Feb 27, 2018 City Council on 2018-02-27 12:00 PM

Welcome everybody to this meeting of the Denton City Council. On Tuesday, February 27, 2018, it is 1201 p.m. We do have a quorum and I'll call the meeting to order. Our first item on the agenda is citizen comments on consent agenda items. Do we have any comments on consent agenda items? We say no cards submitted. So we'll move on to agenda item number two, which are our work session reports. Agenda item 2A is receive report, hold discussion, give staff direction regarding the Texas Commission on the Arts Cultural District Programs. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council members. I'm Caroline Booth, Director of Economic Development, and I 'm excited to be here to talk to you guys about the Texas Commission on the Arts Cultural District Program. It's been interesting to learn about this program that many cities across the state have implemented in their communities, and I'm excited to share it with you and get some of your feedback on the possible creation of a district in Denton. So as I said, I'm going to provide you some information and ask for your direction about the creation of a cultural district. And I want to start off by throwing up some great pictures from Denton and some of the things that make up our culture here. And the culture of a community is its characteristics, its arts, its music, its built environment, its historic aspects, all different kinds of things that come together to give a community its unique identity. And since we're focusing on arts for this conversation, I wanted to put some photos up of, you know, you can see arts and jazz there. You can see some of our historic features with the Bayless Selby House. There's some family activities going on at some music programs. And so all of these things are things that we enjoy together as a community and part of what makes Denton unique. It's just another set of pictures. I love all the color and energy that comes across in these pictures, and I think it's really representative of what makes Denton special. To start off with some background about the cultural districts program, the Texas Commission on the Arts is able to designate these cultural districts in different cities. And what cultural districts are defined as is geographical areas which encourage and celebrate arts, culture, entertainment, and history for the specific purpose of economic and community development. One thing that I learned that's really important in the concept of cultural districts is that they're formed around an existing concentration of cultural assets that are clustered in an area that's ideally walkable. And it's an area that a city wants to promote both to residents and to visitors from outside the community. When we talk about cultural assets, we are including things like performances and exhibitions, creative activity or the actual production of art and music , architecture, and historical offerings. One thing that I do want to make sure we point out clearly at the beginning is that cultural districts do not obligate property owners within a district to any type of additional regulations. A cultural district is a designation of an area for the purpose of promotion of arts and culture, not to obligate people to do or not do anything in particular with their property. One of the important aspects of being a Texas Commission on the Arts designated district is that it opens up an opportunity to apply for grant funding from the TCA. And it is a match grant that can include up to 50% of a project's budget not to exceed $250,000. They have several eligible categories that include programming, cultural district enhancement, so this is capital improvement type things within the district, especially directed at safety and accessibility, signage and wayfinding, promotion of the district in terms of marketing, and also support for management and operations of the district. Cultural districts are used as a marketing tool for communities. And just some kind of housekeeping things, if you apply to have a cultural district through the TCA, you are required to submit an annual report every year regarding the activities of the district and if you are achieving the success metrics that you set for yourself. And then districts must be fully recertified every 10 years under the program. I wanted to include this map just to give you a broad idea of where cultural districts are within the state, so they're kind of all over the place . They seem to be clustered along the I-35 corridor, which may or may not be surprising, but communities of all different sizes have these districts and they are unique to the community and what makes a district successful is also unique to the community . So if we decide to do this here in Denton, how we define our success does not look like how Lubbock defines it or how Dallas defines it, so we have the ability to customize it, to make it our own. The application process through TCA is done on an annual cycle and we have learned through exploring the process that planning prior to the actual application is very in-depth and it does require significant support from political leaders, from arts and cultural leaders within a community. There's an expectation of resolutions of support for the process from the city council, from the county commissioner's court, from local arts organizations, boards, so all of those things help bolster an application when it's made. The other thing is that capacity for funding and management of the district has to be clearly demonstrated in the application and not all applications are approved. There's a committee that reviews them and some of them are not approved. You can apply as many times as you need to apparently, but they don't all go through on the first time. I have learned that some communities designate cultural districts at the local level instead of going through the state process with the TCA. There are some advantages to that in that you can do it immediately. You don't have to go through an application process, but I think the biggest disadvantage there is that you are not eligible for the grant funding because you have to be an officially designated TCA district to be eligible to apply for that. Councilmember Briggs has a question. On the image before, the ones marked there are actually designated cultural districts. Do you have an idea of how many in the state that ... There are 30 designated districts and some communities like Houston, for example, and I think San Antonio, they have more than one district within their cities. Within their city? Okay. Anybody else? Okay. As with anything, there are going to be benefits and challenges to a cultural district. I'm not going to read each one of these things to you here, but you can see on the benefits side there is the encouragement of business development, job development, preservation, reuse of historic buildings, enhancing property values, and that happens through the redevelopment and the promotion of the district as it grows, and then establishing tourism destinations. This is another way to put arms around what we have going on culturally and say you want to come visit Denton, come to our cultural district and see what we have to offer. Some of the challenges that we identified that are common is particularly in the formation stage, defining and clarifying roles and responsibilities between the different parties that participate in district formation, and all of these challenges can be overcome. That just seems to be a common one. Planning and administration, there is quite a bit of effort that has to go into the planning, the application process, and then the ongoing administration of a district. Resources, both time and money have to be dedicated to that . That ties into the startup and ongoing funding. Long-term planning for what you want the district to look like over time, because this is not something that you, the intention is not to establish it and then not pay attention to it, but the intention is to establish it and help it grow and flourish. Then relevance to local residents. Sometimes these things are very outward facing, and that's part of what they're intended to be is to promote visitors coming into the community. That's how it factors into economic development, but it's important to remember that to include local residents in the planning process and the promotion of the district and what it has to offer. And then finally, gentrification is an issue that has come up in some communities. When I say that, I mean the displacement of existing residents or businesses as an area redevelops. This happens, of course, it can happen without the presence of a cultural district, but I do think it's important to acknowledge that that has happened in other communities. Council Member Riggs, I believe you had a question. Later on we have a discussion about hot funding. On the staffing administration startup ongoing funding, does this type of thing qualify for hot funds? That's a great question. And my initial conversations with legal staff say that it sounds like it can. There's nothing that clearly says it doesn't apply. And we do have an example in the city of Lubbock has used some of their hot funds to promote their cultural district. So there's at least one example we've been able to find of that happening. So I think that the tentative answer is yes, but we would want to delve into that a little deeper to have a 100% solid answer on that. Thank you. You're welcome. Mayor Pro Tem has a question as well. I have a question about the ongoing administration and staffing. Would you anticipate if anything in terms of what type of staffing it might require, would it need somebody that was only focused on this? I think at first it probably would not. Maybe in the ramp up stage. I think that we could just looking at my office as an example, I think we could roll that into the capacity that we have with existing staff. I think if it's successful and it grows, it could take more time for someone. But I do think at this point in time and for the near term future, if we moved forward with it, we could absorb the capacity with existing staff. We also looked at the success factors that are common among successful cultural districts, thriving districts. Our understanding from the TCA staff is that some of these may serve as indicators of potential success in new districts. Again, I'm not going to read you the whole list, but I want to highlight a few things that jump out at me regarding what makes a district successful. The first one really is that unique and authentic identity. I take that to mean you don't create an identity so you can create a district. You have an identity that you build a district around. I think we're very well positioned here in Denton with that identity already. That speaks to me of to our potential success here. Political and community support, again, I've heard that over and over from the districts that we've visited with about their formation, the TCA staff saying that this really is something that has to have a broad base of support. Then those strategic partnerships, when you're looking at forming your committee that's going to work on the application, you want to make sure that you 're pulling in the right people from different areas of expertise, from the arts community, from music community, folks from the historic preservation community, and people who really are interested in seeing a district formed and be successful. I also want to call out the artists, our partners. If you're talking about a cultural district, you are obviously talking about people who create art, music, and contribute to that culture. They have to be viewed as partners in the process. I think that's just important to emphasize at this point. To sum up, I think that we're very fortunate to have a wealth of cultural assets already, and a cultural district could be a new way to embrace and promote these assets for economic development and cultural tourism. It could give us a new avenue to apply for grant funding for some things that we would like to accomplish as a city. Cultural districts are the anchor of a recognized area of a community that has an existing high concentration of arts and cultural facilities, individual artists, events, and historical offerings. I think we clearly have that. The application process and the ongoing district management do require planning, collaboration, and funding, and staff resources too. Cultural districts offer some potential benefits in economic development and community revitalization, but they can come with challenges. As we just discussed, the success factors from existing districts may be indicators of successful new districts. Depending on what your direction is, there are some next steps that we might undertake. Those would be to gauge the interest of key stakeholders in participating in the formation and planning for the district. We would need to look at our level of funding that it might require potential funding sources, possibly through hot funds, and the staff resources that would be necessary to form and maintain the district. We have talked to some communities about their districts, but we would want to delve a little bit deeper into that, potentially go visit some of these districts. There are a lot of them pretty close. Then we would want to determine the potential boundaries for a district and develop an initial plan and a timeline for application. With that, I am seeking your direction on Council's interest in pursuing a cultural district in Denton, and if that is to be considered at the TCA designated level or at the locally designated level. - Council Member Riggs. - Thank you for the presentation. I asked about this in their new business a while ago after traveling to other cities and noticing that they had culture districts and wondered why we didn't. I am in favor of the TCA designated district going towards that route. My question is, do other communities locally designate first while applying for this? Is that something you can do at the same time? - According to TCA staff, they gave me examples of two communities that have done that, that did a local designation first and then did an official TCA designation, Texarkana and Dallas. That's not the way that everybody does it. It's the way those communities did it. It's not in any way detrimental to an official application later on, is my understanding from staff. He described it to me as maybe training wheels on your bike . You test it out, see what works, what doesn't work and then move forward with an official application. - How long does the process take with the TCA? - The official process starts with the submission of a letter of intent and that's done, I think it's a January 15 deadline for that. And then the full application is due by June 15 of each year. So it's just an annual cycle, but that's what the cycle looks like. And then the evaluation takes a couple of months, I think, to hear back from the committee about whether the designation is received or not. - Okay, thank you. - Any other questions or comments? You had some in your run. Excuse me. - You mentioned a couple of places in there about funding and that was separate from staff. So do we have any ideas to what costs are involved and how much that's going to be? - The primary cost that I see is gonna be related to marketing and promotion, which is an expected part of an application. You have to have a plan. We have some in-house resources that can address some of that. Depending on how elaborate we wanted to get with it, we might need some outside assistance. I wanna look into that further if the direction is to move forward. I think there are a number of ways this could be addressed. We could try to keep it all in-house or we could seek some outside resources. There's a range of things that we could do. And I'm happy to delve into that further with your direction and share that information. - Do you see this as primarily staying under economic development or being a partnership between economic development and CVV? - I think that we would need to involve the CVV in any kind of formation committee, but I think that it makes sense for economic development to take the lead on this. We have been undertaking some other arts and culture related certifications like the certified music friendly community, the film friendly community. So we're really seeing that arts and culture is an industry in Denton and that has a direct tie to economic development. Film and the CVV is a part of economic development. So we would want their support and assistance, but I see it staying with economic development. - Okay, thank you. - Council member Gregory. - Thank you, Mayor. My suggestion would be to move forward with the TCA designation. - Okay. - Anybody over here? As far as comments, everybody's okay with moving forward? - I guess I would kind of like to see, you know, do the locally designated first and then pursue the TSA. - Okay. So that I understand, the local designation does not allow for the grant funding, but if you have a local designation, you can apply for a state designation, TCA designation? - Yes, you can. - It doesn't impede you from doing it later on if you want to. And my understanding about the formation of a local district is it could be as simple as a resolution of the council to say this is your district . - Okay. All right. So it seems like that's one of the choices of direction is local designation or TCA or both or something. Council member Duff has indicated interest in the local designation pursuing that first. Are there other council members that would give that same direction or is it everybody's sort of looking towards the TCA? Yes, Council member Ryan. - Well, I guess part of it depends on the timing because stated that January 15th is the first application. So if this is something that we could get rolling on in a couple of months with a local designation and then proceed down the road that next year we go after the TCA, I'd be in favor of that to kind of get it in place now since we've kind of missed this year's deadline. That would be my only reason for kind of looking at the local designation. - Yes, Mayor Pro Tem. - My guess is you're gonna have to have a lot of stakeholder meetings to determine what the outlines of the district are. So I mean, I don't really see any rush to go into local designation really or the TCA designation because it's such an important decision and you 're gonna have to get a lot of buy-in from people. I mean, I know certain neighborhoods have already been wanting this cultural designation for a long time. So I just think it's gonna take some time and I'm not really in a rush. I think it'll happen organically and I'm okay with either designation. - Yes? - I think it's really important and we wanna make sure that we do it right. We wanna reach out to the community and if we, I mean, having it locally designated just for the few months before we can apply, I mean, is that gonna really make that much of a difference? - I don't have an indication of whether having the local designation is a benefit. I mean, it was put to me as it's not a hindrance. It might give us a little bit of experience in sort of trying out some things, some promotions, but I think it could be successful either way is the indication from what I've learned and the folks I've talked to. It's six one half a dozen of the other. - So let me maybe make a suggestion because for the TCA designation, there's gonna be a substantial planning, pre-planning stakeholder development. I would say I'm not in favor of just passing a resolution to get it locally and I don't think that's what Council Member Duff was saying either, quite frankly. So I think we can move down a parallel track because they 're all the same kind of planning mechanism so we're gonna have two or three months of stakeholder meetings and those kind of things and even that committee or whoever can begin to toss around, do we need something prior to the TCA? So I'd say we keep them both on the table and pursue the planning stages that we have to to become TCA designated and in that conversation, I think it will come to the surface if a local designation would be advantageous at that time. Does that make sense? - That sounds great, yes. - Any questions or more comments about this? Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Duff for your comment on that. I think that's helpful. All right, well then we'll move on to agenda item 2B, which I believe you're still there at the podium or stand or lectern or whatever we want to call that. Receive a porthole discussion, give staff direction regarding the city's policies for tax abatement and incentives. - So as the mayor said, this is going to be an update for you on the policy for tax abatement and incentives and I need to get myself organized for a second. There has been a prior action on this. On January 10th, we presented our revisions to the incentive policy to the Economic Development Partnership Board and then shortly thereafter on the 16th, we presented those proposed changes in the ADP board comments to the council and had a good discussion with you all at that time. And on February 14th, we went back to the ADP board, shared with them your comments and presented the actual draft policy document to that group. And the ADP board did make a recommendation for approval of the policy by the council and the vote on that was seven to zero. I'm going to pop this slide up there for a quick refresher about the consensus revisions and that's consensus among the ADP board members and the council about the changes that were proposed. We're working on the organization clarity and readability. We're bringing some different policies and funds under one policy. I do want to make a note on that though the economic development investment fund, the ordinance that established that fund does need to remain in place and that's because of accounting regulations that govern funds. So that will remain in place, but we will be able to repeal the base aircraft incentive policy and roll it under the general policy here. There was feedback to not restrict the terms of chapter 380 agreements to 10 years, but to leave them open for longer than that. We talked about putting some parameters around incentiv ization of retail projects. We talked about removing the capital investment framework, but retaining the additional factors that could support an application in terms of things that the community finds desirable. And then we are going to add some general language regarding the option of a jobs-based incentive and we're adding protections in the incentive contracts themselves, not the policy, but in the individual contracts if there are jobs- based incentives offered, we want to make sure that we're recapturing those incentives if a business were to leave the community. Question on that. Yes, sir. On the fourth one, the leakage issue on retail projects. So retail projects comes in a couple of different forms. One is single building project or building and the other is more of a retail development. Let's say like Razor Ranch or Denton Crossing or something like that. So is this addressing, does this apply to both of those different types of examples? What's the scope of that? It's general so that it could apply to both of them. There's flexibility. Because I see what you're asking, you could get one giant Nebraska furniture mart or that would be meeting a leakage issue. That's, you know, we're talking about that kind of stuff. I guess my thought on this is I don't and it doesn't sound like it's so tightly written that if you had a project that some stores were new to the community and bringing, you know, keeping people from driving off but some were not, this, it would just be a discussion then a policy discussion on how to. Correct. Okay. Yes. Yes, Mayor Pro Tem. Okay. I have a couple questions. So I'm looking through the AIS and there's a section on the AIS that says staff proposed changes, EDB board comments and then council comments. When are the council comments from? The 16th of January. Okay. I didn't realize we talked about all of, I don't remember talking about chapter 380 on the 16th of January, did we? Yes. Okay. Well, what do you know? All right. So I guess this is after the 16th, you went to ADP with our comments. That's right. Because we need a formal recommendation from them about the acceptance, if they recommend that you all accept the policy. And we wanted to take back your comments from the 16th to them so that they would know what the council feedback was and have a chance to ask us questions about it and discuss it. Okay. I guess I'm thrown off because some of the council comments say agree with ADP but then the ADP thing was afterwards. No, we met with the ADP on January 10th, gave them the first presentation, then came to you guys on January 16th, told you what they said and then went back to them. And so I hope that the cycle stops at some point. I want you to go back to them now. Well, I vaguely remember having the conversation about the capital improvement. So is the idea that we don't have a minimum capital investment now? Right. Well, in sort of procedurally, no, there's still a $5 million minimum. There's just not a chart that says 10 million equals 6 years and 25%, 15 million equals 8 years and 25%. Because that was potentially viewed, if someone's reading that application, it might seem like there was an entitlement to an incentive if you invested a certain amount of capital. So we've retained the minimum investment of $5 million but decoupled it from terms, length, and percentage. It's just gone. Okay. No, go ahead. I just have a question at the end. I think I'm finished with that slide. Oh, no, I'm talking about the end end? Yeah, the end end. Yeah. Okay. And to review the council direction from when we were here with you on the 16th, we want to make sure that any additional factors that were claimed in the incentive application and used when a decision was made would be referenced in the contract as a compliance requirement and that we're verifying those prior to an incentive payment being made. Making the jobs based potential incentives available to all types of businesses, including those that would qualify for ad valorem or sales tax based incentives because there was a discussion about if a business could qualify for an ad valorem or a sales tax incentive, we would not allow them to ask for jobs based incentives also. But y'all's direction was to make jobs based incentives available to any type of business or that would qualify otherwise. And then we had the discussion about applicants being required to achieve 100% of the valuation that they listed in their application as well as 100% of the hiring projections that they listed and that any potential deviations from that would be addressed during contract negotiations because there was some specificity around percentages of achievement and the council's direction was to hold them to what they put in their application. >> On the jobs incentives, when I'm reading the criteria, it talks about and this is under staff proposed changes column, not EDP comments or council comments. It could include net new jobs created and wages above the D inton County median or net new knowledge based or high skilled jobs created in one of Dinton's target industry sectors. The first criteria was talking about Dinton County median income. There are several different values for Dinton County median income. There's single or family. I know sometimes I get confused because I want to make sure all of our publications are consistent as far as what is that important to us? Are we looking at the median income? Isn't that how they're measured? There's one that's household median household and then there's median. Are you familiar with those? >> Oh, yes, I am and I appreciate the question. And it's a good question. And so what we did in the policy, we didn't put those specifics that you're referring to. We didn't include that in the policy. We left the door open for consideration of jobs based incentives. And when we have a situation in which we want to bring something like that forward, then we would apply the parameters to it using the terms that we felt were the most appropriate, council felt were the most appropriate in terms of comparison. I mean, do we want to use the $64,000, which is the median family income for the county as the comp or do we want to use the single income for the comparison? And that's something that we decided would be more appropriate when a specific case is brought forward to look at that. >> Then -- and I understand that. I think from a policy perspective, because this is a policy document, so when we say median, people who say businesses who are reading this are going to be, okay, they're going to either decide on their own what they think that means and decide that their criteria meets -- you know, because there's several definitions. My point being if we're going to have that much flexibility in it, I don't know if we just need to make it even a little bit more flexible and not necessarily tie it down to -- I mean, we would have that level, but am I making -- >> You are, and I'm sorry, I don't think I was very -- I wasn't clear. The notes that you're referring to about the comments, that 's -- those are the comments. We made the policy general to say the city council will consider jobs-based incentives. >> Right. >> And that's pretty much it. >> So these comments are not necessarily verbatim in the policy. >> Exactly. >> Never mind. All right. Fantastic. Ends that discussion. >> Okay. To wrap up with next steps, after your discussion here and the direction that you provide, we are planning on bringing the policy to you for a vote on March 20th, and there's a -- I need to correct something that's on the slide there. It also says individual consideration of a resolution repe aling the base aircraft incentive resolution. We can actually do that all in one step. I have been advised, so it will just be one item that would take care of everything. And then also just a note regarding the PID guidelines, which you all have also discussed. We were talking about these two things together at first, but now we have separated them, and we are going to be having another work session with you regarding PID guidelines on March 5th, and then we'll take that back to the ADP board, tell them what you said, and then move forward from there. But the incentive policy is what you would be considering a vote on March 20th. >> Okay. Mayor Pro Tem, you had a comment or question? >> On the last slide, when we were talking about DCAD valu ations of the project, so what I understand is that the ADP board would like to do away with basically having a minimum threshold. If the threshold is missed, then there can be a reduction of the incentive. >> Right. They were discussing options for if the threshold is missed , which can range from