Sep 28, 2021 City Council on 2021-09-28 1:00 PM (SPECIAL CALLED MEETING)

Good afternoon and welcome to this meeting of the Denton City Council. Today is September 28th, 2021, it is 1 p.m. and we do have a quorum so I'll call the meeting to order. The special call meeting and the first order of business is callers if we have any of those staff. No sir, there are no callers. Okay thank you, that takes us to questions from council on the consent agenda, questions for staff. Councilmember Beck? [inaudible] Okay, first one's A, if someone could, who's ever going to speak to item A on the consent agenda and then K, you're on deck. So you can go ahead and ask your question, they'll make their way up. Thank you sir, I'm not sure about the A question, oh sorry, the K question, that might be in our executive session so I'll take advisement on that one. K, that was the minutes and I just wanted to sort of comment that the minutes stated that we're following the Plano model and I wanted to check everyone's memory a little bit that that was sort of generally the framework and I wanted to make sure our minutes didn't sort of lock us in to that. So that's just sort of a comment on A. Okay and then K. So I think I can answer this in a generic way and if it's not then staff will advise me. Why is it that on these sort of solar PPAs, it seems like we're using generally a boilerplate standard conditions sort of arrangement, why do we need specific PPAs for specific contracts, why is this not a sort of generic solar function and if staff could maybe educate me a little bit because I guess I'm a little worried about PPA creep, having a million PPAs on file for all these solar contracts. Councilmember Beck, Bill Sheppard from Dent municipal electric should be able to answer that question. Sarah this is Tony, I'm on the line, I can probably answer that if that's okay. Yes that's good, thank you. Yeah so Councilmember, generally speaking these much larger systems certainly have a potential larger financial impact on the utility itself and so generally speaking we're looking at a much higher volume of electricity that's being produced than a rooftop solar and so we got to be cognizant of the impact on the rest of our rate payers and so generally speaking that requires a PPA to be able to negotiate a different rate than the rate that we offer to our residents. Now this is now really our second PPA related to a system such as this, so I don't anticipate many more of these coming through, now we could certainly talk down the road of a different rate that's based on a larger generation amount if that's something that the council would like for us to do. So if I might clarify just a little bit, this is really generally just for large solar purchase agreements and not sort of the sort of standard household needs. Yeah correct, correct for commercial entities where you're looking at a much larger system that plays a much larger impact onto our utility system, that's correct. And a final follow up on that one, as we go further and further into solar, as we convert more and more onto electrical needs and reduce our impacts from fossil fuels, we'll hypothetically be seeing more and more distributed generation. I mean I'm going to encourage businesses to work with you to do distributed generation, so do we have a process that, I guess what you're saying is that each one impacts the rates we need for the future after we implement one, but that seems like we're always chasing our tail then a little bit, is there not a streamline mechanism that we could have that generally would be applicable for certain categories of solar generation? We potentially could, again I'll just remind the council that we have a negotiated agreement here that was acceptable to the embassy suites, and so they certainly found a benefit of the way that this has been structured. We certainly do not want to discourage distributed generation for our commercial entities and certainly we'll work with them just like we have here with embassy suites. But again, we have to look at those on an individual case-by-case basis so we can make sure that we understand the financial impact on the utility and ultimately the rest of our rate base. Okay, thank you. Okay, and then L? L, yes thank you sir. L is the fraud policy, and this is very brief, looking at the policy itself I wasn't clear whether this fraud policy would cover fraud that we experienced in economic development projects, and so does this policy overlap that area? This policy basically pertains to, it lays out the procedures for if we get a fraud submitted to the investigation committee, so yes if that occurred in the economic development and they submitted it through the channels to get it to the investigation committee it would potentially deal with that. So if it was reported to you then it would go through this policy? Correct, and there are a number of ways for it to get reported to us that way. Okay, but there's not really much in the way of barriers to reporting something to you? No, it can either be directly reported to one of the investigation committee or myself or through the anonymous fraud hotline that the city has. Okay thank you, that clarifies that thank you. And sir, my last question is from Ann, this is on the tech services contract. Okay you can go ahead with your question in the right person, yeah there you go. Thank you sir. So I have two questions really, one when's the last time we reviewed our tech services capacity and capabilities? Hi this is Lisa Mining the chief technology officer council member back, I am brand new here and I understand that a technology assessment has not been done in many years so a long time is about the best way I can answer that. Fair enough, fair enough and it's something that does need to be done regularly so you know where you're at. Yes. So I appreciate that. So I guess my second follow-up question to this is, okay so by way of analogy you know I also work in the tech industry and we do a lot of our own assessment so I guess I mean on these same exact categories listed in the item and so I guess my question is why do we need Barry Dunn or what are we lacking that we can't do this in-house? I think that Barry Dunn brings a lot of experience because they do this in so many different organizations there's some we know what we know and we're kind of limited to what we know in the city of Denton ecosystem so they can bring some perspective on best practices best practices and what other cities are doing to improve their technology environment. It's just another way of doing the very best we can to provide great services and and if we need to look at more external or different types of way of doing that I'm totally open to doing that so it's just another objective view of our environment I think it's good for us to kind of absorb and see what we can do to do better for ourselves. Okay I guess I'll say the rationale for why I asked the question it seems well I'm trying to be mindful of consultation creep creep is going into a lot of my questions today sorry about that but I'm trying to be mindful of consultation creep because it just becomes really easy to farm that out and and I don't know that there's I mean I guess I'll ask is a question is there would we be able to do this if we took 18 months instead of a year and do it in-house and is that a reasonable extension of our time frame or really this is only something that we could do with a consultant? I'll ask the city manager I'll ask the city manager to speak to that if she wants and then Lisa let me answer so I I've been here two years and six months and had the opportunity to oversee IT for the last year and six months and one of the main reasons that we need to completely go out and have someone look at this is someone else from a different eye to look at everything from our own strategic plan that was developed policies and procedures how we're operating what we're doing how we're doing it and this is separate from those 400 programs that we have that we're dealing with so this really is this is really a scrub of what we've been doing how we've been doing it because I think it's necessary that we do that in the face of how much technology is changing and growing and the fact that we may not be where we need to be and to bring someone in like Lisa which is a right move in the right direction but she needs to start with a clean slate and kind of no current reality and I'm not sure there's a lot there to be able to even see if it really needs someone from the outside to give us a thorough scrub all right fair enough I appreciate that thank you that's all my question sir okay Councilman McGuire thank you mayor I'd also like like to speak to the same issue in the minutes and my recollection is that there were elements of Plano's ordinance which were favored by a majority of Council but particularly related to enforcement and investigation and handling of of complaints but not necessarily that we