Apr 24, 2018 City Council on 2018-04-24 1:00 PM

Good afternoon. Welcome to this meeting of the Dutton City Council. Today is Tuesday, April 24th. The time is 1.03 p.m. We'll start with our work session reports. Item A is receive a report, hold a discussion, and give staff direction regarding the construction of the G. Rowland-Vela Athletic Complex Capital Project. Good afternoon. Gary Pack and Director of Parks and Recreation. I wanted to give you an update on the G. Rowland-Vela Soc cer Complex. This is a follow-up to the April 3rd presentation that staff provided that was primarily focused on funding discussions and options, as well as design construction options as well. Some of the questions that came up during that presentation were specifically focused on finishes within the facility, the cost of the restroom, and some alternatives that could be considered, looking at some comparable facilities within the industry and other municipalities, as well as options that we could look at for the restroom, concession stand, and then the breezeway that's part of that structural design as well. Again, the focus specifically for the presentation is this area in the yellow box. This is the main entry point to the entire facility. It's designed symmetrically. Obviously, you can cut the facility in half, but that's where everyone's coming in and out of the soccer complex, the four fields, as well as the playground area. Looking at some of the finishes, this is a burnished CMU block. That's what the exterior of the building will look like. We haven't finalized color, although we'd look at the design of the existing facilities within North Lakes, and to match that, it's kind of like a cream, khaki-type look with green roofing structures. This is a burnished CMU block, in addition to some accents with a glazed tile on the walls as well as the buildings themselves. Then precast stone in select areas, specifically along the roof edges and the wall edges. Then the roof is a standing seam metal roof. We talked a little bit about storm shelters and protection for the community. It's designed for up to approximately 115 miles per hour. It's not tornado-proof in a sense of anything higher than 115. It is a standing seam post-tension slab concrete base with footers for the actual concrete that the building sits on. The facility itself, this area here is the restroom, and then this side section is the actual concession stand. Here's your women's restroom, your men's here with your plumbing chase in between both the restrooms. This area right here is currently designed for athletic storage, and then this area over here is our electrical room. A comment came from Councilman Hudsmith, and he's not here today, about the possibility of adding a family changing room as an option. That's something that's starting to show up more and more in public facilities. Not that it's a requirement, but more of a demand from the public, especially when you have, if I'm out there with a daughter or a special needs individual, I can go in there and take care of them as opposed to sending them into a restroom, into the women's room by themselves. He had asked if this was an option to turn this into a family changing area. We reached out to Dunaway, and they did confirm that that is an option. We could look at that and basically run this chase right down to this area here, and then put in one urinal or a toilet for that specific need. Then this side over here, this L-shaped area is the con cession area. This square back here is actually concession storage. Here's your vending area for the concession stand itself. Then this is in itself is a maintenance storage area for staff. Each one of these buildings, they're identical in square footage of 978 square feet apiece. Then the breezeway itself, which incorporates the actual roof structure, that is that main entry gate into the facility, but it includes everything within the blue outside of the building. All the concrete work is included into that price as well in that square footage. Do you have a comment, Council Member Briggs? If there was a storm, would you go into the restrooms or into the breezeway? You could take them into the restrooms, into the storage area. That could be opened up if staff was on property as well as the concession area in the maintenance room. But the breezeway would not be as safe? The breezeway is just a covered structure. So if it was raining or hailing, that would be a safe place to go. It just provides cover. Okay. Thanks. You're welcome. Okay, so the total square footage of both facilities in the breezeway component is 3,300 square feet. That works out to be, based on the cost from our lowest bid , $269 in change per square foot. To kind of give you an idea in regards to how that compares to other bidders on the project, our average square foot was $254 a square foot. When I figured out those numbers, I did remove bidder number two just because that price was so low. I figured there might be an issue with that bid because it was so off of all the other bidders. So that's $75.75. While it sounds like a good number, it just doesn't seem right. So I took that out of when I figured out the average. So based off of that, bidders three, four, five, and six, it's pretty comparable in regards to those other bids that we received. In comparison to other like facilities within DFW, they range from $263 a square foot up to $377 a square foot. Now I know specifically this third one, Randall Mill Park in Arlington, is a green design. So I think that dictated a little bit of the higher price point. But as you can see, at $263 being the lowest in this sample , we are towards the lower end of those comparables. I have a question. In one of our, I think it was audit finance committee meeting, we had a proposition for a precast concrete building. And I think the direction was to look at that cost in comparison to these costs as well. Can you speak to that a little bit? Sure. I have it on a later slide. Great. But I can jump to that if you prefer. No, it's okay. Okay. Okay. Some comments from Dunnaway and Associates, they're our architect and engineering firm on the project. It is designed as a full service facility for sports industry, as well as the anticipated number of visitors that we have at the complex. The building is designed appropriately for major public facilities in obviously durability and abuse just by the repetitive use. It's similar in style to other park facilities, whether it 's in Denton or other parks with DFW. It is commercial grade with anticipated long-term performance. Mechanical and plumbing, it's more complicated. It's not a typical toilet that you would have in your house with the amenities that support that. These remain to be used and flushed repetitively on a Saturday when there's a large amount of people within the property. And then the cost per square foot, Dunnaway feels is very advantageous compared to the current market. Some additional comments, North Rock Construction was our lowest bidder. They had, in attaining some questions and comments, they had made a comment that ready mix concrete and the steel will be rising in May. Their bid is good until May 18th. And we had a third party cost estimator look at this and we just got this on Friday. And their evaluation of the exact drawings that we provided was $913,000. So it actually, the third party came in a little bit higher than our current contract, our current bid. I'll try to frame this the best I can in regards to cost comparisons from residential commercial. Residential typically is a frame facility with wood and commercial is more steel and concrete. Wood is not as stringent on residential compared to commercial. A mechanical as I mentioned earlier in plumbing in a typical household obviously you don't have as many restroom units or restroom facilities in a house compared to a restroom where that's its main purpose and it's getting heavier use. Roofing where you may have shingles. Granted, we have shingled facilities within our park system , but metal or a rubber type of roofing material is more commercial grade. Finishes, they obviously vary based on the preference of the homeowner or the commercial builder. And then vandalism, I put low to none on residential. My kids abuse us about everything we have in the house. So that was to qualify the kids in the house. But vandalism in a commercial grade facility in our parks, we get a lot of vandalism in our public parks. So that's made to withstand some of that level of vandalism . We're providing some options for City Council to consider. Option one is to proceed as designed with the full construction as proposed. We'd move forward with North Rock construction. Again the deadline for the bid is May 18th. And again this would serve as the gateway point in the entry point to the entire facility. On April 3rd we provided you a breakdown of the cost and this is the identical breakdown that we provided at that point in time. Again that works out to be $269 a square foot, total of 3, 300 square feet. Option two would redesign the facility, remove the con cession and the breezeway from the project. And we'd have to determine if we want to redesign the position of the building. We could easily take out the breezeway, which is this component here, as well as the concession stand and leave the restroom where it's at. But as the focal point it might be a little awkward. It's not centered, everything being symmetrical. Obviously we could live with that the way it is and decide if we wanted to build that down the road and add to that at that point. But that's a decision we'd have to make a decision on. If we did remove the concession and breezeway there would be some amendments that would be needed to the construction drawings. We had a quote, it's about $13,000 to do that redesign work . And then the cost from our lowest bidder is $517,000 to build the restroom itself. So it's not a 50% reduction from a square footage standpoint. Option two, again there's the breakdown of the $517,000 in regards to its major components. And that consists of the elimination of the concession and breezeway. The restroom would still be 978 square feet. And then the cost per square foot actually rises with that reduction to $529 a square foot. And then option three and four in regards to prefab structures. This option three is a restroom and storage only. If we decided that we just didn't want to be in the con cession construction business, this is approximately 675 square feet, costs approximately $200,000 at $295 a square foot. And then option four, same prefab structure but this includes a concession component and it's slightly larger at 936 square feet and a little bit more at 300,000 square feet at a total of 320 approximate square feet cost per square foot . In summary, those options, option number one is proceed as designed at the $889,000 or $269 a square foot. Redesign the facility, remove the concession stand and breezeway. We would do concessions outside of that facility. So whether it's under a tent or bring in food trucks or a trailer of that stance, we would plan accordingly. And then option three and four are modified designs with alternative structure components that would be prefabricated and providing that resource. At this point in time, I'd like to entertain any questions. >> I think you have them already queued up. >> Nobody's requested questions yet. >> Okay. >> All right. We'll just go around the horn. We'll start with customer Gregory and then just go around. In the back up, you provided also the presentation that we received on April the 3rd regarding funding. Do you have that on your -- can you go ahead and get to that slide or not? >> Actually Tony was step up and talk about the funding breakdown. Tony pointed to Director Finance. Councilmember, if you recall from the previous presentation that we had made, I think even at the last meeting, the initial funding was 1.33 million that was included in the 2014 bond program. There was some additional funding that was already included in the program for that, about 1.9 million. What we had recommended was that we, you know, switch some funding around. I think the council was hesitant about that. So the last meeting we came back to you that we would draw down the general fund balance additionally to get this project completed. So the proposal that you'll receive on May 1st, part of a budget amendment, is that we would draw down fund balance in the general fund, about $2. 1 million to get this project completed along with additional half a million dollars in some CIP savings to get to the full $6 million. So those would be the sources of funds. I don't have a slide for you, but that's the sources of funding we would recommend. Yes, sir. Councilmember Ryan, did you have a comment? Yes, thank you. How do we determine how big a restroom facility needs to be ? Do we not have standards? Because when I look at the option one, the original design, it's showing a total of eight toilets and urinals combined, and then on options three and four, you've only got four total. Right. The option three and four are similar facilities that we have in our park system to provide an alternate that we could provide at our existing parks. Now the change here is with Vela being four soccer fields, obviously, and we're having tournaments out there, you potentially have 16 teams going at the same time, coming in and out. So there's a lot more use. So that is going to dictate more facilities from that standpoint. You could design 20 urinals and toilets out there, but at some point in time, you can't build it for Easter Sunday type of a mentality. So you're going to accommodate as best you can based off of a proposed budget. Okay. Because I mean, we're not looking at this. I mean, there's a difference in the design, but there's also a difference in how much capacity the facilities have. And I would think that there would be something out there in some criteria manual that would say just like with restaurants, it's based on the number of square feet or the number of seats you have as to how big your restaurants need to be , that there should be some sort of something out there criteria wise that should tell us what we would need for four soccer fields. We have Dunaway and Associates here. I don't know. Is there any component that's the standard for so many ur inals per field ratio? If you'll come to the mic. Yeah, because we're broadcasting. Thank you. Good afternoon. Philip Neely with Dunaway Associates. There's no published criteria for sport fields number of restroom stalls, state, local or federal. There's some rules of thumb and we've through the years and a number of complexes we've done in terms of number of fields and like you're talking about when you're the transition from with one group finishing and another. So what you're seeing on option one is very normal with that many fields, but there's not like there would be in the uniform building code. There's not a code requirement for number of men's and women's on a sports facility. Okay. Thank you. Councilmember Riggs, did you have a question? Yes, go ahead. So a few things. I appreciate all the options because from the beginning I had trouble with how much it cost and so just looking at option four, we saved nearly $600,000 by going back in and separating from the original design. So my question is, have we done that with other things because this is just one aspect of the $6 million. Have we looked at how much it would cost if we did other things in house? So to answer your question, we have, but not to the full extent of serving as a general contractor. If you remember back on the April 3rd presentation, we provided some options of not building all of the fields or phasing it in and staff at the time was proposed to do some of the turf installation, hydro mulching and tree planting as a component to help reduce some of the expenses, but we did not look at concrete irrigation, fence insulation or serving as a general contractor. Okay. Thanks. Mayor Pro Tem and then we'll come back. On the prefabricated buildings, as far as I understand that it's concrete, correct? So what is the storm protection level of a prefab building like that? I'd have to get back to you and I don't have the exact wind load on those facilities. So I couldn't give you an accurate response. And so just so we're clear, it's prefab, but it's an actual building that's been built with concrete and then it's moved over to the site. It's yeah, it's prefabbed walls that's put in place. The concrete is, you know, could be thickness varies. I think the ones that we have on property are 10 inches thick approximately. We already have some on property. We do not not on North Lakes, but within the park system. Where are they? Mack Park and Roberts Field. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Councilmember Gregory. Thanks. Well, I appreciate the information that you provided and I appreciate the fact that you were comparing the construction cost for option one with other cities and their construction cost. I think that's very helpful. It seems to me that to to delay means an obvious increase in cost when we do build. I prefer the original option having had kids playing in tournaments, especially when there are a lot of teams having a facility that has a breezeway gives folks a place to go. If the weather is if it gets rainy or if it is hot and people need to get in out of the sun for a little while. That's especially true when you have tournaments and people are out at the fields for 12 hours, eight to 12 hours. And that happens a lot. So to have a breezeway have the full facility means that we could get to host more tournaments. And we have a facility that does not provide those kinds of amenities. It means that the tournaments will go elsewhere rather than to dent. Meaning that our kids have to travel. Our our teams have to travel somewhere else rather than other teams traveling to us at times. So I would prefer to move ahead with option one. Councilmember Ryan. Another question I have on the original plan. You showed the electrical room and assume that that was not only just for the building but also for all of the field lighting and etc. That would all be controlled from there. I believe so. Is that true? Where would where would we do it on options three or four? There's not a electrical room. We have to modify that building or add a separate to provide that component. Yes. Okay. So that would be an additional cost as well. Councilmember Duff. I guess the way I look at this is this is not something that's just going to be there for a short while. It's something that's going to be there for a long time. And I personally think that if we're going to do it we need to do it right. And that that would be option one. Anybody else? Councilmember Bray. Do you have a question or comment? I'm not in favor of option one. I'm in favor of if anything option four. And I still would be in favor of looking deeper into the project to see what we can separate to save costs just as a benefit for the taxpayers. Thank you. Yes. Mayor Pro Tem. I have a question about building shade structures. So if we were to build a shade structure elsewhere that's explicitly for a shade structure, how much would that I know that's a kind of big question to ask you but how much would that cost like if we wanted to cover the seating for instance? So obviously that's going to depend on size. I haven't bid one of those out recently. I don't know what we've most recently placed. We can get you a cost estimate for that. Shade structures vary from what we have over our existing bleachers which rain can penetrate for the most part. It's just a penetrable surface of fabric to actual roofs that could be put in place that are more safe from hail as an example. So that can vary as an option. Okay. Appreciate that. And I really commend you on your presentation because it has all of the information plus some that we requested. So very good presentation. Thank you. My recommendation would be to go well my direction would be to go with either option three or four. I was really impressed with the prefabricated concrete when we got the presentation and our audit finance committee. And I mean it's concrete so it's going to become more strong