termination immediately to you don't get an incentive that particular year, or the percentage of the incentive that you get is reduced by the percentage of which you missed the threshold. That's not -- none of that is incorporated verbatim into the policy itself. That was another item that was discussed and decided that it's better to address that in the agreement itself, what the terms or what the conditions would be and what the consequences would be if a threshold were missed. >> Well, I mean, it definitely needs to be in the contract, but I think there has to be a policy, you know, stated as far as what happens. The expectation is that they would meet 100% of what they list in their application, and that is stated in the policy. >> Sure. I guess what I'm saying is I think we should have a policy if the 100% isn't met. >> What happens. >> And what happens, as opposed to just letting it -- because then you have like ad hoc type of contractual negotiations where one company might have one thing in their contract and another might have another. So I just think there needs to be a policy, like, that's actually stated, this is what we do when people don't meet their thresholds. That's my offering. >> And I understand that. In general, I agree with it. I think the -- my concern is that no matter what we put in there, there are going to be maybe factors and facts that arise in specific situations that -- let's say, for instance, somebody misses an incentive by -- they're going to miss it by five days. They're building a project and they're going to be five days out. If you don't have it built by January 1, your whole incentive goes away and you can -- they're pretty clear, we'll have it finished, we'll pull our CO and all that on January 5. If it's an all or nothing, it seems a little harsh or we could say you have a percentage wise. So are you saying to put in the various different options available, are you saying to have one hard option that this is it or help me understand exactly what you're -- >> Well, I'm definitely not in favor of anything that the E DP board recommended, for instance, allowing proportional reduction of the incentive because you could have a project that says, hey, we're a $10 million project, this is going to be our valuation, the valuation ends up being $2 million, so they still get 20% of their incentive, which is absolutely not what the goal of any type of economic development is. So I think that has to be completely off the table. And requesting an amendment, I'm okay with it in theory, but, you know, is it one of these situations where you're five days off or whatever? There should be some type of de minimis exception for things, but when we're talking about valuation, that usually doesn't have to do with the timeline issue. It's more they've requested a tax reduction from the app raisal district or the project really just wasn't valued to what they thought it was. And in that case, I don't really -- I mean, I don't personally see a need to modify an agreement because it was an arm's length transaction. They said they're going to provide us with X. They didn't provide us with X. We don't have an agreement. So I don't really -- I don't see a lot of room there except for a scenario like you described where you're five days off or something. So you're saying -- so it sounds like what I'm hearing you say is your concern is primarily from the valuation perspective. If somebody says we're going -- our incentive is based upon you get, you know, we're going to bring in $50 million worth of valuation. And they come in at 40 or they come in at 45 or they come in at 20. But for you, it's -- if you're saying you're going to deliver 50 and you don't, then that's it. You know, you don't get the incentive. Or you're saying if we can come up with some policy statement of if you're within plus or minus -- or minus, I guess. >> Right. Like a de minimis amount. >> Yeah. Whatever that's defined as. Nothing as substantial as the example that you used. But if it's 45 million or if it's 10% or 5% or something like that. And I get that because I wouldn't -- because when you get to a certain point, you've really gone beyond the bounds of what we relied upon to give the incentive. And that's really what you're saying. >> Right. >> Yeah. So I'm open to that discussion. I just don't know how you go about memorializing that in a policy. >> You can say plus or minus 5% of valuation is the room that you have. And then it's clear, every contract is clear going forward. And we did have -- we had an option of that. But we were going with 80% based on historical information. And that did not -- that was not something that you all were interested in. But the concept was the same. So if it's a 5%, you know, if you have to meet 95% of your value as an amount, I mean, I think that would be -- that would be a clear way to set the expectation for -- >> Can I follow up? >> Yes. >> The question is, you know, these projects will come online and then they immediately turn around and, you know, do their property tax appeals, which, of course, nobody wants to pay property taxes. But are we giving incentives to people who use the property tax appeals process? >> We wait until they're through their appeals process. And if they adjust themselves below their threshold in their contract, they do not get an incentive. >> Okay. >> Councilmember Gregory. >> Well, on that line, our agreement so far have -- if they 're based on capital improvements, it's not the amount that they actually paid for the capital improvements. And that's agreed upon in the contract. It's the amount that is assessed by the central appraisal district. Is that correct? >> It can be both. They can have a requirement to spend a certain amount, but then they can also have -- and the more common one is the value that is assessed by the central appraisal district. So you're right. It's always that, but it also could be the total capital investment. >> So in the last six months or nine months, we've had a couple of reports that companies that had received incentives had those canceled because the property valuation from the central appraisal district was, I guess in most cases significantly lower than what they had said it was going to -- what it was going to need to be in order to receive the abatement. Have you talked with any of those companies? Do they -- this is a silly question to ask. Were they complaining that the central appraisal district undervalued their improvements? What was going on there? Or was that a result of appeals that they had because it wasn't going to -- it was going to be better to get lower valuations because of their school taxes and their county taxes than what they would make off of the incentive from us? >> I talked to all of them. I had some interesting conversations with them. What happened -- we learned two things. One that expansion projects, what you spend on an expansion project does not in any way equate to the increase in value. In most cases, the value added is much lower than the amount spent. Does that make sense? >> Do they understand that going in? >> I don't think so. We now know what we need to tell people when we have these conversations about people who come to us with expansion projects. Just put that in the experience column. This is part of the conversation we will have with people. We didn't know that either. Honestly, there was a raft of expansion projects that were approved a couple years ago all at once. This is the outcome. We've learned how these projects are valued when they are expansion. There's that. There's also the depreciation aspect of a business. You have business personal property, machinery, equipment, and it depreciates over time. >> They set some of those depreciation rates themselves. >> Yes. What we learned is sometimes people managing the incentive and requesting the incentive are not the same people who are doing the taxes. So again, that's another thing that we've realized that we need to have these conversations with people to give them the heads up about it. We did talk about you can go and ask to be valued higher, which is a very strange conversation to have with someone. Nobody did that. But really what it came down to in the end for these companies I think was I don't see -- I don't think any of them were ever going to go and protest that they would like their value to be made higher. But it came out in at least one case we know for sure to the advantage of the company, the incentive was less than their lower taxes, right? Taking the lower valuation was better for their bottom line than getting the incentive would have been. So interesting situations, but kind of a combination of different things. Are they causing that to happen? >> Thank you. >> Yes. Councilmember Hussbett. >> Thank you. So I don't know that I'm for the percentage if you fail type approach. I am okay with kind of capturing the thought behind it, which is let's solidify the process to say if you fail they'll be handed on an individual basis . But I think we get right back where we are now where a company does all the things in theory to meet the goal and some things out of their control force them to miss that goal and then we're kind of tied if it doesn't meet a 5% threshold, 10% threshold, are all the businesses the same, 5% of what, 10% of what. So I think those are just best handled individually kind of as was proposed initially because it allows that consideration if the business makes X amount then percentages vacillate. And so we're not the goal is to be even. Numbers are applied even but they also are left up to interpretation based on the numbers they're being applied to versus a true distinct individual consideration of circumstances and how they got there, which is I think the intent of the board and what I would fall in line with is because I think that is the only true even handed approach is to say we'll take each one on an individual basis. Here's the merits. Here's what happened. And yes or no, this incentive and it gives us more control over that process versus a well sorry it's in the contract. You know we can't consider those things. So that's just my I'd like to see I understand the need to close the loop but I and then there is that interesting component. You're not hedging against yourself but you're saying you 're like hey we hope you don't fail but in the instance that you do fail, you know here's I like that song. So I think that's the that would be my approach. Yes close the loop but I don't think don't close it with a number. Close it with you will sit down with you evaluate and I get it that there's a threshold that we understand that would say we have to cancel it because the bad outweighs the good but that's my approach. So if I could just ask a couple of questions of clarification on that and maybe staff can help me understand this. So because I'm distinguishing I'm making a distinction between we've got a policy that either has your approach which is we have a hard number but then we consider it case by case and with Mayor Pro Tems where we have this percentage wise. I'm also to me outside of this discussion is the ability for a someone to come in and say to make an amendment to their agreement to their incentive agreement saying we know we're not going to make it. Can we we want to request an amendment to our agreement which then will be considered on the merits of that each individually. So am I correct or incorrect in seeing that we're talking about really two different things that we're talking about a general policy here that if nobody does anything the terms of the contract apply and whatever the contract says based upon the policy is what governs. Whereas over here we could we could have this take no prisoners approach that says OK look you miss it you're out. They have an opportunity then to come and ask for an amendment before the termination of that. Am I am I understanding the process. Yes if I understand what you're saying that's the way that it operates now. Right. Yes. And are we trying to change that. No. OK. So we're just trying to say we're trying to get our policy guidelines and to make some changes to it. But an applicant or an incentive company receiving incentive always has the opportunity to come back if there's going to be some issue like we've had several come back in the past and say it's rained too much our construction and you know it's been raining for three weeks we can't get our crews in there. The city has taken some time on the permit process or you know or something. They can come back and then we will consider those individually. So really whether we go with Mayor Pro Tem's comments or suggestions about a percentage or yours there's always that avenue that they have to come back and renegotiate or ask for an amendment to their to their incentive agreement. That's correct. Am I right on that. Yes. If there's no if there's no deadline in the contract that would prevent them from doing that. Yes. I mean I think that is the only circumstance that I can think of that has happened where somebody's contract was going to. Well that's not even a good example. So never mind. We've had circumstances where contracts have been extended from a deadline simply because of just so. Yeah. But that's sort of laying along the same policies. We got a hard date in a contract. Hey these are the circumstances we all consider and then each time the council gets to make that individual decision notwithstanding what the policy says because we can decide if we want to amend the terms of the contract. Right. And the policy is clear in that the council has discretion to address anything contained within the policy on a case by case basis. Yeah. OK. So in that case I mean whether we go with your suggestion Council Member Husband and I want to make sure I understand what you're saying is are you saying so given that discussion are you saying hey if we have a if it's a really hard line in the policy everyone still has an opportunity through a request for an amendment to come back and consider it on a case by case basis instead of doing it at the contract level. In other words well first of all who discusses that who makes that ultimate decision whereas if they're requesting an amendment that's always going to come before the EDP board and the city council I'm assuming as do the contracts. Right. Yes. Right. Whereas if you took Mayor Pro Tem's suggestion it's sort of the same thing it's just you have a you have a de minimis kind of where we don't have to go through that amendment process in other words sort of makes it a little bit easier because if you're going to meet it if you're going to miss it by 5 percent let's say you don't have to come back and ask for an amendment you can just go okay is that how I sort of see that am I way off on that. No I think you're I'm hearing you state correctly what I heard them say I will say that if say okay so we're using the 5 percent in our experience of those that have missed their threshold they miss it by way more than 5 percent and so then I'm wondering if even if you had that would you still have everybody coming back anyway. Yeah. To ask for an amendment. So you know honestly then based on that because I'm okay with having in the policy a harder line of saying if you miss it you miss it but each person each entity knows that they have an opportunity before that to come and if they think they're going to miss it to ask for an amendment because you don't want to have the contract expire and then come back and ask for amendment I mean we should that should be on the business that that duty should be on the business receiving the incentive to come forward so to me it's you say potato I say potato so I mean I'm really okay with either one because there is a remedy if the businesses choose to move down that path because in some cases it would be in our best interest to say hey you know what this is all happening we probably should do something you know have an extension or a because I mean just things happen so I'm okay with either one so I'm trying to so councilmember Hussbuss were you saying in the policy you wanted what in the policy yeah no so I think you've outlined it right a a solidified policy that then has an option to an amendment yeah yeah to to then yeah come back and at their request amend I guess my follow-up question to that understanding that policy understanding that amendment process I'm fine with five percent I guess another question to that would be and forgive me if I should know this but is there a solidified per agreement almost documented return on investment goals that sort of thing on each agreement does it say for example you're going to build this building and here's the contribution here's the agreement the stated express purpose of that is you're going to get a building we're going to get you know 68 jobs and and the taxpayers are going to make X amount is that kind of capture that's captured in agreement because I think a document that that mr. city manager sent to me was very very informative it kind of captured some of those net gains you know and I think that that really shed a lot of light on departments or part me it's not construction but anyway those those type entities that are receiving those and what that return is and so that speaks volumes to me and I just wasn't sure if it's kind of hate because then when you miss it's like okay well you missed and here's what we're missing out on and we can make an educated decision yes that's part of every contract and we're even we're beefing that up even more even though it was already part it's more apart excellent thank you councilmember Duff yeah I wanted to you know make a few comments on on the dcat appraisals I have a great deal of experience on homes and I can tell you I don't have really much faith in the accuracy of those as far as the real value of the home and I can imagine it looks gonna be a whole lot more difficult when you talk about buildings and add-ons or just total buildings so I don't have a real you know a lot of faith in in the numbers they come up with and how they come up with them and so I can see that could be I can understand how they they put X number of dollars into a to a building and it comes in evaluated considerably less because that happens in homes all the time yeah okay great thank you so it seems like what I'm hearing is mayor pro tem suggestion of if we had a de minimis on the valuation per part of five percent that we don't have to have this type of amendment process councilmember husband said that he was you know that now you know he's okay with that given that they have an amendment opportunity anybody else oppose that are you okay with that suggestion from mayor pro tem on that I'm seeing a bunch of blank stares okay now I'm seeing some nodding heads okay councilmember more than five percent then they don't get it they don't get it at all right unless they come back and ask for an amendment that's right okay yes yeah prior to the contract expiring yes I'm good with that we're we're inserting the de minimis of ninety five percent of the applicant yes or the application right right yours yeah okay yeah okay all right okay and so question and if I'm out of posting just let me know on this well he looks at me like oh when you talk about notes on PID guidelines I had an opportunity with Scott McDonald to go to Scott here he was here yeah he was there to go to a was it the Dallas home builders association developer subcommittee meeting and we talked about that pits and sort of where Denton was at least in the conversation and you know one of the gentlemen had a had you know some good feedback in that are we trying to get some not feedback or direction from a developer community but from developers who are not trying to come to the city in other words people who don't have a vested interest in trying to get a pit here what generally out there in the so I would hope that we could try to get some you know maybe use them as a resource because they certainly had a lot of people there who are familiar with good ways of approaching this and not good ways and I just want to make sure that we have information from the various stakeholders who don't have maybe a self-dealing interest at that particular moment standing here advocating for us to give them something just more of a general sense of comments and observations and then we can make our decision I just I don't want the conversation to be too one-sided but so they offered that and so I just thought I throw that out there you guys can do it what you want I'm not saying it's requirement but you know obviously the more information we can have the better off we are making an informed decision and if they're pretty much neutral then I understand okay so I didn't get a piece of paper rattled at me so I appreciate that any other comments is that does that conclude your presentation yes so we'll make that revision oh I'm sorry yes on the chapter 380 limit to 10 years so what is our policy now what is the policy directive that we go beyond 10 years well chapter 380 statutory guidelines are vague there is no limit in the statute and there is the policy that we have at this point does not apply a limit that there was the attempt to align it with the 10-year time frame that is statutorily required for a tax abatement we felt like that made sense it was a tie but the the EDP board feedback was pretty strong against that limitation so it remains it remains open and just would follow the statute at this point okay well I'll just for the record I'm in favor of a 10- year limit on the chapter 380 agreements I will say on that I'm on the board and I was also in favor of matching it and aligning it but there were a lot of people on the board that weren't in agreement matching it and aligning it with with the tax abatement tax abat ement because by law you can't have a term longer than 10 years for a tax abatement okay they were afraid that it was going to turn some people off if they saw the max of 10 years sure but ultimately a council can decide and that's correct that's what she told everybody too but that being in the policy was right okay all right okay okay so I hear one one addition and as I hear otherwise that seems to be the direction is maybe to leave that a little bit more flexible okay unless somebody starts yeah jumping up and telling me okay okay okay thank you all right you bet well we're all just we're all chipper today or just giving direction left and right okay thank you so much Caroline great presentation we now have we'll go into our work session reports to see receive report hold discussion give staff direction regarding the schedule of miscellaneous fees deposits etc. contained in ordinance 2016 - 276 good afternoon George Morrow DME general manager staff is before you today with an update of the utility customer service policy which includes fees and procedures for customer service most of which you've responded to the customer service manager on and have endorsed the new piece is the one we like to focus on today which is a issue with customers who do not want to have our automated metering infrastructure installed at their at their property and so I'm going to introduce JR Richardson JR is our superintendent of met ering at the utility and and one of the great people that I've been fortunate to meet in my short time here with the city and he's gonna give you the background on this and we're here to answer any questions you might have thank you thank you George good afternoon city manager mayor members of the council and get this keyboard out here it's a lot easier than this mouse today we're going to go over some discussion over the opt-out program briefly I'll go over some of the safety and advantages for our disadvantages of customers and utilities and also I have a slide that has some of the rates that other Texas utilities have adopted for their opt-out program and then we'll open it up for questions again as I 've shared with you before we have roughly yes sir I'm sorry I think customer Briggs had an initial question before you started just so I can get on the same page as you is this we approved something recently in council for purchasing meters is this coincide with that it does it does in a sense because what this is talking about is well the purchase was of our AMI meters and associated equipment and this is actually the discussion today is going to talk about possibly adopting an opt-out program for our utility customers to where we have which I'll have a slide come or actually right here we have less than 40 customers who refuse to AMI meter when we did the initial rollout of the AMI program actually that number of today is 34 customers we have 34 customers who do not have an AMI meter and we have another three who wish not to have one if we choose to adopt this opt-out program okay and if that will that affect what we decide today will that affect any decisions that we made in council on the purchase of these no because the only thing that's going to affect is this small handful of customers who don't have the AMI meter everything else that we approved before we'll move forward we will continue to have that and actually whenever I get to the slide about the disadvantages I'll go over what that would do all right so again we have 53,000 electric meters in the city 99.99 percent of those do have the AMI meter which we approved at the last time I addressed you there's been several institutions that have provided ample studies on the safety of the radio frequency ANSI IEEE and the Federal Communications Commission which deemed that the exposure to the radio that are in the AMI meters have no adverse exposure or negative health or safety impacts and the reason why I want to put that up there is because some of the 38 customers or 34 customers that refuse the meter use that as a reason why they were concerned about the radio frequency but the radio frequency that we use is actually 2.4 gigahertz which is similar to what a Wi-Fi uses with what we have in this room actually and it's actually inside the home and anytime a customer has our internet router a wireless router they have that frequency within the home and these meters are actually located outside the home and it only has a 1 watt radio where your cell phone has a stronger radio signal it's actually operates normally with a 2 watt radio so and then in addition our AMI meters don't constantly broadcast that signal like your router does typically we can get all of our data in less than 6 minutes throughout an entire day. Some of the disadvantages for the customers are listed here but the one I think is most important here is not being able to be a part of the outage management system I think I shared this with you before that as an AMI meter that's out on the system if there's ever an outage it will send a what the industry deems as a last gasp in other words it says that hey you know send help I'm out yeah so and the advantage for that for a customer is say we have weather like we did last week where the ice is breaking limbs out or what have you and it falls down and you have a home that has overhead service and it pulls that service down it may cause the line fuse to open up that for the whole neighborhood or your block for instance and we go out and we refuse that and get it on and every customer comes back on and say for maybe your home because that's where the service got pulled down and what if you're out of town if you're out of town then and you don't have an AMI meter we don't know that you weren't restored every other meter is going to say hey okay I'm back online thanks for the help you know but if you don 't have that then you could be there without power without our knowledge. Yes sir. Quick question on that so there's someone who's I guess it's dispatch or somebody that's monitoring this screen that that this data comes into so if let's say there's not an outage let's say that all of a sudden somebody's looking and one of these AMI meters goes out in other words it says I'm on my last gas we've just lost power it could be a short it could be a tree fallen is that a proactive monitoring on that in other words if somebody sees that will they dispatch someone out there or is there 's a do you have to wait until somebody actually calls in. That is the beauty of it Mr. Mayor we no longer have to wait for us custom call in yes our system operators are monitoring that I'll tell you how sensitive it is whenever we're going out say a new home has been built and we put up a softball you know the aid in the construction of the home when it comes time to final out that home and actually put a meter now on the home and power up the home we use the same meter that's in the softball so when the service truck goes out there they actually have to or we develop a practice now to contact the system operator to let them know hey we 're at such-and-such address we're getting ready to put this meter on the home because if not they'll see that outage and dispatch a truck okay and you know the growing pains of getting the system and actually tying it with our average management system initially we were having someone there doing the work and then someone showing up right there was an out age so now we have the practice in place to notify the system operator so it is proactive if you see go out if somebody hadn't called said we're changing out of meter they'll send somebody out there without necessarily needing a call that is correct great great thank you some of the other disadvantages is you know not being able to be eligible for the prepaid billing which is scheduled to come out maybe mid some mid to late summer and also not being able to have access to your 15-minute interval data which you can do if you have an AMI meter some of the disadvantages for our utility are again the outage management system but I think one here that's really worth noting is the second to the last and it's unable to monitor for diversion or unregistered behind the meter generation our AMI team which Brandon was a supervisor of he's now our electric meter manager but they monitor different reports daily one of those reports is a reverse flow report and we have identified several unregistered generation installations to the state where people may go out to Hobby Lobby wherever and purchase a solar panel system and hook it up in their backyard I personally witnessed one that was just sitting in the backyard on center blocks and they had actually just plugged into their outlet on their patio and was kind of backfitting well if they were to leave and go out of town where there's a minimum load that report will show a reverse flow and there's and the reason why we're you know we really want to know about those is because say for instance something goes out and we don't know that there's there and if they haven 't gone through the proper channels then there's not an isolation relay there so in other words when the power goes out yeah you