Aug 21, 2021 City Council on 2021-08-21 9:00 AM (Council Retreat - Day 2)

Good morning. It is 9.07 and I'll call the annual council retreat to order. It's August, Saturday, August 21st, 2021. We do have a quorum. I will turn it over to the city manager to kind of, if we, if we need to. We're good. I think we're good. Okay. Great. Okay. Then I'll, I'll just note for the record that council member Meltzer, Mayor Pro Tem Meltzer has opted to leave. And so they'll just be the six of us through today. Can I? No, go ahead. Go ahead. Okay. All right. So let me, good morning everybody. I hope everybody had a good night's sleep. There is some breakfast in the break room. Feel free to help yourself. We will take a mid morning break this morning. Give you a chance to stretch your legs. If you need to obviously use the facilities or grab something during the session, please feel free to do that. We want to make this as comfortable and casual as possible for all of you. Hopefully everybody has their binder and did their homework last night, read through the materials. Let me direct your attention if I would and keep this binder handy. You're going to be referencing it quite a bit today on tab four. So if you find that tab four on your, in your binder. Can you go to the next slide? Can you do that? And that's, that's a slide two is just a little bit about me and, but we talked about my background and experience in expertise last night, but that just gave you a little bit of information, but I'm going to move on to the next slide, slide three, which is on the screen as well as in your binder to review the agenda for today. And these time frames are guardrails. It's important to have some time frames on these subjects to have some ebb and flow to it, to try to accomplish what we need to by the time that we've stated. It'll be up to me to manage that. If we ended up needing a little bit more time or a little less time, we'll have some ebb and flow and I'll try to do my best around those timeframes and managing that. So the morning, what we're going to, this morning, what we're going to do is review the goals for the day, which is the next step. What we're going to do is spend some time on the current council priorities and much of today, Sarah and I are going to sort of tag team. So we'll be both, we'll both be sort of going back and forth a little bit of toggling between her contribution and her points that she wants to raise to the council and then how I facilitate those conversations. So there'll be a little bit of a tag team. So we're going to review the current council priorities and major projects. I'll give you an update, a general update, if I would, if I will, on that and then dive into based on that and your own estimation and your observations and insight. What about those priorities? Do you maybe want to press on the gas and move sooner about, sooner faster? Are there things not on there that you would like to consider adding, which is a big part of today. If there are items on that list that you want to pump the brakes and say, hold on, we're not sure we want to make progress toward that. Maybe things, things change. There's an evolution of this. It's an iteration. So the balance of the most of the morning is really reviewing the projects and then determining what, if anything, needs to change. It is not a linear discussion. So as you may recall yesterday, I mentioned the whole notion of making spaghetti and you're going to exchange ideas and try to share perspectives. We're going to dive through those. We're going to try to keep them somewhat in order of each of the priority areas if we can, but if we zigzag, that's perfectly fine. And the opportunity as well as a challenge about those discussions is one person bringing it up doesn't necessarily translate that you want to make time, effort and energy putting against that. We're trying to not have voting today. We're trying to do this based on a consensus. Remember the outcome of the revised strategic planning priority list is the city manager and her staff will spend time, effort and energy against those items. So really the strategic plan, as I had said, no one watches a rental car because they don't own it. So we want you all to own the car and own that list because the staff is going to spend time against us. This is also in addition to what obligates them to do on a daily basis to ensure the delivery of core services. So in some respects, their augmentations are enhancements, as I mentioned yesterday. So this morning, there's definitely a back and forth ebb and flow of exchange of ideas. We wanted to try to by the time lunch arrives, by the time we wrap up for lunch is we have an agreed upon list of what those priorities are going forward. And I would offer this to you just as an opportunity. If you simply reaffirm the priority list as it stands now, there's value in that. Try not to measure the success of the strategic plan update by the length of the list. Better to do a few things well than try to do a lot of things. And sometimes councils get caught up in the notion we got to do a bunch of new things. And so you add to the list and the list always gets longer. Something I would ask you to consider, and I'm going to pull this out just as you have these discussions. And it's just a really quick diagram. It's nothing fancy, but I see councils as they evaluate items to explore in the future, sometimes as they grapple with that, which can be in the best of times very difficult. This is simply our simple apparatus that I'm going to draw up here. That's a critical thinking and priority setting device. As you look in your role as community builders and you look at the community of Denton, as you examine what you're trying to do to refresh the recipe today, what must you do well to be successful in those efforts? What is non-negotiable? You have an obligation, you have a fiduciary responsibility to the taxpayers of the city of Denton to ensure that the high quality delivery of those services must. The second dimension is what do you need to do to keep the community realizing its potential? That's a little bit more subjective, a little bit more arbitrary. And depending on me you ask, you get a different response. And the third dimension of that is nice. What's nice to do to build a community as it continually realizes its potential? Must, need, and nice. A very simple device. It's not up to me to decide what content goes into each category, but I find councils struggle with everything's a priority. And I think for this council in particular, as you continually work together, I think it's going to be crucially important to your continued success to try to determine the gauge or the criteria by which you're trying to move this community toward. Because if everything is in must, that's not sustainable. Need is a little bit more arbitrary as I mentioned, and trying for you all as a group to determine what that is. And then nice. The challenge is if you ask somebody in Denton, if you think something is nice to them it's a must. So I'm not trying to muddy the water here, but I'm simply trying to introduce this concept of how are you prioritizing against what criteria? And I think that goes back to the whole concept of what is your role. How do you see your role? You stand on the shoulders of your predecessors. You inherit this from them. The decisions they made right, wrong, or indifferent. Your successors will inherit the decisions from you. As we know in local government, things are multi-year. This community is not what it was several years ago, and who knows where it's going. But how do you craft, influence, and guide, and shepherd the community into the future? There are dividends of growth. There's unintended consequences of growth. How do you manage? You talked a little bit about that yesterday. How do you sort of guide that growth? How would your role as a catalyst? You have great heritage here in Denton. How do you make sure that stays vibrant as part of your future? That's always a challenge, even in the best of times. So I do share that with you. Very simple device, must, need, and nice. As you examine the topics today, as you look to the future in the community that you're building. So then we'll break for lunch. Then we come back from lunch. We're going to be reviewing some information to help you give a chance to scrub it and determine what, if anything, you want to make changes about. First is the council committees, the role, the function. How are they working? Do you want to keep the same number? Do you want to revise it, refresh it, reduce it? What's the function of those committees? The challenge sometimes of council committees, as I think you all know, is you really rely on those committees to do the leg work about what that policy item is or whatever that subject is. They really are part of your decision-making apparatus as a governing body, the governance side. You're trying to rely on their capability, their guidance, their influence. The key to those committees is how you factor their input into your decisions. So we'll have a discussion about the council committees. Right after that, we'll go into the council meetings and the agenda process, the prioritization and scheduling of additional requests. One of the fascinating things about council meetings, no matter where I go, no matter what jurisdiction you're in, is how they engineer the preparation of council agenda items. There's no perfect way. It's very subject to the organization's past practice. What's a proven practice, it's also dependent upon the governing body and their preference. But there is an engineering process in order to do that. And we want to kind of re-engineer today and say, how's it working? Is it meeting your expectations? There is steps that are gone through just to get an item as a council item on the agenda. It's not just, here's an item, let's put it on the... I mean, I think you're all well immersed in that. So today's discussion is simply to have a refresh and a revisit of that process. How it's working and if any tweaks may need to be made to make sure it's successful. Right? It's not about being overly bureaucratic, but there is a methodology to it. And that's important. You want to be whimsical about the process there. It should not be something that is, every time you do it, it's a brand new endeavor. That's stressful and it's unnecessary. So as the staff has worked with council over the last several years, there is a process. We're going to review that. See how it works, if there's any tweaks. It's also to manage your expectations, which I think is an ongoing opportunity. To say, if an item comes up, there is capacity, there are things going to come up later on, what may need to be moved around. And then the final item we're going to discuss are the council requests, in particular, the one minute pitch process. Staff has done some research in cities in the Metroplex about how they handle it, providing you some options, including keeping the current approach, as well as some other options to that one minute pitch. There's no, again, no perfect way. It's really what you're comfortable with and how it works. And managing the volume. From my vantage point, what I see is the volume is continually intensifying and increasing and expanding. How do you not say no to things at an immediate reaction, but how does the council stay disciplined and intentional and purposeful in what you're trying to do? There's always, there's no shortage of priorities putting pressure on each of you and all of you to say, we need to do something about this. We need to do something about that. How do you resolve that through the process? And that one minute pitch process, for better or worse, seems to have some level of effectiveness. And so this is a chance to revisit that. Okay. So that's the agenda for today. There's materials, supporting materials on that tab, four and then five through nine and 10. So I encourage you to keep those materials out. Just a couple other logistics things before we go into more of the meat of the day. We will take a break at some point, but if you need to go to the bathroom or if you want to go get a snack, you're welcome to do so at any time. We ask that there's no eating in this room. So even when we have lunch, there are other conference rooms available throughout the building. So just find Stuart or myself. We can help you go to one of those if you want to eat by yourself in a room. Just wanted to make that known. There's plenty of space in this building, but just kind of want to set those parameters. Is there anything else? No, but there are some, there are like private cubicles. People could go in. There's actually a couple of meeting rooms in there. Just go to any of those areas. So there's some, you know, people don't feel uncomfortable and that way everybody's safe. Where are the restrooms? Right here. Just right over here. So I'm going to move on to slide four and these are just a quick review of today, the goals for today. You're trying to engage in collaborative, creative, can you move on to the next one? Collaborative, creative, and collegial conversations about the future of Denton and the city's role in helping its potential be realized. That's really the outcome of today. Continually that next step in helping the community realize its potential, whatever that might be. To distinguish between problems you can fix and issues you can only address. That can be, it can be a challenge, can create a conundrum there about how you unknot some of those threads. So we had the conversation about that today. Help the governing body coalesce around their role as community builders. You're obviously as community leaders, first and foremost, you're seen as visible community builders to the members, businesses, others that have an affiliation with the city of Denton. So trying to fortify that. Foster trust among the elected officials and their deliberations about the future of Denton. We talked a little bit last night about trust. It's the currency in all relationships. How do you do that? How do you exchange ideas, maintaining healthy relationships in those interactions and ensuring that trust is continually replenished. To fortify the council staff partnership. Again, we're trying to make sure there's alignment of priorities and agreement upon those expectations as an outcome of today. And the final one is to strengthen your versatility to be both responsive and proactive. You may recall, we touched on that a little bit yesterday about that notion. Those are different muscles. So you're trying to be responsive in the short term, like you got to deal with things like right now. And then you're trying to be proactive forecasting on the horizon in the short term in some, in some respects, the long term. So those are the goals, kind of the guidelines, if you will, somewhat prescriptively about what you're trying to do and how you're trying to do it today. So I hope those resonate with you in the approach that we're trying to utilize. We want to utilize. The next item is we're going to review the council priorities and major projects. And we've got about 45 minutes scheduled for that. We'll see if we need to spend all that time for those. And that really starts on slide six. And so I'll take over and go through this first part, which is really just to share where we are currently with our current council priorities. And then I'll turn it back over to Patrick, who's going to lead you through the development of next year's priorities. But staff wanted to take an opportunity to share with you a lot of progress that has been made in our priorities, but also major projects and initiatives that you've already approved through various items or through the budget. But wanted to take an opportunity to say why, why do we, why do you all establish your priorities and how does that help staff? And that really helps us better plan and focus our time and efforts in terms of what we should be focusing on for policy operations or budget development. And really just helps us understand what is most important to you, what is most critical that we are getting done and advancing forward for the community. So the last retreat you all held was in February. That was six months ago. That was a little different timeframe just due to the delay of the elections of the pandemic. But since that time, we have made progress and we do have full details in tab five, if you've had a chance to read through that. And then we also have on our city website, we do a quarterly update to the public of where we are on those council priorities. And so I'll move to the next slide, which just reminds you of the nine priorities that have been set by city council and kind of walk you through an update just very quickly on each one. I think you're all very familiar, hopefully, where we stand on these items. But the first is to implement the economic development strategic plan. So that plan was adopted in February of this year. Since that time, Jessica and her staff have held a number of work sessions from items coming out of that plan, including discussion of the catalyst fund. She just presented this last week and some other tools that you have available to you for economic development. And there's another work session scheduled in October. The second item is to develop the loop 288 building to serve individuals experiencing homelessness. So this will be the 24/7 center for our community for those who are experiencing homelessness or at risk of homelessness. Since February, we did finish our work with the architect, we brought forward the final design, the budget and next steps in the process in April, we got direction from you all to move forward. And then in June, we approved city council approved a contract with our daily bread for the management and operation of that center. And then recently, during the last council meeting, you all approved the CMAR contract. So we will be going forward to do the next steps of actually having the CMAR, the construction manager at risk bid that project out. And so it is still on the timeline to be completed substantially by December of 2022. So it's an update a lot of that project will take a lot of time throughout the next year. And there's a lot of management that goes into such a really substantial renovation and construction projects and then working closely with our nonprofit partners to understand what exact services will be provided at that facility, what agreements are necessary, just a lot of details, a lot of planning work that will take some time over the next year, to make sure that's as successful as it can be immediately. The third item is the comp plan update. So we did have a recent presentation to council on August 3rd, with planning staff and the matrix group, they gave you an update on some of the public feedback that they've received so far through the engagement process. And also kind of gave you a peek into what's coming next. We expect more work sessions to be held later this fall, with hopefully adoption later end of calendar year. And this will be taken up with the mobility plan as it was presented to you to make sure those two are aligned with each other. The fourth item is to develop a comprehensive solid waste management strategy. So we have had a consultant, Burns and McDonnell, working closely with our solid waste and recycling, doing public engagement as well. We're going into a series of work sessions this fall with city council to present to you and get some direction, hoping to adopt that strategy by the end of the calendar year. And then through the rest of the fiscal year, staff would take that strategy, develop some budget options for implementation for consideration during the next fiscal year. The fifth item is to develop an affordable housing strategy. So since February, we did hold a work session with council in February to show the assessment that we had with our consultant and then receive direction at that time to go into the next phase, which is to develop some tools, potential tools to help foster our needs of affordable housing in the community. We've been working with the consultant, have done a number of stakeholder engagement throughout the summer, and we will be bringing a presentation and a work session forward to city council on September 21st with that consultant. The sixth item is to respond to COVID-19. So this has been a major focus throughout the last year and a half. It kind of died down a little bit through the spring and summer, but we will be readjusting and focusing more staff time on responding to COVID-19. And this is in a number of different ways that affects our city operations and our city workforce, as well as community wide. And then in addition to, we'll kind of talk about it when we get to major projects, all of the federal funding that we're still trying to administer and develop programs for and make sure that we're getting that out to our businesses, our nonprofits, and to the community. The seventh item is to complete the mobility plan. Again, we've had some updates on that recently. That'll be kind of in alignment with the comp plan coming later this fall. The eighth item to improve capital project planning and communication, our capital projects team is working very diligently on this. They are adopting a project management software. They've been working on that with their staff and training. And they have developed also as part of that a draft map that could be eventually pushed out to the public to better communicate project timelines and project information. So still more to come. And as well as you've seen a number of contracts come before you, some alternative delivery methods, and whether that be construction manager at risk or bundling of street reconstruction projects, how can we do and look at construction projects differently to be more efficient and effective in the timelines and the execution of those projects? So a lot of efforts and a lot of good things coming out of capital projects. The last item is City Hall West. So unfortunately, in February, probably shortly after these priorities were adopted, we had the winter storm. That building did experience some significant damage. We have been doing the remediation steps necessary. I think that's going to be completed in the next few weeks. And then we will start with the request for information, the RFI process. But we had to wait to kind of do some of that remediation first, because it was unsafe to go into the facility. And that RFI process, anyone that's potentially interested in that is going to want to go inside of the facility and see it in order to propose. The best way possible. So that's kind of a quick update of where we stand on the current City Council priorities. Any questions for staff? Council Member Beck. Do we use project management software to help us facilitate interactions, tasks, issues, epics, that sort of business management approach? Sure. In any department? Sort of across the board and then down through the departments? Yeah, there is different approaches across the organization in terms of project management software. There's a lot of different softwares that are available, but I will say a lot of them, a lot of our departments, do use project planning software, whether that be Microsoft or some others that we have available. Yeah, that's why we're doing the study to look at all the applications that we have. One of the problems that we're experiencing, we have over 400 applications in the city. And what we want to be able to do is pick the very best of those so that we're not, one department's using one thing, one department's doing another. We need it to all top each other. And so that's what we're working on now. But they have each department's, many of them have the same project management software, but not all. And that's my concern is that I want one that's talking to all the departments. And so we have a consultant that's actually beginning the process, a letter went out to department heads yesterday to talk about the goal, which is to one, look at those that are no longer viable, outdated, not working. Two, are any of them duplicative? And three, what is the best application for us to use across the board? So that's where we are. That you were prescient, that you pre-answered all my questions on that. I was concerned with the number of priorities, some of which are very different strategies that you can't be successful one, unless we're implementing similar strategies for all. Thank you. Mayor Pritzker-Melzer. Thank you. You know, I was really struck by Mr. Ibarra yesterday saying that across the country, every different kind of locality that you're seeing, affordable housing, affordability of housing and homelessness surface and even eclipsing economic development. And it's sort of a little outside of our scope of what we need to accomplish today. But I wonder if you'd be willing to even just send us a letter later about any remarkable approaches you've observed, you know, on those two fronts that we could, you know, just look into. Sure. I'd appreciate that. Thank you. Any other questions for staff? Okay. Okay. I'll move into the next four slides to give you more updates on some of the major projects and initiatives that staff are undertaking as well. And the way we've tried to organize, kind of providing you some updates on those is into six key focus areas, as we're calling them. And we develop these key focus areas based upon past strategic plans of city council, also knowing what your priorities are, your set priorities. And then we've also used these before in our annual report to the community as part of the state of the city events so that we are communicating better to the community about what the key focus areas are and what we're accomplishing each year. I'll move right into the next slide. Shows the first three kind of key areas with the council priorities and projects outlined underneath each one of these. So the ones in blue are your council priorities. We've slotted into underneath these key focus areas and then some other projects that staff just wanted to make you aware of that are going to take significant time throughout the next year, but that will also have significant benefits to our operations and to our community. So that first one is pursue organizational excellence. We've talked about the council priority and then some other major things that we're working on that we kind of fit under this category is developing and implementing American Rescue Plan funding and programs. As I talked about, that's going to take a lot of staff time from economic development to community services to finance to legal to a number of other departments to implement what you have given us policy direction on already in terms of how we should use those American Rescue Plan dollars. We're going to have to set up grant applications, programs, review those with committees and then bring back final awards to you on those dollars. And then monitor going forward once they are awarded to make sure that we're in compliance with federal regulations. The next item is to implement 3-in-1 system. We've presented before as part of the budget process and we'll actually have in September a contract coming forward to city council for the procurement of a 3-in-1 software system and that'll be a 12-month project at least and it'll involve multiple departments but it will hopefully significantly improve how we are responding to citizen service requests. So right now we're using Engage Denton which has been very very helpful but this will allow an opportunity to have one number for citizens to call as well as one application for citizens to use and then all of that work will take place on the back end and it will be much more efficient for staff as well and will give us better reporting and metrics to understand how we are servicing the community and how we continue to get better. Budget is always a major focus area and soon after we adopt this current year budget we're already looking at the next fiscal year's budget. At grant management as you know we set up a grant management office last year so we continue to look at opportunities for additional grants but then also making sure that we're successfully managing the ones that we do have currently across the organization and being consistent in best practices there. We're also launching completing and launching a new website so that'll launch before the end of the calendar year or in January of next year and that will hopefully improve how we can communicate out critical information and just how we're able to organize all of that information for our residents and improve the search functionality of the website as well. So moving into that second key focus area this is focusing on utilities infrastructure and mobility. A number of council priorities fall underneath this category or focus area. Again this is all in your backup so I don't want to take too much time but we do have a number of city facility construction projects that we're working on from parks projects to police station and so forth. We have the bond program capital projects and then we're continuing to do a number of parks planning efforts that you will see coming before you as well for example example the master trails park plan. The third area is economic vitality so also have a couple of council priorities that fit underneath this category and then as well as the historic preservation plan that was adopted I think earlier this year or last year we now have the historic preservation officer who's working to implement that plan and bring back things to city council. We're also continuing to review the debt and development code amendments so in the backup it does show a number of amendments that have been moved forward and approved and then a number of amendments that we're looking to do next to continue to improve that. I'll move into the next slide with the last three kind of focus areas there to strengthen community and neighborhood services so the two council priorities we've discussed and then in addition what has really been impacting our time is helping to manage all the federal and state funds that we have received in response to COVID. Some wonderful opportunities in the community to support housing but it does take a significant amount of work and we will we will keep you updated along the way in terms of how those programs are going. I know we just had an ISR to council in terms of our alternative shelter program and the housing outcomes that we have realized from having that alternative shelter program but it does take a lot of work to do that program and others like it and then lastly just a number of different initiatives and programs we have for homelessness and the housing crisis response system how we're looking to continue to see what the gaps are and how we strengthen that as a city and then with all of our partners through the Denton County homelessness leadership team we did add a work session on November 1st I think that's the luncheon to give city council an update on where we stand in kind of our strategy and road roadmap for strengthening the housing crisis response system. That fifth key focus area there is to support public safety a number of different initiatives the police and fire departments are undertaking continuing to develop our new mental health unit team continuing to update the PD policies and training they have undertaken I'd say over 100 new policies within the last couple of years so really significant amount of work there that going into the updating of the policies and the training for the department they've also started the new in June the new police chief advisory board that body has met three times already and continuing to work on the public safety facilities that were approved in the recent 2019 bond program I think we're still looking at substantial completion by summer of 2022 for those facilities. For the fire department they have a pretty big initiative to undergo fire department accreditation this is really just trying to ensure that we're adopting the best practices to provide services to the community in the areas of fire and EMS and then lastly the planning and design of fire station nine we recently presented that to city council and got direction to move forward with hiring an architect to start the design process you'll see more coming forward throughout the next year in terms of that fire station nine design process and then lastly sustainability and the environment so we do have the solid waste comprehensive management strategy underneath that category and then we are continuing to work on implementing the sustainable framework plan and then also the committee has started to meet has been formed and has started to meet over the spring and summer as well and then lastly the expanding the bike and pedestrian network continues to be a focus as well really excited that we have that staff member on board and helping to lead forward a number of things going forward there in terms of bike and pedestrian any questions on some of the major initiatives and projects that we have planned for the upcoming year councilman beck thank you mr sir for the for the public safety i know we're doing uh uh traffic safety traffic flow overhaul where is where is that fitting into our schema uh it seems like it's a big deal and it doesn't i mean i'm not sure i mean maybe it's just because we had to summarize everything that's thin uh and i looked through the backup but and i know that that the becky and chandra are doing it so my my question is more where since traffic safety is such a large issue it's not one of our smaller more detailed ones but it has a lot of details in it where does it fit in the schema yeah under mobility and we can add that if that's something you want regular well i know that we're already i'm sorry i didn't mean to interrupt i know we're already doing it so i i would i it sort of feels like appropriate to to make sure it's it's it's denoted considering the issues okay any other questions councilman berg my my question is uh going towards the police chief advisory board uh is there a room for council member on the board or are they already on the board have i missed something there everyone appointed right do you want to speak to that good morning mayor council so when the board was created each council member had the opportunity to appoint someone to sit on it so right now we have i believe 13 appointees and then some ex-officio members on there as well that are non-voting okay are there any any council members sitting on there no council members just council appointees the appointees from the council okay thank you any other questions council member maguire thank you um sort of to council member beck's point about um certain things that are definitely priorities may be fitting under multiple um categories um i've been like kind of adding bullet points and under promote sustainability in the environment um i'd love for like the comp plan the mobility