wanted it modeled directly on Plano's ordinance I think there were elements of several different examples that we liked and the mayor also spoke to the importance of having our our own ordinance that's not directly modeled on any other my second question is actually a question about I guess I guess procedure and the agenda so will we be hearing the the public hearings before the consent agenda tonight I just think that goes to to time and if we can get if we can take care of business then we just have a hard stop time at 630 for these other items and if we if we can move efficiently and get the other things done before that then great if not then they'll have to fall behind it okay so the answer is yes to that the answer is we have a 630 hard stop start for those items yes okay all right all right we'll discuss I'll send an email on that that's fine okay any other questions any in so Councilman armature yeah that's two about items that have already been covered first about the the minutes and thank you to councilmember McGuire for pointing that out I agree that it's inaccurate to say the proposed ordinance should model the city of Plano's adopted ordinance this is this is of course for our non-discrimination ordinance like that or I should say I can't vote yes to that unless then you know first bullet point is just struck there was not consensus to to model the ordinance on Plano's ordinance there were some things that some people might have liked about Plano's ordinance but I don't feel comfortable voting on that if that language is in there so I would like to you know request that that be changed before we vote on it on the consent agenda I'm not sure what the process is for that I can't remember the last time you know I've requested a change in the minutes and I'm not sure councilmember McGuire if you were requesting a change as well it sounded like you were okay miss city attorney you want to speak to that because I would think that the remedy is just to pull it and you can always vote no or I don't know I don't want to poison the pool your thoughts that's certainly one option there's an option to postpone it for consideration so that staff can revisit the minutes that they have the notes that they have there's also the possibility that you can move to approve the minutes or with some stated change to them yeah I would like to do I'd like to just strike that one bullet point and then I can vote yes on and I think that's the simplest way okay so I'd like to make that proposal well you'll just you'll just need to pull it yes exactly okay then your next question so my next question was about k which councilmember Beck had questions about I had similar you know questions and concerns about that as well as just you know a pleasure that that you know one of our big big users is using that much solar I think that's wonderful and I'm excited about that I too you know had had a number of questions that I think do not so much warrant kind of pulling this item for a an open discussion tonight but since power purchase agreements are the kind of things we usually have closed meetings on you know I would like to request to pull that and to have a closed session item on that at a at a future meeting and again I'm you know very strongly in favor of discounting wide-scale solar use I like councilmember Beck I hope to see a lot more of that so you know I want to make sure that we're setting a really positive precedent but I do think that we should see it as some sort of precedent that we're setting and not as a one-off one-off deal so I again I want to pull it for a future closed meeting so are you I don't understand pull it for a close meet you're gonna pull pull it and then make a motion well I got to finish so you're gonna pull it and then make a request to postpone I don't I don't understand how those two go together okay then we'll just pull it and have that conversation okay yes any other questions see none okay great so we have item A and item M that are pulled and I don't see any other no presentation on either and we'll just have those conversations here at the dais and move those you didn't pull k no yes I'm sorry yes Tony spoke to K yes all right so that's A and K got it okay no other questions got it that takes us to our next section our agenda work sessions I'll call the first session it's item and I and I before I do that if staff could just confirm I think the embassy sweets thing is time-sensitive they have the product sitting in the back that they need to get mounted so that they're not damaged if staff could confirm that before that that's just a precursor to my question so okay so first work session item is item a ID 211267 city report hold discussion give staff direction regarding a audit project zero to three hello mayor and council share my screen I'm Madison Rocha and city auditor I'm going to present our findings from our audit of the city's payroll administration processes so this audit generally evaluated the effectiveness of the city's payroll administration processes annually the city spends about 129 million dollars on payroll costs for its almost 1800 employees and I just want to clear point out that this was originally inaccurately noted as 88 million dollars in the report but it's been corrected now so in general the payroll process includes ensuring the payroll is up to date with employee changes reviewing employee time cards for accuracy and calculating and processing the payroll payments with the bank this audit evaluated the city's payroll administration processes including payroll updates time card approvals and payroll verification calculation and payment so I'll begin by discussing the city's payroll update process so in order to ensure all city employees are paid accurately the payroll must be updated regularly to reflect employee changes including new hires terminations and pay rate changes under the city's current payroll update process employees generally submit these changes to human resources using a standard form that must be appropriately authorized by department management HR then updates the city's financial system with these changes and notifies payroll about the changes every two weeks payroll then uses this information to verify the financial system and update the timekeeping system with new hires and any terminations this process generally ensures that duties are appropriately separated which reduces the risk of fraud in addition based on a review of 60 payroll changes this process appears to be effective as all reviewed new hires pay rate changes and terminations were accurately made and put into effect in the next applicable pay period that being said we did find that only one staff member in HR currently updates the financial system with these changes which increases the risk of error and fraud as there's currently no process in the HR department to verify that employment changes made in the financial system were all the way appropriately authorized back to that form so based on their management response HR intends to implement a quarterly audit process to ensure changes entered into the financial system by HR were accurate based on information submitted by a department next the Fair Labor Standards Act requires employers to keep accurate records of the wages and hours worked by its employees in order to comply with this act the city generally requires employees to enter their work hours in the city's timekeeping system these hours are then reviewed by employees supervisors and or their department timekeeper to ensure that each employees entered hours are accurate based on a review of three pay periods we found that of the 5100 employees reviewed only three did not have their hours approved in addition city policy allows supervisors and timekeepers to adjust to adjust an employee's hours only if an employee forgets to clock in or out if an employee is sick or if a time clock malfunctions while adjustments are allowed in these cases it can be difficult to verify whether a timecard adjustment complies with the policy without contract contacting the supervisor of timekeeper according to payroll staff they train supervisors and timekeepers quarterly on when to add comments as well as other payroll processes however this requirement is not formalized for that reason we recommended that supervisors and timekeepers be required to comment on any corrections made to employee timecards requiring these comments should help ensure that adjustments are only made in accordance with city policy and based on their management response finance plans to formalize this requirement in a standard operating procedure finally every two weeks the city of Denton's payroll staff reviews employee timecards from the previous pay period to verify that time has been entered and approved appropriately once this is complete payroll uses the city's financial system to calculate each employee's paychecks for the pay period and so based on a review of a statistical sample 383 