can have this solar power power for your home but we need something to disconnect from our system so it's not bad feeding backfeeding which will cause a safety hazard for our alignment going out you know they're going out thinking they're going to work on a dead line and now this thing is you know backfeeding and that transformer back there is doing the reverse where you know normally it takes the primary voltage and step it down to secondary well now it's taking that secondary voltage coming back and stepping it up which creates a hazard for our employees yes mayor put in the time of time of use rate so basically that's where you pay higher lower rates depending on if you're on peak or off peak times that is correct so what is the rate that's offered to these customers i don 't have that information right yet and i and um it's in our our miscellaneous schedule is it just some type of flat rate that's offered to them as opposed to a fluctuating rate no i'm jumping okay so it's a very general rate that uh really applies today only to our solar customers and it it will be a little bit higher charge for a what's defined as a peak period and a little bit lower it's nothing significant a little bit lower during the off peak period so so that we try to value the surplus solar energy a little more commensurate with you know what it's worth to the to the utility so at some point in time in our industry we'll be moving toward time of use rates probably several years down the road and there'll be a number of phases to that so you know there will be a lot of involvement by the council and the public utility board before we before we'd ever move forward with that but so we don't have time of use rates right now that would be applicable to to general customers that's correct so nobody gets time of use rates with the exception of the solar customers who we want to again value their their energy as it that gets pushed back to us okay so this isn't just something that's only for the 34 folks that are afraid of radio waves it's all of it it's for everybody nobody don't let the opt-out program the time of use rate is not applied to any dme customer except for solar right now correct got it okay thank you and that's a good point but people without the am i meter would not be able to yes once it's available yes ma'am here this slide shows some of the utilities that who have opted to provide an opt-out program for some of their customers we put this together and i want to point out on here brian texas utilities is another municipality who chose not to have an opt-out fee therefore all their customers do have an am i meter georgetown we put on there that they don't have one but they're actually in our situation where they 're in the process of adopting or deciding whether or not to adopt the not doubt program and we added the city of denton on the side just as a quick reference to see where our proposed rates kind of how it correlates with the rest of the utilities in texas that we contacted so under the city of denton i'm assuming those are the proposals proposed yes sir is that a 131 dollar flat fee and then a 30 dollar month per charge extra is that what yes the 131 is the flat fee for a non-standard meter in other words if say you have an am i meter now and you call us which we have three people kind of in the queue uh waiting on and you call and say hey you know i really don't care to have this am i meter there would be a one-time flat fee of 131 dollars which is the cost of that non-standard uh electric meter and then a monthly 30 dollar fee for the manual read and also for uh maintenance and testing of that meter that's not part of our standard program all right okay on january the ninth uh the city council did approve the credit and collection policy ordinance uh agenda item 18 uh 073 and at that time we took advantage of uh since the miscellaneous rate schedule was going to be revised we went and added those rates that you saw on the last slide in the event that we will have to utilize those but of course if we don't then they'll just be there and then we'll fall off next year but they are part of the rate schedule as we speak today so our two options are either to you know one not have an am i uh opt out program or two to uh go ahead and adopt an opt out program for our citizens that will include these charges uh staff and the pub has recommended to adopt the am i opt out program or option number two and uh in conclusion if we decide to move forward then this item will come back to you uh next week for approval okay yes councilman rafael did you say that the the fees that we were just um shown we actually have already approved we have not approved them we just took advantage of adding them to our miscellaneous rate schedule so they're already there because they were doing the uh changes that we're discussing the collection process so we just took advantage of having them added there but they have not been approved and and they are not in effect and they won't be until approval okay okay uh questions comments and i'm okay with opt out too i mean yes councilman rafael yeah no likewise i'm in i'm in agreement with the with the policy as as presented i think it's i appreciate the detail as to where the dollars are going uh because that that's easy to track and straight line um i i want the one question i have is do we have a database with homes that have solar uh so that we can then uh somehow better protect if that person's ops out and they have a solar power source is that flagged somehow so that we know that house if we have to go out for repairs that kind of gets updated to the the crew or how do we manage that yes sir we do have a database uh that's uh maintained through our engineering department and uh also with uh yeah our electric gis system which is the mapping system for our utility system okay thank you councilmember defton councilmember gregory i would be in favor of option one okay all right councilmember gregory uh with pardon me with option two if there's um if somebody does what you said and has their their um own uh plug-in solar panel do do we necessarily know that yes we do because there's actually a criterion program which they have to adhere to for it to be approved there's an um a submittal process that you go through what if they have an unapproved they didn't if it's they didn't ask for a rebate or anything if it's unapproved it's identified through that report that i mentioned earlier and whenever we identify a customer that hasn't gone through the approval level we send staff out to then contact them and request that they do go through the approval level so we have the protection that we need for our our employees so i i does i think i'm okay with option two um but i would like to see when we communicate to folks that that choose that option you know explain to them the rate explain to them also that that we would not know if their electricity is off and stays off yes sir uh so that we're not we're not responsible for um for that if they have if they come back after a week and then also explain their requirements to uh notify us if they if they add any uh solar collection or any other kind of home generation options yes i think that requiring that as part of the adoption too would be important yes that's something that we would have to check on uh monthly when we go out to read the meter i guess that that person would then have to check to make sure that a system hasn't been added because without the ami system it won't catch we won 't catch it in the report so and then what happens if that particular person um and i guess they're walking around in their hat house with some aluminum foil over their head to keep safe i know i'm not running for a reelection i can say it but what if they have a really mean dog and and in the backyard and and our meter reader can't get out there do we have to make appointments or what we don't make appointments we have actually ran into that in uh different situations uh because again as i shared with you last week all of the ami meters aren't doesn't have that connect disconnect functionality so we still have some homes that have an ami meter that we do have to make access to the backyard and whenever we have a dog that is too vicious we 've actually contacted animal control and they have come out and assisted us with those with the reading of the meter well not with the well not with the reading because if they have an ami meter we're getting the read but if in this case if we have a person that doesn 't have an ami meter and we need to get into the yard and they have a bad dog then yes we will have to uh well on a read we probably wouldn't contact animal control right away just sit there and wait on them we'd probably leave a door hanger and then put it on our high low which the next day we'll go out and hopefully that customer will be there at a certain time or have put the dog up to where it allows to gain access to the to the meter okay thanks uh let me understand if they if they do not have the ami meter yes sir okay and they come in and they plug in a solar can you detect that you know to protect your your people if if it's feeding back not without visual confirmation no sir so in other words in other words if they have the old meter uh you don't have any protection for your people that is correct other than uh of course when a lineman goes up and and and takes a work on anything for safety it's not dead if it's not grounded so yeah in in the process of installing our safety equipment or our grounding equipment it will tell us then that we have an issue but it is still risky yes sir okay thank you thank you i forgot to ask one thing what is what does the opt out look like do we have some sort of contract signature something that that then protects us that that if someone one person in the household opts out another person says we didn't opt out i mean how do we do we have something that just captures a signature a thumbprint something that says um we truly this household does opt out it's something that we can have that i just just in case in that household one thinks they're not opted out and they see a bill for you know that particular that initial month of 160 dollars what is this we didn't opt out well here's a contract who here's who signed for it is do we have that i want to touch on something that was mentioned over here so the intention is we'll send the letter to every one of these customers that are that might opt out or that we know of already it would attach to that would be a form we'd ask them to fill out to document that and if subsequent customers come forward and say hey we want to also join the opt out we'll require their execution of a small document to say yes we understand the consequences and i think we're going to point out a lot of things to these customers in that cover letter related to you know some of the issues and concerns some of the benefits that they're not going to be able to get if they continue to go forward opt out so it gives us another opportunity of maybe having them change their minds you know here's a 30 dollar per month charge that they're going to have to deal with and that might persuade folks to to join the program which we think actually the staff we think makes a lot of sense that that folks are part of the ami program thank you thank you mayor i think uh councilman husbeth's question kind of handled mine was is there going to be a document that we can create to let them know that these are the are the issues and i think that's very important that we do have that yes sir and and after that uh the way i understand it now if a customer calls in with a concern of the account they actually have to be the account holder or listed on the account for us to even have that dialogue with them correct so one question i had you mentioned briefly in passing that of the ami meters not all of them are equipped with uh disconnect and connect features that is that because of a um deficiency at the meter based site based upon the electrical configuration which is not the city's or is that something that we have control over i mean i would say both mr mayor uh one is any home that's greater than a 200 amp service we do have some homes that are larger and they have a three 320 amp service uh the industry just doesn't offer that connect disconnect availability under the glass at this time so it has to be a 200 amp service and the other reason why some homes don't have that at this time uh as i shared with you before this is not dme's first stab at uh automated reading we've had amr and ami uh as far as back as right the turtle so yeah uh which was a power line carrier so whenever we started the initial rollout we wanted to get that old equipment off the system first so we utilized the disconnects and a lot of those were uh as we discussed before apartment complexes because of our two utilities what have you but your um i guess your everyday residential home for instance my home i don't have a disconnect function on my meter however i do have an ami and uh as we uh the purchase that we approved last time uh every meter we we purchase now will have that that capability and through nutrition we were changing those out as we as we go fantastic okay so it seemed like we had a consensus for option two outside of councilmember duff is that my understanding all right okay thank you very much appreciate you yes you sure can absolutely i can't believe we're spending all this amount of time on point oh one percent of the people that get electricity yeah i appreciate that okay all right any other comments questions all right thank you okay everybody okay don't need a break everybody good all right no no i'm just checking because i mean when i say i take a break people look at me like what are you doing taking a break i'm okay well we'll just check in next time i can't win one way or the other all right then we'll move on to agenda item 2c which is i'm sorry 2d receive report and hold discussion give staff direction regarding the city 's hotel occupancy tax program uh mayor city council my name is tony puenta director finance i'm here to talk to you a little bit about the hotel occupancy tax program for the city that was an item that was requested by several of you so we're here to you know go through this discussion and answer any questions that you may have just briefly i'm going to go through real quick on the legal framework for this hot program also revenue collection the how we get the revenue and the amount of the revenue and then the other item we'll cover is revenue allocation or how we expense these dollars and then finally just go through real quickly with you on the program year 19 calendar of events so very quickly here for you the hotel occupancy tax program what we call hot is authorized and by chapter 351 of the texas tax code there was also an ordinance adopted back in 96 it's listed here for you that basically made that levy in the city and also mirror state law the local rate the city rate is seven percent uh when an individual stays in a local hotel or or books a room and we'll talk a little bit about what those lodging establishments are they pay a total of 13 so seven percent comes directly to the city that's the city piece six percent is remitted directly to the state we don't get any of that so this is applicable to all lodging establishments within the city limits of denton uh in a couple of slides i'll go through what what a lod ging establishment is within the city is as defined by the code and there's been a lot of changes in that industry that encompass what that is the primary purpose of this tax is to promote tourism and the convention of hotel industry i think in the past we've talked to you about this concept of a two-step uh that tml and texas ag's office um promulgates in the use of hotel occupancy taxes step one is we need to ensure that the money that's being spent is for tourism and to promote the convention and hotel industry and in step two i'll talk a little bit briefly on the allocation side there 's a number of things that are allowed are only allowed to be used this money can be used for got some upgrades yes ma'am so our ordinance was passed in 1996 yes ma'am and is it still in compliance with all the with the law i mean have there been a lot of things that have changed that we need to update that um we did look at that and um the only the only change uh that's applicable to the city um and understand that the ordinance in our view references state law so i think any changes there would still be applicable uh but the only item that's different to the city of denton is that this last legislative session we were allowed to use some of the hot funds for upgrading and making improvements to city-owned sports facilities so that 's really the only thing that has changed um that we can that we can see um now i will tell you that a couple years ago we did hire an outside firm that came in helped us do some audits they also reviewed our ordinance and felt that there was no changes that were needed but it is it is quite old okay thank you thank you mayor in the state law or in our local ordinances are there any exceptions to hot funds uh payments or the occupancy tax payments for a person who is therefore an extended stay for a person who is uh taking up maybe a short-term residence or longer because of uh being displaced due to a natural disaster or people who uh are homeless uh the answer is is yes for most of those permanent residents anybody that's staying in a local hotel for longer than 30 days is exempt from paying that hotel motel tax there's certain exemptions for governmental employees tend to be federal and state employees city employees are not exempt from those and there's other exemptions members of the military and such there's also been declarations um by the state in times of of you know um emergencies uh with all the hurricanes and so there's been temporary exemptions in certain areas uh for those individuals as well thank you yes sir so just moving on to revenue collection as i mentioned earlier uh this revenue comes directly to the city it is a restricted revenue we have a a fund that we call the tourist and convention fund and you may be familiar in in the annual budget process that we talk about that um it is a a segregated fund from all our other funds that we have an ordinance um actually we don't have an ordinance but it's it's established per the state law um the current fund balance in in that fund is 2.2 million almost 2.3 million dollars that's in that fund as of the end of september 30th 2017 moving on to lodging establishments as i mentioned already the rate is a total of 13 percent a lodging establishment is um is defined as generally a hotel and a motel but also encompasses bed and breakfast guest and housing um situations short- term rentals uh this would cover rooms and you know the van parked on the side of the street that people are renting to airbnb vrbo so those those all are considered rooms they're all considered um lodging establishments they should all be collecting and remitting hotel motel taxes as i mentioned these taxes are remitted directly to the city generally when a new hotel or establishment comes into the city they'll usually contact the finance department will work with them to make sure that that they understand the requirements and that they're remitting um taxes uh appropriately uh we also uh all all those checks come in or payments come in through the finance department we do review those on a monthly basis uh we look at what's called their folios uh what happened during that that month we review all the exemptions to make sure that somebody didn't get an exemption that wasn't supposed to um and so we work closely with with our local establishments to make sure that they're in compliance as i mentioned earlier uh back in fiscal year 13 through 15 we did we did do a city-wide audit of all establishments it was an outside firm that we utilized for that uh we did recover uh the at least we recovered the cost of the audit plus a little bit more uh so uh so it was very successful uh the the other last thing that i'll mention is that in the current internal audit plan i know we have a new auditor and so we're going to have to have discussions with him about that but in the current audit plan um we did have or there was the audit of these hotels as part of that audit plan instead of outsourcing that but that'll be a discussion that we'll be having with the internal auditor as he looks at his audit plan and what that may be uh revenue allocation as i mentioned earlier that's the expense side of this program we do have a hot committee made up of three council members uh mayor watts council members gregory and husband our current the current members the committee meets at least annually to review and establish the program guidelines for recipients and also what the application looks like and and what may be required for not just our current recipients but new recipients to apply for for hot fund proceeds the committee reviews our financial forecast for the fund uh they review the applications of current recipients and new applicants so once they come in and then they make funding recommendations to the city council in conjunction with the proposed citywide budget the other item that i'll mention to you here too that it's applicable is resolution uh 2013 021 what's called the public art policy that policy does require that 2.4 percent of hot revenues be allocated to public art in the current year uh there's been a little bit more that was allocated for a one-time project and that one-time project was an update or an expansion of the bricks uh structure as a big sculpture that's at the police department so so they did get a little bit more this year than the 2.4 as far as our our hot fund recipients they are all primarily primarily made up of non-profit organizations although we do have a few city operations that do receive hot funds as i mentioned earlier the parks department was one that received a one-time allocation this year for an improvement a drainage improvement to the softball field out at north lakes for tournament play but we also the city also coordinates and assists with the juteen and cinco de mayo celebrations and that's all run uh through the city as far as managing these hot funds for that particular for those particular events uh council member breaks out a question so on the um on the itemized list of those that received funds it says the dense square maintenance um parks and recreation department i guess so is that something that is voted on through the committee on who gets that or is that still come through council on who gets that contract um the the actual contract to perform that um i don't believe that that contract that there's a contract i think that's performed by city staff okay so that just goes to the city parks budget well i think they used it for certain um certain equipment and materials uh for that lighting event on the square oh this is for the square lighting no um for cleaning up the square oh the square maintenance yeah um yeah i think that's to just offset some um some equipment and materials that they use uh around the square like flowers and stuff like that yes correct okay we do have a contract with an outside vendor that does some uh power washing on the sidewalks and i don't know if that's from the hot funds or something else but we do have okay so i'm having my staff member saying that this is it sorry yes ma'am that's what it is yes okay great so um again the uh the recipients that that get a hot allocation do report back uh to the city on a monthly and quarterly basis on how they've utilized those hot proceeds uh we ensure that they're in compliance with the with the program guidelines um in addition uh the there is a contract the council approves on an annual basis for these external entities uh that contract again stipulates um a number of provisions one of those provisions is that in the event of an economic downturn that those recipients may have to return those hot funds um i think in talking with city staff in the last 15 or 20 years i think that's only happened twice um but uh but it is something that's in in in the contract and our recipients are very well aware of that um finally uh the calendar events so uh the the plan is that in april 2018 we will be meeting with the hot committee to go and review the the program guidelines and the application and then get that advertised on our website we we email our our current recipients work with them and with putting together their applications those are due back to the city in may in june the hot fund committee will meet again to uh to go through and recommend allocations uh to recipients um and in in august that comes to the council as part of the city proposed budget so that covers all that i had if you have any questions council member uh mayor portemba gary tony would you mind pulling up the itemized list are you able to pull that up i do if you give me one quick second okay you do know this to being recorded yes i know since you're not okay is that too big no i think it's good okay i want to make sure it's the same one i have yep um i have a question about a couple of items so the o 'reilly hospitality 380 rebate agreement yes ma'am that's it's a 658 000 rebate is that the city of denton hot funds portion or is it the state and like what portion of the hot funds is going into that rebate that is that is only the piece that's going to come to the city it's only the seven percent and in the agreement we were we are going to rebate 100 of that back to o'reilly so what we 've done is we've included an offsetting revenue projected revenue um in in fiscal 1718 to offset that expense so it's 100 of the seven percent that we collect there's six percent still goes to the state that's correct and then how long does that last for how many years 25 years is it is there a finance is there a number cap or it's a year cap 54 million okay um i think it's the entire incentive not just you know the hot piece all right so basically if there hadn't been that agreement and o'reilly had decided to build already there would be 600 000 more in the hot funds fund thinking of it a different way okay um then i had another question about the resolution that was pat you can leave it on this but so there's the public art committee pd denton pd lobby art so one of the first things i asked when i was elected was of the legal department what can we use hot funds for and it was basically to put heads in beds so with our public art resolution is there some tie-in to the overnight stays like how does our public art resolution tie into the hot funds distribution who wants to answer that brian's chomping at the bit i believe there is a provision in the in the act related to hot funds that allows you to spend up to 15 percent i don't remember if i remember correctly 15 percent on our art and artistic top programs and so that's where the authorization comes from for that particular program is tourism and so there's not going to be a requirement that they are related to a festival or anything like that right but we since it's our resolution we could put whatever we wanted in the resolution in terms of how we want those funds used correct absolutely and i think if you know if you wanted to have any kind of revisions to the public art policy which is where that piece comes from that that could also be tied to that if that's what the council chose to do okay thank you that's helpful any other questions comments yes yes councilman so i have a of a list here because yeah um my suggestions that if uh that i would like to see done and if there's so i guess i don't know how you want to take these i'll list them and then we can take them up but i just want to have some clarity as to if if we're going to act upon them or not so uh for example um vendor for the the vendors that would submit or the applicants to say in this instance i i would think there needs to be a local preference across all those spending categories advertising art historical any of those things we're going to spend on i i'd like a local preference first and if we're not going to use a local printer then that somehow triggers some kind of review to say this external this there's not an internal provider for that because we're taking local hotel dollars and then the applicant has carte blanche to go to louisville have them printed or dallas and so for me that doesn't sit well um so that's one it's one deal uh vendor i think there needs the applicant needs to provide some transparency in their vendor selection and my key area of heartburn for this is the social media aspect of it so you in theory right now the applicant can say they're spending ten thousand dollars on social media and it could be a kid operating out of a dorm that's making 500 bucks but you know they're saying hey we need ten thousand dollars for this you know so what what institution are you contracting with who are you working with who's handling your social media and what reporting comes from that because if you look at the the request and the ask a lot of it centers around social media and none of it has data to support it so which is the easiest mechanism to pull if i run a facebook ad it tells me who it touched when what area so those dollars i think it's super easy to then equate to what it's going to right versus saying hey social media is popular i'm gonna dump it in there and say hey i need fifteen thousand dollars for this because social media is a good buzzword and i'm not going to back it up with any data so i'd like to see some kind of change to the to the requirements to add transparency to the to the vendor specifically social media but the others as well then got that number 11 so on on the i'll pull that up in a minute and so i can refer what i'm talking to i'll get back to it but i'd like to see something on the application there's nothing on the bottom of an application that has some language legal language that says they're going to attest to these facts right there you know it lists all those things that you're supposed to require it lists the director or the co-director to sign but it doesn't say penalty of perjury hey well there's no repercussions for giving misinformation so i'd like to see that be added and i'll tell you and then i'd like to somehow normalize the application it's so the applications all of them it's 1011 pages for everyone that that applied and and it's it's a very various number of pages so one group may have 20 pages another group may have 30 pages and so that's i would assume that's difficult uh to to kind of get through so i'd love to see that kind of normalized some way so that it's more um regimented or regulated or the same so each group gets 11 pages or whatever that is to kind of to kind of close close that in a bit in my thought and and i'll tell you all this is coming and i guess the last part is having