plan the ddc amendments um and our our parks plan to sort of be considered part of sustainability in the environment as well even though of course they also fall into other categories um just because i really want us to approach those with the attitude that sustainability has to be at the heart of how we plan our mobility sustainability has to be at the heart of how we plan our development um and and things like that so just a good point we can suggestion yeah and there is a number of these that overlap but you know maybe calling out more specifically that in terms of sustainability and the life and the environment the alignment with the other planning at multiple planning efforts that we have going on yes council member davis thank you mayor i i just wanted to say first of all i second some of the things that have been said already especially council member beg thank you for bringing up traffic safety and uh we've got a framework that we're working on so we definitely need to see it reflected in kind of our organizational priorities um but i really appreciate the framework that staff has developed with these key areas it was kind of pointed out to me after february that we had a big list of projects you know a big list of things to to do and accomplish but not necessarily uh strategic goals not necessarily you know things that uh for the next project what is our guidance when these we've completed these bullet points now what do we do next it's still in line with goals and priorities so i really appreciate these key areas and already just from some of the input that we've had um on the existing priorities already provides a very uh a strong framework i think for moving forward with adding what really are priority projects to organizational strategic goals so um thank you staff for thinking beyond where we were in february and organizing these into maybe a more useful framework than what we came up with before thank you okay any other questions councilman beck thank you uh that that um councilor davis bring brings reminds me of a question i had sort of at the beginning when you were talking about the 311 system but i think it's applicable sort of broadly and we have a number of things that we're implementing differently my first question about project management software the three three one one system uh you know expanding our strategic goals into specific projects so some of these are are requiring us to to bring on board new ideas new concepts but we're living with the existing mechanisms right now so um and i guess there's no way in the time frame of today but but could unless and maybe a few words on what are we using to bridge between the old way and the new things that we're going to do and purposely being generic but you know we could take something like the 311 system as a as a case in point uh how are we bridging from engage denton to 311 and how are we bridging from the old website to the new website how are we bridging between some of our old and new things because the the citizens i think will be concerned that we will wait and let the perfect be the i know that's one of my catch phrases but the perfect being the enemy of the good uh they won't they won't be happy about that if we don't have a bridge mechanism in there somehow uh and and could you maybe in a sentence or two somebody address how what our philosophy is on that yeah and i'm trying to understand like just that so maybe just the 311 system how are we bridging from engaged denton to 311 because there's still needs which is why we're going to 311 but we can't wait till 311 is on the ground no ryan ryan's actually overseeing that and i would prefer if he answered that because i know he's working on that councilman if i think i understand your question just how is the transition going to be to make sure that residents aren't either confused or feel like they're out of the loop and that we bring them along with us as we we make these improvements to our services is that correct that's correct well and i think that's a very good point and some of the things 311 being a great example is is we are are going to put plans in place that make sure that we let the residents know and i'll say this is our philosophy with the website as well they see it coming down the line they know the value of it they know exactly what's going to happen and they know that in addition to that it's a work in progress it's an evolving uh program that we want to continually adapt to meet their needs so we're not just going to come in and flip a switch and tell them hey you have this new thing now there you go good luck uh we're going to make sure that they know that this is how you use it this is how it's going to benefit you and this is really why we did it because of all those problems that you keep telling us about we brought this in and we've got a solution for you so let's let's explore it together and make sure that that you know how to use it and that we understand we are listening to you so that we're not just going to put something out there and walk away that we can keep improving it and and if i might the it's really i think you guys actually do a really good job of telling the citizens what big picture we're going to do say the 311 and this is all the thing the reasons we're good but i guess more my question is geared at while we're waiting to implement all the sexy cool new toys what are we doing with the old mechanisms that are helping not have them collapse under their own weight of need while we get there how are we shoring up the say for example engage dentin so that it can hand transition to 311 with with less of a steep curve and more more of a okay we're you know we're going to do these three things we we can't afford to do really too much but we're going to do these three things to to shore up engage dentin and i'm not asking for three things i i just pulled that number out but we're going to do these x things to shore up engage dentin while we get 311 implemented so that you know there's a nice blend of transitioning off of the old tools but not letting them still be have the problems that that caused us to go to 311 in the first place right so and i and i guess you know that question but then also generically how are we bridging how are we shoring up our existing uh mechanisms to get us into the new ones i think the best thing that we that we can do toward that ends is make sure that internally our processes are in place outside of the actual software that we use platform that we use that our staff and our processes are in essentially established before we bring the new uh the new platform on board unfortunately and i'll use 311 in the website as examples is that for a long time we've been very much stuck uh with a platform with a technology that just has no room for growth or improvement which is part of the reason why we're changing these technologies so what we want to do internally and also as we work with work with the community is to make sure that whenever we bring this new technology on board it's not learning how to use it as we go we're ready for it and that's very much an internal uh squaring away of resources internally training our staff to know how to use it and how know how to be effective with it just as much as we are with the external community but unfortunately with a lot of these you know the website's a great example and we went over this before we procured a new website is that unfortunately there's just we've squeezed all we can out of it uh to benefit our community and we have to we have to level up uh with as far as technology goes and that's what we're attempting to do okay any other questions council member armature yeah just kind of making a meta comment on that um this uh so everything that that uh ryan just said in an answer to brian's question these are the kind of things that we talk about on as uh vicki and paul know and the the community engagement committee um and so i feel being a member of that committee i feel uh you know confident in that answer like i already know know that answer just mentioning that moving forward because i think that speaks for um you know how on the one hand how important it is to have a kind of sustained time where council members can actually discuss this kind of issue you know instead of just getting it in a in an update so i love that about that committee and uh you know if and i know we're going to be talking possibly doing away with that committee i'm actually open to it as long as we could still have sustained conversations about these kinds of issues on on council uh because the time spent on that i think is is really worthwhile as council members okay any other questions i'll say this uh sarah i'd like to hear from staff perspective with respect to uh economic development obviously uh so that's page 10 i think is that right um anyway it's economic development and um pardon me foster economic development page nine so so with respect so this council voted down the mechanism to feed the economic development component um it was a priority to a prior council um where does that put us how does that i don't want to i don't want to sacrifice that for you know that opportunity uh but it so does it stay a priority and and bump some other stuff down once it's back reworked i just how does that work and to that point the bigger point in that because that's a great example uh patrick that's my challenge for you today staff that's my ask for a takeaway i think when we're talking about these priorities we have an election every year this body is potential to change every year and so i think in these priorities it's just simplest to put a star by the things that can be accomplished within a calendar year if it can't then okay start it differently for two years but i think what that achieves is it keeps us focused on core issues the majority of our community because if you get because you've seen in national politics it get polarized and we don't need to get polarized we need to serve the majority of our community and you do that by focusing on that core group of citizens and i believe and so it nothing gives more of an indicator of that than there's something that says hey this is a five-year plan and if it's a five-year plan that doesn't line up with the current makeup of the community the next person to get selected is generally potentially going to come back towards the middle and your plan's not going to live five years right that's five elections that's five opportunities for people to reverse their course just like we're seeing here this course get reversed in one year we've had stuff get reversed week to week and so i just think it just kind of is folk it's important to focus on although people don't like to talk about the political nature of our job everything we do is political and the fact of the matter is this body changes potentially every year and so those that can be accomplished in one year okay great those that are going to take two years maybe that helps people to focus that hey if you want this done you've got to make it doable and appealing to the majority versus being polarized i don't know if any of that makes sense but just to recap where are we with economic development because i think that's important that's where we're getting 10 million dollars potentially and some um so we got to feed continue to feed the monster uh so that we can save the right payers and i'd like to see some indicator of timing so that each body comes on and knows hey if i want to get this done we have to negotiate okay and i'll have david kind of speak to economic development and then as far as the priorities themselves steward has kind of had a really great outline on the website where we have just kind of a chart and its key steps or actions to the priority and then the timeline so you can kind of see our approximation of how long it will take to go through the necessary steps to get to substantial achievement of that priority great so that's one way we've tried to at least demonstrate what are the steps necessary and just an estimated timeline and what page is that that's on the web page but which tab uh it is the city council priorities page on the website thank you good morning mayor council specifically on the economic development strategic plan if you look at the list of priorities i think if you we were going to check any of them off and say that's complete that would be one you could check off and say i mean the intent of that really was to get this plan complete that was complete a conversation off that was the catalyst one we had that conversation and it is where it is right now so i think if council wanted to rethink the way that if you want economic development to be a priority and think about what focus needs to be for economic development that's an opportunity for today is to direct economic development as a priority as far as the strategic plan itself that has been completed at this point and we've had those subsequent conversations so if that answers your question mayor i mean i think it's an opportunity to further economic development as a priority in whatever manner council about so but if i hear you right you're saying currently that box is checked right like we don't have an economic development plan to move forward per se because of the vote voting down of the funding mechanism well the well the strategic plan the economic development plan was approved by council that was a big accomplishment to get that done a number of months ago the catalyst one conversation was subsequent to that it had it said hey we think the strategic plan mentioned the catalyst plan as an option moving forward so i think it's two different kind of pieces to that but strategic plan itself has been approved and it's moving forward there are some pieces to that that we're still doing like the incentives and incentive policy and things like that but the plan itself has been approved got it so the catalyst plan that was voted down is not going to move i mean it's done right and until it's either reconstituted or repurposed or requested back in my tracking without a funding source yeah the fund doesn't exist okay got it thank you mayor pretzel melzer i don't know if this is the time to kind of keep going in this on this topic you know you can let me know if it isn't but my observation is that five out of the last five proposed incentives were approved unanimously by this council and as i recall the conversation about funding the catalyst fund there's there are different points of view about how to do it but you know there's sort of a choice you can say well you know if everyone doesn't like the exact recommendation i can make an issue out of it and hope to you know turn over the council and run against them on this issue because they didn't you know kind of polarize it make a stand about it or you can say well i do want to get something done in this year and if there is agreement on supporting five out of five at last initiatives people apparently want to fund them somehow you know let's see if we can find common ground let's have a you know another session where we talk about how much and how or if it's really true that nobody wants to do it just i haven't observed that i haven't observed anybody say i don't want to do them at all what i observe is they vote for the the proposals so you know my leaning would be to keep it on there but not polarize it into well you know if you don't like the recommendation therefore you're against the entire direction any other questions councilor davis i just want to acknowledge for staff's benefit that i think i think we understand there is a uh there's a real cost to whiplash you know if one council has a set of priorities in in february and then i'll pick an absurd example example if this council were to decide you know what city hall west let's just tear it down we're done with it there's a real cost to manpower to that there's a real cost to i mean that absurd example aside there's a real cost to uh funding we've already put into that priority and all the kind of steps moving forward or if we were to say you know good job ryan but we don't like 311 anymore we want to do something completely different that kind of whiplash has a real a real cost not just in in dollars but in staff time and staff energy all that kind of thing so i think i think we're all cognizant of that going forward that if we've got you know big swings from year to year uh we have some real that you really have to weigh the cost of those things versus the the benefit of big different new priorities i think what would help us mayor and council is when we have these discussions like the economic development strategy plan that's out there and i think all of you agreed to move you know that it was fine move it forward part of the catalyst fund discussion was we brought it back because a council asked us to bring it back when that happens and there is a uh a point where this council says some like it some don't it would help us if you said let's put it on the parking lot let's leave it where it can be brought back up for discussion when you find there may be one more funding available more acceptable funding available from different pots of money because what we see it happen is once we present it we get a no vote kind of we put it on the back burner if there is enough there though that find the catalyst fund may be something you want to look at down the road as we begin to look at these various projects that come forward and may need some kind of a boost then we could at least put it over and say that it's on hold for a further discussion that would help us instead of just taking it off the list yeah and i want to and i i was trying not to say anything but i i have to because i think you're you're spot on and i think the issue is that we have surplus funding that we're talking about and it doesn't bubble to the top and we from the same mechanism it is the exact same utility fund that now it's like hey well let's send it over here a general fund let's send it over there versus reconstituting what we've talked about and so to your point in my aggravation city staff works up a plan hey let's do it no we don't like that funding mechanism another plan rolls around sustainability per se we like that funding mechanism and we like taking from the same fund we didn't like before that then is confusion that's a direct conflict using the same thing and that to me is a problem because you have this council negating the future the previous council which is fine every prerogative to do that but i think that then backs up my point that we need to to then either having an understanding we're going to respect previous council to a degree of pain point or just understand that those things get jerked around from year to year and you you have to weather that storm but just just my thought thank you very much questions all right coming back over to you sarah or actually at this time so that was kind of the review of where we stand the current priorities and projects and then patrick's going to lead the discussion in terms of forming priorities for next year thank you sarah so let me draw your attention to slide 11 which is on the screen then we're going to go backwards just a little bit um just some good reminders pardon me about priorities i mentioned this yesterday execution is the strategy that's really what you're trying to do is not just identify a list but you're it's only as good as the commitment to executing it and your approach is problem solvers and your creativity to use different lenses use a microscope a magnifying glass a telescope binoculars to examine issues and explore the future and one device i i failed to include on that list which is one of my favorite devices is a kaleidoscope as you look at the future how are you trying to fashion what that future looks like the third one is as i mentioned yesterday is to refresh the city's recipe for continued success and determine priorities in the short and long term so let's stop right there about the the timing because you all just were talking about that here is the the conundrum local governments not unique to dentin deal with across the country you do inherit the decisions from your predecessors things are not going to be done as you know in one year maybe not even two years especially capital projects where you have to kind of buy the right way or acquire the property get it designed as as sarah was talking about the rfi have this building design then it's constructed that could be two three maybe four years just from that start to finish the challenge is you do inherit those decisions from your predecessors just like they did from theirs and as you look at it said mayor to your point your politics does rear its head sometimes in those discussions i'm going to step back and ask you just to think about uh today which is somewhat of a little bit of a an exploration question is how do you define success as elected official is it about the list of projects that you check off is it about the impact you have on the quality of life each one of you runs on something when you think about your value proposition as a community builder and then how you blend that together this is difficult in local government you're not in the output business you're in the outcome business and some of those outcomes have long roots about him for those to be materialized for those to manifest itself you're trying to position the community for the future whether or not you're on the council about some of those items and absolutely there's trends that happen and how you blend those that's both an opportunity and a challenge one of the things that successful councils do is they're disciplined they're not rigid but they're disciplined about saying this is what we're going to do and we have some persistence and insistence about how we're going to do it because we think this is for the betterment of the community even though you may not have agreed with it pre your time on the council how do you see that all shaking taking place that's difficult and it is political about how you work through that but i think i would just try to expand your horizon that things for to help this community realize its potential there's no perfect time frame but i think it's just trying to think through how are you trying to prepare it for the future none of us has a crystal ball we don't know what's around the next corner but some of these things are a little bit more manageable you deal with a lot of ambiguity we hope to reduce some of that ambiguity today so you can feel more confident in crafting the future i'm just giving that to you as some food for thought about how you look at time frames there is an old saying an old adage you know there's two of them that are very relevant to local governments one is public policies made by those who show up and two is it's hard to have a five-year plan on four-year election cycles which is a little bit of tongue-in-cheek right i'm just sharing that with you because and and and after 911 cities dropped 2020 plans after the great recession cities dropped even 10-year plans most cities i work with they work on a two to three to four-year plan that's about it things that they can kind of see on the horizon how they craft but the idea of five and 10-year plan other than capital improvements which have whether it's your fleet or your buildings that's different ecosystem entirely because it's more observable about timing or projects but the whole notion of what you're planning you're trying to get out in front of some of those issues that are impacting the community i just share that with you about timing the next one is you're capitalizing on your strength strategic planning is not a deficit closing strategy you have several strengths and you're trying to build on those to shape the future i mentioned this yesterday the next bullet point try not to measure the success by the length of the list sometimes it's easy to get caught up in the bright and shiny notion let's do more of this let's do more of this as was mentioned and it's difficult sometimes when i say this having been a city manager in 15 years and working with cities the last 19 plus it's difficult for staff to to say no it just is and i think for elected officials it's hard when the public sometimes is not always reasonable with their expectations about can't you do this like right now just go do it right now and i think that's difficult you know you all are the community chefs and you're in the kitchen trying to refresh the recipe for continued success sometimes there's a lot of cooks in the kitchen offering their perspectives but you also are the community storytellers you have a great story in denton how are you telling that story to people that sometimes don't recognize the dimensions that you have to explore in order to build the community of the future today it's just not very provocative to some people again we're a little bit you're this is like inside baseball you understand all the ingredients but sometimes the public just doesn't and it's not because they're not capable it's just not sometimes very compelling to them so how you refresh them how you tell that story to say hey that sounds really good and let's talk about what that would obligate the city to do one thing that a lot of cities as they deal with this american rescue plan money that i would just reinforce the notion that's one-time money so you have to be very careful how you budget that money and a lot of cities are having to be extremely cautious about what they apply that american rescue plan money because when that money's gone whether it's a grant program or funding businesses well that money's gone um i think it would be extremely difficult for the city to be a surrogate and provide that funding i'm just sharing that with you so as you look at that american rescue plan money just keep in mind that's one-time money now it may come again now who knows but it's not going to be funding in perpetuity the next one is the outcome as i mentioned yesterday to create a roadmap that achieves cohesion among elected officials and staff clarity about priorities and commitment to implementation nothing really changes in this room it's what you do as a result of discussions you have that gets activates efforts as you leave this room if you will starting tomorrow even if it's to accelerate some cities they're kind of pregnant they have their foot on the gas at the break at the same time they do use perfection as the gauge to your to your catchphrase and they're waiting they want to know for sure that this is going to work exactly that way hard to build a community when you're kind of paralyzed by the notion of we have to make sure it works but let's make sure that it works exactly the way we're so being comfortable in that role about building the future there's a little bit of risk taking right it's it's it's uh can be a struggle so i just encourage you it's not about going faster but it's also not about just pumping the brakes but if you have your foot in the brake at the same time it's hard to make progress meanwhile the community is still evolving so how do you step into that and shape that it influence that that's both an opportunity and a challenge i just share those with some comments and now what we want to do is if you could go back to the previous slide i'm going to just direct your attention if you want to keep these out slides nine and ten the priorities and major items my key area what we want to do and not necessarily in any order but i want to have an open discussion about when you look at these items you touched on a few of these questions more questions about these items more details about these items are there items on here that you do want to press on the gas about and say we need to do this sooner faster are there items on that list that you want to pump the brakes and say we're not so sure things have changed the terrain has changed and the third dimension of that is what items may not be on this list that you want to discuss and have an exchange of ideas and there's no particular order and i'm going to get out my trusty easel here so as you start to talk about these and you know the beauty of these sessions is you get to talk about things you don't get to talk about the way you always get to talk about that's liberating so this is like an extended study session yes council member so the first one that comes to mind because it's kind of this morning is kind of a maybe a little bit of change of focus under foster economic vitality we have on there to continue implementing the strategic plan well that's every plan right you want to continue implementing every single plan what have we focused in a little bit on that item and called it identify funding for catalyst fund yes council member i want to second that i think that's an excellent way of framing that to completely change topics i think we need to re-examine city hall west and and what we're doing there and i'm sure a lot of folks will be surprised to hear me say this as a musician but given how many urgent things we are addressing right now i'm not sure that city hall west necessarily needs to be a high priority i definitely want to see us mitigating the damage that was done during the storm i want to see us you know doing what we need to do to preserve the structural integrity of the building and you know make sure that the envelope of the building is secure and there isn't further damage being done but i don't know that we necessarily need to move very fast on it i think it's something that can be perhaps moved to the back burner okay let's go back to if we can we'll come back to that one thank you council member back to the point council member davis may do you want to elaborate a little bit on that council member davis what you think would be a good approach about dealing with the economic development plan and the funding there well i i think just even shifting that this is just speak for myself just switching that item from continued implementation because that's what we want to do with every good plan that we have to specifically focusing on identifying a funding source for the catalyst because the rest of it is fairly non-controversial that mayor pro tem pointed out earlier we have a plan we're working the plan we have a good staff working the plan we have good community partners working the plan the the missing piece of that puzzle is the funding source for the catalyst fund and the rest of it is kind of rolling forward thoughts about that as a pursuit to identify the funding source for the catalyst fund thoughts about that yes yeah i i would concur with a lot of that i don't sense in the meetings that we've had that there was much i mean to some degree there can't be much disagreement because the our general plan is a 50 000 foot plan without that many details to argue about and i think where you're sensing that the the disconnect is this is one micro detail where but but even within the the concept of economic development we didn't have a lot of disagreement that we should do some level of economic development that a catalyst fund type approach would would succeed i i concur that it the the drilling down into specifically how we fund that and and you know what are the avenues is would would give us some six you know low-hanging fruit successful opportunities even if not all of council agreed to that i mean to the final solution um and but you know so for the overall economic strategic development i think there we do have deliverables and they're they were listed so i think the fact that we we are making progress along those as signs that we are proceeding along in economic development so yeah the plans being implemented so the item to discuss is identify the funding source for the catalyst fund comments about that thoughts insights concerns support man yeah no i'd support it and and i think the the current success as a result of that in the past right and so it's just hey let's keep it going because it's successful i think the two conversations work together it's just and if there's a disconnect then the disconnect is on how we got to the to the successful projects i would represent that it was a catalyst fund that wasn't formalized that was but was being utilized and so staff trying to formalize that policy that yielded the projects that then are being touted as successful i don't see them as disjointed i see them as which came first chicken or the egg thoughts about this i think you've got general agreement i'm happy to talk about the next thing i'm just trying to make sure thoughts about this sir you want to have any thoughts about that no i mean i think this is fine i um it just gives us sort of a little bullet point to start putting underneath the actual strategic plan which is you know an objective to to achieve in addition to what we're doing just as a reminder just real quickly the six key area focus areas that were mentioned earlier by sarah in her presentation that's and some of you commented about it does give the city some structure typically what cities do is they don't change the six categories they may wordsmith a little bit here and there but what changes are the objectives underneath each of those which is really where you're spending some time on today and there's no perfect number of key result areas i always encourage clients to have something that's manageable so six seven eight something like that but not to make it so unwielding that you're in double digits what changes from year to year are the injectors you know actually yeah as i hit the period of my sentence i had a further thought that uh i think to pursue what we've just said that the task would be incumbent upon us to dig a little deeper on what the principles are that each member has about what's a valid or you know a palatable funding idea so that we find common ground and not just give up if we don't like idea one that that that that that would be the direction okay all right uh yes council member then yes yes so um the uh uh continue to strengthen homeless initiatives and housing crisis response uh has a lot of overlap uh potential overlap um with under foster economic vitality we uh continue implementing i'm sorry i review and develop dentin development code amendments when we when uh we get our next presentation from the uh how affordable housing consultant you know they're going to be addressed i don't know what they're going to say um but they're going to talk about but one of the things that they're going to talk about will be our zoning and um you know but presumably ways in which our our zoning uh could be changed in our codes could be changed to uh provide fewer obstacles to affordable housing that's my my wording and my my bias is intent in there so it is obvious in there but um anyway just mentioning that there's real intersectionality you know between those kind of two different aspects of uh you know under two different uh seemingly very different categories in our priorities that i think