with time. The fact that it's already at Mack Park and Roberts Field indicates to me that it does have a good long-term lifespan. I don't know how long they've been at Mack Park or Roberts Field. Just I think 2016. Okay. So relatively new. So I'm satisfied with either three or four with understanding that we can add amenities like shade structures and things of that nature to make the experience more comfortable for people. Also, we have the option of you know doing electrical for food trucks if we wanted to do something like that. I think looking at the entire picture is a good way to approach you know bringing these these competitions to the region or to our area. Just to add a comment to Councilman Gregory in regards to tournaments and his experience. Just this weekend I spent the weekend in Plano and on Sunday we were there from we started at nine o'clock in the morning so we got there at eight and we're there till 11 o'clock at night. We weren't sitting there the whole time and we went and had lunch and that type of thing but you do spend a lot of time with for tournaments in facilities. So it's you know try to provide as much comfort as you can and an enjoyable experience. So it's something I personally experience myself. Councilman Ryan. It's difficult to say I think I'd like option three or four a little better than one but we are not getting the same amount of facility out of it and I'm afraid that we'll end up you know if you ever had the opportunity before they tore down Cowboy Stadium those restrooms were very there wasn't enough there enough facilities there and I don't want people to decide not to come back to Denton because they had to stand in line too long. I'd like to see the numbers to have the same amount of facility in an option three or four and also look at that electrical room. We may be right back up to that same cost so that's that's where I am on this is I really can't make a decision without knowing what the cost is on three or four to add on to that. Is it going to be the same same amount per square foot to add more or generally it's going to reduce them. The the pricing on option three or four is is roughly what we paid for 2016 for those facilities just to kind of get a price point so those are a couple years. Okay well it doesn't sound like I mean it sounds like we've got a couple who prefer option one definitively and then a couple that prefer option I guess for three or three or four and then Councilmember Ryan is needing to see more more costs. I think the discussion we're having here is is commensurate with the struggle that we have with just some of these costs in general. I mean I struggle with this I understand it's commercial development I understand the different codes and things that are required for commercial construction. In other words the cost that we're seeing I mean the the contractor didn't come in and modify any costs they just this is what that just refined what the breakdown of the costs were. We don't know if we were to bid out the plumbing or something like that if it would come in less I mean they I don't know what is an average contractors up charge is it 10% 15% what what what is dude you know I may be done away may want to provide more detail to that I was assuming 15% on some other projects we've done in the past in regards to the breakdown that third party gave us I do have that and they gave a breakdown of the actual let's see not specifically these same same exact breakdown categories per se it was eight hundred eighteen thousand dollars for all those amenities and then all the additional expenses general liability builders risk permits and fees subs bond premiums for subs and general contractor and overhead and profit was roughly another hundred thousand dollars to get it to nine hundred thirteen thousand dollars and that was from pre- construction services that did a third party analysis of that bid so they actually came in higher than what our current bid is. Who came in higher? The third party estimator that did it for us. Because I think that's a good point on option four we don't have an electrical room which one of the most expensive things in a project or your mechanicals your HVAC your electrical and your plumbing so that may add I don't know what that would add to it but I mean it's not going to add five hundred thousand dollars to it they may add fifty thousand or forty or something like that by the time it's all said and done and when I look at option four I mean this is a tough decision I mean it's just very difficult to pay two hundred fifty nine dollars a square foot for in essence concrete brick and things such as that we've got I mean we've got to figure out a way how and if we're going to be doing this a lot I mean I think it's worth the the investigation to say if we were to hire some if we were to have people on staff to do these if we're going to have a lot of construction projects what is the price differential I mean and I understand the advantages and disadvantages of contractors or in-house and but that that all can be explored that can you can nail some of that down pretty succinctly the thing I struggle with is number one I don't want to pay nine hundred thousand dollars but when I look at the options that are presented this is just the ones that are presented and I appreciate the detail of your presentation because it's helpful it's very helpful when I look at option four all right and I see what it is and I see that it's nine hundred thirty six square feet and it's three hundred and twenty dollars of per foot yeah we'd be paying almost triple that but we're getting almost three more than three times the square footage when you include the breezeway I don't I really the breezeway I I'm not sure about I mean if we're going to be constructing these kind of structures for utilitarian functions such as people go to get food people go to use restroom but if we're also constructing them for pseudo shelters I mean if we're constructing them for tornado shelters that's very different than constructing them for a shelter to get out of the rain some hail and some lightning and and and I 'm not saying either one's right or wrong I'm just saying those are very different policy decisions which carry a lot of different costs differential right in that and that's certainly I think something we need to start considering because we've got a lot of construction projects going on not just with parks so I think I would like to see if we're going to go with option four I would like to see what additional costs it's going to be whether it's on site electrical modification to that structure or if you have to put it somewhere off site what is that what is that going to do to it okay because it seems like the the square footage for the actual restrooms and the concession stand are 978 each and in option four it's 9 36 for both is that correct I mean so I'm looking at option four it says the total square footage for the prefabricated structure restroom storage and concession right the total is 936 yeah so so here is your restroom facilities here right you basically have to see a 50 percent of the space in regards to toilets and then you have storage here and then the con cession area here so there's like three sections to the building so does this hold up our moving forward on the project in general this particular component the the bid is expires on May 18th if we're going to do a change order in regards to that contract we'd have to work through that process so I would anticipate we could move forward with the contract and then do a deduct to take that out so it would be comparable to that's a good question I I'm not sure what the cost would be on the entire project if we took out the entire restroom facility I doubt very seriously that they will give us a dollar for dollar reduction correct I mean that's evident off compared to option one and option two it's not you know 50 percent when you're taking off half the building right Councilmember breaks so on the on the number two for 250,000 that you said you didn't even like include in the scoring did anybody look at that bid to see and compare it or did y'all just kind of throw it away because it was too cheap I'm just curious because it's I did not I don't have communication with the bit the bidders and that was done prior to me getting here I took it out just because I felt personally that with it being almost you know a third of the cost a little less a little more than a third a little less than a third that compared to the other prices that it seemed it seemed off that's extremely low cost at $75 a square foot so it just seemed like something was wrong there and I would be concerned that there would be expenses that would show up at a later date yeah yeah plus the total bid is is you know approximately $200,000 higher than the overall bid as well I was just wondering about the individual structure within that bid I know that the total bid is is overall higher but this is all individualized and so I was wondering if the the structures compared to each other within one and two they are there they've been on the same documents so it's the same structure but their number you know I don't know how they came up with that number I didn't see the breakdown of their analysis because that wasn't part of it it just raises some concern that that's very low so if you leave the slide up so what I'm seeing here are the the bids that came in yes which you said the bid expires May 18th yes sir and if a bid exp ires what happens we have to start over you re-bid it yes sir so when we look at these we've got six bids we've got two in the 5.6 5.8 range the rest are seven million or above and those include the same option one restroom configuration am I right on that's correct okay they're bidding off the same document right so from a purely take out my just shock and dismay at construction but if you look at this deal from a truly financial perspective given the facts on the ground so if we go with option four that saves us half a million dollars roughly six hundred thousand dollars we get half or less than half of what we originally wanted if the bid expires or let's say it didn't expire we are 1.1 million dollars away from the nearest bid other than bid two which we've sort of thrown out because somehow something looks a little that's probably just either residential component construction or something because you can't even build you can't even build residential for that in addition with approximately expenses and construction are going up about one percent a month so the longer that delays that will have an impact on the overall cost as well right right okay has anybody asked the the one who's got the bid if they're able to knock off a couple hundred thousand dollars or can you do that is that first of all can you do that under the procurement laws in the state of texas we have asked for their best and final offer twice so technically you're supposed to so basically that's about as far as we can go legally okay and the question about the seventy five dollar per square foot i just want to clear that up as deputy manager langley said we still got a bid that's 150,000 higher we are not able to mix and match components of so i think i think where you're going mayor is right it 's very possible that as these contractors get busier we could rebid this out and come back with an even higher price so that is a risk sure of course yes mayor pro tem on page excuse me page 23 questions for consideration so when i do the math dividing eight hundred eighty nine thousand by 270 dollars per square foot comes out to 3300 square feet so that's the breezeway component that's everything that's both the restroom the concess stand and the breezeway components which is the concrete around the restrooms in between the restrooms and the roof structure so the actual restroom and concession portion of it is how many square feet those are nine hundred and each change 978 square feet piece okay yeah and i suspect that you know if we let's say if we took off the breezeway and just sort of backed all that up somehow end to end you're you're not really i mean you've got concrete and a metal roof supporting structure and the actual material of course the way things are priced these days i probably would be shocked at what that would be but so so a cost for the breezeway just the roof component itself was roughly 90 plus thousand dollars if you wanted to pull that component off that's an option to be considered say that one more time it was 90 thousand dollars approximately okay is that including the supporting structure down to the concrete are you just talking about the metal what does that include the the breezeway itself is cantilevered off of the buildings and the the actual walls of the structures right so if we need to omit some some support in those beams specifically that's something we'd have to look into but that's how it's designed is to utilize the building as its main support the okay all right councilmember griggs did you have a question comment well even if i decide hey you know from a financial perspective we you know if we looked at option one we still don't have a consensus on that because it's sort of it's it's three who favor option i'm saying hypothetically it's three who favor option one and three who do not favor option one at least at this time so that's i mean we're sort of back to where we are at least i understand at least if you're on an official vote a tie leads to defeat of whatever the underlying motion was if i'm correct is that correct mr city manager i mean mr city attorney i'm sorry say that again if if you're in a voting situation and someone makes a motion which we're not in a voting situation this is simply for discussion and someone makes a motion and it's seconded but it's a three three tie the motion that's on the floor fails because it's a tie correct all right well i think given that i think there's just more information that we need but the risk is that you know can we get that done in a timely manner before the bid expires you know the the addition of the electrical facilities either added on to option four the prefab building or we have to build it somewhere else or we have to have it contracted to put on to this structure and so i don't know how these prefab structures are designed or manufactured and then we don't know for certain if we take the restroom out of the current bid we don't have a definitive answer i know you said option two is redesigning it and removing it but but that's not that's something different we don't know if we decide to take it out if we reduce our bid by the 890 000 or whatever that was that if it's a dollar for a dollar we don't know that do we well there's there's still going to be some infrastructure going to have to be in place the condu it's running to the the structure itself you're still going to have to be there water tap that type of thing but that that's my point i mean if if we if we say that okay bidder one winning bidder take this out but we got to get we got to keep the plumbing coming to it we got to keep the electrical coming to it what does that reduce our bid by well if they come back and say oh it reduces it only by 500 000 so then we've got to add the 300 000 or whatever that delta is to the cost of whatever option we choose and now we're back to you know maybe a couple hundred thousand dollar difference so i think it's critical that we know that number the the one of if we take the the the if we did it some other way except with this current bidder what is it going to reduce our contract price to because my hunch is if it only changed it 100 to 150 000 i could be wrong but that may make it that may make a difference in i mean somebody's thought about it if we're if we're only going to be building this something that's half the size saving 150 or 200 000 in the end and have a risk of losing the bid expiring and rebidding it sometimes you just got to look at these things so council member gregory then council member would you show the design for option four please i think what would be helpful for the next discussion which we're going to need to schedule very soon is that we look at not only a comparison of option one to option four let's look at it in terms of square feet let's look at it in terms of how much square footage is dedicated to storage and option one as opposed to option four how many toilets there are in option one as compared to option four of course get get a revised notion of the cost for option four with with electrical facility also and if that means that there's less storage we need to we need to see that so that we're really looking at what we're really getting for this reduced price and and and if what we're getting you know is going to accommodate 16 teams and their guest and i agree with that because i think my biggest concern in why i really couldn't decide at this point which way to go is because options three and four only have four stalls total and i feel like we really need the eight that is designed the other item that i heard mentioned is you had impact fees are are they in the building cost or when you did you had the breakdown to the 889 how much of the electrical is actually for the facility how much of the plumbing is for other parts 120 000 in plumbing you're going to have to run the water line pay the tap fee just to do the irrigation so if that's included in the building cost the building cost really isn't 889 it's much lower but if we're going to have to pay those separately to do this smaller building are those types of things included in the 200 000 300 000 options three and four yeah there would have to be a little bit more of an analysis on the bin it looks great right now but i think i think inevitably i'll end up on option one once we look at all those but i really need to see what those numbers are first we tried comparing the best we can from apples to apples but in some aspects we we have different flavors of apples and from different locations i guess in regards to what the finished product is the functionality the amount of units that are in each facility but we try to provide options for council's consideration based off of similar things that are in the industry yeah because the the option four which is the prefab building you took off of a similar one we have over in mac park so was that price inclusive of of the infrastructure getting to the structure or is that just that's what we pay the manufacturer to make this building ship it here we pull it off and we set it down it is my understanding that this was replacing an existing structure that was within the park correct so the infrastructure was already there so okay i think it's really clear that really to get a good analysis of let's say option one and four obviously you want to compare the actual amenity what's what's in one what's on the other square footage and number of stalls etc but you really need to have an ability to dissect the cost because if the infrastructure costs are not in this 300 000 to bring the plumbing that's to bring the electrical then we don't know what that is and if that's built into the other one then that means it's going to have to stay that amount so i think it's a matter of what amount of the cost of option one is infrastructure getting to the site and then actually erecting the building because if we're looking at this purely from a cost versus what asset what's the amenity we 're getting we have to be able to know pretty clear if not we're going to be somebody's going to come back to us in parks with an amendment a contract amendment saying it's going to cost an additional 100 000 150 000 and we just i'd rather know that up front mayor pro tem well on option one's breakdown it says that you know plumbing is 130 000 it has a lot of the cost that you're talking about broken down i don't think they're exactly transferable but it looks like it's about 230 to 250 000 for all of the electrical and plumbing are you in the actual cost breakdown or 18 on what slide 18 slide 18 of the present of this one this well but yeah is the because when we look at the the actual cost projections the bid alternates or well that's the bid alternates where's the so i looked at that that's for the whole project