sit on the board for the first time we we and it's in the minutes a three percent increase across the board and that i think can't stand i mean i cannot get behind uh not making this a eat what you kill complete meritocracy because we're taking money from the hotels which then should those that are benefiting the hotel most be it the be it the um the the community event there the uh the the black film festival whatever's doing the most should be recompensated for doing so who's ever bringing the most people to our town that uh then puts heads in beds should be treated different than someone that just requests the money and and gets it you know at a regular clip i just was that just to me is the most uh was the most painful part of sitting on that that that board is you have people that are outperforming that are growing and you have people that are stagnant and they all got a three percent increase across the board so at that i'm incentivized to just if i got in early and i have a number established then that number just continues to go up and all as well and i don't think that should be the case i think we should have some competition some people leapfrogging each other and i don't know how staff wants to justify that decision or support those or weight those but i think there absolutely needs to be an incentive for someone to go lean and overproduce and i want to reward those people and have the ability to do so and it pained me that we couldn't this year uh but i i absolutely want to put something in place that allows that uh that uh scrutiny um and again it's just straight meritocracy it's easy to prove up how many people you've brought in and let's go that route so thank you council member hudson makes an important point about people proving out that they're spending what they say they're spending in the way that they're spending and could you tell us about how our staff currently goes about checking on that uh so as part of the the application process when these recipients make a request they submit a budget and so so once the allocation is approved the contract is made we're making the allocations they're submitting reports back to us and we're reviewing all of their reports including you know receipts that they submit to us to ensure that that what they said they were going to spend the money on is is consistent with that budget that's being approved so council member hudspeth is that not sufficient or are you wanting some more uh proving up other than than you know staff reviewing all of those receipts and verifying that those are legitimate expenses that are related to the to their application and legal based on the the the rules of the state and the city or do you want more uh effort than what what we're already doing sir no i think i think if that's the case and if that's the case and it's somehow tied to because you know i can get on word and make an invoice say whatever i needed to say right if no one then digs deeper and says hey this is this i call this company i'm familiar with this company i've vetted this company something like that i mean that would be my and and they may do that i may just have not tracked the the depth of what they but i just want to make sure the entity has a website phone number social media presence something that can be authenticated that this is a standalone company and not uh a quote unquote consultant that you know operates out of their living room and can generate an invoice so so do we ever have any situations where we where we do that kind of follow-up because we're not we have some concern that that may not be a legitimate invoice um not that i'm aware of as far as a legitimate invoice um we do from time to time question and expense the way it's described um as to whether or not it actually meets the spirit of the budget and the contract and so we work with our recipients to get that clarification i can probably point to just a a handful of times where we 've determined that a particular expense wasn't eligible and so what we do with the recipients is they normally will have an eligible expense that they haven't submitted to us and so we allow them to make that exchange um and so so that's usually what happens but to my knowledge we've not ever found uh you know an erroneous or a fabricated invoice but we do from time to time uh use some of the hot funds because it's uh an allowable expense to do some uh auditing don't we and mainly in the past we've been auditing to see if we're actually uh receiving from the uh the hotel occupancy tax the amount that that the hotel is collecting that's correct what we what we've done in the past the council member is that we will pay for the those hotel expenses out of the recovered delinquent uh taxes if there is if there's not enough to to cover that particular expense is generally covered by the general fund and and so the comment was made that we're taking money from the hotels the the hotel occupancy tax is that charged to the hotel or is that charged to the uh the the customer that's staying at the hotel it's charged to the occupant okay to the occupant okay thank you council member breaks so just along those same lines um so the increase in funds does that tie back um when you take away the invo ices do we go and look at the event and and then look at the hotel um that weekend and see that as the increase in funding is that means there's more heads in the beds do we do we verify that those coordinate together since that's the objective no ma'am we've um we've not gotten that granular uh to look at that and um i think you've got to understand too is that many of the hotels view their information as proprietary and so many cases when we're trying to get information from them as to uh what their occupancy rates were at specific time trying to tie that to the timing of a particular event um becomes somewhat challenging so so no ma'am we have we've not tried to do that at that level okay well i'd like to make a comment on that i mean i've asked for that for years i mean when i was on council there's no way to tie increased occupancy and i think that's what council member husbeth was referring to is this he called it a meritocracy in other words how do you if you can show that certain organizations are truly achieving that goal of bringing people in and getting them to stay in hotels then they're more deserving of you know maybe some different funding allocations there is no way for us to verify that without a volunteer uh without the hotels voluntarily either submitting surveys to their people coming in and then submitting those to us we don't have a mechanism whereby we are able to attach those two together and then let me council member ryan's been waiting so if your comment is to mine just let him well that's fine follow up it's about this copy it's about that wait yeah okay well i just a couple things one is if if i'm not mistaken it's not only an invoice that must be turned over but quite often it's a copy of the canceled checks that we're able to verify that a check was written to that company i do think that something that would be good to look at on in line with that it's tough to tell how many heads and beds but how many people attend an event and that might be something that would be good on the application that says look i'm asking for 24 000 and i've got 100 people showing i think that's included in the app that they do have an estimate okay yeah that we kind of know how much per person attending is is going to be yes sent to them well and my follow-up in that same regard is while we don't we don't get that information from the hotels we do ask for that information from uh the the recipients and some are able to do a because of the nature of their event they're able to get more of that information so for example an event like um at the park where there's a music festival they don't have a way of those folks don't register they don't pay to get in in most cases but at some other events where they do pay they do ask so at at the bicycle ride that the that morning Kiwanis club does when people register they indicate what town they're from and i believe that they also indicate if they were staying over and the same thing happens for some of the other events where where it's easier to collect that information like the storytelling festival because the folks that come in there uh register and they give that information but but that's more a requirement of the um recipient than it is of the hotel to to get that information and in some cases we get it and in some cases we don't there are some assumptions that that certain types of expenditures cause more people to come to visit the town and and and to determine and i think at one time the north the north texas fair commissioned a study to to help to help get some numbers about that again they were they were estimates because they don't ask people as they're coming into the fairgrounds each night where they 're from but but you know so it's not i don't think it's ever going to be a completely accurate list as far as that's concerned but i think that's where uh you know in the application because of the nature of some events the applicant is going to have more pages because they've got more of that data that they can share yes may protein um i'd like to clarify that hot funds can be used for historical restoration and preservation projects as well is that correct that is correct and i will tell you council member that that is also capped at no more than 15 it was 50 but because of of the city's participation in the in the local visitor center that is now capped at 15 so it moved from 50 to 15 percent so because we have a visitor center we are now unable to spend as much money on historical preservation by law yes ma'am that's that's our interpretation of that we haven't vetted that through our legal department but we believe that that is the case well it probably would have been good to know so okay well um what i would i'd like to see us go a little bit deeper into the monies that we're allocating for public art and also have a discussion if we would like to allocate any percentage towards historical restoration and preservation projects to me it seems like this might be a better use a better source of funds than some other funds that we've been using for historical preservation since there's a closer tie-in um so if we could maybe just set that for a work session discussion in june july i guess i'll show up if it's in july i will tell you council member that based on our current budget and how much we've allocated for art there's about an additional 112 000 dollars worth of capacity that we could potentially allocate towards the arts or historical historical preservation is about the same well i mean just from my perspective on as a policy discussion we could say we want to have the maximum for art or we want to have the maximum for historical preservation because we have these projects that we want to fund in the future at some point so i mean i don't feel particularly tied to the 2.4 percent this council may decide that they want a different percentage i think that if if the council decides to do that and allocate the entire 15 percent to public art then what that means is some recipients will not be able to receive exactly in those categories yeah any other questions i've just got one remaining one any other questions then i can sort of tie it all up yes sir you have a question yes so i i was just trying to so on the application it's number 11 the i would like to see that uniform specifically that that's the uh hotel i think i should switched away from that page again but yeah i think it's the hotel data you know okay uh just just more and i want to speak to your point mayor watts for me it's not so much try drawing a straight line from participation to heads and beds although you know yes i'd love to have that but understanding that's that's out of scope of reality but i do think if we take something like the community market there's a noticeable attendance rate and activity rate versus you know some other group storytelling festival what how many people attend those how many people in town how many people are from out of town that attend those events i think that is something that is able to be measured and so i think to having a great festival here in town that benefits the citizens if that in that instance if that festival receives more dollars than one that would bring people from out of town that would stay the weekend i think those need to be treated different and not the same correct and and and i understand that and so what the difficulty in that is by your actual example where you chose the storytelling festival which is over what a few days a weekend or something like that and then the community market which is once a month one weekend a month or once a week for a certain time frame whereas to me the community market would tend to bring people in not who are going to stay overnight but they're going to come in spend some time here do their thing at the market and maybe downtown or somewhere else and then and and then go on their merry way whereas an event that truly is a you know multiple day event and that's the difficulty because what just because it brings more people doesn't mean that those people are more susceptible or more apt to stay overnight it may just be that they're coming in for the day and then leaving because it's only a daily event so that's really the hard part of that merit base because each event application they do have to say how many people do we think attend i don't even does applications how many hotel nights do they think they generate does application have that it's not that specific i don't think so this has always been a point of of a discussion it's not been tension it's just a point of discussion so but i think the the discussion is a good one that is a policy discussion on okay we have this is generating now a considerable amount of income you know and each year we try to take a look at these applicants to decide how do we want to and we have done we have not taken that across the board approach i know a couple years ago we provided more funding to the north texas fair association for security and some some others and so my final question is i i was not aware of what you mentioned about if we have a convention visitors bureau that somehow we're kept but that we haven't really gotten down into the legal analysis of that because it doesn't mean if it's if it's an outside organization or if it's inside the city if it's it's a city department or if it's i just like some information about that because we're getting to a place where this fund can you know depending on policy discussion really have an impact on projects like either historical we're doing city hall west we could say well is city hall west potentially doing city potentially doing city hall west oh we're doing city hall i think we're out of posting yeah because six to one is not a good enough we're out of posting we're out of we're out of posting but so we've got i think we can dream a little bit bigger for opportunities with this fund is all i'm saying you know for projects or different kind of events so this is a discussion about the hot funds program and paul that is a part and part of that is a policy discussion so i just want a little more information on what you'd mention because i know nothing about it i'm not making an opinion either way about what's what should or should not be done i just i've never heard of that limitation and from what i'm understanding what you said we haven't really gotten any kind of legal analysis on that whether that's we have those limitations or not that's correct okay fair enough that's what i'd like to see yes and we're going to wrap this up real quick uh council member hudspeth and then council member bridge yeah so i have an ask too so i i my request tony and if y'all don't know tony's a master on an express express excel spreadsheet i mean he can work miracles he can almost build a house with that thing my question is this am i ask i'd like to see that that column of uh last year's applicants and and um pardon me so that's 2017 budget you know that that column with the applicants and i'd like to ask that we send it out to each council member and rank them i just like to know the ranking order a council member looks at the institution and how much was awarded and where they prioritize that group because i i i i may not get it but that's what that's because that's the conversation we need to have right because if you look at it texas filmmakers is fifteen thousand dollars how many people they bring i don't know i gotta look at look into it but is that more when you're talking film to film is that more than the black film festival is that more than a similar film oriented and is that is it to forty thousand dollars less valuable to the city than uh the teja storytelling association you know that's really the question is is there a forty thousand dollar difference between those two entities and if yes why and if not why not you know and so that's really the question it these are real numbers as the mayor pointed out and that's really what it gets down to i want to know ultimately we're going to have the conversation when it comes back and i'm going to ask and there will either be answers or silence or we can get it done in advance and market and private either way uh just heads up that question's coming uh this year okay great sir council member riggs um on here i think i saw where we had updated um the guidelines and policies were there any changes made to that for 2018 no ma'am no okay and um i guess i also just want to take this time to say if we're looking at hot funds for the historic aspect if we can also include um the cultural district cultural district that was we discussed earlier um in that and um the funds that could be allocated for that as well just ma'am we can do that go ahead council member well if we're going to do a poll uh i think that in order for council members to respond to that poll appropriately you're gonna have to have the backup information because otherwise you're it's just a popularity contest and it's not based on any kind of data so i think if you're going to do the poll and i'm not opposed to doing the poll i think you're just going to have to provide all of the the the application data and information on how the money is spent and the participation that that has been in the past that they report on these otherwise uh that i'm not sure but what how useful how informed we can be as we 're we're ranking items well and towards that end i mean i don't i don't mind having this conversation as we get closer to the budgeting process simply because number one we're fixed to have an election which for sure there's going to be two or possibly three you know there's three people running there's three opponents for each race so um we could rank it but that's going to change or could change in in a couple months and we typically have this discussion at what time of the budget cycle when you know the hot funds committee meets and we go through our analysis uh which all of what you're describing can be done also there and then brought forward to the council as well um so you're saying in june we review it and in august is when we present it so somewhere between j une and august if we want to have a more in-depth robust discussion about those kinds of things we can do that yes sir and um and in the last two years um what we've actually done is the committee has asked for additional time and so what goes to the council as part of the proposed budget is just the same allocation as the previous year while the committee continues to work and in a subsequent workshop we'll come back with the recommendations so if there's additional time that the committee might need you know we can certainly work with the committee on that okay all right okay any other questions comments oh yes mayor pro tem i guess when we discuss these additional items for you know public art and historical preservation i think if we if the posting is broad enough we could also discuss guideline changes to the application as well for the upcoming year and that would address some of council member hudspeth's concerns because i share some of those as well i think the application could be a little bit different and if we could just include that all in the discussion that would be good well and i think what would be helpful is of course we have a list of council member hudspeth's suggestions to the application if you could send yours in as well that'd be helpful yeah okay we can do that you bet all right okay well we are going to take a five minute break so uh let's take a five minute break hey welcome everybody back to this meeting of the denton city council on tuesday february 27th 2018 it is 2 20 p.m we're moving back down through our work session reports agenda item 2b is that right yes receive report and hold discussion give staff direction on preliminary research and options for the availability of restrooms in the downtown area good afternoon mayor and council members staff was asked to do some research for public restrooms in the downtown area and we've put together some preliminary research and options so just by quick way of background this request came to us in august and we did put together an informal staff report with some research and options and then the request was made to have a work session so that council could have a discussion together so what we've put together today is some very high level preliminary research and options that we could explore further if council gave us direction so that's what we're seeking feedback on today are there some of these options that you would like us to explore further so first i want to start by looking at what public restrooms are there in the downtown area immediately around the downtown square so the first is the welcome center which is on the south side of the square this facility is used the most often for public restrooms they do have hours during the weekdays weeknights and on weekends they estimate that the monthly restroom usage is about a thousand visitors per month specific to using the restrooms and facilities there the second facility is the county courthouse on the square that facility is only open during the weekdays however they are open for special events so for twilight tunes they do open up that facility and the restrooms there and they do open for other special events as requested and they estimate about 400 visitors per month for the rest rooms and then the third is our development services building which is just off the square to the west because it's only open during weekdays and isn't well known i think that sees very little usage per month but it is another option available to visitors so here is kind of a range of options that could be considered everything from just trying to do an increased education to maybe extending hours of some of the current facilities to maybe looking at purchasing and installing additional restrooms to taking no action at this time so option number one would really be to try to increase communications of where the public restrooms are located right now and so a couple actions that could be taken is there are kiosks at each corner of the square and and we could add to those kiosks there's a map we could add where the public restrooms are located and their hours as well as we have a downtown parking map that is posted on our website and used a lot for special events to show where the parking lots are located we could add that description of public restrooms so just one small action that could be taken for those visitors that may be coming to town and it may not be as familiar with the square where public restrooms are located a second option could be to extend the hours of the welcome center and we did talk with the cvb and they would be open to having that conversation of potentially extending the hours of the welcome center and they did list the costs at 30 dollars per hour for additional hour to be open however if you would look at extending them later in the evenings we would want to discuss with them further in terms of security they did have some security concerns in the past they used to be open later and it actually reduced those hours back to be open to only 9 p.m on weeknights and then 9 30 on the weekends was that reduced primarily for security concerns or was it just supply and demand was it just traffic um primarily security concerns um i believe they had some people coming through concerns of shoplifting sure and otherwise all right customer breaks and i think there was also some extra cost for plumbing right some plumbing issues that yes they have been tracking those costs related to maintenance and the number of visitors coming through to use the facilities and in supplies so okay so a third option would be to purchase and install restrooms now there's a few different options that we looked into the other cities are exploring currently um so this this picture up in the top right here is actually a mobile restroom um so it's a trailer that can be placed in different locations um in denver and austin are currently using this as a pilot program other options that could be looked at is more the conventional type of rest rooms these are the type that you would see in our parks um just a standard facility with one or two restrooms in it um this is also in the bottom right hand corner here another conventional option um a little bit more innovative and used being used in downtown areas um because of its design um it's meant to um you can kind of have increased visibility it's open air so try to get those patrons that may be in inside of it not to stay very long since it is an open-air facility hand sanitizer is on the outside of the facility it's supposed to be graffiti resistant so there's a whole bunch of design um elements to it where some cities are piling these in their downtown areas rather than the conventional style type building that you would see in parks they're trying to address some of those in what they call it's a portland lou style restroom um with any of these we would need to look into further um the costs um and especially the location of where some possible locations for these facilities councilmember gragery has a question on the the bottom right hand corner just is that one that has to be um plums yeah does it have running water and plumbing like like like a conventional one or yes it would need to be plumbed okay thank you um so here is just kind of a high level chart comparing um the two options that i just went over and a third option that we were asked to look into um so mobile as mentioned um some cities are trying trying pilot programs with the mobile trailers to really understand what is the need what is the demand what's the average number of visits what are the concerns they might have with having restrooms in their downtown area um so denver and austin are two that we know of they're seeing about 120 to 150 users per day per one of these mobile trailer restrooms i think austin just received their final report and they're using that data to understand should they install a permanent restroom in a location basically i think they put five trailers out and they're trying to see which is the most popular right location for them to have a permanent restroom facility so you can either purchase one of these um estimated at 25 000 or you can rent a trailer um per month uh they do although they have the low initial capital costs their ongoing maintenance costs are high and so that 72 000 annually is an estimate to have um a contractor really um maintain that facility as far as emptying cleaning waste and everything out of that um now this is just for the maintenance of the trailer itself they also what is not included in the 72 000 is most of the cities have chosen to have those mobile trailers staffed with an attendant at all times while they're open and so that would be about five to ten thousand dollars per month additional on top of the 72 000 annually for that maintenance contract and they're doing that for a number of reasons but really um to make sure that the restrooms have the adequate supplies they need but then also for security concerns and then the second type mentioned is the more conventional and that could be that parks type facility or the portland loo about 120 000 to 150 000 for the purchase and installation of one of these facilities um they have lower ongoing maintenance costs um and our staff does have knowledge of these type of facilities and how to maintain them having them in other locations throughout the city throughout the city right now um the third option we looked into is like a conventional type restroom however they're automated or self-cleaning so what what happens is they have automated features where the doors can lock and they'll actually do a whole sanitization sanitization of the entire facility and cleaning it out um if there's a toilet paper roll missing another one will drop down um you can have automatic locks for it to lock or open at certain times so we reached out to the vendors and also to references to learn a little bit more about these to see if there's the ability to reduce ongoing maintenance costs when we talked with the references they were pretty clear that it doesn't reduce ongoing maintenance costs because there's been a lot of troubles with either toilet paper jamming and then you have to go and clean it out something's malfunctioning and then you have to get a specialized vendor to come in to take care of it um so although it seems like it would be beneficial i don't i don't think it would reduce those operating costs um in addition to the options we just showed we wanted to update even a couple of planned improvements um so quaker town park did have a restroom but it was closed in 2016 because it needed extensive repairs and that restroom is planned to be reconstructed using cdbg grant funding of 152 000 and that construction is planned for later this summer in addition another opportunity could be um to look at the installation of a restroom in the industrial street park right now staff is going through design options for that park and as included as one of those design options we could look at maybe having a single stall portland loo type facility in that park so i'm here to staff is here to seek direction to see if we should look into any of these options further council yes so i opt for option three and the last slide kind of validates that if you're talking 154 000 for new construction and we can enter at 130-ish understanding the the maintenance cost and and the issues i think we can work that out contractually the increased crime possibility understand that um i'd like to look into poor reviews and i'm just saying just because i saw this uh in north carolina and kind of obviously uh not in use but kind of got a feel for it and