employee paychecks from the last 12 months all reviewed employees were appropriately and accurately paid based on their recorded work and leave hours and and their pay rate in addition based on a sample of 30 paychecks overtime hours appeared to be correctly recorded and calculated accurately similarly all required taxes appeared to be paid appropriately in addition we verified that six payroll payments were appropriately reviewed and authorized by finance department management and that the payroll payments made as confirmed by the bank matched up to the payroll supporting documentation that was authorized by management we did however find that once the payroll was authorized one in one payroll staff member is responsible for uploading the payment to the bank without review or additional approval so while this increases the risk of fraud the bank does send an acknowledgement to payroll staff and finance department management that includes the total payroll amount to be paid by the city in addition to counting accounting staff reconciled the payroll payments each month we also found that city staff generally have appropriate access to the city's financial and timekeeping systems to ensure that they can perform their assigned function that being said payroll staff have what's called super user access to the timekeeping system which while necessary increases the risk of fraud or error as they are allowed to modify all employees work hours which are the basis for payroll payments for this reason we recommended that finance develop a process to regularly review the audit trails of payroll staffs activities in the timekeeping system and based on their management response finance plans to develop this process and formalize it in a standard operating procedure so in summary we issued a total of five recommendations to two departments all of which were concurred or partially concurred and based on their response we believe the identified risks will be addressed appropriately and plan to conduct a follow-up in six to 18 months now i'll take this down for questions thank you questions for staff councilmember beck thank you Mr. mayor madison i that recommendation number four i guess i didn't see a lot of uh information in your report on that is that just sort of dealing with banks and and sometimes the weird ways that they want to be uh have direct deposit or something like that yeah so the way that the process works is they have like a basically a document that says this is the payroll payment all of the backup um and they send it to finance management they sign off on it authorize it but then they have a separate file that gets uploaded to the bank's website that they get paid off of and so only one employee does that oh that was the one employee thing all right all right thank you for clarifying i appreciate that any other questions for staff seeing none thank you very much i appreciate it madison thank you good job uh that takes that completes a takes us to b which is id uh two one one uh let me see nine seven um receive report hold discussion and give staff direction regarding planned updates good afternoon mayor and council becky davini city engineer director of capital projects thank you for having me here today to talk about the 2020 mobility plan update this presentation will be given by myself and nathan george our senior planner bicycle ada and pedestrian coordinator along with our senior traffic engineer chandra who is present today to ask and answer any questions you might have oh that's not gonna get to that was fast okay let's end the show and let's start over all right here we go sorry about that so the purpose of today's agenda is really to go through and give you the ideas of what we've been handling and working on with the overall process update what we've heard from the comments that we've received what are the different plan elements some recent progress we've had on the mobility plan update some of the companion efforts that we are currently working on along with impact fee information that we'd like to share with you and then have an opportunity for you to ask any questions and give any direction that you would like as you were all aware the last mobility plan was adopted in 2015 and you can see that on the left hand of your screen that actually ended up being adopted in june of 2016 but it was performed by kimley horn and the current mobility plan that you see on your right is that draft form of that mobility plan the current draft adopted date was may of 2020 and that's the document we're actually working through today the purpose of the plan is really to look at that multimodal type of transportation efforts we're going to focus on three different modes of transportation obviously the bicycle the auto and the pedestrian make up this overall plan i think it's very important for everybody to understand that many times we focus severely on the thoroughfare plan but it's very important to know that there are three aspects of this overall mobility plan as far as community input just to give you a little bit of a background in 2019 there were several public meetings that were held four were held in person from july of 2019 through september of 2019 there was one specific meeting that was held with a focus of the bicycle and pedestrian and they had a focus group that actually worked specifically and that was back in 2019 and there were five city council work sessions that were held from december of 2019 through march of 2020 and then you may remember that we had five virtual public meetings held in five different areas the northern area western southern downtown and eastern area and this is just a snip of what that presentation looked like and those were held from september to october of 2020 through that community input we had two different ways that we collected data the 2019 time frame actually collected a cert through a survey that was from july of 2018 or i'm sorry july 18th of 2019 through october 11th of 2019 through that time frame as you see with the graphic that's on the left we collected 384 responses then from march 1st 2020 to october 30th of 2020 through the wiki map which you now have access to online we received 287 responses and i'd like to point out if you do go online and look at that mobility plan map and many of you i know have done this if you look at the point which is this little square with the little arrow at the bottom of it that actually shows the comment so you can click on that and actually look at the specific comment additional opportunities to receive community input one of them was held just a couple of weeks ago when we had the comprehensive plan denton plan 2020 open house that was held in the development services building that was september 16th you can see a few pictures here that i wanted to highlight of chandra and nathan both talking to different individuals from the community i'm looking at the draft maps and i'll show you a glance of some of those draft maps in just a minute that same opportunity exists still through september 30th of 2021 those comment periods are opened currently you can actually use the qr code to go in and add additional comments obviously we're making the presentation today and then we will be making further presentations to traffic safety and mobility committee meetings as necessary some of the themes that we received from the comments are specifically related to that multimodal approach that i speak spoke to that complete streets so complete streets is a theme that also is a part of the denton plan 2040 where we really look at the bicycle pedestrian and auto modes of transportation another theme was to actually accommodate the bicycle and pedestrian safety and access another theme we received was really specific to addressing some of the maintenance and operations concerns the good thing about that is we were able to share those with our friends in public works and some of those can be addressed today without having to wait to go through actually adopting the mobility plan obviously there's consideration for future development you'll see that we've made some modifications as requested as different projects have gone through the public hearing process and we're making those modifications to the mobility plan there's several future text dot roadways obviously that are expanding or widening and so that's another consideration that was a theme roadway classification was a big theme we heard individuals were wanting to look at the difference between an arterial or a collector the difference between a primary arterial and a secondary arterial obviously each roadway requires a different right away width and the need for multiple primary arterials maybe in one particular area could one of those be classified to a lower classification of roadway and then really that consistency with the comprehensive plan the denton plan 2040 as you know there is a land use map that's a part of that plan and it's very important that