okay so we don't have a breakdown so i'm sorry mayor pro tem are you saying that the the plumbing the 130 000 is to come from the sewer main or the water line to this structure that's what it appears to be that's the cost or is it including all the fi xtures all the plumbing within the this is a breakdown of the concession stand the restroom does not include the irrigation water to the facility i i can't answer that okay 100 but we do have other uh you know irrigation related issues and water related questions yes to follow up on that so if we don't have the cost of taking the lines to this facility already in these bids that's a fixed cost across all four projects is that am i understanding it correctly i believe yes that's the way i understand it i don't know if don away has any additional comments on that well i think i think your quote your statement is a is a correct statement my question is i don't know if part of that cost is in this cause he's saying no i i can't 100 answer that question okay so um does somebody need to come up and address that and i see head shaking i hear i hear voices trembling um does anybody have an answer to that question on this so the the gentleman from north rock constructions here if you'd like have him come up and yes give a little more detail and he stayed his name that'd be great yeah come on up here and okay yes the the sewer line is in a different line item running to the building within you know five ten feet of the building okay so this cost is basically just to connect to that and do the buildings okay same with the water line water electrical like you said that that there would be something different there because of all the electrical that's coming into that building supplying other areas and things like that okay so um so why i've got you so what you're telling me is the infrastructure is coming to this particular uh design option one and for the plumbing for eight toilet and this is including all the fixtures this is including the sinks the faucets the toilets whatever's in the concession stand that doing the rough-in plumbing the stack out and the finish for this structure is 130 000 for the plumbing yes and we had three estimates come in on that and two of them were right next to each other right around 114 000 114 and 116 and then the third one was 150 okay um and do you know off the top here how many fixtures there are i mean i don't want to count them but you got eight toilets i mean i was just trying to get a price per fixture on that because i know that's how they bid a lot of these things is a price per fixture um i'd have to ask for a breakdown okay okay that's so you're answering the question of this 129 is simply to take care of the plumbing infrastructure or anything in this list for that structure only except for electrical we may have to figure out something different okay fair enough thank you appreciate that that's very helpful and just to answer another question yes we did we did come back and the price had been reduced in when we were asked to for our final best offer okay so for the total the total price not just this but for the whole for the whole contract this this did come down as well okay uh any idea and if you don't answer that if you don't know this i'm okay with that because you've heard us talk about if we were to say let's just pull this component out what how much that may be off of the total that you know would you get a dollar for dollar reduction or it wouldn't be a total dollar for dollar because that area will have to do something with that area um say when we pull out the the breeze away in the red and the concession stand then what we did is we added a 13 000 dollar price start to to go ahead and do concrete to fill that area right um unless it's going to be grass it just depends on those those kind of okay just whichever way we'll still need to get that number then as far as yep okay hey thank you very helpful the other side of that too is on a prefab we've set quite a few prefabs i and i'm not sure if then we can speak to that but i know that there are size restrictions and how big you can actually buy those in okay and the cost dramatically goes up with the crane size the set of things all right thank you very much i appreciate it okay that's helpful we do know then that the fixed cost is there uh so really for me the only out remaining question is what would be if we pulled this out to do a different option what would be the new price what would be the reduction from the current contract on that and then an exam examination of the electrical because that's i mean that's especially if it's handling the entire if it's handling the entire field it's not just handling a concession stand it's handling all the lighting and everything that's pretty substantial well just to move things along my guess is that there will probably be about 10 percent i have five to 15 percent added on to these final costs just for different types of contingencies just based on my experience these past two years there's always additional costs so i think really what you're looking at is option one is about a million dollars option two is 600 option three would probably be 300 with electrical and everything option four would probably be about 400 somewhere in there so given those numbers and the fact that it seems like you guys really don't want the prefab option i'm willing to go with option two just to move this thing along um but i i will not vote for a one million dollar concession stand and toilet facility okay all right any other comments let me look at let me go back to the presentation so you're saying option two which is saying i can live with option two because i'm taking the temperature and it seems like people really don't want the prefab buildings so as a compromise so would that that's removing the brief that's removing the concession and breezeway yes i think i explained at our last meeting why i wouldn't be voting for a concession stand yes you did i understand okay all right any more comments um well i'm not sure that really moves the needle much uh but yeah so if if we could maybe just have that that number of if you if you took it out what is that contingency and also if if i mean mayor pro tem makes a good point and that is um we've seen where we've had to come back and increase bids but so this 889 for option one so that is a contract that we have accepted the bid on right so the only way that 's going to go up is if we make a change is that how i see this well during construction something could happen um you know there could be like a rock boulders underneath there that we have to deal with and outside of that outside of sun some unforeseen because you build that into all contracts you know given you know if we got to do this this this or this i understand that but if all the things per the bid sort of play out from a construction perspective um then they they build it for that price unless we change it or they encounter some unforeseen unreasonable contractually omitted or or contracted around situation that would require additional cost that's correct okay you know if we decided we wanted to um to go in and change the storage area here this athletic storage area and put in that family changing area that would be our decision right to request that cost and make the modification okay all right councilmember briggs just for clarification when you're gonna bring something back it's going to be um option four plus the what it would cost if we did the um plumbing and electrical on the the prefab is that so we can get a better idea of total cost well or no it's currently in the design based on what north rock just communicated so it 's stubbed up within 10 feet of the building so then the concept would be if whoever does the prefab structure they would tap into that area wherever it's it dead ends okay so done away did the bid done away did the design they're the architects engineers and north rock construction is the is the lowest bid that did the baffo for us and then they contract out plumbing and and what have you for other jobs is that i don't i'm not 100 clear on what they do themselves and what they contract out you know where their specialty is okay all right thanks yeah question on the um so on these prefab buildings so they are they have probably the plumbing within the building but as far as the rough end plumbing which when they go to set that slab down and they go to set that prefab building down there's a place for the toilet to be hooked up there's a place for the water line to be hooked up there's but so somebody's got to get those connections is that part of that bid so the the prefab structures that we put at mac park already had infrastructure in place right so when they pull it off the stuff out's already there yeah so you had to cut that off you know 10 feet from the building and start over and that building goes into place you're tying that into that meter or wherever that area is where it's stubbed off for the electric water okay sewer well and i hate to get in the weeds and we can we'll move on from this but because it 's important i think to know what we're what numbers we're going to be receiving okay because it's one thing to hook up a water line and a sewer line to a line that's brought from the the main and all the other connections the drain connections in the building have been funneled into your drain pipe but it's another to have to do the rough end plumbing so when you put the building down the drains are already in place whereas like with the the prefab building if it didn't fit in the exact same location that the other drain lines where they they're gonna have to do a new rough end plumbing for that i would assume there's some modifications that are going on yes yeah so i think you have some direction we just maybe not we've not covered every base but the the basic point is let's get as close to comparing cost to cost as we can and see exactly try to really filter it down to what are we getting what's it actually costing us based upon all these variables and then i think we'll be able to move forward from that and you want that comparison from option one and option four i believe so as much net you know what that net is yeah okay okay fantastic thank you all right we'll move on to the next agenda item which is receive report and hold discussion give staff direction regarding policy and application process to reviews have to review excuse me housing tax credit requests good afternoon mayor and council members i 'm sarah keichler i'm the director of public affairs i'm here today to present a revised housing tax credit application and policy so by quick way of background i know we've had a few work sessions on this topic but the texas department of housing and community affairs administers the federal housing tax credit program so the developers can apply with tdhca for four percent and nine percent housing tax credits they fill out an application and tdhca ranks their application on a number of factors and one of those factors is if they have a resolution of support from the community where their project will be located so council asked staff to come up with a policy and application process that could be implemented to review these requests for support really to establish expectations for the applicants and to also streamline the review process instead of going back and forth with the developers coming forth with that request so here is a kind of a breakdown of the meetings we've had so far the first work session was in june of 2017 and we presented research of how other cities handle these requests it ranges from just having a basic application to really function as an information for informational gathering tool to having some policy preferences stated to going even as far as having policy minimum thresholds on october 10th we came back with the revised draft policy and application it was really kind of a basic application that listed some factors that may be considered by council when they review the application applications and then we just condensed and streamlined the application somewhat and made it so that four percent applications could be considered year round and the nine percent would be considered on a schedule in line with the tdhca requirements after that work session city council requested a joint work session with the denton housing authority board that work session was held on december fourth following that work session the denton housing authority board of commissioners did send us did send the city a letter with their feedback on the draft application and policy just a couple things to note from their letter it was included as an exhibit in your backup they had requested that the timeline for four percent be year round which already exists and that the nine percent be matched annually with the qap from the state which we'll do as well for criteria they had commented that the criteria the general criteria that we had listed in the policy was too vague and unclear they really didn't know which projects might receive council support and then third they just wanted some clarification and some of the narrative sections that we had in there about what items would be requested and should be filled out as part of that application they also noted that although they can provide preliminary financial information for their projects it would be just that preliminary it may change as they go on with the developers so as we were doing that in december of last year tdhca released their timeline for nine percent requests with a deadline of march first due to the quick timeline and we did have interest from a couple developers staff decided to test out the draft application and policy with interested developers we did have two that completed the application staff met with them did review one withdrew their application and the other one which was palladium t's lee came before city council and city council approved a resolution of support for that nine percent housing tax credit project we did ask both those developers for their feedback on the process that we used in the application they expressed support for having this type of process in place it really sets clear expectations to them what we're requesting by when and what they need to attend the only feedback they had for improvement is that they offered if the policy would state some preferences or criteria that would be helpful for them in determining could their project be successful in denton so based upon the feedback from the developers from the dha board and additional staff review we've made some revisions i think council member breaks had a question on the one that withdrew the application was that just something on their end or was it something involved with the city it was on their end so tdhca will actually release a preliminary scoring matrix and they kind of reviewed it and didn't think their application was going to score high enough to receive that very competitive nine percent housing tax credit so they decided to put their efforts in some of their other projects which were scoring a little bit higher in the state's criteria thank you so here were some of the changes that we made for the application we added the self scoring matrix that tdhca has so we can actually see how they ranked themselves on those criteria and we adjusted the requirements in part three which is the narrative section we did get some feedback that when requesting letters of support or opposition from the school district or county sometimes those letters will be sent to ask for their feedback but they'll receive no response back so we at least want to have it documented they reached out to get input from the school district or county but if no response is received that that's okay sometimes for the nine percent housing tax credits especially that are going through the process extremely fast and in two months time sometimes the school district doesn't prefer to comment on in support or opposition but they receive the notification letter and then third for the four percent requests although they can be accepted year round and reviewed by city council we put at least 60 days minimum time frame in there so that we're not rushing through the review process and we can by the time we bring the request forward to council we have all the information that you're looking for and that we can go through a couple reviews if needed and that's just to set the expectations not that you feel like you're pressured to either support or oppose a project and then the last recommendation that staff had based upon the develop feedback from the developers and from the DHA board was to state policy preferences in the in the policy itself so there's really two paths council can head down you can keep the basic draft application and policy and it's really just going to be an informational gathering tool to help facilitate and streamline the process of review or go down the second path which is setting policy preferences for which projects may be supported here in Denton and I'll go over what staff recommends and how we got to that place and this is still provides you all the flexibility although these are listed as policy preferences you still have council still has the ultimate decision to support a project or not so staff spent some time reviewing the city's strategic plan Denton plan 2030 the consolidated plan for HUD policy documents that are ready existed as well as previous council discussions to come up with maybe what are some policy preferences that council could consider if you if you wish so the first is the acquisition and rehabilitation or renovation of existing existing affordable housing Denton plan 2030 contains a goal to maintain and preserve affordable housing and neighborhoods including reinvesting and reinvestment in existing housing stock the second is senior housing developments Denton plan 2030 includes a goal to expand the availability of housing choices for existing and potential community members most in need of housing including seniors third is the mix of affordable and market rate unit developments Denton plan 2030 supports this policy preference and encourages mixed income housing and neighborhoods to address neighborhood stability and conservation the fourth is the distance between other HTC projects in the city of Denton and this is this preference would actually align with the TDH CA policy which scores applications higher if the proposed development is not within a two mile radius of existing housing tax credit developments the fifth would be proposed development would be subject to property tax it's based on previous discussions with council property taxes ensure that there are funded community resources available to serve a growing population and then six is designated designating set aside units for supportive housing programs and this is stated in Denton plan 2030 as well as in the city's strategic plan to help those most in need and those most vulnerable those are the policy preferences we're suggesting so we're seeking direction for any revisions if you would like to head in that direction of stating those policy preferences this is something that we would recommend annually that we review with the city council and we can make any revisions as needed if you'd like us to proceed we recommend bringing our resolution back at the next council meeting to officially adopt the draft the application and policy councilmember breaks so I'm good with all the options here I do have a question though I think last legislature we saw some efforts to restrict local control on what councils can do regarding the housing tax benefits do we see any legislation coming forward to prohib it us from doing this we will be closely monitoring that going into the next legislative session and bringing that as part of the city's legislative program there was legislation introduced during the last session but it was not approved or passed which would remove a local government's authority to give a resolution of support any other questions I think if we'll go back okay here we have no this is fine on slide five on recommendation five I can't speak for any other council members I mean that I have more flexibility with that one depending on the partnerships