are really important and overlapping and still priorities for me so what i hear you saying is the acknowledgement that there is that intersection but also to factor into that discussion about affordable housing which may or may not be present and likely will be the whole subject of zoning and how that intersects also with the uh develop the development code yeah and acknowledging how those dimensions do overlap yes yeah and i'm also stating that that they're both still very important to me all right so one of the things that i think leaps off of that and mayor pro tem is uh both is is um i think it would be helpful if uh we had a a rubric and i hate to pull this out of my education background but i mean these kinds of rubrics are really important because that is what's in this development plan is essentially a rubric that we then applied scoring to and tick boxes too so uh if if we if we developed sort of a rubric of what we thought a successful project would look like and and sort of what elements of other of the strategic goals would dovetail in with this like council maguire mentioned earlier the sustainability plan should be cross-cutting and i couldn't agree with that more uh that you can't you can do any of these tasks without the you know sort of cross-cutting sustainability plan but just to be fair i'm not sure you could do a lot of these without a competent economic development plan as well so you know what i i would like to see a rubric that allowed us to say you know to at least get to staff this is what we think is important and you know scoring these things and and we're we're using rubrics everywhere we're using rubrics for project management capital improvement projects uh there's there's no reason for us to sort of throw out a big bucket of ideas on the floor and sort at them like toddlers so i i mean i think we can be smarter than that i'd just like to add there there are a lot of teachers here who are i'm very excited about a rubric and i can spell rubric and i think part of developing a rubric is also having the conditions by which the rubric is crafted around which gets back to some of the points you've made right you can you have to have a creative upon that criteria that goes into that rubric so uh council member bird uh yes i was looking at this implement historic preservation plan i really do appreciate that being here um i'm just i need somebody to tell me how does that uh connect with the foster economic vitality as i probably would have been thinking that it goes more under the community and neighborhood services i think that you know as i'm we're just talking about kind of like our priorities and while we're here and what we're thinking and what brought us to this point i know that i'm i'm biased towards the strengthening community i'm a community person and i'm a public safety individual and um for the most part so how did we end up putting that implement historic preservation plan over here on the economic vitality how does that work well well i can kind of tell you actually i think what's interesting here is when you have a strategic you have strategic priority areas one of the things we're missing is is a um is a sort of a and i don't want to say graph but it's an actual picture that shows how each one of these areas interconnect um for instance um these topics could change easily to like look at foster economic vitality could easily say economic opportunity and affordability and if you look at that and you think about what does that mean that means that when you're implementing an historic preservation plan it may be to maintain the economic viability of that of that home or that business and so that is part of that when you look at the development code that's a part of creating economic vitality or opportunities maybe affordability and so what we're missing here i think once we um finalize sort of where you want to be from a strategic priority area is we need to show the interconnectivity between these and that it isn't it isn't cyclical this cyclical areas these are cross-functional opportunities and that if we do this right when we're working with staff on a project then we talk about the fact that it may be in this area but cross-functionally it is it may be it also is under let's say pursue organization organizational excellence or i like to use the term government that works for all so that it it literally touches the areas you put it under a main area but it does impact other areas you could say that historic preservation plan falls under infrastructure so it really to me is your strategic priority areas and then those things that we're doing that fit under there but then we need to be showing how it works cross-functionally and so it really is on a lot of those that's how it fits thank you and so that that brings me back over to the mayor's point that you know we've had plans already set up and then you bring in new people and it comes back to life and then it changes uh that is we just need to keep that in mind yes you know as we're growing as we're thinking towards the future how is this historical you know thinking of the historical nature as to why we have decided to do it in the first place and so as new members come on on board or the council changes over i think it will be just very helpful for city managing to remind us you know as we're getting these things before us that this is historically what we did and this is why we did it and so if you all and we get our recommendations but the recommendations don't tell us why and i like to see more of this is why you we did it this way or why we think we need to change it that way we can do more of that and when we do our agenda information sheets when we're we can talk about the why um you know obviously the history and then why it's coming back or why we're recommending something different and as i uh begin to you know set my tone for uh district one uh and and i speak to these people and i'm going to be talking to them more and i told them that i was going to keep them field and if they listen to me and start trusting me then i can go back and tell them why when we look at the agenda and after we've had our city council meeting i'm going to go back to them and say hey this is what we talked about and this is why and they need to know why so um i appreciate you all adding that on give us a little bit more historical uh background on that yeah i just want to i think council member bird raises some good points but i also want to speak up for historic preservation being under economic vitality in its own right i was really pleased to see it there for two reasons one because historic preservation is an economic driver as even before covid we were moving towards more and more people getting to choose to live wherever they wanted to because they could work from anywhere in the world and this idea of sticky cities and magnet cities started to kind of crop up denton is both denton is a magnet and also people like to stay here and part of that is our historic uh our historic downtown you the good stock of historic homes homes that are becoming more and more historic brian lives in a neighborhood that is getting to the the point where there are many historic areas in that in that area people like buying mid-century homes in denton so those are big economic drivers to have that historic preservation and then also as we work on economic development projects you have to keep that history in mind you can't bulldoze something just because you have something big new and shiny coming through you have to work that all in together so i when i think of economic historic preservation i think about economic vitality and i think about bringing people to our city and why people move here why people want to have jobs here build their business and then that's even leaving aside the fact that there's money out there for people who want to do historic preservation that people that want to have a their building their office building be a historic building they want to renovate a warehouse into something cool and new there's grant money out there there's federal money out there so it just keeps keeps the economy churning i'm going to suggest if we can pause now maybe and take a break we've been sitting for a while i've got 10 30 can we take a 10 minute biology break that's good yes sir yeah so do i need to okay great we're all good thanks welcome back to this uh work session of the it's council retreat technically work session uh the city of didn't uh didn't council and uh it is 10 44 still saturday the 20 august 21st 2021 and we're back okay thank you mayor yes something that was mentioned earlier that we that was identified that we didn't discuss is about the city hall west and the timing of that there's a comment made by the council member about possibly putting that on the back burner and not to make as much time after energy to it still to mitigate the building to get it ready but not necessarily move forward with whatever those next steps are so i wanted to sample points of view from other members of the council about their thoughts about that yes council member so um i i'm inclined to want to move forward with that uh i hearing a lot from you know the community about or i should say i'm hearing put it this way i'm hearing some from the uh members in the community who are really adamant about what's happening with city hall west what's happening with city hall west and i haven't heard um that doesn't mean it's not happening but you know any pushback on why are you renovating this you know building um at this time when we have all these other things going on uh so yeah i'm i'm kind of more inclined to keep uh pushing ahead since it's already been held up okay all right thanks council member uh i've similar been hearing that but uh in the community for how can we use it but i i think there's a there's a room for a stage development where we as as council mcguire could said we could we could stage it uh to a to a functional point and then you know if we're not ready to have the full solution we could do something creative like you know i don't know artist lofts or permanent booths or or some sort of more temporary solution that allowed gave us the time and flexibility but yet also put it in in the function at the same time so i think there's there's realm there's opportunities that we can craft to do both move forward and maybe not move forward with quite as much gusto so yeah council member so it's not perfect but i like what we what we came up with in february because the the challenge with that project has been identifying a responsible funding source not just the and that's tied up with what you actually use the building for because how's the building helping to pay for itself etc but what we came up with in february and what we asked for as a prior then was the rfi rfp process and the thing that's good about that is it doesn't rocket it up to the top of the priority list but it does it invites community partners if there's going to be funding available in the community for that if there's going to be ideas we haven't come up with yet just on on we're in the third or fourth iteration of council to consider that that building so we we've had to go outside the city we need to go outside the city to get input and and frankly funding for that project so i like kind of where it's at with the let's put it out there let's do the procurement process and let's see what comes back and then if it comes back you know here's some ideas but the city's going to need to pony up millions and millions we don't have that that's probably i think the time to have the conversation of are we up here on the financial priority list or are we kind of kind of down here and what are our next steps yes council yeah i uh concur very much of course i've been you know on the council during the twice before when it's been on the list so my perspective is not like wow we are gunning great guns on making this thing happen it's still on the list and and the obstacle is exactly that it's a boatload of money so this uh the way that it's being pursued is to have it move forward without you know without dominating city resources so it's kind of already in the you know the most constructive slow lane it can be yes yes no i think that's i think that's exactly right that was my understanding leveraging the rfp process yes to understand who are the potential occupants and then go forward i mean just i mean you've been a city manager imagine imagine the nightmare that is hey we have a brand new renovated city hall building that you could use for free because it's a public space who wants it right that list forms to the left uh you know that line just kind of funnels out goes around the corner wraps around a couple of times but having a express purpose baked in there then what do they need and then what kind of else can fit or what is a public use just kind of wide open to the public is a very different conversation so i think that's the best approach is to identify who could possibly manage what funding is associated etc etc then that that kind of separates who can actually make it go who can't then program what's left oh um sorry i completely lost my train of thought oh uh the mayor pro tem's point is well taken that it's sort of already in the slow lane which is essentially what i was suggesting um you know i i definitely don't want to see city hall west torn down or anything like that um i'm just saying yeah that it's we're talking about a project that would consume a lot of staff time and a lot of of city funds and it's um because we have so much that is urgent right now that it probably should be in in the slow line lane but continue moving forward i have a question um probably for staff but there might be some some folks on council who have been here longer than i have who can speak to it as well um as far as what funding sources have been explored and i'm thinking particularly particularly of like uh like federal nea grants um is that is that a an avenue that has been explored so we have looked at some grants um and one of the things that is let me go back a little bit we've replaced the windows we had to replace the windows because and that is complete because we were starting to see degradation inside the building from the antiquated windows then the storm happened and we had a huge uh rush of water that ran all the way down the walls and we had to do a cleanup there some of that was hazardous material so it's taken longer so the third thing we're doing now is it's getting ready to kick off the rfi rfp i'm sorry the parade is going by am i growing another head go outside to catch candy it scared me so the answer is yes um since the city is trying to take the avenue as you heard from council member davis of not expending a lot of dollars or time uh what we are doing is encouraging when we prepare us and they're working on the rfi rfp that it's creative measures and creative opportunities to partner and look at grant opportunities and so we've identified some but we're looking for those that might bid on these to then apply for those grants that they're eligible for and so all of that is in sort of the product that we're and we are encouraging creative um ideas opportunities for this building and even to the point where we'll be giving perspective uh developers tours of the building so they can get a good view of it unfortunately we weren't able to do that till we cleaned it up okay all right thank you yeah that kind of gives me a sense of where we are we are i mean this is a way to do this without expending a lot of city staff time and money and um we just were delayed because of the uh destruction that occurred it would seem as the project does give you some great opportunity for discretion it's not a city quote unquote city facility like a maintenance yard or some other city facility or even the development service center where we are and so it's wonderful to see what opportunities there might be explored and identified for the multi-use or whatever that use might be for itself but it will be different and so you're not bound by the past in some respects which is wonderful and because you do an rfi remember there's an rfi an rfq and an rfp and there are different dimensions and so an rfi gives you a lot of latitude you just kind of evaluate uh what are people's ideas you don't really know what might be out there this is going to be a market driven in some way shape or form i would think uh endeavor and it's i don't mean profit necessarily driven but it's going to be a market driven about the appetite for whatever uh investors or or um those that choose to participate in that process are going to be able to identify as something that's going to be viable and that's exciting something else that came up are there other thoughts about that i'm gonna move on um there was some discussion came up about traffic safety so and that can come because you know we're all traffic engineers right i'm just kidding that's if you ask an engineer that's when they yeah everybody's a what i even broke traffic engineering traffic safety about the idea of traffic safety and what all that encompasses that's a pretty broad and pretty uh vast ecosystem about what uh traffic safety looks like whether it's uh infrastructure or programs or what have you yes yes um i i'd like to know um i i would imagine that uh at the very least sarah is aware of the vision zero um initiative that that some cities have taken on and um you know have you looked at that and what are your thoughts on that yes we have as a matter of fact i believe it um last year or the year before our council was very interested in that correct me if i'm wrong council member i thought i thought we gave direction at a work session yeah again correct me if i'm wrong and so we that we are on board with that and did we have a resolution or we i think like we did something formal and voted on it i think we passed yeah sure remember the work session i think we passed a resolution yeah exactly yeah i feel like there was the work session and then we voted so we are um looking at that i i need to go back that is something i have not recently been briefed on and i i need to go back and look at where we are but i know it was discussed and i know council gave us direction to look at that so and maybe council member armature you have more information from your thoughts but well this is just more of a you know just personal opinion that uh i i would love to see it get more integrated into all of the decisions that that that we make and even that are you know brought forward by staff um kind of like how uh when development projects come up we have to um you know check off does this meet our you know uh 2020 plan it's you know how does this fit with you know this plan to do such and such does this fit with our with vision zero plan because otherwise it's not helpful because it really is that kind of huge framework um council member davis at our last meeting said and i concurred um that he would like to see the bike friendly communities plan there are so many plans um integrated with our mobility plan and i think this is another opportunity for that kind of thing if if we can this is because this looks at it um if you take the bike friendly plan if you take your vision zero and you take your mobility plan they should all be coordinated together even your um uh walkable walkable streets walkable streets and i'm i'm failing to think um pedestrian friendly the pedestrian safe routes to schools the streets uh golly accessibility the streets the street trees and all the other things that go into it all of that has to be looked at but it's also looking at the community and equity when you're looking at how you put it together so we are working on that from a mobility plan i think you'll hear becky use the word um a holistic approach all of that has to be tied together um so that's that's what we are doing but i will find out about the vision zero where we are on that i uh if i can just offer some help i know he's got a totally different job now but pre-tem will remember where that was filed council member davis yeah kind of adding to the you know the the list of things we love to see in our streets plan and our mobility plan um but we talk about it all the time and constituents bring it up all the time i've gotten facebook messages just while we sit here about residential street speed and there's a little bit of open question katherine i'll send you an email about uh text dot and an administrative rule the 85 percent rule and all that kind of stuff that's a conversation for another day but i would have no no problem with denton being the slowest residential city you know drive 45 on the text dot roads the big the big uh primary arterials the things that get you to work in the morning that kind of stuff but if we just crawled through our neighborhood streets my kids and i would appreciate it very much yeah no i i couldn't agree more uh profoundly with what councilor davis just said that it's it's probably the number two issue that i'm approached with is is uh traffic safety and it's probably the the number one if you count my histogram of of requests to the city of of things that we they would citizens would like to deal with and you know even even normalizing to the squeaky wheel gets the grease factor it's still number one so uh but i i also wanted to uh concur uh really strongly with this idea of as as we get as we adopt plans that you know it's just like a surgical checklist okay you know you know is this you know part of the you know the street improvement plan check check check vision for the you know that that we don't lose track of these things that we we're all in agreement with that that we don't want to just wave our hands out and say oh yeah that's that's part of our goals that we we actually procedurally mechanically make sure that we're meeting that would be my recommendation yes i want to second that idea of of a a checklist that's perhaps um included in the mobility plan and and just to give you a little bit of context we had a situation recently where um a a major um thoroughfare that that runs through um our largest college campus um had you know a a rebuilding or a resurfacing right um was planned but there was not a bike lane included in it which is i mean and that's that's a street that um a lot of cyclists use and it was really just an oversight because i you know our our bike plan included bike paths for for that street so um yeah yeah just a procedural um uh mechanism to ensure that um you know capital projects and streets that they're going down a checklist and saying okay does this meet our vision zero goals does this meet our bike friendliness goals does it meet our ada goals our pedestrian goals all that well something you may want to pursue in the future as a council that some councils have adopted because this is what i'm kind of hearing is what are your principles as a as a community what are your values because you're starting to talk about that checklist manifests itself into policies and if you're going to build a street we're going to make sure there's this i don't mean as specific as this but in your principles but you're an advocate with the word you have the night last night you use that word advocate a lot beneficial for the group at some point in the future to actually capture in writing what are you an advocate about somewhat philosophically but also your principles which is kind of uh rubs up against the notion of your vision remember a vision shared is not the same things as shared vision so i'm just this is some of what today is a discovery opportunity and i look at it from the third party and i start to hear common words and i see maybe that you can you can adopt policies for that but it may even precede that about what are the principles that you're trying to reflect that you think community members want in the policies that you do adopt and that's where you i'm just offering that as a perspective some cities have done that and it gives them some comforting guidance and all their public policy decisions these are some principles that are the basis for those decisions so yes speaking of which um i do have conversations about principles uh of of the overall feel for what this community is and so one of the things that uh that i've been having a conversation about is the maintenance of a homestyle type community and um and i always talk about our sister cities over here to the east and how they just grew so quickly and it just seems like people are just kind of coming and going and with these large buildings and everything is just kind of looks the same but when you come over here to didn't we still are um in a homestyle home feeling type uh community and uh i would hope that and i totally agree with it i've been here 38 years and i appreciate that we still have this feeling of a place where people live and they work and they play here and so um i appreciate that coming up because it is something that's important to a lot of people here in town that as we are bringing in businesses and we still like the fact that we still feel like a community family community although we're going to be growing you know we're looking forward to just still getting out there and growing but are we going to start letting you know glass buildings come in here are we going to be changing the landscape of what our of what our horizon looks looks like are we going to just start looking like everywhere else that is what uh one of the primary concerns are for people that i've spoken with and me too and a play on words just a little bit something you might want to keep in mind in your mindset and your approach that is there are roots and there are anchors roots i'm thinking beyond just what's traditionally right but roots what are the dimensions of this community that you draw emotional strength from heritage right this is a community of shared commitment they're they're very much emotional energy drivers so those are roots and then there are anchors and anchors are those mindsets that hold the community back from realizing its future some cities spend a lot of time trying to mitigate the anchors and don't leverage their roots and then they're just sort of standing still i'm just giving that to you as you look at these principles as you look at that livability notion how do you even for those people that have been here a long time you want to maintain the character of this community it's still going to require the city to do something things different and do different things because it's not where it was some communities just shut the door behind them and go maybe if we don't deal with it it'll just go away that's naive and they end up there are a lot of unintended consequences of growth and there's not a lot of do-overs with growth that trajectory of growth may be sustained for decades but how are you dealing with it as you go on i'm just offering that to you again at that mindset as you approach the kind of community you're trying to cultivate so mayor pretend yeah to uh you know bridge off your comment maybe this will get us to uh something for the list we're already doing the comprehensive plan update but uh i think you know if we can maybe sharpen the the focus on what we want the outcome of that to be at councilmember bird's point i mean yes we need to refresh our vision of what our preferred uh pattern of development to be where where if anywhere do the big tall glass buildings go nowhere or somewhere and if somewhere where and but also what's our preferred pattern of preservation i've said it before but you know this seems to be the time to to bring it up again that i would like uh you know i would love it if this council uh concurred that a priority would be to end up with a clear vision of our preferred pattern of preservation with policies to support that and then when i say preservation that that goes to both historic preservation which does add to our uniqueness and our attractiveness and it's part of our cultural life but also you know our uh environmental preservation as well there are tree canopy and so on yes man yeah so i got a few uh but i want to this is all under the guise of you talked about i may be saying it wrong we're about output right well you're about outcomes outcomes yeah and so that that that comes from there's there's an idea and then there's kind of some action items and then so those conflict points because i just i just think you have to talk about those so i think when you're talking about uh for example uh a bike lane approach um i think it's important to talk about the fact that okay there's not universal agreement amongst bike riders right i've talked to some that say protected lanes are key there's others that would say and it's a fact we don't have a sweet street sweeper that's small enough to go in the protected lane so they gather trash so then bike riders i don't like protected lanes because there's a lot of trash in there rumble strips you know on the on the side of road they're great for cars terrible for bikes uh and so you you have mixed opinions about how those go so then you'll have cars that park in the bike lane on the side of their house which is a public road which they're right to do but then you to prevent that you then put a protected lane there which then gathers trash and people don't use it and so i i think when you're talking about this list to not have a just kind of a pause for conflict right resolution then i think you you miss an action item that that helps you get to an outcome if if you don't pause for the fact that there's not universal agreement amongst everyone that rides a bike you know it's like it sounds great right all bike riders want this not true you know and so that's really where where are we pulsing that where are we gathering that data to say we're going this direction based on what you know and and that's really key to me yeah i would just offer i think one of the challenges that you all have as policymakers and staff has this as well that's the part of uh the whole local government ecosystem is a whole idea that um if you can't do it for everybody you don't do it for anybody which it seems very equitable and egalitarian on the nature of it but when you stop and think about decisions you're making as policymakers you are trying to customize some of these decisions based on preference based on appetite based on advocacy and then you're also trying to identify where does your role start and stop and where the staff role pick up because some of those are operational issues whether there's rumble strips or chop or hatch lines what have you right if you're an advocate that where it's appropriate and you want to be more aggressive just on the example of bike lanes that's one thing to be an advocate i think that's time well invested for all of you is new development comes in and you look at the development code or you look at you're going to resurface elves whatever as you do some of those projects how you want to ensure that happens the house that happens is really a staff about factoring in what's the design of the street you're now you're into the mechanics and and how it's going to work well so i think that again that's a challenge sometimes government struggles is we can't do it for everybody we don't do it for anybody which i think is no way to build a community i think it's short-sighted and so you are trying to customize things but you also i would offer to you as policymakers where does your role sort of end in the implementation of whatever those policies are and how is it going to be most if some people say well they have rumble strips on that street why don't we have them over here it's like well it's not really appropriate it's an arterial street this is residential street it's a 40 mile marathon now you're getting down into you know into the mechanics of things that may not necessarily be in your wheelhouse as elected officials but the public doesn't know that and they want to know what do you know it's like well that's where you have conversations with the city manager or the staff and you say well what was the decision point there they didn't do it haphazardly or whimsically it was based on you know proven practices of good street design and good bicycle i'm just sharing that with you as an example that i think is part of you recognizing those boundaries so council member so question stepping back for a moment kind of a meta question about so it's so 11 10 and thinking about like how we're going to spend the next 50 minutes and i'm i'm wondering uh you know what what is how you know maybe this would be a good time for for you to to to share with us and and apologies to my colleagues if if everybody else understands this and i i don't uh but uh how how should we be you know framing like i have kind of three newish not really new to this council but not here listed in this framework issues i want to bring up it doesn't that they don't fit in organically with what we're discussing right now so i'm kind of letting this conversation you know organically play out right um but uh and i'm interested and involved in it you know what what should we if you could kind of explain how we should be thinking about using the next 50 minutes as far as like ish talking about issues that are already priority stops working on those versus kind of new things that we want to bring to the table i appreciate your point i think that's and this is a good time we're at the fork of the road right we spending some time we can spend the next balance of the day simply revisiting the items on the list we we are trying to give you an opportunity to ask questions about those maybe expand those a little bit if the group is comfortable that the oh yes this is now stands with a few modifications based on your conversations today are going to staff is going to go back and polish those up then absolutely as i mentioned earlier we want to make sure to give you the opportunity to say if there's things that are not on that list this is the time to bring them up i would also say and this is a bit of a challenge is the things that are discussed today that staff will go back and refine and bring back to you for consideration to adoption of a relative solution this is part of the challenge you have is if somebody has something that comes up in november that is fairly macro and policy focused it's you know heavy investment of staff time effort and energy if the opportunity there is that you want to reconsider what's on the strategic plan then there should be a meaningful discussion about what's going to come off the strategic plan because it shouldn't be a straight jacket but it shouldn't be optional so that's kind of the balance right so yeah so yeah um i mean one thing that and i feel bad if this is making us go backwards in the conversation or forward but uh that that is related to the development uh update development code update is uh revisiting our notification process which is something that we did and i