Jul 24, 2018 City Council on 2018-07-24 1:00 PM

in the Denton City Council. Tuesday July 24th 2018 it is one o'clock p.m. We do have a quorum. We have a couple of absences but expect council member Hussbut to join us here soon. We'll move through our agenda. Citizens comments on consent agenda items. Okay he's for the... yeah any... don't see any. We do have a card for an individual item for individual consideration but that will be for a later time. Seeing no citizen comments for consent agenda items moving on to request for clarification of agenda items on the agenda for July 24th. Any clarification? Yes, Council Member Meltzer. Thank you Mayor. I'm not sure if this means it needs to be pulled out but you know there's a discussion I'd like to have on item A just about sort of whether our our costs can ever be known by the public. You know under what circumstances so I don't know if that requires us pulling it out if we just could have that conversation and I have a couple of others as well. Okay and then on item B now I've it's actually already been answered for my sake but I think it'd be just interesting and helpful for the public to know that we're required to do an outside study because I had asked what what they're going to do for us that our internal resources couldn't do and it's not that we couldn't do it but they were actually required to have an outside consultant by charter so I think that's you know useful information for the public and I think I'll ask we pull out E yeah I'll ask we pull out E so we can have a more a fuller discussion on that. Okay. Sorry that's a lot. I don't want an 11 hour meeting. Sure no well so A let's see if we can't take care of A's questions during the this part of the agenda. So who could answer that? I can answer that. Okay. This happens to be the the joint RFP that we're in with four other communities and this the agreement to not discuss price while we're negotiating is is very common in the electric industry as these new wind farms or plants are being constructed the owners of these properties are just very in these facilities are very concerned about their competition understanding what they're cutting deals for so it's been a standard provision that we've had to agree to in each one of our respective contracts in order to move forward. The public does get to see an aggregate cost I suppose there's a way of backing into it if you know the number of megawatts and that sort of thing but we do have to agree to keep this confidential in order to participate in this RFP and that's been a standard condition in every one of these deals. If I sure I don't see that this has been reviewed by the P UB but I I is is that the case was did it need to be? I believe it went to PUB last night however it could be was it on PUB last night? Yeah okay it was on PUB last night so typically the way we've operated with these is anytime we're asked to sign a confidentiality provision or agreement like that to enter into negotiations we'll put those before the PUB and council to let even the public know what's going on. I guess there's not much more to to say to that I you know I I would think that in dealing with a public entity that you know the suppliers would you know it would sort of have to realize that there is a greater need for for transparency than possibly you're dealing in private industry? We have been through this with our gas contracts wind and solar and their proprietary their their desire to not harm their bargaining position in the in the market with the competitors has trumped if we want to be at the table and partake in these types of contracts it's a provision that we simply have had to agree to. It is unfortunate but that is how these industries are working. I'll see if other council members have comment. Yes so I had planned to ask to have that same item pooled and I don't know if the staff how much further beyond what Mr. Heilman had said the staff presentation would go but I had it probably wouldn't go any further than that it's a simple contractual requirement if we want to continue negotiations with Invenergy we must agree to this confidentiality agreement provision. Okay yeah I would still like to pull it in just see if there's any discussion on that that will ens ue but I do understand okay how that you know that this is how things go but I think for the public's sake that would be great thanks. Yeah I mean I don't have a problem with this if it were just us we could make a decision on on that but also state law provides you know discussion with our municipal agency with DME to be proprietary what's it called what's the term they use for the exception to the Texas Open to the Open Meetings Act for competitive matters competitive matters which we can always you know not hold those kind of discussions in closed session but I don't think that it I would be surprised if people in the public expect us to negotiate in public when I think anybody knows that when you're negotiating with any kind of situation during the negotiations that it's important that those be as discrete as possible if you're wanting to get your best opportunity for the public so it's a trade-off I mean yeah go ahead. Although yeah I understand that completely and it's just that in this case that the result is never known to the public either. You mean as far as the the price negotiated? Yeah. Well I think that that's a policy decision that could be changed somewhere down the line I think you have again when you're looking at further negotiations future negotiations I mean nobody's to look nobody's trying to hide anything from the public we're trying to make sure that we get the best deal for the public that we can. So if you if if the council wants to all of a sudden make all negotiations public I don't think it will take very long at all to find out that okay if we're willing to pay the cost for that that's fair enough I get that so that that's a decision but especially if we're entering into it with other communities I think that would be detrimental to the other communities and if if the council decides they don't want to do that we can make that decision. Yes. I believe that the we're just asking to have this item pulled and not the larger conversation. No no I understand but that but I think that's the context of the item being pulled I mean the reason it was the the question on its face was about the the confidentiality nature of this particular item so I think I mean we didn't have that discussion now we can have it later I think as well within the posting if we're talking about confidentiality if we're trying to determine do we want to make this confidential or not and from what I understand if we don't we won't participate in this particular RFP is that my understanding? That's correct. Okay all right yep that makes sense? Yep yep okay that's what I was going to say. Yes no no okay and so it is going to be pulled and yeah we can carry on later either that or you can vote your you know what what your decision is on this. Maybe it'll be a short discussion yeah but I just wanted to mostly just know that you know these issues bothers some elements of the public and I think it's good to have people understand the reasoning and you know and what the trade- offs are. Sure well and I get that I've been on this council for 10 years and this conversation comes up rather regularly so I don't I don't think it's anything new that that people that some people in the community are concerned about it and that certainly I have no problem with that but this isn't a new conversation this is a conversation that that has gone on for that since I've been elected and probably even prior to that so I get it and we can continue to have them that's that's a good process absolutely. Okay so we're going to pull A and then we're going to pull E. Do you is there any particular this do you need any answers from staff Council Member Melt zer on agenda item E that they can research in in between the time ? No and they they have for you know responded in advance of the meeting to my satisfaction although I think there's a little dialogue we can have but again it's just something where it you know it's not obvious on the face but what this is all about I think it'd be helpful for people to hear what it's all about. Sure okay. It actually looks kind of really different than it is. Okay great all right so so far we have A and E that we're pulling. Any other clarifications or consent agenda items to be pulled? Okay all right then we'll move on to our work session reports which are 3A. Receive report hold discussion receive departmental presentations preparation for the capital improvement program five-year financial forecast etc. I believe we have six six presentations is that right? Five okay I'm sorry. Mayor members of council I'm Nancy Toll I'm the budget manager. We've saved some of the best for last here today of the department presentations we're going to have capital projects streets traffic operations and we're going to have our public safety communications that's going to be a new division for next year that's our dispatch and then also finance and to start with we'll have Todd Estes doing the capital projects. Good afternoon mayor council Todd Estes city engineer. Nancy's built this up and I hope I can live up to that one so we'll see how this goes. If I can get the technology to work for us there we go. So capital projects just stated capital project sounds very much like capital projects that we're performing we're doing construction in regard to capital projects. In regard to this budget item it's actually the operational budget for the capital projects department. Before we get into any of the particulars I just thought since two of the add-on or two of the following budgets we're discussing I just briefly run through this org chart we'll also come back to it later but what you see in blue here are the actual hbus or business units that we're talking about with this budget and then in white this is all the entirety of capital projects department in white these are funded by separate budgets and drainage operations you've actually heard as part of the wastewater budget and then you will hear streets and the traffic operation here shortly operations planning is one that we are working towards putting in place to help us better coordinate all of our street projects and drainage projects with the water and resource water and wastewater projects that are currently out there as capital investments. Some of our accomplishments from the 2017-2018 fiscal years so we we took the vast majority of capital projects that were on the books specifically 2012-2014 bond projects some older monies that were out there projects that have been around for 10-15 years and identified what was going on to keep them from getting out the door and getting to construction found that a vast majority of them had some severe budget gaps just from a lack of timely delivery uh construction cost inflation has gone up over the last five or six years other items that were not originally incorporated into the financial planning of those projects were not incorporated like right away acquisitions and design and some of the other elements that just have to be a component of each one of these capital projects to make sure they're delivered on time they're delivered to a high quality so we get the best possible value for the public we also streamline the design procurement process now that doesn't mean we just go out and pick willy nilly what we went out last fall and did and council was a part of that selection process was we we put a request for qualifications out last fall for a variety of engineering consultants so that depending on what type of work we're doing the rfq is already in place that will streamline the total time lost in an rfq process which could take two to three months on any given project and when we're losing ground on the construction cost to the tune of a one percent per dollar or one percent compounded per month then that shortens the time window where we're losing the value of the construction dollar we've also founded a program management office it could also be called a project management office we opted to go down the route of program management office just to differentiate between our project managers and this group this group is focused on the transparency of projects and project delivery on the governance of projects making sure that we deliver them the same way that the standards that our best industry practices are put in place and that we utilize that in a very effective way across the board the intent for that organization starts in our department but long term it reaches beyond our department it could be almost enterprise wide and what it coordinates and collaborates it will be the front end resource especially for council and the city manager's office and the public in general to know where projects are where they're going and to have that single one point of contact to figure out who do i go to to get information on that project we also began auditing all of our internal processes when it came to just how the department functions how do we get projects out the door how do we collaborate on those projects how do we coordinate with our departments and with the public in general that's still an ongoing process it will never stop that continues year after year we look at how well we did last year and try to figure out what we might need to tweak if we need to based on what's happening in the next year we also realigned our divisions internal department you saw what that looked like before we i'll have a snapshot here earlier of what the budget for last year was set up based on and how we tweak that to better get our efficiencies better refine roles and responsibilities for individual divisions and departments we also eliminated several communication barriers one of which was just getting out and talking to people something engineering had not in the past been real effective at so we have made a very concentrated effort to just make sure that we reach out to all of our community stakeholders and partners and our internal community internal stakeholders and partners to make sure that we are really on the same page with everybody else some of the big things that occurred this year is we had two big projects go out the door this last year bonnie bray phase one and mayhill they are both under construction and on target to deliver on time and on budget that's a major accomplishment center where we were about a year ago we weren't sure we were going to be able to get there we've bundled a lot of our streets projects not just in their geographic vicinity so that we get multiple street segments put together and have a complete project but also with other components like water wastewater stormwater to make sure that we go into a neighborhood at one time and then we're done we're not coming back to do some other improvement multiple times over toad what does the eac stand for estimate at completion okay so each project has cost beyond just the construction cost and we use the term eac so that we get a better idea what the total project budget is to deliver that project that's everything included in the project from design the internal staff resources allocated to the project right away going out and making sure we get the right thing built making sure the inspectors are out there on site and getting the best quality all those things that take us all the efforts that are required to get that project delivered that's wrapped up in that estimate at completion so when you say staff allocation that's not going to say that's a soft cost because we are paying staff but you estimate some hourly rate how much they spend on the project i mean that's yes that's not something that we've actually wrote a check for specifically for that it's it's sort of combined with staff there's no monthly salary for there's not like a defined monthly invoice like a contract or our consultant would submit but we do keep track of that through payroll and all those things just to make sure that we know what a project costs us right in total to deliver and i've also listed here seven of the current projects yes seven projects we have going out the door one of them is already almost complete and that's the mckin ney street sidewalks the construction phase sidewalks that's the first stage of that mckinney repurposing from uh or widening from loop 288 out to the high school they should be done by the end of next week if not by next tuesday so they are on target to be done this month the rest of those projects will be bid over the next 30 to 45 days so that we have them under construction this fall that's about 40 million dollars worth of construction all going out the door in about 45 days some of our goals for this coming year we are currently in the process of training and will continue to train our staff to abide by the industry best practices of the project management body of knowledge so that we're all talking the same language we're delivering the projects in a very transparent and uniform way we're also utilizing pmo to make sure that there is that single point of contact and they will need a software that helps to bring all those resources together both externally and internally how do we manage those projects and give them the tools to both give you a dashboard to see where things are going on let the public see what's going on but then give us the fine-tuned tools to deliver those projects what 's a project manager need to really be able to stay on top of that project from day one at its birth to the end cradle to grave delivery then we're looking to establish centers of excellence so we we we really do want to make sure that we are doing things through the best of our possible best of our possible talents and resources utilize them as well as we can and be recognized not just in our city but around the state and the country for what we're doing that's our goal we also look to improve our quality assurance part of that is a an infusion and recognition that we have staff that is just overburdened with too many things to do especially when it comes to inspections and when it comes to development review we have people working some unbelievable hours to try to keep pace with what's going on we have got to give them some relief we have got to make sure that they can do their job to the best of their abilities and not be burned out and the other things that we're looking to do is make sure that we set and establish very aggressive schedules to deliver the projects we've committed to the public to do not unrealistic but they are aggressive and we want to make sure those get delivered for instance all projects that we had identified last fall as capital projects will be complete through design by the end of this year there yes sir if you could go back to the ones that are going out the door i think this year that list i want to look on it uh hickory street west yes sir west being from what west from fm 2181 west back to hickory creek i'm sorry i was thinking hickory street i had somebody talk to me about hickory street as it gets up to carol from and i know we've done all the utilities in there i believe we've done the utility work we're working we're working our way towards the segment from welch to carol where we are also looking to do sidewalks and street lights improvements as well as and then you'll come back and repay that whole i mean we've already started i think down by bonnie bray yes sir to come okay i just sorry i misread that so i apologize for that so i'm gonna step i'm gonna go on past that one sorry i kind of lost my train of thought there uh so cost containment strategies there are several things that we are currently in the process of doing to make sure that we keep our our budget under control one of those improving quality control on projects we have talked about that one that's a necessity that's making sure not just our internal budget stays under control but it's all the project budgets that we work with those costs don't spiral out of control you have to have eyes on the project at all times to be able to get there we want to keep that aggressive schedule on the projects as we identified earlier to minimize the impact of construction cost inflation right now we're seeing and have seen over the last five or six years construction compound monthly at one percent doesn't sound like too much if i'm just looking at two or three months of delay but as you start to add two to three months and become six months and becomes two years or becomes 10 years that significantly increases the cost of a project to deliver so any delay in the upfront before you go to construction is what we're trying to minimize as much as possible want to identify any bottlenecks and inefficiencies that we have in the project delivery process so anytime we introduce a bottlene ck or we find an inefficiency we're going to delay that time frame so part of what pmo is doing our program management office is looking at our internal work breakdown structure and identifying where the hang-ups is there a hang-up in say real estate is there a hang-up somewhere else we want to identify those work with them try to get the maximum efficiency out of them and then get as much possible value by minimizing the time that it takes before we go to construction to get there and we also want to continue to look at projects for what they are economies of scale play a big factor in how we deliver these projects so the more i can put into a grouping that makes sense so instead of letting one signal project out and let another signal project out for construction there are two driving factors there one it keeps the cost down i got one contractor doing multiple things and it works it keeps the cost down just economy of scale the other issue that you have is with the inflated market in the area right now especially the dows fort worth metroplex area you just cannot get contractors to take a project at a certain level in other words 10 years ago you would have had people beating down the door to bid on a 250 000 signal job now they won't even look at you unless you can get a million dollars plus i can remember sitting in a bid opening just about 12 14 months ago nobody showed up it was crickets and it was just a hair under a million dollars so that's the impact that we're seeing throughout the entire metroplex area that's generally inflating that construction cost and then we're also wanting to make sure that we front end load all projects so any activities that we do we want to make sure when i talk about front end loading is making sure that we understand what pitfalls are out there that may cause some kind of delay to the project whether it's a scheduled delay cause an inflation budget may increase the scope we want to identify those early so that we can then come talk to you about what those are and what the impacts to that project might be we don't want to wait until oops i thought we could go to construction and now we got a whole slew of other issues that's going to cause us a year of delay we want to go talk to you about it early make sure you understand it and that means that we have to do our homework up front so some process improvements we just talked about front end loading that applies to not just capital project delivery but it also comes back to even some of the other things that we do in the form of real estate and property acquisitions making sure that we understand what the project needs well in advance of us come and say hey here's what i think i'm going to need they need to at least understand the property owners they need to start looking forward to what other issues might come to us you have a development review that might be an issue for us it has been an issue for us in the future one of the ways we can minimize its impact is to better work with the development community to talk to them about projects early right now we wait until plans are submitted and then the development community and and our review staff start talking about how do we partner how do what kinds of changes need to be occurring on the plan set if we have those conversations up front front end loaded then we can better set a for sure and definitive timeline for the developer so that he knows exactly what he's getting into we want to continue to train our staff and best management best practices for project management so that we're all talking the same language we want to establish some effective kpis that tell you something kpis key performance indicators just in case we're not on the same page there there's a variety of kpis that apply across the board for us and depending on which division department in our department that you're talking about they're very different how do you categorize a key performance indicator for project delivery it's fun to say we're gonna get everything designed and out the door to construction by the end of this year but how do i know i'm actually going to achieve that those are the things that we need to make sure that we have in place so that we can see that early and then we want to make sure that we 're establishing very transparent consistent reporting methodologies not just externally not to you it's all of those but it's also internally how do we work with our internal customers so they know exactly what we're doing and when so now we're getting into the numbers part of this and and i'm hoping tony will help me if i ever get in trouble here so i don't want to say anything incorrect one of the biggest issues that you'll see here is we do have quite a few fees permits inspection related fees that is rolled into that budget you know last year we were estimating somewhere between one and a half million to two million dollars in those fees i think we will be on target for that but we are absolutely anticipating an increased rate of those fees and those permits going into the total amount of work that is uh of revenue generated for us one of the big items that you will see down there as well is the cip charge back and transfers that's how we interact with both the capital projects that we're working on and then many of the other things that we do for internal customers so engineering as part of capital the capital projects department the engineering services group performs wastewater modeling so they're modeling the wastewater system as improvements come in or upgrades or as we tweak it and look at alternatives they're doing that work we do some in-house design all those little things that we do that are not just as readily apparent or visible as doing a street job or doing a major capital project that's rolled into those costs as well how do we do that work yes uh oh yes um can you explain on the slide back the budget resources highlights can you explain to me um how these transfers work and uh and what kinds of transfers generally they are sure and this is where i'm gonna go to the bullpen and ask for a little relief okay thanks mayor city council tony went to director finance i think i 'll tackle the capital charge backs as well because i've probably a question on that so um so when when we have our engineering staff that works on a capital project they charge directly to that capital project there is a a markup on those direct labor charges associated our recognition of the benefits and also a part of the operation maintenance component of that budget that is charged directly to that capital project you know it's we call it capitalizing that labor it's no different than if we had outsourced and hired an outside engineer to come in and work in that capital project invoices and the cost for that service would be billed directly to that capital project the transfers that you see here there are components of this budget that are wholly funded by the general fund there's allocations of some of those costs one of the examples that i'll give you is within this budget is the bike coordinator the bike coordinator was previously budgeted in the general fund we've now moved it over to the engineering fund but the general fund still picks up 100 of that cost and so that that goes as part of the transfer and so there's a number of transfers that happen in that recognition and part of the allocation process to to to fund this internal service fund uh just just as reminder this is an internal service fund and so you know there's some outside revenues but there's revenues that are coming internally as well councilmember okay councilmember belter don't go anywhere i mean you know clearly we're asking about those areas i think the answers are good things but i don't think it's that apparent you know why the precipitous rise like i can't get that's how transfer works it's like you're charging an internal you know you're you're paying for an internal resource but but it's a precipitous rise right so this reflects a whole lot of new activity and maybe you can say why well actually maybe it's not so much on you tony yeah yeah you know why is there so much more in transfers in the proposal than in any prior year on the slide and you know and such as you know sharp uh rise in cip charge backs as well where does that reflect so the short answer is that reflects the increase in production we anticipate and are in the process of pushing out the door in the form of capital projects so it's getting more big roadway projects more of the capital projects and bond projects that have lingered in the past where staff was only capable of generally pushing out what you see here closer to 1.7 1.4 million dollars annually and we're effectively doubling and tripling the actual production at the same at the rate of increase that you're seeing here thank you and i'm just to add to the the transfers in i asked for this change to be made the budget because it was not readily apparent how