't think tent cities are the answer. That doesn't mean that we can't monitor them while they're here because they're going to they're going to come up. But I think as the officer said, we've got we've got to find a more comprehensive approach. But this city has done a tremendous amount of work in the last three years. When I look at a million dollars a year that we that we now if we want to reallocate those funds somehow. I don't know how it's some of its through committees and recommendations and all that. Can we do more? Absolutely. Are we the only ones that I think should be doing it? Absolutely not. This is a county problem and this is an issue that is not necessarily the in the total purview of the city of Denton. And I think the city of Denton has taken a very strong lead in doing something about this. So it's not anything about your comment, but I get very concerned when I hear that people say we're not doing anything. When I look up on this screen. Two years ago, we weren't sheltering 90 people. They were out on the street. They were sleeping under people's hedgerows. They were sleeping on park benches. They were doing all that. As far as Monsignor King and how they run their shelter, it 's all volunteer. I'll be glad to chat with them. And if the city wants to do something or some nonprofits wants to do something helps with funding or some additional services, we can see if they're open to that. But I do not want to discount what we've done up to this point. That doesn't mean we can't do more. But to say that somehow the status quo, I don't even know what that means. I agree with you that our biggest need in this community is housing for families, homeless families. If you're a single person, you can go to the shelter. If you don't have much, you can leave it there. You can leave it outside. I'm not saying that's ideal, but it's something for families. We literally have nothing except to put them up in a hotel. And to me, if I were to say the status quo, if I were to label anything the status quo, that that has not been addressed over the last two or three years, I would say that would be the issue because you've been dealing with it for a few months. I've been dealing with it in the last couple of weeks. And it's a tragedy that we don't. But six months ago, we would not have had the Barriers Fund to potentially provide some financial support to people to make up the delta in the fair market rent and try to mitigate some of those risks in landlords. I'm going to come back to what I've said from day one. We can sit here and talk till we're blue in the face. We can throw all the money we want to in the world at it. But until we find places where we can put people, the solution isn't to put them in a tent. It's how can we find a place where people can actually have a roof over their head, can have shelter from the elements, and have some sense of self-confidence and to begin to build that self-confidence to re-merge into society to be able to be self-sustaining. So we've got to get more units. Building them? I mean, you didn't show the data. You didn't show the data about how much money, if we were to find housing for all these people, it was like $3 or $4 million, I think, or something like that. Yeah, it's a little more than that when you combine. Okay. So how much was it? 3.4. 3.4. 3.4. That's yearly. Right. Okay. If we weren't making an impact. We would expect some of that to go down over time. It's not going to go down to zero. Right. Well, we hope so. At some point to get to functional zero. But my point is, and to your point, yes, can we increase our goals? Absolutely. Can we do something? Can we continue to move forward to do something that we're not doing now? I don't believe that it necessarily falls on the city administration to figure out this. If we're going this road alone, we're going to be very, very ineffective because we haven't been going it alone. And I look at what we've been able to do. So I'm all for trying to figure out how we increase the ability to house people, especially families, especially single mothers with children, especially, you know, intact families, husband and wife, wife, wife, husband. It doesn't matter if they've got kids. Where do we find a place for them if they're temporarily homeless or if they're chronically homeless? So I'm glad we're having this conversation. I get I'm to the point where we've got to start doing something as far as getting they used to call it boots on the ground for a different concept where we start putting heads in beds, not from a hotel motel tax consideration. We've got to start putting people and we're not going to be able to put them all. And that's the most frustrating thing about this whole conversation. We would love to. I don't think there's one person in this room that wouldn't love to do that. But we've got to have some help. We got to have help from the county. We've got to have help from some of the other cities in the county. And so I'm all for doing it. But as far as that the status quo isn't working. I just disagree with that statement and that concept because I think a lot of what we're doing is working and a lot of what we're doing is laying the foundation for it to work really well. I think in the really near future and preceding preceding months. Yes. So I agree. And by status quo, I mean, if we don't start changing and doing things, we are going to be able to keep walking out here in the park and seeing people going to downtown seeing people going to the library seeing people. That's what I mean. It's not going to be okay to do nothing . We have to start doing something or status quo is going to maintain. And my point is, I think we are doing something. I think I think we are doing something. And, and so we are, but we have a lot of things that we still need to do. Of course, absolutely. It's going to persist. I mean, we're still going to have people sleeping in our parks if we don't have some place for them to go. And I don't disagree with that. I think we could have a place like giving and let me say something else. We visited a lot of big cities. We visited Austin. We visited San Antonio, great communities are doing a lot of good work. We've got to figure out how to make it scalable, because we just don't have the resources that they do. And in some ways we probably have on a percentage basis, a bigger problem as far as homeless per capita, and maybe people who are what is it 42,000 families in the county that are at poverty level or below. We might have a bigger problem per capita than some of these other organizations, but we don't have near the resources. The iceberg. Yes. So no, I'm all for moving people from the parks and the libraries and all that. I just think, though, in the end, we can't force people to go to where we're providing them services. But I really do think we're moving in that direction. I think we can make headway. There's some options that we can talk about, I think, in a different context that would really provide some immediate opportunities. But I'm going to hawk the barriers fund. I'm going to hawk it, because that's a place right now, if it were funded well, you can find even if you just put them in a hotel room or something, just something that temporarily before they can move into a place, because that's the biggest problem. People just can't if the market rents in this town are high . And there are landlords who are very altruistic, very caring and compassionate hearted people, and they're going to do what they can. But it's going to take a lot of people doing this because you know we need 100 150 units for permanent supportive housing. So, I'm certainly open to the recommendations and if we need to talk with shelters to see how can we help to. But we also have to understand these are autonomous organizations that have their own have their own vision. Yes. So to that point, Mayor, you, you have the support of the Denton County homelessness leadership team to engage the board members governing board members of those social service organizations who built these solutions that look very patchwork quilt wise over the decades in this community and to engage them in a way that recognizes their autonomous authority to govern their social service 501 c three organizations, but we know their support and their mission and their desire is to serve people we can engage them in a way to relocate or to move services in a way that helps people more efficiently. I love the passion dialogue in this council about this issue. There have to be other city councils coming alongside with you, commissioners court has to come with you. And it's not just the beds I want to encourage you to remember that putting people in beds alone without the professionals that case managers that will guide them through this moment of fragility to a time 1824 months down the road of self sufficiency. It's going to take personnel budget, as well as the brick and mortar budget, or will simply be other communities like a San Antonio that moved a problem from one institution to another in the interest of a greater pressing need whether that's tourism or economic development. If your desire is to really improve and restore lives to repair lives to restore lives, you have to see the personnel side of the case management work that takes years to actually get our families are individuals back up on their feet through this time of crisis to this moment of moment of self sufficiency, and it is expensive. So I'm just curious, was that would that come through United Way or is that something that has been asked of the city was that in the last budget, I can't know we can we came forward in a previous presentation that coordinated in July, just for information about how that might happen and housing navigator was an option. But when asked to prioritize coordinated entry was our priority we needed the foundation , so that we can