don't remember if this was 2018 or 2019 but it was uh there was a work session i wish i could remember who presented it but i know that it was it was something that i had requested about looking into a program like what mckinney has which does notifications i think it was mckinney i forget the name of their program based on uh neighborhoods kind of more organically um not so much instead of this you know 200 500 feet foot rule um but that includes that and kind of goes beyond that in other words raising the bar on that um and uh uh staff i don't know maybe it was ron um i forget who gave her presentation on that but somewhere they've got a presentation and council at the time decided that they didn't there was as i remember it the consensus like didn't want to go forward with it um but it's it's still something that it was a very different council then and i i wonder if this council would would be open to to reconsidering it because we get uh i get anyway you know just just so many complaints from people about you know why wasn't i notified i'm in this neighborhood well you're not within this you know and but this affects me you know and i know that staff deals a lot with that a lot too council member was do you remember was that the southlake program the spin program yes yes not not just wanting to make sure i remember actually what you were talking about that's why when i was searching my emails for mckinney i couldn't find it yes okay i just wanted to make sure we were thank you so much i remember it had the nick yeah it was called spin spin uh they just kind of mandated public meetings but they held them at city hall uh so the developer would come in and kind of do their community meetings they do now just at a central location yes and so we we went with that one aspect of it right so it was that but but the part about you know notifying whole neighborhoods as they're organically um as uh you know defined by communities um you know neighborhoods like you know southeast denton or you know noddingham woods area you know we're going to notify everybody here about this um that was another factor of that that that council majority at that time didn't want to you know go in the direction of but and if i remember correctly i think ron talked about it during one of his presentations it was a mandatory meetings um we're going to at the time and i don't know where it is be folded into the new uh comprehensive plan and uh ddc so i think that's something that we can follow up on to see where that what the status of that is awesome yeah it's it's it's definitely a part of that whole i mean fits into that whole conversation you know that we're actually having yeah that's from over here and then i want to come back to you i know you had a couple of other items me oh well i mean the others i can bring up later if people want to talk about i i just um i guess want procedural clarification on like what we're doing right now are we discussing like this list of nine priorities and which ones we want to keep and which ones we want to adjust or okay we're talking more about that in terms of these key areas okay um sorry to jump around a little bit um i'm looking at the the pursue or organizational excellence uh key area um i think that's definitely an important one it's one that we've talked about quite a bit here um i would argue that covet 19 response probably doesn't belong in that category although it absolutely is a priority and a very urgent one um i would like to add to um this kind of list of items that are related to organizational excellence um a category of things that in our conversation before this meeting i called being a good employer um and just um a couple of items that come to my mind as examples of things that fall under that that category are um something that we've already talked quite a bit about today streamlining processes and procedures and using technology in order to more efficiently use staff time and resources um addressing uh staffing shortages in in some of our departments um we you know obviously we we had our voluntary separation program um which in some departments was definitely a really good thing and in some departments resulted in um a staff shortage that has resulted then in um quite quite a few staff members being overworked um i'd also like to examine our leave policies and this might be something that like uh i don't know maybe something that we can can give to madison um to to bring to us you know kind of a general overview of what our leave policies look like currently in particular i'm thinking about paid parental leave um which is not something that we provide it's not something that most public entities provide but i think that we should be providing um and and i think that that's you know more more details about that or something to be discussed at another time but that's something i would like to see us looking at as part of our you know organizational excellence key area we're actually coming back just uh councilmember mcguire we're actually coming back i believe in november maybe december on the leave policy when i've asked tiffany to um come back on current leave uh situations but also address the issue that the mayor brought up about um leave for someone who's had a had a pregnancy but um other uh circumstances that were involved around it tiffany's coming back to address or at least present some things there so we have it on our work session great i look forward to that thank you thoughts about those items about being a good employer which includes streamlining policies and procedures using technology which are sort of the how-to things right there's not really project attached to that but it's an emphasis um to address staffing shortage which is a potential project to evaluate the staffing levels and come back to you by part maybe that could be part of the budget process usually it is about where staffing levels are and then the last one is sarah just responded to the lead policies there's going to be an update to you november and december so i want to engage the rest of the council about especially that and i assume the staffing shortage has always factored into budget discussions it is yes um but um certainly we also will at times do an analysis or ask our staff either hr uh to do an analysis of a ratio of supervisors to staff and then staffing numbers comparable to other cities in those areas so we can certainly look at that as well so incorporating that into the budget conversation would that be appropriate again and then the lead policy is going to be brought back to you for consideration we had over here you counselor and then the mayor and oh sorry i just want to clarify i guess about the staffing shortages obviously with where we're at in the budget conversation that's being um addressed to an extent but i would also like it to be an ongoing conversation you know once we pass this year's budget i'd like to kind of revisit it and start talking early about what we want to see in next year's budget as far as staffing so just just to keep the stream of thought just a little bit but before i ask my my actual question and that was uh yeah no i think we need to and i think critical to this idea of understanding voluntary separation versus leave is is noting when what are our staff levels and what are voluntary separations recovery that kind of thing when we see the budgets because this was a real confusion from the public why isn't this in the mno budget and why why is this a supplemental when in reality all we're doing is getting back to who we were right that's not a supplemental that's that's just returning to normal um and but the the citizens were very confused by the budget language um i do think as far as the continuing again this stream this this idea i think i think it's it's it's going to be critical that's it's sort of an umbrella issue for the city at large not just the city's employer to to develop our non-discrimination policies and make that really clear and prioritize that very very strongly because that's going to impact not just us but the entire city so i i think we do prioritize it but i'd like to see us prioritize that within this context as well as broadly but now finally digging back out to my my actually original question it feels like organically we've gone to details but my my question is i think this counselor maguire asked the same question is are we at 50 000 feet or 5 000 feet or 50 feet because we have a lot of details that you know every one of us is passionate about you know you know there's no npas in this in this council but yet we're all apparently npas so you know and i'm going to point the finger exactly at myself as much as anyone else so so the question i i guess i'm asking is are you procedurally for this event today are we are we looking at the nine you know the or the nine 50 000 foot priorities the the 12 or so 10 000 foot priorities are we down at 50 feet with details we're trying to look at these now the the challenge that you have as elected officials is not everybody thinks to the same lens so some people think broadly they go from the macro to the micro some people go from the micro to the macro we've tried to listen to those detailed questions that you have today and put those as part of a larger approach that's what i've tried to do is say whether it's the bike lanes that's part of it a larger approach that you're trying to do in urban mobility so it's yeah it'd be ideal if people stayed at the policy level and we're trying to keep you there but not everybody thinks broadly they think micro and then in order to go from the micro we have to help them kind of get comfortable if that's a macro decision and that's okay right that's okay if you're going to be in those details if you're at the 50 foot level it's okay to have a conversation i'm going to try to pull you up and say okay what does that mean that the city needs to do differently but we're trying to not allow you not not having you get in and play sort of the armchair quarterback to say this is exactly what i think we should do because again you're one person and you don't make policy it's what the group does so if you want to talk about details which you had you've done today and you will continue i'm trying to say okay that's part of a larger schematic about what's the policy that needs to change so it's okay that people talk about things detail i'm good with that because i you you want to be heard and i want you to make sure that you get a chance to share your points of view don't feel as though that somehow what you're saying how you're saying is incorrect my role is to take that and filter that up or take that and say what does that mean and operational side so so in terms of policy then it's sort of like try to be at least 10 000 feet here um i i think the the two that i heard that that i was going to mention anyway are this we really need to define um this sort of idea of preservation or empty space role in our in our development concepts um both both green space and empty space and you know the the interplay with redevelopment um that i heard from mayor pro tem and the the idea of feedback um that we're you were hearing a lot of it that goes to that strategic goal of of responsiveness that we talked about yesterday um i i think the 311 will help but uh i think we even with the 311 this this idea of having a um push notification if you will of various concepts is is is really important because push notification of band-aids push notification of of you know zoning developments push notification and we we need to be a little bit more proactive a push notification of impacted stakeholders keep in mind the mayor and then you and then you um keep in mind that what we're trying to make sure that to avoid and give you some give staff some wiggle room as a result of today is this is not a set of instructions right we're not assembling a model so it's not do this do that do this do that sarah the staff are taking notes i'm taking notes we're all in the room we're going to convene after this to go back and put some spit polish on some of these listening to your intent trying to revise that so you get another bite of the apple when you consider this for adoption so i'm trying to keep you without it singing like we're down in the nitty gritty where you're giving instructions we're picking up the the emphasis of your comments and you'll get another bite again you get another chance to review this and say does that really reflect what we were talking about in those conversations we had on saturday the 21st and i think that's better time that's time better set for you all than to get down into the instructional side which then creates just we we can't see the force for the truth so to speak so mayor you've been waiting patiently and then council armator and then mayor procter i think across the board a policy that the that the council i believe should adopt is the ability for staff to push back far too many times there there's just a lack of information or from a individual or a individual puts out kind of this notion that then sparks interest from the community and it's not steeped in reality and so i just think it's important for staff to be able to be for this body to give staff the ability to kind of say hey we understand we're going to push back we're going to ask quite you know and and maybe the council have a directive to itself to ask questions versus make statements that that aren't accurate and i say that across this so for example we all get the emails denton's going to turn into frisco that's physically not possible frisco had a bunch of open land that they then came in developing large swaths right that's just city of denton is established and has established neighborhoods it's just physically not possible to replicate that to replicate dallas because the downtown you know so it's just some of those things well if you put that out there and as a body we don't rebuff that that or don't at least speak kind of historical fact to that you then give rise to that that then is a distraction that then keeps us from moving the conversation forward so i just think there's some answers that city staff and the management office have that i need them to be comfortable if this body's comfortable giving them authorization to say hey look there's there's just some stuff and again that's that's that comes with embracing the fact that i was elected but that doesn't make me a subject matter expert on any of it and then to take that a step further i'll say this when we're talking about i don't think we have a notification issue i just don't because there is a pnz member from my community that voted for an object that had no neighborhood meeting right i mean so this person's in the meeting has all the backup gets an intense amount of information more so than anyone and they miss it right so i just think there's it's not a notification issue it whatever the issue is it's not that because this person has all that information and and same thing i mean you just have members on pnz that have all the information and vote different than this council all right and so and that's their freedom to do so i just say that to say it's not a notification issue it's you've pointed it out it's different people processing different information different ways that doesn't mean that we have to ask staff to go give a whole bunch of more notice that people are not going to ignore are not going to pay attention to that information you know it's just it assumes that more information would cause people to pay attention and i don't know that that's true and when we're talking about resources and finite time i think it's it's okay to acknowledge some of those shortcomings or just kind of people's habits or that sort of thing but it's not a one-to-one correlation more information means different decisions not true you know so i just think from from an overall view just kind of all these items i just think there needs to be some kind of quick we need to authorize staff to push back a bit and say hey i'm going to accept that and from a council perspective try to if you don't know then ask a question and and ask it sooner than later so that you have time to get the answer but i just think the the declarative statements um from from a body are are difficult you know because they're they're not accurate you know and and then you don't get it staff doesn't get a chance to they got to correct it on the fly collect correct you know it's just there's problems in not understanding what you don't know or owning what you don't know you know so from from a body because you just then you you you just shake up the public and cause more misinformation versus saying hey i don't know let me get an answer or staff what's the answer to this yeah let me just before if you can hold on one second if you would please can you bring to the point which i think is relevant to your conversations you know there's two ways of thinking about things you know there is an issue there's an opportunity there's a challenge and uh you know finance people engineers they think this way it's called convergent thinking you ask them a question they give you the answer it's precise it's calculation it's computation you want them to be precise in their approach then when you look at other issues an issue an opportunity a challenge it's divergent thinking public policies here here's an option here's an option here's an option here's an option never ask an attorney a yes or no question right because their response is it depends hr people planners it depends i would offer to all of you maybe this will give you comfort when you're frustrated most of what you're dealing with is here you have lots of different ways to look at lots of different ways to solve the problem there's not just one perfect way to solve the problem some cities chase things they chase the holy grail they're looking for the perfect solution they don't exist in public policy it's whatever you have the appetite for and you're willing to commit to in the decisions that you're making and i think it's also recognizing from your colleagues not everybody comes from the same point of view it's how you blend those perspectives and that's the challenge and that's the beauty of democracy but it's also going to be frustrating how you blend those perspectives so just a thought council member i appreciate you waiting oh sure so um going back to something that council member mcguire said earlier about uh you know that covet might not really fit under and you don't need to necessarily turn back on the list that coveted response might not necessarily fit under um yeah pursue organizational excellence um you know one place where and i think we would all agree that covered response is really important right so wherever you put it um but you know if the uh support public safety category was expanded to include to be called support public health and safety um and i'm going to just say a little bit more about this um because if you look at even the things that are already there right the fire department most of what they do uh is uh is health related right they are responding to health issues actually uh putting out fires is a small percentage of the daily work they do and so sometimes people say uh well the city shouldn't be in the business of you know of public health well i think that you know covet has shown that we really are um but but our fire department that is most of what they do you know and even and the um you know the uh uh police department with with police departments you know around the country are um you know kind of grappling with this that that they have been uh that they end up responding to mental health crises and trying to figure out what to do with that so it's kind of already i would kind of make the case that it's already a public health and safety category um but the health is invisible there and i think those two fit so nicely together and and i'm going to use this to segue into uh uh stating that you know it's a priority for me and i've mentioned this before i know at least one other council member has mentioned it publicly you know that we have a public health coordinator i would love to have and i think it's critical that we have a public health coordinator for the city because so much when these issues come up you know we've we've got a staff who um you know not only are they really busy um uh with with other things but you know somebody to really kind of coordinate this these efforts and work with not not in a way that's redundant with what the county already has but to work with the county which is our our county public health official is very very busy you know with a number of different cities that are very very different you know we need somebody who's going to work with them i would love to see an assessment also of what are our public health needs as a city um and to what extent are they and aren't they being met and i mean not just so much not only by by government but you know by services that are already available in the community you know these are the people that we're serving we're already again i can't underscore that enough we're already uh committed to their to public health this this is not something new um uh and and i would include in that uh you know mental health again with the the the mental health unit team and and i'm pretty sure chief dickson would agree you know that that this is about it's about response what you're doing right response but as far as the issues of you know mhmr i'm using mhmr as an example because it's an obvious example you know people can um the crisis response team can bring someone to mhmr but mhmr they they have a a a very unmanageable you know case worker to client ratio they have to turn people away and it's devastating i'm not blaming them for it um uh but you know but we really need to be looking at how are how are needs being met um are they um and uh also in terms of addiction treatment you know we've got real addiction problems in this city of all kinds and i think that's a you know police end up on the responding end to to that often too you know and and i think that we need as far as you know addiction treatment um of course i would love to see a a sobering center that's a little getting more in the weeds but anyway um that to me is that's something that i wanted to make sure to bring to the table today if if this helps um one of the things i think patrick mentions this one of the things i'm taking notes one of the things that we're going to be doing is going back and looking at your comments in relationship to um the covet 19 statement and where it belongs uh some of the other things so we'll kind of work to to see where some of these things go and maybe you look at the actual strategic priority area and if it's the right the right wording and get that back out to you so that we will be doing that to look at that councillor thank you um agree on the where covet 19 fits uh that that's uh the most persuasive case i've heard so far for a public health official and i would concur with the idea i'd ask you to wait whether you could be open to this there's a way to build support for this time and effort uh i'll concur with the idea of evaluating what a role would be that would be different from the county and i and uh whether there's a job description that that is distinct and that relates you know uh i'd be open to seeing that and to your earlier to councilor's earlier uh question about what's the game plan you know here in this room uh i can tell you just the way i'm playing my own scrabble tiles is that i i think we're kind of going through the top nine while looking at the others to see do any of them need to be refocused and we've actually done a lot of that you know adding refocusing comments where maybe that wasn't even possible a year ago but where there's more consensus uh you know on digging into how do we fund the catalyst fund and you know looking at vision zero in the mobility plan and all that so uh uh and and then also to see what to add and then at the end at some point we got to say there aren't 36 top 10 priorities you know at some point we got to figure out which are the most important because prioritization if you don't do it uh a year will go by and we will pass a lot of spending items but we won't really be able to tell if we accomplished anything so anyway my next uh kind of refocusing one i'd like to tee up is regarding number two uh i'm pretty confident at this point that we're going to develop the live 288 building i'm really confident that's going to happen it's funded and sort of and uh you know it's underway but uh in in the time that that went from a council priority to address this issue to a building purchase to a plan etc in that time uh we've gotten some deep bigger insights for me it was during snow vid when off-duty police officers were you know kind of on their own time driving around in the freezing cold asking people if they could bring them to shelter and they were saying no thanks i'm good you know it helped me appreciate the fact there is you know it's not the only or total answer uh there's a large part of that or you know there is a part of that community that is just never going to go to shelter and uh i would just my refocusing is that we uh you know just have have uh next strategy whether it's you know and i'm not pushing it one some people may advocate the bus ticket method i'll argue against it because every other community already figured out the bus ticket method at some point you got to deal with it uh you know all the way to community first we obviously already care about that issue because i think a lot of people have already signed up to go look at community first so i think implicitly we kind of know that there's another chapter and we got to be thinking about it so that's what i would tee up is is you know broaden that uh item to say you know uh and frankly it's as much an economic development issue as anything else you know address uh homelessness beyond those who are willing to go to shelter address you know open to hearing good ideas about how and if i can add in prior to this this priority on the loop 28 building the prior year was a more broader priority for how do we strengthen the housing crisis response system so really when you're looking at all of those elements um assisting those and reaching out to those that are living unsheltered to those that are maybe now sheltered so then getting to housing and what's that housing option look like based on that needs assessment specific to that individual that is an option there could be more priority to go back to look at systematically with all of the data we do have in the system we have we can identify what are we currently working on that are gaps in the system and where are the other gaps in the system if there is additional investment that this council wants to make or other partners want to make in the system where are those next steps in the road map sure first to piggyback off of that one i i like the broader i like the broader heading for that one a lot because it does let's us do two things it's one getting the community response and the community initiatives and the things the community wants to do and talking about those but also letting the staff perspective enter into it like our staff has traveled around the country and gone to different cities that have different solutions and examine how it works how it doesn't work is this best as a city solution is this best as a community solution is this best is something that's you know next door to one of your big city buildings or is it something that's better out in the unincorporated county where it can do what it wants to do so um having i think the broader heading as opposed to right now we have the the broader heading plus the project-based one so not having the the project-based one but the broader what's the next step and that answer can come from the community and that answer could come from staff and then somehow get you know get synthesized together at the council level on the public health uh the public health coordinator that might be might be the first time i've heard the word coordinator it might not be it might have just been that i missed i missed it but i agree with councilmember melzer that that was probably the most persuasive uh argument i've heard for a public health coordinator thus far because the last time we've talked about it the only times we've talked about it it's been basically in the context of we want to do something we're not getting the the data and support for what we want for an outcome we'd like to see from our existing either whether it was county or whether it was uh city staff and competencies they have and competencies they don't have and so we'd like to have someone who's here on our staff to tell us this is what we need to do next i like much better the idea because that is that's programming and budgeting and planning for one exact crisis where we're not happy with certain outcomes i like much better the idea of the city has a public health role let's figure out what that is and the way that complements the well-trained and well-compensated folks who already work for the county or already work for the state and figure out what that role is is it something that goes together with an emergency management coordinator is it something that pulls together things we haven't even talked about yet like west nile response that our environmental services people have to deal with every single summer giving us a west nile response um but i i'd like to keep that one really broad too and let staff come up with solutions that right size to denton and not you know i heard about something someplace else another city happens to have this another city has that program or whatever and and let us synthesize the thing that works best for denton so i think a broad heading for that one also and then uh management can can give us options on how to proceed with it when i um when i sat when i became a council member i was appreciating the fact that the council is a group of people that that's what they do they counsel their liaisons between the community and the city manager's office and so i'm appreciating the fact that the city manager's office is a a tool it's a resource to give us and they could see they could see the historical value and they can help us with our future thought processes and um that's why i just want the the community just to also appreciate that mindset is that we are sitting here and we're listening to the community and we're bringing those ideas and we're laying them out and we're asking the city manager's office uh to be the tool and the research resource to see if it can happen and see and then as a city i'm speaking for me now and then as a person that's sitting on the council they're guiding me as to what i should be thinking and what i should be relaying back to the people you know in the community that i serve so um with all of that being said i i do want to take this to a personal level i don't feel like i'm necessarily triggered here but um i'm going to get i'm just going to be direct here i think it just needs to be said right now i'm feeling like whenever our mayor is speaking uh he's having this tone right now of dismissing um suggestions and statements i do want you mayor to know that you are just bringing this tone for me about what the people are asking me and questioning me about certain things and if i bring those up i don't feel need to feel like i'm being dismissed uh i don't feel like my constituents need to be dismissed about whatever historical nature has come about so if someone wants to talk about a large glass building and not looking like you know the other locations that's what they're saying but it doesn't need to be dismissed as oh we're not going to do that right now that's what i'm hearing that's what i'm feeling and it needs to be put out there that if someone brings about a topic or a conversation that they've had with their constituents it needs to just lay there and let the city count let the city manager's office give that perspective mayor i think that you need to be mindful of that as you are communicating with the city not just with me but i think it just needs to lay down right there and i want you to be mindful of that i'm gonna put that out there publicly i know i probably couldn't text you say your tone is is kind of off right there but i do want us to um be on the same front that we're here to help people understand i'm a retired educator and i just appreciate the why and i appreciate uh the opportunity to be as basic and simple in our thought process we know that our society thinks on the sixth grade level and we have higher thinking people and lower thinking people we have to come in the middle but the tone to say that oh well we already talked about that and we did this and we did that that that's not helpful to me because i don't think that's helpful to my constituents i think that we just need to have a positive force going on here from this point forward and if it happens again i'm gonna put it up here again because i don't appreciate that so i'm learning i'm new to this game i'm i don't feel like a politician but i do know the art of compromise i know how that works i know how that works when you're a kid you have brothers and sisters and you got to compromise with them you might fight it out but that's where you do that you do that in the classroom that's the first thing you learn in the classroom it's classroom rules treat others the way you want to be treated and good teachers will make sure that their classrooms are aligned like that so we can move forward but the dismissiveness of the history a lot of people that just moved here we have a brand new community that's like you said there's a lot of people that just showed up here in the past 10 years so they don't know the historical value the historical nature that's why we put it in our plan and so we just need to be respectful of that mr mayor and anybody else that's needs to know that but i just uh want to go forward and i want to say what i need to say because i'm not just speaking for myself i'm speaking for the people that trust me to give them a good amount of information the right information the targeted information it's a learning process here for all of us every last one of us that are sitting here we're learning something new okay thank you so i have to say did i not say everyone gets to say i don't i don't know that i targeted one person so i need help understanding that one and then two i i accept your feelings but i don't think i don't have feelings well i accept your statement i just i just did not i don't think i targeted anyone you didn't target and i and i'll say this because it's occupational hazard i'll take it no problem with it but if you go watch all our movies all our movies it's pretty accurate all of our council meetings every council member has no problems with each other in the in the meetings every