much it was costing us to operate engineering um a lot of these uh funds have been kept in the transfers were just basically being held in other budgets uh utility funds that sort of thing i wanted the public the council to understand what it costs us to operate the engineering department so so i mean just if if i can uh paraphrase a little yeah yeah this uh this uh burst of activity is getting 2012 and 2014 projects done it's getting on top of the 25 of the roads that are important conditions yes done you know and more besides that's what we're that's right thank you for including that cost appreciate that it helps with the big picture all right any other questions on this line i don't know why you're moving way back over there so engineering budget highlights from an expenditure standpoint you're also going to see a reflection in the amount of personal services that go up that would be your salaries the personnel that we're currently hiring and have going towards projects actively engaged and then the facility to facilitate the folks that we need to bring on board to continue to perform this increase in escalation and pushing projects out the door effectively we could escalate the way we're pushing out projects but if you do that in a haphazard way you ultimately end up costing the city a lot more from the standpoint that we have failures or we have projects that run into issues out in the field price escalation we have change orders from lack of quality management in the field if a contractor is allowed to just perform whatever he wants to do a good contractor based on their maintenance their maintenance clauses their warranties that are included in the contract good contractors going to take care of themselves it's not to say every contractor will and it's not to say you won't run into mistakes in the field sometimes materials are not up to snap you a concrete mix that you thought was going to be one strength or hardness comes in totally different once it actually makes it to the site you don't find out till after the fact yes sir are you going to go well i'll just ask you a question so and i think it's in your next slide where you talk about your fte's sort of goes into the breakdown of personnel services operations this is for the engineering department is that right primarily on this slide or just this budget presentation yes so i don't help me understand what the operation what distingu ishes personnel services from the operations so from the operations side what we're talking about there are things that people would need to have in place to get their work done such as if we hire seven more inspectors we also need the subsequent equipment that goes with it we need vehicles we need the computers we need the boots and the heart the equipment they have to have to do their job hard hats and vests and all the things they need this this includes that ramping up of all those efforts in that operational amount plus you have the software we were talking about earlier to make things more transparent that project management project collaboration software that's also ruled up in that so would you say most of those are one-time expenses i mean i see the the historical context of operations which would be probably more of your ongoing but that would be primarily would you say 60 percent of that 80 percent of that something like that yes sir the overall budget if you take a look at that baseline number you get to the 8.1 we're not looking at 8.1 indefinitely it would actually be substantially less because that is in support of the new folks that are one-time expenditures and so when you get to the personnel i want to sort of link up your personnel chart with this chart with the last one you just showed as far as so but we'll get to that yes do you have a question yeah just you know occurred to me as following your line of reasoning you know if if a lot of that is one-time charges is some of that potentially maybe this might be a tony question able to be capitalized and is would there be any benefit in carrying that on the balance sheet rather than in the budget this way you know todd referred to you as sort of the what you call reliever or something so i wonder what your uh is it er a earn run average yeah i guess it's it's zero right now you're doing pretty good uh the the boy that just well hopefully i'll mess it up now i'm just teasing you tony i'm just okay all right i guess the short answer to that council member is that we actually are doing that we are capitalizing a portion of these operating dollars through through the direct labor charge to capital projects plus an additional markup and so again that markup will will vary from ear to ear depending on what the operator operational expenses may be now is it very specific items it's not it's in the aggregate but so my response to you is that we're already doing that just merely by the way that we're costing out um those engineering services so this is the part that can 't be capitalized so you're saying no what i'm saying is that when a portion of that is capitalized when we charge to those capital projects and add a markup to that in recognition of the benefits that are paid to those employees plus also the operating expenses and so again as as those operating dollars ebb and flow those charges to capital projects would ebb and flow as well i don't want to spend an awful lot of time on this i'll follow up with the offline church i don't think it'd be that fascinating for everyone all right any other questions on this slide so just to give you a brief snapshot you know we've we've looked at just on the previous two slides what the budget looked like for engineering services capital projects over the last several years last year the fy 1718 budget was established on an organization that looked like this chart right here you effectively had four business units that we were trying to manage with that budget and that was engineering in-house design we estimated revenues and our budget expenditures based on what this organization looked like engineering development review actually didn't report to us but they were in our business unit so they were external and internal all at the same point then you still had street operations drainage operations track out traffic operations is all consolidated into one group what we have morphed into is better recognition of each division's roles and responsibilities we have taken the city traffic engineer which had historically been housed in that engineering design group and set him up with the traffic operations group as well as giving them some additional capacity by bringing in a traffic engineer some assistance in just getting the day-to-day communication pieces together and then the bike ped coordinator was also added to that particular group they're all in related to those traffic considerations that they deal with on a daily basis then what had historically been that engineering in-house design group that group has split out into multiple functions and facets you have the inspections piece which is the quality control of delivering those projects you have a project delivery group with three right now project managers and then we have a fourth coming online here in the very near future to help us push the sheer magnitude of projects that we have out the door get them done and then you've got that engineering services group they are doing those other things the water model some small in-house design projects you know if we need an ada ramp and an intersection because of an issue or another that's the group we would call and say can you design that let's get it done quickly get it out the door quickly engineering development review is back in under the engineering group as well as uh the project management and real estate division all of those items listed in blue they're all business they're all divisions within business units or business units in the engineering group the white segments are also divisions within our department but they have separate funding sources as we talked about earlier streets operations and traffic will be following drainage was a part of the wastewater hpu some of the additions we're asking for coming into this next year we added is another hpu that's the traffic group traffic engineering so they show up for the first time here that group consists of our city traffic engineer another f te that will be the traffic engineer and then the bike ped coordinator that resides in that group you'll see that we reduce the engineering staff by one that's the traffic engineer moving to the traffic group the biggest increase is public works inspections to be able to tackle the sheer amount of work we're talking about delivering over the next three years for sure and as future debt programs come online and we continue to grow we don't see the need to reduce this level of interaction by our public works inspectors currently on a weekly basis they're trying to juggle between 56 and 70 projects primarily that has been development review projects there are two major capital projects and three or four minor capital projects on the street right now that's about to turn one of the biggest issues we have is if you just take the six active public works inspectors their manager and then our single right away inspector who's handling almost 500 to a thousand permits a year to try to stay on top of throughout the city of Denton they are not able to keep up with what they have effectively so what that means is is they're able to spend 15 to 25 minutes on a site so a public work inspector on a private development job would come by if they came by every day they would have only about 15 minutes to assess what's going on are we pouring concrete correctly are we back filling on the sewer lines and the wastewater line or water lines correctly if things being installed the way they should be so that we're not coming back within two or three years of the maintenance bond and spending city dollars to fix what should have been done right the first time if they can only capture that in 15 to 20 minutes on site and the contractor is there eight to 12 hours a day we're missing a lot what i've seen in most cities and as a benchmark that we go by is you for a minimum on the development projects we need our inspectors to be on site at least an hour a day per project for capital projects that the city owns wholly at least two hours a day that ensures that we deliver projects on time and we keep the cost down to a minimum council member husspeth and then council member robert thank you i know we had mixed in contractors to kind of bridge this gap so can you help me understand where we are currently with contractors and then with the increased number what do you see that i guess you can use percentages how do you see that mix so let me answer it this way so currently we have our two major capital projects mayhill and bonnie bray they still require an in- house public works inspector for formal decisions formal paper trails but there's a representative on site every day that we're paying the consultant or a contract third party to do there's a lot of value in that it makes sure that we don't miss things and when you're operating a project as large as those two projects it definitely makes sense on smaller projects million dollar project million and a half two million dollar project it doesn't make as much sense when i can still achieve the same goal using internal resources i just have to have the amount of resources to get there so this would bring us up to that point and the answer where you were going if i may so yes but at 15 you're still saying the larger if a larger project we would still need to contract that out while the 15 manage the other potentially okay that would be something you would evaluate based on the project and the project the project's overall magnitude thank you councilmembrometer so first i i want to preface my question by saying i strongly support um increasing the number of public works inspectors for all the reasons you say so how you answer this question does not affect you know my support of it one way or the other i'm just curious and i know that members of the public are curious as well to know have there been any any incidents in the recent past and if so just could you give briefly an example where uh the the paucity of inspectors has led to some sort of um oversight uh mistake expense in capital projects and again like i said even if the answer is no we haven't had that so far that that's a that's a good thing and it's better to be prepared for the future so just from a lack of capital projects out on the street of the magnitude we're talking about delivering over the next three to four years we haven't had that issue we don't want to run that risk i have multiple examples either as a project manager in other communities or in other communities where that has exactly happened when you don't have the contract or you don't have the inspector laying eyes on it things do happen that incur a great deal of cost to the project one of the causes that we've seen recently in the pavement failures where residential neighborhood streets have been built and shortly with that outside of the maintenance bond which is usually two years after they complete construction we're out having to rebuild parts of the street if not the whole street we don't know yet as we're still doing the investigation on what drove those costs what drove that to be what it was but there's a good likelihood that lack of inspection time on site could have been a cause thank you very much couple questions in private subdiv isions do we have a request do they get to make the election of either concrete or asphalt streets or do we typically i think the requirement is concrete for for private subdivision yes okay and so when i look at this is sort of tying those slides together that i was talking to you about so when i see the the primary increase is in your public works inspection so if you could go back to the personnel service charges so we have an increase there that's including all of them including the transfers yes sir and um okay and then so that's you got about a 1.6 million dollar a little less than that increase there 1.5 excuse me uh and that was over about 13 13 uh fts so if you go back to the previous slide before this is that the operations one yeah well the one where it shows operations right there so this 1.13 million so you're saying this is what's required or some of it or most of it to i'm assuming the traffic engineers and those that are being transferred already have the necessary tools that they i mean they're not additional staff they're so one of them does okay one and then the other ones are the the inspectors and they will all need vehicles i presume uh and things such as that yes so just to go back to council member melzer's question which i think this is where he's getting if not then forgive me but so i was a little confused when because this is in the budget but then i thought i heard that some of this budget cost will be is either is capitalized or will be capital ized and um so that's where i get confused if it's going to be capitalized or if it's capitalized what's the reason that would still show up here in the in the budget and i may have to go to the bull pen again in a minute but let me take a stab at it do you have an answer for that yes if you go back one more slide if you look at the cip charge backs that's what gets charged to capital projects so that's what 's being capitalized and that that's where your increase is coming from that's why i understood and that that's 3.1 million that comes from personnel time primarily people on on projects well i think we were talking about the operations time though the operations were it weren't so much personnel i don't think it was more equipment and things such as that yes i think i think part of what might be confusing here is that so on the expense side we're showing the full expense that's being offset by incoming revenue um into into that fund and so we're not netting those expenses um when we're capitalizing them if if that if that makes sense i'll have to get with you offline on that too yeah because i i don't i don't i mean that's that's an accounting con i don't i don't there's a lot more detail behind this and so yeah i 'll just talk with you about it yes sir yeah that's not a problem okay any other questions where we were uh we do have uh i'm sorry i do have a question yes if you go back to the revenues were the inspection fees uh uh public work inspection right so if we're doing it like i looked at the developments going across on bonnie br ay yes and looked at some of the the paperwork on that you know the public paperwork and it showed inspection fees of a certain amount of money sure so that's the money that developers pay to try and offset our our costs for those inspectors is that is that is that what those that fees primarily for or what yes so there's typically a one to three percent charge on the construction value of the project for the time for public works inspectors on the public works piece of the project right so it covers their time on site to make sure that that's put in place correctly so then my question becomes because we do these cost of services review and if the public works inspectors yes are doing both city public work inspecting and private public work inspecting have we determined or have we done a study that shows that at least for the private portion of the inspection services that we are collecting sufficient funding to cover the inspections for the private public work inspection as far as the study we have not that would be something we 'd be engaging in this year okay both from the engineering development review side and the public works inspection side historically the intake of fees has covered our operations on the public works inspection side but as we grow the group to more people it may not so that is another item that we have to make sure we look into this year and have a better understanding exactly what those fees need to be well i think that's important because what i've heard you say is that these fees may be based upon covering the department in previous years but that coverage was wholly inadequate to really i think provide the kind of inspections that would give us a better assurance or confidence as far as in the private and even for our own inspections so then as we try to make it more consistent with maybe best practices then that means that those fees probably will will need to increase to cover those costs of services is that potentially good yes okay all right any other questions before he moves on that's your last slide i'm kidding you i'm not no it's not i'm very close i'm teasing you very i'm kidding no this is good good good discussion some engineering development reviews similar you have folks on staff that are working 120 hours a week just trying to keep up with the demand we are seeing higher demand and development projects coming through the city than we've had in the past and we are looking to augment that group we're asking for three fte's but we're looking to augment that group with a consultant that would help us to define are those three fte's all we really need does it need to be something totally different that's an area that's pretty gray as far as how much time really goes into that we know people are killing themselves to try to make that deliverable but we're looking at alternative ways to get there and reinvent that process council member melzer yeah um mr city city managers is what we're seeing here part of uh your initial you know work up that was within the effective rate or is this part of you know what might lead us to you know go beyond the effective rate uh this this is all contained within the effective rate the only the only things that would require us to go above their effective rate would have been the capital projects and the bond package that we had recommended okay so this is all and i do want to reiterate what todd just said the is the council's aware we've spent a lot of time pulling apart our processes and putting them back together with building inspections planning engineering development review is the last of that three-legged stool that needs to be addressed and we are in the process of kind of taking those processes apart bringing in a firm that kind of has got much more expertise in this area than the city does and helping us with some recommendations and a staffing plan moving forward but this is probably the one area that many of you when you get calls from developers about being hung up in our process is it starts right here and it's kind of getting them out of that initial gate so this is a huge initiative we've got a work session coming up in august for you to better bet this out for you you know i had a comment that uh this is the stuff that you know citizens have started to view as like the symbol of our inability to deliver you know our basic functions and i'm very excited uh at the prospect of thinking about what this meeting will be like uh any year well and i want to say and i want to echo the city manager 's comments that most of the concern in the development community has been and that's not a criticism it's not a you know trying to say people aren't doing a good job it's just a matter that we may not have enough uh personnel to cover it and you can only push people so far in in their work environment and then you begin a point of diminishing return so i really want us to i mean i really want us to take a look at this to make sure that we get the people we need because and this was brought up in the last meeting the better economic development that we have and and i'm not even talking about incentives i'm just talking about the the more robust economic development that we have which means getting projects in getting them on the ground getting completed getting the tax revenue the faster and the more relief we will provide in our tax rates where the the i think council member hussbuff you brought it up about shifting some of the you know if you get more strong economic development projects you are able to dilute that residential tax base so as we reverse that kind of perception that we we can't do it um the city's sort of very difficult and we're always gonna have some people are always going to say that because i hear them say it in other communities where i've heard people say oh look at other they're doing it and i hear developers talk about no they're not but so i really would encourage that we i'd hate to come back in six months and say we needed an additional two or three people so that's not to say change it i just really want to encourage you to get the people you need to get the job done so that you know we can hear about this part of the process like we've heard on other parts of the process like it's getting better we feel much more confident and and this is one of those last pieces of that puzzle absolutely then the only other increase on the fte's is in the real estate department currently we have a manager and five land agents we are the increase that you see there is we have three intern positions that we're consolidating into one and that 's a gis technician to better facilitate us acquiring properties keeping track of where that status of that property is and moving forward yes councilmember hudspeth can you touch on so new hires i mean i've been to the to your office regularly what does that look like layout wise i mean do we do we we've found homes we're planning on success let's hope so we found homes for people what does that look like um so the service center told we don't need more office space by some people here so i just want to understand what that looks like so the service center is definitely getting tight and and there is an effort to look at the renovation of that entire facility that facility was originally built in the early mid 80s has been around to service really field crews and staffing that were substantially less than what we have now we've been operating in that environment for 30 years now and we are outgrowing the space definitely but we are finding ways to get everybody in there find effective ways to get everybody in there and then we're utilizing some space in other places for instance i instance our real estate division is over at the development services annex so it does require some effort on our part to make sure we all stay in touch but we're doing what we can regarding the space constraints we have and that uh that rehab and expansion of the of the workspace is included in the proposed debt package that we discussed last week so that really needs to get done they're running out of space and the conditions over there pretty poor but the and if i may so those yes but those sync up yes so so if we can get the dollars appropriated and get rolling by the time we source we we yeah or kind of shift around yeah mr kanzar is already working on an rfp to uh to bring somebody on board and we've got somebody on board actually it's going to be looking at this project and uh with your with the the debt funding that we're proposing we'll be able to get this under construction the next year but yeah it needs to be done and part of part of the strategy also if you recall was to move materials management and um out of that building and free up some additional space which can be recaptured into better workspaces and more workspaces yes councillor milter so just to clarify the the it that needs to be done is the uh as i recall the 14 million dollars associated with the uh the service center new service center we're not talking we're not talking about city hall annex here no these people no okay thank you all right now we're at the last slide okay yeah okay all right questions comments thank you very much appreciate it so streets is up next is that correct are you streets as well no i'm going to bring that guy in the food over there okay all right afternoon council my name is uh danny kramer deputy director of operations streets and drainage so street departments here's some of our accomplishments that we've had over the past year i've divided these up into both internal and external on how we've how we've historically uh presented these numbers has been usually we have two contract um construction crews that work with us so they do a lot of stuff and we've can we've put all those together yes sir oh sorry so what we did is uh broke these out to actually show what our internal crews versus our contract work will be doing over the next uh over the past years so as you can see on our street reconstruction uh this is our year-to-date number uh we're looking at about 4.2 and all these are um lane miles here to you on those so our target is 12 uh what we're looking at is after we get hick ory and everything done we will be up yes sir if you could once again state a lane mile is what just one lane yes sir one lane so it's 10 feet wide and it's a mile in length so uh the reason we like using those versus a segment is because a segment is usually a block uh some blocks are longer than others so it's a more consistent way of measuring and centerline miles which is another term is if it's a four lane road that's just considered you know a mile long even though it's four lanes but that would be four lane miles right if it was okay all right good that's helpful thank you yes sir um so internally you know our in our reconstruction we're looking at the target of 12 uh we will be getting you know closer to nine by the end of getting hickory and we should be um and malone street finishing up we should get pretty close to our our target on that for this year uh milling overlay um same with that our target on that is actually uh 15 so we will be uh bringing that up and uh as we finish up here in the next uh month and a half and also asphalt and base failures um a lot of those have come up with some of the issues in some of the streets and everything else we've had to go out and do some extra work that wasn't planned on and reallocate some of our funds to doing the base failures that wasn't originally planned daniel just a real quick question uh with this type of heat does that affect asphalt roads or do they just get a little oily i mean it doesn't affect maybe the the capacity or just the functionability of that or does it i mean i'm just curious as as we i mean because we're does that increase our costs i guess not typically i mean it can if you're in a segment of roadway that doesn't have curb and gutter on the sides because what ends up happening is if you think of asphalt it's it's very it's pretty much a tar and as tar heats up it will expand and as it expands and doesn't have a boundary to stop it from expanding it will get thinner and thinner and thinner and it causes more wear on the roadway so you can see that to happen now we put curb and gutter on the side of the road and it helps lock it in place so that it can't do that right just curious and if you don't know it i just i'll get with you offline that seems to be the phrase of the day at what temperature does that begin to happen where the asphalt or the tar begins to either liquefy or get to where if it doesn't have a boundary it can tend to spread out do you have any idea what what so it's more varying degrees even if it's cold outside it still flows it is it is just a very slow flowing material okay so it still can do it no matter all right fair enough just the hotter it gets the the quicker it happens okay all right thank you very helpful thanks okay now we move on to the accomplishments for some of our contracts which right now jago public holds that contract so they're the contract that's working on most of this so on our reconstruction they're actually sitting at a 7.73 lane miles and with by the time we get done we should be sitting over our 10 