the value that's a time lock some of those things but i just think we have to act uh when you're talking 1 000 people going through the visitor center expressly for the restroom i i'm all for foot traffic but i think uh the issues they've had with that and and some of the negative aspects of that we really need to move that so in in a perfect world for me it would be option three with the automated self-cleaning but i would also include a component to partner with dentin community health clinic and i mentioned that before when i asked for this because it gives you an on staff uh nurse that that kind of very small area to treat you know dehydration slips falls that sort of thing that happened on the square i think those things as the fire department's now tracking calls for homelessness and some other things it's it's becoming an increasing issue so if we can head some of those off or make it a more informed 911 call and at the same time invest in a community health clinic that has a rapport with this community i think that's the key component they they work with the homelessness homeless uh regularly and have a report and and it when it comes to associating with who the issue is and what they need to to satisfy whatever uh issue arises that they meet that component well so we're reinvesting in our community with the hospital that serves a community that is in need uh and at the same time providing the restroom in my target area for the restroom would be the parking lot uh the half way home uh down there william square that that area someplace uh kind of working with the residents there but it's it's where you park anyway so hey we're going to jump out of car run to the restroom and then you're on the square and and but we're not attracting people to the square to to use the restroom uh it would be that's my ideal uh location so option three with a little small like entry space if you will that would then house a nursing station to kind of manage some of those uh issues maintenance issues and or you know misuse uh issues and at the same time whatever that number is we're pouring it right back into a community hospital that that serves the homeless community and has a rapport and would help manage any emergencies that come from uh from that community so that's that's what i but i no matter what we do i'd like to see a a hopefully the council understands that 1 000 people a month is not sustainable and we need to do something so thank you i like the mobile idea i think we can roll it around to events and we can pay for it with hot funds that's what i think okay all right i'm not sure about the the hot funds aspect of it but i do like the mobile from the test multiple areas and we can determine what areas are more necessary and it can be utilized by our parks department not just in the downtown area but if you've got a baseball tournament up at north lakes it can be moved over there or something you know wherever in town it's needed where we've got a large event that rather than having to bring in the blue boxes that gives us a much better option anybody else yes my pro temp i like the mobile but i would say just park it there's um a good spot just in front of this monument we could park it directly in front of there permanently until we put up a permanent facility directly in front of the monument it's a good location i'm being dead serious also okay all right go ahead well just so that we have plenty of ideas out there if if the the idea of adding a few hours and and making sure that we have enough financial support for the visitor center to to do that because while they're getting a thousand visits a week i've visited there a few times and it's clean and it's neat and it's convenient and it's a lot less expensive i'm intrigued about uh mr hudson's idea about the clinic but it seems to me that now we're talking about a significant amount of extra expense because we're talking about extra square footage for a clinic location i'm not sure how much square footage that would be i would think probably at least 600 square feet but i have no idea because i've never i'm basing that on what a a nurse's office in a restroom in a public school is but um but i don 't know who who's spending the money to to put a uh a professional in there in how many hours a week they're there do you have any do you have any details in your suggestion regarding how we pay for the nurse and and how many hours and yes so i don't have the i don't have the hours but yes i talked to alice there at the community hospital and uh i don't have my my notes today on what she said that rate would be uh but i'll tell you i also take from the emergency calls that have and i i have that number but i don't it's in my notes as far as how many times we're dispatching the fire men for minor emergencies that could be handled downtown yes yeah and because they began to track that number so i think there's some savings if not monetarily uh just hours and and uh kind of uh using our resources differently that that would save us uh some money as well but i'll have to get hard numbers for those can i add one piece of information um the denton community health clinic they have started to do satellite services at our daily bread on occasion providing medical services and i think they're exploring that model a little bit more fully in terms of how do we provide more medical services to those in need who may already be visiting those certain agencies so i think the homeless leadership team is going to continue to work with those agencies to see how that model may work or could be expanded to provide more hours okay yes the information section i'm in favor of as well so not just the mobile but having education education information i would just add the dcta center and i think there's a museum as well that are both open and that's considered the downtown area also yeah so the museum and the fire station has a public restroom that's open the fire station has a public restroom that's open yes it does central yeah honestly i'm for option four in the sense of do nothing from these three options because i think we have enough you i've just heard three different alternatives for people who need to use the restroom that i wasn't necessarily aware of that there's a public restroom and fire station central fire station i know there's one in gda i don't know what all these hours are but when you break down the thousand people and if you don't even because i think the visitor centers is that it's not open seven days a week is it okay all right seven days a week so that's uh 30 that's 30 something people a day all right so you get eight to ten hours of operation which they're open longer than that uh you get three or four people an hour so when you really break it down to and i think if you educate that we have some other facilities we have them because i don't the goal is not to get restrooms down on the square proper uh you know we've had a a suggestion of putting one in front of a certain location it's going to take up too many parking spaces so i don't know if that would um or we could put it on the park property that we have out there by industrial and if we really want to start getting creative out there the the pocket park that i'm kidding i'm kidding i'm just simply saying i think if we haven't we have enough opportunity that if we educate people where they are um and also well i'm not going to say that um but also if worse comes we have a public restroom here at city hall that literally you walk in the door here and it's right there i mean it's it's by legal and if worse comes to worse if there was a way that we had to have that open a little bit longer i think there's another door there that you can lock that off and you can screen off the building so i think there's some other opportunities that are much less costly that i think would be just as effective um as spending the kind of money we're looking at um especially since we're doing the remodeling of the one in the park because it's been it's been shut down restaurant or whatever it's been shut down it hasn't even been open so nobody's using that go ahead that's as far as i'm and so when i say do nothing maybe i'm i need to say i'm in favor of increased education i'm in favor of extended hours and availability but as far as the three options you put on the portable the self cleaning um which i i can't get my arms around that but that's okay um and then the other one which was the open air yeah yeah yeah i think we have i mean worse comes to worse we can always go there but i don't think we're at that point yet uh but that's just me council member husband so before i speak can you share what you've heard from the employees or those that are at the visitor center because i think that component is important to note the the headaches or issues or concerns or mishaps whatever you want to title them uh eventful days can you can you can you express some of those please sure i can share a little bit and then kim phillips is here as well if you'd like to hear from her but i know they they do send it they do spend a considerable amount of time um cleaning those restrooms throughout the day and rest ocking them um and that they have had to spend more in supplies to keep them stocked um and then there's you know are they really coming to the facility are they just coming for the restroom are they coming to visit and um get information and be shopping as well but i can invite kim phillips up if she has anything else to add sure yeah because there's i mean the police a call there people have locked themselves in there spent 20 30 minutes in the restroom all bad first impressions but okay well that and that's fine i don't i don't and i understand that but this is a public facility and so if there's a way that we can if if we can have ways to if they need more staff to help with the cleaning if we can find ways to uh provide additional services if we can't have people locking themselves in there but to go spend 150 or 200 thousand dollars a year uh then we need to rethink a lot of things because that's just because we're going to have those exact same problems somewhere else now not going to be in a retail establishment that may have been our first kind of mistake but i think we had to have those restrooms because of the restaurant on top in other words for us to get that space for something to happen i can't remember what it was but because they had a bar on top they needed that additional restroom so i don't think that was necessarily the city's goal was to have a public restroom there but in order to get that space if i remember correctly that 's what we had to do do well yeah okay well that's fine i just i mean i know there's a lot of problems out there with homeless people coming in there and taking baths and you're basically shy and that's so i understand that but i don't know if the solution because we're just moving the problem if we need to move the problem that's fine but then how do you keep them out from doing that still because if you have a portable restroom they're not going to have the kind of so how do you how will you prevent that same situation from continuing to occur and that's what i'm understanding is there would like to be a change there of having some increased availability so that it will mitigate some of those issues i might am i correct in that you want to come speak to that and while she's coming i'll answer your question you have you have someone that has a rapport in a in a connection with that community be in place to educate them and direct them on better processes and that would happen to be alice at the are you talking well i i'm sanctioning your question right well i'm not in favor of equipping a restroom with a nerd if we're going to be if we're going to have a community health clinic downtown we need to have a community health clinic downtown which i think we have in that building on locust but um if we're gonna i mean i don't want to combine a restroom facility problem with trying to address issues of homelessness because i think we can do those very separately but that's just me i mean if the council decides on that i 'm okay with that yes go ahead here's you're here to describe all the problems you are having with your public restrooms um i think i think by the way kim phillips didn't commission a visitor's bureau and discovered it in welcome center um i think y'all have adequately um summarized some of the issues that we're dealing with um you know it's it's increased cost simply because it as sarah said primarily the issues have been security related and so we 've had to have additional staff than what we had originally planned would need to man that facility we've had to increase that for the security of the people that are working um and been but we do work very closely with denton police department they've been very helpful so um it's just the wear and tear and the staff resources and the investment of staff time and the doubling of the staff necessary to be there during our open hours so it was out correct in that we had to have that restroom there because of the bar configuration on top am i remembering that correctly or no um i think actually what you're remembering is the elevator aspect okay that may be it and i thought it had a restroom component but so the restroom wasn't part of that we decided to put that restroom in as a public restroom when we looked at the facility as a welcome center as a visitor center it it is a public facility period so but we had to have restrooms of course because we're a business and employees work there but uh one of the decisions that we did make because it was a visitor center was to make sure that there were two stalls in each of the restrooms in order to um de-escalate the issue of people locking themselves in because there is no lock on the door which has been a great that was an unintended great thing that we did um but okay that's it okay i think so we're gonna go briggs and then councilman gregory um i this may not be on topic but you did mention having um a relationship with the denton police and i remember in those discussions originally we were talking about maybe having an officer located in that building but there was some reason we couldn't can you is it okay if she's asking for a poster is that i'm asking just for a reminder of why that wasn't and if that's something that we could do to make the restrooms a safer place there you go very good very good i would suppose that would be something that would we could revisit or that legal could help us revisit i know that it was a legal thing it had to do with police department funding versus the hotel tax funding which is the city's part of the investment of the welcome center and those two mixing okay but i can't articulate it specifically we'd need to go back and revisit that okay thank you councilman gregory maybe we could get an update from our legal department on that to to flesh that out a little further as i recall uh you've come back to us since the visitor center opened and asked for more funding and that was actually for in more hours for workers to handle those security issues of always having two people available is that right yes and did we provide that yes sir has that been sufficient it is sufficient at this time yes sir and when i visited there yesterday what i heard was some concerns about the cost for all of the the materials not only the cleaning but but mainly the materials to replenish materials in there so is that a budget issue that that we need to address when we do our next budget cycle i mean security wise we would certainly welcome the exploration in into how we're trying to address it on the budget that we have but we are also really diligently trying to build a volunteer initiative that will help offset some of that labor cost but at this point in time that just hasn't happened part partly because the biggest time frame that we face the challenges are at night and the volunteers it's much harder to staff volunteers at night than during the day any notion um without without being too harsh in in or judgmental of the percentage of the use of the restroom facilities by homeless folks or as opposed to to other people who who are needing to use restroom but that are not patrons of any of the stores at the time that they need to go yes sir we actually track that very closely and and we have submitted those reports to city staff i don't think they're they're part of this but we do track it and it's roughly 20 percent okay of the foot traffic um that we have it exactly that we can provide to you if you'd like to look closely at it so that would be about 200 people a month 200 visits a month okay thank you 200 well actually that would be like a week because we on the average yes sir yeah we on the average we have about 6 000 visitors a month okay okay so that's just 20 percent of the foot traffic you weren't saying i think i missed that are you saying what was your question to her again that she answered the percentage of folks who are who are using their restroom facilities that are that are homeless okay gotcha she's saying about 20 i think yes sir kim have you noticed if there's any particular time frame that that's more prevalent okay you said in the evening there's more of a security issue which um because y'all stay open till is it nine nine on weekdays until thursday and then 9 30 on thursday and friday nights and so on on those hours are you do you still feel that you have a security issue uh and is that when just trying to understand is there a time frame that's more prevalent for this concern of security because what i'm hearing is you that the security is either people who whether they need to use restroom or not are going to come in and maybe cause some problems but then maybe ones who are just coming in to use the restroom is there more of an opportunity for there to be something that security becomes a concern yeah i think i understand um the question i mean the the issues the disruptions are on 100 the 20 population that we're talking about uh we've we've not had a single incident outside of that particular population right as far as when when um they're most prevalent prevalently of in the center it's all day it starts the minute we open until it until late at night when i mentioned late at night what i was referring to was the difficulty of trying to find volunteer staffing for nighttime okay all right um otherwise we we just pay our our part-time staff and they are all part- timers except for the management team there so really what i'm hearing you say is that 20 which is i forgot what you said 200 oh about a week a week yes sir uh are people who are coming in there not to shop right not to browse to use the restroom and then depending on their disposition at the time it could cause some disruption that would require some type of security action like the police to be called or something like that is correct okay all right okay uh we 're going to come with mr duff and then we'll go to council member husbick council member duff is it a total ridiculous thing to uh suggest that maybe we could hire an off-duty policeman to be there in the evenings i don't know okay if that's a possibility that might be able to take care of the biggest part of the problem that you've got council member husbick yeah i i want to start by touching on a couple of couple of facts but but primarily so the parks can close their restroom and they do right the parks are beginning to close restaurants that restrooms that would normally be open there were issues and so we just close them at night right we'd lock them there is some restrooms that close in the evening and then there are three restrooms that remain open at all times right and do we know why why are we closing those at night that we do close um i'm gonna look at drew h uffman who's our park superintendent to answer that if you haven't answered the question come on yeah state your name name and address and your time will begin good lord just never mind sir drew h uffman park maintenance superintendent so some of the restrooms that we do close for that are in our park park facilities have to do with security reasons that that are happening all over town so uh in certain areas that we do close restrooms has to do with uh the same population that we're talking about that they've vandalized the restrooms as far as a few years last year we had they took the heaters out of the restrooms and put them all in one and then locked the doors and police had to be called because they vandalized the heaters so and they of course they it doesn't matter whether it's a men or women's restroom whichever one's open or they can get into they use it and of course it happened to be a male individual in a female's restroom that caused the incident so those have been locked so my point is we cannot as a council i feel we not address the issue 100 of the problems 20 of the people and so i think to then invite disperse that problem to different locations is is as far as okay you can use this restroom in the city you can use that one down at the fire department i i just don't think that's the that's a good move it's not and i don't think it's a good move to ignore the fact that there is an issue at hand and so for me to again it becomes i understand the the reluctance to add this nurse component i i think as a parent that has young kids that would at fall scrape get dehydrated on the square i considered a service when i walked around in north carolina and at every at the parks they had a nurse station at the at the baseball park they had a nurse station they they it's being done and so it's it to me confirmed what i was thinking and also these the comments today confirmed what i'm thinking you have to have someone that can relate and not just it's not an enforcement issue because if you can't communicate with that person it's going to escalate and we don't want to escalate a problem we want someone who has rapport to be able to alleviate a problem and have one someone or a poor to direct them and so i think it's not a it's not a health clinic it's a place to get water if you 're hot it's it's a place to be evaluated if you before we call the police they pull them away from something it's a place to be evaluated before we call the fire department or you utilize 911 and if we do have to do that it's an educated call this person has elevated this or this that and we've looked at this and here's what we have and so it's it's uh that's how i envision it uh being utilized and if there's four of us that want to i'm not for the trailer but i can be sold on the trailer if it gets us off into action mode and then from there collect that data and make another educated decision but i think to do nothing and leave um and disperse the issue uh is and i think it goes way back and this is firsthand knowledge i talked to the post office uh when they closed their building in their restrooms and it was because it was vandalized i mean so it's not this is not brand new it's not uh it is a consistent issue that has to be managed um and i think addressing it in some kind of way to have some kind of continuity uh that doesn't say hey go to other areas here's a specific place for restrooms this is for shopping and oh by the way if while you're shopping you need the rest you that that's available to you is is kind of a different educational uh process but again 100 of the issues 20 of the population our usage right and so this is my problem with this discussion this discussion is public restrooms in downtown but what it 's turned into which is fine it's a discussion we need to have is dealing with homelessness issues in the downtown area which go far beyond restroom usage there's other security concerns there's other kinds of concerns that people have that have expressed all so i'm all for talking about those issues i don't want to somehow combine those issues and conflate them with if we need more restrooms downtown to meet the needs of the public man i'm all for that but what i'm hearing is there's a larger problem if we need a if we need a sign up first aid station downtown where to avoid what you just mentioned articulated all those things that could be avoided great ideas great ideas if so that's certainly something we can have a conversation about but when i read the posting when i read this it talks about restrooms in downtown denton if you put a trailer out there do we on which if there's four of you one i'm not going to say i don't want the trailer i'm trying to figure out the problems that have been presented now when you first started your presentation we talked about how many people and these kinds of but as we funneled this discussion down we're talking about 20 of the people who are creating 100 of the problem which we've sort of you know identified that as a certain part of the population here that that frequents downtown that's now we're getting into a whole different so if you think of the trailer is going to resolve the issues that we are talking about now i think it it may take some of them out of the the visitor center it's not going to take all of them we're just going to displace and disperse as you said we don't we're going to move some of the problem from here over here that may be the solution for now but what i'm hearing is we have a problem that we need to have a comprehensive approach towards and i don't think if we need more restrooms so people can literally just go take a restroom break fair enough fair enough but if we're trying to resolve the the issues with the visitor center because we've got people coming in there that that don't have any intention to shop don't have any intention may have an intention to cause problems well we we got a whole different issue we got to talk about so however you guys want to do this is fine i'm just saying if we think spending 150 000 dollars is going to resolve this issue that we're talking about right now not that people need other places to use the bathroom that's all we're talking about in the beginning people using a place to use the bathroom those are not the issues we're talking about right now so i want to redirect us i'm going to let you say something but i'm going to get us back on track because we're going to need to set up we need to set a close another workshop to address your idea of a first aid station or something downtown to help mitigate some of the things you described if they can be combined with some other types of services that we can provide that's a that's a great idea so i'm going to let council member gregory go ahead and have your comments and then it's back to the basic subject okay because and it's why we have our parks representative here because one of the concerns i have about about uh if we if we build a restroom anywhere or with the restrooms that we already have if we uh reopen a restroom here in quaker town park sir um the concern is i've heard from parents of kids who are going to some of the uh not downtown but it 's related to the downtown going to some of the recreation facilities the the baseball parks mac park or roberts field or or the other fields and they get there for their kids to play that evening and the restrooms are in pretty bad shape because of non-athletes and that have been using those restrooms and have uh made them um inappropriate for any kids to go into at all because of what's been left in the restrooms so in those kinds of situations what is the kind of time frame if you get a phone call first of all if if a parent's going in a grandparent's going in with the kid and says oh we can't go in here can is there a number out there that they could call yes sir i believe there's numbers posted and we have the on call of course we have on call personnel staff that can get on 24/7 that can get a hold of and we send those staff out about how about how fast typically can you get someone out there to within an hour really yes sir that's good because i was just curious about what the cost would be if we had a restroom downtown uh or anywhere close to downtown that that we were going to be responsible for caring for and if and how fast it would be if it was an emergency service those bathrooms those restrooms get attended to every day of course we have park personnel that are out in the parks and taking care of whether it be maintenance on the fence or the what 's the cost grounds i can get you those costs we're looking at normally i think you saw in there around ten thousand dollars annually for cost of cleaning and uh stocking materials okay thank you yes sir so of the options we have your option is option three the self-cleaning yes sir somehow i keep thinking self-cleaning oven i don't know why i'm thinking that but it's about to happen in the summertime yes council member dov i really don't like any of the options okay so some less than others all right if you had to okay i'll take that the education and and you know everything but three i think okay i'm still not crazy about those three okay all right you're for the trailer i think having a mobile bathroom unit would be good for us to have just in general as well just in general i mean you know if we need to lease it for a little while to see if it's something we want to invest in that's fine but just to have it in our stock of buildings in case a bathroom closes down in a park we could roll it in sure okay i'm in line with that i think increased education is probably the primary thing we need to worry about but having that as a tool to use for whether it's an event in in downtown i don't know that we have a huge need for additional restroom in downtown on a 24/7 basis right now but when we have certain events that's when that restroom usage becomes the issue and so i think we need to have something a game plan for different areas that can be used throughout the town and and i like the idea of being able to to do counts and find out what areas make sense to to put capital funds to actually do the capital improvement of putting an on the ground restroom in before we go that direction one in options one and two and those are increased oh okay you're not extended for any for any of the new installations such as just options one and two all right um yeah i'm one and two i might could get on board for a trailer only because i think it'd be used more probably outside of this area than than not simply because uh i don't know where you'd put it but because i wait wait y'all want to have some emails go ahead and plop that thing down somewhere may i of course you're up next if we put the trailer directly across from the visitor center which is where i suggested then we could actually have data on if it alleviates pressure on the visitor center this is why you have your jd degree straight face arguments right no i mean i understand yes council member husband yeah no so i i'm uh three and but i also um had a thought and it's gotten away from me so anyway i should write it down yeah no so yeah i think