almost every council member has taken a shot at me and again part of that's occupational hazards but part of that is interesting that somehow there's no issues with anyone else right it's just i'm running the meeting poorly i'm advocating for this i'm shortcutting that again i get it occupational hazards but i wish being fully political on may 22nd this seat is available and let's have that conversation there when we're looking at each other versus me getting shot from the curtain on the side of the stage and i've had that conversation with people individually and i'll have it here let's have a conversation about how i manage the meeting and all those things in the proper format which is in those areas and be consistent take issue with all your peers there's not one instance that i can recall since i've been in this seat that there's been a kind of a crossfire amongst the council not one and i get it that i'm the first one to sit in this seat that looks like me and so there's a different management style and i get it that people will dismiss that and say that's not part of it but i'll say if everyone else is entitled to their opinion i should be entitled to mine and i'm just saying that's a uniqueness that i've noticed that there's no crossfires anywhere else and again some of that comes with the job i'll take it but also i'm just pointing out statistical anomalies if you will so and i'm just saying psychologically and emotionally when you are when you are supposed to be summarizing and that's why i used the term yesterday summaries the mayor summarizes the idea of taking little extra little things that doesn't necessarily need to be said but just summarize what we have discussed and let the vote do it do what it does there's no need to add any extra dismissiveness the tone of dismissiveness i think this is a great place to put this right here because that's where i'm going to put it and i don't have any feelings you probably ever hear me say i feel i feel i feel i leave that at home that's in my car that's out the door well this is what i think and i have gotten feedback from some folks about that and so i think that it's okay it's okay that's your style but if people keep telling you the same thing you need to listen to these people nobody has a personal problem with you it just has to do with pushing our ideas for and letting it go ahead and let that vote be what it is and you just need to summarize what we said and you have your thoughts and feelings about whatever but if it just feels like you're dismissing everybody else and oh and then i have a problem with that i've already spoken to you in private about that and i want to make sure that we stay publicly i think that everybody needs to understand that we've had we need to have this conversation and i think that and i think that it does bring a certain uh a certain amount of contention yeah we're not going to solve that right i know we're not going to solve it but i just wanted to lay it out there and i'm done with it so part of the beauty that uh compels each of you to choose to run for office is your own motivations right why you chose to run why you chose to run again why you stay in office it's about giving back to the community it's about feeling good about what you're doing on behalf of residents it's sometimes it's a it's you know some people have a job some people have a career some people have a call so the motivations each of you have uh is both the source of strength and it can also be one of those areas that's a blind spot you all have lots of passion about this community i mean it's evident from last night today and the meetings i've watched the conversations i've had with each of you lots of advocacy lots of support tremendous amount of energy and enthusiasm and passion about what you're trying to do at the same time everything's done within the public domain so all that you used this word yesterday counselor counselor beck which is a good word all the tendencies of this governing body are amplified because they're all done within the sphere of the public meeting i watched a few of your council meetings on i think they go uh from my observation there's an on and on and on and on and on it seems as though there's a tendency so please just receive this in the spirit that i i offer it there seems to be the notion that everybody wants to be right and everybody wants to have their last word in that's going to be tough to sustain going forward because um that is just going to i think reflect where there's a clash and then you do turn into politicians and i want to be right about this and i don't agree with her and i gotta tell her like right now or i gotta tell him right now so i would encourage all of you i say this to all groups think about what it means to be a professional elected official what are those attributes what are those behaviors what are those choices absolutely some things are going to spill over like we've just had right but part of the challenge that you have is you don't have the community is not going to wait until you resolve the personal disputes those issues just are banging on the door saying what are we going to do about it right so if you can accept some dysfunctionality without it making it worse than matrimonious that's going to be part of an elected office that's not unique to denton i mean most cities have those issues but i think it's that you know valor is the better part of the discussion and saying there are times i'm going to say something they're going to get their consequences for that and there are times i'm not going to say something maybe i'm not going to call somebody out or i'm not going to say that because we all have those tendencies and sometimes there's just a collision and i would hope that you reflect on that as a governing body and how you want to make sure that not only what you do but how you do it is above approach doesn't mean you're not going to dip your toe into sometimes saying something to people but forgiveness is an act of kindness in a sense of humility and sometimes in public office it's in short supply so i just offer i'm not trying to lecture to you i'm just trying to share with you just some things to think about in public office okay just some things to think about because there is a lot of tremendous pressure on each of you but diamonds are made under pressure and so make sure that doesn't shrink you but you ride pressures of privilege and so you chose to be in office and there's a high expectation of residents of this community about what you're doing and how you're doing it and you want to live up to that people want to be proud of you does that mean you're not perfect but how you allow some of that conflict if it just festers and blisters and pops it's not healthy for you it's not healthy for other people just not mayor you got something and we're about out of time because for lunch so if you want to chair and then counselor then counselor i'll just be short and succinct i go look at the last two meetings and i've stopped summarizing so i would just expect credit where credit's due right that's that's it thank you um i uh i i acknowledge um council member bird's concerns i think that those are valid concerns that we need to address but um in the interest of kind of staying on topic and keeping this moving forward i would like to return to some points that were brought up by mayor pro tem and council member davis first when it comes to covid response i think it's important for us to clarify what we're talking about there because i think that there are times when we say covid response and we mean economic recovery and there are times when we say covid response and we mean public health concerns and the implementation of those two different types of covid response are very different so i think that it's worth bifurcating that and maybe um talking about covid response both in the context of fostering economic vitality and then separately um i love um council member armenter's point about viewing public health and safety in a holistic sense having covid response be part of of supporting public health and safety as well as um you know our our fire department our police department talking about traffic safety in in as part of that conversation talking about a public health coordinator as part of that conversation talking about mental health and addiction as part of that conversation i i really like that framing of it i would also like to um i third the points that mayor pro tem and council member davis made about our current council priority number two developing the loop 288 building we are like we're on that road it's happening and so i think now is the time to zoom back out and maybe amend that priority to rather than being about the loop 288 building being about homelessness addressing homelessness um i do think that homelessness and affordable housing are big enough issues they're urgent enough issues and they're complex enough issues that it merits having sort of two separate priorities a priority for affordable housing and a priority for um addressing homelessness i would like to suggest that we also zoom out a bit on um council priority number four developing a comprehensive solid waste management strategy i think we should consider that as being part of our broader priority of sustainability initiatives of which we have many and solid waste is one of them and we can dig into the details of those another time but um i think that just this solid waste management strategy falls under the broader umbrella of of our many sustainability initiatives that we need to kind of integrate for uh for staff notes uh i just i completely concur with with everything just council member said i i think um two things that this is something that sarah brought up earlier is this uh this concept of the higher order networking and i think that's where we're seeing sort of a little bit of disconnect here not a disconnect we needed additional connect to to jump off of sarah's comment and and i i think this is where that this public health aspect gives you that connectivity to these different disparate mobility you know it gives you a channel to connect mobility and comprehensive planning and public health safety traffic that that arctic you're looking for an arctic category over arctic category that connects broadly across i i would say it even hits organizational excellence because for the last sort of how long has it been 18 months uh and three different councils make-ups um we've been we've been clashing with this concept of well we don't have the public health authority to do xyz because we simply lack that we have not assigned ourselves a public health authority so i think you can fit public health into into this organizational excellence category as well uh it does tells with uh what council armature said um if we simply give ourselves a low-hanging fruit of it's extremely low-hanging fruit of saying what is our public health authority don't leave it gray and nevertheless don't you know if it's going to be the county it's going to be dr richardson then assign it bam that's dr richardson if it's going to be one of us or not one of us but someone on staff a public health coordinator i love this idea uh going forward um but the that then i think you can really begin to commit a lot of dots even amongst the organizational excellence if you say this is the role and here is the authority that we as a council have imbued it with and under the laws of texas yeah i'm gonna kind of piggyback and kind of i think add one under organizational excellence i think that and i'll say i have a healthy skepticism of exercises like the one we're we're doing now the the i made a joke on facebook last night about trust falls when you said the word kaleidoscope earlier i just about lost you know like i have a healthy skepticism about the team building exercise in a political body but i think we can see that this particular team needs to work on some particular areas and i think a council if uh we're going to talk about meetings and agendas and uh mechanics later on i don't think that the council's issue is necessarily mechanics i think that's part of it and we're mechanically structurally not the best setup for some of the things we need to do running efficient meetings moving the ball forward focusing on what's important and not getting off in the weeds i think it organizational excellence priority may need to include council efficiency and effectiveness and that can include relationships with each other that can include strategies we use outside of council meetings to attempt to influence our our peers um you know it's really difficult to make decisions when you worry that there might be a protest outside city hall in five minutes if you don't make exactly the right decision it's difficult to make decisions if you feel like there might be a a mean tweet or something about it later on and um i'm not really interested in the the hocus pocus of it you know the the trust falls and everything i am interested in the dynamics of the group and developing shared respect for each other and because that will shorten our meetings by hours if we can have some trust with each other if we're not behaving in certain ways outside of the meetings that will move that will uh improve staff's ability to respond to what a sometimes schizophrenic group wants to do if we can figure out strategies for developing consensus among ourselves so i think uh to council member bird's point and also to the mayor's point i think that we need to look in the mirror sometimes and i think that ought to be a priority we're not the first council in denton to have this problem and we are on track to be the first of the one among many many many more going forward if we can't figure out how to make this body lead this city out of schizophrenia and into focus first of all i think you're giving trust falls short shrift if y'all want to do some at lunch i'm fine that's fine yeah i i concur with that i think the the essence of it is this if we can really embrace the fact that we have an opportunity this year and i take the mayor's point very uh seriously we have this year for sure if we can if we can really embrace the fact that we haven't that we're we we went through all this trouble and hassle and anxiety to get to sit in these seats and we have an opportunity to make the city better this year and that all of us are here to do that you know if we can focus on where we can find shared purpose and not score points off each other it's just a precious opportunity and uh it'll be gone before you know it so i think we focus there a lot of the rest takes care of itself remember inspiration as an exploration so you have to translate energy into action ideas and implementation what we tried to cover this morning was quite a bit of terrain in the time that was allowed for this from the micro to the macro from macro to the micro from bike lanes to addiction centers from new buildings to uh what's on the horizon what we're going to do now is uh be partnering with staff we're going to take all these notes in the note states up and refresh this strategic plan these items underneath the six priority areas and that'll be brought back to you i'll recap some of that but that'll be brought back to you uh in september for your reconsideration right so we can't and i should have mentioned this last night i apologize i didn't you're not going to be walking out of the door this afternoon where this is all tied up in a bow and it's nice and neat and you know exactly your time is better invested on those issues that you just discussed not getting down into when does that happen and how do we want to make that happen the instructions so what we're going to do now is i'm going to it's at 12 10 we validated 30 minutes for lunch if you're going to step out of the building just be back we can reconvene at about 12 45 it's going to be a few extra minutes lunch is in the break room there's plenty of places you can eat in the building or outside or where have you but if you do we can just be back it is 12 48 and we are back it is still saturday august 21st uh and uh so we're we're all back so i'll turn it back over to uh to uh patrick is that right yes there we go got it right okay thanks mayor yes and i'm going to transition over to sarah we're actually on slide 14 on city council committee discussion so we're going to tag team a little bit of this she's going to review it and then we're going to have a conversation we've allocated up to 30 minutes for this we don't need to take the entire time with the group doesn't believe it needs to take that much time so sarah so i'll go ahead and just tee up this conversation um this is a follow-up from a approved one-minute pitch back in june from the mayor in regards to taking a fresh look at the council committees and really allow for council to have a discussion do you want to continue with the same number and format of your council committees are there some that you want to take a look at and maybe alter or change and maybe just delete and have those items come straight to city council in the interest of all of your time as well as city staff so what we did to provide information for this discussion is in tab 9 there is a bigger 11 by 17 material that outlines each of the committees the current members how often they meet the purpose of those council committees so all of that information is there and i also kind of summarized it here on slide 15 just to note that council appointee performance review committee it is established but it has not met i think in at least a few years so it does exist but those council appointee reviews have been going through the full city council and to help your discussion staff suggested some committees that we feel where items could come back to the full city council and potentially skip that additional process or step of going to a council committee first and bringing them right back to full city council or through alternative ways so kind of the options that we have forward again you can add to if you'd like to and these are just some things suggested by city staff so one option would be to retire the council airport committee just refer any airport items to the full city council a second option that we looked at is to retire the audit and finance committee and how it is currently composed and have all those finance items come back to city council we know you all are very interested in hearing about those finance items but as far as the audit committee or audit you know how we're reviewing things from internal audit the internal auditor wanted to take an opportunity to maybe look at different options with you and bring those forward as part of her new work plan and how those items get potentially reviewed whether that be continuing with a council committee maybe a different board or committee before they come forward to city council and then lastly another option would be to retire committee on community engagement while we really enjoy those sessions we do feel like we could give some updates to all of city council through a memo format which we have been doing throughout coven as we've tried to reduce the number of public meetings that we've had but we know this is critical and important to be communicating and engaging our community but one that we thought might be an option where we could handle our alternatively there's one more oh and yes one more um and this sorry this is kind of a blend of a council committee and a planning and zoning committee is the development code review committee is another option that could be looked at if those any code and potential code amendments just come straight to city council instead of going through that hybrid council committee planning and zoning committee so we're happy to open up the discussion i'm gonna have patrick help to facilitate this discussion as well yes councillor okay so i'll just go through the options and i'll call the the development code review committee option d looking at the yeah so uh so option a now i'm not on the airport committee but as somebody who's not on that committee you know as far as i know until proven otherwise i'm fine with that coming before all of council and retiring that committee for option b i am on the audit and finance committee and uh i i am fine having everything come to council uh and i would really uh be interested to hear you know when the time comes what the suggestions that you know eternal auditor had i heard and you know and what you said a hint of impossible or maybe i misread that but uh you know some sort of a community committee or something like that and so that sounds exciting to me so i trust that you know she'll come back with some interesting ideas um and uh option option c or actually i'll do that last um option d i like the idea of of having uh that is a development code changes come forward to council uh all of council together uh i'm maybe someone can talk me out of it you know but i know that um and i've never been on that committee uh but under the this is a previous council because i remember keely being on there at the time and i think she was on that committee right um and uh and i remember there was you know some discussion we were having where it was it was keely it was john ryan i forget who else was on that committee but they had a much more in the weed it had come before council after coming before that committee and they had a much more in the weeds discussion of the details of what we were discussing and so there was a lot that was redundant uh for them and i am redundant for staff too presumably so um i i'm fine with that coming before all council c is the one i'm i'm generally torn with i really don't i genuinely don't know so on the one hand the committee on community engagement i'm i'm on that committee you know the thing that i love about that committee is it it well number one all of the staff that's sitting around at the table which is that's also a disadvantage of it right because that's time they're spending there not doing other things um but uh i i feel like staff is not just there to um you know it can inform council on things but i also see a lot of times on that committee staff from different areas of community development say tech services and and uh you know public relations or uh that are already kind of in touch with each other but having everybody sit around at the table it's a really nice group dynamic um i feel like the kind of things we discuss on that committee are things that would that be otherwise just updates in the friday report um that uh because we're as council members we're so busy fielding you know complaints and concerns from members of the community uh about you know there's a pothole in my street you know you know why don't you have you know this kind of ordinance uh that um i'm i'm unlikely to take the time to find out and sit down and talk with a person on so exactly how is the 311 rollout going to be you know handled i'll just see an update but then so i i really appreciate taking the time and these things being forced to take the time but i could be convinced if as long as i know that some of them would would come to council and not we'd not just be updated on them because they're so important um i i would be open to that uh that committee being being dissolved too that's all council davis yeah i think it's it's important and i don't know if we can do this today or not but i think it's important for us to kind of decide as a group what our consensus for the role of these committees is if they're working committees for instance like we heard some examples already but on on my committee the community partnership committee we're looking at nuts and bolts budgets right like we're going through and allocating a set amount of money to many different worthy projects and there's there's some heavy lifting to do there and then we bring forward a recommendation to the council the committee on the environment does some of that same kind of stuff if it's a working committee that's bringing forward a recommendation and the rest of the council is comfortable accepting the recommendation and using that as a starting point then a committee can be very very useful i'm i'm very wary of the idea of scrapping a committee that then ends up in extra work sessions for council or more opportunities for council to disagree and not not find any consensus because we don't have a kind of a common starting point we're either spending our time in committee or spending our time in council if we are trusting of our committee members in our committee process that can be a big efficiency for everybody that we're kind of dividing the work and to that point like for instance at dcrc i'm not not quite sure how it took on the controversy that it did but if we're talking about different kinds of zoning in the city if we're talking about wanting to accomplish some policy goals through development code revisions a committee of folks that can talk about between the pnz and the council a committee of folks who can say listen i can tell you that's not going to go at council we need to revisit this idea and what does pnz think and that back and forth that's a very productive working group for some of the things that we're talking about doing so i'd prefer to keep that one but for any of these that are kind of on the chopping block i'm all about skipping meetings and not having superfluous meetings but if we think that there's some if it's a committee that does heart heavy lifting and brings forward something to council that council that can can start a hundred yards down the field instead of i'm going to mix up metaphors i'm going to stop somewhere you know and there's a home run in there someplace so if it can start us off ahead because the work's been done in committee that has utility and usefulness if it's looking at something that is going to be on an agenda for council two weeks from now and it's going to be just as cut up and just as changed around or just as much only checking an update box at council then there's not a purpose and having it come to committee first if that makes sense yeah very very helpful framing comments uh i'll just kind of tick from my list i imagine you're keeping score uh runs whatever um so council pointy performance review committee and i guess it's a cleanup thing to just formally get rid of it if it's worth the effort if it's not creating a problem on the airport committee having served on that it's just it's uh it's controversial approximately zero percent of the time so i just don't think it adds value but but there's more to say than just it would go straight to council it would be there's that other airport committee right that's the the resident board yeah so i just say enough let it go to them i'm interested in their recommendation you know and and and and those recommendations from you know other bodies have weight with me i don't always agree with them but you know at least lets me know eyes have been on it so i'm comfortable with that on community engagement i think it can serve a valuable function better than it has there you know i'm as vulnerable to this as anybody else probably more so there is an irresistible human impulse to correct someone else's copy and you know everybody's an art director but i think what would would be valuable would be earlier in the process to to to vet here's here's the objective here's the target audience here are the messages not not to have us be you know a creative review committee because you know we're no better at it probably worse at it than than y'all so you know to agree up basically on on creative strategy target objective target and message and you know there are some things where if it's a super sensitive item it may be just a mat like a letter where it could potentially be uh you know cause controversy or if you want another set of eyes to go okay we think our constituents will absorb this message well or not i think it can be potentially helpful to you that way too so i'd say just a different way to use it on audit and finance uh uh 97 percent of the time that's not controversial uh the finance items i mean it's really very ritualistic you know we kind of trust you all the oversight is very important but i think i can't go straight to council the audit items generally our trust level is so high that they're it's incredibly interesting but hearing it once is good enough however very occasionally there are very occasionally they're partially contested or or you know non-concurrent items in the audit report and i would say it doesn't have to meet very frequently to cover this but i would say if there are items of non-concurrents have that go to that committee just to kind of hash it out hear about it and maybe get it resolved you know before it comes to council i i would propose that uh on uh uh code development review committee i mean i you know i objected you know on the creation but i've kind of made my peace with it and i'm interested in whether those who are on it are finding it productive and that they're you know being able to hash out complex issues i mean and whether staff finds it helpful i'm i'll just say i have an open mind and on agenda committee i i think it would be helpful if instead of having a long meeting once a month if we had short meetings weekly before the agendas go out to go here's an issue there's an issue you know mayor just a simple one that i know you or i would have caught uh we spoke about it briefly when we already had agreement on the packages for uh the judge and the auditor like that could have gone to consent like just little things like that i think we could like be that extra set of eyes and you know catch things like that so uh that those are my thoughts oh i very much lost my train of thought um well i i was going to um ask you know i think that council member davis's framing is really helpful um you know let's ask ourselves which of these committees are um really doing work in their meetings that would not be a smart use of time in a full council meeting um and i've i've never been in an audit and finance committee meeting so i would love to hear um from folks who are on that committee um if you feel that you are hashing things out and doing work in those committee meetings that would be an unwise to address or or perhaps not an efficient use of time if we address them in full council meetings yeah i mean i think i think i just spoke to that and same yeah not not so much okay um all right yeah then that i guess that answers my question on that um uh i'm i'm i'm again i've never served on the airport committee um but uh my general sense is that that's something that could you know either come before full council or be referred to the the citizen um airport advisory board um i would say that the the um i yeah let's go ahead and remove the council point d performance review committee because we're doing that in full council already um i would prefer to keep the uh the dcrc um i i think that that um the the development code needs um quite a few revisions and um that's probably going to be a timely process especially with you know the new comp plan coming out the updates to the mobility plan we're going to need to sort of update the dcrc in order to match that and it's going to be a lengthy process and it would take um an enormous amount of time i think if full council were to address those changes i think that needs to be addressed in in a committee um yeah that's my piece okay thanks council uh i think the uh thank you uh the i think the framing that that uh councilor mcguire and davis were talking about is is the really important one is and to some degree mayor protem as well that you know are are you doing work that we otherwise would gloss over in a friday report or in the time commitment that we have for a tuesday meeting and and well while i'm technically on two of these committees that are uh being reviewed uh the one that i have um not direct familiarity but but conversational familiarity with is the dcrc and it does seem like we need that that lift that that detailed push um at least from talking with others um on both council and p and z side uh so i i wouldn't be in favor of getting rid of that just because council isn't simply going to spend an entire work session talking about you know frontage you know distances or something whereas this committee might um i the the the big thing for me is the pros and cons i mean are we are we contributing i i don't want to have staff to have two meetings where they say the same thing with the same slide deck if you're going to do that there's no point to that um and and so unless there's going to be substantive differences uh i i concur with mayor protem i think it's probably we could send airport to the airport uh uh citizens committee um uh i i i don't know it sounds like for mayor protem that only very rarely do we get into the audit and finance weeds so my i guess my suggestion is keep it but can we do that ad hoc and say this is an item that we're likely to need to refer to committee and therefore you know i mean i don't what are the pros and cons of not having a standing time slot i know for zba because they don't have a time slot and they're a little bit ad hoc you have attendance issues now i think that won't be an issue for council we are here whether we want to be or not sometimes so i think that that probably would solve itself whereas zba you can understand that that's all they they might meet once or twice a year um uh so i don't think we will suffer from that but i i would maybe recommend that we do that ad hawker as needed maybe not dissolve it but just only as needed um and i guess uh i will i will take others recommendations in the community engagement it seems like it's a really important thing to do but if i guess again if we're not doing heavy lifting if you're gonna do the same thing twice i concur with everyone else that said that i don't want to do that again and again and again um if we're not going to dig in and really you know do some heavy lifting as counselor davis said i i think that anything when we're not doing that we should uh we should do so but i i think we do that regularly or at least i see it they don't haven't met very much because of covet i guess but the dcrc seemed to have done that in the past and i don't see the expectation why they wouldn't do that once we resume more normal meetings um so i guess that's my point on that thank you briefly so i support staff's recommendations uh to do away with those four for the following reasons succinctly um the um you look at the number of meetings we have 37 meetings scheduled in 2021 as a council you look at these boards that they've referenced and even if you go back to 2018 i mean i think the high water markets eight maybe nine meetings and that's 18 you know you can look at 2019 as well and see some they're just not meeting with enough frequency to to warrant the amount of work that staff has to do and it is repetitive and it is not a consensus so then you