lane mile target for them and as we start getting into as i'll go farther in on how we're repurposing and getting more away from all these reconstruction projects their numbers go quite a bit up on what they'll be doing over the next year crack seal which is another one we contract out just because those guys can come in get a lot more done we've got 83 excuse me done already and our target was 60 so we are looking at bringing that that number up over the next next year to actually get more streets done and get some more in there and crack seal as in my other presentation a month or so ago is with the first process in your basic maintenance so then you go into your micro seal and as i realize this year to date that 57 lane miles is incorrect on that and i apologize for not updating it it was some of the issues we had with getting the contract out in time and we we missed our window in doing it when it was cooler because micro seals is one of our operations that when it gets too hot you have too many issues of putting it down so those are going to be pushed back to later in the right now we're kind of looking September time frame but we do have enough that we can double it so we'll include this year and next year's so we will make our complete target but it'll be pushed back a little bit on that okay sidewalks also we've pushed forth our effort on that and done a lot more our normal go on that is about two miles so we have completed so far three and a half and we got you know quite a bit more and sidewalks in miles not in land miles yes so question about the previous slide so does this sidewalk mileage does that cover new sidewalk and sidewalk reconstruction or a sidewalk reconstruction included in that larger reconstruction what um how this is divided is um pre-tam who will be up here next and pedestrian he does the new sidewalk bundles he works with those um this right here is in sidewalk repairs and in some very small segments that we've done as we repair the road we'll do those and we do have some sidewalk bundles that are coming up in the next next year and those will be full projects that will be capitalized and we'll go through big um gaps that we have in the city and fill those in another question that actually just came up yesterday and i know this is a uh question that something that affects citizens when the city repairs a road or does something to the road that ends up um having to uh cover over the house numbers in a residential neighborhood you know the numbers that are printed on the curb is it the homeowner that who is responsible to cover the expense of having those repainted or does the city there would be an expense in my understanding and if you want to answer this one so typically if there's something that any one of our crews whether it's in house or contract crew disturbs that would not have been part of the normal job but they disturbed it it was not incidental the project then the city would replace that if it's not incidental the project say you had an accident that occurred in your sprinkler system but we just happen to be out there it had nothing to do with the construction we were doing then that would obviously be at the homeowners expense and not the cities thanks any more questions on these so for 1819 uh what we're looking at is to maximize the use of our contractors in order to get our our programs back on in line what we're doing now is currently our crews we do have a reconstruction crew who does a lot of our projects around town and we do have issues with you know we have a lot of um non-oci activities so those include pothole repairs those incur curb and gutter some sidewalk repairs and everything that we do all around the city so we have to keep ourselves more on smaller projects so we have the ability to mobilize and get these projects done throughout the year and get these smaller ones here and there so we're moving more towards contract work to do the big reconstruction projects so we can give them a timeline they're set down here's when you start here's what you finish and they just can sit there and knock it out so that's what we're going to be doing now in we're going to be working on increasing our overlay activities base failure repairs and micro seal programs and prepping those so that we can keep our maintenance as we discussed before you know our big issue with the way that our streets are is we don't have a very well-rounded maintenance program to keep everything where it needs to be you know we're sitting 25 of our streets are below 45 so when you hit 40 45 40 is when it goes into reconstruct mode and there's no point in really doing much until you can go through and just reconstruct the whole street now everything above that you know we have excuse me crack seal and you know what that does is first step to micro seal but it also keeps all the moisture out of the soil so we don't have the base for base failures and everything then you got the micro seal which we can just put on that can last you know anywhere from five to seven years depending on our traffic and how much we have on that street and then you know our overlays as we're rebuilding our streets currently a lot of the streets are old here in denton and a lot of the problems is they don't have enough asphalt on them to really do an overlay on them so we can't do the good maintenance on them you know some of them only have two to four inches of asphalt on them and when there's not enough there to go over and do that now as we're putting the roads back we're putting eight inches or more on it depending on where it's at and that allows us to come through take the new surface off and then go back and do an overlay and that allows us to actually extend the life of the road so and as we've seen we use our our pavement studies to go through we'll have another one coming up around 2020 to go through and revamp and make sure that all of our numbers are where they say and using the software to plan everything out as we go you know some of our um oci activities our backlog is sitting at 233 miles now which is 742 segments and your backlog is any road below a 40 oci and that just puts it directly in your reconstruct 40 45 is a very thin line that you might not have to do any work you might still be able to save it and with us having excuse me you know 1300 almost 1400 lane miles and that is as we are current we'll have new subdivisions coming online and any of the new text out roads if we take over those that will increase our lane miles as we go right there so that's you know 3500 segments with that um to keep them above 40 so i'll bring this up again just kind of showing kind of where we're at for our our minor maintenance major maintenance and reconstruct our internal crews our focus is going to be on the minor and the major maintenance from what we can and then we're going to outs ource all of our reconstructs and bundle all those projects together to actually get us some better pricing and to get these projects out the door quicker and be able to finish all these on time and if you look at the breakdown on how we have everything you know out of our almost 1400 lane miles of roadway you know 842 of those lane miles are in our residential areas and then 224 are our interior and 252 are in collectors and you can see the percentages of how we have everything broken down into our our backlogs in each area so some of this is um the way we've been yes go ahead yeah do you mind going back just i'm trying to reconcile like backlog i believe is how you're referring to the uh the lane miles that are below 40 40 yes 40 which on the previous slide it looked like it's about 25 percent of the of the 20 25 percent under 45 now i know that can get confusing i and i apologize for that the the 40 and the 45 difference is the current um calculations that we had on the the software that we're using uses 40 instead of 45 and we will keep that clear from going now forward but in order to get all these numbers worked out and the math and i'll share some of that with you so we can actually show a good breakout i had to use the the 40 number and for that well uh maybe maybe that maybe that is the answer to the question i wasn't hung up on 40 versus 45 okay uh i was hung up on 25 percent being the backlog and here i'm seeing 17 percent and maybe the difference is yes sir the 40 versus the 45 yes we're sitting at exactly 17.7 percent so 18 percent backlog 18 percent or below 40 a pull of 40 and then there's another smidge you know that the difference between that and 25 is between 40 and 45 let's see i and then and then are you going to share with us uh what oci this brings this this program will bring dentin to what i um i don't have it in slide i apologize for that but i can send it out afterwards and we do have that information on the way the budget's broken down now correctly right now and i we can go into this now or we can wait till we get to the slide on how much wait i'll wait yeah yeah if you got a slide on it yeah it'll it'll be more of a conversation on that but you know as i talked before you know uh cost containment strategies making sure we outsource as many as we can for the reconstruct and then keeping our crews as maintenance which will allow us to be able to move back and forth get the small repairs done where needed some of these small transportation projects right turn lanes and stuff that we're adding here and there will be where our crews focus were is and on all of the maintenance as we go forward so kind of what we're looking at is you know this is on all the bids that we have going for process improvements we have looking to the the best way that we can run run the department and we're working with the p mo and purchasing to make sure that all the contracts that we put out we have a good tracking system in them so that we can verify where all the contracts are keep everything up to date and everything moving forward so we don't have any of these some of these holdups that we we've had in the past with us not being able to get our our contracts through and having to rush stuff through so that that'll fall back on us tracking everything and making sure that we're where we're at when we need to we're also working on bundles as i said you know we got windsor hinkle magnolia drainage project um is coming coming up and then we got london area pays le ases just some of them and we've also gone through our whole list with the increased in funding the 11 and a half million that we went back and we've went through every single list and tried to get as many bundles as we possibly can and we're working through engineering right now of getting those so that we can go out to bid on those and get those projects running faster and get everything taken care of for those so as you see in our our budget our our ending number here is what we'll be looking for is right at 15 million now our basic breakdown as i said before we have oci and non-oci activities so based on past history we've been sitting right at close to four million dollars and what we 've been spending in non-oci activities we're looking to be four and a half um 4.8 million as we're coming up in the next year that we'll spend on non-oci curbs gutters sidewalks pothole repairs emergency services and everything else so that leaves us roughly 10 million dollars that will go to towards oci pardon while i look at my notes here i don't have all these numbers memorized so as we look at this we're going to be going if if we go for one year the 10 million dollars and i've already included all the extra bond projects that we already plan on getting ready and taking care of it so that money is not in any of this by the end of the year we should be at a roughly a 65 and by the end of a five year program we should be sitting at a 68 if we have roughly 10 million dollars on average going into oci activities now the more we increase that you know we've heard discussions as you know what number do we want to get to you know if we were in to invest 15 million in oci we could get up to a 72 in five years you know 20 million a 20 million a year over five years 77 or up to 25 million would be roughly an 80 over five years in different time so what this is is and the goal is not just to get the oci hire but to reduce the backlog when we're sitting at 18 we don't have the ability the streets are falling off into 40 or below before we have a chance to actually get to them and do the maintenance so the goal is to get everything below 10 percent so at a 10 million budget and after five years that'll put us at 68 and it's still at a 15 percent 15 backlog in order to get us really into a good standing 15 million in oci will put us at 72 and a 9 backlog which at that point is where it becomes manageable now we can as we go forward that gap we can look at bond programs and throw in capital into it for that because those will be our reconstructs which we'll be sending out for projects but roughly as we're going forward we're looking at you know in order to get us under control 15 million dollars for about five years to get us under a 10 backlog and to put us at you know a 72 on our oci rating first streets yes sir go ahead sure i just want to make sure i'm tracking so you're saying we're you're proposing 10 but but you're describing the results that 15 would get right you know we're not actually you're not actually proposing right now with what it is what we're looking forward to is you know the influx it's going to take us over this next year getting the crews back in reorganizing the organization making sure everything's where it needs to be and go in and as in next year i just wanted to give a little bit of preface to kind of where we 're at and what we're looking because i know the oci scores has been important where we're at so i wanted to talk on that just a little bit as we were going through yeah so i mean and you know i think i know what the answer is but i don't think it's been expressed so with the recommended program what oci do we get to over five years maybe you said it went by fast or something so just to make sure we're we're all clear on what we're proposing is that if we keep the current budget as we've had over the last several years which is 15 million dollars total 10 million of that would go into these reconstruction activities that actually bring the oca up if you maintain the current rate over the next five years we're only going to bring the average oci throughout the city up to a 68 by incrementally increasing to 20 million overall 15 million for reconstruction and 5 million still in the maintenance that over five years that would bring us to an average oci of 72 does that make sense now i'm following you i don't know that you know everyone would necessarily understand what's the difference on the ground between having a 67 or 68 and a 72 as i recall 70 is where good starts right yes we look at it from the standpoint of you will notice 70 and above being a roadway that doesn't have many potholes that doesn't have a lot of und ulations in the pavement it's not very noisy you might hear some and that's where we would be putting in some minor what we would call minor rehab the mills and overlays things like that we could do fairly quickly and return it to a good quality roadway but even then if you know we're talking about average oci right so that if if we're at an average of just below good you know half are less than that half are correct right that's correct although uh and i'm not saying this and it sounds kind of condemnatory but i'm just trying to characterize it i think it also matters what the range is around the average right it's my uh as my grandfather used to say if you have a horse has four legs a person has two on average they have three doesn't that's very informative right but if so so this is where backlog becomes important exactly yeah so backlog are really horrible if you're really that's probably the best place to go with backlog is absolutely that if you look at it now you're talking 20 to 25 percent depending on where you draw the line 40 and ocf 40 or 45 is in bad shape bad enough shape that i've got to tear up everything go all the way down to the very bottom the foundation of the roadway the subgrade and rebuild the whole thing versus just doing some we're gonna grind down the top put down a new layer of asphalt and let's move on or i'm just gonna put a little layer or top coat on top of concrete and smooth it back out there's some things we can do that are less expensive over time to keep there i just wonder you know perceptually when people say the roads in denton are terrible are they experienced and i don't know this is not a question you can answer rhetorical question you know i wonder if they're experiencing that 25 percent of really horrible roads that are distributed all over the map that you're bound to bump into on just about any ride you take they are and and if you take a look at where the oci breakdown actually comes into play the category of street that has the worst oci on average throughout the entire street are the more highly traveled roads there are collectors naturally are minor arterials you hit them whether you want to or not because let's say you go on the way home and they've been around a long time so they've taken a lot of wear and tear over time those are the roadways we're talking about it it's not the the carol boulevard and by and large it's not a lot of your neighborhood streets it's the roadways you have to leave your good roadway to get on to another roadway to get where you want to go well where this takes me is is there a different way to balance it so that you really get very aggressive on the backlog and accept you know like could we shift it even a little more to you know maybe not as stellar an overall oci but a very small backlog like it's can we go even do you think there's another balance point that tips it even further in the direction of almost no terrible roads could you get there sure well anything possible yeah i mean the biggest issue that i keep looking at from a funding standpoint if you could get to steady state yeah where a lot of cities like to try to get is if i can stay at a 10% backlog or less that really defines my next debt program those the only part so national of the overall city streets that i want to put into a debt program and the other 90 plus of the roadways are purely operations and maintenance from their maintenance through overall through the minor maintenance and the major maintenance standard o and m funding i'm only going to debt fund those really bad roads how do i marginalize that as much as possible and that's where we'd like to get as quickly as possible which is why i think you're trying to go but you can't shift from one to the other it's two different pots council member ryan when you were looking at the fact that for five million on general repairs and 10 million going to oci and franchise fees makes up the majority of this and i think we had was it a 10-year plan to transfer all did you take that into account when you were looking at your five year you said if we stayed at that 15 million is that have you included adding that every year yes that would we're assuming the baseline budget that you have right now and then if we incrementally added say another five million on top of that through some other resource whether it's general fund or something else then i could get a step closer to achieving those goals over five years so you did take in on that budget account you were accounting over those five years for that i think it's around 600 some thousand dollars a year i think the i think the thing that in why you're you're hearing i'm kind of running in place once it gets to 68 is inflation's largely eroding the increase in the franchise fee so you know the strategy has been to clean out these the 2012 and 14 bond packages we made we pitched to you last meeting trying to make the residential streets whole from the last bond packages which is another 100 or 125 segments once we can get those cleaned out to to start working on the next bond package and and also continue to try to identify additional funding but there's just no way to get there right now ultimately the 15 million without significantly altering either current service levels in other departments or raising taxes and we wanted to be sure that we could deliver on those bond packages and get those cleaned out i mean we've got one obviously that's six years old the other one that's four and i'll be a huge you know commend todd he's been here what 10 months now and you know we've been able to get the you know applying in place and get you know the design back on track and the staffing there's been just a huge amount of work that's been done but we really need to clean those packages out and make sure that we've got the adequate staffing to do all this and then continue identifying strategies moving forward well i think this is great i think it's a great plan i was involved in this council many years ago when we first started doing this and it looked a heck of a lot worse than it does now and so i really appreciate the hard work and the diligence for staff your staff for city management to to put together some plan that says hey we're on our way and i think as we see when mayhill bonnie bray hickory some of these where we're doing major capital projects of utility reconstruction because hickory is probably one of those that's you know bonnie bray in some segments is probably some of you know that's south of 35 or even south of scripture so i think this is a this is a great first step in really being able to stay within i think the recommended budget to get us on a plan to get to 68 because i think back when we were all talking about this we were our plan was 68 or 70 or 72 or something like that and now we have a pathway that is at least it's close to doable and i and again this oci i appreciate your question councilmember melzer because it 's it's that's a number somebody has assigned based upon some kind of methodology but it's you know what does it feel like to drive over the road i mean that that's really and and i so i i appreciate that standard of measurement because you got to have something but i don't know if i want to hang a 15 million dollar budget on the three letter symbol that you know is hard to define it's it's been developed by somebody that you know you got to have standards i understand that but i really appreciate the the diligence and hard work and and why it doesn't sound like we're making much progress this is a tremendous amount of progress based upon the historical context of this so thank you thank you so much for that and and it's it's it's it's strikeable and then if the community wants to have more bond programs for getting rid of that backlog getting us back to just sort of a base level of okay now we've got enough maintenance we just got to repair these things that are really dragging this quote-unquote number down uh that's something that the citizens have available to them and can make a choice on that so i i appreciate it i'm i think it's a i think it's a very good workable plan for what we're trying to accomplish thank you sir so again just the budget highlights as in you know our maintenance budget which is really consist of just anything we need to work on all the materials and all the equipment everything you're going through there so it's the same song and dance pretty much we just went through um as for our total uh positionary summary we're looking at a total of 46 we're not looking at you know increasing any for this year keeping everything the same is what we have um here's our organizational chart um as you can see you know we have our different uh crews down here you have uh two crews for reconstruction two for mill and overlay and concrete and p.m crews so what we're going to be looking at is you know over the course of the year we'll be changing our reconstruct crews into more towards our maintenance either in filling some gaps in the mill and overlay or going into our smaller p.m crews and working those guys into those different areas we 've had a few different um train of thoughts on the best way to do this and we're working with the teams to make sure that we can get these the best you know we can run it like a construction crew where we got you know you got your your paver crew you got your demo crew and you know they can just follow each other along and everybody works specifics or we can have a whole entire crew that just goes to a job and stays on the job we're weighing the um the pros and cons of each and looking at the best way that we can utilize our time and make the uh the best gains as we go forward go ahead um i know i know you've responded to me in writing but i i'd like to hear it maybe others would too can you tell me about what the difference is between a street superintendent and a street's operation manager and just to be you know you know open it optically it looks a little funny to have one person report to one person and i do agree with that as we've been looking through our our org chart um originally uh the street superintendents was also over drainage and traffic at one point and they were moved over into the streets because uh you know that's where their expertise that's where they've they've started at they have a lot of knowledge in there and um a lot of tribal knowledge and they're very good with that now what we're doing in return to that is the street's operation manager we're changing stuff around um we're going to be working on them as more of a planning manager and um kind of be pulled out some and mostly reporting directly to myself and what we're looking at for that range is it's going to be uh verifying that all these schedules are correct um the biggest thing is to get everything out there and we have to have um the day to back it up we have to have as i've showed you before our um timelines and everything set up so that we know where our guys are going when they're going and how we're going to be working on that so the operations manager is going to be turned into a planning manager and that's going to really help us to be able to make sure that all of our guys and that's also working with the outside construction crews to help manage those on our contracts because what we're doing with them is we're going through and we're giving them the bundles the groups that we're working on and saying okay here here's where everything is here's what you have and they're putting their rough draft of their schedule on uh we're giving their timelines when when they need to make it and they're putting them together and how they should and we're managing their schedules and making sure they fit with ours and they work with that and the crews are all working uh together to get our goal done so so in reality is uh who do the supervisors in reality really report to for direction the manager or the superintendent because the description sounds like the manager is kind of a resource to the superintendent yeah yes the manager goes in he does a lot of the the ground and the planning on that and um that's the main uh report to your errors they go through go ahead sorry to get way into your business but you know it looks a little fun well and part of what we're we're trying to adjust to is that change in strategy that we're looking at with internal crews one of the strengths of our internal crews whether it's water wastewater streets stormwater is that they can be pulled and pushed and pulled where we need them to go to address whatever is the highest priority target like some of our small transportation projects that were recently approved for funding or the ones that were approved last year we transition our crews to what they're really good at what they're not best suited for is us sticking them on a project that has a long-term schedule like hickory one of the downfalls of hickory is is that crew made me needed to go say when we had bell the water main on bell break earlier this year i gotta pull them off hickory because i need all hands on deck to go take care of this issue they're constantly getting pulled that way if i can keep them on shorter time frame projects and more focused on that we use them where they're really strongest and then use the contractor to really achieve the aim of what are all those planned projects that i can push together multiple segments of roadways put that on the contractor to go take himself out there on the ground for long periods of time and get that done the operations planning effort is coordinating between all those work orders that are those high priority small transportation projects coordinating that with the similar projects that are going on a water wastewater and those crews and then looking at how much of that work also needs to be contracted out so that that really is an arm that as we start trying to get our arms wrapped around oci long term it needs more time and effort put into it so that we really can give you the best possible answers on how to get there does that answer your question okay so i have a question i don't know who who would answer this so i want to make sure i understand sort of this shift in philosophy based upon the org chart so i see the crew field service supervisor for reconstruct yes and that reconstruct means what because my understanding is with bond programs you can't you can't finance maintenance and those kinds of things with bond programs it has to be reconstruction or new construction so in our bond programs are currently are are these reconstruct crews doing let's let's say street x was approved in the 2014 bond so we've got a crew we got contractors doing it but then we got a crew out there doing street x based upon the bond program in some cases yes i mean a good lion's share of the 2014 bond and 2012 street segments that have been completed