we look at that land use map and we are working currently with our friends in the planning department through development services to really evaluate see if there's any recommendations based on those land use assumptions that would change the actual roadway classifications that we're currently evaluating so i'm going to go over just i wanted to have be able to show you a visual of currently what we're working on and then nathan's going to show you the next two so on the auto portion of the mobility plan this is an example and councilmember becky will remember this one sir this is where we discussed cindy lane extending up through the area and really what we talked about was loop 280 west west is this black dashed line that you see so we worked with that developer and they're currently in the development phase planning phase to actually develop a collector that would go through their property in order to have that connection to the windsor that is going to be obviously extended at some point in the future and have that connection between loop 288 and windsor so this is just a snip of one of the areas that we've been looking at making those modifications so i chose and worked with the team to take the existing maps that were the latest and final version and i like to redline those make the comments so that everybody can see the final version and then also any changes that we're making so that you have clear direction so there are a few more that we're still working through but this is just one little corner and i'm going to turn it over to nathan and let him talk about the bicycle mobility thanks becky so if you'll indulge me just a moment nathan george i'm the new bicycle pedestrian ada coordinator it's nice to finally meet you and see all your smiling faces i'll leave my jokes there so i'll talk about the bicycle and pedestrian components of the mobility plan when i first took a look at this plan one of the main themes that i was looking for is how the bicycle plan would improve connectivity because we really want to focus on where our riders are going to be accessing different roads or different thoroughfares to get through the community that's one of the key we call it complete and connected networks in the industry so really focusing on what are our main areas that folks are going to ride so i'd put dash pink lines that you'll see all around the plan kind of highlighting areas that i think we will see a need for those facilities to be prioritized there's certainly needs to put facilities into our neighborhoods and provide connectivity but those are the the core of our network of facilities that will provide the best mobility and connectivity throughout the city and the real goal there was to put that in front of the public and see you know are we are they providing some input of anything that we may have missed or any opportunities that they may be aware of for connections they want to make a few of the themes that really jumped out to me looking at this plan initially was that we have some of these connectivity improvements that are shown going to things like i-35 frontage roads and clearly we don't want to be promoting riding on the i-35 frontage roads so those are the sorts of elements we want to massage out and make sure that our plan has complete and connected networks but also prioritizes where people should be going and then i also identified themes of where we need to be talking with our neighbors what are the facility recommendations that we have with our adjacent jurisdictions so we can be talking with them about making sure that our plans align with each other as we build out this network so that that are the key themes that i saw in the bicycle element pedestrian elements a little bit different we have a lot of plans currently ongoing with our sidewalk program with our ada transition plan i'll be talking about that a bit more in november as we develop out that plan or build out the long range plan but one of the big elements that jumped out to me on this mobility plan is that we have priorities identified and i think it would be really appropriate for us to take those take that recommendation the priority part out of the mobility plan and identify these as gaps we want to make sure that it's we're not creating a plan that we can't continually update the way we can our work plans so we want to basically identify where those gaps are rely on other other processes to identify what the priorities are going to be that'll be an easier way for us to to implement those improvements so that's one of the larger broader recommendations in this thematic area but really just making sure that it's clear we've identified gaps one of the other areas that really jumped out is the committed sidewalk projects it probably should say more like under consideration because in some cases those are not actually commitments but maybe they are roads that are in a in a bond program that need to be looked at but they may not include sidewalks and then the last item i'm going to touch on is our plan coordination so clearly this all works the mobility plan is all part of a a lot of our planning processes so parks is working on their their trails plan and it's really important to acknowledge that trails do provide a mobility benefit in some cases in other cases they're a recreational facility so we are talking continually with parks about where we see that intersection between a park trail and the mobility benefits that it will provide and including that in our priorities and then also the mobility or sorry the denton plan 2040 so our comprehensive plan is going to identify where we're going to see concentrations of users and that's going to really spur a lot of activity in that bike and ped area i'm starting to see some some citizen input about different places where we've seen recent development and needs to address some of those mobility needs specifically in the pedestrian area so just wanted to touch on those coordination items and i'll turn it back over to becky thank you nathan so the last thing that i really wanted to take the time to cover with the mobility plan is really talking about three key areas that our team is currently focusing on and the first area is really that traffic safety area where our team is currently working on that citywide speed study i know we've been mentioning that to you in friday reports and different items so that's something that we have ongoing there is a signal timing project that we're currently working on along the 380 corridor and then working on that project with our traffic operations team and then also with that citywide speed study really looking at the vision zero and really the next steps the next area which nathan has been working on and he just alluded to was really the ada transition plan and that's really an ongoing effort along with that sidewalk work plan and that's an entire program to look at where are the areas where we need to fill in the gaps where some of the areas where we can see foot traffic already on the ground what are some of the safe routes to school you know we have some of the dcta trip funding right now that we're currently using so really looking at that plan from our favorite word the holistic view and then that bicycle work plan you know is very similar looking at some of those key areas where we do need to build the bicycle infrastructure that's needed in order for folks to be able to get from one side of town to the other the third area that we're really working on is our project delivery rachel's team is working on this and that's really that capital project checklist this is something that i know that everyone's interested in working through a checklist or what are some of those typical things when a project comes in that we need to be evaluating whether it be you know the bicycle the pedestrian the the auto and then that coordination with the parks department the coordination with the comp plan and and future development and so that's something we currently have a draft of we're working through there's our favorite word again that holistic project delivery and where we're looking at things from a more programmatic view and then last one of the things that will come from the mobility plan is really that roadway impact fee and so that's something that we'll be updating and that's the last subject i'm going to talk about today and it really is that next step to that update so i think you're probably all aware that the best practice for a roadway impact fee collection is to use the latest mobility plan which really provides that classification and location of those roadways our current roadway impact fees are going to be required to have an update as part of that 2020 mobility plan and i wanted to provide you an example from the single family homes if you look at and this is based on 2015 numbers for example let's just take service area a for residential development the 2015 eligible recovery fee and as we do this update