have this data so now we have, I'm confident in the data enough to say we can make some decisions now about that and so housing navigators still something that is relevant to this, this issue, I remember hearing it before I just I think we'd want to put some better budget numbers around it. And let me let me, and that's a good question, because I had a conversation with United Way about this in depth conversation to understand more of the detailed process of this so my understanding is what's happening is the case workers that are currently in the different organizations, let's say giving hope for example, their case workers, they have client base and they do all kinds of case management services but one of them is trying to find them housing. And it's my understanding that the case managers may spend up to 40 to 50% of their time. As you understand, turned down, we're trying to find places for people to live. So when we talk about that we need case management services sort of part of the problem of pilot program that we were trying to work on didn't hasn't gotten off the ground yet was because we didn't have case management services, but if you take the housing navigator component out of the currently existing case managers, then you automatically free up case management capacity, that's sort of how I see it so what I would like to see and I asked for this in the private meeting is, if there's if there's an ask from the city, together with some of the other cities in the community in the county on a housing navigator. What, you know, obviously what's it going to cost but what will it free up as far as case management capacity with these organizations, because if we're, if we can't tell landlords we've got people that will help, help them. If there's a situation. I can tell you what the answer is going to be. So we can almost create an immediate capacity for case management, maybe with just a housing navigator instead of going out and hiring additional case managers which you know I don't know how much that is but to me that's more efficient. So I agree with Councilmember Briggs, let's have a conversation about what is the cost of that. What is the benefit in increasing the case management capacity of who we currently have doing case management, what are they doing now, how many clients do they have, you plop off that housing navigator duty. How many people does that allow them to add to their case management roster. Because that's how you sell that position. I mean, instead of hiring for case managers, you hire one navigator and that might equal two or three case managers as far as increased capacity. So, but again, let's go back. We're hiring a housing, what do we call housing navigator navigator, because we got to start finding housing. I mean I can't say that enough. And, you know, I'm trying to do it personally I know some other people trying to but we can't. It's got to be a coordinated effort yes Councilmember Duff. Yeah, you. In fact, just, just what you were talking about kind of hit what I'm sitting here thinking about is, you know, we need we need. We need the housing for these people . Okay. But we also need to solve the underlying problem. And the case managers can help do that. We need to get the people on their own self sufficient. I think that's what our ultimate goal should be here. You know, initially our goal is got it we got to get a bed for him to put their head down. But ultimately, we need to solve the underlying problem. And there's a lot of them we're not going to be able to do that. Right. That's that permanent supportive housing. Just, just a reminder, back to one of our earlier items, the affordable housing from palladium. We did request setting aside certain units and that's how we start a few at a time. So, you know, we agree, we, we do have the ability to start working on it. Yeah, you would have tools at your disposal for lots of solutions with developers should we look at that as well as an option in the future, not just our housing tax credits but all developers to ask them to do some, some things like that. Well, and I strongly believe that we have enough people in this community who own housing units, who would be willing to take a risk, you know with some, you know, with some, some padding with some could you know just to understand hey I'm not, you know, help me I'm, you know, I don't know, I have these stereotypes I have these things and, you know, trust me as somebody who's been in that business for 25 years. It doesn't matter. Anybody can destroy your property, anybody can cause an issue I mean it's it's yeah it's quite interesting to be educated. But just one of the biggest things that we can get landlords to advocate for that it's not just people who are who have higher barriers that destroy property. It's just a stereotype that we've really got so on the next steps, these look good but we also want to get have a work session we want to have the homelessness leadership team talk about the housing navigator issue. How do we draw in some other communities to help with that and you want that in a work session at the homelessness leadership team and then we can have it here to. Yeah, we can have it here too. Because I know that's how we did the homeless coordinator the city, I think paid half and the United Way paid half. So, I would like to begin to encourage some of the other communities in the county for some funding help as Louis ville did in the county did with the ESG grant. Yeah. And then some follow up some specific. Yes. Okay, yes. Councilmember husband and then we'll go with Councilmember Gregory. Yeah. I would like to hear. Again, pragmatic approach, right, because I don't believe. Well, better said, how do we go forward right because I think when you're talking about people to a certain area so that they can get services in the in the confiner whatever that is right I think all of the discussion I've heard, and maybe it's just, I've not heard the, the realistic approach right it's like the realistic approach is everything to Gary's point is downtown, right. That's a key area for sales and and and and commerce is downtown. Those two worlds don't. They mesh, but I can tell you right now when I sit down with a business owner downtown and they say, business is slow, because that becomes a concern, is it valid, I don't I mean I'm not crunching numbers it could be a myriad of things right but, but I know that comes up right. And so I think, for me the challenge is, I want to speak to, to that and have a direct conversation without the fear of repercussions that all urine sensitive you. I tell people all the time I told Alice at the, at the community health clinic, I don't get it. You know I helped me educate me you know and I'll be the first to admit that and she was she's been very helpful in that regard. So my, I would like to see as next steps, a. What's, what are the steps, what's the first phase, right, I mean is it, is it to, I think it's to embrace the fact that the two communities don't get along. You know they may not work well together. And here's a plan forward to kind of, hey, those that are leaving monsignor King, if you'll work with us to go this path and show improvement that way, maybe we can get these unaffected business owners now to show to buy into the business owners that they have some control because I'll tell you that's that's a realistic concern is, I don't know that I'm certain, any, they, there's a, there's a mechanism by which people can work together but but for example, I got I spoke about this during my campaign so the gentleman, and he passed away out there by, by LA fitness, and it was very cold that night, and his friend is that he was near, you know they had a relationship that report, ask him to come in and he did not he just he would not right. So I think there's going to be those instances where you can't to Mary Watts point, you can't regulate someone's activity of even in dire circumstance just won't work out that way we're all free thinking individuals. So at that point that that's the concern. Can you produce right can you're saying if we build this will be able to help regulate. I would like to see that impacted first right if I'm drawing the steps it's, hey let's, let's transition, how people leave money on monsignor Kings, and how they travel downtown let's set a path. Let's, let's , hey let's negotiate a way that works well with others. And then I go to those business owners and I say, look, buy in, because I'm demonstrating what we can do so that's phase one right and then you're talking about the library talking to parks we can start influencing those travel patterns are showing results that then get business owners to buy in the sale okay I get it you you're, you're, you're helping me, you're taking one step then I'm going to, I'm going to meet you with that step, and so that you can continue to produce good results because that to me, and I just want to have more conversations about those legitimate concerns because there 's nothing here that I see that jumps out and and and and acknowledges the fact that the downtown businesses, and those that are are experiencing homelessness. How do we bring those together, how, what what path works for you is it Austin Street because you know whatever, whatever those paths are let's let's have those conversations and and get less calls to the police because there's less confrontation, because I'm not trying to be best buddies, we're just trying to coexist right. And so I think once we start having those conversations and start demonstrating an ability to to be sensitive to those needs. Because I think that's a very different conversation than to say, I'm going to sell someone on the fact that it's important if they do this because at the end of the day that business owner that that landlords got to believe that they're doing the right thing because they're not going