so far have been done by in-house crews but they've also been done by contract crews so you've had what we've had historically no and that that answers my question i don't want to get get us off so then help me understand if i'm seeing this right or help me understand why i'm not seeing it right so a bond a bond issuance for street x we get the money to do that reconstruction that money either goes to pay a contractor or it goes to pay street crews so and this is really an account it might be an accounting thing but i'm really trying to understand this because what i'm hearing you say is we're going to take this reconstruct crew these two crews and instead of them doing reconstruction some of it having to do with the bond program we're going to move them over to do more of the mill and overlays the oci kind of components of what our streets need is that they will be doing some of that also these small transportation projects that we have been funding okay which are complete reconstruct projects we will do those or they'll be adding on to a project that like adding a right turn lane or a left turn lane or doing a full reconstruct of an intersection if it's a high priority target we may go do that now with those crews instead of going through the bid process okay so that that's so because my thought was if we're moving two crews from reconstruction primarily to oci related and non oci related projects well that means we're going to be hiring someone else to do the reconstruction and that money comes from the bond proceeds this is the only way i know how to say it we got 15 million dollars represented up here on this slide right x number of those dollars and and we're saying in the budget we're saying 10 million of that will be oci related and 5 million will be non oci related and that the org chart representing that strategic shift will look different than this the labels will be different reconstruct will be something else it'll be a combination of those two things or something they'll still be a construction crew right there still will be so to me that it seems like there would be an increase even because you got 15 million dollars here but some of that was for reconstruction these crews were doing reconstruction i don't know what that would be one or two million or something like that so this is we got the same number of same amount of revenue but because we're now saying we've got these two crews that even if they did 50 oci and 50 the other we've just increased our capacity and the funding for the reconstructed these crews were doing are coming from outside of streets budget am i is that not correct accounting or i mean i'd rather do it on the whiteboard because i think it's a little too confusing but because we're shifting we're saying if they did two million dollars a year in reconstruction work in our budget they're doing reconstruction work which i don't know how they could do that if it's bond funded but so i think i'm it's an accounting thing i'm struggling with i think mayor the difference here is that these crews do not charge those capital projects and so so the costs for these crews are already included as operating expenses within this budget so there is no charges over capital project for labor for these folks and so again that decision was made so that we wouldn't diminish the amount of bonds that are out there or dilute the amount of bonds that are out there well do uh that there's a couple other aspects to that as well so that i don't want it to get too far off the point there is a significant amount of reconstruction work that also gets done using operations and maintenance funding so part of what we have you mean for streets yes okay i don't i know transportation signal lights and all that i'm i'm primarily trying to say right so let me lay a scenario for you so in 2012 we basically selected streets based on an oci and worse then in 2014 there was a recognition that we had more but there was also an attempt when they were selected to say okay well in 2012 we just kind of took the list and said from here down it's bad so we got to do them we didn't look at the map and go well this one's here and this one's here and everybody in between kind of gets left out in the cold and i still got a road that while it may not be 40 or less it may be going that direction it may be a 60 or maybe a 55 and instead of impacting the neighborhood in multiple times you know multiple debt programs over time we're gonna do the whole project so there is an infusion of o and m money that goes into making those complete projects and not just and i get that and i think that's i think i think and and i might have to get with you and try to understand this a little bit better but i think you could um because if we got 15 million dollars now and some of it is crew is is street reconstruction i think i like things clean if we got a bond program i really don't think our budget o and m should be i mean i think we need to charge the bond program even though we're saying we don't want to diminish those bond funds but what we're doing is we're exchanging one problem for another we're saying we're going to go ahead and do that and this isn't a criticism this is just me trying to understand that so if we're moving these crews to over to transportation projects and oci related things that means we're going to have to start charging the bonds which i'm because that gives a real clear picture of what the cost is and i think it allows us to we're shifting money from reconstruction to oci so this would be my anticipation if this chart represents 10 million dollars of oci and part and which is oci which this field service reconstruct they are not part of that they are not part of that maintenance component from what unless i'm hearing this wrong that they're they're doing reconstruction but they're not charging the bonds so that it's coming out of o and m funding the budget is that let me get with you because this is very technical but i i really want to understand this because i think it's i think they've all understand what i'm saying yes and and to answer your question is that this has been probably one of the biggest sources of discussion for with todd and i is this crew had their foot in each each pack each funding package so there was initially a recognition a few years ago that the the costs were escalating there wasn't enough money in the bond package and the crews were planning to take on more and more of the bond package to offset that cost of inflation which would reduce our oci related funding yes and so what happened what would eventually happen is that they get moved around so much because of emergencies that these projects were taking so long we were losing even more purchasing power so we've basically redirected them to the oci related projects as well as those small the small quick win projects which you've basically approved another six million dollars in the last two years they did the shady shores right turn lane they did the one at ryan road that they're there when we can focus them on small short-term projects like that in addition to the oci work that's where they're maximally efficient and we've been able to then bundle these other projects in the bond packages to try to our best offset the cost of inflation by getting better pricing so we've just simply redirected them based upon where their proficiency is i understand that but but what i heard was the five-year forecast was if we keep 10 million dollars and we're focused primarily on the dollar aspect 10 million dollars of funding on oci this is where we're going to get but now maybe it did but what i'm hearing is right now we 're at that same place sort of around 10 million a little less oci funding but we also have some of those personnel who are under the streets budget off doing reconstruction which has an oci component but that's not how we're labeling we're not labeling new construction or reconstruction as an oci related it helps it but it's not part of the budget process so if they are going to go over and start doing 50 oci and 50 transportation then i we're still spending the same amount of money but we're getting more people doing oci related activities so my hunch is your oci is going to be higher because your your revenue your expenses aren't going up but what you've got is people coming over that are doing more of that work instead of being constructed over here because the the streets was paying for this reconstruction and now those crews it's not costing us any more money but their function is shifting their function is going from street reconstruction to oci so now you have more people doing oci related things in the coming years based upon this paradigm so capacity increases yes so that's why i don't know if that was taken into consideration i think it's been primarily a number issue but you're saying we are going to be able to increase the people doing oci work without changing the dollars we'll definitely go back and take a look at that number and give you a make sure that we didn't miss it i mean no i i think i think unless i'm somebody just explaining to me where i'm wrong if you're not wrong you're articulating our vision i think i think i think we're i think where we're struggling with right now is we need a year or two to pull it off but okay you very well so you're saying we might we might be able to do this expanding the pie without expanding the cost yes and it's we we need to be sure we can pull it off in the next year or two and then you may be right we may be a little bit low we 're not sure yet okay well i'm just trying to figure out how we can no you 're yeah okay this is exactly the conversations we've been okay yes councilmember so help me because listening to that conversation and what i have in my mind is that though when you say bonds from those years they may be lingering but there's what number are we talking about because and what when i look at it i think we've absolutely missed the boat we previous administrations that sort of thing and and that money is all coming out of the same pool at this point like it's been spent or you're saying there's a minimal amount left my understanding is the cost of inflated the delays that has eroded that number to where it's you're not going to get those bonds are done you know and we got as much done as we could i would say the initial plan for those bonds i can't comment on the accuracy of the estimates to get the work done but the plan for those bonds we as we showed you last week we're about 11 and a half million dollars short on the residential streets and that's for 125 segments we've also had to significantly pare back bonnie bray and one of our other large projects so to be honest with you we're probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 to 60 million dollars short out of those two bonds what was initially envisioned but again i can't speak to the accuracy or the methodology used in how the projects were actually funded and the promises were made at that time so we've we basically are going as far as we possibly can on the major arterials with that money we know we're it's well short by at least 50 or 60 million and we're trying to make those residential streets whole in this upcoming budget year and to do the best we can yeah and so just thinking out loud that's where i get into it's all coming from the same bucket because that bond bucket is either miscalculated spent it's been stretched in my mind to the end of its ropes and at this point it's it's incumbent on some other funding source yes to try to pick that up and make the citizens whole right uh and not just leave them hanging it's a cut you're right it's a combination of one-time money that we've been recommending through the supplementals in the last couple of years uh we will clean out the bond packages um it's a we've just uh proposed issuing some additional debt to supplement it and then the rest of it's going to have to move to another bond package so your your description is absolutely exactly what 's been going on thank you and and that's the reality but that doesn't mean i don't think that because of change in circumstances of the economy number one change and and and maybe a oversight or a miss or an underestimate of the project costs on the front end uh i don't think that that means that somehow i mean if we're going if we're going to make a policy decision that we're going to make up those bond those bond costs out of the general fund and in the budget okay we can have that discussion but what i'm hearing is that was sort of happening trying to do that and now we're trying to clean it up to say hey if we if we're short of bond funding then we need to own it and we need to figure out how to do it we had three cents that the uh the voter said you could add to the tax rate to do that so i think that's a whole different discussion um but i just like things to be clean and so if we're going to make a decision where we're going to spend two three four million dollars a year trying to make up for the bond program well then we have to understand that that does affect us moving forward that we're sort of not getting ahead of the problem we're sort of just staying static or even making it worse because we can't maintain the roads we have and and that's a that's a worthy discussion i mean because i think council member hudson's right it's okay the money's got to come from somewhere but i think where it comes from and how you structure that can you maximize getting out of the problem i mean is it easier to say we just need to finance this shortfall bite the bullet and then get the maintenance thing squared up to where we don't run into this situation ever again instead of trying to limp along so i get it yeah i just so i i think i understand it now um yeah okay yep and there we are no no questions yes any questions well no that's a good discussion i mean that's a very good discussion i think it's important for us to understand how how this this system works because obviously roads is a is an important issue and there are some ones that people still drive on i do every day that are bad but i will say that i also am driving on a lot more roads that have been repaired that have been reconstructed and have been remilled and i can tell a difference so i appreciate the hard work and we're going to get we'll dig out of this i feel very confident we're well on our way and i think it's conversations and discussions like this that help us and help the public understand sort of what what we're looking at so any other comments questions yes so i have two comments for for management pertaining to aspects of of street construction and and budgeting um number one i'd like to see a a written study at some point of how the processed concrete excuse me and asphalt from our rubble collections and solid waste in the future could be used could or not in our excuse me future road construction uh secondly um and and this is just about the way that streets get get have gotten funded in the past i know that um in the past some street repair and uh reconstruction in certain neighborhoods deemed low income has been paid for with uh cdbg funds uh i know that that's not always the case um and uh it it uh it's my my personal belief that that money that federal grant money should be used for housing which is the the primary purpose of that grant money um and not for other infrastructure like this that um in my view should be coming from this this budget instead of from our community development budget so that all all roads and all neighborhoods are and sidewalks are are treated equally um so anyway that's a discussion that i would like to see it happen at some at some future point um and some sort of you know written record of kind of you know how often cdbg funds have been used for this purpose versus our street fund well i think it really depends with the cdbg on how typically you'll see grant for grants that are eligible for for cdbg so it really depends on how the proposal was made into the federal government typically they separate um housing projects and um i guess property uh maintenance projects from capital projects but if there's a if there's the demographics that make it c dbg eligible you might be able to get money out of all three pots so in that particular case it's not really supplanting um general fund it would be in addition to so it all depends on how the requests of the federal government are made and what restrictions they put on the money but i don't think there's there's been a conscious attempt to supplant any uh general fund dollars only cdbg dollars in certain parts of the community it's just whether if there's funds available i look at it as going after a grant if there's additional funds available to add to our funding process we should go after those and um whether it's coming from cdbg or cog or wherever we can get additional money for our residents we would definitely not support a program though that would supplant uh housing dollars for infrastructure and in fact this year um we pulled out two relatively small water line projects out of the block grant program so there would be additional dollars to for the uh housing program so that is just not a recommend policy recommendation that we're making and thank you yes and actually it was those it was precisely those projects that kind of made me aware of this issue but i really like i like the new approach uh and yeah thank you anybody else all right thank you we're going to take about a five 10 minute break before we come up with the next one yep all right welcome everybody welcome everyone back to this meeting of the denton city council on july 24th 2018 it is about 305 we are uh still on our first work session agenda item but it's got five or six subsets to be fair five or six subsets to be fair so all right we'll for the net traffic operations division budget presentation good afternoon mr mayor and members of the council i'm pre- tem dash book i'm the traffic engineer for the city and we're presenting the traffic operations budget the first slide shows our accomplishments as well as goal i want to start with identifying what exactly we do we do both we it's kind of a two-fold thing we do we are involved in maintaining the street signals as well as pavement markings and signs at the same time we also help in inspecting new construction work so any new traffic signals being installed or any new signage and pavement markings and new subdivisions we help make sure that those are consistent with our standard state and federal guidelines having said that and some of these goals and accomplishments also reflect the amount of funding that we currently have as a division with some of the projects as well as our current capacity to do these projects the amount of people that we have in division so in last year we installed or replaced about 10 signals and upgraded 27 all new equipment for detection or certain other equipment controllers and and stuff and under the signs and markings we replaced over 300 linear feet of pavement markings we've started this inventorying program where we are cat we are kind of cataloging some of our signs markings where they are what condition they are in in gis so we're trying to make sure that we keep track of all our signs and then we've replaced 1500 signs this is based on the reflectivity standards that these signs as they are placed in the field over time they get faded and they're they need to be replaced so the future goals that we have we're going to replace install 12 traffic signals upgrade about 20 of them and then on the signs and markings we're upping our number of pavement linear feed it's about 390,000 pavement linear feed and then replace some our school crosswalks throughout the city we replace them every year so that's always been our goal is once a year we refresh them around the summertime when the school are back when the kids are back to school and then last one we've added this time it's the efficiency through cross training and i can talk a little bit more about it it's more related to the fiber communication network that we're thinking of our vision and need for funding they're tied together our vision is we want to design implement and maintain state-of-the-art infrastructure related to traffic signals pavements and signs and markings and the need of money is to we should be able to fund those items for maintaining as well as implementing and designing them and the second aspect of this is we want to continually improve our traffic conditions address congestion improve safety and mobility within the city and we also need money for that to conduct various coordination signal coordination projects as well as improve equipment so we want to more modernize a lot of our equipment so that we can do some some of this stuff this is an interesting chart i really wanted to present that this shows the age of our infrastructure related to signals we have 121 signals and i know it's kind of hard to see but i've kind of summarized this on the next slide every single vertical line is one signal and you can see out of the 120 almost half of them are 20 years or more in age typically there are two aspects of this pole manufacturers recommend 20 year lifespan for the poles after that there's no warranty on the poles so that's the external part of the signal but if you compare 20 years as a lifespan for electronic device it's pretty ancient i mean within the next couple years electronic changes same as computer you need to replace so some of these signals they're getting into 25 30 year mark and the equipment is no longer manufactured it becomes an issue to maintain some of the old equipment trying to communicate with them so that's why this is really important we have about we have 13 and 14 we have two we have about 27 or so signals that are currently about the age of 30 and out of this we have already funded and currently under design for 14 signals which is a good thing and we're moving in the right direction we're getting them replaced we still have 13 more to go to make sure that we've already all addressed everything above 30 years that are older than 30 right behind that we have about 19 that are more than 20 years so they're between 20 and 30 years so that's the we want to make sure that we take care of all that infrastructure that's needed and this is not to bring the oci item back but this is like the oci where you know it it is a clear marker once you go past 20 you need to replace that equipment what are our cost containment strategies and one of the most important things is using in-house crews we are getting a lot of savings if we use in-house staff for signal maintenance we get a 76 percent cost saving typically as as todd alluded to earlier that it's hard to get signal contractors on the ground and it's hard to bid a project at 250 000 signal and given the special ization in the field every time we have some contractors show up they're charging us for 400 an hour and about a four to six hour response time whereas in-house crews it is almost one fourth of the cost 95 an hour with a response time of 30 minutes so that's that's the cost saving that we're focusing on it's a similar type of cost saving in the science and pavement markings field and it's about 74 percent if we use in-house crews we have requested funding for adding more staff and i'll get to the next slide that they'll allude to why in the supplemental package and then the other cost containment strategies also include implementing or improving our communication infrastructure going from currently we have wireless communication in the city we have about a little over 50 percent of our signals are wirelessly communicable we can talk to them but the amount of data that transfer between the signal and back to our main center is very low and as we move forward the next generation is going to be a fiber network and that's what we want to move forward with and then the last cost containment strategy is selection of equipment we go through a rigorous process every time there's a new equipment in the market we go ahead and make sure that we've tested it we've implemented it and tried it and once we get a better feel and feedback from other agencies that are using them then we actually only recommend using that type of equipment throughout the city so that's this one of our cost control just curious in the new generation of equipment with you know with fiber what what types of information would you be able to have and respond to that we don't have now so i i have it on the next slide but i can i can no just go ahead yeah yeah normal course okay so this is what the traffic operations crews uh signal crews are doing um they are they're looking at the pie chart on this side they're spending a lot more time with responding to citizen requests and part of the reason is the aging infrastructure but the other part is they're not finding enough time to maintain the signals they're spending really little time so there it's a dual effect that the lesser the time you you spend maintaining and the age of the equipment they act so they're more kind of a reactive phase if you may currently and we want to get this to back to where it is we are not we're proactive in maintaining our equipment so currently they are if you look at the maintenance chart here there's the amount of maintenance hours they should be spending uh is close to 4 000 it's just under 4 000 while they're only dedicating little less than 700 hours for maintenance and it's just the sheer amount of volume of work the age of the equipment and all these different factors come into play and what we want to get to is reversing this where majority of the chunk of the time spent would be maintenance there's also this about 30 project oversight or inspections that they're spending so that's why in the supplemental package we're we're asking for more staff help and we want to reverse this to go from a reactive to proactive approach but yeah i still want to make sure that council member melter's question gets answered yeah so so i didn't understand that when i first saw the deck is is the point that the citizen requests are telling you about things that you can't tell because you're not getting the information remotely i'll there is one more to it i'll get to the remote okay i'll get to the communication there is there's definitely a slide it's getting there okay council member uh amator yeah so my my question might sound a little bit like that but it's a little different uh and my question is of those that uh 54 percent of the technician time spent on citizen requests what percentage would you say maybe the answer is 100 percent of those citizen requests involve legitimate uh you know time sensitive traffic signal issues and versus what percent are either frivolous at the opposite extreme or kind of somewhere in the middle so uh yes that's that's the part that will answer when we have a fiber network to begin with yes we do try and address each and every concern as it it's legitimate so every time there's a concern that the signal is not working there will be a technician out in the field but if we have the fiber communication plan in place uh we will be deploying cameras we can uh record we can turn the camera around and actually find out if the if the information that was provided or the concern that came in is it still legit can is the timing not working we can actually talk to the signal remotely and get that data without leaving and going to the place so we'll be saving a lot of time and that's where the next slide is where the process improvements that we're putting in place is we will be putting in the fiber network which will help us look at things without leaving the traffic management center does that so just just to add to that uh you know so i had asked about what the percentage and you don't have to answer the you know the percentage but i can tell from your answer that it's not that 100 are legitimate and that a lot of time is spent and i see um so yes that would be a huge time saver whatever the whatever the answer would be you don't have to answer uh well and and just to your point everybody when we get a complaint our staff does a really good job of treating it very much as a concern it is a concern it's their perception of what's going on it needs to be addressed and typically what we find out is while it might not actually be a hardware issue it might not be that the computer and the signal is not working or it may be it may actually be that there's something else going on in that vicinity that we got to look at and take care of in a different way thank you thank you so similar type of chart for payment markings and signs this is the entire pavement marking in the city and it's growing as you can see new subdivisions come in place and the pavement marking continues to grow we're building up bonnie gray we're building up mayhill all the tech stock facilities that we're putting in our maintenance typically we want to hit once every four years the same pavement marking the reason being texas weather it's it's cold it's hot it's cold so the marking gets beaten up a lot of times and based on the weather we want to hit at least once every four years the same area so the amount of effort required is close to 600 000 hours i'm sorry 600 000 linear feet and between the in-house crew which is at 70 000 that that many linear feet they're covering and the contractor which is 230 000 linear feet we're only getting to that mark we're not hitting the 600 000 linear feet mark every year and we want to get there with more help that we've requested so what are the process improvements and this is the slide i really wanted to get to and couldn't get enough fast enough we are trying to let's move on yeah absolutely got any more you need to get to real fast i'm just teasing you free