run the risk of having a three two hour meeting only to come back to council and get totally different direction have to scrap the two three hours you spent in preparation scrap the two three hours you spent in the meeting throw that all away come back with council direction and redo it and then it has to go back through that process again just seems counterintuitive i trust staff's analysis to say these are those exposure and then the history of the dcrc as i understand it was to prepare for that huge kind of revamp and we're not going to revamp at a great level anymore that's going to be kind of incremental changes and so those can be either spun up as needed and or just kind of brought to entire council again so that you only have to do it once so that body obviously you can look at the number of votes from a council from a p and z perspective to a council perspective just look at just to you know compare those and you'll see it's a different read and i get it that you're trying to normalize that but at the end of the day it's it's double work for for staff and if we're saying we want to be more efficient that way and i think it can come to the entirety of council or you can spin this up as needed uh kind of hey call you in and all that to say that that stops none of this none of these meetings none of these subcommittees stops anyone i can go talk schedule a meeting with city management with a director level and city management and pull in whoever i need at any point and every council member has that opportunity so you're you're able to avail yourself of the information at whatever level you want to it just requires you to commit a little time independently and a little forethought independently which is which is great right because you can drill down into what you want to hammer out and kind of carry that forward and i think that is a better use of time because it has some specificity to it's like hey i want to understand these things better i want to get more information about these things and it's kind of targeted versus assembling a kind of whole committee you got to post it you got to send out notifications etc etc for something that happens as infrequent as these i think we can be just as effective uh but but taking a surgical approach to it thanks uh yes i am in agreement with the city staff uh option a uh i every time i go to to look at see what's going on with the committees they're always counseled so uh you know always counseling their meetings so i've never been to i've never had an opportunity to even review what they've what they had been working on and what they are going to work on so that can go um retire the audit i kind of want to just have in my mind i want to keep that from a risk management perspective i appreciate her coming in and telling us some of the some of the needs so i uh would like to and i can probably just go online and read it i don't know if that's necessarily for it to come but i think just giving the opportunity to speak back and forth on our audits uh yes the finance committee maybe so that can go internal uh auditor again um keep the audit if we can uh retire the committee on community engagement reviews and considers environment no um we where am i community engagement there it is advisors regarding the timely distribution distribution of information that didn't citizens and advised methods of engaging didn't citizens in the city government i feel like that's what we have to do i think that that is something that we should keep i think that is my angle i think i've uh even said have mentioned that kind of time and time again that i'm speaking to the people i want to educate them and let them know what we're what we want to do going on the information uh propaganda point to let them know how we're doing and what are we doing i know that the city has a great uh website and i've seen the videos i've learned so much from the videos but is how effective is that when they're still asking questions are they going themselves and what about their city council person coming before them saying hey this is the topic that we're working on so i won't go too far into that but i appreciate the community engagement um committee uh i have down here keep the uh development co-review and and it's so connected with the planning and zoning committee i just i wish you watch you on that but i'm going to say keep that okay so that's my opinion thank you sure a second way to look at the role of committees too is it is and this is how some of them came to be in the first place it does say something about the policy areas where we're putting emphasis on a council you know what we as a council things we find important and if we follow staff's options a b and c what we're left with i i think is a a good clear policy statement emphasis statement about what this council and future councils are focused on and ought to be focused on indent right now i have thoughts on agenda committee i'll save for later when we talk about agenda setting but environment community partnership mobility and smart development and i think those are really good clear emphatic statements of you know what if we're going to have to sit through an extra meeting if we're going to use staff time if we're going to do the heavy lift and get into the weeds those four areas are the ways that we're going to spend that time i think that's a that's using option a b and c and i think that's a good clear statement from this council and how we want to prioritize what we do we don't have i need to i need more direction this is not clear direction i mean i i hear you know i could go this way but um i need more direction for us to literally figure out i i think there's consensus on the airport we can take that one out okay and i think there's it's kind of uh more that say you know they're okay with the audit and finance going away but being able to when there's items of non uh concurrence that they should be able to call it back but is that right am i hearing that right that was my point of view i don't know if others agree i mean for me i'm fine with i mean i agree that items of non-concurrence are important i'm fine with those coming before council uh because we are going to bring all that and you know as you all know madison's really good we work really well together she's going to bring all that anyway to you um and finance we bring all those things to you as well um on c uh the community engagement i will say um that is a heavy lift for our staff to prepare the documents for it could that be a possible maybe for quarterly and that's the new schedule that was just adopted so it may work to do just just do leave it as quarterly and recently we've been doing more just quarterly updates so here's the projects we're working on seeking any feedback so we're happy to continue that if council would like to and then the dcrc i just want some clarification because i'll just be honest with you i talked to scott mcdonnell about it just to see what his thoughts were and he said that on that when we were thinking about forming there were at least two council members that said this is all going to come before council anyway why are we separating it out and that most the important things are going to be something that council needs to decide so i'm i'm we're at the mercy of what you really want to do on that one um but most of those items even though they'll be discussed in the committee will go before council counselor and steward had something so a couple things one um it might help you or i don't know if it would uh for us to do a kind of raise hands if you want to see just like a kind of up down who would be okay with doing away with it because maybe some of my um you know maybe i was doing so much talking that the point was was was not clear because i i wasn't sure about committee retiring committee on community engagement i could see the ups and downs but you know listening to everybody thinking it through um i'm really okay with doing away with that uh that that committee you know one thing that um maybe could happen if um when i mean as uh uh forget if it was uh mayor or council member davis who said uh that uh you know council members can always you know take up an issue with staff anyway i would say if if there's an issue a community engagement issue or any issue that staff would like council feedback on um but not so much in the sense of having a meeting on it but just is everybody okay you know here's the flyer we're going to be putting out because i agree with what council member melcher had said you know it's um sometimes seeing things on their kind of earlier end um you know can uh can be nice to just get more eyes on it sometimes it cannot necessarily stall up stall the process but maybe just in a friday report have it you know staff would would love council's feedback if you want you know send this person i mean i think you you guys do that anyway you know send this person a note by this date you know uh maybe an email reminder if you're not hearing from anybody yeah i think um another thing that we have just started to do with all of you is to do monthly meetings yes um with the cmo and each council member so if there are questions or you see like hey i'm getting a lot of feedback that we're missing communications on that that's another avenue where we can monthly discuss um some of those topics as well yeah i was just going to mention i i heard a lot of you uh about option b say you'd be interested in what that would look like just to let you know in talking with madison uh her plan if y'all decided to do that today or gave direction to do that today would be to take kind of those options to the audit finance committee on friday uh for that meeting and then be able to discuss it and then come to the full council to kind of discuss it further so i just wanted y'all to know kind of what that the mechanism of that would kind of look like for the audit side yeah for the audit side of it we did here to eliminate the pointy performance review we got that one and the airport we got that one it's the others that we might want to do yeah to sort of try to adjust and you know find consensus uh the idea that the non-concurrence items on audit could come to full council that's fine too i'm not like super dug in on that and on uh community engagement if if if it's just something you feel you're doing for us i don't need that if if if what i was laying out was something that you know i would be willing to do if it would help you but if it's if you don't need it or you don't see any value in it please don't yeah i can read an update is you know in the friday report and give input if i really have a concern so if that helps all right let's get a sense then uh the agenda committee yes keep i don't think i don't think option a so are you asking for what are you yeah that's the airport okay thumbs down if you don't want the airport airport committee so we don't want okay thumbs down i don't want the air option b you support it keep it do you support retiring it so that would be so are we raising it wait we're trying to summarize right that's what we're trying to do we're struggling with that just just curious okay go ahead option b is to retire the audit finance committee do you support retiring it raise your hand if you do if you support and then the dcrc i want to keep that keep it okay we're keeping the dcrc okay all right thank you that was easy or sort of all right it was easy because you told us you need a direction yeah it was easy once you told us you needed direction yeah right out to us that we had not reached consensus yeah i just i couldn't tell and i didn't want to make that decision and then everybody go that's not what we said that was very helpful very helpful honestly was very helpful and i wish we had more elements of that in our regular meetings to be honest well i'll do it just don't give me the dirty look ever sarah or you can it be all right okay so we're going to roll right into the next section and this is not going to take a full hour these next few slides are really just more informational and it'll kind of set up getting into the discussion of the one minute pitch and how do we how does council consider requests from fellow council members and how does that then get on the agenda so i'll just go right into it um this is just for background and informational purposes of what it takes to create an agenda we should create an agenda and any item on an agenda so it's at least six weeks of a process from start to finish at least to get an item onto the agenda it usually takes a lot longer than that so just walking you through an example we're going to put something on i don't have a pointer sorry on the june 22nd agenda and you're walking it back by that friday before we have to post the agenda to meet tomo requirements two to three days prior to that we have to have it in legistar so it's going through an approval sequence and it goes through multiple reviews of that approval sequence to make sure that the department director has seen it the cmo has seen it and as well as legal and finance if that item has any legal or finance components and then if it's a work session item we generally as the cmo we do dry runs and every work session presentation try to do that two weeks in advance so that if there are any major changes it's not clear we're not presenting clear options clear recommendations that we're making those adjustments so by the time you've seen an item it's likely gone through a dry run at least once or twice and it may have gone through boards and commissions and committees as well stepping back even further than that it's reviewed by the agenda committee and then even further back we need to take into time that legal has a chance to review all of the items and ensure that they're ready to go and to prepare the ordinances the resolutions the agreements and so forth so it it takes at least a few weeks for that process with the agenda items and that's just you know there are exceptions to that you know sometimes we need to be flexible in that process but we're trying to create what is the best practice to making sure that these things are being vetted so that the time it gets to you for consideration you have some trust and confidence that this item has gone through all of the reviews that it needs to and that it is ready for your final consideration and is in the best shape it can be so that's just some just some background about what we do from a staff perspective and a lot of time goes it goes into each one of those agenda items for metrics this is going from the calendar year so from January 1 to the beginning of August city council has held 31 meetings on average those meetings have lasted six hours and 24 minutes and then the luncheons are we took that separately so those luncheons are two hours and 34 minutes cumulatively across those 31 meetings we've had 579 total agenda items and you can see underneath they're kind of broken up into the different types of agenda items that have been brought forth and this is on council meetings only so we do have 30 other boards commissions and committees where we're regularly trying to get the agenda items for those as well through and that's just not just to tell you kind of the volume of work that is done to make sure that we're preparing these for you we definitely shouldn't take two and a half hours for lunch if that's what you're saying i knew you were somebody's gonna say that so what we what we've done and to try to better manage what's on each one of those meetings and the length of it make sure you're not overloaded is to create that work session matrix we've had this for a long time but we've recently revamped it and on tab seven it shows what is our current work session topics and meeting information and the cmo and entire director leadership team we review this every week as well as our upcoming city council agendas and so we're constantly trying to make sure that we're balancing those items that are time-sensitive those that are council priorities the normal city business items that just need to go forward on a schedule such as the budget i've been really kind of slotting in where we can and we do seek the advice of the agenda committee on this as well as we're working through but you can see all the way through october and even into november we're full on work sessions and some of these will change may change somewhat but even if you look on september 14th as an example we have quite a few hefty work sessions there we still need to add in a coven 19 update based on the circumstances so it may be that an item has to be pushed back two weeks or so to balance that better to make sure that we're respectful of everyone's time in this room as well as city staff and then as well as the public so that they can come be part of those conversations and they're not going to to midnight or past so that's just one tool that we've been using and then we're also trying to list out in the back their work session dates that still need to be determined as well as work sessions that have been approved through the one minute pitch process that still need to be scheduled so showing what is outstanding what do we still need to get to that has been approved that's just kind of the overview of that matrix tool and let me just say one little thing here because it's appropriate to say it so i'll just be so to give you a heads up council member davis we're moving and and this is what happens we had a dry run this week on the interactive fountain sculpture it's not ready to go i'm i am we never want to bring something forward to council that we don't believe is ready to be presented so david and i pulled it and are moving it back a little bit because it's not it doesn't do any good to bring you something that's not fully baked and so just to give you that that's the other thing that happens on some occasions we do a dry run and for many reasons it's not ready to go and we don't want to waste your time or others so we push it push it back and that's what happens anything else to add there sir no but where you see october 26 2021 it says city holidays that's actually going to go into leave and other things so actually i was wrong it's in it's actually in october the end of october council member maguire i'm sorry what oh oh talking about talking about leave that's i have asked her to expand that so it won't just cover city holidays it will cover leave and what the mayor had mentioned as well okay great thank you so many of the items that you'll see especially coming forward in september october or they have council priority listed so we are making a focus to have those items be the priority items and if some others whether that be one minute pitch or city business items that could be moved off we're trying to be really cognizant of what have been the council priorities to bring those forward okay so in terms of scheduling the additional requests i had just kind of walked through that that's that one minute pitch work sessions that have been approved that we're listing out on that matrix as well and then depending upon the workload to prepare that item which department's preparing that we slot those in as we can and accomplish those as we can i know council might be also interested in having a discussion about how you rate some of those approved one minute pitches in terms of priority to all of you as well so that kind of leads us right into the council request well stop and take any questions on the information just presented if i may just an observation uh this is the first time i've seen or or maybe first time i've noticed that that you all did this exercise of timing out each of the items make up the meeting which i think thank you i think it was all kinds of sense that came to that suggestion at one of our tend to reviews that thank you very much well uh you know no wonder i think it makes all kinds of sense but and my observation is i noticed that you know when mr barra said well we've got 30 minutes to cover this item like we're totally capable of doing that you know i mean it can be an effective team and i and uh you know i i think it's entirely uh acceptable to me and how others would feel you know if the mayor were to say we've allotted 60 minutes on this item you know i think we can you know we can work within that framework uh and how it could help us make sure we cover every you know everything we need to in a meeting so anyway i just wanted to show that counselor those i agree with that i've always said i could play with the shot clock and i think most of our items were capable like like you said paul we're very capable of doing that it's just helpful to know kind of and have little reminders general reminders as we go we've spent 30 minutes and we intend to spend 60 minutes on this item let's kind of keep things moving and you know if we get into something that needs more time there's nothing that says there can't be more time spent but knowing that we have a goal it'll help those of us who like to talk a lot including myself it'll help us remember to keep the keep the conversation moving along and that we don't necessarily have to offer every single thought we've got like i sometimes do yeah so i'm a little wary about having a total allotted time for an individual discussion for for certain for certain more controversial items sometimes we know to advance what the controversial items are going to be sometimes we don't know you know my biggest problem with that is that it doesn't ensure that people have equal opportunity to speak for an equal amount of time so i would be more in favor of and i know this is something that roberts rules allows and i'm sure i'll get dinged by this you know but i i would be open to trying it if others would too to have in a lot of time and we make a comment um you know to say uh you know it can't be more than two minutes three minutes i feel like one minute is too short even though sometimes all i have to say is like i you know and some of us will say oh i agree but i think that that having a limit for individual contributions uh you know you can you can speak but keep it to three minutes whatever um i also have a few other suggestions uh outside of the one minute pitch uh redo process that could help possibly make work sessions more manageable and shorter um one you know when we look at uh the problem of you know how long our our meetings are uh we're always thinking about the council discussion part of it uh and and that is for good reason you know however um you know if we look to on certain items maybe having shorter power points and uh kind of focusing more on you know the the assumption that we're going to do our due diligence beforehand and read the backup you know and can ask questions about anything in the backup um i'm a little wary to kind of set a limit and say you know there should be no powerpoint presentation longer than 10 slides some of them you really need a lot also i understand that the powerpoint presentations they're not just for council it's also for the public uh and and i don't expect the public to do the uh all of the homework that we have to do right so the power the powerpoints are very well done in in that sense but i do think it'd be a good idea to look at those i also feel like every once in a while i wish i could think of an example now um maybe someone else can but sometimes there's a work session where council is not clear and you know including myself do you want direction from us and then the answer is like oh no this is just an update i think that uh a lot of those you know if not all of them we could just go without a work session yes you know uh because we do do our homework and we do read and that you know and that takes time so i feel like things should only come to us if you want direction okay um uh two other issues uh i i would love to kind of pursue coming up with a an efficient way of showing agreement with what others have said um because i know that uh staff i know the mayor yeah somebody and um each of us are i think we're keeping tabs you know i'll be like okay there's one person who you know wants option a there's two there's so i'm kind of keeping it tally uh but to do that sometimes we have to have like the way we have it now is you have to get in the queue raise your hand yeah i would like uh uh maybe not thumbs up i mean sometimes i wish that we had a um on our uh buttons at our computers if there was a way to like you can on social media click heart on something you know but a lot of times i'll find myself nodding along with something somebody's saying and then i'll think like i hope you know i hope that sarah sees me nodding you know that way i don't have to raise my hand and go but it's not fair to expect that you are noticing nods or or you know head shaking whatever um i think that sometimes ideas get put forward by council members where there it where there might be consensus but because we don't go around the horn because it would take too long to take the time okay now each of you speak to what you think of that um they these they end up getting lost um so anyway there's that um and then i guess this third one is not so much a solution it's just a statement of a problem i wish i had this solution to it but sometime and i've been told uh by uh by by friends and allies you know that i tend to repeat myself in um uh council meetings i'll state my idea and then i'll state it again a slightly different way and then again a slightly different way and sometimes i hear myself doing that and um and i don't know why i'm doing that but uh uh when i think about why i'm doing that it's it's i think it comes from a worry that i won't be heard um because and i think it's it's something that and it's not unique to council it's just i think women especially you know sometimes feel just not heard in the world um and you know we each have our own unique ways of of dealing with that uh so uh anyway i i think maybe the kind of showing agreement thing you know just having a simple way of showing agreement that that would be a way to let people know that they're they're heard or even showing i disagree um but uh you know just kind of working on listening i myself have to work on listening um and of course you know being more concise uh and uh and then i think also the kind of a getting misunderstood issue sometimes we attribute and this is actually something that under robert's rules you're not supposed to do you know attribute like motives or intent you know you're just saying that because um you know you you want to please your your base or or you're you're just you know doing that to make me look like the bad guy or something like that um you know we all think these things and we all imagine what other people's motives might be but i think if we keep that out of it um and don't attribute motives uh to what people are saying or you know just kind of take them at their word i focus and i try really hard to just take people at their word uh then maybe people will feel more like they're being heard and less like they need to repeat themselves again and again well i was just going to address i like your idea honestly and i'm just saying this from a interim city manager point of view but i like the idea of if if you could come to consensus on limiting each opinion two time two minutes and then you go around two times or something where it's a set thing where you you all have agreed that you're going to speak each time two minutes and maybe y'all decide it's three times but the shorter powerpoints i can see if you want to you can look at my friends in the back and they'll tell you that that is one of my bones of contention that anything more than eight slides unless unless there's a lot of information that needs to be shared it's not to me it's not going to be fruitful so i'm a big stickler for clear concise and to the point and and then if there are questions let the council ask those questions um i've also we are also trying to do more updates in the friday report that are not asking for direction because if we're not asking for direction and it's just an information bit that can go in the friday report so you'll can count on me to to do that and the other thing is um i will try my best to help the mayor and he does a good job of it but to keep notes that will help make sure people are heard and that we have some information that that basically then helps people say that this person's in agreement this person's on the fence this person's not sure you know is not for it so that kind of thing councilor davis yeah one of the things we lost with going to zoom that was really unfortunate and then now we're trying to get it back together in the in the work sessions that we have on the dais that informal where you don't have to queue up it's the flow of the conversation is much quicker it's much more constructive and builds on itself so getting back to that in whatever way we can i think would be very helpful for work sessions specifically and then when it comes to uh action items um we all do it and the only one i can't think of an example of her doing i think council member bird i haven't heard you do it yet we ask questions and then give directions with the questions or we ask a question and they're like yeah see here's the thing about that question i asked here's why i asked it i have a 15 minute reason to tell you about it and i do it all the time if we can if we can stick with uh like what the mayor tries to do most of the time the robert robert's rules questions then we have a motion and then we have discussion on the motion that really helps structure their conversation very very well and then we could even bring in the the time limits the two minutes uh don't have to give us a little quick kind of stuff and it just structures the conversation in such a way where you don't feel like you have to be kind of tit for tatting and answering every question all at once and all that kind of stuff so i like a lot of the things you said council member armenter about just the the structure of how we do things and i think the time limits make a whole lot of sense um the the power points pet peeve of mine is the this is a lot of information i'm not going to read it all to you now i'm going to read it all to you and if we can just a little bit of extra coaching sometimes for the the dense slides they've read it they don't need you to read it out loud uh these planning criteria are the same for every single project we don't have to read them every single project i think that'd be helpful counselor i'll just follow that quickly uh one thing i when i was you know with my own students i would say you know people are going to ask you questions so so give this brief slide and then at the end of your slide deck have the detailed slide in case some somebody in the room has questions so i i mean you need the detailed slide to figure out what the summary slide is so you know i understand staff's impetus to do that and i i agree uh you need that because we're gonna say wait how many blah blah blahs fit in a blah blah blah and we're gonna do that but then you're like aha slide 30 that i didn't show you sob it's right here so you know and you get a little you'll get a little owning of a council member you know it'll feel great uh so then the the other thing that we haven't really addressed that i would like to sort of bring up is um a lot of what we're putting in the agenda committee and sarah are prioritizing um and some of those priorities slipped because of just natural practice that she said earlier and some other things um but i i know some prior councils didn't really want to scale but the problem with a flat priority scale means everything is of equal importance and then someone is guessing what's the important items and so there may be things that it we we say this is cool we would like to address it but we don't have to address it right away and in fact sometimes there's verbiage to that effect when we're when we're giving ascension or opposition but for instance i'll just use myself as an example um the very first meeting of this council i asked for a thing and it's way in the back it's like november or something i'm fine with that that we've kicked it down the road because for me it's a lower priority item and and i'm i'm not getting all bent out of shape that it keeps getting pushed down there are other higher priority items that just have to be addressed and we should bump them up and so i personally would be interested in some sort of prioritization uh scale um i think that would help us i use this in work all the time i'm in my project management software we got a scale of five and you know like and it gets bumped and we we adjust it up and down and as workloads um determined and i know i know that that there's there's the the con of that is things getting kicked down the road kicked down the road kicked down the road to where they never get addressed i i understand that but you know uh there's mechanisms to solve that that we could just you know address like okay you know if you kick something down the road then you can't kick it down the road twice in a row or something i mean there's other mechanisms where you can avoid kicking items down the road on a prioritization mechanism so i would like to see us discuss and and at least come to some consensus whether we'd like a prioritization mechanism and if we do want one what that would be so that we can say some of these items especially emergency items have to come up more quickly you know there's a time sensitivity to some of them so that that would be my recommendation thanks um i i just want to i pretty much express agreement with several points that have been made um i agree with council member armentor that um items that come before us in work sessions that are really just informational in nature um most of the time those could probably be um included in the friday report um we are a council that does our readings so you can i think you can trust us to actually read the friday reports um i i agree that we need some type of efficient mechanism for formally expressing agreement because here i am right now just reiterating exactly what deb just said so that it's on the record that i agree um i i i have a little more nuance on this one i like the idea of guidelines for how long um agenda items should take i appreciate that you've started kind of including those in the matrix um i would love to see um those included in the in the agendas and of course you'll see you know some some bodies like ours will include like timestamps on their agendas of how long they anticipate that something will take um i also appreciate the importance of being mindful of how long we're talking and how many times we're talking however i'm not in favor of placing hard limits on that um so maybe we could like for example when we have a member of the public speaking and they have a time limit or when we're giving a one-minute pitch and they we have a time limit um the the mayor i believe it's the mayor that