to do. And so that that to me is, is, I'd like to see that some sort of, can I address a couple of those. Sure, okay, you just said, so I would say it's probably not a phased approach I'd say we're already targeting sort of multiple things happening at the same time so in the conversation we're having here is taking the homeless leadership team and saying, we're going to negotiate with service providers to see what we can do around changing how they operate so that that may change behaviors, and certainly can't impede people's movement or how they choose to move but we could say that there's a way that we can negotiate where service providers are, or where they're located which is something I think Gary was alluding to. But then there's the other prong approach which is how do we increase housing and that's where we're talking about, you know, developing the barriers fund and getting it fully funded, so that we can negotiate the housing need as well. And then we're just working on the other baseline supports of just how are we creating more supportive services around so I think those things are happening. So, figuring out how to clearly show that to you I think is what I'm hearing from you. But I would hopefully give you some confidence that those things are happening. For example, the barriers fun. Actually we already had this conversation with the Main Street Association, and that was something that they were interested in, because they have issues around panhandling or other things that are impeding their businesses. So we 've already engaged in those conversations with them, and we feel like we're going to be jointly collaborating with the communication about that various fund to sort of impact and help improve what's happening in their businesses. So it's just one example of stuff that's already in place. Yeah, so I mean, I'm tracking with you but I don't understand what that means practically. Okay, so when you say you talk to downtown Main Street Association practically that means creating a campaign that give to the barriers fun and that will decrease panhandling and help people get housed. So, do you then get a buy in from the from. So for example, do you go to the police and say, who are you getting complaints about obviously because the fire department's tracking who gets picked up right so I'm assuming, and you have we have names with so is it. So you say, Bob's regularly panhandling, and we know Bob do does the, does the. Do you go approach Bob and say hey, that's our I need you to not do that. And what is the source of the, what's the need right, right, so let's meet that so that you can stop panhandling is it. Yeah, I mean it could be because that's the, that's then another prong of the service provision which is outreach making sure we're connecting with every person experiencing homelessness and connecting them to services so you got outreach happening you got housing, happening you've got campaigns to help fund programs so these are all happening at the same time so they're not, they're not phases but they are happening it's just figuring out how to communicate that to you in a better way so you can see it. I think that's key from just for me I may not be speaking for anyone else is so many small things that are happening there that are addressing those well but and I think the concern is that it's again, very naive thinking and very shallow. It could be, hey, you're panhandling, but you have a cell phone. Now a cell phone may be easy to come by. I mean, I'm just saying, looking at it from a again from a negative standpoint. I think it's important to address those issues, and I think it's, I don't know how easy it is to get a cell phone, I don't know how easy it is to get a cell phone. Yeah, and so I don't know that and so I think those are those are conversations that need to be had right because I don't, I don't know that you know I don 't, I think it's a phone cost, you know, whatever, 50 bucks, 30 bucks. And so I think when you're, I think it needs to be, how do you get a job without a phone. Yeah, I think that's that's the conversation it's at a level. I think we're, and I'm not trying to, I'm just saying what you're wanting is I need practical steps that result in practical solution, not at all. I think what I'm saying is that nothing on here, all these are positive, and they're great. But there's a negative side that exists in our community that none of these address. None of those speak to the clash between downtown and the homeless, I disagree, and let me tell you why disagree. Because what we're trying to do, if you house people. If you get people who are currently homeless, and you house them. They're not going to be at Monsignor King walking from Monsignor King through the downtown area to, and then hanging out on the square if you want to try to get them a job. We've already talked to DCTA to try to figure out how we can get bus service from Mons ignor King to some to our daily bread, instead of at eight o 'clock in the morning, everybody leaves there and where they track across downtown, which is they're free to go where they want to go. Absolutely. So , what what you and I understand what you're saying, but I think that you're sort of at that macro that micro level which is, I understand how do we address is this addressing the problems that you're saying exist in downtown, how are we doing that how are these suggestions, and this whole conversation going to address the clash between economic development and a part of our city that is the, you know, one of the major attractions to our city. How do we address that with the amount of homeless population that we have there that create issues that sometimes make people not want to either shop there or go down there or feel safe there. How are we trying to help resolve that in all of this stuff . We're talking about is what I'm is what I, how are what we talking about going to impact at that micro level. The issue between tourist attraction and homelessness presence. Well, no, but I think it's, it's not that succinct, it's more more. What are the detractors going to say, and how do we address those to educate the detractors, maybe that's maybe that's my point. How do we educate those that would be detractors to buy in. I think I think what we're, we're trying to establish a program that, and I'm going to tell you, some people, you can't educate them. That's right. Some people are going to be detractors no matter what they're going to be detractors to be detractors to be detractors and so I'll be perfectly honest with you. I feel very confident in the process that as we move forward and as we begin to take certain steps to move forward, and to start housing people. The success of it will speak for itself, and so a detractor is going to be a detractor they're either here she's going to say well, this is great thank you I'm going to get on board, or they're going to say, I really don't really care about these people. And I just care about me and my business and what I believe and all the education in the world is not going to make a hell of a means to those people who think that way. So, what I hear you asking to is, let's make sure that we are developing some kind of program or tool like you said you want the one pager. You want the one pager, where the person comes up off the street he says, why should I do this. Here's why you should do it. That's right. That's what you're one. That's right. Yep. And I think that's what we're working on and I think that's , they certainly heard you before when you asked for that and I think we can incorporate that into what you're asking for right now. Because that you're absolutely right. I mean, how do you do it, I tell you, I think it is an education thing I think there's those that are detractors but I think there's. I think oftentimes that that's steeped in ignorance lacking knowledge, right, because I don't know how much the phone costs, you know, and I don't know you can get it for free. And so I think there's the education part that maybe it's maybe it's just a class for people that, you know, I don't know what it is but I'm saying there is an education component of information that they have that they've probably forgotten about that I don't understand at all. Yeah, no I understand. I mean, yeah, I've been talking about this for three years and I don't understand. Sure, a lot of it so we're just I'm just trying to find a way to put put people in, in, in housing and I do believe I truly believe that. And you know what not everybody you do that with is going to get it. That's right. I mean the people you can help that it may not. It may not help them, but it's going to help some. Yes, and you just have to, you just have to move. So we got a couple other people that is that okay to. Yes, I'm done. I want to close with this though because I think you and I had a great conversation about housing is not. It may be one room in an entire family. And I mean, you know, there's there's. It's, it's, it's temporary, or it's moving to a better permanency but it's not, you know, I think efficiencies can can hold more than one per I mean, to me, I think that's important to kind of lay that groundwork. And I think that's what we're going to go forward that it's not, you know, three bedroom apartment for, you know, one adult two kids, it's if we have to we're gonna we're gonna have to be really close for a little while as we grow out of this, I get that. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Okay, cool. No. Bring up on future steps and what we want to look at from my perspective, and I'm looking at the ladder to self su fficiency that has food clothing, housing, or the beginning. And above that we have healthcare is which we talked about our emergency rooms being overrun by that that's something organizations like HSNT handle, but right above that is mental health and substance abuse and Denton County is the lowest per capita funded MHMR. Right. And that's what we need to lobby for. That's where we can make a difference. And we already have to so I think that's a great point we've had some successes in the legislature and the last session. So, and I hope that you embrace that equally because it's just not enough. Absolutely. Thank you. Okay. Go ahead. Oh, well, we have these next steps but I think we also have Councilmember Husper that which I think would be good for all of us whatever you develop for him, as far as just a really good bullet point. I don't want to call it a cheat sheet but something that's very concise and, and has some very good facts and figures that can help, you know, educate people I think that'd be great. Just, not just for him but for us and for the community at large. So the first thing we talked about was more of kind of a housing analysis looking at what what cost burden means and what that might be, but also some additional, how do we communicate some of those more important messages I think I heard a couple of different things there specific since you want yeah y'all get together and figure out what would be most helpful to you. That's that's important we want to make sure we get you the information you need. And then I making sure we do some additional cost analysis I think was the other takeaway that I heard specifically but we have a lot of work to do to try to get that information, it's difficult for hospitals to allow us to even access what their costs are so we have some struggles with getting that kind of data but we definitely know that we need to understand what's the true cost and how we can do cost savings. And part of that you could probably get from the county when they asked the county for reimbursements. Oh, that's good. Thank you. So, so, and Councilmember Gregory brought it up which I think was very good very in the beginning. So if people wanted number one to get additional information, they can contact who Courtney Courtney Courtney crossing United Way. Okay, all right. So if anyone any more information, and then if you want about our programs and such and if you want to contribute to the barriers fund, you get a hold of who the same. Yep. Okay, Gary Henderson or Courtney cross of the United Way. Okay, and there's also a website so if you go to United Way, denton.org slash dch lt. There's more information on the barriers fund and you can donate through that that website. And, and we'll be helping to promote that campaign as well and rolling that out to the larger public. Yes, great. Councilmember and I did ask our lawyer question. If money from Council members campaign funds could be legally and appropriately directed towards that so we could write checks from our campaign from to. Now some of us don't have to worry about finding any more campaigns. It's easier but but the rest of you. So in closing I just want to thank everybody who's involved number one in the conversation, but more importantly involved in helping to try to find a solution, be it, you know, the people on the didn't county homelessness leadership team didn't city council, our public safety personnel who go out and make sure that, you know, even those small encampments that they're, they 're, they're operating in a way that is safe for those people there and trying to keep safety in the neighborhood and. And I'll close with this and I've said this several times when we were in a homelessness leadership team after we received news that we received the grant for two years. There was a board member who said, raise your hand and said , I really appreciate it because it seems like for the first time in a long time. We need to collaborate together in order to receive this grant again. And as far as I'm concerned, that was my whole point of this whole endeavor was to get people to start working together. Not because they weren't working, but to work together to increase the efficiencies to brainstorm. We spent a lot of time talking about this and now it's just come down to where the rubber meets the road, we've laid the foundation. We start building and you know what in six months, if nothing's happened, if we, your statement is absolutely on point. I mean we have no excuse now. We've got what we need. We've got the data. We've got the, what's the entry system the coordinated entry system. That 's right. We've got the barriers fund. We've got the tools that we need to try to make a bigger difference in this issue. So I really want to thank everybody who's worked so hard up to this point and who continues to work hard on it because it's a dauntless. It's a very difficult task, and it's a never ending task. So the more we can find efficient ways to do it to help more people. That's what we have to keep striving for. So thank you so much for your support. Thank you United Way for your support. And again, Barriers Fund Courtney Cross or United Way. Gary Henderson. So, any other final comments. Okay, all right. Thank you very much. We'll take a break before we go on to our next agenda item. Did we order dinner. He received a report hold discussion of staff direction regarding the formation of a community focus group to review and provide recommended updates to the parks and Rec reation Department integrated pest management program. Thank you very much. Good evening Mayor council members my name is Laura Barons and I'm with the city of Denton Parks and Recreation Department, and several weeks ago, staff brought forward to you a recommendation to review the current IPM program, which council supported. And today I want to go over a proposal for moving forward with that review, and what that process would look like. I want to start off with just a little bit of history. The current IPM program was adopted in 2001. Several components that were included in the creation of that document was citizen input through focus group meetings pilot program that included five sites by park sites within the city testing several alternative methods. And then we also had some immediate city wide changes that took effect during this process. And there was a big focus on continued education and evaluation . The current IPM program is designed to achieve long term control of pest with minimal impact on non target organisms and the environment. This includes cultural methods that are mowing heights, natural nutrients, overseeding, and it does establish no mo natural species. So these are components that are included in the current IPM program. It also includes product use their specific, specific process on the selection of products, the use of those specific products or outline, and it even calls them out by name. There is a schedule for the use, and it includes an outline of turf maintenance by classification. There are procedures for minimal exposure, and there's also a notification process for that for spring and the product use. It also includes design and maintenance standards and education. So I'm sorry, go ahead. So I assume since 2001 you have you had acquired more land or more parkland more property. Yes, we have. And so this applies to that new new areas and no mo areas are gone in and they're established in that new, new properties that is correct. Yes. Okay. So moving forward with the review, we're recommend, we're recommending a very similar process to the original one done back in 2001, and that is to form a community focus group with a maximum of 15 members. We've identified 11 members from the feedback that we received from you a couple of weeks ago. This includes a breakdown of two community representatives to representatives from our athletic associations, our partner agencies, we're including a representative from each one of the following UNT, TWU, and DISD. And then we're also including some field specialists to representative from the master garden ers to from the master naturalist group. And then as advisors will have representatives from the Texas A&M AgriLife extension, and also from our internal environmental service departments. Councilmember Griggs. I do know that we have one that we partner with DISD on the water park, but what do we partner with UNT and TWU on in our parks. Well what we're looking at and one of the things that was brought up. The question was, what are some of the other agencies in our areas doing in their IPM program, just in terms of exposure from their population people that are also outside that have outdoor or park areas. How do we compare to not only our agencies here but also other cities. So benchmarking is a component but also learning from their processes. Okay. And so the advisors make up part of the 15 members. No, they do not. So why why wouldn't the college agencies be more advisors than they would actually take up the decision making part on the, on the focus group. And that's something that we can definitely adjust. Okay, this is just a proposal and some of the initial stakeholders that were mentioned in our previous discussion . Okay, thank you. Okay, it looked like you're about to say something. So along with the focus group will also analyze our current IPM program, establish pilot sites, and that will give us an opportunity to evaluate and test any new methods or alternative methods that may be presented during the review will also be conducting our research and benchmarking at that time, will come back with a draft document for our focus group to review, make some additional revisions recommendations will also do our evaluation of our pilot sites include those evaluation results into those recommendations, perform a final review, bring that back to council work through council on input, and then ultimately have adoption of a new IPM program. I do have a question. Because I know this is sort of how we do it sometimes when we're working with committees we meeting staff or consultants or whoever will provide sort of a draft or an