tam i'm just kidding so we want to can what we're doing is we've completed semi-annual reviews when we get these citizen concerns we want to make sure that we're our staff is using the time appropriately so when they're at an intersection they just conduct the semi- annual review once not just fixing the problem per se but reviewing all the detail equipment testing troubleshooting spending additional couple couple hours making sure that that signal is functional and will remain functional so it's an annual review maintenance kind of deal so that's what we're currently doing trying to you know make best use of our time and then we've also seen synchronized i would say about five or six major corridors within the city and we're currently working on the last one which is carol boulevard in the future this is where the upgrade in the communication what we want to do is establish a traffic management center that communicates to all the signals with the within the city and as part of that communication it will remotely wrong one sorry about that it'll remotely enable us to continuously monitor all the intersections so if we get a concern our first goal would be let's go check out that intersection online and see how it works how it functions talk to the controller see it's working fine we can a lot of those even though i don't have the percentage but a lot of those can be remotely addressed saying you know there was an issue we fixed it or there isn 't an issue or we're tracking it something that can resolve that it would mean lowering response time which means we can really address concerns quickly as they come in better customer service there and then frequent updates to signal timings we can remotely update signal timing if there is an increase on certain streets that you notice that traffic has gone up will increase the timing remotely and then inventory management something i talked about we're tracking it in gis making sure that we have inventorying everything yes i want to make sure councilmember is this your question okay all right good councilmember alter so with the the fiber network technology i i take it you would also be able to remotely increase the timing of a pedestrian walk signal correct okay that is yeah thank you thanks because that's a concern you probably hear that a lot i know that i hear that a lot from especially from senior and disabled residents that there's not enough time uh to cross this to cross the street so thank you thank you question pre-tem on the future of the upgrade is that is that in the current budget proposal or is this something that is going to be implemented so there are a couple things we 're doing uh we did have a 10 year old grant from cog to put in fiber network that we're currently underway so it's under construction okay we're putting the first phase of the fiber additionally we're working with the it department to use the existing dme fiber so what we're doing is we are going to work with them they have a lot of dark fiber which means unused fiber network throughout the city and we're going to connect all our signals onto their fiber network so this is something that's in the process of being done it's a correct a three or five year plan down the road this is no this is currently happening and it will soon be online well and and just as a side note at the state of the city i believe traffic department had a signal out there that was the one one of the new ones that was going to go out at the on the square if i remember i don't know if if you got a chance to see that but those are it it's very complicated i mean it's quite a quite a piece of technology so appreciated y'all bringing that out that was important thank you so quickly i want to go through the numbers there are 12 people we have three signal technicians one crew leader four pavement sign technicians and one crew leader and then we have a field services supervisor along with a traffic operations manager and then admin assistant so these are the 12 um fte's they've not changed over many years and we hope to add more people and do the work that's needed to that was the fourth time he's mentioned that presentation so yeah so this is the org chart quickly any questions on this any questions on the org chart i guess it's been like this for a while then yes okay long time all right this is our budget and as you see as you see um numbers are not changing between the current budget and future budget and um the only changes are with cost of services which is will we pay certain other departments to run the cost and some personnel salary changes there are not many but as as far as budget is concerned there's no changes questions comments so one question it with the implementation of the fiber program will that be helpful and you'd mentioned that sometimes it'd be nice to have additional personnel would that be helpful in in being able to maybe redistribute some of the workload that the current personnel have now in other words would it give you some relief in that regard the implementation of this fiber program yes so um we're working closely for the implementation part but once the program is in place and the new traffic management center which we're working on that's a separate aspect but once that is in place definitely we want to make sure that we train our crews accordingly so some of the crews that are running around they will be in the management center looking at things and addressing so it will be a huge relief be more efficient very efficient we'll assign it that way great all right any other questions comments thank you very much i appreciate it thank you thank you you bet who's up next oh it i guess or no uh communications or dispatch good afternoon mayor council a city manager i'm elissa craft i'm the chief technology officer and today we'll be talking about our public safety communications so our goals and accomplishments we did form a public safety communications governance and operations board committee in the effort to provide feedback and oversight of operations we did develop a public safety communications work plan to prioritize and address issues brought forward by consultants and internal assessments so the goal with this is to help modernize kind of our operations we have a lot of key initiatives around public safety communication center whether that's the remodel a new cat rms the radio upgrade which we also receive updated quotes it's actually a lot less than what they originally proposed so i'm excited to share more on that too we also coordinated with tech services to enhance training by utilizing a test cat environment that was not something that they had previously to be able to take calls in a uh non productive environment where it's not we also worked with vendors to upgrade recording software to ensure reliability and also develop benchmarks and metrics consistent with industry standards to ensure the operating operations is operating effectively i want to highlight ray that was one of the first things that we kind of did as part of the operations uh governance board that we kind of put together he was the forefront on helping consolidate a lot of that data so so here you see our 911 call answering time in 10 seconds so you can see the nina standard that's a standard that is enforced upon the all really public safety answering points so you can kind of see here over the past year what our call volume is in total around 182 000 calls our goal is to do 90 and better and answer it within 10 seconds so here you can kind of see the standard and here you can kind of see where we are answering those here you can see it in the 15 seconds so within 15 seconds our goals to answer the 911 call 95 percent of the time so you can kind of see here our call volume and the percentage of how we answered in seconds question counselor melcer yeah just curious did did something happen in november that you know kind of threw a wrench into things and it also looks like it might have been a sort of a change in practice inflection point right because things were kind of getting worse and then they've kind of gotten steadily better so i think part of that was uh through to our attrition levels we did have a little bit of turnover the past year we've had uh four people uh leave the city so i think that was part of that impact there and also uh i'd like to highlight ray he actually came on board around december january time so i think with the morale i think that that helped a bit too oh i'm sorry councilmember robert um what uh percentage would you say of 911 calls are made on cell phones versus landline i have that here for you that was again one of the first data sets we just worked with denko to bring in uh analytics tool to be able to give us more data to be able to make some of those decisions you can kind of see here as far as wireless 33 of our call volume is wireless phones around 37 percent uh outgoing that's generally if we 're trying to call a record from non-emergency services we're working with the departments we're communicating with the police front desk or detectives and so forth so yes go ahead oh yeah and i have a follow-up question on um to that is there you know i don't know if this is up to the city to control uh as i understand that there's no way to text 911 right it has to be a phone call uh but if it is if that were to be kind of looked into is that um under the city's control or is that some state or federally man it would mandated so i think it's dependent on how the phone system is currently configured so our phone phone system is currently managed through denko 911 and uh that's a feature that they've been testing i'd like to bring Ray so he can kind of give you the industry perspective as well thanks sure and we actually do have access to receive text through 911 it isn't utilized very often the sms portion of the slide that's up right now is actually the number of text messages that can come in it says 231 over that year and that also includes test calls that may have come in from other agencies where they'll send us a text we'll send them a text to make sure that they're at least getting some of that so it is operational and people are able to use it but there's a perspective from the industry that you're going to get a faster response and we're going to be able to collect more information if we're able to do it over the telephone so there's an effort to educate people to ensure that if they're able to call that they do instead of using text thank you and that's really good to know and yeah i would encourage that that this both that this service that this possibility of texting 911 be communicated to the community and also what you just said you know communicating to them the the preference to if you can call that calling is you know will will enable you to provide the best service but if you can't you can text because i i didn't know that and even just seeing sms there i didn't quite know what that was so thank you very much thank you sorry and also in our previous conversations with denko 911 there's uh you know other cities that utilize denko 911 and that's not really a highly utilized service so it might be due to just not advertising it or just people want to call some of our upcoming goals we are doing a communication center remodel currently this project is in the rfp process uh the radio p 25 upgrade hopefully we should have a contract for you sometime in august we did get uh an additional discount of a million dollars for some of those time-based incentives so in our original proposal they were able to really come close instead of you know that heightened amount that we saw last time so we were looking at multi-discipline council member medsor question just covering for council member briggs i'm sure she would ask about the efforts to have uh other entities chip in to other radios of you know like the campus police and so on yes we did meet with unt this week we also meet with denton county and we still need to meet with twu but we are in those preliminary discussions with them we're also looking at our public safety cat and our mess replacement that's currently in the rfp process as well we're looking at multi-discipline protocols we're currently evaluating the need for standardized police and fire incident call taking protocols similar to the protocols currently utilized for medical calls we are probably going to be deferring out until we get a new police chief in place we also created a public safety operations committee in this committee we review operation man operation matters training needs policies and procedures related to this batch this is a pretty critical component as we start to look at modernizing and automating some of our processes specifically around our sops we are also looking at our quality insurance program this is some of the newer things we've recently started here in june 2018 which is uh you know evaluation of calls and try to get some standardized benchmarking around those areas as well too our budget emphasis is really around dispatcher training of renewed emphasis on continuing education for public safety dispatcher to meet licensing requirements and improve performance in the communication center they've not had a dedicated training budget in the past this was kind of in a big pot for all of uh police and dispatch included this will be the first year we can actually dedicate a training budget for them to continue to help advance all of their skills we also want to raise the minimum staffing this will allow the lead dispatchers to focus more on supervisory duties and provide some relief within the schedule to focus more on training and quality assurance improvements some of our cost containment strategies we did look at evaluation we just did a recent bid on our shift schedule to try to see in ways we can minimize overtime when required while providing effective coverage we're also looking at evaluating job tasks in a communication center to determine which are essential so the core functionality they are doing around 30 percent of their time performing ancillary duties that are typically not within the dispatch operations that are typically handled in other areas of police and we're working through that process now we are requesting a management analyst fte to assist in developing analyzing evaluating and improving the effectiveness of work methods and procedures hopefully with this position we can continue to modernize our operations but also look at a certain accreditation path as we're looking ahead in the future some of our processing improvements we did develop a more efficient hiring procedure to minimize the amount of time from application from hire previously what would take us three months we were able to do in about three weeks i want to highlight ray for a good job on that we also overhauled our training program to maximize training time and provide all the information necessary to succeed at the job last time the training manual was updated was over eight years ago things have changed google tends to be a little better now compared to what we had in the past we're also utilizing our new cat administration excuse me new cat administrator position to delegate secondary task away from management and staff so these were some of the ancillary functions that the previous communications manager would do which is much more technical in nature we're also looking at ways to increase communications with all stakeholders to understand their needs and improve customer service through standardized service level agreements and standardized benchmarks that we can report on a monthly basis to make sure we see any increase in certain areas and improvements that need to be made some of our organizational changes operations was transferred from police operations to technology services uh again establishment of the governance board this includes police fire city manager's office and technology services we did establish a communications manager position a dedicated training coordinator and a dedicated cat administrator so here's our budget we don't have a historical context at this point because uh some of the overtime it was included in a police civilian overtime but you can see here kind of some of the things we are requesting it does include a twenty three thousand dollar purchase for us to outsource some of our emd quality assurance process as we're getting ramped up with our quality assurance program it also includes materials and supplies for some of the training components that we would like to have for different dispatchers so here's the fte's did you have questions sorry yeah so yeah question about um if you go back i think it's one slide back uh yeah so this is about the the transfer of operations from police to technology services so does that mean that prior to this this change any um public safety communications whether it regarded or whether it was dispatched to police or fire would go through police yes yes okay okay so now and and when did that change take place that the chain switched to technology about two and a half months ago okay so okay pretty recent okay i think the goal with that 's to you know as we're modernizing a lot of the key initiatives surrounding technology just made sense and based on the governance board's uh kind of general consensus it seems like the best place to do it in a more neutral kind of location as we're looking at providing that service yeah yeah thank you that makes a lot of sense to me thanks our fte is by functional area the communication manager he reports directly to me we also have four lead dispatchers slash supervisor positions and those dispatchers uh each dispatcher reports to the lead dispatcher we do have a training coordinator and a management analyst currently those some of those positions are in the recruitment process as we speak and that's all i have yes council member hudson so currently we have four nine-on-one call stations is that going to maintain through the i was trying to make sure because i know you mentioned there was some uh remodeling is it are we going to add a station or no yes uh hopefully six okay seven with the backup yes okay and then so what does the shift look like how often are the shifts so it's it's three people on shift four people on shift generally around four people on shift sometimes we have to go down to three okay and then a supervisor including a supervisor and i think that some of the challenge really you know as a supervisor your core core focus should be on quality assurance uh keeping up with overtime looking at personnel evaluating the calls ensuring things are getting shifted but i'm sorry if we're sure no but with the additional stations we'll have room to hopefully grow that have more on shift supervisor doing supervisor things that sort of thing you know and actually back in october 25th we had mission critical partners kind of come in and just do a big assessment on the nine-on-one communication center and you know part of the recommendation was to really up the staffing level up to 36 we're trying to do that over time we also just recently did an updated staffing level analysis using the apco nina standard so this takes into account your uh overtime attrition rate vacation sick time utilization versus capacity and one of the things that came out was very similar to the mission critical partners so we are requesting additional staffing for as a supplemental package as well thank you so there's um i believe four positions and new positions that we're adding into this budget this year as a supplemental three dispatchers the other thing that was kind of skewing the facts where went back and reviewed the transition there's there's a couple areas in the city where we're seeing we're seeing quite a bit of att rition this was one of the areas and so we went in through i think i sent you a memo on this went through and adjusted all the salaries up it immediately exponentially increased their recruiting pool uh in the quality of the candidates and um so we're the idea was to get that fully staffed and then continue to add at least three more dispatchers most likely another three next year is the plan this is just not an area you want to be short in so the supplemental package it was still within the city manager's recommended budget of the tax rate prior to the capital programs there's three dispatchers three firemen and four police personnel in that in those supplementals all within the effective rate so just process question why would they not be included in this presentation if is it because we haven't approved it yes okay all right okay all right because it says baseline is that okay got you all right not to propose if it has said proposed then that had been different yes yes okay all right okay any other questions comments thank you appreciate it malissa thank you i believe the uh last but not least is finance oh i'm close here speaking of the budget golly i didn't think you thought that ill of your presentation uh mayor city council uh tony puente and working finance um this is not the full city budget this is just the finance no i understand i'm just giving hard time i will cover within within this um our non-departmental or what we call our finance miscellaneous budget um you know i know that there's been some questions uh regarding that so hopefully we'll be able to kind of walk you through that um and i'll and i will let you know i do have a teaser here at the end and the teaser is that uh we did receive our appraised value certified praise value yesterday we've been working through that so i'm going to leave that just right there for you to kind of ponder on and mayor if you're ready to wage let's go so uh just really quickly uh here for you these are our fte accounts um these are all our functional areas our divisions within the finance department uh we did uh transfer uh two fte's into our area one was an admin assistant that we were able to convert into a payroll uh person and also we did add a treasury manager to address some of the cash handling uh cash issues that we've had in the past and really trying to beef that up we did have a vacancy we had a retirement of a three-quarter time employee um that was at a pretty high salary level we're able to to downgrade that position converted into a full-time and added a quarter fte and we're still able to to save a little bit of money here in our budget so uh that covers uh the fte's i will say that customer service municipal court also reports to the finance department um you've already seen those presentations but those fte's are not included in in these numbers um this is our current organizational chart um you'll certainly be happy to ask any questions that you may have um regarding organization uh pretty linear i believe um some of our goals some of our accomplishments i'm just going to hit on a couple of these uh we have now completed the deployment of our chronos automated time uh timekeeping system um you know we're still you know that's been a three year uh process but we've completed that we're still kind of ironing down some kinks but again i think it's a pretty good system uh that we're utilizing for timekeeping uh converted paper process to an automated process um and then for goals for uh for next year um coming to you in the next couple of uh couple of meetings you'll have a uh a contract for a budget software system that we'll be implementing our hope is to implement that next year um as part of the budget process we'll probably run a parallel process um again trying to address some uniformity across the various funds and try to improve again moving away from paper to more electronic process um here you have some of our performance measures i will uh just point to our percent of invoices paid within within 30 days that is a state law requirement uh known as the prompt payment act any invoices that are not paid within that 30 day time frame uh we we are required to pay interest um there are exceptions to that and so generally when we have invoices that were there in dispute they're not counted as part of that percentage some of our cost containment strategies i mentioned earlier we did downgrade an fte a treasury administrator to the treasury analyst uh for a statement is about 12 000 we've had a number of conversations with you when we've talked to you about our preliminary uh forecasts both the general government but also with some of the utilities with some of the um budget improvements that were that we've made some of the trending analysis on budget line items we've done some zero-based budgeting on some specific line items we'll continue to do that going forward we've made a number of various improvements and recommendations to you including creating an internal service fund for customer service breaking that out of the water fund to better reflect that operation also improve the calculation of the fund balance within within the water fund we've also worked with our parks department to do some consolidation of some of their business units as well as consolidating the leisure services with the recreation programs again you saw that as part of the presentation that gary brought to you recently some of the process improvements um you know certainly again you know we continue to look at our payroll processes with the implementation of the chrono system uh trying to bring some uniformity to policies and and how um we track and and pay for our employees a big project for us in the future uh the one project the one item that i'll kind of mention to you here of course is our budget software again you know the hope is to streamline that budget process continue to make improvements provide more data one of the things one of the aspects that we'll be looking at is uh an outward facing a component of that software that could help help be maybe a little more interactive with with our citizens and during our budget process and and and how our budget process is uh is developed and what it what it comprises yes councilman mcdermott about the the outsourcing of the w 2 printing and mailing is that uh primarily to save time staff time it was there was also some internal printing costs that were done in-house um by our reprographic staff um and you know frankly council member was something that no additional cost to us it was already within a software that we leveraging for our employees uh to be able to log in all it took us is to click a a little box and ask the vendor to do it and and they did it you know so real simple thanks so this is our expenditure budget again this covers all the functional areas um that i that i mentioned to you i will just point out to you that um this increase here in the operations is um is associated uh with a little bit over seventy thousand dollar um expense associated with our um budget software it's annual maintenance and licensing and that's really what's uh what's driven that particular increase so without if you don't have any questions about the the finance department i can go through our non-departmental or finance miscellaneous budget any questions yep so the non-departmental our finance miscellaneous budget again this houses a number of expenditures we try to make it as as as comprehensive here for you to to detail detail out for you i'll mention a couple of things here we do budget our salary savings number here this is what we anticipate 1.5 million in savings across the entire organization not just the finance department right and so so that's that's aggregated there um and um again you know that number can fluctuate based on vacancies our city management team continues to look at vacancies as they come in before they're before they're refilled um we also have in this budget um you know forty thousand dollar expense for the july 4th kiwanis uh firework show um that that years ago was in in the hot funds but there was some um some requirements that or some um some issues that prevented us from funding those based on an ag interpretation so it's funded out of general fund um we also include expenses associated with a contract with gdac in the campus theater um 101 000 associated with the homeless coordinator um which that's funded at 40 000 homeless initiative is 40 000 the balance of that 21 000 is the employee to empower um these items are managed by our community development staff um i i will um mention that our you know city manager contingency is budgeted at 200 000 and again as requests that come in as issues projects come in that um draws that down those are shifted to a number of different places whether it's a budget or a capital expense um and so again 200 000 is what we've historically um budgeted for city manager's contingency yes council member robert i was surprised to see uh the the koanis fireworks expense um it had actually it had always been my understanding because it's called the koanis fireworks that that that koanis uh covered how much does ko anis cover contribute to that i don't have that budget here in front of me um but that's probably maybe a third of the total expense maybe half this this 40 000 is about a total expense for that show for the koanis this isn't the full funding for that fireworks show this is just the city's contribution yeah yeah so this is yeah this is for the pyrotechnical i know i understand and there i mean they're very impressive pyrotechnics and you know see them try to see them every year um you know to me that that's a a big expense coming coming from the city uh i'll just just leave that there um and to see if any you know any any my uh colleagues have any any reflection on that um but that is that is quite quite a big expense council member melzer uh i'm actually surprised to hear that somebody other than the city funds you know july 4th fireworks any place i've lived it's always been like a municipal thing uh so i mean i'm surprised that it cost that much to do fireworks