i think there's traction for three um for a mobile version and i would even be i think if even if uh council member riggs suggestion if we lease one there's uh planning companies notice one for sure that did our uh did the uh opening event at um grand opening there at the at the uh embassy okay yeah that had they're in town they're local i'm all for that you know is maybe maybe a test but so either way either permanently or temporarily i can get get in line with that councilor i could be on board with leasing one okay i mean it's a matter of let's try it let's see if it works we're not going to have to invest that much okay councilor mayor pro tem so something i just thought of i didn't mean to jump in but i know that when the county came and talked with us about improvements to the denton county historical part part of it includes restrooms right one of the things that they included was restrooms so i would just put this out there that maybe we include the mobile restroom during those community market hours and see what the demand is over there is a test to see what the you know yeah put an option out there yes go ahead all right i'm sold so i'm hearing traction for uh the trailer option on a lease basis uh and i don't know how long those leases are uh so we'll just have to come back and take a look at that but that sort of is the direction at least what i'm hearing and to be able to use it not just for now somebody's gonna have to have the discussion of where to put this thing initially and all those kind of things we'll get more details and options just based on if you can go back to the slide that's got the restroom options it's showing 25 000 to purchase or 2700 a month is that 27 dollars a hundred a month does that include that 72 000 annual it does not okay so in less than 10 months we will pay for one so it does not necessarily make sense to to do the lease wait good question the annual cost the 72 000 annual cost is regardless of whether it's lease or purchase correct correct you're gonna need a contractor to really take care of this facility and maintain it day to day now we could look at our own staffing options but we we'd have to look at that from what we've told what we've seen from the other cities and their models is they typically have a contractor that comes in sometimes you have to transport the trailer to empty it to bring it back there's a lot of maintenance involved in it and what you're saying council member ryan is we should just buy it i'm saying after not paying rent for nine and a half months you've paid the purchase price always a landlord that's good council member so i think it's either a maybe it's a cool it's a three month six month type window where you try it out and see if it's worth buying and then i mean that that's kind of in the middle um but if if you do purchase it i can see it getting used right yeah but yeah yeah and and i would almost the salesman in me says there's going to be someone excited to to you know we could sell signage on it and uh you know restroom sponsored by oh yeah now we're way beyond scope yeah council member riggs had a comment i thought no oh well yeah if the service isn't included in the monthly rent which i thought if you rent it then the service was being included then it makes more sense to just purchase it well let's just wrap this up let's just let staff come back to us because we might find that one of these companies has a lease purchase agreement we could try it for three months uh get a report back and find out and especially if it's the lease purchase agreement after three months we could say well we'd like to apply that towards the purchase how about something like that you do some okay so i'm going to wrap it up i'm gonna get the last fun comments you know they're made i can't even say that i i think the challenge is going to be and i'm going to make this prediction i mean i think we can use it a lot of other places we buy it this may not solve the downtown problem but i think it'll help us in a lot of other areas but when we're going to start using this for the downtown or the surrounding area you just wait you think you think nimby is you know a problem not in my backyard when nobody's going to want this on the square proper i mean nobody well one person does mayor pro tem does we'll let her cut the ribbon if that's where we put it so so staff now so the next step their staff will come back with lease options purchase options costs potential locations placement options the whole street and are y'all going to have any discussions with main street association about this as far as to get their state the stakeholder group kind of comments on locations and things such as that yes we would plan to do that we haven't done any public outreach so far any outreach to the businesses we really wanted to see some direction first before we were go back to the stakeholders and what i would request is once this gets deployed if it's deployed in the downtown i want data so i want you know if we need to provide some kind of software or something to the visitor center to say hey we want some kind of way to track what's going on not just sort of anecdotally i want data from the usage of that particular facility because that's what's going to help us decide was this the solution or not and maybe narrow it down to a little bit better solution can do okay any other comments questions wow okay what a great discussion about restrooms all right we're going to go on to our i think it's our last work work session item which will probably be the fastest agenda item two f which is receive report hold discussion provide direction to staff on recommended changes to residential parking standards good afternoon richard canoni and our planning director if you recall this this item was discussed about a month ago we had presented maybe 10 or 12 considerations with respect to parking at the conclusion of that that meeting we were sort of tasked with coming back within a month at some specific recommendations with respect to having some flexibility but also looking at improving some of the parking standards in the short term while we're in the process of updating updating the ddc so sort of to just jump right into it the first item is increasing the minimum standards the the we split this into two parts part a is for single family part b is multifamily if you recall this is this is exactly sort of what we what we proposed at that at our initial presentation looking at four as opposed to two per dwelling this would be for single family and duplex with a minimum of two in the garage and not allowing for tandem tandem back end to end and then front back yeah councilman graver so a question on that if you're saying for a single family home you have to have four spaces two of them have to be in a garage that means that the other two are going to be in the driveway or are you going to allow to count street parking no it would they would have to be in the driveway side by side so what does that do for the notion of setbacks of of houses in an nr6 because they have to be there has to be enough room in the driveway for the cars to park without blocking the sidewalk how does does that impact the the setback in any way it it wouldn't right now this is actually an nr6 i thought i would i would get a chauffer as an example and our six i was gonna ask that question see there you're good you're good for the most part they they provide a a parking pad roughly 18 by 18 is what we typically see for for nr6 this is a development two phases so you'll see in the first phase they have a single car garage but they do have the two two spaces within the driveway maybe the last few rezoning applications where we did receive comments from from the public where there were concerns with respect to to parking in single car garages this is typically what they what they reference so as you can see with with these lots phase one they they range from 50 to 58 feet in width but once you start adding those driveways with that obviously it lessens the amount of parking that that could occur on street so you see here you're already i mean you have the two spaces and and the there is a car in the garage phase two they are now going with the two car garage but what this has done is actually moved the house out further phase one they had five foot setbacks roughly five foot some six on the sides phase two they're at a four foot setback so what that what that has then done was really push that push that house to the limits if you see in the middle of the driveway in order to meet their lot coverage standards they went with a pervious portion of the driveway now interestingly this counts towards the landscape area the way the code is interpreted and and i know but that that is about three percent of the landscape area and so this is um and how fast are we changing this code i mean that's that's insane it's it's it's insane i mean i'm it's our code it's so that 's that's our code and i'm okay i mean we got to be okay with it it's our code but we 've got to find some ways so you're telling me nr6 has a four foot setback side yard setback correct rarely do do developers actually build at that but we have on on on one or two occasions have seen at least in the time that i've been here where they've come in at four foot fire fire has has made it aware that they really need it has to be five five foot so i think when we actually i think when you when we get through the ddc update you will see that that address so i have a question on this photo i'm sorry i interrupted you were you finished i'm sorry go ahead yeah i can't wait to hear what you're gonna ask well i know part of our code says that if you have if it's either a concrete gravel drive you can't have a dirt drive if you have a gravel drive and you have grass growing up in it that's a violation of our code what i'm hearing you tell me is that because this is the landscape requirement of the home that if grass or some weeds start growing up in that thing our code we can't go out there and say hey you got to clean that out because it's a parking structure no that's part of the landscape requirement so is it my understanding counts towards that that that landscape of 40 percent i would i would suggest that we need to figure out a way to solve some of this temporary because the code rewrite is going to take another probably what what are you expecting the year no i don't think i don 't think i certainly hope not that long because what we have is a problem we have conflict we what your parking requirement said was we can't have car new new homes from now on and denton with that if that change goes through there'll be no such thing as a single car garage anymore correct all right so if that's the case which this council may decide that if that's the case then we need to look at the rest of our code to say okay given that how do we avoid what we've imposed i mean i my response isn't to the developer because they're just doing what our code requires and it's not a response to anybody here it's just this is the quirky stuff right that we have that we're not paying a lot of attention to so i would suggest that whatever decisions we make here we have to figure out unless we want because we had 368 permits filed from october of 2017 to january that same time last year from the presentation that same time last year last year the year before was 117 we've tripled the amount of permits from year to year and most of them my hunch is is going to be in an nr4 or an nr6 category correct and these are the kinds of things that we're going to be facing so i really think we need to find some interim fixes for this so that developers can understand we can if we we can lower the landscape requirement in a situation like this because that's not that it's i mean even with the pitch of the driveway it's not gonna yeah it's meeting the spirit or the letter of the code but it's not meeting the spirit of and if we are okay with this we're okay with that just being concrete and and having grass so uh council member well gregory the reason i'm talking about this and and the parking on the on the driveway which a lot of folks do and by the way those are two blocks from my house those photos and we approved the majority of the members of this council have approved two more developments just like that off of audra because part of the rule was that the setback was to be 20 feet because in our six setback really isn't 20 feet and and what we did by by pushing the setback back is if you want to get any kind of square footage in the homes then it's got up the house has got to push out but it bulges out to the side because trust me in those lots there's no room in the backyard the backyards are about eight feet deep um so so it's it's just one of the issues that we have of accommodating the parking concern and then the setbacks on the side that are only and i mentioned this when we talked about this before houses that are eight feet apart whereas the the fire department will not let the school district put portable classrooms any closer than 10 feet council member riggs and then don't see anybody on this side i think later we are going to talk about max parking with permeable surfaces but my question here is is that to help with drainage or runoff at the surface there in the middle or is that it was to meet the it wasn't to meet the lot coverage lot coverage standards were 60 percent um in order to meet that without reducing the size of the house they they went with basically 120 square feet uh within the middle of the driveway to meet that lot coverage okay if you will so instead of 40 landscaping i mean really you have 37 so what was our intent by that with the code that that would grow up in the kind of landscaping the from what i understand again and this is has been a a and maybe a bad interpretation just that's carried on through the years uh because within the definition of landscaping it mentions pervious and so there's been a very liberal interpretation that um because it's per vious and if these are pervious pavers then it can count towards landscaping okay it yes it's about it's about the requirement of so so much percentage being pervious and so much percentage allowed to be non-pervious and and and so so and then you're saying if it's pervious it's landscape right and and you know a lot of times you'll see in codes where they will have a minimum pervious area um ours does not right now um it just it's either lot coverage which includes paved areas or landscaped area which sort of pulls everything into that so if it's pervious to a certain extent then it's it's counted towards that landscape so that could be a i mean in other words what i heard you say was this was sort of an interpretation this could be an easy fix in the code from an interpretation perspective okay all right well we've sort of got sidetracked on that photo but that but that's good it's a good conversation to understand how some of the decisions we're making on zoning and you know what our codes allow for setbacks and you know i think we got to take a wholesale look at our residential classifications our setbacks you know exactly what what's the impact on the ground to these and these are great examples so uh yeah okay all right and then well could you go back to this the first slide so i can make sure because i don't think we talked about multifamily duplexes or duplexes i mean okay so so so duplex right now it's for if it's one to three bedrooms it's two per dwelling and then each bedroom over three it's one one um for each bedroom so if it's a four bedroom then it would be three three parking spaces required for a du plex okay so this brings up a question it says a minimum of two spaces shall be in a garage are you saying that every duplex now in the city of denton built must have a garage under the under the proposed correct okay i think that's that that may myself included so i'm just going to put that disclosure out there i mean i've built duplexes and you know a lot of people now instead of building multifamily they're building duplexes to reduce the density but they still have to they still have to um so maybe this is my catch they still have to put in no i don't know if they do i can't remember whether it's a commercial parking regulation or if it's still the park the parking is pursu ant to the residential duplex parking requirements i have to go back and look at i can't remember what my project did i think it's you still only had to have two if you're three bedrooms and under you had to have two it's two correct so if you're four bedrooms then it kicks it up to right so um might have to talk about that because if they have enough parking that's not on it's not on the street it's a it's a it's not just a single duplex it's a it's a one or two acres or a half acre of two or three duplexes that had interior parking the issue has been you've got the space for parking but because of our code you can't put it in unless it's pervious which it doesn't make sense so i'm going to struggle with that if we can find some kind of you know if it's a single duplex on a single lot but you understand what i'm saying yeah so uh uh if you've got them what i'm showing is you've got to have a minimum of two spaces and then uh if you've got but you won't even but in the thing i'm talking about you couldn't even have four the code would not literally allow because you're thinking of a duplex with a regular single-family driveway correct i'm thinking i can't think of the name of the street i had it in the last example where we had um they're literally it's an entire street of duplexes yeah and actually it would meet it because they have two you know they have a two-car garage and they have the two spaces in the garage yeah in the drive whereas some of them they're they're just they're they're on single platted lots but there might be three duplexes and then a parking lot similar to if it were multifamily and you wouldn't have a so might have to tweak that a little bit uh yes mayor pro tem so this is saying if there's a one-bedroom duplex that there are four parking spots required it would be um i don't know if we have any one-bedroom du plexes but well i'm guessing a townhouse would count or like would that be a yeah that would that would that would be a row house of some kind typically single families how though just attach single family so one bedroom two bedroom doesn't matter it's going to be four parking spaces yes okay yeah i don't i don't i don't know if i can be on on board with that because that would seem a little over well i mean we talked about this at the last just to credit them they brought this up at the last meeting and everybody was on board with it uh okay i don't know if it was presented and that's fine okay then i overlooked it all right yeah yeah i i have an issue with making people have a garage i'm just um if they don't want what we're saying that if somebody builds something new they're forced to to build a garage in their design is that what we're saying correct yeah i mean was that the way it was before any of this no right now it's just two parking spaces yeah i mean if if the area is there to park then that should be yeah what yeah customer yeah that was my question so habitat houses so you 're telling me a habitat house would then have to incorporate a garage under the proposed correct yeah yeah and so let let me this sounds like criticism but it's not obviously there's things that we didn't think about in the last presentation as we were taking in this information so uh i'll certainly own my part of it um so what i'm hearing you say is what what i think i hear you say that because the problem has been how do we get if we have a residential development how do we keep people from parking on the street i mean how do we provide enough off-site parking in a single family or a duplex development or structure to reduce the pressure for on-st reet parking because when two people park on both sides of the street in our current residential configuration you can't hardly even get down the road is that what i'm is that correct yeah we we looked at this in terms of a new subdivision not necessarily single you know in in phil-loss and maybe that's the distinction that needs to be made um moving forward um so in so in your case council member riggs and so help me richard if if if i'm off base you're just wanting to say hey if you're building a structure whether it be a single family home or a duplex you need to provide off-street parking for up to four vehicles in a single family home which can be your two cars two sets of cars in tandem to one another correct two two rows uh whereas the duplex is the one bedroom you have to have four um um that doesn't mean they have to park that many just means you have to have the space correct to do that whether it's in a square or it's in a you know dependent on the development yes council member mr head oh yes oh go ahead sorry no um all right so for me i think i just need education on what that effect has because we have a society is changing minimizing that sort of thing you know so not everyone wants uh the two-car garage and so i just i need some help understanding uh what that does value-wise i guess and it just could be absolute ignorance on my part as far as not understanding how to increase decrease the value of your home i may just not be up to speed on that but i just i don't understand uh one that how the these different bills affect how home values and then i just don't believe in um people not parking on because you have the space i'm not going to park on the street and the case i'll give you you can drive by any night uh here across from the police station uh alongside stoke and in the bakery there whatever that is and those people from the apartment complex park right there on the street i don't know if it's simplicity i don't know if it's to get away faster i don't know what the motivation is but there's plenty of spaces on that development we know but there is just hey it's easier faster just to pull up in this parallel parking spot and park here so i think using that that as a base of knowledge i don't know that requiring extra parking in a if you're going to park on the street you're going to park on the street so if that's the issue if it's an enforcement issue then we just need to pass an ordinance that says no overnight parking on the street you 're going to get a ticket throughout the city you know and then just start training people that way but i don't think there's plenty of spots in that complex they just don't do it for whatever reason and so i think that would be the same in the neighborhood it's just faster to get out i don 't have to back out i don't have to you know i can't see around whatever it is it's just people are going to do it unless we make it uh make it and enforce it to where you can't do it now they 're motivated to park in in the in the driveway that's just my thought okay thank you mayor i think partial answer to your question and realtors could probably answer this better but um two car garages had value to a home if you see a three-bedroom two-bath home with a one car garage it generally is less expensive than the same kind of home with a two-car garage um so so it adds value and i think that that one of the situations that we're looking at is we have some conflicting goals because on the one hand we're very interested in uh offering affordable housing on the other hand we're also interested in increasing the quality of the housing stock in denton because if you look at the overall inventory of housing stock in denton it's um in relation to other cities in the county and the metroplex more affordable meaning that our housing values are low and if you go to that slide that you just showed with the pictures of those homes with the garages there you go the the home there with the cool studebaker that's that's a that's a two-car tandem garage and and those homes that that home next to it there is is selling for about 170 thousand 170 dollars a square foot that's that that house right there that yellow house is about 35 thousand dollars that's a starter home now so uh so even even when we're trying to to to to do regulations that are allowing for um affordable housing there's a whole different definition of affordable now in new homes a question for our staff with these new regulations if they were to go into effect the way that you have them proposed my guess is um uh that that if a person bought that house uh to councilmember riggs statement and they decided that they really weren't going to use a two-car garage and they wanted to split it and make it a one-car garage and add another bedroom or a den or a workspace or or they wanted to close off the whole thing that that with a code requiring that they couldn't get a building permit to do that is that correct correct if there were if if if a two-car garage was required uh-huh um and they they came in later to turn it into a family room or an additional there's a neighborhood where my wife grew up and we still have that house as a rental house a lot of those houses had one car garages and they've been converted into uh air-conditioned space living space and they have no garages and it's pushed cars out into the driveway and then from the driveway out into the street um so it so uh the design for the street is no longer quite as good as it was because there's so many cars parked in the street councilmember duff and john did you have any after duff and then councilmember riggs yeah i can i can absolutely guarantee you the value of a house goes down a great deal with you know if you don't have a garage or you don't have a two -car garage anymore um i'm i'm really kind of conflicted with this whole thing too because a garage adds cost onto a house you know um i'm not sure how you how you get the cost down to be where it's affordable to considerably more people uh my goodness where i live if you don't have a golf cart garage it devalues your house and i you know i would suggest you do what we what we do out there because you can't park if you have a two-car garage in two cars you can't park one of them in the driveway overnight and you can't park on the street overnight period but you know that's not practical for you know general public i'm sure but uh i i don't know i i have real mixed emotions about this because you know i'd like to get the cost of of being able to get houses down where some people that can't afford them now can but well and i'm going to take your con then we're going to let you finish your presentation so then we can ask questions so that's my mistake councilmember uh ryan okay i think i'm fine with the single family is presented but i think we also want to have something for infill that maybe has a matches existing area within a certain distance because if it's mainly one car garages in that area that's going to be cohesive on the duplex i just don't see i mean i can see having four spaces required but not necessarily two of them in the garage that can be an option for them if they want to do that but uh du plexes in this town have can be of two totally different it can be student housing and it can be family housing and that presents totally different aspects of needed parking that goes along with that and it's tough for us to figure out where each one's going to fall in place but having the four spaces available not necessarily in the garage i've got a three-car garage and i don't have room for my car in there so garages aren't necessarily only used for parking all right let's finish the presentation then did you yeah okay go ahead and then we'll finish the presentation well i just wanted to make a comment about um garage um converting garages and how that wouldn't be allowed because in our older established neighborhoods we have wider streets and we also have families who move into these homes because they're affordable and then they expand on them because their families grow and then we're just going to say that you can't expand your house even though your family is growing and is that what i'm understanding here with the garage conversation that they wouldn't be able to convert their under under what would be proposed regardless they still have to provide under the current code they still have to provide for two spaces right but they're if they're if there's a lot if there's parking spaces in the driveway that's sufficient and the garage is closed so i just want to make sure that that we address that okay to that point i think just because you can't go in the garage do you not want me to do it no no go ahead you don't have to only expand in the garage you could expand to the back you could maybe expand to the side you could expand up it's the most affordable way sure okay all right let's move on to multifamily and we'll come back if we need to multifamily if you recall it we were we were looking at a number of different scenarios one classifying sro as a standalone use coming up with different requirements as well as a modifying and and then including visitor space what we're proposing is for all multifamily dwellings regardless of of bedroom size or i'm sorry regardless of number of bedrooms it would be one space per bedroom plus 10 for visitor parking now for for the most part this would increase obviously two and three bedrooms for one bedroom and and efficiencies it would actually go down slightly what i've done is just to kind of give give an example of sort of our rationale behind that and and where we typically see a lot of just single one bedroom apartments are not typically the larger apartments but if you you know looking at sort of redevelopment potential long term in the city particularly around the university and i just pulled these two because it was the the easiest data that i could i could pull together but you have the the one on the bottom of the screen built in 1967 density of 27 units an acre roughly 64 units 110 bedrooms 93 parking spaces and so that's the equivalent of 0.85 spaces per bedroom or 1.45 per unit the one on the top built in 65 density of 45 units an acre 41 units 52 bedrooms 46 parking spaces 0.88 spaces per bedroom or 1.12 the other thing i wanted to add is the density currently under this district this is d2 is 30 units an acre and so the likelihood particularly the one at 41 units an acre for them to redevelop there's there's really no incentive or no reason why they would lose they would lose units same for the the bottom one it would be pretty close and i doubt they would be able to get that many under the under the current parking parking standards so there's really no and we're also looking at this long term most of these are obviously they're over 50 years old and the life the lifespan of some of these some of these older older properties and to address council member husbeth your point about the apartment building on is it hickory next to the stoke uh the one you're talking about i think if we