outline of something, and then the committee will kind of work off that I guess what I'd like to see is at least maybe the first meeting so try to get some ideas and input that will, in other words, if you just hand them a draft and say hey what do you all think about this. We've sort of set the boundaries, instead of, okay, give them maybe the current one we have some of the conversation that the council has had about certain types of product that we're using and just and get the ideas of how they're doing it because, and that's not a criticism it's just more of a process change that I think would be helpful. Absolutely, I completely agree and we've actually already started that benchmarking. We have already started that process of collecting some other IPM programs from other cities. Okay, good. Or one one more. Okay. So we're looking at a timeline for this project. So what we 're looking for is in March a formation of the focus group. And then I have our hold our first meeting during that month, and then over the next 60 days what we're looking at is reviewing the current document, conducting our research, and then following along with the benchmarking site selection for pilot parks and began our testing testing techniques for any alternative methods that are desired to be explored at that time. Once we'll after that 60 day period passes in July, will evaluate the initial results of our pilot sites and you'll see this as a theme and this is really one of the things that's driving the timeline is that evaluation of pilot sites because we're looking at starting this in the spring and capturing as many of our seasons as we can during this process. So back in July to the group of first draft of a document, get input, gather feedback over the next 30 days, incorporate that preliminary pilot site information into the draft do a final review of the draft document, and then by September what we'd like to do is come back to council with a preliminary proposal on a new and revised IPM program. From that we'd give ourselves an additional 30 days to continue evaluation of our pilot sites, follow up with any council input at that time, incorporate it into the IPM, and then in November, looking at actually, I'm sorry in October, looking for adoption, but from November through December we want to continue to evaluate those pilot sites, document our results, and report our findings so we will continue to report back to council on what the findings are even after adoption. So that you'll be able to see again that evaluation of whatever alternative methods we may be exploring at that time. All right. Timeline looks good any questions, observation or comments. Yes, Councilmember Briggs. I would like for council to consider moving the two advisors from two people from the college from UNT and TW over to the advisor section and free up two spaces for community reps so it would be for community members instead of two on the 15 board makeup. Could I see the list again. Thank you. Okay, what about DSP leave DSP, we are actually a partner with them at the water park and the other two we don't have any physical partnerships with I mean, and that was a question I had, how are we picking these people. Well, a couple of different things were taken into consideration number one some of the feedback that we received several weeks ago when we brought initially the IP M product contract, some of these organizations were mentioned and then just identifying stakeholders. It's a good way that two of our community representatives that have been identified have been Mr. And Miss. So, and Carol so who I've already met with and they actually also recommended a couple of individuals that they thought would be some good stakeholders in this and so the natural guard started the master garden ers and the natural master naturalist recommendations made by them. We have already spoken with our regional representative from Texas and AgriLife extension, Janet Hurley and she also thought that that would be, they would be appropriate stakeholders through this process. So it's just been a combination of some of the community input that we've already received some of the feedback that we got from you a couple of weeks ago, and then just identifying some additional stakeholders that would be able to give us a meaning, meaningful feedback during this process. This is going to sound odd and it's not because this is how I feel about it. But I think what's important when we have a group like this is that we make sure we have different type of thought processes, and not necessarily all like minded people. So my point being that some people would look at some of the concerns that were expressed, I'm not saying I am saying this but some people say well, these are over infl ated or this isn't as big a concern so when I said how are we selecting these specific people. That was really the thrust of my question is how do we make it balanced. We are also looking for a very balanced approach to this. Yes, sir. And that. No, go ahead. I'm sorry, I was just about to say that's why also we've got representatives from the athletic associations they have a different perspective on park use. And then also, even between the master gardeners and the master naturalist they both take different approaches to. Okay, good. I appreciate that. Thank you. That's very helpful. Yes, just in order to make sure that it happens. I mean, I would assume that the master gardeners and the two representatives from the master gardeners and the two representatives from the master naturalist are going to be the same person in residence. That's what we're looking for . Yes, we already have them six community representatives. I think what we were looking for also in that perspective was just that field specialist, people that have a little more knowledge and knowledge and expertise in that more effort getting trained. We're trying to balance park usage with somebody that also had a little bit more again knowledge expertise in the area, along with identifying some partners in the community other agencies that are also, you know, subject to IPM programs and how they're learning from their experience in their implementation process. Well, if those four are actually residents of the city, then that that's okay. I didn't know if they were coming in from, from other areas or not. So, the goal is to find those that are specific, yes to our area. And we can definitely come back when we finish identifying and you know, get commitment from the actual individuals bring that list back to you. Yeah, when we first recommended doing this board or this panel. We had before us, a contract to purchase chemicals for the year. Yes, sir. And it looks like this is going to take us through most of the year. Do we need to bring that back to us so that we can get that done. Well, at the time one of the things that we discussed will continue to monitor and work through purchasing with is that we do have a threshold, a monetary threshold that will will be able to continue to purchase our products. We believe that will last us through the end of the year but again we'll monitor that very closely. And we are our current practices will continue to follow the IPM program. Okay, any other questions comments. Yes, don't. Councilmember death. Just one brief thing. Since it's a past, are you including wild hogs in there. I hope you don't have to know and I don't know that anything that we purchase on that product list would be effective against wild hogs but if that becomes an issue, definitely. Anything of that nature that's usable. I understand. Yes, sir. Questions comments. Thank you. We'll go to our last work session item side of one he received a porthole discussion give staff direction regarding a proposed expedited competitive process for professional engineering services for the city's public works infrastructure. The word expedited so that means this, this presentation is expedited is that absolutely okay. Good evening mayor council, Todd as the city engineer, we just wanted to bring to you the process we've been going through to find a much more expedited pathway to both achieve the selection of consultants to deliver our capital projects and any other design engineering related projects that we potentially have coming up. But also, not have to come do this because repetitively, because it does take time from a staff standpoint, the consultants themselves put a lot of effort and energy and money into an RFQ process. So one of the things we were looking at was how do we cut some time out of the design process, so that we also don't lose out on some of the losses that we're seeing in our buying dollar when it comes to construction. We kind of found out with an RFQ last fall, which means we basically put the whole advertisement together in regard to seven different categories those categories were project management help putting together a package for review of private development projects, that would help our current staff to fill some of the gaps when the workload gets too extensive or too cumbersome for the personnel that we currently have. And then design of professional services and five categories, the transportation piece which is roadways bridges intersections also rolls in sidewalks and some of those other items. You've got a traffic signals and streetlights component traffic signals also incorporates railroad quiet zones. They are signalized so that rolls into that same piece, and you've got a stormwater design, a wastewater design and water design component. So the biggest reason we lumped all this together into one overall package is to reduce the time it takes to get to construction. Currently, and for the last five or six years the construction market is seeing inflation in construction , 1% compounded per month. So, net that means every month that we delay in going to construction we're losing 1% on