but the idea that the city funds july 4th fireworks seems like totally uh what i would expect what i'm a little surprised it seems like just kind of like uh a detail that maybe we would change when we get to in the future is that some of these odds and ends aren't kind of in the departments you'd expect them like homeless coordinator you know it's probably a convenience because things happen mid-year and like that but it seems like something you want to tidy up at some point makes sense yeah sure just to clarify i mean you know my surprise primarily came from the fact that it's called the co because it's the koanis fireworks i thought that that it was that koanis was uh was doing it so well koanis is doing it it's that's been who's held that show for uh many many years and it's a fundraiser for the koanis club which provides uh low cost or free dental care to to low-income children oh yeah yeah i know yeah and it is also a free event right yeah oh yes yeah and i mean i'm a huge fan of this and of the fireworks and i think it's important to have fireworks on fourth of july uh so um again i i thought that koanis was exclusively to thank for this this terrific um uh event i'm not against you know city contributing uh to it i i just because it's called koanis fireworks i didn't know that we contribute uh so much to that that's all yeah and and council member we we do have a contract that we did with koanis um and i can certainly forward that to you that shows a detailed on what the total budget is for that that would be great thanks it's really more like a sponsorship it's like anything else it's like we sponsor north texas fair and rodeo and other things it's it's it's along those lines uh conceptually but yeah okay so um so so here um again a couple of items that i'll point out uh we do pay for our external audit um again out of this particular budget um you know it's not in the finance department necessarily uh because this this is a city wide um internal audit uh external audit excuse me that's none of our financial statements um you know it also serves to my opinion here also serves helps us when we allocate those costs out to the various funds um the appraisal district uh budget is also included here uh budget at four and thirty eight thousand uh for 1819 that's our share of the appraisal district's cost uh for this for this coming year um there was a couple of questions that came through regarding outside contract services uh these tend to be uh small contracts associated with managing our investments for the city um and then also the bank charges these are charges by walsfar go bank for services rented to the city they are our depository bank but also we have credit card charges associated with some of our general government department um that are actually captured and paid for out of this budget as well. -Councilmember hudspeth. - How how aggressive can we be to i mean no no offense to to uh that that's a tale that something bad about to happen no offense to wals fargo but i mean how often do we research opportunities i just don't expect that cost to continue it going up is troubling to me because technology it just it should be going the other way right it's almost like um i bet you i could get a landline phone pretty cheap nowadays because you know just technology says so and so i'd like to see how often do we explore i guess is the question how often do we explore that banking or is there something prohibitive that that we have a legacy that would prevent that uh that transition from being uh an option so the first thing that i'll mention to you is that um we are limited by state law to no more than a five-year contract for depository depository services um historically in the past you know we've uh completed an rfp for depository services every three to five years uh the last contract that that we the last rfp process that we did uh was in late 2016 so in 2017 uh was the beginning of a new contract with walsfargo uh walsfargo hasn't always been our our depository there's been other banks that have been our depositories uh that contract is a five- year continuous contract uh but certainly as as we continue to look at what's going on in those depository services that there 's need uh for us to go back out and do another rfp for the services we can certainly do that um i will mention that that because of some of the services that the city requires um even though we send out rfp notices to all our local banks um in in many cases it's normally just the big banks that are bidding on our rfp you talk about walsfargo jp morgan chase bank of america um and so in in the banking industry there's been changes to services um that they provide i think that going into the next rfp we may have to separate some of those uh services and that could potentially create some opportunities uh to award contracts to some of our local banks um the complexity with that is now you're managing multiple contracts uh for you know for services that are that are coming through the depository and so again how we manage that going forward is certainly an opportunity um i will tell you that based on the last rfp uh walsfargo was certainly very competitive uh with the only other we had only one other bid that came in and so they were very competitive it was not a huge increase um the majority of the increases that we're seeing is really on the credit card side um and it's the processing charges by visa master card that's really what drives a lot of a lot of charges that are coming in into this particular line item for us yeah if i if i could yeah if you could send me a point of reference where i can go look at that rfp or those bids you know back 17 and then yeah i i'd just like to i'll take a look at that and that'll help me understand it better because i i just think there is competition and i'm okay with the the larger banks and and i think you know walsfargo obviously has its challenges in in you know the news uh and so who i'm just across the board there there's some concerns uh for me personally understand i'm not advocating for going you know by advocating services and making it more onerous to manage all our processes i'm just saying for example with the squares and just there's technology should dictate even if it is credit card charges i just need to be educated on why that should cost more in this point in time right i think technology should should dictate that uh we should especially if it's credit card charges that shouldn't and it could just be my absolute ignorance to understanding how the business works on the back side but from the front side just my understanding it should be decreasing in cost but i'm missing something and as that as part of that process we also bid out credit card services i will tell you that the contract that we have currently with walsfargo and a couple of other partners uh the the processing fees did come down based on our previous provider but again you're seeing uh large increases in volume um that's that's being driven through our various locations both not just in customer service but in building inspections in the parks department in our libraries and so uh so some of this is also volume driven so but i can certainly get you that information thank yes that's my mother uh i'll go after the big numbers tony uh well can you if you if you've already told this night you can get it i apologize but what's in cost of service and why is it going up 800 000 and then also what what's in capital outlays and why is it expected to tail off so um all of the internal service transfers that go out to uh to pay for a piece of customer service uh there's also watershed technology all of that is made up of this 2.7 and so we've seen increases in those amounts primarily um in our in our technology services um you know can certainly get you a breakdown of what those what those are but these are transfers to other other funds within within the city to service that provides services to general government so what why is it a transfer through finance i just i just don't get a conception i don't need a detailed list i just want to understand the mechanism it's just again it's just a transfer to uh in the case of technology services technology service is its own internal service fund and so our p the cost to to service all the computers to to do all the the different calls associated with the help desk are paid by the general fund to the tech service fund and it's and this is where the transfer is the transfer doesn't show up in each individual department budget it all it's all aggregated here for the general fund so okay so the the services that those departments require has not been shown to us in their budget correct so it's okay that's weird um and and what are the capital outlays so so the capital the capital outlays uh for next year the 600 000 is the cash funding of vehicles um if you recall last year we had budgeted 300 000 we did increase that by 300 000 this year so 600 000 is projected to go to cash fund primarily um uh some of our public safety vehicles um the amounts that you see here for for last year every year as part of the budget process including this year um we're going to be showing you some one-time expenditures uh we normally amend that budget and we transfer uh those funds out of this particular business unit into capital projects to fund those and so all of these primarily are one-time capital projects that are being funded out of the general fund but it's at the till end of the year we transfer that into a job um that may span multiple multiple fiscal years i mean in the context of you know the whole general fund and all the different departments it's sort of these these two line items aren't really that big but you know why wouldn't it make sense to reflect their their expenditures and their capital outlays you know within their departmental budgets we we can certainly do that it would it would um it was really just done out of um just kind of expediency really just to make things a little bit easier i think the department sometimes had some confusion as to exactly what that was and how how they can impact that um and so so we just aggregated them here something to think about for next year council member so a question about the first item uh legislative consultants is that the city clerks uh these are uh legislative um um lobbyists that that the city hires uh we did um move that expenditure out of out of this budget and it's now over in the public affairs that manages um i think it's down to just a single contract okay okay so those are lobbyists yes yes no that doesn't now is my understanding that the court clerks had at least had been under finance yeah yes the municipal court yes for the municipal court they still report to finance but it's not part of this budget it's a separate budget okay okay yeah within the general fund but it's a different um home business unit okay okay so they report to so i guess this is because so this presentation uh doesn't have the um uh structure you know chain of command a slide on that as i recall oh oh oh there we go okay so you see uh customer service um a municipal court okay that's where okay got it okay thank you any other questions for this well any other questions for this presentation yes so this is just kind of just a comment about precisely that aspect of it um that i would like to see for future discussion and this doesn't the uh the funding of this particular budget doesn't hinge on this this for me but it it does have to do with with that uh structure whereby our uh municipal clerks are under our our finance department or rather under our customer service is that right which which is in turn under the finance department um i know that it's done this way in other cities uh and and and also it's done differently in in other cities um and it would seem to me um and at least i'd like like to have a discussion about it in the future uh with the with the municipal judge as well to look into the possibility of having our our uh municipal clerks under our our municipal judge uh also to kind of along the lines of what judge ramsey had kind of talked about in his budget presentation which was before i got uncounselable which i saw which has kind of been been a theme for him which i support that you know our our judiciary is that the purpose is about um you know justice doling out justice not taking in money and so um i think it would help that much more with public perception to to show that we don't see that you know judiciary as kind of a function of finance great thanks all right any other comments questions thank you all right so just the last thing mayor it's not part of this presentation but we did receive our uh appraised values um yesterday we're still kind of working through the numbers we're working with denton county on the effective texture calculation um the increase um before we back out any of the turds values uh was nine point seven percent and so um you know previously we had we had budgeted we were estim ating about 10 percent um so it's certainly not the 14 and 12 percent that the mayor thought but um no that's what you said it was don't tell me under the bus oh that's just what you reported yes so the tapes we've got tapes we've got recordings so so we 'll so um on august 2nd we are scheduled to come back to you to present you the proposed budget we'll have a lot more details for you but i did want to let you know kind of where we were and kind of what we're looking at it go ahead councilmember nelson oh yeah as as long as we're doing you know kind of surprise items around this time of year uh do you have a revised point of view on uh what what surplus we might have at the end of the year that might apply to supplemental requests or still need to you know still too soon to say surplus for the current year yeah yeah it's still yeah it's yeah um we'll have more information for you on august 2nd so yeah okay i think what would be helpful if you could just send it out is um it they i don't know if they keep track of it but it'd be interesting because you've got residential and commercial and it'd be interesting to see and be interesting over the each week but at what point do those values really begin to drop what property types are being protested that that create that precipitous drop in other words is the is the overall you've got your initial mail out and at the end you know you've got a residential and commercial component at the end what is each one of those i'm sure they have that what is each one of those to see which one of those really is the one that that that drops the most we can certainly work on putting a little chart together okay great it'd be interesting to see all right thank you very much appreciate it well i think that concludes our agenda item 3a is that correct that is correct okay we'll move on to agenda item 3b receive report and hold discussion give staff direction regarding an internal audit risk assessment and audit plan good afternoon good afternoon uh city auditor i got two back-to-back presentation one is for my risk assessment and audit plan and one is for my budget let me give you a little bit background about why we needed the risk assessment the role of city internal audit in a government is to verify accountability and transparency evaluating efficiency and effectiveness of the citizen services provided verifying compliance with laws regulations and policies and all of this involves identifying variety of risks that that may impact those these issues and recommend procedures to prevent materializing of these risks and therefore when i began to work for the city i needed to understand what the risks are existing and therefore the risk assessment was necessary this risk assessment was presented to the audit and finance committee and i'm presenting it to the full council today basically the risk assessment is a process uh it identifies the conditions which may prevent city from accomplishing its objectives now city's objectives are i think there are five objectives fiscal stewardship organizational excellence maintaining public infrastructure and facilities quality of life for citizen and economic development we gathered the information for this risk assessment through interviews with city council city management city staff we reviewed several internal documents just such as financial statement budget other internal documents studies we also looked at the external sources such as anything that was published on city we also looked at the information published by local government auditors association and i use my past experience i've got about 35 years of experience in local government again to complete this risk assessment i consider a variety of factors which are listed here there are some significant opportunities that exist in terms of reviewing economic development contract compliance enhancing communication with citizens and enhancing i mean basically enhancing efficiencies and maybe identifying new sources of revenue or identifying additional revenue in existing sources our major risks are concentrated in utilities operation capital projects finance police compliance and procurement you will notice that most of the city's city's resources are committed to these areas the risk assessment identified 200 auditable units or projects uh this list is not complete for two reasons one of them is i'm brand new to the to the city and i don't have a very limited understanding of city operation when this risk assessment was conducted so this was conducted based on limited knowledge in several departments and city has several agreements grants etc and those may have to be audited separately and they are not listed separately and on this risk assessment but it is a good start uh your hand at handout that i have provided to you gives you those 200 plus opportunities the risk assessment and again i mean this opportunities were chosen based on uh my experience my knowledge of possible audit opportunity that will yield some benefit to the city when i look at the city organization and i use the information from interviews and so on and so forth it seemed like 52 percent of the audit opportunities could have high vulnerabilities 39 could have medium vulnerabilities and remaining may have low vulnerabilities which we may not have to audit now based on risk assessment the these are the audits that were selected for of fy 18 however and this were approved by the audit and finance committee soon after the plan was approved city administration identified some issues with procurement process and we couldn't conduct that audit and we couldn't conduct accounts payable audit because accounts payable and procurement go hand in hand so we had to go plan b and we selected another area uh customer services now this area process is about 270 million dollars of city's revenue so we almost finished that audit and we will be presenting that to the audit and finance committee i also wanted to point out that uh make couple couple issues here first of all city auditor's office received complaints for fraud, waste, and abuse complaints and uh recently my office has been asked to be support to the ethics board and we are going to be receiving ethics complaint so confidentiality does matter here and secondly i wanted to point out that auditors are finance process procedure professionals they are not engineers they are not electrical engineers or they are not chemists so when we audit operations like water distribution or dme we may need some help and i'll deal with this in a budget presentation a little bit but are there any questions on this presentation i think um most people think or at least let's say i thought about it as uh almost like a policing function like you know a kind of uh quality assurance accountability kind of function but i noticed that you listed economic development as a area of opportunity and uh i wonder if you could you help me understand maybe others would find it interesting too what what an audit function would be that that's a kind of constructive role in economic development because it's sort of not obvious from the title you know okay let me first of all uh clarify the audit function itself audit function in in government has come long way now nowadays the internal auditors in government are conducting uh mainly performance operational type of audits and those audits are value-added audits they help look at the processes and uh try to help uh organization improve re-engineer processes and basically organizations intend to save money make processes efficient deliver service more effectively and basically also comply which is a policing function so that is there uh in terms of economic development economic development is also a process it requires a strategy it requires uh several players to come together and identify what opportunities are existing where cities should invest money in terms of incentives or where which industry city should encourage and which industry city shouldn't it also depends upon the leveraging the industry within uh dentin and uh industries outside dentin uh so there are different synergies and the decisions need to be made uh where are we going to invest our money and efforts and again internal audit can play a very significant role here by looking at that process question yes i just wanted to say as more of a a comment um and also in a show of support um about the confidentiality slide um i'm i'm pleased to at least as i understand it um that there's a move for kind of more independence for the auditing office and i think that that 's absolutely uh the right way to go to allow um the auditing office to do what it what it needs to do so i i applaud that um i agree maintaining confidentiality is critical um and i'm i'm so happy that we have an an auditing office and it's it's new enough uh to the city of dentin or rather it had been so long until relatively recently that we even had an office an auditing office um that you know i don't take it for for granted but i think also because it's still relatively new new office and uh city of dentin um that or not a new office but it's it's new that we have somebody actually in that position um that uh there's you know still a lot of educating that kind of needs to be done in the community about what what city auditors you know do and and don't do um i so anyway that said so thank you i'm so glad uh that that you're here um i had a question about and i realize there's no slide to go with this and and that you're going to be covering this more um when when you do uh your budget presentation but i had a question about this document uh that in these categories um so there's nothing i know there's nothing to put up on the screen but for people who are hearing it at home it's a list of the audit audit audible units um objectives likelihood impact weights and score and i was wondering if you have that up there if you could kind of just take us through one so so we could know exactly how to read this so for instance on the first page like hot funds so i understand you know objective compliance i understand that um likelihood um i take it the h is high and l is low so um likelihood of compliance is that what it means that means the likelihood of achieving that objective okay let me walk you thank you just take one example and walk us through yeah yes real quickly thank you uh for example let's to pick the second one uh pension liability uh basically you audit this kind of pension is a big big expense for the city big liability for the city uh and you provide uh you audit this to provide assurance whether we have adequately provided for that liability we have set aside enough money so that there is no impending uh liability hanging out there which city will have to put up large amount of cash the likelihood based on what i know about that pension liability and talking to finance department and so forth and so forth it's it's not likely that we will have to put out a lot of money some of the cities will have like millions and some cities have billions of dollars of liability that they have not funded we are we don't appear to be in that bucket impact is going to be like if that becomes true that we have impending liability the impact will be very high so the score total score is going to be still low because of likelihood i mean it's not very likely that we are going to face that does that help i think so yeah kind of a follow-up question just to make sure i understand um so the so the objective is the objective um not of the unit itself but of the process of auditing that unit what's the objective of auditing that unit right auditing is going to be that we have set aside adequate amount of funding to meet our obligations if we have not done that then there is going to be a future liability oh yes for which we may not have adequate provision yes yes so just by just understanding kind of what the categories mean so the category objective it's the objective of auditing this this unit okay and so and then um um for the imp i'll skip over the likelihood because i understand that well now um the impact category so that means um that uh the impact of let me clarify that okay yeah um pension liability typically is associated with a very high dollar and if we have not funded it adequately then the impact would be high yes yes so that was so what my description was was going to be and so correct me if i'm understanding this right and again this is just about what that impact category means that impact category means the impact that um uh that a negative uh uh rating or or failure to meet that uh failure to perform right the impact that a potential failure to perform but it's all about the potential and the if so it's it's a conditional uh it's a conditional category that is and so um the impact category is not uh conditional on the likelihood category right it doesn't matter in other words what there is no under the likelihood category okay and that that was that was the key that i wanted to understand what they what their relation was to so thank you okay that helps me independent factors yes that helps me very much thank you thank you all right all right let me jump to quickly to my budget presentation i'll be brief okay yeah hold on a second yes sir um i don't think we're posted for this we're not posted for this this is uh receive report hold discussion give staff direction regarding internal audit risk assessment audit plan um do i don't i don't even think we had the budget in the backup um so i'm not i don't think we can hear the budget presentation so can we get that on the next work session absolutely yeah okay all right sorry for that mix up whatever happens okay uh yeah this was kind of a miscommunication okay you bet no problem all right uh any other questions for uh the audit plan or audit assessment seeing none okay thank you appreciate it thank you and so now we've completed our regularly scheduled work session so following the completion of this work session the city council will convene in a special called meeting uh at 4 32 uh to consider the following the first one will be uh the consent agenda but i believe we're pulling well i'll let somebody make a motion on that yeah council member melzer i thought we kind of already did it oh i see okay so i i so we're moving the there are opportunities here to move approval of the consent agenda minus the items that's correct yes okay so i move approval of the consent agenda excluding items a and e a and e okay yes council member our turn second okay thank you we have a motion and a second for approval of the consent agenda except for agenda consent agenda items a and e all who are in favor please signify by raising your right hand passage unanimously we will now consider agenda items that have been pulled as items for individual consideration we'll go to agenda item 1a which is considered option of ordinance of the city of denton author izing city manager or designate to execute a confidentiality agreement between the city and in in vernergy how do you say that in energy okay uh llc is there a presentation or uh questions we sort of talked about it a little bit is there any more comment on this particular agenda item well yes yes sir yeah frankly i imagined that we would have uh george here uh to but actually you could probably fulfill this function i suspect uh the question is fundamentally uh if if we were to go to a policy that we we only wanted to deal with with uh providers that would that would accept full transparency let's say not during negotiation but of final results uh what would you know what would the likely impact be on our ability to operate and on our cost of operating i realize that's a you know a massive kind of question but i'd take your kind of question of answer i'm not sure we would get any bidders uh right now with the and if we did the prices would be significantly higher than they currently are in our proposals because they do not want their these firms do not want their competitors saying what they 're negotiating deals with at right now and you know there's we're seeing extremely favorable pricing in this current deal we haven't been able to to get in and go through all the contract in detail because they're requiring the um confidentiality agreement but i can tell you that um we tried this with the um pipeline project to the deck uh at first and uh no one would bid on it uh part of that was there was a um on-demand gas requirement but the second one is they don't want their prices out in the open and so when you're buying natural gas you've you've signed naysbees and basically for that particular transaction everything is confidential um with the solar and the wind projects um every deal that we've been involved with they've required a confidentiality agreement and not disclosing their pricing because they don 't want their competitors know what they're