Feb 27, 2018 City Council on 2018-02-27 12:00 PM
February 27, 2018 City Council
Full Transcript
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 ]