we'll be looking at current figures not 2015 and this was an example from that time frame the actual eligibility recovery figure was ten thousand seven hundred and eighty dollars the adopted fee currently that we have is two thousand dollars and so we currently in service area a are collecting 19 percent of the percent that's a percent recovered from the development what we're seeing in the metroplex is really that the percentage recovered from development is closer to 50 we have some cities that we've reached out to through our individual who's working on this roadway impact the update for us and they've shown us some areas where frisco has recently made some updates fort worth is working on some of their updates and we have that specific information and a chart that kind of shows that information but denton definitely has the lowest adopted recovery fee currently at this time so several of those other cities like i mentioned are really getting more towards that 50 and in some cases some cities are actually higher than that 50 recovery rate and with that i'm going to stop sharing and turn it over to questions so that myself nathan chandra we can all assist with what questions you might have right questions for staff counselor beth thank you mr mayor becky i i love that you guys have put those timetables up that's really going to help me answer a lot of questions that i get from constituents about like we know that this is working and and uh but we don't know when it's coming down the pipe so so that'll be really helpful i appreciate that especially that comprehensive speed study i think uh that's probably the the dominant question i'm getting regards to roads is not fix my roads but slow my roads down yes sir um so i i'm really really looking forward to that and and i wouldn't tell you to rush because i want you to do it right but but rush if we can okay so uh to the extent that good practices allow sure um but i did have a question um let's see so it's really about and you ended with it is the the impact fees and and i i love that you're evaluating and where we are and sort of the ratio of recovery on that but sort of our needs um are based on what what nathan is going to figure out in terms of our overall mobility plan so it feels like that should be something that we have on every single road so i guess my question is do we have a bike and pedestrian designation characteristic for every single road i mean it may be like zero like a frontage road like you were talking about like there's just it is specifically denoted do not let things happen here kind of thing as opposed to i i feel like a lot of our roads sometimes have defaults of of nothing or nebulousness so that we go to resurface or rebuild or whatever and then um uh you know we get you know all the way through design and realize oh we didn't do bike lanes you know or something or we maybe we did bike lanes but we didn't put them into the budget and now it's an afterthought that we have to cough up separately and that goes back to your budget thing so i i guess can my question is are we denoting the bike and pedestrian characteristic of all our roads and and if not can we or is there a problem with doing that is that an issue so my answer to your question would be that we really are going to be looking at the standard details that we have as a part of our criteria manual um i would say traditionally um what you are experiencing is some of the similar things our team experienced as we came into taking on some of these projects is uh you know maybe the bicycle lane might not be something that was thought about until after the fact and so i think that's really what the ideal is for the the plan for the mobility plan itself is to be able to identify those key corridors nathan will tell you that he'd like to have for the bicycles you know some key routes some key corridors where when we do those improvements we're using that mobility plan truly as a guide that says this shall have this type of bike lane and then we have kind of a cafeteria plan of what type of bike lane based on what the roadway cross section is for every single roadway to have a bicycle classification not necessarily but we are working towards kind of that complete streets making some of those recommendations of some of the standard things we'd like to see on different roadway cross sections as we are currently also working on updating our criteria manual but i will also tell you that with the complete streets thought process and the standard details and the criteria manual you know sidewalk obviously is something that's always a part of certain ones of those cross sections and i will tell you that we also are looking at where those key spine roads where those key corridors where we want to have those bicycle traffic so to say that it would be on every single road would probably be a false statement but to tell you that we're looking at how do we get people from point a to point b or from you know downtown to you know the west side of town or you know how do we get people from the north to the south or on one of the trails that the parks department has those are the things we're looking at as nathan showed kind of just in that graphic you know we want to make sure that we have those key elements of those spine roads they're not really roads the spine roads that are markings of where those bicycles are going to go so i would tell you that there is not a specific classification for every single roadway that says residential street shall always have this type of bike lane or an arterial shall always have this type of bike lane we won't really want to use that plan to help us develop what we should have in certain areas and and honestly we receive a lot of citizen input too as to some of the areas you know they want to get from the dcta you know the train to the downtown well what's the safest way to get folks from point a to point b yeah no i think that makes a lot of sense and i and the only thing i will encourage you to do is is by having sort of a not assuming a default by actually having a designated category even if it's nothing like don't allow bikes on this or don't allow pedestrians on this it at least is then when you're doing your planning you're like oh well maybe we need to change this from off to sometimes on or or as you go forward particularly as development is occurring um because if if it's just a you know a county road going out into an etj road and we but we know that a big subdivision is coming in there then back to the impact fees where i tried to start we don't know what to ask out of that developer a priori necessarily you know unless there's already a category in there that we can charge against sure i guess i'm just saying um rather than have a default have it as a defined characteristic that we're mindful that you can perfectly control and and flex and and make primary networks but i i i just the point i made is that i don't want it to be an afterthought kind of thing 100 agree and that's why i'm really excited about the plan and having nathan on board so he can help us look at those elements where the bicycle um you know that that mode of the multimodal approach can really help us um evaluate that and make sure that we're considering that i will also tell you that's a part of the checklist you know making sure that we're looking at all the boxes just like we look at a water sewer line when a roadway needs to be replaced we need to be thinking at the tell in too what is the surface going to look like after the surface is put down you know what is this bike lane striping going to be and there's also several different ways to do the bike lane striping so i appreciate that comment thank you thank you any other questions for staff mayor for tim elter yeah thank you mayor yeah in a similar vein this is a bit symbolic but in the same way i think can kind of affect our thinking and make sure we are conscious about it when we say multimodal uh we're accustomed to thinking of it as as as car bike pad but we know it's really car bike pad wheelchair you know car bike pad accessible i don't know exactly what the sort of term of art is now and i know it's in your thinking uh always and i know it's sort of on the checklist but i know that uh like with bike we're going to end up with sort of an overlay right that we know if as you know councilmember beck indicated it's turned off on these lanes but it's turned on here as you're conscious of the connectivity similarly you know with pedestrian passageways i think it'd be helpful if we also say yeah there's an overlay too that's about uh accessible connectivity you know between uh you know key key points on the map uh and so that that's really kind of the fourth mode like i say it's a bit symbolic but i think if it's if we kind of frame things that way it'll make it more automatic uh that that would also not be an afterthought on projects no i appreciate that comment and definitely something nathan's been