paying if we insist on a provision like that it's possible we could get bids um my guess is that they would be significantly higher than what we're currently uh what we've paid for our most recent uh solar and wind deals and what we're negotiating on this one deal which is very very attractive pricing they're just simply uh concerned about those numbers getting out in the press and they've been very they've been very candid about it um miss armatuer's point i think she remember on pv that i went to enterprise and i gave our attorneys a very hard time about uh trying to disclose um you know some of the information um and we got significant pushback that if you require that that information we put out there we will not provide you service i'm i'm hoping council member armator will comment just because you know i i believe you to be someone who's both very interested in transparency particularly literally in the energy area and someone who's you know serve time on pub and i'd be interested in whether you've kind of gone through a thought process uh on this issue oh yeah so yes um and i will say let's see so that contract enterprise that was that one was enterprise and i'm gonna i want to caution us about getting outside of the scope of the posting because i mean if we want to talk about this specific i mean because what we're talking about now is a policy discussion which okay i guess we could probably work that into the this particular agenda item but so if that's going to be helpful to you to make your decision then yes certainly and that and that was my yeah when you were first i'll come out of my comments to say you know does that give you any perspective that that uh your does your experience give you any perspective that would weigh on this contract yes it it does and that is um that you know transparent that transparency is relative right so they i mean there are different levels of transparency and as somebody who you know transparency is high priority for me uh and but even i know that uh you know a hundred percent transparency is not always possible so it's a matter of kind of what what are um you know when i look at it's something like this i can compare it to in the example just by way of contrast the example that that you gave that enterprise contract it had it compared to this contract which i have now on the screen in in front of me um that contract or i'm sorry that's not this this is an ordinance not a contract but but that had the amount of information that was allowed to go public was so little um there was so much more than just the the price that that was not allowed to go forward um and so uh and that's not to say that for this um with with this particular um you know in in in this case that this is better or worse but you know i would at least uh i'd like to see um i'd like to see a contract you know uh and to and and to hear about it's useful for me to hear about as it was in that case uh about you know here's what here's what we asked for here's what they couldn't get you know give us if i if i can clarify um we're at a step before that right now what this particular provision does is simply allows the city to go in and it's a negotiating table uh once the deal is negotiated with our partners in in energy uh we would bring back the final agreement and the purchase power agreement to both council and pub for you to look at obviously we will ask we know where the council stands pub is also taking the same position and in terms of releasing as much information as possible our attorneys are well aware of that staff is well aware of that and we will try to get as much of that information public as possible i just want to set expectations though there is no way they 're going to allow pricing to be disclosed yeah they will certainly allow maybe other deal points that we don't know yet since we haven't negotiated with him but the pricing is going to be something that's not going to be allowed there's at this point yeah and i understand of course that that what is being voted on now is the confidentiality agreement not the contract but that's just to say that um you know when we vote on a confidentiality agreement you know obviously that means that confidentiality is an issue and that when the contract comes forward to us there will be certain things we can see and certain things we can't see and so you know all that is to say that um i i appreciated that the the effort that was made in the case that that you the example that you gave you know an effort was made to ask and to show that this is important to us as a city and you know we ended out still doing the deal anyway um and and i don't think that anything was correct me if i 'm wrong but that any there were there were any losses in letting you know our priorities be known um because it wasn't a matter of it wasn't all or nothing and maybe there were you're smiling uh chris no i'm just i was acknowledging george okay he's wanting to speak we could certainly take the same approach and let them know that we have a council and the public that wants as much information as possible push as far as we can i think the only way to really answer your question intelligently would be we need we need a couple of benchmark deals to compare it to and then we could certainly try down the road to issue an rfp that required the pricing be open and my guess is it's going to be significantly higher and that will give you the answer you're looking for but right now um you know we've got two municipal partners that have spent a ton of time on this with us uh and this this is probably going to be the most attractive deal or one of most attractive deals that we've signed if we get it there um but we can certainly issue another rfp just to test and see what the price of transparency is yeah okay well i was just going to wrap yeah wrap up yeah just to wrap up to say you know i'm going to vote to um to support this um with you know with with the understanding that um or that uh that uh staff is going to going to go forward and look into these issues and let these uh companies know that or i shouldn't say these companies let in this case you know let let them know look we've got a culture that really values transparency and we would like to see uh what it is that that can be revealed and whatnot and what can't be instead of just simply accepting that way even if the end result is that we get the same amount of information that we would have gotten otherwise we've you know made a good faith effort um for more transparency even if it's not successful and i think that that that does make a big difference to the public council member hudson yeah i just want to this conversation is is problematic for me because it fails to acknowledge all the progress in my opinion i can be absolutely wrong that this um current city manager and staff has made to increase transparency to compare them to previous administrations i think if you were to compare apples to apples something lists something this current administration has done that has been non-transparent to compare to and say due to this issue we're going to press you harder on transparency and then i think i i would ask before staff goes through and i know it's no time but before staff goes through sending out a rfp i would press my colleagues on a number right if you're saying what is your pain threshold that you would be willing to take the right payers through for transparency divulge that number in advance because you 're asking staff to walk around a blind corner they're saying it's against our better judgment to pursue this avenue if you're going to force them to pursue this avenue then you should say what number you have in mind and what you have found that would then challenge their theory that this is the best deal right because if someone comes to me and i say go find me the best deal they say here's the best deal then i say i disagree with you because i have a hunch that to me is inconsistent they've done the research so councilman i just want to i really want to try to get a sound on the contract because because this is a conversation i think it 's a good policy discussion but but as far as this particular contract i mean i think what you're addressing is sort of this future kind of discussion and so yes i just want to try to it just bring yes so so yeah i sorry no no i i need it lord knows i need it but this i mean so that's my thing is is for my future thought for a future agenda item that's coming before us and a future rfp is that we force those that want to see it to produce why or to boost some number and for this issue i just want to say i appreciate staff getting us the best deal possible under the confines that we have and i'd like to say i've had zero since 2017 transparency issues with this administration and i've had a lot of transparency issues before that but that's just my personal experience from okay over here is it yes is this regarding the okay i just i just want to answer so councilman hud spith um uh just to answer your your comments just now um i am extremely appreciative um and and in fact i uh had fought uh publicly to get this kind of new uh administration and its commitment it and your mr howman uh commitment to transparency and better process and and maybe you misunderstood uh councilman hud spith but when i said uh i i genuinely meant and this is not the first time i've said this publicly i've said this on pub also uh that i was so grateful for the efforts that our administration our new administration has made in previous cases to to try to chase down that transparency even when it hasn't been possible as far as the question um about what dollar amount uh i'm not the problem we i i understand i'm gonna kept this pretty quick because we're we are all over the place on this on this contract so yeah i mean his question to you was really outside the bounds of this particular okay okay yeah okay that i agree and i will just say that um i do not want to increase the uh cost that this is not about increasing uh cost it's about looking to see what is possible for transparency within a within a cost we all agree that's that is reasonable so does that make sense uh gerard yeah he's not gonna let me answer okay yeah we'll talk offline and then we're gonna go with yes go ahead no okay i was gonna call the question but uh if uh well let's we've been down there let's not do that council member council member brave motion in a second yeah i just want to remind everybody this is for a confidential confidentiality agreement for the purpose of discussing not for if you don't feel like there's enough transparency when the contract comes back then you can vote against it at that point so and with that i will move approval of item okay council member uh i'll let council member hudson second if you'd prefer but i'm willing to second and i do we have a motion and second for agenda item 1a all in favor please signify by raising your right hand uh passage unanimously we'll go on to agenda item 1e consider approval of a resolution of the city council of the city of denton and authorizing the mayor to approve the iss uance of new hope cultural education facilities finance corporation capital improvement revenue bonds is that the title for that yes that is wow okay all right well before is there a specific question i think you asked this people is there a specific question that staff might be able to answer instead of necessarily going into a whole presentation well basically what what is the city of denton's role in this and uh and if and i understand it to be i understand that our approval is required even though this isn't an obligation of the city which you know i want that to be made clear to the public um but i'd also like to understand under what conditions we would reasonably even consider withholding approval correct um mayorcy council tony pointa director finance so first of all just let me mention that you do have we did put in front of you a revised resolution um that includes a whereas an additional whereas statement um confirming that the borrower did the borrower did hold another public hearing uh they did publish um in in requirements with federal law have provided us a certificate we we've included that information in your backup so uh so just uh quickly um you know this is you're exactly right this is not an obligation of the city um the the the um the particular project uh both the dining hall the residence hall or the the uh um yeah the residence hall and also the parking lot are all on currently tax exempt properties owned by twu um the most of these properties and most of these situations were that come before you um the properties are already tax exempt and so in the event that a property uh would be on um a currently taxable property uh that might be a situation where the council could uh potentially um um you know either enter to some type of negotiation or deny um the approval of those bonds that would in essence uh remove that taxable property into a you know non-tax exempt status but in this particular case uh this entire project which is on the east side of bell avenue um is already on property owned by twu it's already off of the tax rolls so there is no financial impact the city obviously there's no obligation for us to um regarding these bonds that will be wholly paid by those revenues or an obligation of tvu in the case of of the parking lot yes so are are we restricted in any way in uh in uh only being uh only being able to withhold approval under those circumstances where there's a sort of direct financial impact on the city or you know is there any are there any ground rules at all uh i mean legal ground rules for what would lead us to withhold or not withhold and i think the city attorney might be able to address that or we do have uh bond council for the for tvu here that might be able to address that if if that's okay let's hear from bond council yes so this is this is joe eckard with mccall parkerson horton good afternoon and thanks for including this on your agenda this evening um basically if this the reason for publishing notice and holding a hearing is to give the citizens an opportunity to object and then we present that information to you and if if the citizens don't like the the project or you guys don't like the project you can reject it so there isn't the limitation on on that you know i think what uh sure i think what what comes to mind and uh is not actually in this um issue uh but when people see tvu and construction is they think about the interface between tvu and the surrounding area which has uh homes of historic significance and the like the first assumption which is not in this issue is that some uh valued piece of property is going to be taken and and you know destroyed so that's not here but i wonder if there isn't grounds for some kind of reciprocal understanding between the city and tvu right because that's yes i mean tvu seeks the city of dent ons uh and in fact requires city of dentons approval to move forward with this project for whatever you know reason uh you know our elected officials have seen fit to require that but you know that's what tvu needs and maybe something that city of denton needs or wants would be you know some kind of reciprocal understanding about uh even though it's outside of this deal uh about historic properties on the perimeter of tvu see what i'm going with this well what i what i'm hearing you say is you want to use that as leverage to say hey we're going to exact an agreement from tvu to uh not condemn property in historic area or we're not going to sign this particular we're not going to prove this particular resolution that'd be a very extreme view but i think we might you know reach a kind of a common understanding well i appreciate that um i i know where this project is um i have full faith and confidence in texas women's university and the current leadership that means leadership may change no i'm not willing to do that i'm not willing to to use that kind of heavy hand because tvu is a state institution and let's say for instance we use that heavy hand which i consider that a heavy hand um they can do pretty much whatever they want to do i mean in this city i mean they could condemn every piece of property around that university they don't have to to allow any historic house to remain standing and i think it would really show a great uh distrust in in the institutional leadership uh not just the current but the past and the future that would be a horrible horrible tactic i'm just going to tell you that that just i mean i understand about hard knuckle negotiating but that would be something because we may have the leverage here but we don't have the leverage in anywhere else and they could probably go build it somewhere else or some with some other type of financing and if that's the case we have just really sunk a ship with a partner that i think has been quite a great partner over the years for this community so i hear what you're saying and i understand the spirit of it but the spirit of that well well i understand that council member melzer but when you're when when you present it as hey we want i mean the words can be a little nicer but the actual impact is the same so um i'm not willing to do that and jeopardize that relationship with the university because number one we haven't had that issue uh every from my understanding every uh property that's been purchased has been one that has been voluntarily sold to the university i don't i can't think of the last time that tw condemned a house uh for for the expansion of their university so i i just i think that would really be and quite honestly i i hope that just even this conversation doesn't have an impact uh on the relationship quite quite frankly so that sounds pretty strong but that's sort of that's how i see it yes yeah i'm just going to propose kind of an entirely different framework in relation to this and and this sounds very good and um i think it's always a good idea to have good communication with people with entities that we work with frequently the city work with frequently and i can't imagine tw would be opposed to it seems very much in the spirit of you know that that fine university and its great relationship with the city to want to um expand communication sitting down working out differences you know uh uh and and getting to know the people in the neighborhood you know and and concerns about historic housing so i see this as what um unless i'm misunderstanding you and maybe i should just speak fully from my perspective um it's just you know you've got you've got a growing university and you got uh you know historic houses and gosh get everybody talking and continuing the positive relationship which is positive so far i think they do that i think they already do that what i heard was that the purpose of that communication is to withhold a decision or even a an affirmative decision on this particular resolution in order to get some type of tangential or collateral agreement to not do something and if i'm mistaken please correct me because that's that's that's sort of what i heard yeah it's definitely uh you know going to an extreme that i i would not hope to end up at but i think the spirit of it is let's acknowledge that we each have needs and and can we have a you know is this a i don't know in what in what forum do we discuss together you know our our needs in relation to sure i think it's the i think it's the it's the upcoming work session agenda item which is going to have twu presenting their master plan so i think i think that's but so in the spirit of conversation communication we have a quarterly meeting with the university every quarter to talk about partnerships and collaboration so i don't think anybody sitting at this table is is opposed to communication and better communication and expression of interest and how do we work together to have you know meet each other's interests so i i can get on board with that but i can't get home board with using that as some kind of leverage because this is something that's important to them and that they require in order to get this financing to that be sort of part of that conversation because i don't think it's necessary yes and then i'm going to go council member hudspeth this is the second time this happened i was about to move approval but well no i got to get council member hudsp eth an opportunity to share yeah no and i heard the same thing you heard and and and noted it because that that is uh understanding a state university that's very very dangerous territory and i think it's been noted in our fr iday reports etc that that conversation is coming with twu for a very long time i mean i requested it so i know it's been a long time bubbling to the top no just kidding but no i'm giving a hard time but i also think it's important to note that that that university's administration is very well attended at a lot of events i've seen them at least three four times outside of this recently i mean they're easy to find easy to work with so i absolutely heard the same thing uh and and so it was troubling for me to hear uh just to to put that out there for i mean you can again i think it was well crafted and and rec rafted to be soft or gentler but i think the net result was the same to me uh but and i was going to motion but i'll wait okay council member unless there's anybody over here anything else to say council member milson well i just to you know be uh to be very open uh i am uh responding somewhat from hearing at our last session that there was a that there was a history because we heard from our preservation officer say there was a history of properties that were historically designated that were destroyed and you're you're uh you know informing me that they were sold they were condemned and you know uh my perception was that there that there was some uh maybe lack of communication and i think that was a why i mean he that was mentioned i don't think there were specific details on the property who did it what institution what time frame which that could have been 30 or 40 i mean the city of dent on has torn down i think to some degree some properties it could have potentially been historic so i can appreciate that but i would have liked to have had a little bit more context from that discussion to then make the leap from this but well okay fair enough i appreciate that well look i'm instructed by you know my colleagues and uh you know my my objective is to have a very engaged relationship and you know and i'm very pleased to hear that's coming very soon and i move approval of item e okay uh second we have a motion and a second for agenda item one e uh all in favor please signify by raising your right hand passes unanimously uh we'll go on to our last item before concluding items which which is where is it agenda item oh i'm on the resolution no wonder it's not there 2a consider a motion to reconsider ordinance z 17 0028 d adopted july 17 2018 to formally address minimum lot size requirements we do have a card wishing to speak uh do we want to do that before staff presentation okay let's go ahead and do that mr bono if you'll just come up state your name and address your time again is it four three or four minutes three minutes three minutes thank you mayor council members uh justin bono astro development 92 19 or 92 19 arbor trail drive uh dallas texas thank you for the opportunity to speak here today uh didn't think i'd be back in front of you uh this soon but happy to have the opportunity and appreciate the opportunity to address this item so as the applicant um would like to first just for the record state our opposition to the proposed motion if i need to take a side on that um and but really direct my comments here this afternoon as to why uh we feel operationally that the uh proposed motion is unnecessary so first let me say that you know i understand uh the interest and protecting against really small lots in this location we had that discussion a week ago and that came through loud and clear however i think it's important to understand um what has already been built into our process and the approvals to date to protect against this first of all as we stated uh last week we um followed our preliminary plat really in conjunction with zoning right to follow behind zoning so that we were completely transparent with staff and then ultimately p and z and you guys as to what we were intending to build on the property which are all lots that are 50 foot wide or wider um and we'll tell you we have two home builders under contract for all of those lots they've we've drafted those contracts and have moved forward on that transaction based on the constructs of that plat and what we're showing them that we're we're putting on the ground so if that changes that obviously compromises our uh compromises our transactions and um you know they're not uh certainly not interested in making a change at at this late hour for that transaction um as you'll recall too we included a restriction against attached housing in this location which certainly um you know would eliminate any really small lots in this location that attached housing would drive and then we probably most importantly in this case we agreed on a density cap of 4.7 units to the acre it's important to understand that that cap was developed based on the plat we filed so based on those 50 foot lots we backed in with staff to what that uh what that cap would be of that 4.7 units so let's just say for sake of argument that somebody wanted to come along behind us if we dropped the property and wanted to develop 40 foot lots on that they're still limited to the same lot count because the math still works that on 74 acres times 4 .7 they can only get about 350 lots whether they're 50 foot wide or 40 foot wide or 30 foot wide so what practically that means is that if i go develop 350 40 foot lots those 40 foot lots are worth about ten thousand dollars per lot on retail basis less than the 50 foot lots i'm proposing so i would voluntarily be i would voluntarily be reducing my revenue on this project by three and a half million dollars which practically just you know isn't you know isn't going to happen there so hold on just say with that is that okay yeah go ahead thank you yeah um so so from a practical standpoint in this and you know i've been running around long enough no never say never and you know i'm sure we can all come up with hypotheticals where you know somebody might make a bad business decision uh but you know when you have the opportunity to develop 50 foot lots at a at three and a half million dollar you know revenue number higher than you would 40 foot lots we've already proved up that you know there's a market there for we have all 390 lots under contract to two different home builders the practicality of that happening is not uh you know not realistic so um you know in in that case just to further underscore that somebody could get this land for free if the if they were just d to the land and they still wouldn't make up the delta for that uh you know that loss in revenue of developing 350 40 foot lots versus 350 50 foot lots so um so just wanted to underscore the practicality of why people wouldn't logically make that business decision if they had the opportunity um but with that you know would certainly happy to entertain any questions you have or further clarity that i can provide but you know would ask that this motion not be made so that we may finish off our plat process in the coming weeks we've as i think staff will tell you we're you know knocking on the door of having a plat ready to go to p and z on the 8th of august um and obviously this would completely change that timeline with the posting requirements of another public hearing and um you know uh we're we could honestly be at the finish line with the preliminary plat um you know demonstrating what we're going to do with the project um and before we could get back to you guys to you know reconsider a zoning case uh on that plat so um again happy to answer any questions but would respectfully ask that um this motion either not be made or not be supported so that we might move forward with the unanim ous approval that we gained from you guys and also from p and z over the last uh last couple of weeks so thank you for your time yes councilman well i'm actually a question for legal would this have to be reposted as a public hearing or would this come back as an item for individual consideration this this would have to go back as a public hearing item and the reason why is as soon as this council made its decision it lost jurisdiction on a zoning matter per state law so and case law so the only way to regain it is to publish a a public hearing and redo it at the council level once again okay and the time frame for that is how long uh i know that there was uh due to the publication we couldn't get it before that before you until the 14th or the 21st the 21st so 20 21st for um the public hearing before so you're not still standing anybody have any questions for the presenter for the applicant anybody any questions thank you i just didn't want you standing up there if we didn't have any questions sorry you bet thank you yes council member i was just going to ask you to explain uh the rationale behind this thanks okay well uh good afternoon wait a minute rationale behind what oh behind the the rationale uh behind the the motion to reconsider and the issue with the lot size in other words what precisely what's about to happen i wanted to make sure that was going to happen well i want to i think we have to make a very nuanced discussion here because my understanding when i've done this before is there's a there's a line albeit you know sometimes you have to be careful between talking about the underlying substantive issue and then talking about the motion for