starts the clock and we can see it in front of the the podium um you know maybe uh there could be something like that that's like yeah like a shot clock kind of letting us know visually maybe on our screens or something how long we've been talking but letting us kind of self-monitor that um and and have it be an understood collective goal that we're trying to move things along rather than having it be um what it sometimes turns into which is some people getting shut down um i think we should focus on self-monitoring um in that way um and i totally agree with the the point that council member beck made about a prioritization scale i think that's particularly um relevant to our one-minute pitches and you i i've heard some some frustration because brian and i both do this that will say like yes i want to move forward with this in a work session but i don't think it's that urgent and you're kind of like well there's no there's no mechanism for you to take that type of input so as we as we move forward i think we should discuss what kind of mechanism that should be for the one-minute pitch uh but i think that we should also maybe um explore uh ways for council to give input on the urgency and time uh time sensitivity of uh agenda items that are not one-minute pitches as well okay councilor bird then mayor pro tem uh i uh i just want to say i'm just going to say this um i think that we spent a of a bit more time i think it's we spent too much time agreeing with agreeing i think that we uh you know everybody's got their own way of their own style of communicating um and i'm not saying that because i'm just not agreeing with that i i have been i had been observing that when it's time okay so when it's time to ask questions there is there are statements that uh appear you know to be made that they're already making the their you know the way that they're going to vote or their idea it's part of the question process you you motion second are there any questions and in my experience that's where you get to ask your questions and come to you know some idea of which way you're going to vote but i had been recognizing a very early on it doesn't even bother me that much anymore uh that there's a lot of statements being made with agreeing i agree and i agree with so and so i agree with so and so and then so now you already have a feeling that this is the way that i'm going to take this in this direction and now it's time for the discussion and then we're kind of going back over the same thing that we had already was doing when we were in the question portion of the discussion so i know that uh for sure me i spend my question time as asking a question or two and then of course i'm gathering information from everybody that's giving information uh which um and then at some point we've got to vote well by the time we get done with all of the gathering of information and all the questions it almost seems like well what's the use of voting we already know which way we're going and we could just kind of raise our hand and we're done with it does that make sense to everybody is everybody kind of following along okay not um trying to be negative or anything but i think that we just kind of have to narrow down some of that and that'll help us move the conversation along to stick with um where we're trying to go so i wanted to just put that out there um and then i have something about debating um going around when we go around once we have opportunity to make our statements um when we're in the discussion phase make our statements and then we go back around it's the same statements it's just a reiterating of the same statements or unless that was something that was said prior that needed clarification i can understand that but i've been recognizing that it's the same comments again and so the mayor i think that he does a great job in trying to make a stay on point because he'll say okay okay okay um and then it's someone may want to go you know and reiterate again and he'll have to say well we've already been we've already done that twice so uh i don't know if we need to come to a consensus that do we need to just go once or are we going to agree to go twice or three times also work sessions we're talking about our information given us to work sessions and some of the work session uh materials can probably be sent to us on a friday report do we really need work sessions or what are work sessions for really for if a lot of the things that's being put on you know what's coming in for work sessions now we're saying that they can probably just be put in on the friday report why why work sessions other than to just go over the agenda and be prepared for you know what's coming up on tuesday so that's what i have to say and maybe that i've contributed or not i think that if we can um just be more mindful of our time you know like we said we have families at home we have people waiting on us to do things and then sometimes we have to turn around i think we had a had a meeting that lasted to 11 45 one evening and that was just too late to go round and around and around so um just whatever you guys can do whatever you what do you think that we could do to just kind of narrow some of that time down then i'm all for it thank you mayor pro tem yeah thank you i don't know if uh y'all noticed how many times i hit the like button while you're speaking and i really uh i enjoy so many good points that have been raised i'll just make a uh a pitch uh for a modification on the thought of yes having you know planned times for a couple reasons to keep us on track but also so the public can tell about when are you going to hit this topic i mean i hear that all the time particularly when are you coming back in closed session you know i mean they just don't know so i think it's helpful for that too but also it's uh say as someone who used to watch too much c-span i think in most legislative bodies there's a maneuver where someone can say i move we extend the time for debate and then you vote on that and then you can do more so it's never like you know you're totally out of gas if there's something that you know emerges that you have to do uh so just wanted to add that councilor davis um so vicki i really appreciate your comments because what you're describing is called posturing and as somebody who's also watched a lot of c-span usually that room is empty it's that member of congress down there making their passion speech and pound the table and the people who are watching are all the ones at home who just have to be tuned into c-span we all have our communication streams we all have our ways of communicating with the people who want to hear from us the people who are watching at home nine times out of 10 know exactly how we're going to vote on an item after they've had the discussion so if we can limit that and myself included if we can limit that that will move our meetings along very very nicely and then to the to the point about um statements and questions and when the appropriate time is uh mayor probably remembers a uh a time where that same conversation was had with the council four years ago at least at least maybe even five years ago and then council member armenter and uh melzer when y'all came on and richard haze came and gave a presentation about parliamentary procedure and questions come first and then there's a motion and there's discussion so all of these are great observations and really good ideas but we do have to self-regulate we do have to stick to that and if the mayor holds us to that format because it's working then we have to be okay with that too and say i'm sorry i stepped out i'm not going to make my statement i'll hold on to it for later on pardon me mayor yeah just i don't know i don't know if this is the right spot for this i just want to get your input patrick you watched the meetings and just where did you see the best efficiencies or opportunities for efficiency in the meetings that's that's and so if that's not at this point if we're not there yet but i just want to kind of get your input on that yeah i think you know you can adopt the policies and practices and some of you have said this so i observed uh you know just the what you're doing right now which is i got to let you know exactly what i'm thinking somebody else has something else i have to build on what they said my concern from a third party is um the longer the process doesn't always generate a better outcome so sometimes less is more so my observation would be you're doing it right now you're about the same thing you're going back and forth around and around and building and building and building and that's okay some of that's harmless that's kind of what today is but this uh if you're doing that at the council meetings which i observed i'm not sure the points are going to be continually be reinforced if you're just building and building and building and saying well i got to build on this or i got to correct him or i got to correct her i got to be the person you're all the experts it's how you join together to make those decisions so i think it's you know be mindful of it i mean you can create all the timelines you want i've seen this council's do it we're going to create two but but then they continually violate it and then if what's the rule of have point of having policy if you're always going to amend it and and update it so i think you have to think about the habits this group is establishing and which ones are helping you make good decisions and which ones you think are holding you back for making good decisions and be willing to say this is what i'm going to try to do and this is what i think we need to try to do because i hear a lot of acknowledgement of that today but in here this is a little bit we're in isolation it's at your next meeting what are you going to do when that item comes up and you feel like you're going to need to say something and we all everybody in this room gets that there are times you need to say something for public consumption i think that's totally but if it's about everything all the time that's hard to sustain when you're not when you feel as though you need to have have to say something all the time so when i watched the meeting i watched it about the mobility in particular was one of the things that stuck out that was an item that's not even the downward the the oh i'm sorry i can't remember it was the dcta thank you and that's an area that's not even kind of part of the repertoire of what the city is dealing with right that was an external issue and there was a long discussion about an issue that's not even in the necessarily the the backbone of what you're trying to do as policymakers i'm not saying disputing the importance of the issue i'm just offering that and so if you're going to spend that much time talking about issue in some respects that's peripheral to what you're doing as policymakers it's probably indicative of how long you're spending time having discussions about things that are near and dear to what you're doing as policymakers so you know some cities adopt governance manuals but again it's only as good as the people in office that they're going to be willing to live up to this so again i'm not trying to be a debbie downer i'm just trying to offer an observation but you're doing it right now which is you're going around and around and around so it's okay thanks yeah i mean i i think that's fair and we definitely are i'm doing it right now but that's because i we don't have any quick and easy mechanism to let sarah know yes i agree that with that point that was just made if i if i didn't raise my hand and say i agree with deb that informational sessions should be staff reports i agree with deb that we need an efficient mechanism for formally expressing agreement with someone then sarah wouldn't know that i think that and she might think that deb is the only person who thinks that um so i think that that that efficient mechanism for formally expressing agreement without having to be called on and talk about it is really going to be key here i think you're going to see changes now that she's having one-on-one meetings with you on a regular basis that she's going to get a feel for where you're coming from and you're going to get a feel for where she's coming well and i'll ask i'll ask more questions and i'll also um ask the mayor if i can ask a point of clarification if i need to uh to say i don't feel like i have uh i don't feel like i have the direction or i don't feel like i have a good handle on how everyone feels i'll i'll certainly do that council yeah so i want to address um something that that was brought up a little earlier um and that is this idea of posturing that some that council member davis mentioned you know some people are just posturing um that's a really you know you know toxic accusation i i believe that that's a really toxic accusation and kind of in that category of uh you know the kind of performative gesture that i mentioned before that is attributing motive to people um i i happen to hear a podcast that um you know council member davis did that was of course you have every right you know to say these things and have these opinions but um you know stating that some of us are just you know posturing playing to our base you know playing to the mob um you know there were some you know red baiting jokes in there that were hurtful to me uh and uh i i would just prefer that you know if we feel that people are taking too much time talking then just say people are taking too much time talking or being repetitive but that we really refrain from attributing any kind of motive or lack of sincerity or you know playing political games because we really don't know that we can't read minds and hearts i think that and now i'm going to get to the um kind of uh you know problem solving idea you know if we if we are concerned that people are being repetitive i know sometimes i get repetitive um you know and so say i have my hand up right uh maybe you know for uh the mayor to ask you know instead of saying well we are we already know where you stand you said it before you know um to say um are you are you going to say something new or are you responding to something that another council member has said because a lot of times when i raise my hand a second time or a third time it's because i'm responding to something that somebody else said to either do that thing that we were just talking about registering agreement um sometimes it's because uh a statement i made has been mischaracterized and it's not so much that i care about you know protecting my reputation but just for the record and for the process i want to say for instance um and a lot of times there's not even any um you know uh ill intent in it for instance um it took me saying oh um you know when uh i don't necessarily even though i agree with mayor protem on x y and z i don't necessarily think that uh items of contention on the audit finance committee have to come before you know uh and so i hate that that took up time for me to say that but it was necessary because i think because it seemed like there was this agreement there and i just needed to to distinguish that because and then that can end up changing you know where the consensus is so i'm not going to um you know defend everything i do pretend i'm perfect about it uh at uh the way i i i handled my time in meetings um but uh you know sometime but but if we do want to address these issues of of you know if we really feel like it's important to say publicly that um you know fellow council members are just playing to the mob or posturing or just just trying to rile people up so they'll have a protest um i think we can use that kind of couples therapy language of you know when you do this i feel you know when they do this i feel is opposed to um they're doing this you're you know you're doing this because do you need any more direction on that item or can we move on to the one minute pitch um i don't i don't think i absolutely need direction other than i'm going to summarize if that's okay um so the actual uh matrix we put that on there so we kind of have an idea how the agenda is going to flow especially under work session we try very hard not to overload you with a lot of information and have like six presentations that are going to go for an hour i mean that is information overload unfortunately it may happen a couple of times so we try to put the hour you know how long we think it's going to be for each of those that doesn't mean it's going to take that long for you all or it doesn't mean that you can't go beyond that it's just our estimate guesstimate the other thing is it um i think what we will do because i think the suggestion is good is we'll put on the agenda you know the approximate time that we think it will take and then going beyond that is is certainly y'all's privilege we we we just put that on there um we uh i do think i took a lot of notes we will work on our powerpoints we will work on not doing anything that's not direction oriented um i will try very hard to keep up with um sort of where we are on consensus to share with the mayor so he's not constantly having to do that and run the meeting it's very hard for him anybody trying to run a meeting to hear you know where they're on the schedule trying to make sure this listening to everyone else and then every once in a while i'm trying to give him some information so i'm probably taking away from his um i do like the idea of prioritization schedule i think that will help us so when you get an item that someone wants to see on there um if there's a way to say you know it's a five on the list it's not a top two and whatever if that's what you all want to talk about um and decide and the only thing i would say is the mayor has mentioned this um and i know he tries to share with you if it's gone around once or twice and sometimes we end up going around three or four times i would just ask if not time but maybe an understanding of if you get your chance to give your comments and then there's another chance to say it again would that be appropriate instead of going around three and four times on the subject or i don't know i'm just asking that because i think that's where the aggravation occurs i see it i see it happening uh i see the aggravation or i see the you know like this because we're going to go talk about this now for the fourth time i don't know maybe that's something you all can talk about later counselor um i believe in robert's rule gives us an opportunity to ask for uh ask for the question yes and i haven't done that uh before or yet uh but i think that that is something that we should be okay with doing uh if the mayor you know was okay with that uh but i i think we should add that to our our conversation as well i'm just seeing if there's anything but it's got to be kind of done in a way that it's not dismissive or anything like that but if we are just kind of beaten is dead or at some point somebody's gotta and the mayor is really actively does do that like he should um but if you know if one of us can do it i don't i don't want it to seem like we're you know putting a negative steam on it it's just that we need to just kind of keep moving all right i think i'm good i think i've got what i need to do okay we're going to move on to the last item which is the one minute pitch which is starts on slide 22 goes on to 23 discussing prioritization this is a good segue um i'm just going to give you some background on the one minute pitch history on the current numbers that we have that have been approved so this was formed following the 2019 council retreat this this one minute pitch process was formed and just as a reminder it was formed because we had so many significant council requests at one point we had a list 100 plus council requests and frankly no one was happy because there was different items from all of the different council members they would take significant amount of staff time and we just weren't getting we didn't know if they were priority if they really weren't and if you're having a really difficult time managing from a staff perspective what was most important to the city council where should we be directing our time and energy and so we wanted to make sure that as these council requests came forward and if they did require more than two hours of staff staff time and significant resources how could the council have the ability to quickly discuss that and give consensus that yes we do want staff to work on this item and to move that forward or no this is not high this is not what we want to do at this time staff should not move forward there is still as part of this process if it's less than two hours of staff time we will prepare a report we will handle certainly any service request from the citizen we will handle and i really appreciate that many of you have been using the Engage Denton app as well for citizen service requests and that just helps us to route it more efficiently throughout the organization and hopefully when we get to 301 system we'll have even more opportunities to improve how we're handling those service requests but that one minute pitch process really came out of that council retreat and was a way how could we effectively allow a process for council members to pitch to their other council members that this needs to be done now here's why it's important here's why there's a gap and then allow each council member an opportunity to respond and see if there was consensus to move forward with that item so we did put the full ordinance and in tab eight that outlines the mechanics of that process going on to slide 24 this is just a review of the total council requests for information so this is all of the requests that come through we do track them and this is primarily tracked because we want to make sure that we are being responsive and getting you the information that you need or that you need to go back and talk with your constituents so we do have it mapped out there by council member then also by department you can see we're still really heavy on capital projects related questions which is it's normal and we know is something that we want to continue to improve upon how we are communicating capital projects timelines and different items for those and then this is just an overview of those council requests which have been estimated to take more than two hours of time we've had 28 total one-minute pitches of those 28 19 were approved to move forward and that's showing it by council member there on the chart and so council had asked to have a discussion today during the retreat in terms of the one-minute pitch process if modifications should be made to your current process or if you wanted to adopt some other method that staff could receive direction from you on what items should move forward what items should be a priority for things that may come up during the year knowing that we already have your council priorities that will be set after this retreat that we are going to spend most of our staff time working towards but wanted to review some other council request models that we have found i will say the majority of municipalities that we reached out to do not have any such process at all they do not have a significant amount of council requests and if they do most of them are just related to citizen service requests and they're handling those through the city manager's office but we did find some other cities that have made it a more formalized process to really understand how staff time is being used and i want to thank stewart and rachel for developing the research on these so if there's questions i might allow them to chime in as well as i know a little bit more about each of these cities but i'll give an overview so the city of arlington what they do is council can request an informational staff report staff will prepare those reports they'll put them out in weekly reports that go out to all of city council and then they have a standing work session item where council can discuss and say thank you i got the information i needed we got the update i needed nothing further is required or you know that information is really helpful but i think there's some next steps that we need to take as a policy making body and i'd like to see a work session come back before the city council or i'd like to see this council committee take up that policy item so that's their process they start with just a brief staff report and then council has an outstanding item where they can decide should any further actions or steps be taken the city of austin has quite a process in place and sarah can probably speak to this a little bit more they have any council request requires getting an approved resolution prior to staff proceeding with the work in order to even bring forward a resolution for the full city council's consideration you have to have at least three other council signatures and i know that is quite a process to manage um and there's there's an outstanding list of all of those council resolutions well because just so you know i counted one council meeting we had 28 resolutions by council directing the city manager and that's not and then and then the next one was 15 and so it's it's it never get they never get finished they never go um so then the city of fort worth uh council makes requests during a standing work session item uh if if it requires so this is i think just an open work session item if it requires more than four hours of staff time um they will seek consensus from council to move forward or not the city of louisville um really what they do is just an annual retreat of setting their council priorities maybe discussing other council requests that may have further seeking consensus to move forward on they do also use an engagement app like engage denton and so most of their council members are entering their requests right through that engagement app as well and then san antonio maybe one one of the more different ones i think just also how they're structured in their form of government uh the council committee they have a council committee that's chaired by the mayor that then reviews a list of all their council requests that have come in and that committee decides which requests are added to your future agenda or not or maybe go forward with a staff report or not so it may be similar to an agenda committee but it also is just different based upon the structure of san antonio so what staff has tried to do just to help council discuss different options that might be available is to develop three different options the first would really be to keep the current pitch process and maybe make some amendments or modifications to it if council desires i know there's been some discussion around should there be a one minute limit should that be modified should it be a more generalized time limit maybe you know a total of 10 or 15 minutes per item of discussion or not we did put those time parameters in place when the pitch process was first set up to make sure that we could get direction but that it would not significantly prolong the meeting or end up that council's just having a full discussion on this item without the full facts or information or staff having an ability to really develop and prepare that item into a full work session so that was really the purpose behind some of having those time limits other things that we have heard is that prioritization factor is there an ability when submitting the one minute pitches pitch requests or when we have council members responding to could they somehow indicate what level they think that priority is we can maybe do that as part of the one minute pitch process when you're responding or another way that that could be done is maybe every quarter or semi-annually we are bringing back the list of requests that have been approved and really allowing council to tell us of the five to ten or however many that are outstanding do we have them prioritized correctly or is there some more urgency to those requests option two that we looked at was kind of a process similar to arlington where maybe staff would be first always developing that informational staff report with a maximum time limit of hours that we would spend so whether that be the current two hour time limit or not this might some of the considerations for this it could allow us to maybe scope better some of the work that would be required if this item is going to move forward but it would require some more staff time because we're going to be doing a staff report for each one of these items it also just might extend the timeline for us to consider some of your requests if it has to come first as an informational staff report in a Friday report then you have to come back and say yes it's still like for this to go forward in a work session it just could prolong that timeline a little bit further and then lastly we thought of an option for a quarterly work session item so somewhat similar similar to lewisville or even kind of what we're doing today is to gather requests that come in over a quarter just create a list and whether that be we get 10 to 20 total requests and almost like what we did in the February retreat is just going through one by one at that time and seeing which have council direction to move forward or not again it's not going to be as responsive for some items that might be more time sensitive but just some different options and considerations that we put together for council discussion. Mayor Pro Tem? Yeah I would just uh I can't wait to hear what everyone has to say I would just ask that if possible my colleagues try to define what problem they're trying to solve what is it about the current system what dimension is an issue it's not you know it may become obvious right here but not obvious at the moment and then on the prioritization issue I would just suggest that if you just rank ones twos threes fours and fives our prediction is everything's 0 1 and what I'd suggest as an alternative is although equally artificial is a forced rank all the items in a in a rank order maybe it's not obvious why 17 is ahead of 18 but a forced rank and that when you decide to put something in the list you move for where you put it on the list suggestion. Okay councilor Davis? Yeah I I agree with that and the one thing I've learned from staff's research is that no there's no one size fits all there's no one way that is right for every city to do this I think this is a good fit for the issue we had at the time if it needs some tweaking I think it needs some tweaking and I agree council member Melzer about if there's an issue let's identify what the issue is before we just kind of check the whole thing if we modify it I like the idea of maybe giving the pitcher two minutes instead of one minute we don't all need two minutes because it takes less than 30 seconds to say yes I agree or one minute to say I agree but I have a slight modification of how I'd like to staff to emphasize the information we get back and then I think that's the other part of it is allowing in that conversation because I've heard some some good criticism of the process that if we're not allowed to add emphasis you know I agree that that's something we need to talk about but I'd really like to hear more about this aspect of it if we're able to do that within the one minute pitch or two minute pitch process then I think that also lets staff better anticipate the things that are going to come up at that work session you're like I want to hear about solid waste but I don't need to hear about that exactly we need to hear about this and that may draw a different consensus than the pitcher expected or was looking for but it's still a council consensus I like about the current process too that it's nimble that in some ways if we know something is is time sensitive it can be brought up right then you don't have to wait for the next quarterly matrix discussion item you can bring it up right then and we've had a number of pitches that have been like that and I agree that we need some some form of prioritization quick recap of the issue we had before that it has to be done in a ATOMA compliant way it has to be very public and some council members were uncomfortable with a public ranking because there's kind of this uncharitable interpretation of oh you didn't rank this high enough or you know they'd get bad feedback that way if we can all kind of have the best I think the highest possible things about each other and understand that sometimes there's not a lot of daylight between 17 and 18 and it's just picking priorities and there's got to be balance in all things then I think a prioritization can work really well if we use it as an opportunity to snipe and say well you don't care about this very much at all then the whole thing starts falling apart again so if we use priorities we have to use them just for what they're needed for and that is staff time attention and all this kind of stuff okay yeah so I'm responding to you know Mayor Pro Tem's suggestion that it's a good idea to you know for those of us who think we should change the one-minute pitch process to say what we think is not working about it so I'll begin by saying one thing I like about it which is it doesn't take up that much time in a meeting right and it gives everybody an opportunity to you know have their say what I don't like about it and why I want to change it a number of reasons one the fact that there's and by the way I realize this is contradictory because the the things that I don't like about it if we added it to the one minute pitch process it would make it take more time right which is why I want another process instead so the fact that there's no opportunity for a rebuttal it can be problematic if for instance you know say you know I want I propose some policy change and then you know one council member responds well I'm not okay with the work session on that because that's illegal you know and then people go around say yeah it's illegal yeah it's illegal and maybe it's not illegal right but it's so it kind of it can kind of end up being like a discussion because the one comment can build on another comment but then you don't have a chance to rebut I'm not suggesting that we add a rebuttal to it right I'm suggesting a different process sometimes I think also and and that sometimes in the sometimes you end up getting a kind of staff feedback to the pitch request some and and sometimes it's just in fact most of the time it's just kind of the basics that you need to lay a foundation other times at least to me anyway it feels like at editorializing especially when there's when some pitches have kind of more elaborate you know well here are the potential cons if we did this for instance you know here are the pros and the cons if we did this and then if somebody else's pitch doesn't get that I'm not I'm not saying it feels personal to the to the individual but it feels like well why didn't my pitch get a list of pros and cons and why couldn't we take that up at a work session you