evaluating is the ada transition plan and making sure that we're taking that into consideration as we're building new construction so i appreciate that thanks okay any other questions seeing none uh i i'll say this in conclusion that um i think from a mobility standpoint um one thing this and this may be kind of forward looking a little a little hazy but uh on the north side of town when we're talking about um kind of that king's way development and kind of heartly feel i just think it's important that we communicate and start that process early obviously there's going to be a lot of resistance but if we're going to go through there to some degree we need to start having that conversation to uh at least get people to the table have that conversation and and make it as comprehensive and as active as possible with that input but to just kind of leave that dangling is just for me it's a it's a problem we just need to communicate clearly hey we don't have another choice here's what here's where we're going here's options that sort of thing so that's really going to be critical for me uh and then for this i think just kind of picking up where i think i understood councilmember beck to be i just but kind of on a pragmatic standpoint not if every road should have those uh bike paths but more what do we how do we evaluate the what's the best option right so i've heard cyclists talk about rumble strips being terrible they're great for cars terrible for bikes right and then you talk about uh protected bike lanes which is my preference right but then also how do you get a street sweeper in there to clean it so i've heard cyclists talk about how all the trash that collects in there because you can't get the street sweeper in there so from a city perspective do we need to find a is it a cleaning tool or piece of equipment that helps us have protected lanes that would be my preference just because you see it all the time in neighborhoods where it's a cycle bicycle lane that a car is parked in that now uh you know it puts the cyclists in the road so i just think we need to have a kind of a comprehensive best practices and here's how we're going to how here's what it looks like on the ground here's what it looks like and how it affects the cyclists then i'll pick up on uh what um nathan mentioned with respect to the gaps and i and i'll take his point that we don't need a priority but i think there are roads or paths that are used more frequently than others and and so there has to be some prioritization there or some evaluation of key data points to say what we're going to do and how it impact uh the most people or if it's in a section and we can leverage federal dollars or something like that then let's let's prioritize those because we get more bang for the buck just something to guide a formula approach then that says here's the gaps here's where we can get the most done for the most efficiency or higher traffic in these areas just we'll need i would need some direction on you know how to move those things forward all things being equal so sure and that's um a part of that work plan and we actually have an index that we're using with a criteria scoring you know how close is it to a school um where you know where is another bus stop or a dcta light rail you know there's a lot of things that we evaluate how close is it to another capital project that's already happening um and i think it's also just an overall uh shift in how we approach projects is going in and looking at it from all modes of transportation but then also looking what's under the ground working with atlas you know water wastewater street lights etc so i appreciate those comments i will mention on the north side of northeast side of town where you were mentioning we are very anxious to hear from our friends at tex dot they're waiting to have one more public hearing and so we are going to be waiting to have that information back but at this point we show those lines on our map just simply from the perspective that we want to be forthcoming and let everyone know that those are possible roadways we anticipate um some changes to the mobility plan in that area so if you were to see our big map today you would see this big bubble all the way around it saying we're kind of waiting on tech stock but i do appreciate the comments to let those residents be involved in a part of that process and several of them did show up to the comp plan meeting so we did get to speak with them good yeah and i think to your point that but i think the king's way project is moving forward and we're going to have them stub out a road you know so it's like we need you know if as that moves forward sure that gives us more time to to kind of plan and if that road stuff to make sure it steps out in the right space that those sort of things so excellent thank you very much appreciate it great presentation welcome okay that uh completes item b takes us to item c which is uh id 211 651 receive report hold discussion give staff direction regarding a proposed bell avenue bicycle and pedestrian corridor for the portion of the roadway through texas women's university thank you mayor and council i'm rachel wood deputy director of capital projects let me share my screen really quickly here okay so part of today's presentation we're going to start with an overview of the t2 that looks strange i'm not sure what's happening here billy or dtv team it looks like it's off centered and i'm not exactly sure what i need to do to recenter it ryan's on his way here looks like i'm sure it's user error on my part so okay perfect thank you you'd think i'd be used to this over a year into uh covet but i'm not so um really briefly we're going to start with an overview of the twu area program and then from there we're going to go into really the purpose of today's presentation after that i'm going to talk about some of the history of different conversations that we've had about the bicycle and pedestrian safety along bell avenue and then i'm going to discuss a joint effort as city of denton texas women's university area traffic study and the results of that traffic study from there we're going to talk about some of staff's recommendations if the city council does give direction today for us to proceed with the bell avenue bicycle pedestrian corridor after we talk about staff's recommendations then we're going to do a value comparison so as i get into the discussion on the twu area program we do have the mingo and rudel extension projects where we're going to have some significant right-of-way ask of texas women's university and so we just want to show you the comparison of what in the early stages we're looking at asking of twu in comparison to the proposed investment for the bicycle pedestrian corridor at the conclusion of today's presentation we are going to be requesting feedback from city council first on if you want us to proceed with this project or not and then if yes what you want the scope of the project to entail so really success for us today is first getting clear direction from city council do we proceed with this project which is currently less than 30 designed and then if so we have a couple of questions that we need to have answered so the texas women's university area program really was the city of denton's first attempt at that holistic more programmatic approach to project management and in october of 2020 we assigned tracy beck who's here with us today as the project manager for the twu area program and she's really done a great job of kind of setting the stage for that more programmatic approach to project delivery we've actually got two projects that have already completed so one is the twu traffic study and i'll go into in a later slide greater detail on that traffic study and then recently in december of 2020 the bell avenue wastewater project was completed currently under construction and you can see the signs at mckinney right now is the bell avenue water project and that project's been underway since december 2020 and it's getting ready to wrap up in december of 2021 in march of 2021 the city council approved two different design contracts one of those design contracts was with kimley horn and associates for the bell avenue bicycle pedestrian corridor and then the second one was with bridge farmer and associates and that was for several projects that are part of the 2014 bond program including the mingo rudel intersection rudel widening mingo riding and then the mingo quiet zone which includes several intersections that follow that union pacific railroad line that runs parallel to mingo road texas women's university also has several projects in the area one of them is they want to expand their access at frame street they're also looking at doing a campus-wide drainage study and as a part of that drainage study the city also has some drainage studies that we're looking at we want to first get the information from the excuse me the twu drainage study and then from