and what those funds would go so these are not you know set in stone in the sense of you can't modify from that I just want to make sure that that of all those I'm probably the most flexible on that given what the actual deal points are or the terms are for a particular project because what I don't want to do is send a message that if there's partners out there that you know developers want to work with it may take it off the tax rolls that the city is sending a message that you can't talk to him because it's not going to be it's not going to be worth it but that's just me so I don't know if that's something that could be tweaked a little bit to provide some maybe if the council so desires but those are my thoughts on it but I'll let others speak for themselves if they if they would like any other questions or comments about the go ahead I'm sorry I can offer one suggestion to it proposed development would be subject to property tax or demonstrate significant community investment sure we've had that prior wording I know the Denton Housing Authority said well what does significant community investment mean but at least I think it would set the tone that it's not just subject to property taxes right you know if you can demonstrate how those funds would be used and reinvested in the community which is also part of the application sure okay yeah that sounds good yeah yeah okay anything else all right thank you thank you I've had a request council members to move and we're not there yet but just I'm gonna take care of it while I'm remembering it the closed meetings to the end of the agenda so that once we get through with the work session any staff that's not needed for the items for individual consideration that they can be released is that is that okay all right I see shaking of the heads okay fantastic all right that's what we'll do we'll move it and I'll probably call it just right after in this order on the agenda so just remind me we'll go on then to agenda agenda items excuse me work session reports 1c which is receive report hold discussion and give staff direction regarding existing pavement failures on selected concrete streets afternoon mayor council taught us to city engineer wanted to discuss pavement failures with you on concrete streets throughout the city of Denton one of the issues has been cropping up for us over time but really more as an issue that has really come to the fore for us over the last several years has been concrete pavement that is failing in residential neighborhoods primarily there are a lot of reasons for that you see a wide variety of things we have some pictures here just to give you an idea of what we're talking about there's a little bit of lamination going on here at this curb these look fairly minor but they're indicators of things that may come to be much bigger issues I have to hand it to our field crews I went out to try to get pictures of where these failures are occurring and I'm usually too late to catch it and they haven't taken pictures beforehand they've gone out and already fixed them so what you've got here where I've seen some early looks at pavement failures that are coming up one of the things you do see here that's a concern for us is you've got a longitudinal crack and you've got some cracking at the joints and corners that can really hint at some other things we're seeing this across the board and a lot of different areas throughout the city again primarily with concrete streets and residential neighborhoods that are newer than five to eight years old so concrete pavement just so that we got some base framework to work through that top layer is your concrete it can be anywhere from six inches to 12 inches thick depending on the type of roadway that you have and then you have what we call a base course says non-erosive what that basically just means is we're rolling something into the soil underneath that could be a concrete cement mixture it could be lime which is typical in our area it could even be something totally different where we over excavate and put some we call flex base in which is just building the foundation for the roadway that will typically be anywhere from six inches and a very lightly used area to 12 inches or even 18 inches even if we built this road of asphalt you'd still have the same basic layers and then the sub base is if you were in an area where you had a lot of destabilized soils you might do something extra beneath that that's not typical in this area that's something you would use in other areas. One of the major contributors that we've seen over time to concrete failures is that we have a lot of utilities under the road so just to give you a quick synopsis of what kinds of things you're you're trying to contend with when we're building these roadways is you've got sewer lines you've got stormwater pipes you've got water pipe you've got service is that run back and forth you've got utility cables for fiber for electricity all kinds of things running out on the street anywhere we put that pipe there's two things that are potential to happen you typically dig a trench to put it in so now I've dug a hole in the existing soil and I've put in something different. Usually we handle that through a detail that says here's how much you have to compact that dirt and you have to pound it real good tamp it down so that it won't settle underneath the rail underneath the road even a trench just as wide as a small pipe can do damage to a roadway if not compacted correctly. There are a lot of different types of pavement failures out there. This little illustration right here gives you some idea of the different types of pavement failures that we deal with routinely the primary type that we're concerned about with the failures we're seeing today are these longitudinal cracks. They're more of a concern for us because they typically do propagate through the entire depth of the concrete when we see those that's usually because there is something that is not underneath the roadway supporting the roadway so the roadway tends to break. The problem with rigid pavements versus asphalt which we call a flexible pavement. Rigid pavements were designed much like the foundation of a house to either bridge over something weak underneath or it was designed as kind of a raft so it would float in the soils that we have here where you've got a lot of clays. The clays here when it gets hit by water they tend to expand and when we go through the drought season then it tends to shrink and when that happens you just have a lot of different stresses on the concrete that you don't have in other places. It makes it very hard. That's why houses settle there's a lot of reasons for that but that's one of the many reasons houses do so. Roads are no different they're just longer and straighter typically. And you're trying to protect the roadway and all the utilities underneath it with what you're building so you may be bridging it you may be doing other things with that structure to try to hold that pavement up. By its very nature concrete is rigid so it acts as a structure over the soil underneath so whereas asphalt will tend to when it when the soil fails underneath asphalt you'll see the asphalt immediately start to show signs of it. It might start to warp a little bit you might see a crack there's something going on you see it quickly so you can address the issue fast. Concrete is by its nature designed to withstand a lot more torture. It's a rigid concrete rigid pavement so because of that it 's built more like a structure and you don't see those failures until they really become an issue. So you're looking for subtle clues as quickly as you can find them to make sure you see them but by the time by and large you see a true failure that causes a structural collapse of the roadway where it starts to bend or fracture or pieces of it starts to pop off full depth then what you end up finding out is is there's a much broader problem underneath. That could be due to improper installation of utilities it could be not compacted well soils all underneath it could be other things there could be materials or chemicals in the soil that are interacting with that lime and it does something instead of salt making that more solid under the roadway it actually gets gummier and mushier and it makes it harder for that concrete to withstand all the all the loads that you're putting on it all the stretching and compression that you're going to put on it over its life. Typical life cycle for concrete pavement is 30 years they can get 50 to 75 years depending on how we build them and one of the things you typically see with concrete pavement this is a good illustration of what that life cycle would look like if we can get 75 percent of its lifespan out of 30 years for this before we start doing any kind of minimal renovation or reconstruction you're talking closer to 20 22 years before we do anything. I think Councilmember Briggs had a question. Yes ma'am. To this slide because I know that some of the calls and issues are coming from preserve the concrete and other some newer residential areas that have the concrete street and they immediately call us no matter how long it's been to fix it do we require the the builders who build the street to to do the to go by this time period I mean what at what point is it our responsibility right after it's built or is there or are they responsible for it up to a certain point given this chart. There's a variety of ways to answer that so let me take a stab at it. So when they go build one of these streets they come in they talk to city staff the design criteria manual that we have in place sets forth a certain amount of concrete that has to go in at a minimal depth right now at seven inches it used to be six inches we also require a certain amount of steel to hold that concrete together and then we require a certain depth of that lime stabilization right now our manual shows seven inches of concrete on top of eight inches. Historically the rule of thumb was six inches on six inches and we found over time that especially in our area that's not thick enough you end up having to go do something to it or you find out that the materials underneath that soil were never analyzed through a technical exploration so I go out there and I core with a machine drill into the soil and I find out what's underneath it I can find those things that will make that lime not work well should I use something different. If I don't want to spend that money to go do that then what we've put into the manual is use this as your minimum because it's a very conservative pavement design to handle the worst case scenario in the city. If you'd like to do something different then you need to go do that analysis so that's in place. Let's say you come in you do all those things you do the ge otechnical analysis or you opt to just use our standard here's the minimum specification we'll accept if you go forward that we permit it the contractor will go build it our inspectors are supposed to be out on site they get there as frequently as they absolutely can with all the work we have going the contractors also required to do pavement samples so as they're pouring concrete they pull concrete we call them cylinders because they're in little six inch or three inch cylinder depending on how much of that test we want they pull that out of the concrete that comes on site and then they go and set it in an incub ator for 27 days or close to that and then we break it to see if it meets the minimum specification is it strong enough so all those things happen they even do that with the soil underneath the roadway as they sample that to see if it has been compacted enough we get those tests back from the contractor to make sure that we're seeing what we thought we saw in the field just while they were placing it and then once the contract is complete they put everything in and we've said yes this looks good they are required to give us a two-year maintenance bond so we have a warranty for two years the problem that we're seeing with these pavement failures our streets crews and our inspectors are catching what they can within that first two years but we're seeing these just outside the warranty period so they're happening at three years at four years at five years and we've really seen a run on these over the last five years that's where we're noticed so it means they happened eight years ago basically okay thank you does that answer your question yeah okay all right so the pavement life cycle one of the things I would like to bring your attention on this particular chart is if you look at the excellent good fair poor very poor and failed that also coincides with our OCI our pavement scores so a hundred would be excellent you get down to good we're at 80 percent fair at 60 percent 40 20 and zero so if you see those pavement scores when we're talking about maintaining a 40 as a target because a lot of things are lower than a 40 and we want to get up to a 60 we're talking about these things right here and it relates to the pavement life cycle once you get down below fair and get into the below 60 percent you're incurring a lot more cost over the life of that concrete to maintain it and reconstruct it so that's where we're coming up with these OCI's and how that impacts us long term just to give you an overview of where we're noticing a lot of these pavement failures we see a lot of them on the south side of town if you see in yellow that's where our crews have been exact have been extremely productive and they've gone out and replaced what they found we've still also started to see some on the north side of town we're overlaying this on soils maps so that we know are there some soil conditions that are causing this is it just perchance a lot of things happening all at one time you know one of the things that we're struggling with is we have limited amount of resources when it comes to inspections we have six public works inspectors and they are averaging on on average they're trying to manage somewhere between 70 and 90 projects between those six so if you just run the numbers and I wanted to get them on site an hour a day to make sure that everything's getting done correctly I can't get there without them working 12 to 15 hours a day five days a week that means they're going to be out there trying to inspect something when the contractors not there so the reality is is they're either on site for an hour or two one day and then they got to move to something else and they don't come back for another two or three days or they're on site for 15 20 minutes looks good and then I move on these guys do a really good job of getting out and making sure that they see everything they can see but the realities were just not there that often one of the things that we have seen over the last five years on this slide it says payment failures date back 2005 that goes back to a subdivision wind river the states off of unicorn and wind river that whole area on the south side of town just east of Teasley there was a lawsuit that lasted eight years I'm sure several y'all remember that one after that lawsuit streets really took a lot of time to make sure they were keeping up with it and within the last two years is when we've seen the primary expense and the total number of lane miles here is about 60 to 75 percent when we've seen it over the last two years we've spent nearly three and a half million just trying to keep up with them before that over the two or three years before that they've been noticing them they just they're worn as many and that just tells you it's propagating over time we're just not we're still not getting the 10 years the 20 years out of life for that concrete that we should be getting before we have to do anything so I want to ask you about that because I mean I understand what you're saying and I'm I hope in this budget process I would much rather spend a little money on a couple few extra inspectors than this if that's what the issue is but I mean I obviously you know in this area the soils are horrible yes so when you say we should be getting 10 to 20 years of life I can't think of anything that has been poured in concrete where within the first five or eight years first of all within the first year you may see a ha irline shrinkage crank all right you may see something a little bit larger that's not necessarily indication of some structural failure absolutely so I'm just trying to understand when you say that what the expectations are I'm trying to understand what the expectations are of somebody builds a street it should last 10 or 20 years until we do X well you're going to have cracks that develop that people can go seal to keep water penetration from from eroding the sub base you might depending on how it was poured what weather conditions you might see a little bit of scape so are you saying and I'm just trying to understand what you're saying about what your expectations are so when we pour concrete street there should be no kind of I guess I'm gonna say maintenance for better lack of a word but you're distinguishing between maintenance whatever that means on a concrete street I know what it is for asphalt compared to for a concrete street what are you what are we having to do now that you don't think we should have to do until 10 or 20 years once somebody's poured a street or a different number based on so that's a good question yeah what I don't expect to do is to rip up a whole panel four or five of them in a row and put them back down okay you're saying remove it all together that's something underneath it we're talking about yeah you're you're absolutely right there are a slew of pavement failures that can happen out there and they don't structurally cause the road to fail okay what we're seeing is is say a road typically crowns in the middle like this we 're seeing in the middle of the road the road collapsing like this okay now you still drive on it but at some point you're gonna get more of it to pull apart and that's what we're actually seeing is you're saying the crown of the road drop a foot okay all right typically it lines up with a utility line sewer line is where we're really seeing them but doesn 't necessarily mean that's where we're seeing all of them some of them we're seeing and it looks like we're having some other issues out there we don't know exactly what's causing them okay but we're talking about a full depth concrete structural pavement failure not some spalling on top some scaling maybe they didn't get the moisture just right and the top quarter inches flakes not I mean we're not talking about those things those are easy you basically paste that over with another substance and it's good to go okay we're not talking about those issues we should not have to reconstruct a panel of pavement for 30 years that's what I'm talking about that's the expectation when we design these roadways okay all right okay all right sorry trying to get my train of thought back no no you're getting there's a good question there yeah so some of the areas that we've noticed this are on the south side of town but we're also starting to see them on the north side in town all of them primarily in newer subdivisions that are ten years or less in their age that's exactly the type of areas where we're not expecting to have complete structural failure of a one panel two panel if you go on google earth you can actually see on one stretch of roadway where our crews were taking out an entire block to replace those panels because once you pull one where you're seeing the primary failure you get into the dirt you end up finding out there it's much bigger an issue than you thought okay so that those are what we're talking about so some of the possible causes we've hit on them throughout the discussion just in different ways but just to summarize those there's a lack of upfront geotechnical exploration a lack of desire to want to go check and see what's out there so that this doesn't happen because it costs money it absolutely costs money to get a geotechnical engineer involved and have them go and test it and the standards that we had one of the vast majority of these subdivisions were put in were using pavement thicknesses that were much thinner you didn't know if they would or