the construction amount of the project, but the overall project amount, the construction amount which is by and large 75% of total cost of a project. If not more depends on the size of the project the larger the scope of the project. The design costs the admin costs they all come down and the construction costs becomes a bigger piece of that pie. So, one of the ways that we look to reduce that overall effect, both from a scope standpoint the scope creep standpoint which tends to happen as we go through the design process and everything gets elongated past, say six months to a year and it goes into two, three, four or five years there are these great ideas that come up and we add to the project was adds to the cost of the project. And it just keeps on rolling to get to the point where we are today. You have a lot of projects that are somewhat more fat than what they were when they were initially set up and intended, not all of them. There were other reasons for other products. There's some reasons for the other pieces there. One of those is in house design for the sheer amount of workload that we have the capital projects that we need to get out the door. We're not staffed like a small engineering or medium sized engineering firm would. So, trying to do all that in house design work. You would need 35 to 40 engineers, EITs, personnel just dedicated to design. That doesn't leave them dedicated to project management when it goes to construction. So, where we sit today, at least coming into this revamp of what capital projects looks like, we have five engineers on staff doing design work when we needed 35. So, the solution that we're proposing and that we've already gone on the path of is our internal engineers are being repurposed and they're learning to be effective project managers. They have come a long way. But they need the tools to be able to deliver those projects. One of those tools is having this professional services help to help them get through the design process and if we need to fill the gap in some of these project management roles. On average, your RFQ process per project will take about three months. It takes about a month to put together that package, get it out on the streets and advertise another month to let it kind of marinate. And then you get another month where you got staff that's tied up and reviewing it. And then you select them. Then you go to council with your recommendation after you've negotiated contracts. There's another couple of months there that's in that mainstream. So, I've lost five months in the project delivery process that also equates to real dollars lost going to construction. So, those opportunity costs are what we're trying to close the gap on. Oh, my go back one key point here is the other RF other piece of the RFQ processes, we got to make sure that there is a fair selection process in place. So, across the board, when you're selected, everybody knows what the criteria is that we're going to evaluate on. This process allows for a streamlined delivery process when we go through the project process if we say we want to go build 1000 foot of water line. I don't have to go through an RFQ process for that $300,000 project, which ties up all that time that effort that money , I can shrink that down to where I come into you with a council recommendation, saying, here's the contract we'd like to put in place, go do this design work go to construction, and we're three months out of that minimum. Yes, sir. Could you help me understand what you mean when you say our engineers would be involved in project management. What, what kinds of things are they doing as project managers, so project managers. So, they're in the general overview is making sure the scope doesn't creep on the project that this project is delivered on time and on budget now that's incorporated into that is making sure that we get the best possible product for the citizens of Denton, that we can possibly get. If I go and engage a consultant to design a project. They can large, take that information and go work on what they think that needs to be done without the city engineer being involved in that piece, whether they're a project manager wherever the role is the likelihood that when the engineer gets this project, and they come back to us and say hey I got something I want you to look at. They may be on this side of the spectrum and we may have intended for this and I've lost that time and effort. So project manager is paving the way to remove roadblocks that from a right away standpoint they're engaged in the community, laying the groundwork for what this project is going to be getting feedback from them to make sure that we didn't miss something in the evaluation of what is this project going to be when we set it up. Making sure that the project budget doesn't appear to escal ate every month of the project, you know as that scope has a an inclination you know the engineer comes back to the city and says, we uncovered this wonderful item that would be a great add your project somebody hears that and says, that would be great. So we added to the project I've added another $125,000 to the project. Can the budget handle that. Managing, if I may, the design of the project. It does it also manage does the engineer go out when the contractor is actually laying that pipeline. Yes, or building that road. Yes, make sure that it's being done according to specification they go where they cover it up. We don't know if it really. So we have an inspector that goes out on a daily basis. And an engineer inspector. No. There's two roles here. There's the public works inspector who is responsible and knowledgeable in all the methods and methodology that goes into actually putting that pipe in the ground. So anytime say a water line goes in the ground. They put all the components in that have to be in there. There's an inspector they're watching that being done making sure it gets done properly. The project manager who was involved in the design piece helps to make sure that we don't lose time through arguments over contractors will do this thing you know I think we should go lay it that lay the pipe over here because that makes more sense. Well that may present another problem that the inspector and the contract we're never aware of because we're never in the design process so the project manager has that knowledge and they stay engaged in that process, all the way to the end of the project. Question. Okay. There's a lot more to it but I don't want any further than you want me to. So going down this path with the RFQ also gives us the maximum flexibility and resources so what we've done with this process is our thought was, instead of selecting one consultant to do transportation design we said you know if you would like to be considered for transportation design, here's the minimum qualifications you must have. We 'll rank everybody from who we think is the most qualified to the least qualified. And at the end of this process I have, say 26 companies that want to do that I got 26 companies I could go select off of. Now we would start with the most qualified and work our way down the list until we have the contract that fits. The other big component to this is it meets the funding requirements that we have depending on the funding source. In other words, if we get federal or state dollars, however it comes to us through grants through funding agreements. If the state is overseeing that part of the project. The requirements on the paperwork are much greater, including how we select the consultant to do the design work. The first step into this process when we put this together with purchasing was to make sure there was a way that we could use this over the life of the RFQ that we could select for those contracts as well. Some cities don't do that and what you end up with is is great I got the stable of contracts that I could go to at any time. But I can't use it for federal dollars. I can't use it for state dollars and I got to go do a separate RFQ process and insert that three month period back into it. So it was set up to take care of that issue. It was also set up so that other departments in the city could utilize the same RFQ process. Use the same consultants office. So where we are today. We are currently reviewing all of the submittals that we got we had 59 people from 59 or we had more than 59 people but we had 59 consulting firms represented at the pre subm ittal meeting which was you guys come ask us questions so that we can resolve any issues you have with this RFQ process then we sent out to addendums based on those questions and some follow up questions so that it was as clear as it could be. When they submitted that back to us then we established seven review panels to go through all 41 submittals that came in there to some of them are 200 pages long some of them are 25 pages long so each of those groups has gone through and reviewed, or at least is in the process of reviewing each one of those. As they apply to those separate structures so here's where we are today. So we have completed four of the categories of the seven categories that were in the RFQ. We have when I say complete we've reviewed all of those components so five firms and project management and development review then 27 firms and roadways and so on across the board we have not started the water infrastructure review we had some folks in and out and coordinating those schedules has been difficult wastewater and stormwater we should have wrapped up here in the next two to three weeks. So next steps, we are coming back to you here as quickly as we can. Our anticipated date is March 6 with all the pre qualifications for as at least four of those seven categories if not five of them. So you know who those firms are why we select them where they ranked in that process and get your recommendation that for approval that that's a good pathway