there do our own studies on willis and oakland following that oakland study we do know that we're going to need to do a drainage project on oakland as a part of a future cip and that project will also include reconstruction of oakland so really getting into why are we here so as i mentioned as a part of that twu area program bell avenue has had intermittent traffic closures dating back to october 2020 due to the water and wastewater projects that have been under construction bell avenue is currently closed from chapel drive to administration drive and that's changing a little bit on a daily basis for the construction of that water utility project so as a part of the closures that are currently underway city staff and twu staff have been in discussions about the potential of maintaining those existing traffic patterns and what i mean by that is maintaining the closure of bell avenue from chapel drive to administration drive until the potential construction of that bicycle pedestrian corridor is completed so based on the feedback received today from the city council the anticipated construction completion date of the proposed bell avenue bicycle pedestrian corridor would be quarter three so sometime in the summer of calendar year 2022 and again this project is still very much in its early phases we're at less than 30 percent design right now to date staff has received very minimal feedback from residents regarding the concerns of those construction related closures on bell avenue so obviously with texas women's university being essentially bisected by bell avenue conversations about pedestrian safety are not new to the campus actually dating back to 1962 a pedestrian bridge was constructed at the twu campus in 2008 the decision was made to close that bridge the primary reason for the closure of that bridge was really structural concerns and in 2017 that bridge was closed and instead of having the bridge it was replaced with ag grade pedestrian crossings two of which are located on the north and south south end of administration drive in september of 2018 i know a few of you were on council at that time that's when you first heard from chancellor fayton the twu master plan presentation and as a part of her presentation chancellor fayton discussed about the importance of an auto free pedestrian campus core running through bell avenue as i mentioned in october of 2020 that's when we really started this more programmatic holistic approach to project management with twu's area program being that first area that we focused on from that programmatic management approach in march as you heard earlier that's whenever we um entered into the design contract with bridge farmer and kimley horn and associates for several projects in the twu area and then in june i know some of you heard presentations from tracy back at the mobility committee on some of those very preliminary designs she then gave a very similar presentation to the traffic safety commission and then just over a month ago you heard from chancellor fayton an update to that twu area program master plan where there was a focus of that importance of the pedestrian experience with an auto free core on bella avenue so really briefly um back in 2019 the city of denton and texas women's university entered into a joint partnership to conduct a traffic study and that traffic study data was collected in fall of 2019 so pre-covid data was primarily conducted collected in september so after the twu school year had begun and then in fall of 2020 that study was produced the study included 21 different intersections and it looked at today's traffic volumes as well as for that forecasted projections for the year 2045 each intersection was analyzed based on the assumption that bella avenue would be closed for a certain section and only used for bicycle pedestrian and emergency traffic purposes the study concluded that implementing a bicycle pedestrian corridor between chapel drive and administration drive would have no significant impact to surrounding roadways until at least the year 2045 so based on the traffic study as well as regular conversations we've had internally with police fire nathan has been very engaged in those conversations as well staff is recommending that we establish a 550 foot dedicated bicycle and pedestrian corridor from chapel drive to administration drive that will support emergency response vehicles using the northbound lane and i'll get into the details of the design in just a minute would maintain access for public utilities would create two dedicated bike lanes on the current southbound lane of bell avenue would connect to existing sidewalks would also accommodate delivery as well as solid waste vehicles and would maintain those existing traffic patterns that has been that have been established as a result of the current utility construction this recommendation would leave about 88 percent of bella avenue from mingo to us 380 open to vehicular traffic and so in looking at you know current plans and just thinking about the presentation that becky just delivered along with nathan george we really wanted to see how does this correspond to some of our current governing documents and best practices the dedicated bicycle and pedestrian corridor actually exceeds the requirements of both the 2012 bike plan as well as the 2020 draft mobility plan both of which call for shared facilities on bella avenue and then it meets the requirements of our public safety needs and that's been established through conversations we've had with police and fire we actually have representatives from the fire department with us here today and then of course it's supported by that 2019 traffic study which of course is attached as a part of your agenda materials for today so just providing a little bit of detail and again this is still very much in the preliminary design phase what we're recommending is that the northbound lane would be dedicated to emergency traffic as well as delivery vehicles utility and solid waste and so these two pink lines and again this is a very preliminary sketch represent where those gates would be located and i have a subsequent slide that shows what those gates would look like so we'd have the northbound lane dedicated to emergency access and delivery and then the southbound lane would be split to have both a southbound as well as a northbound bicycle lane to navigate the roadway motorists that are heading north would have the option to turn left or right on administration drive and then if they're heading south we're going to have what we call kind of a modified teardrop where there would be a turnaround and this is key just because it would still allow for access to the dining hall and key loading decks on the twu campus so getting a better idea of the gate arms that we're considering and we did consider several different options with police fire as well as with twu staff and really what we landed on is something that's very similar to what you see currently at our police training facility the images that you see at night are actually images of the gate arms that are currently in use at the police training facility and we've had really positive experience using them they're easy to see they're green when they're up they're red when they're down and so we'll be working on signage to make sure it's clearly visible during the day but this is the type of improvement that we're looking at recommending as a part of this new twu proposed bicycle pedestrian corridor so as i mentioned earlier one of the benefits of having that truly programmatic holistic approach is we're able to do advanced planning not just looking at a single project but looking at the impact of those projects on each other as they're planned over time so for and and again these projects are less than 30 percent design at this point but we know we're going to need about three acres at minimum of right-of-way for the rudel street right-of-way as well as the mingo road expansion project and so an estimate that we have right now based on very preliminary surveys as well as work that's happened with our right real estate team is we're looking at that asking about five hundred thousand dollars worth of right-of-way that we'd be requesting from texas women's university we have some pretty severe constraints on our options for right-of-way so the most likely place for us to go just because especially on mingo we're constrained by union pacific railroad right-of-way is we would need to encroach on the area that was previously housed by twu's golf course and so it is very challenging to condemn state property and it's not something that we would want to do we would want to go through this as a part of a partnership and so that's been part of what we've been discussing with twu as we meet with them on a monthly basis is here's what we know we're going to need in the future as a part of these important roadway widening projects so just kind of again this is all very preliminary