would not work on that particular soil type because nobody really checked it so we used that standard or we grandfathered something in as opposed to either having a stronger section like we do now a little bit more concrete stronger foundation to that concrete or have the developer go and do the ge otechnical exploration tell us what they think it should be substandard pavement design we just talked about that six on six was a rule of thumb let me just let me ask you a real quick question I want to make sure I didn't I heard what I heard you said that you something about geotechnical and the developers tell us what they think should be or say that one more time so one of the common complaints we hear from development from the development community is they don't want to go pay for geotechnical exploration so they don't want to go pay to have a bunch of holes drilled that's that is a common comment that we hear so they just want to use the rule of thumb or they would use the minimum pavement section of course so yeah okay all right I've just had some comments I'll just save them for the end some other possible causes or construction defects it could be that when the inspectors not on site or maybe one of them some of the materials that were used in the concrete mix had something in it that caused the concrete to fail sooner that's a possibility it could happen lack of quality control we talked about that and just not being able to have enough bodies on site enough of the time to make sure that we know what's going on and we're getting the right quality of work TV I'm sorry customer breaks and so back to that do we have any recourse if we go back in and something has failed say in the third year and we noticed that they did something not right or skipped a step is there or since it's two years past it bad on us because we didn't catch it kind of thing typically I've seen that be a very hard road hoe because it's very hard to point back to well you didn't do this you didn't do that after so much time has gone by if there's a very clear indication of that you can absolutely try to make that case I believe that was part of what we tried to make the case with that wind river Wind River subdivision was exactly that scenario was something was not right whether it was design or it was construct ability or methods or even materials that was the path we were trying to go down it's very hard to make that case so it's something we need to make sure upfront and yes and ahead absolutely thank you you're certainly talking about concrete roads yes sir the street I live on is asphalt yes sir and Emerson between Old North Road and Nottingham between Nottingham and Rockwood it's been rebuilt the good thing about my section of the street is that we don't even have to have road humps in order to have speed control because several years ago we had all of the lines to every house replaced going out yes so the ones that are further away because the line the line was on the south side of the street so every 80 feet we have a dip significant because so it was that lack of quality control that that when they were putting in those new I don't know if they were water or sewer lines that they did not compact the soil properly and so so you've had that failure of it could be I don't know the particulars of that I don't know if that was done by in-house crews or if that was done by a contractor I don't know I would need to know those particular details and we could look into it and find out more about it we have a debate as to whether we want them fixed or not because cars go very slowly sure but but we have some extra bills for our alignment yeah issues so potential solutions one solution that we've already put in place is u pping the minimum requirement for roadways so we've we've taken what is a pavement design for some of the worst areas of town where we know by experience we've had to go with a thicker pavement section that's the minimum requirement now if you would like to it even says this in the manual whenever you're doing a project if you would like to come in and do the geotechnical exploration and tell us you want to use a different pavement design based on a sign sealed report from a geotechnical engineer or licensed professional engineer state Texas will be glad to look at that that's absolutely an option but we just want that assurance that you've done that otherwise we're going to go with our preferred minimum that minimum is is conservative and it does have varying depths and strengths and we've also given them the ability to with the current manual to say you don't have to do purely lime stabilization if you'd like to use flex base which is another option there are other alternatives that we'll even consider there as well when you said that our minimum is very conservative I don't know what that means means we're building it stronger for some of the more worst case soil types in the city thank you that way we don't have to worry about even if you're in an area where you could go less we want to make sure if you're not going to do the upfront homework then we need to do that and I would say that with our CIP projects we do test every project we core and drill every 500 feet if not closer to make sure that we've done that exploration up front so on the minimum pavement standards those have increased how does that compare still say because we want to encourage ge otechnical exploration how does that price compare with our minimums increased is it still more financial prudent for them to do the minimum rather than the geotechnical exploration it depends on the particular project and what they're putting out there I mean if it's a very large subdivision absolutely and I don't mean to imply that every developer in the community doesn't want to that's absolutely not the case with the vast majority of developers we work with understand that it's it benefits them in the long run to do their homework up front and not come back with well I just don't want to do it but we do have a few that like to make that claim so we've given them the option both ways what is it possible to I'm sorry is it possible to expand the guarantee from two years to say like three if they do one and not the other it's definitely a possibility I don't think there's a limit on how much we can ask for it now it does offset in price if the contractor is going to be held to something they've put in place there's a limit to how long they want to be responsible for a road because there are a lot of other things that could be the cause of a road that fails so there is a limit to how far they'll go before the price just gets exorbitant anything can hold together for two years almost I mean it seems okay thanks so some of the other possible outcomes of this assessment so what we're recommending is that we engage a consultant to go identify what's really causing these problems they're wide enough spread we've invested enough money instead of us taking a knee-jerk approach to the solution we'd like to have a holistic approach to the solution which may generate us coming into a program approach to resolving these payment failures that are outside the warranty period it may mean that we need to have more inspection staff available or we even look at contract inspection staff to make sure that we can handle the ups wing in development projects and CIP projects and then making sure that we don't let projects go by under a grandfathered set of standards you know just because you came in 30 years ago doesn't mean you get to use the 30-year set you still got to go by what we're doing today so our recommendation is we approve a contract with Tegnault and Perkins we have negotiated contract with them we'd like to seek council's recommendation and approval to go forward with engaging them to test the vast majority of these areas and new areas that are under construction now that may have gotten through either a grandfather or just making sure that we're double checking what we're doing so that we don't have any issues with those subdivisions as they're laying out concrete streets. Tegnault and Perkins was part of our recent RFQ they were on the roadways and transportation segment of design and then based on that we'll be getting better recommendations we'll bring back to you on what the pathway forward is to resolving these issues correcting these issues and where we stand in that program in itself and then of course we may find out that there are some other recommendations that they see once we dig into this and really get an idea of what the causes were there may be some other things that come out of that we'd like to be able to come back to you and present what those might impact for us in the future. Any questions? Explain to me when you say grandfather clause grandfather what does that mean? So let me give you an example. Yes I can give you an example that I've heard. One is a developer comes in and has platted a piece of property say six years ago seven years ago and this was with some previous staff that is not here anymore. They come in they get the plat or they at least start the preliminary platting process they haven't gotten CEPs or civil engineering plans together so they're ready to go build the project they wait a few years and they come back in four or five years later when they're really ready to go and they bring us the plans. Well I want to use what I was approved under originally. Well there were staff again no longer here that allowed stuff to go through with the previous set of design requirements. So this is really easy to figure this one out. Are we still doing that are we still going by that practice ? No. Okay so that's off the table. There's not any more grandfathered stuff in. Okay. All right. Okay. Any questions? I mean it sounds like from what you're telling what you're sharing is that when we're when people are putting in new water and sewer lines that were somehow the compaction isn't correct or the moisture isn't correct so that those lines cave in. That could absolutely be. And erode the base underneath. All right any questions comments recommendations you're going to get insulted to give us a more definitive answer and then we'll come back with a yes for the pathway. As we said on the slide this contract would be coming to you next council meeting for approval. All right great. Thank you very much appreciate it. Thank you Todd. Okay so we are skipping the closed session items till moving them to the end of the agenda. So now let's take a little break. Yeah let's take about a five minute break. And 18 at 2 55 our first item on the agenda are items for individual consideration. Item 1A is considered option of an ordinance of the city of Denton Texas amending the code of ordinances related to Chapter 2 administration titled ethics. We do have a blue card wishing to speak so I'm going to now recognize the public speaker Mr. David Zoltner if you'd like to come and state your name and address your time will begin. And this is an item for individual consideration so it's not a public hearing to so to speak you would need to have a blue card so just want to let that make that announcement to the rest of you. Thank you Mayor and Council my name is David Zoltner. I live at 2501 Timber Trail in Denton. A bit of a disclaimer I've kind of lost track on where you were moving and the status of this ordinance over the past couple of months. March and April for me were family funerals and flu and other exciting things so I'm kind of catching up on where you are. First I want to categorically support this final draft of this ethics didn't ethics code and offer my appreciation to every member of this council and especially Alan Boracuis for all his hard work and thoughtful meetings. Especially since two years ago majority of this council publicly scolded a sitting council member for even suggesting that Denton needed an ethics ordinance. After that memorable work session a group of private citizens went to work drafting an ethics ordinance believing an initiative petition might even be eventually necessary to get this job done. One of the basic principles of that ethics code drafted by citizens was the belief that an ethics board should be as apolitical and independent as humanly possible to earn the public's trust. That independence would be far less about credentials than how members were actually chosen to serve on an ethics board. We felt that a best practice would be a formal inclusive nominating process allowing as many as possible across the community to participate. The least acceptable option in our opinion and according to current thought from ethics scholars at the time would have had individual council members appointing their personal chummies to oversight ethics board as if an ethics board was just another routine appointment. Last week I sent some background information to council members on the philosophy behind this nomination process and I hope you've had some time to look it over briefly. Let's consider hypothetically just for the moment what it would mean in terms of public trust if each of the following were standing members of a nominating committee as to submit names to a pool to be considered and chosen by council majority to your five or seven member board. The Denton Bar Association possibly, the Serv Denton Board, school trustees, the school superintendent, the city manager, Denton Interfaith, the commissioners, the dean's office of TW and UNT, the list would be endless in a town of this size. If the effective date of this code is still four months away, on September 1st there is still plenty of time and opportunity for this council to fully explore how this board is to be seated to maximize public trust. I hope you'll consider this as a constructive suggestion realizing that Denton has a unique opportunity to raise the ethics bar and present a model code for other Texas cities to emulate and follow Denton's lead for a change. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Any questions for the speaker? >> Yes, councilmember Riggs. >> So are you suggesting that council put in certain groups and then those groups nominate someone from the community and then council approves like say seven from that nominated group from the community members? >> Yes, there are a number of different ways to actually go about this. This nominating committee or I talked to Alan about this after one of your meetings and although this is not commonly done, as far as he knew anywhere close to us here, he understands the philosophy behind this independent board. Actually some other cities actually have a regional ethics board where, for example, three or four cities that are sister cities close to each other that are somewhat familiar with each other's ordinance would share a complaint. In other words, you would not have any vested interest whatsoever. Names would be irrelevant. And so there's a number of different ways to do this, but this nominating committee or nominating board would hopefully -- I know you can't always do it, but it would hopefully strip the politics away from this as much as possible where names and things such as that are irrelevant. So it's just an option. He's aware of it and he didn't feel like it was his place to recommend it to you, but it's just something to consider. Because you've got four months to do this. This is not just another committee, in my opinion. So I hope you'll take this very seriously moving ahead. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay. I see no more cards, so does the staff have a presentation? >> I do. Brian Langley, deputy city manager. I have a very short presentation. I know you've had many hours of discussion on this, so I'll get through this very quickly. Just in terms of background, the city council formed a charter review committee in October 2016 to look at various charter issues that you were concerned about. The charter review committee did look at a number of issues , and on the ethics matter in particular, they presented their recommendations to you in June of 2017. And those were ultimately approved by the voters in November of 2017. Then the council, after that, hired the attorney of Alan Borquez to begin working with you to draft this ordinance. Number of different meetings that we've held since June of 2017 on this issue have various drafts that we've looked at over the last few meetings, including three public hearings that were held to get a variety of public comments on the ethics ordinance. The key elements of the code of ethics are the following. It would apply to the mayor, council, planning and zoning, zoning board of adjustment, public utilities board, and all the department heads that are appointed by the city council. And to a limited extent, some of the former city officials and vendors. It also would prohibit gifts over $50 and no more than $200 from a single source per fiscal year. And it would create a seven member board of ethics to hear complaints of alleged violations in the code. And it would include sanctions for violations of the code of ethics. Yes. So on that 200 from a single source, that doesn't mean from one individual. That means total, right? $200 total from all sources, like individual people. Let me look at the exact language for you. Six different people can't contribute $200 in a single year . It would be from one single source providing one gift to you, a gift of four different gifts of $50 in that one particular year. Is there a maximum though in gifts that one can receive or is the only limit $200 from one source so that say six different people can give you $ 200 per year? The maximum would be $200 per fiscal year. And the language in that section reads that she'll be a violation of this article for a vendor to offer or give a gift to a city official exceed ing $50 per gift or multiple gifts commutatively valued at more than $200 per single fiscal year. Does that make sense? Hopefully I answered that question for you. So it's one vendor, if they try to give more than four gifts of individual gifts of $50, that would be prohibited. Let's say, so the way that it's worded, five different vendors could give you up to $200. So there's not a limit on the amount of gifts you can receive per year. And that's why I thought that that was per year, not per vendor. So I understand your question. Yeah. I'm a little confused by that. I thought our maximum total allowed gifts was $200 per year , not per vendor. That would make more sense to me, I think. And that's why we included all those exceptions, I thought, for community functions, tickets given out, that kind of thing. So the wording is different from what you thought. We can certainly go back and address that. I understand your question. I think the way I'm interpreting the language here is it would allow it from multiples. Yeah. Okay. Well, we need to get some clarification on that to make sure that we all have an understanding of what that was supposed to be. We can certainly do that. Okay. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Last slide. If the council does want to move forward with adopting the ordinance tonight, we would then need to consider nominations for the Board of Ethics on that process. We'd develop some training for the city officials and the board. We'd also need to bring back the rules of procedure for the ethics -- Board of Ethics itself and then develop an internal procedure for the receipt of complaints and maintaining the conflict of interest logs. All the things we've been talking about. Mayor, those are my brief comments on the ordinance. Be happy to answer any other questions that you may have. And I think we had a -- somebody's going to fill out a blue card and I know we're not supposed to take those until after agenda item is called. We've done that out in the regular meeting. Because we didn't know exactly what time this meeting was going to start. If council is okay with that, then we'll move forward with that once I get it. So I have a question. We had something that was added. It was section 2.277 about subpoena authority. And it helped me understand just what the origin of that was because I know we've been meeting a long time and we haven't really discussed that. Was that just Alan's recommendation? What's the origin of that? There was a -- as you may remember going back to when we worked with the charter review committee, they had some recommendations they brought forth , the specific things that they wanted to include in the ordinance. They did not include the subpoena powers in that recommendation. But through several discussions that we had with the city council, the city council added some language that would be submitted to the voters to include that provision, that requirement. That language was ultimately approved by the voters to include those subpoena powers. So you're right. It wasn't discussed with the council over the last few weeks. And I think it probably should have been. But we didn't discuss it with the council. And so we wanted to add that into the ordinance to be consistent with the charter. So because I know that there was a charter provision about adding subpoena power. But was that just a separate charter provision or was that embedded within the ethics portion of the charter? It was embedded within the ethics portion of the charter. Okay. Of the language that was submitted to them. I'm going to go with Councilmember McGregor and then Councilmember Briggs. And then Councilmember Ryan. Thanks. So that was one of the reasons why I wanted us to go back and look and see what we were charged with doing to make sure that we covered all of our bases. Yes, sir. But I was surprised that we hadn't covered that base and I was surprised when I saw it there because I'd forgotten about it. I have a couple of questions about that because I think it 's fair if we're trying to get information to make a determination that we have access to information or that the ethics board would have access to information. I am also concerned, however, that this might be used in a way that becomes a phishing expedition asking for information that's maybe not relevant. So I guess one of the questions, and this may be a question for an attorney, is would it be appropriate in the ordinance to give any direction to the ethics board as to how when a subpoena for documents might be issued or when a sub poena for someone to appear might be issued. So that's a question, there's another question that goes along with that is in legal proceedings I know that when there's a trial or something when somebody is, there are people that can issue subpoenas. My guess is that there has to be some logic, some reason behind it, some legal rationale for it so that it's not, I think there's something in the Constitution about search and seizure that there has to be probable cause or something. So can somebody talk to me about that and the legality involved there? Typically when a subpoena is used in a trial setting it will be to subpoena individuals or documents to a trial and I think that is what is contemplated here when there's a hearing before the board of ethics is what they would want to use that for to be able to compel attendance or production of documents. So would there be any protection if they were asking for documents that were not applicable? So they say we want any and all financial documents, you know your checkbook, register and your bank statements for the last five years. Typically what happens in a civil or criminal proceeding is a motion to quash is filed by the individual that the information is being sought from and we would need to develop procedural methods to address that before the board because typically that would go in a civil case or criminal case and we go before the judge in which that trial is pending. My concern is I want an ethics board to have access to the information it needs. On the other hand I don't want them to have free rein to ask for any and all documents that might or might not be relevant and I would certainly want to have some procedures in place to protect folks privacy rights. Also I would want some procedures in place to ensure a level of fairness and a level of certainty that the documents that are asked for, documents that are needed in order to render a fair judgment. How do we go about doing that? We might be able to scope out the range of information of what could be subpoenaed by the board and limited to that but I think that you have no idea what would come before the board in terms of types of violations that they may be considering and so it would be difficult to craft that. Do we have any rules, I think we have some rules that for some actions on the part of the ethics board that there has to be a super majority vote ? Right now that was it. That was the only time they had that. That was the only time they had it was on the frivolous complaint but other than that everything was done by a majority of the members of the board. I believe that's correct. Before we get into too much discussion because I think there's a little bit further discussion, I wanted to give the speaker an opportunity to speak. Is that okay with the council members? Sure. Okay. If you'll come up and state your name and address your time will begin. And since I allowed that if there's anybody else that wants to fill out a blue card and speak feel free to do that. Simply because we didn't know what time this was going to start so it's hard to gauge when you need to show up. Thank you. Name and address. Members of the council. I'm John Johnson, 319 West Oak here in Denton, 76201. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to speak. I was watching you on my computer at the office and you guys took a really short break and jumped right in. So thank you. So I'm here today kind of I would say representing the business community. The first of all I'll just say I'm in favor of an ethics ordinance. I think an ethics ordinance should be there to enforce penalties on someone who does something unethical. I've emailed all of you as these revisions have gone through with some concerns. My major concern is this ordinance seems to me like it is trying to prevent someone from having the opportunity to be unethical. And I don't think your intention would be to exclude any certain members of the community or people with a certain type of job to be able to serve. For example, ZBA, it states you want people that are architects, civil engineers, understand construction, et cetera. Yet those people have to represent their clients before the city to make their living. And the way this thing is written for a period of one year after, they wouldn't be able to do so. It was two years, now one year. I would prefer not to get into a bunch of details because there's a variety of things in here that I think a lot of folks have some concerns with . What I'm here to ask you to do today is, here it is on a Tuesday at 3 o'clock. I think you got quite a bit of feedback from the Chamber of Commerce representative and some other business folks about some concerns at the last public hearing. Those folks are all at work right now. And so to take action on this on a Tuesday afternoon without folks who are at work having the opportunity to come back after having read this current revision, I think would be not very transparent. So I would appreciate you guys considering taking action on this at your next evening meeting which would be, I believe, May the 1st or 2nd so that folks have a chance to review this revision, come to a public hearing in the evening and give their feedback. My personal feedback is unethical people will be unethical no matter what your rules are. And ethical rule following people will follow whatever rules you have. And so, you know, this seems to be crafted in such a way to try to make sure that no one has the opportunity to be unethical. But the penalty is a letter. And what the voters voted on was a stronger ethics ordinance. While this one's a lot longer and has a lot more detail in it, at the end of the day an unethical person gets a letter saying they're unethical. I would prefer if someone does something unethical, under handed, illegal, money under the table, whatever it is, put them in jail. Fine them 20 grand. But let's don't preclude people that have the expertise that we need on planning and zoning on ZBA, on historical landmark commission and on council from being willing or able to serve. Because I think attorneys, civil engineers, architects, real estate brokers are going to say they can't serve. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to speak. Thank you, Mayor, members of the council. I wasn't going to speak today, but you got off on a topic and you're still working on it. I just want to say something about subpoenas. In my opinion, in my limited experience, I work on Fenner arbitration boards. Generally speaking, one side or the other is going to ask for a subpoena and it's not usually the board itself looking for more documents. It could be, but you're going to have the opposing attorneys or representatives give you the reasons for or against the subpoenas and then the board itself will be acting as the judge to determine whether they need a subpoena or not. So I don't think you need to limit the ability to subpoena. You just need to train your board members in the appropriate use of subpoenas. I don't think you need to require a supermajority. I think it's just a question of training. Otherwise, I like the ordinance. It's not perfect. I support it 100%. Thank you. Okay. Any questions over here? We'll look over here to the right side. Sorry. Yeah, we'll go with Mayor Pro Tems. I'll come over here. Yeah. I just wanted to clarify the vendor gifts issue. It seems what I recall is that there was a $200 cumulative limit for vendor gifts. And so I wanted to go around and make sure that that's accurate because I remember us explicitly putting a limit on vendor gifts. It was not an unlimited amount of money. So that was my first clarification from the council. And the second item I wanted to clarify was if that's everybody's recollection and that $200 is the annual limit, then there's a really easy fix to that on section 2.273, which is require, you know, putting a period and then saying this shall be cumulative for all vendors. So. Okay. All right. Well, let's go ahead and answer your question to the council. What is the remaining council's recollection of that particular? We'll go with Keely and we'll just start around. Council Member Briggs, we'll start around and come back to you. Thanks. Well, we're going to start here and then come around the horn. Yeah. So my recollection is the same, that the $200 was max. I recall I was at zero and then it kind of went up from 50 and then $200 decided we decided to be the max. And then there were some questions and concerns about that being so low. But then that's when all the exceptions and exemptions from charity functions, backyard picnics, that is the reason why those were added to that section. That's what I recall. And I am in favor of it being 200 maximum. I mean, we actually have held our staff to $0 in gifts. And so allowing us and voting for us to have an unlimited amount, but only 200 per vendor, I think is not a good thing to do. Okay. So your understanding was that it's capped at 200 per vendor per year. No, no, total. A vendor can that we could only receive up to $200 per year in gifts from anybody, from anybody, not per vendor. Okay. Gotcha. All right. Councilmember Ryan. Well, I recall the discussion and I know we kind of talked about both ways, which way we wanted it. And as I recall, this language has been in there since about draft B or so. It's been that way for quite some time. Okay so then you're saying if we put it in terms of the different direction of is it $200 total a year amongst all people who are giving gifts or 200 per vendor. And I'm okay with either way. All I'm saying is that this, this particular draft, that portion is not changing the draft since early on. Okay. Councilmember Gregory, any comments? Councilmember Duff, any comments? What I recall, it was $200 for a vendor. And I don't have a big deal to yield to that. You know, if it's a, it can be 200 max or it could be per vendor. But I think the way it's written right now, it says per vendor. Right. Yeah. Per year. Yeah. Yes. Councilmember Gregory. I think that's a change, we probably need to make it to sub paragraph two and sub paragraph three. Because one of them refers to the city official and the other refers to the vendor. So let's take the first policy question. Are we all okay with making it to where it's $200 per year maximum amongst any gifts? You know, you can't receive more than $50 from a single vendor or source, but you're limited to $200 maximum from any sources for that year. Is that what we're saying is what we're wanting? Is that okay? Is everybody okay with that, that change? Okay. All right. And then we'll work on how we make the changes to accomplish that goal. Any other questions on that or Councilmember Ryan, did you have some additional questions or? I had additional questions. Okay. Any other questions on at least that policy that Mayor Pro Temin brought up? It sounds like we've got that resolved. So then I'm going to go on to Councilmember Ryan and his additional questions. County is on the new ad of the subpoena power and I guess this would be for legal. Because we have a subcommittee as well that's listed in here as to who has the subpoena power. Would this require a vote of the full board of ethics? Would this be the chair? Would this be the subcommittee? Who actually would have that power? It would need to be delineated in there and I would expect that it would be limited to the board itself and not to any subcommittee. So I think that language needs to be added into this. Yes, and I've got a couple questions on that. And I think, I mean, what I don't want to be doing is crafting this ordinance today and then passing it today. I think this is an important policy that we need to make sure we get it clear and we have an opportunity for people as we're making these changes to come and speak to us if they want. So I have a question about the one that was added about a vendor. It's section, I think it's under definitions. Yes, section 2269. Says a person who provides or seeks to provide good services and or real property to the city in exchange for compensation. This definition does not include those property owners from whom the city acquires public right of way or other real property interests for capital improvement projects and I know that our attorney had sent us some backup information on that. But I have a question about it. We buy property for a lot of different reasons. And capital improvement projects is broad to some degree. But I don't think that necessarily unless the staff will say that would cover probably any purchase that we would have for real property for a capital improvement project. What I don't want to do is have a purchase that is not a capital improvement project that somehow falls outside of this because it seems like the reason for this addition was to exclude sellers from the particular rules of this ethics ordinance that we're purchasing property from. Is that correct? Yes, sir. I think that was correct. And Councilmember Gregory. I think what we were trying to get at as I recall during the discussion and I think why we talked about capital improvement projects is the notion of when the city approaches a property owner about the purchase of property because we want to expand the park or we want to expand a roadway or something of that nature. So when we're initiating the need to acquire property to accommodate a public need, the person that we're trying to acquire it from is not a vendor . They're just a property owner that has been approached by us. That's what I had in mind and if there is a better way to word that than to say for capital improvement projects. But my thought is an individual in town who's owned a piece of property for five years or 50 years and the city comes to them wanting to buy it isn't really a vendor. Okay and I understand that distinction but are you saying that if someone has a piece of property and they simply contact the city proactively to say hey I've got this piece of property it's next to X that you might have an interest in? Are you saying that they would somehow fall under the definition of a vendor because the city didn't seek them out first? Is that the delineation in the who's making the initial contact or no? Well now you've confused me. I don't know. Okay well I just want to make sure that if we're going to be thinking about this we're not going to want to be changing this within the next three or four months. I mean it's going to be enough scar tissue in it as it is to say hey we forgot this or we've got a situation now we didn't think of. So I guess if what the gist of it is that if the city is purchasing property whether it was approached by the seller or the city if it's being purchased for a public use which that entails a lot of different types of elements then they 're outside of the vendor definition. Well I'm thinking it through. So let's say a person has got a piece of property that is on a street that it has been announced is going to be widened. We know we're going to be widening it. We have the preliminary plans for how wide it's going to be . It's going to take a significant portion of that person's property. That person was going to put the property up for sale anyhow now rather than just putting it on the market they approach the real estate office of the city and say I was going to buy this you just want to buy the whole thing anyway. I was going to sell this you want to buy the whole thing anyhow. I don't think that makes them a vendor I think they're just trying to deal with it. They're just getting they're dealing with the inevitable but they're initiating the contact. I don't I don't think that makes them a vendor when they're just initiating the contact. Well any property that we're going to purchase would be for public use or we couldn't be acquiring it so we could just simply end the sentence at property interest period and not have the public or capital improvement project language. Well and we'll run this I mean that's what I'm saying I don 't want to start crafting this. Yes Mayor Pro Tem. So if I'm understanding what you said earlier correctly and I'll touch on the vendor issue. You're saying because there are some clarifications that we 've made in today's meeting that we should postpone a vote until the next meeting which would be I'm assuming it won't be during our Denton ISD joint lunch so it would be May 1st. So on May 1st that means that nobody can make any adjustments to the ethics ordinance at all because if we were to make any changes whatsoever then by your logic we would also have to postpone another week to give people time. No no that's not right. Okay. Because I remember talking in the meeting last time that the rationale at least I wasn't in the meeting but the rationale I heard at the day is when I was in the meeting that we wanted a clean copy with no changes or modifications so that we so that the public number one would be able to see a clean copy and that we're not crafting things on the day. So it's not a matter of making a period or ministry we're talking about making some definitions to the subpoena power. So I'm not trying to push this off but I don't think we have to also figure out how we move this forward if we're still trying to find substance. Some of these things change that we hadn't even talked about and I'll be perfectly honest with you I mean hearing one of the speakers talk about hey what are some other options for appointing the board we can consider that after it's passed but I don't think that's necessarily a bad idea to talk about that. We don't have to do that before we pass it so that's just my opinion there's five other six other five other people up here so I'm trying to figure out what what where is the dividing line between well we can talk about board composition after the ethics vote is passed but subpoenas we need to talk about before the vote is passed. Well then we can talk about board composition before it passes. Well I'm just trying to understand the reasoning behind you know if the ideas we need to. I can tell you the reasoning. The board composition has been in this ordinance draft for since the beginning so we've had you know plenty opportunity to look at it to to massage it to entertain certain things