were to pull that specifically i think you will find because i know those are they've got some two bedrooms maybe three bedrooms i doubt that they have one parking spot per bedroom so there's probably not enough parking there based upon our current standards that's our current standards are such that whereas the what you're proposing for multi-family is hey if you got three bedrooms you gotta have three spots if you got two bedrooms two spots one bedroom one spot plus 10 visitor correct if you could go back to the last slide you say multi-family dwelling or manufactured housing that that's in that's the way it's currently worded in in the code that we should probably going back through it um this is one of those we actually have within the multi-family i'm sorry within the manufactured stand housing standards there's there's parking standards that are buried within there um i typically don't look at the manufacturer because we have i mean actually none in the last five or five and a half months that i've been here but that could actually be stricken and it could just be for multi-family our manufactured housing i thought i know modular housing is allowed in the city uh i mean on residential lots but i didn't think that manufactured what i'm thinking of is manufacture which i grew up in which was what they used to call a mobile home correct that those aren't allowed on single-family lots for sure in single-family residential zone but so that's the only reason i ask that question because to make sure that there's not that should actually be stricken under under these um okay council member hudson drive down hickory street from the county courthouse and you'll see one well and i have a question about that so and i did so uh but that's for a different discussion um okay i'm okay with this on the multi-family side is there anybody has any objections to the multi-family side the parking requirements on the multif amily yes yeah but i'm just not going to vote for it so i'm gonna vote for any of it well i'm i'm not going to vote for the multi-family i mean i don't if i have to not vote for any of it i won't i'll probably make a friendly amendment once it comes to what would you what what are your thoughts on that i like the i mean i like the old way honestly and i brought this up at our last meeting as well which is i just i think the old way was a better way of doing it but i mean i'm i'm okay with something in between i just think one space per bedroom doesn't count kids it's going to be overbuilt overpaved lose more green space less permeability i mean i don't know that 's just my two cents okay great yes yeah that's that's when in the last discussion i was saying that sros are different because you're going to have one unit in one car more than likely if you 're going to have but i know that conversation has has sailed but for me that's where the different lies is in the vehicles that are there but yeah i mean i agree with mayor pro tem on the amount of space i don't want to see extra concrete if if we don't need it but on the one the apartments by dcta the rail yard apartments i think there was an issue there and we had questions about that because the on street parking was getting counted for more than three or four different areas which is why it was crowded there they were counting the spaces over and over again for for different things so that we discussed that before i think one of the most important things i've heard today is what you said with the slide where you were showing the slide about some of the apartments built in the 60s and i think that that's really relevant in terms of of of writing a code that that meets our needs now but but does not create a disin centive for replacing some very old and what is becoming in some cases substandard multifamily housing especially around u.n.t and i i want to make sure that we don't disincentivize those folks the owners of those properties or new new people that might want to invest in those properties from from being able to to rebuild those in such a way that you know if if we've if we created an ordinance that that makes those permanent then we've we've made a mistake and i think for me as i further refine my thinking on this and mayor pro tem and council member riggs sort of the problem for me and from what i've heard from other developers isn't so much the parking requirement as it is that there's no range in other words like you said currently you don't have to put one per bedroom if you have mainly two or three bedrooms you're not gonna if you want to go above the parking requirement it all has to be permeable is that right yeah and that is where the rub comes in because then you start putting things in like we saw on that house which if you're talking about an extra five or ten spaces but you're still able to meet that lock coverage ratio so it's not so much do we need to change necessarily what the the i say the maximum or how what how do we look at what is allowed that you can have concrete or if you need more spaces if you if you need more spaces you don't have to necessarily go but if you don't need more spaces in this case like a non sro if you don't need them then you don't have to put them in you know there is a minimum there's a minimum but what happens is the way the code's written currently is if you go above that i say minimum it's really maximum non-permeable minimum maximum they're the one i'm saying yeah if you go above that that's when you start getting into things that cost more money that are harder to maintain and i'm i mean but if you're still within the lock coverage ratio of the zoning requirement i don't and that's goes back to the houses of that permeable has been sort of defined as quote unquote part of the lens and i think we need to bifurcate that to some degree right and and part of the problem with that parking maximum kind of jumping into recommendation two to get to to to eliminate that when that when that additional parking is provided um that lot coverage of let 's just say 80 that that stays the same where that where it starts to creep in again it pulls away from the actual landscape so it's almost like a fallacy that that you're you're improving the pervious because you're you're really not by putting the pervious pavers and it's not 100 pervious but what you're what you're in fact doing is taking away from truly the landscape area okay and so part of our recommendation was right now is is is to eliminate that but then as part of our the broader uh update with the landscape ordinance look at it incorporating additional um landscaping or uh tree requirements within within the parking to start to sort of alleviate to alleviate that yeah so it sounds like you have a recommendation for something else coming yeah let's let me yeah i also wanted i also wanted to show this this example um this was built in 2000 um this had it was 405 units 564 bedrooms 564 cases okay um interestingly enough uh the code in 1999 again before 2002 um it had 1.25 for for efficiency 1.5 for uh one bedroom and then anything two or greater it was one one to one you had a two-bedroom apartment you were required two spaces right so when the 2002 code came in we actually reduced the parking requirements for both two- bedroom and three-bedroom right in addition there was a um there was a visitor parking requirement in that 99 code i think it was one to 10 bedrooms if you were greater than 50 units right um i think i think single i think all one bedroom apartments were exempt but i think it's just worth mentioning um this is just uncovered it i didn't even know we had that that code laying around yeah yeah it went from what we had because yeah most of the older apartments that are 2000 or less you have one parking spot per bedroom if it's a one bedroom if it's a two bed i mean you which provides adequate parking for people because nobody's ever there they're not most people are not all there at the same time so it does provide that sort of visitor parking you don't have it spilling over on the streets uh it's when with the the later code of 2000 when it shrunk the two and three bedroom requirements to um you don't have to have that that's when you really begin to see your issues of people don't have a place to park but anyway go ahead particularly when they're renting them by the bedroom yeah yeah and this is this is just an example of of a um 100 unit development 250 bedrooms you just see the current the current code and and what would be recommended uh and and the change there the increase um what we also built into this which will sort of get into recommendations three four and five um are are some some items that offer some flexibility where um they could reduce that based on based on a number of factors and i'll i'll i'll move to that this is one um uh the the top one actually would reduce the parking this is actually a real project that we have i didn't want it because we haven't it's not approved yet so i didn't want to show it um publicly um but it is a project directly across the street from uh twu um that is i think owned by the university but being developed by by somebody else um and it is nine efficiency apartments um and um they're they're struggling back and forth with with trying to fit everything onto that onto that site and make it work uh coupled with on-street parking um under the proposed it would it would work for them um it would absolutely work for them um without having to uh depend on on-street parking whether or not they would go to a um a one bedroom it would be the same um but it was just i wanted to provide that example uh a lot of times what we'll see is um at times they will reduce the one bedroom to an efficiency just because it's that lower parking ratio um where at the end of the day it's really it's really one one in the same and so is it a better living condition if you have a one bedroom as opposed to efficiency our recommendation was just just treat them treat them treat them the same okay all right um this goes back to to what we were just talking about is eliminate the parking maximums in the end term um again right now the this is an example of sprouts so i made sure that all of my pictures were dentin um so there there are no uh you won't see anything else there might be one from arlington um but but they're all dentin um but again this is actually probably the best example of of of truly um poor i 'll call it porous paving um but again you know rains like we've had the last week uh given our soil types um it doesn't it doesn't provide for much um uh much relief um and so really again this isn't they're they're adding additional parking but at the same time by adding that additional parking it's we're not what we what we haven't been doing is maintaining that lot coverage so that's why i said it's kind of a fallacy because instead of having true open landscape area right you have that yeah and so i think we're better served with with truly true landscape area yeah i i have an issue with just going ahead and getting rid of this especially this hasn't come to our committee on the environment and this is something that i would like for the the committee to discuss because there are reasons that this is put in here for stormwater and drainage and things like that and i would like um to find out more about that before we just strike it and get rid of it okay well we had a report i i don't know if it was council on the environment or mobility committee uh the committee on the environment or the mobility committee but we had seen a couple of years ago there had been some videos uh folks literally with with fire trucks hosing down an area of asphalt and all of the water was soaking in and so we asked for a report on that and in fact we got one an engineer uh from a and m they had an office over in the north dallas area and they had actually done some experimenting with these different types of pavements they they look more like a regular pavement than that photo shows but because of the way that they're constructed and they they've constructed them with with concrete with asphalt and with pavers and all of those and they they did this in their parking lot to do some testing and uh there's hardly any runoff because of the way that this is constructed and in fact uh uh in the report said that it wasn't very cheap to do it in very small quantities like in a small parking lot but that that uh text dot contracted for a big uh section of i-45 going from dallas to to houston to be constructed this way you're driving on that part of i-45 in the rain it looks like regular asphalt and there's no water pooling anywhere so i i think to say that that non-pervious uh or that pervious pavement doesn't do the job it's not really accurate because it can do the job and it can hold the water and they can redirect it and let it out slowly uh in a way that that really provides less impact on flooding since we're concreting over so much of you know we're p aving over so much if we can do it in a way that doesn't allow that so we might need to go back and re uh re-educate ourselves on some of that area right and it might actually be a matter of of having standards for for that type of that type of surface right now we don't and we kind of accept in the past we've accepted anything so if if you're just a regular old brick paver um if you have some sort of aggregate you know um in between that's that's counted as pervious which i i have the same you know but that that's how it's been that's how it's been through carried and i and i think and we can take it back to the environmental committee i i don't think this is an environmental issue i mean this is what we're trying to do we're trying to mix all these if we want to if we're saying we've got too much concrete then we need to address that from our from our standards as far as if but pervious being included in a landscape lot coverage ratio is like you said it's a perfect example of how the purpose of a landscape lot coverage is to provide more green space to provide truly more pervious the purpose of green space is to have green space um you know if everything percolated in the ground none of our legs would be full i mean you know we've we've that i mean unfortunately but if you're going to have parking have parking and let the developer decide what kind of material best meets my development needs and if we have an interest in saying okay from an environmental perspective how much runoff do we want to have on on these things well then we can adjust our codes accordingly uh because this in my opinion is silliness it's not silliness because i'm anti-environmental it's silliness because we've got so many our code is so fragmented we don't have a comprehensive holistic approach to we want lot coverage ratio and that will affect developments that will affect this store would only be a certain size which means you only have so many parking spaces because parking is is is uh determined by the size of the building am i correct on that correct and the standards that we apply i'm just saying to to make it pervious or not if we don't want so many parking spaces that are concrete then we let's just but this is i mean it's it's i mean i got so many calls from the appraisal district because they tried to you know they went to increase their parking lot you weren 't here at the time but we forced them to do it in impervious but you know during the summer during the peak period of property tax protests people are parking out on the dirt grass is growing up in it so it can go back to the environmental committee i think the environmental committee then needs to really look at the purpose of look if you're trying to prevent stormwater runoff let's try to find a way to do that that doesn't create situations that don't really look i mean it looks like we're piecing something together and and that's not a criticism of you or the department it's our code that's been so amended and fragmented scar tissue we've been instead of us trying to go okay how to proactively do we want to do this because pervious could be gravel could they not have gravel right there i mean or or something that i don't think for commercial i think they could have gravel but for for residential they could they i believe they could for gravel yeah for residential they could have for residential they could have gravel i mean we don't have to have concrete driveways if i'm understanding that correctly in residential residential yeah okay for new new build under the current code they can have a gravel driveway well i was just gonna say um like razor ranch the way that they did it on this side um the parking lot there we think it's the ice swim we talked about that and so i mean there are discussions that we can do as far as the proper drainage and less concrete that don't look like this absolutely we just need to have that conversation yes i mean with the curb with the eyelet cuts where the water can flow through and you know yeah so no there's all kinds of things that we can do and that's what i'm saying um so i'm going to make this suggestion it sounds like we got people all over the place on a lot of this stuff i don't know if we're ready to give total direct y'all ready to give total direction on this oh i know but go ahead but from what i'm hearing there's not any consensus on anything go ahead and and and to compl icate it more um this recommendation would apply to not just residential but across the board and really our intent was again to sort of let's let's let's you know call it what it is landscape area should be landscaped area not pervious parking so for the interim that was our recommendation to just stop it now yeah you got a comment well i was just gonna say with the i would want something in in the added to the code that says that landscaping is landscaping and pervious parking is not and i think with the line in here about uh you know that's uh requirement numbers required number spaces provided by the subject there unless approved by director of planning and development we're saying you don't have to go through a big long process and i'm sure we've all heard from somebody who's had to go through a long process to add a few spaces at a church at an office building that you know because of the square footage of the office building and they had big meetings there they they ran into roadblocks you know you mentioned the uh prezl district the prezl district you know this gives an out this gives an administrative way for them to get past that as long as they're not using some of their required landscaping space so i think it's a it's a good way to good direction to head in council member yeah i could i could be for that but the administrative thing has a negative connotation because of uh other conversations we've had where that was so i'd like whatever that process is it needs at least passed by so it could be here's what i suggest so i'm all for expedited but autonomous administrative would would be difficult for me just because some once those are done and if we were to catch wind of it and try to roll that back it gets difficult and just to clarify this is this is the current language in in the code that's the current that's the current this is the current language and that allows it to go over that max okay so so if we were to keep the original um then we would just you know the current standards then we we could we could work on addressing this and refining some definitions so so help me understand what you're saying on commercial that you're eliminating the maximum they can build any number of parking spaces they want to build within their lot coverage so right now if they go over the map if they want to go over the maximum they can sort of creep into so if it's 80 percent lot coverage 20 percent landscape area if they want to go if they want to build more than the minimum maximum under the current code that that area would would would get pulled from the landscape area as opposed to staying within the the sort of the boundaries of the minimum lot area doesn't for for some for some retail establishments and retail seems to be changing a lot these days but it seems that that a lot of them want to build parking for that one day capacity or the two-day capacity those biggest shopping days right around Christmas and so uh and and there are some retailers that won't come in unless they have some kind of outrageous number of parking spots that would only be used once or twice a year so this would allow them to do that correct but still stay within the within the boundaries of the minimum lot area so it couldn't so if it's 80 percent lot coverage they would have to do it within that 80 percent lot coverage whereas under under the way it's written now they can go up to 90 percent lot coverage technically because 10 percent of that landscape area could be in the form of a pervious now there's still land tree requirements that they have to have but i'm just kind of giving an exaggerated example on street parking credits if you recall one of the considerations we had at the last meeting was to not sort of have a have a wide cast for this but start to narrow the focus rather than eliminate it completely what we are recommending is keep that to properties within the infill special purpose district we have that we have that overlay now and we define it but then further narrow the types of projects that that could use that that credit to multi- family mixed use or non-residential right now the code does not distinguish between any any use we took it a step further this is just a map to give you an idea of what the infill special purpose district is commonly referred to the area with inside the loop but it's actually a little bit smaller than that how the boundaries were were where they came up with i i'm not aware looking at it we you know as we get through the code update we these are things we need to revisit but right now it's fairly fairly standard we also put in a sort of revised how maximum credits would be calculated right now it's at a it's at a two to i think it's at it's at a one to four ratio it's at a one to four ratio i'm sorry one to two ratio for the first four spaces then it's one to one after that what we're proposing is to just keep it simple one to one but you have to have 18 feet of of continuous linear feet so if you have a driveway that that is not not contiguous so it's whatever you have in front of your property parking has to be permitted on the street in order to get it but it's at it's at 18 feet per space and again narrowing that that focus to or narrowing that area to just the the that infill overlay i think council member breaks out a question how how many times can a space be counted to use because when you're an infill and you know that that somebody else development has used that linear that space in front already for their development and then you have somebody coming in and they want to recount that same space for theirs how how do we control that and how many times can a space be reused right now i don't think we've ever have ever calculated it that's that's part of the part of the problem it's not we there's not a you know a spreadsheet that i can refer to and say within this area we've we've allocated you know 15 uh actually the example here um i don 't know if that was ever written into i haven't pulled the development approvals but we we don't keep track of of we haven't kept track of i should say of uh anytime that that there's been that that credit at least not a running um you know one one particular spreadsheet or or file that that we could refer to what we are attempting here is to really just again keep it simple and if you've got frontage it's 18 linear feet that's right that's you know that's what that that's what goes to that that property okay so it's per property so we wouldn't have the same issues right you wouldn't be counting things across the street or or there would really be no creative interpretation it's it's pretty with this it's pretty straightforward okay because it's based upon the linear feet in front of the property contiguous i mean so across the street it's not going to work adjacent to it's not going to work it's it's what's right there in front of you yeah yeah whereas before there may not have been that level of specificity oh yeah you got this much space and yeah yeah and i was using that so it's okay all right uh the the fourth recommendation um allowing for a percentage of compact cars interestingly the 99 you know keep kind of going back to the 99 code they allowed for compact parking um not just within the garages but within surface lots at at 20 percent the 2002 code changed that and only allowed for compact spaces within a parking structure what we're proposing is to allow it anywhere whether it's a parking garage or or a surface lot but have it at at five percent as the minimum we've also introduced a yeah let's just let's get through this all yeah that's my we've also introduced uh there are some um standards for bicycle parking um although there there's not a requirement for that uh what we what we are proposing here is essentially a substitution which is really what the compact also is uh where you can substitute five percent of of the um total required spaces one parking space for four uh bicycle or one parking space for two motorcycles and this is the one uh one picture that is not in denton this is uh from arlington but it's close enough and this just gets into a uh some some of the the specific standards uh but again in the last sentence i just wanted to point to no instance uh shall the combination be greater greater than five percent of the of the overall parking and so recommendation five administrative relief uh what what we are proposing here is a a a 10 reduction but we did set up some uh some criteria for that that i'll get to uh but it's it's it's an either or so so we wanted to make sure you couldn't sort of double dip um so if you're if you go for the full 10 you can't then reduce five percent for compact and then another five percent um uh for uh for bicycle parking but you could use it in combination so that the the intent is to never exceed 10 percent uh and the criteria again um will not cause excessive congestion danger public safety uh reduce parking availability to other uses other um uh i won't read i won't read every every item but but you get the you get the idea of at least we wanted to have some sort of criteria to to judge these on make sure there's no undue financial or administrative burden on the city where it's not going to require staffing to go out there and and monitor these things it should be it should be a street pretty straightforward request but we also if you were going to ask for an administrative relief we did want to build in an exchange so in exchange of uh you have to provide at least some sort of bicycle parking and what i did here is um provided just a couple of examples just to kind of give you the flavor of it again using that 100 unit 200 uh bedroom with 200 linear feet um on site 236 standard 14 compact 56 bicycle and then on street they would be able to get 11 11 spaces that's assuming 200 you know you have that linear that contiguous linear feed so the the part that's over here on your left side of the screen the required parking 275 spaces that's if you didn't apply any of these other sort of except substitution correct that's going back to the our very first example that that's the required at 275 so i kind of use that as as the starting part okay and then i did a an additional one um just on a on a smaller scale uh 10 unit 10 bedrooms 50 or linear square feet because honestly this is what we we see quite a quite a bit um again looking at at 10 compact or on street um or uh or or the straight 10 administrative relief the the idea was to really provide that flexibility um where where you know maybe maybe compact will work in some instance maybe the bicycle or maybe motorcycle but at least to have the the property owner developer have at least have some options okay all right so if you wouldn't mind we're going to start all over no i'm kidding i'm kidding you if you could go back because i want to sort of take these one because some we've heard that they want to be moved to you know some more deliberation but if there's things that we can give you direction on i want to be so if we'll go to the resident just the residential component first um okay right here all right council what's what's your guidance direction on this how do you want to modify this change it accept it what do you want to do because remember i i would say that uh need to provide for infill development in some way on single family that it would match the the surrounding area uh otherwise single family is good for new development as presented and on the duplex i would probably scratch the requirement for two garage spaces and just say that four spaces they could they could be garage spaces but they don't have to be right okay all right yes yeah on the single family same component infill you know treat that different but um i'm okay with the one garage two space in front so i don't know what i mean i don't know that a two car garage is is necessary but maybe i just live in the wrong part of town i don't i don't i think that i mean i think it meets a need right now and i think the developer has that flexibility to mix and match or uh set that up however they want but that's just my thought i don 't know that a requirement for two a two car garage um is okay but i don't know if it reads that so whatever that is i'm okay with two cars in the driveway and a one car garage wherever that wherever that fits all right okay yes i would agree with mr ryan okay i still feel the same way about um not requiring the garage especially on a house that is already there if a person or family wants to convert um i don't think that we should be able to prevent them from doing what they want with their property by forcing them to have a two car garage if they don't want one and and that's and so we can make this to where when the ordinance passes if it passes that it's simply on properties that have been built since the passage of that in other words if someone is an is older right and it was built at that time before this or the passage of this ordinance that parking requirement doesn't preclude them from doing what council member briggs has said right i think we would just need to outline and we'll work with with the city attorney on it but include some those exemptions if you will right um infill um affordable affordable housing might be should you know would be a good one also to add i think would take care of the issue with with respect to habitat so we we can look at incorporating some of those some of those exemptions um i'm i'm okay with i'm okay with the duplex part the one nobody's building really one bedroom duplexes those are you know if this is about what's if if most of every of all these requirements apply to what's current what's