for us go now and you'd like who we put in place, and we can go from there that allows us to assign contracts very quickly and come back to you effectively. Councilmember great question. It might be more for the city manager but do we currently have a public works inspector that goes out on every project, like even like a sidewalk or a street fill or, or anything like that. We do the public works inspection division reports to stress this all by him kind of talk to you about the difference between the engineering. I don't know it doesn't have to be long I just wanted to yes or no. We do. You want you want to look anything. We currently have six. We currently have six public works inspectors. We have one for right away now the differentiation between that is is say somebody just wants to put a driveway in the right away , like a homeowner is that person would submit for a permit through the right away inspector, we only have one, we have almost 1000 permits through the city active today. So that's an area where we 're having to have that whole team try to work together to pick up some of that area. There's another subsequent RFQ that you'll see come in with some other packages from us, which is how do we supplement that group, the six public works inspectors, they go out. Their requirement is to get out to each job site on daily basis at least one hour. Now the reality of that is there are 90 active projects throughout the city that they must touch. And there are only six inspectors so them getting to each site on a daily basis is tough, they prioritize that based on the work so if the contractor is going to do a concrete pour they make sure they're there. If they're just out there moving some dirt they make sure things are set up and then they go move to where the next highest priority is. It's another thing that we are looking at how do we close that gap to get the best quality control for the city. Thank you. So, it could be you had 23 contractors applied for for one of those areas and let's say 10 qualified. Yes, sir. And you said that there's a list from the most qualified to the least qualified. Yes, which makes me think about that joke about the. What do you call the person who graduated last from medical school, doctor. You know they're still a doctor, they're still a qualified firm. That's right. So my question is, I would be a little bit concerned that that if we have this list of 10 that that y'all keep going to the three top most qualified, and then the other seven wonder why did I bother. Or there's some favoritism going on here. Do you anticipate a process where, where maybe if you're maybe not quite as confident in one of those even though they qualified that they would still get a project. Yes, or ever so often and they may be less intense projects or less rigorous projects. Yes. So, there are several things that we're doing as we go through this evaluation process there were five areas we evaluated all of them on equally they knew what it was. We were up front when all that information went out. And as we go through this with a group can can attest to this, we are trying to moderate everybody to the point we see and evaluate them all equally you can't bring in some other knowledge from somewhere else without having a good explanation for it. We've done a pretty good job of saying, we gave someone so this score over here for taking this off we got to make sure that we do that across the board. And I think that's part of all that is, yes, we have different amounts of. As we go through this we're looking at the company and what they put into that RFQ and saying you know you would be a good fit for this type of work. And we note that in the process so that as we come back to a legal you know, I don't know that I want to give redoing Carol Boulevard from I 35 to university to this person, but certainly sidewalk seems to be something well within their wheelhouse they put the ball out of that information and we're not sure what it's about or all kinds of things that may be out there that are very specific to that firm that would lead us to say that would be a better project for them. Well my, if I may, my guess is is that somewhere along the line, somebody who didn't score as high on paper. After you start working with him you suddenly discovered, wait a minute. There's more quality here than than appeared on paper. So, let's be good for. We're anticipating this would be a three year rotating basis so every three years we would go back and do this process again just because of how much involvement there is trying to get this process. Do you think that that every contractor that qualifies will end up getting a job. I don't know if they if absolutely all 27 of the roadway firms will get one don't know that for sure because we may not have 27 projects. Okay. Okay. What we just answered the last question on the slides. The next slide. Next question so. So, this would be the RFQ that we would refer to. I'm not sure about it's for three it's for a pool, yes, trying to create a pool, and it's going to last over three years. Yes, again, I really and I don't know where it comes in and the legal part of it because I know you can't ask for pricing on an RFQ but I would think after you select the firms. You could begin to inquire about pricing is that correct. Yes, after you selected them then you can start discussing the actual price. Okay. That's actually part of what goes into the way we set this up for the state and federal funding piece. They require that you take the top firm that you rank, you negotiate with them if you cannot come to terms with them you move to the next one. I just I just would really encourage us to be a little more bearish on some of these design costs and engineering because I mean, again, I don't know how it all works I mean , if it works with, we're just going to charge you a percentage of the project. I mean, it's got to be well this how many hours it's going to take we figure we're paying these people as much per hour this what it is. So yeah informal staff report on that . We can do that. Yeah. Any other questions. Okay. Any other comments or questions. So you've got direction is we're just, we're going to wait for you to bring the evaluation to us and we get an up or down. Is that right. That's it. Yes, sir. Great. Fantastic. Thank you. Okay, I think that concludes our work session we will now convene the closed session at 539. 6 PM on February 13 2018. We will consider the following items consultation with attorneys under Texas government code, Texas government code section 551 point oh seven one. Thank you. We're back in open session for this meeting of the Denton City Council on Tuesday, February 13 2018 it is 557. We are now convenient to a special college session for agenda item one a considered option of ordinance author izing the amendment amended engagement of the law firm of Lynn Ross and Ganaway, and the BKD LLP accounting firm. Mayor members of the city council. I'm Jerry Drake. I've got this item on your agenda here to complete an audit that was initiated by the city's own internal auditor. After his departure. Last year, the city attorney's office engaged the law firm of Lynn Ross and Ganaway and the finance department engaged BKD to do some exploratory work to see if there was anything that would warrant conducting a continuation of the audit. In November, the council approved an ordinance for professional fees, not to exceed $50,000 for the completion of the audit. This would include expenses associated with the audit, and in addressing the need to fund the expenses out of it and to cover an increased scope of services that came about once we started getting into the audit. We, we determine the need to come forward to you and ask for this additional funding. The, the new ordinance that's in front of you is in a total, not to exceed amount of $142 ,000 that's all inclusive that includes all professional fees and expenses and embraces all of the fees and expenses that have been built today. So at this time, I'd like to turn the matter over to Julia Ganaway to give a presentation to you. Is the presentation just to go over just the detail of this is that if you would like yes it's it's three slides. And I guess that does this does this anticipate or does this have built in the fees that may be incurred for a public presentation in the future. This includes all of it fees expenses costs through the public presentation. Okay, go. As we as Mr Drake referenced, based on the received tips from the anonymous hotline fraud waste abuse committee began an investigation city auditor resigned on October 16 2017 on phase one. LRG was retained by the city attorney's office to provide initial legal analysis October 20 BKD was retained by Mr Springer, the former finance director to provide an initial assessment of the auditors work and provide feedback. And that that was the 18,000 for phase one. BKD recommended additional investigation and worked with LR G to prepare to prepare a scope of investigation and recommended and the recommended procedures and assumed complete cooperation with the process and and stated initially not to exceed amount of $50,000 for phase two, and that amount included only professional fees not expenses or costs. And the city council approved that recommended initial scope on November 14 2017. On phase two the council determined that this would be a council at initiative, the city auditor worked internal auditor works reports directly to the city council as well. BKD and LRG conducted interviews of city employees identified certain parks board personnel and employees requested and received documentation for a five year period , as the scope was defined by council. I was part of the investigative team with three other members of BKD we follow the facts as they let us where they let us the. There was lots of detail and covered and at least 