so that's been here. The subpoena aspect of it showed up this week. We've discussed the subpoena before. Well we did but it didn't show up in a draft till right now and and I got to tell you that's a that's important. I mean when you can compel people to produce documents I mean unlike one of the speakers you really don't have two parties here. You've got the board you have the complainant but I doubt very seriously a complainant is going to bring an attorney. I guess they could but so as you know subpoena power is powerful and as we heard whether or not it's it's appropriate people ask for them to be qu ashed and so that's a pretty substantial judicial function. Well so I thought when we discussed this that the idea was the board itself will be creating its rules of procedure. And so yes we're entrusting to them the ability to operate on a wide variety of issues compelling people to show up the arguments that people make the presentations that they make. I would assume that that includes the subpoena power that they have which councilmember Ryan clarified that it belongs to the I think you clarified that it belongs to the commission. The board itself. The board right. So I mean if that I guess I'm trying to figure out where we 're going on the subpoena power. We either want the commission to have it or we don't and if we want them to have it we can narrow the scope of what they have or we can allow them to use their judgment within the confines of the law and make their own rules which is what we've done for every other the confines of what law. Well I mean they have some ability to get documents. No I understand that but we don't but I don't know if the board needs to be setting its rules for what are the procedures if someone wants to protest that subpoena. I mean so I guess if we want to say that can the board that 's a pretty substantial judicial function and so I mean when you're talking about I can ask for all the documents from you that I want and your only recourse is to do what with the board of ethics or suffer some type of sanction. That's I'm not opposed to the subpoena power at all. I'm saying let's make sure whether it's set at the board rules which unless you're going to have some people who are consulting with them providing them some fairly strong due process direction I'm just simply saying it's and there's you're obviously you want to go ahead and see if we can't push through this and vote on it today I get that and I don't have any problem with that and I'm not saying that well unless I hear something on the subpoena issue because I think showing up that that's a substantial change to me. I agree with you if okay here's where I agree with you if we're going to talk about the subpoena power let's hash it out right now and figure out exactly what goes into that subpoena portion of it as opposed to you know going around the horn and talking about different things you want to address the subpoena let's figure that out right now you know address vendors we'll figure it out and then just move on but I mean then that's it like everything's not going to be perfect and I just want to point out on slide three or two I think I mean we're at like meeting 17 I think several public hearings I don't really know how much more transparent than that you can get to be quite honest and I do want to address the Chamber of Commerce issue I don't know about you guys I've gotten emails from the chamber responded to all of them for some reason there is this perception that people will not be able to serve because of a conflict of interest the conflict of interest laws are already in the Texas code what we've done is lower the barrier to what is a conflict of interest financially and by relationships that means you can't vote on one item out of perhaps ten it doesn't mean you can't serve on a board or serve on a commission it's just you're accusing yourself from one item I explained this to people on phone and email I just want to put it out there again for the record people will still be able to serve I recuse myself from things having to do with clients doesn't stop me from serving so just to clarify that so that we don't have any more confusion maybe anyway so if we want to move forward I would just ask that let's please sure no details about what I don 't disagree with that I don't disagree with that I think the vendor issue I think we've come to as far as excluding people who are selling the city property I think we've resolved that I think we resolved the $200 that it's a max from anybody in a year per year it 's per year it is am I confused isn't it per year the $200 per year that was my recoll ection of our conversation and we could go back and watch video but that is what I thought we all agreed on and that may be true I think it's not written that way and if you wanted to make that we could certainly make that change that from any source the maximum gift for any council member official would be $200 we can make that change if that's what you want to do it's the way it's written is it's per source right now and I didn't catch that my bad until the slide because this is the first time since we talked about it that it was specifically brought out on the presentation so I just assumed that it was the way it was when we talked about it and so that's why I didn't catch it in that process but I have a question about the subpoena powers if I can because it is something new and I assume that it's put in there and we have to use it because it was in the charter or something the charter committee and so Mayor Pritchett McGarry mentioned we had 16 meetings and so I'm just wondering is there a reason why we're just now seeing it I feel a little bit strange about that and I also wonder if council member Gregory didn't bring it up last meeting if we would have approved an ordinance that didn't have it in there I don't know how to necessarily answer that hypothetical but your first question was why is it showing up this late in the process anybody have an answer for that I think the I think the answer is is that one of the comments that we received at last minute meeting was to cross-re ference this versus the charter review process we went back through that the city attorney 's office had indicated to us that this was something that was approved by the voters and recommended a change in the ordinance to be there so that's the that's the reason that we brought it forward so let's go I mean of course mayor pro tem and I have discussion about where do we go from here you know it's so did slated for a vote today we can handle it one of two or three ways so I haven't heard from anybody else as far as that particular issue so what are some thoughts on that from the rest of my colleagues you know don't everybody speak at once council member Ryan well I do think that the subpoena power is big enough that we've been just trying to get that definition on paper that we can actually see it I also go to the fact that we're only a six member council today and this is something you know it's not that we're kicking the can down the road we're just wanting to make sure that we we have it proper and I believe the councilman member Husbeth would probably like to be he he actually was the one who brought forward having all of our votes on each ordinance so you know I I'll the the 330 in the afternoon I've seen some stuff past in the past that you question it this is a good ordinance it needs a little final tweaking but on that transparency I think that I would have last week and I thought about the fact that this was not a full regular 630 meeting would have said let's move it to the first just so that we would have that that type of openness on it so I would prefer that we put it off and have it next week at the 630 meeting okay council member Br iggs well I I'm in favor of going ahead if we could get everything together I came today with the attention to vote for it personally I didn't vote for it last week because you had asked that we had pushed it to this day and so that is that is why yeah because I was absent during the work session yes but I'm really glad that we didn't because this new issue of subpoena power came up and then we would be it would be a whole different issue that we were talking about so I I am okay I guess moving it until the next meeting if it is wrapped up in a bow and ready to go I don't want to push it off any more sure so council member Duff well I think until we get a clean copy out there for everybody to see you know I'm all for pushing it one more time but but we need to have it finalized and next council meeting vote on it the I think it would be better to wait till next week simply because I think we really need to parse out and be certain about what we're voting on when we're voting on this subpoena power I think that we just need to be clear about that so then can we say can we agree as direction for staff as a council that we've made we've made a couple changes today we've made the change of the $200 applies annually for all gifts we've made a slight change to the definition of a vendor as far as people the city who's seeking to purchase real property and then the only outstanding thing is and we're going to talk about it now I mean we're going to talk about it now is the subpoena issue and so this council is deciding that outside of those three issues nothing else is going to be changed in this ordinance and if we want to consider appointment paradigms we can do that afterwards for the for the board but is that go ahead I know it's pretty strong no no no all I'm concerned about is when I'm hearing us talk about gifts and two thousand two hundred dollars I'm hearing two different things I hear you continue to use the word annually okay then I may be wrong and I'm hearing other folks saying we're striking the annually and it's two hundred dollars total is that lifetime I think I think what I what I heard from the council's the direction is that you did not want to receive more than two hundred dollars in one fiscal year from any vendor from multiple vendors so you can't have ten vendors give you a hundred and fifty dollars and that's fifteen hundred dollars the maximum gift you could have in any one fiscal year from one or multiple vendors be two hundred that's that's what I think I heard if that's your understanding okay does that make sense okay Spina let's have the discussion so we've had one recommendation or one observation that it would be only issued by the full board we had one observation request that would it require a super majority or not we haven't really discussed that anybody think that that's where they're going in that direction or a simple majority did you want to further comment well I'm just I just want to explore what what this authority might include so so let me give an example there's somebody that is claiming that I have violated the Texas open meetings law because I'm deliberating with another council member by text messaging and so they they they ask and I say well I don't have any so could but they think that I've done it so would with this give this give the at the Board of Ethics the authority to subpoena all of my phone records to to make that determination I think there's some questions that we have reached out Alan Bork was about this and I know he would like to look into it a little bit farther to see how far we can go in a board of ethics scenario and that we I don't think we have all the answers to build to give you what you want today on that because I know there have been other questions coming up with respect to subpoena violation and how far you can go on that I mean if this were to be analogous to the Texas Hill practice remedies code then the answer to your question would be yes I mean you could go I mean that's subpoena we would be it would just be like going down the hall going down the street to the courthouse and having a subpoena issue at a civil court and you know the say and that's an option that you have here is to the extent it's enforceable we could follow the the rules for the Texas rule civil procedure and the Texas civil practice and remedies code in terms of issuing statements I don't even know what all of those are but but my guess is that they probably were crafted in a way that gave some assurances for due process yes would it be appropriate for us to add some kind of language like that to to this subpoena power I don't know we I'm not trying to be difficult I'm just trying to not I think we can craft where you want to go but the unknown that we have right now is how far can we go under existing law to do what you're wanting to do as an ethics board right and particularly with the board that's going to be made up of primarily non lawyers and non judges there are some issues that can create itself well would we want to put in here some kind of if we didn't use the language of referring to some other set of rules for subpoenas would we want to put in here some provision that a person could object and appeal handing over all of the pieces of information if they felt like that some of them were not relevant or that overstepped the boundaries I am way out of my league because I don't know the link legal language to say for all of this typically what would happen is so proceeding is if you wanted to turn over documents to the board and have them make a determination as to whether or not they would be used they'd be relevant they're just called submitting in camera and that's where they're sealed the board would look at and then it'd be decide they decide whether to use it in that proceeding but that's kind of the cart before the horse in some ways because that's the group that's going to be deciding the fate of the person that is probably being asked to submit those records so they're going to be there in front of them I think we really need to think through how this would be used and I can see the need for lawyers to definitely be involved in this in terms of what the board may want I mean it's it's a very broad question. Yes, may I pretend? For our purposes can we put in language that states that the subpoena tower is sufficiently narrow in scope for the purposes of the actual investigation? Let me start over again. For the purposes of our ordinance understanding what city attorney has mentioned about the complications of issues I'm really not worried about that because the fact is if something's outside of the law we're not going to be able to do it so I don't think you have to outline every single thing in the law to make it legal you just say if something's contrary to the law it's going to be struck from this provision just like in a contract so with respect to the subpoena power our code requires that the board has a subpoena power I'm sorry not our code our charter requires that they have a subpoena power and it's related to the investigations. We're tracking so far? Okay so for us what we could potentially do is just say that they're going to be sufficiently narrow for the purpose of the investigation and the details of how that operates again I would say belong to the board itself because they're not going to be able to do anything that's outside of the law they may think that the civil practice and remedies code is too onerous for instance or they may want something I don't know more abbreviated than all the timelines that are provided in that code so I would just say that we can have a philosophical discussion about it in the code but let them get into the details of how they operate that narrow subpoena power that's my suggestion. Do we does the does a city council approve the rules and regs of the ethics board? Yes I suppose there's a section related to that that addresses that. So if you look in it's section 2-277 board of ethics sub section K rules of procedures the board of ethics shall adopt rules of procedure governing how to conduct meetings and hearings such procedural rules are subject to confirmation or modification by the city council. So Mayor I think that Mayor Pro Tem has probably offered a modification to the wording that would be sufficient for me I think unless I hear some more discussion I'm comfortable with saying limited to the scope of the investigation. Question for legal let's say somebody is subpoenaed and they're within the range of investigation and they produce documents are those documents public records pursuant to the open records act or? I do not know the answer to that question. In other words do they stay confidential or if you if they ask for something is it going to be released or could it be released that's? If it was some I'm just trying to think through since we haven't had an actual hearing happen we have developed rules of procedure how this would work is when you're in trial and you subpoena an individual to show up with documents and those documents are broad what would be I believe open to the public would be what is admitted into evidence at that point. Not just but then again you have discovery subpoenas which are you know bring this stuff we want to look at it and it would depend and that's why there are different there are a couple different types of subpoenas you have to look at and so that I think a lot of this could be fleshed out in the procedural rules I think I agree with counsel one of Gary's comment about we could draft language and hear and I was just writing something down that the subpoena power is the documents if it's documents are going to be subpoenaed have to be reasonably relevant or related to the scope of the investigation at least we have a standard there that's limited to what that investigation is about and it's just not you can't go ask you can't go ask for one thing when it's not you know one thing over here it's not related to anything over here which I think is the concern I'm hearing from one of the speakers and also what I'm hearing is concern of the council so what you would want to build a subpoena would be documents that are related to that ongoing investigation and nothing beyond that but then what's reasonably related would be left to the board to make that call. So the board then that the board rules and regulations would govern that the sort of technical and procedural aspect of the production of the documents the confidentiality of the documents Texas law obviously would govern that as well. Correct and I think a good starting place would be to look at the Texas Rules or Procedure and the Civil Procedure of Remedies Code as a tried and true way of doing that I mean laws been vetted out in court and you know we're not reinventing out a whole cloth how to do that but we would just limit the scope on the front end. Okay so then it sounds like that we are able to craft some language that would limit the scope sort of in general for the subpoena power and then leave it up to the board as it's formed to set their own rules and procedures that govern that particular process. Is that yes. Which are subject to approval from Council reviewing approval from Council. Yes. I'm good then. All right so it sounds like though then what we've done is we resolved the three issues that were present as far as that have been asked about for this particular ordinance moving forward to get a clean copy no red line copy with these changes that are made and for a vote on is it May 1st. May 1st. May 1st. And that that will be we can either put that on a public hearing where people can speak without a blue card or items for individual consideration they can speak with a blue card. I mean we've had public hearings before might as well just put it on as a public hearing I mean I don't think it's by law we have to but it's just a courtesy public hearing that could do public hearing and consider adoption of an ordinance. Okay. You do that yes. You got a council member right let me go with the council member right. Are we moving on to anything else yet or I have a separate issue that I wanted. Oh with the ethics. No. Oh something different. Something different than ethics are we done with ethics or are we. You talk about something that we're something within I guess I'll just ask the question if you want to skip over it come back here again. Where we have the effective date of September 1st. Right. My question is does that mean that if an offense takes place prior to