know if council wants to discuss it why can't we take up those possible pros and cons at a work session because I do want to hear staff's input but you know as far as I'm concerned that could wait for a work session if we have it so what I want to suggest is a form of option two and as I see it you know there are kind of three basic categories of the kind of pitches that we make one and I'm going to kind of build from like simple to complex the simplest one is for you know a council member and we've had a few of these for instance with our legislative priorities I did a one minute pitch for objecting to some anti-trans legislation at the at being considered by the state legislature and you know we didn't need to have a big work session about how we were going to word that right staff wrote a great letter and I believe we I think we voted on a consent agenda but I might be misremembering that sometimes even people can bring a resolution that's already been written you know we are you know we support the you know removal of this tax on blah blah blah that's you know or we're against this that's happening at the federal level or the state level you know that's something where the way they do things in Austin can actually and and I understand that that in Austin they've got a lot of you know resolutions on the table but I also know that some of these that a lot of what they do is that they're simply like issuing proclamations on things you know Austin and on the one hand it might seem meaningless why why do it if it's just you know a majority of council members sign off to say we love trees you know or puppies are cute you know why bother on the other hand it it takes very little time if it's especially if it's already pre-written if we're not asking staff can you go you know write a treaty on why puppies are cute and we'll all sign it's here's something another city did and what they do that I like is they get it a lot of it done behind the scenes so that this at least as I understand it that they that individual council members go to and I forget you know if they go to the city manager or whatever but they the city attorney yeah the city attorney they individually go to the city attorney and say yeah the thing that you know that you know Paul proposed I'm for that too you can put my name down for that you know and then if they get three people who are for that then that can go forward and you know get on a consent agenda right and so we don't actually so that that process can actually streamline things that don't need a work session I don't think everything needs a work session just because it's a council member bringing it forward if if there's you know three or more people who are okay with it and then people can just vote it up or down so that's the first category this now the second category is a simple policy change and you know and of course that's relative but for instance you know the the one one minute pitch that I brought forward was having people add their emails or having a space where people could provide their emails on a input to council forum that was the kind of thing when I asked about it can we do this I think I might be misremembering but that might have been one of those things where I was asking can we do this and you said that should come before council again correct me if I'm wrong but if you did say that then I think that was the right thing to say whoever told me that I think it makes sense or maybe you said you know it'll take more discussion I don't remember what but you know but that's something that is it's relatively simple there wasn't of course we can never predict you know whether something is going to be controversial or not I didn't expect it to be controversial and it wasn't and people were just you know thought yeah that's a good it seems like a good idea okay let's do that and so you know that's simple enough that that too even though it's not just as simple as signing off on a pre-written resolution it's a simple enough policy change that if we got three council members to tell the city attorney you know I'm cool with that you know without a work session that could come on a consent agenda item now then the last category are more complex policy items where even if everybody agrees with it for instance having a you know a nondiscrimination ordinance even if everybody agrees we should have one we need to have a work session to go over the details because there are many different kinds of ways you can do it right so that would have to require a work session but I think that you know the part of what I don't like about our one-minute pitch process is that even though these these the work session about whether or not to have a work session doesn't take up much time but there's this idea that everything requires a work session and having this big discussion about it so I really think that the policy again approach number two with a policy kind of like Austin's can be actually really streamlined precisely because so much of this determining whether three or more council members are okay with it goes on behind the scenes as long as and I don't know if they do it this way in Austin for me I would want that to be public somehow so that the public could know you know that this council member had had this idea and then you know these three signed signed off on it so council member Archer there's a couple of things the the the council members in Austin find three they find three other people to help them to say they would agree to an item and then those staff those council members staff and they each have three full-time and one staff and one part-time paid staff work together to draft themselves the resolution yes which then goes forward to the city attorney's office for the final touches on the resolution yes the resolution then goes on the agenda with those members of council who have supported it and then it's an item that's taken up for the whole body to approve and so that's why that list is is so is so long and they each have so many staff that they work on this with their respective council members staff to draft those and then again it does go to the city attorney's office who then puts the spin on it and then it goes on yeah yeah so and and that's that absolutely is is right is uh and i'm not saying we replicate what they do because we can't afford to do we can't afford to do that but but um kind of that we take something from it you know there's something that i like about it uh that is and i don't know the Arlington how they do it in Arlington outside of what you know i have here i haven't talked i've talked to people in Austin city council i haven't talked to people in Arlington but so it it might be like a combination a hybrid of Arlington and Austin but but my point being i like that aspect of it that we that there's a way to um without having a work session um just get input because again if you don't have three people um who are okay with something then you don't even have to go through the you know waste waste public time even you know deciding on whether or not to have a work session are there thoughts about this process uh councillor i'm sorry councillor thank you um so yeah i think i'm going to take a similar approach of kind of talking about pros cons possible solutions so um i do generally think that the one minute pitch is um in principle uh has has value it balances conflicting needs of managing staff time right staff are are people with a finite number of hours in the day and we can't put everything on them it manages meeting length well i think and it attempts to do so while um sort of preserving the ability of council members to bring forward legislation right rather than have to just be completely reactive all the time um i i would say that the one minute um it time period is too short and too restrictive um council member davis uh suggested two minutes i would suggest three minutes although i would suggest if we're gonna extend the the pitch to three minutes we keep the responses to one or two minutes otherwise we're getting into um yeah long long meeting territory um i i do think that the concern of like everything being a priority is a very um legitimate concern um i would like to um uh uh introduce the idea that priorities have two dimensions there's importance and urgency right and there are lots of things that we discuss that are very important that if we say if we're asked to rank on a scale of one to ten how important it is we're going to say ten to everything right or i don't know what kind of scale we're confusing our scales but you get what i'm saying but urgency is talking about time when does it need to be addressed um and i think if there were a mechanism for us to maybe rate both of those and yes it's quite possible that everything would be all the way at the top of the importance scale but i think if we are talking about urgency and timeliness um i i think that we probably would find ourselves more often saying you know this is something we need to address very soon versus this is something that we do need to address but maybe you know in a few months um so i would like to see us kind of separating out those dimensions of priority um i also really appreciate um council member Arminter's point that um maybe we should kind of uh uh categorize these types of requests uh maybe break them into two categories like things that are are you know complex that absolutely require a work session like a non-discrimination ordinance we need to talk through that versus something that really just needs to be written up real quick or um not real quick i shouldn't say real quick because of course writing resolution takes time especially from the legal staff but you know just something that needs to be written up and then voted on but doesn't necessarily require a full work session um if if there was some type of mechanism for for us to say um you know i'm making a one minute or a three minute pitch for a work session versus i'm making a three minute pitch that staff write up a resolution and put it on the next agenda for us to vote on um if we could kind of delineate between those i think that might be helpful as well thanks yeah i think the i i like uh where mayor pertin was was trying to get us to focus and i think we all attempted to do that um subsequent to making some statements so i i will say that the my problem with the one minute pitch is was exemplified last tuesday where i didn't quite get the last 10 seconds out and you end up with a truncated pitch so i i concur with this idea of extended it to two minutes and i think maybe the solution to some of the problems that that councillor mcguire brought up is you just do two rounds of one minute pitch with the potential for a vote to extend as as you indicated earlier so um you know if there's no appetite to extend then it's two one minute rounds and then you're done um and so i think that would solve a lot of that but just there's times you can't quite get the the even even just saying what was in the email you're just literally saying the words you can't quite get out um and you see us all like sitting there acting like we're you know we've been practicing um uh and you know it's like oh can i get it in and i'm going to talk too fast and then there's you know people miss words and whatnot so i i would recommend say a two minute opener with two one minute rounds and a vote to extend um i i think the problem one of the problems we also addressed was uh um prioritization and and so i i as as ungainly and unseemly as it is i think um i'm actually going to fall out on the idea of if there's there's there's 18 current ones you've got to suggest where you would insert this uh i it's it's not right or fair that you know you have to rank x above y but we're doing this today this is what we're doing in our strategic planning in our budget um so uh and and that allows you to incorporate urgency uh and the nice thing about that is if you give this a two and tell sarah it needs to be on and you know next week two weeks and then we all agree that that or you know there's some sort of consensus that that's a two then i mean we don't have to call an emergency meeting or something like that we can just say yeah bam that that had to be done because bulldozer hit a building or whatever it is caused us to do that um uh so where i think that we can also solve this issue of time sensitivity and urgency is a partial adoption of the option two and that is if you can come with something more fully baked and present that to legal and have it ready to go then we can just vote on it and if you know once it's been you know if legal can address that in their two-hour limit then you know bam okay you know that's we could just simply vote on it um so i think there's an opportunity to have something come before it's fully baked i think some of the issues with staff time is we're asking you we're saying here's the flour eggs and milk please bake the cake for us and and we don't we don't know whether it's going to be cupcakes or a wedding cake and so i think if we can come in and say frosted cake you know uh yes or no then then that would that would preclude some of the time sensitivity for staff staff engagement and i'm not sure i mean i don't have the ability to do a lot of that i am not a lawyer so um this is where you know probably most of my pitches would end up being the slow pitch but we can do fast pitch baseball there i got your sports metaphor bucko so uh anyway i would recommend uh two two minute one rounds and then maybe some sort of hybrid approach to allow a fully baked cake to be submitted mayor yeah so to be to be super short uh i like the the option to keep it as is primarily uh with some adjustments uh i can get to two minutes on for the for the presenter uh one minute still i mean because again it's simple as yes or no and that's part of my consternation is you know when trying to capture that it's yes but maybe if and those sort of things and when pressed it's i'm not going to let you put me in a box or all those kind of replies so to fix that issue i think it's two minutes for the pitcher for the person to make their pitch one minute kind of responses yes takes two seconds um i think to the point that's made about power points for staff earlier we get all the information read it the pit the person making the presentation can just pick up assuming you read it and so you don't have to read what you wrote you can just articulate the finer points that aren't there in that one minute it's like hey here's what you've read here's enhancements to that and go and then the everyone responds it's yes and then i think to to settle the issue with the the the need to opine on things then there's a secondary process which is a scope so yes we have consensus that would move us to scoping so that staff can properly bring it back then you can have those kind of addendums hey while we're talking about bikes let's talk about the front wheel the back wheel the chain the pedals that sort of thing so i think that addresses both those concerns then when you get to the ranking component i'll tell you i'm the victim of this you know council again goes i hate to beat a dead horse but council changes and i get pushed to the back of the line right and so then that's frustrating and and so and and people don't get it until it happens to them but assuming i think it's important to just hold the line where we are and then everything else is just linear it's either a linear adoption hey this passed we add it to the back of the list but these things that are ready to go just kind of get plugged in in linear form or to council member davis's point it's anonymous everything's anonymous it's here's a survey here's what's ready to go how do you want to hear it and what rank these in order city staff gets those and and pump them in but then it doesn't get weaponized because that did happen before for those that don't know and that's no good and then and then i just think from urgency standpoint there's no real thing i just from this process that's not a real thing because the city manager can add stuff to the to the agenda the city attorney can add stuff to the agenda the agenda committee can add stuff to the agenda i can add stuff to the agenda there's six five different routes to get something on the agenda if it's a legit emergency city running priority issue if it's your individual urgency i don't know that that rises to the level to need something that where we can kind of fast track it through this process so just my read on it okay director sarah do you need i think oh councillor i wanted to i agree with the mayor here um but i wanted to ask a question about um the one minute pitch situation um let's say for instance we're already working on the homeless issue we have all of this homeless stuff on homelessness on you know house that what is the tell me what's the justification for me wanting to do a one minute pitch on that because that's what i was considering doing the city is already working on it it's already part of a priority are we pitching on things that we're already working on mostly or are all of these pitches new situations where we are you know bringing in some new activities and like you said you know maybe something his things are getting pushed to the back yeah you know in the ranking on all of that is that a legitimate question to ask it is okay the honest answer is yes sometimes that is occurring or sometimes there's a specific solution that that you've heard about or you've seen in other communities and you're like i want to hear more about this specific one instead of maybe higher level there's this gap or there's this need and how do we what are some potential options or all of the solutions and the pros and cons and just considering that more holistically well and i think i and i want to make sure we're going to have consensus here but um and i know you all recognize this you have items that you feel very strong about and you want to get it on the agenda but when that happens you have to understand that we want to make sure that there's a consensus by council to get it on the count on the agenda so i want and i know you understand this but it's important for me to say it you know i work for all of you not part of you or some of you and i have to count if there's four or more i know where we go in this case if you pick up the phone or you send an email to us and say hey i just saw a presentation on this that's dealing with people experiencing homelessness we will respond and give you our latest report i'll even give you the report that i did when i was in austin to give you more information we'll go out of our way to try to avoid having to put you in that position if we can possibly do it but i want i want to make it clear that on some occasions there's times when i have to say you know i don't know that there's consensus so i need to bring it forward so i can make sure there is consensus because the other side of the coin is how did this get on the agenda so with that i i want to make sure i'm hearing this um and all of you had great points correct i took notes um but what i'm hearing is to to keep sort of the same process but make it two minutes is it two or three minutes because i heard two and then i heard three i was the only person who said three okay so two minutes um and then i'd like it to be one except for for brian all those and then i didn't hear consensus on going with the option two i heard keeping it but expanding to two minutes so that the presenter had more time is that if i can have kind of an observation that i think helps us here please the thing that we're kind of missing is adding an agenda item not a work session not a night because right now the process is for isrs and work sessions right if we made more use of isrs and work sessions that's great but it's missing agenda items we have two coming up next week that are maybe just agenda items maybe work sessions maybe not and that's created consternation before um both directions so that also dovetails into the even the emergency meeting process we had where is placing an agenda item properly and like legally on the emergency agenda following own procedures is problematic to do so i think if we have a process for placing an agenda item as a council suggestion beyond just work session and the thing we have to remember too is the city manager can concur in any of these things like if i made if i if i put in a work session request a one-minute pitch request it doesn't have to automatically be a one-minute pitch it can be a yeah we're working on that we'll make that a work session on the matrix that's already in there that staff time's allocated so and i think adding the option for adding an agenda item and i think frankly we have an agenda committee that may be integral to that process too however we flesh out that part of the process um and the prioritization all that kind of stuff we we have an agenda committee that exists as part of our existing structure and i think we can lead pretty heavily on that process and to be honest i'd prefer that because it does put us in a very sticky situation of how do you define this and how are you defining that word emergency um it is um you know it is part of the job but so are we looking at then the two-minute pitch would be for an agenda item as well as the work session yeah i think i yeah i i would like to um i suggest that the pitcher um in the two-minute pitch process i'm on board with that if everybody else is uh the two-minute pitcher specify whether they want a work session or an isr or an agenda item okay and and we will do our best just so you know if it's we'll tell you i know several times you've heard one of us call you or something hey we're going to be covering that oh great i don't have to put that in there we'll let you know in many cases we have added something we feel like it's necessary so we can also remember we can give you a very detailed individual staff report if we have the person that has all that expertise and information we'll do that okay yeah um so i'm not going to uh belabor the option two point again because now we're talking about the the two-minute pitch i'll just add to that um so i think uh i i really like the idea uh obviously of of uh having a process to add something to the agenda as well and and i would just ask that i'm not saying that we have a separate process for consent agenda uh but since items on consent agenda can always be removed if someone wants to i think that we at least kind of keep our minds open to that that it could be a consent agenda item and i just mentioned that because we're always thinking about time you know this is going to take more time and if something's on the consent agenda item if there's agreement and i love that all you need is one person to ask to take it off right the consent agenda but if there's agreement it could stay on there then we're not then it doesn't take up more time at the meeting i'm not saying it doesn't take up any time at all there's whatever prep time and preparation but that we'd be open to that um number two um i really like the idea of prioritization i'm just mentioning that now because i didn't weigh in on that and i think with what uh it's important and i just feel strongly that it um not that uh if however that whatever that ends up looking like whether it's numeric ranking or whatever whether we do it in writing um individually or as a group i have no idea i'm open to a number of things but i don't think it should be anonymous i i totally understand what you're saying about how it can be weaponized and that's true um but just because of what our job is you know and and that we're accountable to the public you know i i think it's important uh that our our rankings prioritizations be anything like that you know be public i mean our our emails are technically public someone could request some of the public information requests but i do think it's important that that be public um and then and then finally um so right now the way we have it uh if you don't say anything in response to someone's one-minute pitch instead of silence implying consent silence implies um sounds like dissent uh and so that's kind of i don't think that works very well um and uh it goes against our usual default which is that you know well i haven't seen anyone you know it's kind of nobody seems to have if anyone has a problem with with with this speak up now right or forever hold your peace and then people just kind of nod yeah i'm okay with it and then we move forward so i would kind of i i would suggest either having as the mayor mentioned just kind of a simple yes or no which i mean you wouldn't need a minute you know just even you would just need a second to say yes or no meaning not yes or no do you love this idea or not but are you okay with going forward for a work session you know because is is the mayor an agenda for for what or an agenda or an agenda item or consent agenda item right for going going forward um uh because any qualif any qualifiers you have to add to that as he mentioned can be brought up if it's in the work center it's going to be a work session in the individual item if it's going to be in an individual item all right um so i i would either like just the yes or no or if people don't like that to at least have the the standard uh silences consent versus silence is dissent well and i think that would be the mayor i mean the mayor leads the meeting i don't i don't know how everybody feels about that but i just have i'm not going to speak to that i have another thought though on the straight to the agenda thing uh my thing is this uh can we get an agreement that that won't start until we exhaust the the waiting list right because i mean it's just a perpetual bumping of things based on you know i just think we got to start there has to be a start line for the going straight to the agenda and i i think there should be a prohibition until we clear out the waiting list and then at some point that can move forward i just wanted to look at where we are take the numbers 11 12 yes we well some of them we've actually are i mean we have our budget development we're getting ready to do affordable housing plan come back comprehensive waste strategies on there that's priorities i'm sorry those are priorities uh work session dates redistricting comprehensive three that's just three then okay because most of them are coming back we have flag policy unt parking agreements and more inclusive board and committee requirements we have three then really three that haven't been plugged in so we'll get those plugged in how about that and then we can we'll start plugging those three and then we'll implement it after we plug those three in does everybody would that work mayor i'm biased but yes everybody okay with that because then we okay not so much okay well i i'm just uh a little puzzled some of these things are are on a queue waiting to be work sessions if something is going to be proposed to be an individual item what's the point of it waiting behind a work session you see where i'm going i do i just yeah and i see you hitting the button we don't have to hit the button yeah no no i i turn it off so that they don't hear what i'm mumbling so uh yeah no i hear what you're saying i just from work session it's we have a work session then it gets behind a a thing that went straight to work session i just don't like it i think we need to clear it out have a fresh starting point and then go from there and it hardly matters we will work to get those uh scheduled so that it doesn't conflict with what you've decided today may you know say a couple of other things while i everybody back in line okay uh on on the one on one hand i you know i kind of like the efficiency of it's just a yes or no but more often than not i'm in a position where uh the presenter you know feels strongly about an issue that i may agree with on substance but i don't want to use council time on and it matters to me even if even if only allowed 15 seconds in reply to say agree on principle with the sentiment not how i want to use council time i need more than you know just yes or no to say that and you know because i'm going to be held to account you know by members of the public for how would you vote against this you know the puppies are acute resolution you know so so i'm happy with 15 seconds uh and then uh here's a here's something i'll toss out as a grenade for you to run away from uh you know i i think back to what are the most efficient organizations most and effective organizations i've worked on and and uh the one that worked best had a prioritization list i was just and i was trying to remember how the heck did we do it now i i i never worked in democratic organizations so i say that as a caveat but it was an executive committee uh and they owned the the prioritization they had to and it was they owned it and the beauty of it was it took the pressure off of everybody else if you like that i'm willing to own having to you know haggle with the mayor and staff and have the agenda committee own the prioritization list and you know you have a beef with that raise it but it takes the pressure off you to say your world you didn't put it high enough on the list blame me blame blame the mayor that's and that's a little like the san antonio model at least the way it looks spelled out here yeah it is yeah all the big legislative bodies there are a lot of ways we don't need to be like congress but all of the big legislative bodies have a rules committee or a calendars committee or somebody who owns that calendar they're responsible for getting to the floor for a vote and everybody's mad when their bill doesn't get to the floor on time or they're happy when their bill gets somebody's ear and moves forward but we have such a thing we have that agenda committee and if we give them priority and we also give them the responsibility of mostly city manager and agenda items coming forward it's not fleshed out the the cake is not baked uh we need you council member who prior who brought it up and put it forward to put some more flesh on the bones or get with the staff or get with the with the lawyers and figure it out i think that if our agenda committee is is utilized in that way it can be a very very powerful tool for efficiency and consensus building for getting things through in a very efficient way okay so we're now trying to wrap up around slide 28 if you will the next steps we're going to uh staff and myself will work on refreshing the priorities that you discussed today some polish to that some adjustment to that that'll be brought back to him down to the second full point at the meeting either September 14th or 21st for your consideration one of the things uh sarah and i spoke about was going forward just as a good reminder that when there's a staff report provided to you in a council meeting that will reference the strategic plan and that particular item and also they'll be under consideration to have periodic updates to where it's not just part of the packet but she'll actually pull it out and say here's where we are with the status of progress on the strategic plan just to kind of keep it in front of you on a regular basis give you a study diet you discussed about the council committees main decisions on that and the council request process which you just wrapped up this will all be summarized so you have it obviously sarah and staff took tons of notes the outcome of today was trying to get some clarity about direction in the near term short term as well as certain mechanics about the governance process obviously both dimensions are going to be our work in progress you're still going to think who knows what's going to be around the next corner where you're going to have to deal and reshuffle those priorities who knows at the same time there's the process that you just spent the afternoon discussing that how you're governing and how that's going to work and i think you know just my advice to you is there's no perfect solution get comfortable be willing like you did today to have to be willing to put on the table and say this is working how can we experiment how can we make it better and keep that conversation going because that helps you all just govern more effectively and your your saturation point will increase the longer you're on council and your comfort level with your colleagues and those topics in your immersion that so you may find that the process starts to speed up even more because your depth of understanding about those issues is stronger so your reference points are different i want to say thank you for the opportunity to spend time with you last night and today i know sometimes this process can be uh it's inefficient it's not necessarily efficient but it is supposed to be productive trying to listen trying to learn trying to process trying to examine as i shared with you last night if these issues were easily solved you would have already done so the nature of these sessions are to exchange ideas to build relationships hopefully you had another chance to do that to listen to your colleagues where they're coming from remembering that you all have a passion for dentin and how you're trying to help it realize its potential keep that in mind when you're tired and you haven't eaten dinner and you're at a council meeting and you just wanted to finish and you listen to your colleagues you all have a passion everybody in here has a passion for dentin trying to help it find its future so those are my final comments i don't know if you have final comments no i just want to thank the staff i mean i know they put a lot of effort in putting this together for you and steward and sarah and everybody rachel and just thank them for all their hard work and billy and billy and ryan because billy came in here on friday and put all this together it took him you know several hours to set this up speaking of this this has all been recorded it will be uploaded on monday morning to the city's website so if anyone wants to go watch the video it will be available beginning on monday yeah is the question by the public so i just wanted to let you know and then as patrick said we will have items coming back before council on the three topics discussed today with consent agenda items on the council committees that were agreed to retire and then as well as an individual consideration item for the council priorities and focus areas and then an individual consideration item to amend the one minute pitch process and we'll work in those feedback that we heard in the consensus we heard and thank you all for taking the time to do this i know this is i mean you all have lives outside of this you spend enough time at city hall and it is much appreciated we as staff appreciate helping us and giving us some some direction well we have tuesday off right to compensate take it off we'll just run right through the agenda all right thanks so much everyone thank you patrick thank you yes patrick thank you oh patrick thank you