250,000 lines of data analyzed on this. We did receive some resistance as from parks foundation persons, as they retained council, one person declined to engage in that face to face interview and one retained council and that interview had to be conducted at a separate later date and fortunately incurring more expenses and costs because we had to come back and do separate rounds of interviews. So at an initial overview we were asked to provide additional information at a later time and public presentation of the report and what we did find. Additionally, the unanticipated events necessitated an increased in the budgeted amount city council will receive a written report from both LRG and from BKD collectively together, we will provide a public presentation of the investigation at a date and time specified by the city council. The engagement amount again is a will not exceed as opposed to an assumed not to exceed it is a will not to exceed and that's 142,000 for everything both before we met with y'all during this time, all of this work, and up to the public presentation when you when you show desire. Yes, customer. So last week on our agenda. There was an item to approve this will not to exceed at 115,000. Yes, sir. And clean last week and this week. It jumped by 27,000. What happened between last week and this week to cause that change in amount. Well, there was additional work that needed to be done in conjunction with the meeting that we had and so there was additional work to follow up on. Then there was an additional meeting set. And then, then the final presentation. So, that's, that was the reason for the increase was the additional meeting and the additional revision so some of that is for for time and some of that is for expenses. Yes, sir, some of that is for the time and the time for. I 'm pretty local, but for, you know, for BKD folks to get here as well. And they came from San Antonio San Antonio and then another member of the team came from Kansas City. Okay, thank you. Any other questions comments. Okay, this is a individual consideration. Chair asking, there's any action on this item. That's my right. We have a motion. We have a motion and second. All in favor please signify by raising your right hand. All opposed by like sign motion carries, let me do the math . All right, thank you. We will move on to our next agenda item which is public hearing. Item two a is hold the public hold the second of two public hearings for a voluntary annexation of approximately point three acres of land generally located on the east side of old Alton road, south of the intersection of old Alton road and TZ lane. Okay. You're good. This is the second of two public hearings for a voluntary annexation of approximately point three zero acres of land generally located on the. Sorry, I ran east side of old Alton road, south of the intersection of old Alton road and TZ lane. The applicant is proposing a commercial development. The subject site and the adjacent parcel to the north, which you can see right here, are all part of one lot. And once this side becomes gets annexed and zoned, it will become part of this automotive repair facility. Just take a big deep breath. No, no, no, we're not in that big. I understand I know when I try to talk after running or something it's just so yeah just take a couple of seconds. No, no problem. Just take a couple seconds to just. Yeah, it's all good. The schedule, as we're following it. So, just to be sure, during this first public. We have actually the schedule that we've got here. Our next meeting will be March six, that will be the first reading of the ordinance, and you will take action on the fourth meeting which is April 10. And that concludes my presentation. Thank you. Public hearing, and I have opened the public hearing anybody wishing to speak, please come down and state your name and address or come to the podium. Let me put my glasses on to see if anybody's moving out here in the gallery. Anybody wishing to speak for the public hearing. Okay. All right. Well I'll just do it one more time to make it official anybody else wishing to speak. Seeing none, we will now close the public hearing and move on to our next agenda. And that is concluding items. Yes, Councilmember breaks one, and it's more of a concern so I'd like staff to give us a report and research it a little bit. I believe we may have a serious issue and didn't for our families I was on social media and have recently learned that we do not have a pediatric unit at either of our hospitals. So that when there is a sick child in our community of 130, 000, they're transported to Louisville, or Dallas cooks children. Now in our update it said we were getting a cooks children's hospital, but I've got confirmation that it's not necessarily a hospital it's just pediatric offices. So, there was, there's a need in our community and we have two really nice facilities and I'm just surprised that we don't have even some of them they are treating children with adult needles instead of children needles so I'm was shocked about that. And also I have also heard that Presbyterian may also stop delivering babies which means that medical city stop delivering and now if Presbyterian stops delivering we will not have a labor and delivery unit in our city. So I don't know how much of this is completely fact and I'd like a report on this as soon as possible. Thank you. I'm going to go over here to john Ryan and then customer and then customer. I just wanted to make it make a statement that on the 19th on Monday I have my town hall meeting at South Branch Library at 630 so encourage people to come out and attend. We'll go to cast member Dustin customer Gregory. I brought up the PEDs. I think last time, and you know I'm looking south of us and flower mound and North Lake and our goal and they all have very large housing developments going in, and I met, I ran into the mayor of our goal. And when I chatted with him he indicated to me that our goal and he believed all of the others had some form of pits. And, you know, I think we need to bring that back up again I think it's, you know, I can't really. I won't comment any further. I think it's on I think it's on upcoming agenda. It's on okay. Yes, that's the staff's done the research that you've asked . Yes, and we will address your question at the next workshop on that. Okay, Councilmember Gregory and then we'll go to Council member husband. Mr. Hats off and go next. Okay. I'm perplexed by that comment because I stood alone in support of PEDs and, and Don mentioned how Roberson ranch put their own in and everyone else can put their own in so maybe I'll just reviewed a minute maybe, maybe I'm wrong. Well, well, yeah. And then, well we're not going this I'm sure we're not posted for this so yeah, you have a conclud ing item. Well, well, I want to I want to direct the staff on keyless concern there's a pediatric office across the street from the mall that's fantastic we have to take out there. No, a liar there for her for flu thing. So I would direct you there they're great, called us the next day to follow up outstanding organization, I don't know if it meets, you know you can you can kind of use it as a kind of silo the capabilities but it's, it's fabulous. Great. Okay. Councilmember. Thanks. Couple of weeks ago I'd send an email to our city manager, wanting to get a status report on the enforcement of the ordinance that we passed a couple of years ago on credit access businesses. And I got a great response back they didn't have all the information yet but they're going to be gathering some and I would ask that, as you complete the process, Mr manager of gathering that information that you either provide a staff report to all of the council members a written report, or maybe if there's time in the agenda to schedule a short workshop work session on that. Okay, I don 't have a real strong preference either way but I think that it would be important for all of the council members to be aware of the information. Sure, absolutely. Yeah, I just have one. I'd like to get and I know we're working on it but I'd probably like to get it sooner than later. I know understand that the deck will soon be energized sometime this summer, or late this fall for commercial use. Yes, I'd like to see a budgeted performer of the fixed costs I mean energy plants power plants are divided into two types of costs fixed costs and variable costs variable costs primarily being the fuel costs the energy cost and then transportation if you have any. We should be able to figure out what our fixed costs are we know the debt service we know who we've hired, and those kind of things so I'd like to see that and then also like to see together with that maybe a projection or just a couple of tables on our variable costs it's operating for so long fuel costs you know natural gas is this high, just, I don't want to get it necessarily after the fact I want to see what we think it's going to do so that we can begin to take a look at it from an economic basis. We're working on that and should be ready in within 3060 days. Okay, all right. So it's going to take that long I guess we're working on the format I'm getting lots of questions already about projections on whether it'll cash flow what those mean the assumptions behind it so it's a simple question you're asking. Yeah, no, mine's not about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, mine's not that it's it's more, you know, we've obviously budgeted for personnel, right, we know what the debt service is and we know what some of the, the chemicals or whatever so that 's all I'm looking for as far as energy. That's not what I'm looking for I'm just, what are our costs on the ground. Fixed costs that we have to pay. If the thing never is on at any point. Okay, yep. No problem. All right. Any other questions concluding items. All right, we will stand adjourned at 615.