built after this it allevi ates the problem if somebody's place is burned down of course i don't know you got the 50 rule and then you go into a lot of crazy stuff like that so never mind forget that um so yeah if you know garage requirement on duplexes the single family um i don't know too many people who are building single family without garages i'm torn between the one car and the two car um i struggle with saying hey you gotta do this you gotta build a two-car garage um just as someone who you know developers should have the opportunity because what i really hear the purpose of this is you need to provide enough off-street parking for four spaces in a single family home correct if you got a two-car garage you can put two of them in there if you got a one-car garage then can you fit three cars which you might can maybe not um so maybe what we could do is if it's a if it's a two-car garage you got to provide four spaces if it's a single car garage you got to at least have places for three cars off-site because i just i struggle with saying from now on everything that's been built that's going to be built in the city of dent from a single family perspective has to have a double car garage um of course then you say well why do they have to have a garage at all um and that's so that's where i am on it i i could be okay with council member ryan's if that's if that 's the consensus i can go with that but those are my thoughts let me get to people who haven't spoke yet on this particular on the residential anybody any more comment on the residential yes i like the old rules on on the residential on both okay but we're going to take them one at a time single family and duplex duplex okay both all right yeah i i would i think i would prefer to to let the developer have a little more leeway and they'll make a decision whether they want to put a one car garage or a two car garage in there but at least have if it's going to be a one car garage they got to have at least three parking spaces but you know uh let the market decide what you want i'm just seeking clarification so if somebody built a two bedroom two bath home we're going to make them provide for four spaces theoretically yes i i don't know if we've ever if we've seen a i don't know if we've seen a two bedroom in some time so again we were looking at this is well i i do know that you know some homes we talked about the the movement they're getting smaller more minimal and you know downsizing from larger homes to smaller homes so i'm just trying to get clarification on that so and so before it was two correct see when you require four parking spots for a single family home you're pretty much guaranteeing that you're not going to ever have a two bedroom or three bedroom really family home built anymore you're like maximizing the lot sizes maxim izing square feet i mean that's what's going to happen which if that's what the kind of houses people want and then that's fine but i think it's going to be ugly well that's a fair question again the business side of the business is what what are you seeing requests for i mean what what what is the the prevailing trend the prevailing trend is is two car garage i think we have um you know it's sort of telling even even with this project phase one had one car garage phase two they went with with two car garages other than this development i haven't seen any uh i'm not aware of any others that have a single car garage um phase three you know there is a phase three to this i don't think it's been decided maybe they'll have three car garages i don't know but um i i think this was pretty telling at least for us that you know they they had one one phase that went with a single car garage they opted to go the second phase with a two car but you know they kind of they kind of um flexed out a little bit on the setbacks and and got creative with with the driveway yes so what is give me the the time for it and first let me tell you excellent presentation well done and then and then so what is the time difference years between uh phase one phase two like did they complete phase do you know i'm i'm okay hailey's gonna give me that yeah he's gonna give me that answer i don't think it was that that far of a of a of a excellent of a of a sprint it was at least eight years no it was 15 years i'm sorry 2004 2016 okay well either way i mean that's that's good information to understand you know hey they they compile their data this had time to evaluate came back with the difference that's what thank you again if y'all can correct me if i'm wrong i think this all this whole discussion stemmed from trying to reduce on street parking and the spillover yeah so so i want us to make sure that so that's really what the whole objective has been to try to to do that so let me ask you a question if you go back to that slide um oh it seems like the consensus on the duplexes was and i've not heard any objection on the duplexes from the standpoint of bedrooms or cars the garage was the issue if you have a duplex which is two units you know that's four units total that's four parking spaces total which is two parking spaces per dwelling that's what that says minimum of is that right four slash dwelling which means your building of two units it's not four parking spaces per unit or is it four per unit per per unit or dwelling unit yes so eight eight for you in a duplex you'd have eight correct all right so what i'm hearing on the single family is a concern with the garage is it one car requirement or a two car requirement what i'm hearing with you is if somebody's building a two- bedroom house even with a two car garage are you making them put in the capacity for four spaces maybe it would be so there's a really big policy question in here that is really not part of the discussion of spillover and that is garages because right now the way it's proposed is anything being built except for duplexes single family moving forward from here has to have a garage whether it's single car or double car from the discussion i'm hearing whereas now we do not require that is that correct we do not require it but if you do if if you are going to put one there there are limit there's a 40 limitation where it can 't you can't just have the garage taking up the entire sure sure but but we don't we don't have a it's a total requirement to put it in there are some limitations if you do put it in correct so that's a big policy question and that's not the policy question for me that was trying to address the issue of spillover or on street parking so i'm okay i'm going to just go down the middle i'm okay if we change the single family to three cars you know three and just take off the requirement of the because they got to have three you got to fit three of them in the driveway three off-site parking three off-site parking if you have one car garage you can put one into if you got a two car you can put two and if and you got a four if you got a two car garage you got four built in in essence two in and two out right because i'm not i'm personally not willing to ready to make a decision on whether i think i think all houses will have garages moving forward quite honestly but i don't know if as a policy maker i want to prescribe that because the real issue has been how do we ensure that we're trying to get as much as what's reasonably possible from a structure a dwelling structure to that it accommodates it on site and not off-site in the street so that's where i am on that i think it seems like a compromise at least from the four spaces to the three spaces i mean three is if you got a two-bedroom house you're i mean just the fact if you 're building a driveway nobody's going to very seldom will people build a one car wide driveway in fact i don't yeah are those even allowed i mean do driveways have to happen is it 12 feet it's 12 feet yeah 12 yeah so that's where i am i make that suggestion to try to bring some some consensus to the council anybody up on board for that okay i see well okay all right so is that i mean yeah well you know i understand where you're coming from but i also understand the logistics of it that if you've got it doesn't matter that once you put two cars in that driveway you're gonna be playing musical cars so that's when you end up with the off-street parking as soon as you've got three vehicles on that property but you're gonna have the same issue with the four i mean it's just it's just if you got four cars in there somebody made the musical car issue is the same thing but you know what we got i think five yeah for directions so we're going to yes yeah i just want to make a comment about that because earlier councilman reduff made a good point that we 're trying to get affordable homes in here and the more that we require the less affordable our homes are going to be so i'm glad that we're talking about yeah well just as an aside still in posting those 368 permits from october 17 to january 18 the average price of that was 300 000 so when we talk about 368 permits from october 1 2017 to january 30 2018 is about 358 permits okay so sounds like we got the residential can i can i make just make a suggestion again sure that we eliminate the garage for and just require the four off-site off-street parking for single family if it's two bedrooms or less allow for three some sort of reduction yeah that's fine scott came up and he says man we don't want three cars are you kidding me but part of it is it is it's a setback issue as well and and that's why i was thinking it through i want to make sure that we don't do something then all of a sudden yeah and then have this huge um pavement in the front so it's just okay we'll still sort of look at all of it okay i'm okay with that are people okay with that okay all right good we've got that now we're going to multif amily um i'm trying to figure out how this interplays with your maximum with the non-pervious and per vious there's some there's some interplay here there is so if if they wanted to go if you wanted to go above let's just let me just go to the this is probably the easiest so if you wanted to go to let's say 300 spaces by eliminating that parking maximum right by eliminating the minimum being the maximum right they could they could still do the 300 spaces however it has to be within the confines of that lot coverage so they can't creep into the the the true pervious or the landscape area so if you've got 80% lot coverage and 20 landscaping if you want to go to if you want 200 you know if you want to hit the required 275 with your with your building pad you're within that 80 if you want to go to 300 you're within that same you're within that same within those same boundaries within that 80 and so you're either you know you're either doing one of two things either you 're gonna you're gonna maybe eliminate some units or or modify but but it's you're always going to maintain that that 20% is truly going to be uh landscape area yeah there's not going to be that f udge area of right if we want to go above um that let's basically borrow from yeah we're going to put it in papers and so you could have hardly no green space i mean because you're you're still within that lot you're still within that because the the 20 green space includes if you wanted to add another 10% of pervious paving that counts as that 20% right okay um okay and we did you know we did have a actually a project that went through a lawyer's office um that the poor guy went through an adp and and uh for three parking spaces because he needed it because he knew that his staff um needed he needed the parking for his staff and so uh something that probably could have just went straight you know straightforward request um took took quite a bit of time and effort are some of these recommendations going to be instrumental in mitig ating the requirement so if somebody wants to deviate right now from any of our parking requirements they have to go to an alternative development that that or seek a variance okay all right typically they do the adp route if you could go back to your recommendation on the multifamily and manufacture at home i'm sorry yeah wrong way but also you're saying here that there could be an administrative reduction of 10% correct and or a combination of substitution for bicycle right so compact cars correct motorcycles or motorcycles so there would be this sort of 10% you can either have the administrative reduction of 10% still it's going to require some bicycle parking or you can have it you know you can or a combination thereof or you can have five percent for compact five percent for for for bicycle or motorcycle so i mean you can technically do three percent bicycle two percent motorcycle five percent compact and would give you that that 10% in addition if you're within the infield area um you could also and you have the cont iguous frontage you could have some on street parking right as well okay all right okay who's uh given that explanation what's the what's the status here um well i'll just say mine my hesitation in this i'm okay with what you described but we've had a request to send the pervious issue to the committee on the environment which if that changes would affect to some degree what we're talking about or no um not not really um i think it's going to you know once we're you know we're starting to look at the landscape code now let's go split those out and so it really should be split out and and i think you'll see the the updated landscape code will have different requirements for for landscape landscaping within the parking lots okay i'm okay with this question go ahead and then does does this allow for um counting on street parking as part of the um requirement to to to satisfy the total number correct that that's that's this sort of gives you that that base of here's what here's what you're required and then there's there's sort of different flexibility standards built in and does this if it's transit oriented development is there any exception for that in terms of a reduction in spaces or is it just the 10 minimum required variance it 's just the 10 there's a little bit of difference if we're if we're within the the central business district i'm not ready for that discussion yet and if you're 10 units or less there's no parking requirement but that's that's a whole nother that's a whole nother discussion and and so there's there's a number of variables we're really looking at kind of what we're seeing now it's really on the small scale where this could help but also in much larger developments where where when it gets spread out you see where that unit or i'm sorry that that parking space per bedroom that number starts to go down and and then to follow up with what you'd said earlier so this new the recommended requirements is that going to make it less likely to see because it's i guess it's increasing the total number of parking spots for some of these older units oh the older units for those 1960s for the 1960 it would actually um it would reduce it to what it is today the today standard what it was in 65 i'm not sure what what was required i mean we've seen some things where it was they required one space per unit then it was two spaces per unit so if for example if somebody wanted to redevelop um let's say the one at the top um the 45 unit an acre development um right now uh again we didn't have the bedroom i don't have the bedroom mix um oh but it's it's averaging 1.1 space per per unit per bedroom it's 0.88 um maybe this is a bad because they're they're over density already but but it might it might trigger that you know the one to the south possibly to to to redevelop or even a smaller uh a smaller parcel okay thank you councilman ryan my only concern if you can go back to the i'm sorry is on uh developments that are uh 100 are primarily one bedroom and efficiency because if you've got 10 one bedroom units and that's your complex you're most likely going to have 12 to 14 people living there because you're going to have some double up and so in a larger complex where we have a large mix you've got ones twos th rees you it kind of crosses over and takes care of that issue but i'm afraid on one bedrooms that i think you did an example of a of a 10 unit yeah or a nine unit there you know if you've got nine bedrooms nine one bedrooms or nine efficiencies and only nine spaces uh again you're most likely going to have a couple in one of the in a couple of those units that are both going to have vehicles that i don't know if there's a way to have it if so what you're saying what i'm hearing you say is if you go back to your multifamily recommendation what i'm hearing you say is what if we kept the efficiency slash studio now it's different for one bedroom here's 1.25 1.5 but i don't for what you're describing it doesn't you could double up in efficiency you could double up in a in a one bedroom so if we if we change like for two bedrooms three bedrooms four bedrooms if you had a unit per bedroom parking space per bedroom but for one bedrooms are you saying you would want to see a slight increase in that or like maybe keep it at the 1.25 well the concern isn't on a large development that has you know a hundred of each the concern is on a development that is all one bedroom apartments that you're not going to have enough parking spaces because now you've only developed parking spaces all right is that your only concern with this yeah that's my only concern so it could be that it you know if over 50 that it's 1.5 per efficiency or one bedroom unless more than 50 of that complex is is non one bedroom then you go to the one bedroom something yeah and i'm okay with that because it gives i mean i you know i'd have to look at but you're saying if somebody builds a 10 unit all one bedroom you need to have maybe 12 or 13 spaces right however that works out right so not play with that a little bit and and and i'm okay with that council member us but yeah my focus is a little different and i think you i heard you lump the compact and motorcycle parking in at some point because across the board that makes no sense to me why we'd count that as far as in our numbers if they want to put it in that's good but i don't know why we would count it into the numbers because no one does that right how many times are you driven by and seen a hummer in a in a compact parking but i mean you know i mean if it'll fit and everything else is taken well and and i and i i understand and motorcycle maybe but still i mean but it's pinch but as far as as far as this goes this is just the parking standard for multifamily and then those were substitutions that could be so if you have a problem with the substitution you can address that but this is the parking recommendations if you have a multifamily and then if we want to say well you can't substitute you know this or that for this parking requirement yes okay i understand the five and five component and i know that would come into play more more than likely in these in a business and in a multifamily type environment and i i don't think i just don 't that can't it's not going to get utilized properly we can't get people to back into the spots right so i mean it's you know i mean people are going to do sure what they need to do but as far as the multifamily the parking requirements they've suggested with john ryan's sort of excluding what can be substituted for it that's going to be a separate discussion okay where are you on what's been recommended and sort of uh articulated where do we leave off with so i heard i heard john's and then i heard your yeah i'm okay if if if he he came up with some numbers 50 but we could play with that if you have an all one bedroom or most of them are one bedrooms you've got a you got to pop up the one bedroom requirement maybe not the two or three or the four but the one bedroom requirement yes okay yeah i'm comfortable i'm comfortable with that okay i 'm sorry go ahead and on the multifamily because this i don't know if it comes back as a separate issue but i think don gregory spot on we gotta we gotta incentivize people to to rebuild could you repeat could you repeat that yeah i think don gregory is spot on we we've got to we've got to incentivize to hear that from you at least once before i leave so good i'm sorry go ahead no we've got to incentivize people i mean 1967 i mean yeah we've got to incentivize people to uh so i don't know what that is that's a separate conversation obviously but but that needs to come up pretty quick so council member duff i saw you sort of that's okay so yes so how does that how you showed us a a map that had a infill with uh so is that an exception to that this would apply citywide the the the infill was was only for uh areas that could receive credit for on-street parking so if you're going to build on a uh a multifamily development north of of the loop on complete you know undeveloped land you should you should meet your parking and not get credit for on-st reet parking it's sort of where the simplest way to put it well i think i want to agree with mr ryan but at the same time i'm afraid that it's it's disincentivizing people to rebuild those 1965 and 1950 complexes i think what we'll do is we'll go back and look at uh instances where because because again we have a couple of these sort of real projects um where they're all efficiencies or or all one bedrooms where we can start to look at that and see where that sort of where that that break is maybe it's a matter of of a 1.25 per bedroom but but if you're under a threshold of i don't know 20 units or 25 units then visitor parking's not required so they're not getting double hit so i mean we'll we'll we'll well let me let me because i understand what you're saying but if you take this is going to be a great example we all it's got sort of a a name a nickname to a certain part of the campus west of the campus a lot of concrete a lot of units that are developed back in the 60s right it's all concrete so what will happen is let's say either they scrape it or it burns down to the ground to the slab then you've got this 50 rule that kicks in right now they have to redevelop per our code which i get that because we've moved away from that kind of development lot development of concrete everywhere no grass no trees and so if somebody certainly voluntarily decides to scrape it we have a different policy in our city of how we want those to be developed if it burns to the ground that's just you know you're going to get some good insurance and you'll develop it back to so that's why i'm not too concerned about because the way those were developed back then took very little consideration you put as many units and as much parking on the ground as you could so that's why i'm sort of okay with that if that makes sense but we can still play with how can we provide because i mean this is i mean if they want to redevelop in the sense of remodel their units but not scrape tear them off this doesn't affect that it's just them getting a permit i thought i saw four maybe four and a half to move forward with this portion of it based upon the one bedroom issue of you know how many and okay i know this is prolonged but that's i was going to say we could come to another but we're we're on a roll trying to get some of this resolved and so let's we do have to remember that we've resolved it yeah we resolved it this one um uh yeah this is the one going to the committee on the environment yep well i mean yeah you requested i mean are y'all on the environmental committee is that y'all want to do that well i see one head i see one head shaking so that's two i think as long as we are addressing the that you know as a council that we don't count pervious towards landscaping you know those are two separate things i don't see any reason for it to come to to that except to the well so let me let me make this suggestion because i think what we're unclear of is the impact of that bifurcation we don't know what will be the results of okay if we're going to quit including pervious statements or pervious material or surface in our lot coverage ratio what would that look like how is that going and you might just bring us a sample project and you can either take it to either mobility you can come back to the full council i'll leave it up to them to communicate with you offline to do something like that because that's really the key is we don't know what that impact is going to be it may address it it may address that issue council member well i was just going to say there are instances where pervious could be considered landscaping where there's actually the the plastic blocks that go underneath grass that's for overflow parking or for fire lanes uh but this to me if it's not intended to actually have plants planted on it is not part of landscape right it's sort of a two-fold it goes back to the single family example i showed where it's being counted as not necessarily for overflow park for for increased parking but to count it as landscape area yeah and then you have if you want to go above and beyond required parking then this is this is sort of how how you do it and i don't bring us back some examples of what you're thinking how you want to resolve just the general issue of we need to pervious yeah take pervious out of the landscape and let's see just how it impacts it and and we can okay let's go to recommendation number three uh right at uh credit for on street that's what we talked about the linear footage 18 linear feet and then no you know so sort of moving forward from that if you've if you've got it in front of your property then then that's sort of that's sort of what you know what you got it's not across the street it's not my neighbor's property it's and it and it stays with in other words if you sell that project it still stays with that project but if somehow they scrape it then they got to come back through the whole process it just it's sort of tied to that particular development that correct that requested it correct it's not reserved parking but again it is yes they can use it as part of the parking requirement correct i'm okay with that okay all right yep all right recommendation number four um i struggle with this one just because every time you see a compact car space you see big cars parked in it i mean quite honestly and that that's just me so i'm okay with not allowing the compact car parking as a substitute for just a regular spot because it's you know yeah our thought that's why we sort of reduced it from 20 down down to five percent um again looking at it in in sort of some of these infill lots yeah and and with some constraints the minimum is five percent i i can be okay i mean if you got 10 spots that's a half a spot which i guess one you round up you round up yeah got some embrace it is difficult to park a giant car in a tiny spot i will say so i mean i i don't think you only drive small cars well i'm actually driving a large car okay all right and i don't park it in a tiny spot okay those are saved for tiny cars so so you're saying you're okay with the five percent compact okay are we okay with five percent okay all right uh you are okay with that okay i think we know one that's not um okay all right administrative relief are you all okay with administrative relief of 10 percent yes see i need to prolong these meetings out more because then we get all this good consensus going on because everybody wants to get out of here and then mechanical garages actually this is not in denton all right we need to redesign the parking lot on c edar street to look like that yeah ironically they are compact cars though so so do you have uh adequate direction you think okay so really the only outstanding issue we have is the pervious parking result of the bifurcation correct okay great all right fantastic we got through that wonderful y'all order dinner just kidding okay uh that concludes our work session agenda items we will now move on to a special call meeting the dent city council at 4 48 on february 27 2018 it looks like all we have on our agenda are two consent agenda items and concluding items all right council member gregory i move approval of consent agenda consent agenda items a and b may protein second all right we have a motion to second for approval of consent agenda items let's vote please all but signifies in your right hand if you approve uh passes unanimously concluding items anybody got concluding items i've got just a couple yes i 've got just go ahead just a quick one uh denny neighborhood association had their meeting last night and i want to thank our engineering department for coming out and doing a presentation and i want to thank our i'm guessing it's the it department for getting the projector and screens installed over there so good it was greatly appreciated good all right anybody else concluding items council member hudson council member hudson yeah so i think just as long as we we 've uh have on the list your point about the the bigger conversation downtown just to kind of come back with a work session for that you know okay uh and then um i think that was uh it that jumped out of me so yes thank you all right uh just a couple wanted to um you know i've talked about this before i'd really like to begin to have a conversation of with stakeholders about if denton really has an appetite for some type of performing arts center uh that could allow concerts and things such as that and and on top of that i would like to get some information maybe an informal staff report there was an article in the paper about a establishment that is closing down on in carriage hill because of just development and people buying the property and there were some comments made about that somehow denton is is losing its live music scene or that there's not as much um interest and so we just we just received a award for for that so i want to i sort of want to have some conversation or some staff uh research about the state of that in our city and exactly what's happening with that and if that's the case how do we reverse that uh the other thing i would ask for is i'd like to get a survey of the city's surrounding and i'm going to say pretty large metropolitan area what we would consider because most cities are competing against one another in this community in this metropolitan region dallas fort worth collin county i'd like to get a list of the cities that have a either a 4a or 4b economic development corporation and if they're and if you can find that information exactly what seems to be the yearly contribution to those corporations just to get an idea of what cities have the you know what financial resources from a 4b or 4a that are coming into their city to provide for incentives or for you know attracting businesses like because i really don't know who's got them and who doesn't and what the the level of them are any other concluding items all right we hey we got out of here before the scheduled end time they said it's about 12 to 5 we're going to adjourn at 4 42 [ Silence ]