September 1st that it disappears or would it be at the passage of this that it now becomes an offense in any any proceedings of the board would not happen until after September 1st. Okay. Go ahead. My understanding is that it's anything that occurs after the effective date after September 1st. Is that what y'all discussed last time. I think that's what's in the I'm trying to find the section here there's a section of the document here. I'm going to go ahead and recognize councilmember Briggs. It would be my preference we did discuss it towards the end of the meeting the effective date was September because we were trying to get a timeline on the board but it would be I would like to ask council to consider as soon as it passes that it would go into effect that part and then the any complaints that are received would be held off until September but as soon as we pass it I would like for it to go into effect as far as affecting council. Typically there's a 14 day period just for effective dates in general. Is that is that okay just or you're saying the minute we pass it the next day it's in it. Whatever is typical. Okay. Yeah. Okay. All right. Did you have. Yeah. I'm good with that you know I think you know something occurs then you know we still have time to put together by September the 1st. So you're saying if something happens between the time that we pass it and September 1st the ordinance is in effect if there's a complaint file then it's told sort of put on the shelf until the board gets comprised and the rules and then it's taken down. I think it has to. Okay. All right. Okay. Is that everybody okay with that. All right. Just to be clear that's section 2-267 so that's the prospect of this there about September 1st so that would be a revision of that section based on that and there may be some other pieces that we'd have to address related to that we'd bring back to you. Okay. Yes I want to make sure that we're covered about what we're changing there will be the issue about make sure we've clarified the cumulative annual amount for vendors in the order in the ethics ordinance the definition of vendors as relates to real property and then did to clarify for Ms. Gary is that we're going to limit the scope of the subpoena to it to be reasonably related to the investigation. Is that right? Okay and then and then the board the board will they'll set up their own rules subject to then coming back to the council for approval. Is that everything? Yes. What about the it's the board that has the subpoena power not correct the entire board not the other that's the entire board and then that the effective that when the when it's passed it's got an effective date of I guess it'd be an effective date of the 14 days afterwards but then no hearings would occur until the board is created and rules and regs passed. Is that yeah and and given that I think we you could say September 1st for that but I'm wondering what happens if if we get the board and they don 't get the rules and regulations in place by September 1st. Do we say or when it's when they're put in place I like a date because it it maybe pushes them to and pushes the staff to get that thing done. September 1st is what you're advocating for but but if something happens in between the passage and September 1st then it's told. So because of how this is posted on the agenda today do we have to have a motion to postpone? Yes. Are there are there any other questions or issues with the ordinance not issues but observations comments. So I want to make sure we all understand we've resolved now it's four issues we've resolved the vendor issue of $200 we've resolved the subpoena issue of reasonableness we've resolved the real property exception for vendors and now we've resolved the effective date but if a if a offense occurs or complaints filed after voting to whenever I guess it's just told till the board is ready to hear it. I mean we can say September 1st is because it's really not an effective date anymore. It's just we want to have the board in place and the rules and everything established by September 1 because it's effective within the 14 days after we pass it because if somebody makes a complaint they're subject to this I mean people are now subject to this ordinance and so the September 1st date is more of a we would like you guys to have all this in place by then. Yes. Could we just say that no complaints will be can be filed until September 1st because we do have to have the auditor I believe it is it has to put together the form that's part of that time period but that the it's effective immediately that if it's an offense it's an offense but that no complaints can be filed until September 1st. Or at such time the board is duly constituted to be able to accept because you're saying the forms won't even be in place if if something happens and somebody commits a violation somebody wants to file a complaint two weeks after we voted on this after May 1st then how do you receive it who makes the determine I mean you've got a whole procedural process that it's not saying it can't be filed you're saying it can't be filed until the the board is in place and the procedures in place but that doesn't mean that it's not a valid complaint. Correct. Yeah I'm saying that the effective date is here the it's a violation at that 14 day point but you can't file anything on that violation until either the board is in place with the rules and procedures or September 1st date. Is everybody okay with that? Okay all right so that's that clarification. We'll need to to think about this a little bit more with legal and perhaps Alan but there's a limitations period section of the complaints and it indicates that you can't bring a complaint more than six months after the offense has occurred and so six months from now certainly wouldn't be a problem but if it had been a few months ago depending on when that's being brought forward that someone who wants to report something there could be an issue so just we may have to adjust some of the language there to reflect that I just want to be clear that that may be something we'd have to adjust with this change on the effective date. What I want to make sure that I understand is that the ordinance will go into effect 14 days after it's passed any violation after the effective date will be considered to be an actionable violation it just will not be able to be heard until the board has got its rules and regs in place and it can act. Is that what I understand? Yes. Okay anything else? No sir. Any other questions comments? Yes you may put them in. I mean I just wanted to point out we have one council member short so to the extent that that council member has any issues I would just say. Staff needs to reach out. Yeah staff needs to reach out immediately and that shouldn 't be a reason for not taking a vote next week. And I'll reach out to him as well. Okay. Thank you. That's it. Appreciate your time. Any other? Okay I see consultation going on. Trey just pointed out that there's a 90 day provision that the board will be orientation will occur 90 days after the effective date of the ordinance. They may or may not have the rules and regulations in place by then which kind of renders that moot. So do you want us to build a draft that after they get their rules and regulations in place and they get the board's gonna have to be appointed then they're going to have to put together rules and regs. Yeah. I think I know where you want to go on that. Yeah I don't think that's a hard fast rule it's just saying because this is the beginning stage I mean so I think we need to have some flexibility in that so sometimes these hard dates is what gets us into trouble but see what you can. Do on that you're just saying hey it says 90 days after the effective date we make the effective date on the 15th of May they got through three months from there to have their orientation will by that time they might even have been constituted or just constant well three months May June July I mean we're getting September 1 st so but look nobody's wanting to drag out the appointment of the board. I think we're going to get however we decide to appoint them I think we're gonna get that resolved and they're going to work diligently to get it up and going and I think it'll happen long before September 1st so but we've given at least some ability to have some flexibility. All right any other comments questions if if staff could get those changes to us maybe even before the Friday sort of packet so that we can if there's any questions we can address that yes Councilmember Briggs. I was also going to ask if a copy could be put online for the public to view as soon as it's done because these are just a few changes so before Friday that way they have a little time to review. Okay that's a good idea okay we haven't called it yet. Yes Councilmember Gregory. I move that we postpone item 1A until May 1st. I have a motion second second all in favor please signify by raising your right hand against by raising your right hand so it's four to two I thought you said you were okay with it that's all right four to two so we'll move on to May 1st. Okay we'll go on to our next agenda item which is item 1B consider approval of a resolution of the City Council of the City didn't appoint a primary member and alternate member as the official voting representative North Texas Central Government Regional Transportation Council. Good afternoon Mayor members of council I'm really excited to be here. Got a very short presentation here related to Regional Transportation Council as you may know the Regional Transportation Council is the policy body for the Metropolitan Planning Organization the City of Denton has representation on that on that body there's roughly 44 members from around the North Texas area of which 38 of those are appointed elected officials and six of them are appointed from various organizations such as text dot Dallas text dot Fort Worth the dart DCTA but along with the short is is we the City of Denton has a seat on the RTC we maintain primacy for that particular seat due to population standards when the City of Denton was reached 50,000 population back in 1990 we were recognized as having our own MPO rather than having our own office our own MPO set up we chose to work with the North Central Texas Council of Government so with that said we maintain primacy over that particular seat we represent a cluster of cities including Lake Dallas Corinth and Sanger and at present Mayor Pro Tembigere is the primary member representing the City of Denton and Councilmember Ryan is the current alternate so this particular item is a resolution for appointing a new a new member Mayor Pro Tembigere has indicated that with her schedule and moving off of council due to the election cycle she had requested that this item come forward to the Mobility Committee the Mobility Committee considered this last week and recommended a resolution to move forward for your consideration to appoint Councilmember Ryan as the primary member and there was a discussion or a nomination for Councilmember Briggs who serves on the Mobility Committee as an alternate at this point in time that was the only nomination for the alternate position and so again we do have a resolution in your backup for action today for Councilmember Ryan as the primary and the open alternate would be for your consideration at this point in time. So you're saying you want to serve as the alternate Council member Briggs? I would be happy to. Anybody opposed to that? Do we have to make an official nomination or we just put it in the resolution? You can point it at this point in time. We can make that available for your signature. Okay. Yes. Councilmember Briggs. I move approval of the resolution with Councilmember Ryan as our representative and Councilmember Briggs as our alternate. We have a motion. Councilmember Duff second. All in favor please signify by raising your right hand. Motion carries unanimously. Six zero. Moving on to agenda item what is it 1C. Consider approval of the resolution of the City Council of the City of Denton Texas requesting the Denton County Transportation Authority establish a minimum $250,000 annual investment in passenger amenities for the City of Denton service area. Mayor members, Council, Mark Nelson, Director of Transportation back with you again and what we have in front of you this afternoon is a discussion on DCTA passenger amenities. Quick discussion here as you may recall earlier this month DCTA presented to Council some goals and objectives and responded to inquiries from the Council. One of the items that came out of that was taking a look at closer look at passenger amenities. How do you establish passenger amenities? How much is spent on passenger amenities? What are passenger amenities? So those in this case would be bus shelters, bus benches, improved bus stop locations. What came out of that discussion then was a request to move forward and request that DCTA actually establish an annual amount for passenger amenities in our community for the DCTA service area and the City of Denton and, you know, what was basically outlined in that presentation was roughly about 15% of the 300 bus stops had passenger amenities, either a bus shelter or a bus bench. And so I believe the desire here is to create a more robust passenger amenity program for DCTA, provide a little bit of direction in terms of what our anticipation of that particular agency is in terms of providing service in our community. So with that, that request was placed in front of the Mob ility Committee last week and they essentially recommended option one here, which is establishing or considering this resolution for a $250,000 annual amount for DCTA to plug into their budget. So with that, I'll stand for any questions that you may have. Any questions, comments? I'll make a motion to approve so that we can see stop seeing people sitting on the ground. Second. All right, we have motion and a second for agenda item 1C. All in favor, please signify by raising your right hand. Motion carries unanimously. Moving on to item 1D, consider approval of a resolution of the City of Denton, evidencing support for the Denton community market and its grant application for funding from FY 2018 Farm to Market Promotion Program. Oh yeah, you're good. Perfect timing. We just called the item. >> Yeah, we're fast with Mark. Well, I just have a few slides as well. So we're here today with a request from the Denton community market for a resolution of support regarding their application to the USDA Farmers Market Promotion Program and some staff assistance with their grant application and with implementation over the three-year period of the grant. We've identified about six areas where we would assist the market initially with some grant writing review, assisting with avenues for community outreach for the programs covered under the grant, helping facilitate the use of some of the city facilities for their meetings and outreach efforts, partnering with the Denton community market to facilitate two healthy and sustainable living fairs annually, which would help promote the market and our city programs. Cooking demonstrations, which is something that Sustainable Denton puts on right now through our sustainability series. We do classes for preserving the harvest. And then they've also asked that the city assist with printing services through our reprographics department. Over the period of three years, we're looking at about $9, 000, so about $3,000 annually in assistance and support. In the resolution, we did do not to exceed $10,000 just in case we had any increases in cost for facility rental or printing costs, staff time. I told you it was very brief. And then Vicki's here from the market, Vicki Oppenheim, if anyone has any questions of myself or Vicki. Any questions, comments? Chair would entertain motion or action. I'll move approval. Okay. We have a motion. I'll second. We have a motion and a second for agenda item 1D. Everybody in favor, please signify by raising your right hand. Passes unanimously. Thank you. Okay. Concluding items. Who's got -- yes. Council Member Briggs. Okay. So I would like a work session on increasing the homestead exemption. I know that we passed the effective rate, but tax bills came in and the homeowners are just not seeing the relief. So I just would like to request that. Also informal staff report on the noise ordinance. I've been getting some complaints from homeowners that are living close to bars. I'm just curious if we have a maximum number of complaints allowed. And also if the police say there isn't anything they can do , what can be done? And then also in conjunction with that, what is the current zoning requirement and with our new zoning maps, will these type of establishments be allowed near neighborhoods? And also just as a side note, our smoking ordinance, the negative effect of that was that in the past these bars and the people were inside smoking and now we've pushed them outside into the neighborhoods. And so it's creating a louder environment, which in the past didn't. And so I just thought that was interesting as something we may not have thought about. Last is ADA compliant sidewalk study update. I know that we were supposed to have one and there is a certain day that we are supposed to have everything compliant and I'm not sure, just an informal staff report. And I brought this up because somebody reached out to me that there is a large section on Sherman Drive where a wheelchair actually has to get into the busy road because it won't fit and there's the only one sidewalk on Stewart Road. There's not another option on the other side. So I'd like to see if that sidewalk is compliant. All right. Yes Councilmember Ryan. Thank you Mayor. Just a little follow up. I went ahead and did the search of our code of ordinances and the only two places that the smoking ordinance needs to be realigned with is 22.31 subsection 13 and 22.31.1. I also, while I've spoken with staff on this on several occasions, we were promised a stoplight would be in about 24.99 in Robinson in December , then January, then February, now April. We have only a couple days left in the month of April and the light is still not there. So I just wanted to bring this forward as a public item. I saw that the contractor has been out there and at least has the conduits and the pads set so it's just a matter of getting the poles up and I bring this up now because 21.81 is going to be shut down to one lane for several days between Ryan Road and I believe it's Bent Oaks but at this time we need 24.99 opened up fully in order to help relieve that issue of congestion over there. I would like to get at least an informal staff report possibly it would lead to a work session on we have some water towers in town that have found out that we are having to dump water because of the age of it and that that's actually costing us in the system and it's in areas that will be developed in the future but is there something that we could do as a city to put infrastructure in that would create a quicker use of that water so we're not just having to dump it out because of its age. And let's see agendas the timing on agendas I'd like to see if we can work out something so at least the chair if not the full committee gets it gets agendas sent to them prior to them being posted so if there's any changes that need to be made that that can happen and lastly I want to remind everybody to go out and vote. Okay if I could weigh in on Councilmember Ryan's concern about Robinson in 24.99 we did get a briefing yesterday from Mr. Polster and I have asked staff to reach out to the contractor if there's anything we can do to reprioritize projects on our end you know to go ahead and make that trade-off we agree with you the T iesley information is getting out so we are investigating that and I understand the frustration. Okay anybody else? Seeing none all right that concludes our agenda for the open meeting I will now call the closed session I will now we will now move into closed session at 421 on Tuesday April 24th 2018 pursuant to deliberation regarding personal matters under government code section 551.074 and consultation with attorneys under government code section 551.071.