reconsideration am i right on that as far as just the content i mean i don 't think we can have another staff presentation of what we had um the first time and plus i think council member ryan had asked for this so i certainly want to give him an opportunity to talk about but i'm going to give you a chance to share what you want i think what we 've done in past practice this is not in our council rules procedure but in past practice when a motion for reconsideration or at least has been requested to be considered by the council uh the typically the person or a staff member will bring forth and kind of just give a very broad overview of what the underlying item was and then the reasons why a particular council member had in bringing this forward to the rest of the council to reconsider and so that's typically what we've done to try to avoid getting too too far in the weeds of the actual zoning well so before we before we had the staff presentation i believe council member ryan you had asked for this i just want to hear your thoughts on this and and yes your reasoning during the public hearing we'd asked about a 50 foot lot width for for this to be tied to the zoning which is if it was under two acres would be what it would be required to have to begin with and as the motion was made that kind of got lost it just didn't get put in into place i know there's been some discussion that that could be part of the agreement that staff right now but my concern is this if it's platted now or it doesn't make it to final plot now and the property sets for a couple for a year or so and somebody else comes in they've got this underlying zoning that they are not now required to plat according to what had been agreed upon verbally and i'm just trying to get it into an actual document that that 50 foot whether we call that at the street front or we call that at the building line i don't care but i just feel like that's something that was right that personally i would have liked to have seen incorporated into that yeah and in fact i had a question i mean i think i i had a question once the next day of what this was included was it not and the answer was no it was not and i think there was some confusion some confusion in that regard so i think you're bringing it forward if i'm incorrect let me know just try to clarify that this was batted around there wasn't really a positive decent to it there wasn't a disapproval there just was it's like it was mentioned some people have said okay and then somehow it got lost in the motion in a second and you're trying to clean that right right i'm not from your perspective from from my perspective i'm not trying to change any of the terms that were agreed upon i'm simply trying to codify it into the zoning right so that if something happens down the road someone else becomes a developer and they do a different set of platting that we didn't leave this door open okay yes councilmember mel zer so so is this the sort of least negative impact on the applicant path to get that done you know to get what mayor pertends trying to get done you know to get the 50-foot lot width into it yeah that's my question i think it it affords the city the best protections as far as just from a zoning standpoint it isn't necessarily the the um simplest path it it's the simplest path in which we can go um ultimately i think that the developer would like to see deed restrictions which are not enforce able by the city right right yeah so before you start i do have a question for the applicant if you so you made a comment earlier that these lots do have a 50- foot minimum lot width explain that yeah so that would be measured at the building line so councilman ryan mentioned he was indifferent as to where you that's according to the plat right yeah okay yeah so that's based on the plat that has been submitted and frankly based on the minimum requirements that are included in our contracts with the home builders because they know what homes they want to build they need at least a 50-foot wide lot to do that so so i have a question for you um and this was last week where we heard this motion and the question i think i asked you the question you're going to develop it you're going to what are you going to you know not i don't think it was that direct but you know just saying people can hold it people and you i think proffered the voluntarily hey we may get it entitled and sell it off we may we may develop it how long have you been in contract with the two uh home builders i've had the property myself under contract for over a year now so if you'll recall we annexed this we had an annexation case initially on this so we've been working on this over 12 months um i can't remember i want to say initially our initial contract with the builders was it was earlier this spring but it was it was prior to last week yeah and as i recall the the question was more of a general question of what do you typically do with with sites like this so um and i would tell you i would be you know i'm happy to tell you that i have builders under contract and you know provide generalities but you know obviously i have back to your confidentiality discussion earlier i have confidentiality obligations so i can't get too far into the weeds of course no i should just what their intent is and you know how that how the okay nuts and bolts of our trains okay i appreciate that thank you i appreciate that yep okay uh did you have a question councilor yeah yeah go ahead okay just to summarize um what was approved as of last week was a rezoning to nr6 in that rezoning there was an overlay restriction which um ultimately stated that this will be single-family detached housing as well as a maximum density of 4.7 dwelling units per acre as indicated in that conversation there was um also items discussed of being a minimum of a 50-foot lot lot width and a 6,000 square foot minimum lot area um those items did not make it into the overlay and uh subsequent to that we had a conversation with the developer the developer indicated that he was willing to do a deed restriction which which would ultimately be assigned to that preliminary plat once filed um the the what i don't know is whether the developer on on the 6,000 square foot minimum lot area i don't know that he's in agreeance to do that so that's that other provision that was discussed if i recall correctly the conversation went as that um many would be 6,000 square feet but there would be some that would be under 6,000 square feet um ultimately the options on this if the if the motion fails the applicant um had the opportunity for the for the deed restriction um if the motion to reconsider is approved uh the public hearing would be on August 21st the preliminary plat could then be scheduled for September 12th PNC well if the motion fails i mean i would i would think that the developer wouldn't put the deed restriction on because that means not enough council people would want to reconsider the 50-foot minimum lot size so i i and plus we're dealing with right now with deed restrictions occur when deed restrictions occur and people look to the city to enforce those deed restrictions and we just don't do it and can't do it so deed restrictions are very i mean from a city policy perspective i understand why developers put them on but um okay any questions for staff no yes yes i saw when you were talking about the deed restrictions just to clarify the reason why the city doesn't enforce them is that it somebody has to have an interest in being able to enforce the deed restrictions and the typically the person that has that is a owner of the lot or the developer developer themselves the city doesn't have any kind of interest like that so that's why we don't enforce it okay okay any other questions comments yes i'll just make the comment i'm strongly in favor of this uh it's too bad that you know we didn't do it the right way that time but there's i i don't see any loss to the city in doing this the right way this time so i'm strongly in favor of doing what we can to to um do what what we had kind of all thought that we originally did and didn't realize for me it wasn't until getting the you know the friday report that that i realized this didn't happen anyway um you know when we make a mistake we it is always better to correct it uh than to just keep keep going uh so i'm strong that's just to say i'm strongly in favor i think this is what's best for the city best for the public yes council member yeah no i'm not i hope it dies for a second just because it goes back to what we were just talking about when you're talking about a planning development department you're talking about growth you're talking about re-incentivizing people to come here and trust our processes uh we dropped the ball that means we get a deed restriction in place i i'm willing to trust him until he tells us shows us we can't trust him um i think if the deed restrictions in place it empowers the individual homeowners to hold him accountable so that's whatever 200 lots of people that are account he's accountable to that are actually going to live there and and so for me i think it's it's lesson learned let's be better about taking notes let's be diligent about making sure our motions are succinct but to push it back i mean because i've just seen it on planning zoning too much i mean you're kicking it all the way back to next month uh and we just had a conversation about compound cost etc etc so it just it's not the punishment doesn't fit the crime so we had a clerical the city had a clerical error and for that we're going to cost this individual builder thousands of dollars and so it just doesn't line up as far as um uh just the actions and the consequences for me personally and i want to continue to show individuals that we're going to do our best to get it right absolutely uh but if we make a mistake we own it you gotta you gotta deal with that internally uh but that's not to to cost uh builders and potential builders thousands of dollars it just it sends the wrong message and i and i can appreciate that but i totally disagree and i'm gonna tell you why because you're basing that upon the applicant's discussion of a contract with the builders based upon preliminary plats and all these other kinds of things if if this if we didn't have any of that if we didn't have a preliminary plat if there wasn't if we didn't know that there were contracts and i understand why that's why we're told that we weren't told that last week but we're told that this week uh because that that amps up the pressure but this is a zoning case and typically at zoning cases you don't have preliminary plats that are in you don't have all these kinds of things going on so this is an economic decision and i disagree that we have to therefore if we think we've made a clerical error or mistake that i think our duty as council members is to say what is that going to cost us to correct that what's it going to cost those that we made the mistake with because we would be the first to say if somebody made a mistake with the city we'd want them to have a chance to to make it right so i appreciate that but i think most of that has come most of what you're saying is based upon all of the other tangential things that have been presented with the zoning because you were on planning and zoning you know that most of the time preliminary plats don't necessarily come with i can't think of we get we get conceptual plans but we don't get preliminary plats so and i get it and i don't think that the time issue is necessarily that that's a month plus we were just told that the minimum lot size at the building line is 50 feet so i don't think there's any harm that's being generated at the building line there's any harm that the city is creating in that and i certainly don't think that a month based upon a contract that's been had for over a year that hasn't been closed yet i this that land hasn't been closed yet they're not going to close it without the approval and i doubt that it was closed last week as well so i appreciate that i don't agree that somehow we can't look at our processes and if we've made a mistake that could better protect the citizens in our community at and weigh it against the harm against the harm of of the of those that we're doing trying to correct totally get it in this case the harm is a month from what i've heard the harm is not necessarily uh and it's not even it's the harm is a speculative economic issue it's not something that i mean the land hadn't been closed on it's not like all of a sudden somebody's gonna lose a bunch of money it's losing that potential uh and so i don't i'll be supporting this um because i think that that we can respectfully disagree on that and i appreciate that uh so any other comments questions yes i'd like to actually ask the applicant what the economic impact would be just sure to put a perspective projected economic impact absolutely well to the best of your ability you know and uh obviously firm costs you know probably count more than vague impressions um so the question restate your question what's the uh projected economic um impact on you if we do uh reconsider the motion and you know put you out a month yeah so the time issue is less financial impact is kind of right now my contract is calls to close in august so i'm gonna have to go back and renegotiate the contract frankly to get out past september so i can't answer that question as to what it's going to cost me to now go renegotiate my contract so um so i again it you talked about being speculative i don't know it's going to be something um because right now my contract does not allow me a preliminary plat date that would drag into you know mid september so um so that answers that question as far as the plat itself obviously if um you know what i would certainly hope to get to is an agreement uh just on minimum lot size and not or minimum lot width and not lot size our average is greater than six thousand but we have some some less and some greater um everything is at least 50 foot wide or greater so certainly if we can limit that to the width um there's no real engineering cost if you will and reworking the plat if we go to a minimum then i'm essentially we won't hit the 12th because i'm back to the drawing board on redesigning an entire plan to make sure everything's at least 6 000 square feet so so i think that's important to understand is the dynamic how much there is a difference there is in just calling out that minimum width versus a minimum lot square footage um so um so hopefully that answers your question i want to make sure i understand what you just said so what you're what i heard you say was if it was just restricted to a minimum lot with the 50 at the building at the building line that nothing changes on your plat right the engineering design of our plat can operate as is because i mean we've already done that so as far as the so it doesn't change how many lots you have it doesn't change the configuration of it in fact it really doesn't change anything so there's really very minimal cost i mean your builders probably aren't going to terminate the contract because nothing's different i mean assuming i can get my underlying land owner to you know extend well i have a strange feeling that somebody who's fixing to sell their land uh because they want to sell their land i would be surprised if they didn't uh i've been hanging on a long time yeah yeah well they've been hanging on for a long time for a reason because they they want to sell it so so those are your two those are your two contingencies one is can you renegotiate or can you get your closing date extended based upon this and then other than that then there's really not from from a council member hudspeth is talking about some potential grave economic harm you still have the same exact configuration that you have currently but that the city now has an opportunity at least to feel that we've memorialized what we've sort of agreed to i mean you said you'd agree to put it on the deed restriction to put it on the plaid at the building line and so this that's the city's way of memorializing is okay that's fair enough we can't enforce it in the deed restrictions but here we're sort of saying yeah it's just sort of more form than it is substance but it's it's a it's protects i think everybody uh you know you wouldn't like to have it because it's just another restriction i get that i don't begrudge that at all i don't mind the restriction actually it's just the it's just the the time of you know having to rewind the clock and do all this over again and just the concern honestly of i mean it's not like we're just going back to address that one item we're opening up an entire zoning case so from my standpoint you know i've you guys say that that's all you're going to address but you know i have we have to go you know we have to open up the public hearing and do all this over again i'm i'm hopeful that you know um your people of your word and that that's the only thing we 're going to address but um but you know it could go any number of directions i can appreciate that um so that's that's my concern is that you know we've we've done a lot um to get us to this point of showing you what we're going to do you know i understand the legalities of the deed restriction but please understand we've we've tried to do everything completely above board and be as transparent as we could about what we're trying to do and um and uh and try to find a solution short of you know rewinding the clock and you know adding you know a month plus to the to the process so if this had been decided if somehow that would have been more easily identified at last tuesday's meeting if that's what it was hey 50 foot at the building line we don't care about minimum lot size is not an issue you wouldn't have had an issue with that if we would have added a condition um that was 50 foot minimum lot width at the building line yeah we would have we would have we would have agreed to that okay all right that ain't your question questions well yeah i was actually gonna ask council member hudspeth if that influenced your judgment well thank you and thank you and no i mean for me i'm not gonna support it and here's here's what i'd ask staff to do i feel terrible for you and i'm absolutely sorry uh and i wish uh i had three other people that agreed with me that being said i would ask the city manager and and uh staff to consider when we get to impact fees etc if there's a proven cost that affects his project that we find a way to uh make him hold on in that impact fee process or somewhere down the line i mean i just think that if if there's a tangible cost time is money i i believe that but i'm not trying to sell y'all on that but i'm saying if there's a if there's a if there's a tangible cost associated with this clerical error that we made that we're then uh that impacts this project i would like to see staff or or the management try to make him hold uh on the uh on the back side just my personal preference i could absolutely stand alone on that it could absolutely not be possible i just want to make it known that that uh i've heard i hear this comment i was on pnz for over a year or so and it always comes to this it is always and and now we're telling and again that's very real because all of a sudden so it's very real his his concern that all of a sudden yes now that now that citizens are queued up and and now up extra upset and they send an extra email and some council member flips again and now we're back down this road again that is just absolutely you can't control it right i mean it is just its own process and so you're opening it up you're saying hey we made a clerical error we're going to open it up for everything you know because of that i understand that's the only path forward i just don't agree that it's the best i can appreciate that okay great mayor matt did you mind if i address the one item he talked about from a cost standpoint yeah um i appreciate your comment i mean i fortunately you know our contract was um built based on closing after preliminary flag but that's not always the case i mean a lot of a lot of times you know i'll close after zoning or uh certainly other developers will so i'll just add that i'm fortunate that i i didn't incur the cost of closing this property based on based on zoning because there's a lot of people that would have closed this last week and then found out oh my gosh i really don't have zoning so i would just just from a developer's perspective put that out there that um you know reconsideration of zoning actions like this are just extremely troubling when um you know you're you know typically you get an approval at council and um you you think you're uh you think you're done so um i'm fortunate that i i'm not in that situation and i appreciate uh councilman hudspeth's um advocacy for you know continuing to look for um you know opportunities to you know correct any sort of deficit if that exists and of course that would come before council before staff made that decision okay okay any other comments questions okay i'll just say first off i'll apologize to the developer that the that we're having to go through this and had that 50 foot width that's the only reason that i brought this back is because it leaves the city unprotected in the future we don't we can't enforce deed restrictions so you know we're not looking to to change anything but with that i will make a motion to reconsider uh ordinance z 17 0228 d councilmember yeah i second and let me just say i i have no i understand about it opening up for other people and emails this is my only issue i have no desire to change anything uh and i've received a lot of emails over 10 years that i know where i stand on things and this this is just one of those issues so any other comment question discussion all in favor for this motion to approve the motion to reconsider is that right uh signify by raising your right hand all opposed so motion fails all right uh okay concluding items do what yes say motion fails there's only there's not four here an affirmative vote is yes yes yes okay concluding items yes councilmember thank you sir for coming you bet thank you yep okay um concluding items uh several things um one i'd like a staff update on the uh dcta strike and and denton's role in dcta and how that would be affected obviously you know things are changing day to day i say the strike but the who knows it might um be uh settled in negotiations but whatever happens be nice to have some sort of written report on that um i would advise waiting as close to the last minute as you can to get the most um timely uh report on that um speaking of timeliness i'm something that uh came up this this morning i've already been in in uh communications with uh staff about that this um there uh just a uh and i would like an and some sort of written announcement to the public about the uh the trees that started coming down this morning um on on the uh development behind foxcroft it this happened i got the call about it or this morning right before a 10 30 appointment so i haven 't even had time to do my due diligence on the issue but uh people in the neighborhood are are concerned uh so you know regardless of whether or not this was sanctioned um there were you know people who had not been aware of a change in the uh in the the map and and the plans for this development i know it had been in the work for years so some sort of update on it and so apologies that i don't know the name even of this of this development uh but again this just just came up this morning so i haven't had time to do my due diligence but i did want to get that out there um two uh three more three more things um one um i'd like a work session at some point on the noise ordinance issue um including what technologies are um you know police are using uh versus what technologies are uh code enforcement uses and uh what the pros and cons of those technologies are kind of reassessment of the uh consistency and application of this ordinance and what the policy is on responding to um uh to uh complaints and two more um uh i would like a work session also at some future point uh about code enforcement our uh practices and policies and priorities and code enforcement um and this is this is you know outside of the or community improvement services this is outside of the general um budget issues that we're voting on but a kind of you know uh back to the uh drawing board approach where we get citizen citizens input um and i've already gotten a lot of citizen input over over the years um and looking at really reassess ing uh what the rules are again very much like with with the noise ordinance the you know the consistency with which these rules are advocated are are applied and also um the purpose that they're intended to serve so and finally um you know and i'd like staff to be part of that staff and the public to be all part of that discussion i say back to the drawing board maybe you know we decide everything is good as is but just it seems time to have that have that discussion since it is up to us as a city to make those those rules um finally um about bathrooms and uh city bathrooms uh i would like to propose and and i don't know if this would be best served in a work session or a written staff report but um an assessment of you know how much trouble would it be to take in all of our city buildings these single use bathroom stalls uh sorry single use bathrooms uh like the ones we have downstairs in this building and here and to just take off the the women and men sign and just make them bathrooms um you know this is you know to state the obvious has been shown to when when when businesses and public buildings do this it reduces weight wait time uh and uh it it also makes them bathrooms most accessible uh for everybody um and i would also um propose alongside that some sort of uh uh you know non- monetary in incentive or not even incentive policy but a kind of reward system where uh when private businesses decide to do this to change their uh bathrooms when and if they do uh to gender neutral bathrooms maybe they could get some little piece of paper a little certificate from the city to put in their window just letting people know we have gender neutral bathrooms or whatever you want to call them you know non-gender specific bathroom so that people know uh and uh so that's the extent of my concluding remarks thanks thank you anybody else got a couple and we will be talking about concluding items in the retreat because they i mean we're getting to where i think they're getting um we just need to have some conversation about a council on that council member uh go ahead melzer yes no no go ahead no no no no no obviously not i mean uh no but we just i mean yeah like uh michael yeah um i'd like uh i think it'd be i'd like there to be uh if there isn't already i'd like there to be there to be some cross silo conversation within staff or you know consider this as a suggestion uh on the topic of tree canopy in terms of the an objective uh you know it's stated in many places that it's that preservation and enhancement is important we know it affects air quality watershed heat ambient heat everything else but i don't know that we're managing toward an objective and so you know it touches planning streets parks the arborist environmental services so that that's that's that's the ask and i think well you know once if we can establish an objective i think we can line up policies you know so we can know if we're actually going to hit it or not uh and then the second item um i i just am having some misgivings about whether we're letting uh the industrial street park become a little uh might be totally wrong but whether it might be becoming too much of a cadillac when a chevy would do in terms of cost and i'd be interested in at least seeing what we could do with 150 000 and engaging master gardeners it just seems like you know a lot of money and uh i think we might be getting a little carried away let the rest drop to the bottom line or go to other parkland development okay uh august 31st uh coming up at the square from 6 30 to 7 30 is international overdose awareness day it's a new event here in the city uh regionally actually county to bring awareness to the opioid epidemic and just addiction in general and and how uh you know harmful that is how it affects not just the addict but the families and how can we be supportive and there's going to be people out there providing resources and there's tables and booths for information so i'll be making that announcement as we every time as we come because i really want to bring awareness to it because i think it's something that's very important i want to give a shout out to dme for uh their assistance and also a citizen david honig for their assist his assistance in getting electricity back on for the monsignor king outreach center when they blew a fuse so i think it was only probably less than an hour that they were able to get out there and get that done so really really appreciate them doing that we need to start thinking about an agenda just talking about and i think you talked about dcta council member armature from a different perspective but uh we're going to need to have just a discussion on you know what what's the role of the city you know what what are we getting what are our our factors uh so we'll be discussing that i think probably in a month or two but those are all that i have yep that's all i have anything else okay we'll stand oh yes go ahead um just uh applause to um staff and actually to dcta for uh getting the word out about the cooling shelters uh during this you know time of extreme heat and to dcta for supporting the shuttle to get folks from our daily but over there i think a lot of people were helped okay thank you all right we stand adjourned