but comparing the the ask we're going to have of twu in the future to the proposed investment that the city is going to make there's about ten thousand dollars difference we're looking at a total ask of about five hundred thousand dollars of twu and that's over and above the seventy thousand that were required that they've already committed for the traffic study and the city's all-in proposed expense for part of the bicycle pedestrian corridor is about five hundred and seventy nine thousand seven hundred so this afternoon what we're requesting is really direction from the city council on do you want us to proceed with this project first and then the second question is if the answer to that is yes do you want us to keep bell avenue closed to through traffic during the construction of the project because we're still at design and because we know that the water line is going to be completed in december of 2021 there would be a few months where we could potentially reopen it our recommendation is to keep it closed just because we don't want people to get used to using it as a through street if it's not going to be a through street at the completion of the construction and that would be about three to four thousand dollars to maintain the existing traffic controls and then if we get direction to proceed this evening after that we'll proceed with completing the final design from there we'll prepare a right-of-way use agreement it's very important to us that we as we have current city as well as twu leadership in place that we go ahead and codify the agreement to dedicate that right-of-way for mingo and rudel as a part of this overall programmatic approach to completing these projects and then from there of course once the design is completed we'll need to select a construction contractor and then initiate construction and with that i will conclude my presentation and am happy to answer any questions that you may have okay great questions for staff councilmember davis thank you mayor i have questions i think some direction as well as would you like me to hold direction until we've gone through questions or both at once no no both at once and knowing you clear and concise please not all over the place like you normally are absolutely the first thing i'll note before i do my question is i i think council has received comments regarding closure that may or may not have trickled all the way to to staff in all instances but we have received i've personally received speaking only for myself quite a bit of comment on the closure due to the utility work so i wouldn't i wouldn't write that write that off just yet and i know you looked at some different solutions for the issue have we considered automatic bollards the type that you see in in bigger cities for the existing street without really having to over engineer you know new medians modified teardrops turnarounds all these kind of things and in conjunction with that have we looked at or considered those automatic bollards on a schedule i mean we're still talking about using it as a road just a road with controlled access that's most important in certain parts of the day so have we looked at automatic bollards that are operative at a certain part of the day but could be lowered for emergency delivery and all those things yes so i appreciate the comment that you have received feedback and we have looked at the the bollards that would raise and lower the biggest concern there is the reliability particularly for emergency response issues we've got kind of the proven methodology with the gates and so that was the biggest concern was if there is an emergency and for whatever reason the bollards don't lower as planned then of course that's going to impact response times and so that was the primary reason that we opted to go with the gates versus those raising and lowering hydraulic bollards because you can crash through the gates if you need to i mean i mean literally right that's so you can go through the gate you can yes that is that is one of the benefits of course we wouldn't be encouraging motorists to give that an attempt but yes that that is part of the thought process and again we do already have the proven use of those gates at a few city facilities and then the the second part of my question was doing this on a schedule as opposed to um re-engineering the road and spending some money on rebuilding a road as opposed even if it's some of twu's money re-engineering a road as opposed to controlling access so we have looked at it at several options the primary concern there is if we are going to have dedicated bike lanes of course that would constrict us to only having one of the two either the northbound or southbound lane open to traffic so that is really what we were primarily concerned with is if we're going to have that dedicated bike lane what way do we choose that the traffic is going to go and you know are there options absolutely we could certainly look at that but we really want to make sure that we're truly restricting the access so that we're getting the benefit of that dedicated bicycle and pedestrian core sure i guess by way of direction i appreciate the holistic approach that we're looking at we have a need here they have a need here how can we meet in the middle i don't like that these particular projects are coupled because i think they're very different interests i'm not in favor of closing bell i'm in favor of potentially controlled access a little bit of background unt tried this in the 90s uh they ended up opening the gate closing the gate open the gate closing the gate uh it was i'm pretty much an abject failure um from a traffic mobility standpoint it was great for pedestrians so i think controlled access during particular times is good but the fact that you still have delivery access solid waste access emergency access it's still a road and will continue to be a road i also don't like the um the uh northbound bicycle lane crossover i think we ought to provide if we're going to do uh if we're going to provide for pedestrian bike in this area let's do them uh as side paths you know an extension of what we have now we're going to put some more twu is going to put some work in this area we don't have to re-engineer the whole road we can access control control the auto portion of the road and keep the pedestrian and bike off the road entirely without having to kind of reinvent the wheel for 22 percent of this stretch of road that the taxpayers already paid for so i'm not in favor of closing the road i'm in favor of access control for pedestrian bike safety to the extent necessary during school hours even you know seven to seven catch some night classes but to shut the thing down for taxpayer use i mean basically into perpetuity i can't be behind that okay councillor bett thank you mr mayor um i'm going to echo some of what uh councillor davis said uh i've received a ton of feedback in fact bell is one of district two's primary arterials for going north south if you're an idiot's hill in east you do you don't go over to carol elm falton malone that's not how you get north south you you go down bell um you would go down mingo except the traffic is ugly for the reasons we're trying to renovate it uh that everyone that i've talked to agrees that that desperately needs to be uh part of the regional plan and connect it all the way up with trails and stuff up to lake ray robert so i think you know the entire community is on board fixing mingo but like like councillor davis i'm i'm also um not comfortable coupling these um uh i i do you know if you if you live in this area that is your primary north south area and in fact um you know this is not against tw i used to work for them they're they're a neighborhood university nearby me i used to bike from my house to work and and there is the preferred path was up and down bell so you know to some degree that road is already more bike friendly uh in its existing conditions or maybe with the types of improvements that councillor davis was sort of alluding to better side paths but not stopping auto traffic um i think you can make that even better but that's already better than elm locust other nearby north south pathways um if you live in northeast denton uh the the other thing that that sort of bothered me a little bit and maybe you could talk me through some of this and i i know you're not responsible for but maybe somebody knows it better than just the the report that i was reading is it looked like the um the analysis was one day for mostly between 11 and five and i didn't know if that's a typical sort of analysis that we do to try to understand mobility patterns in a university that has monday wednesday friday and tuesday thursday classes uh and then nothing are very little in weekends and then summer patterns are different i feel like sort of one day between 11 and five felt like it might be a little uh well you know if you came to me with that sort of if a student came to me with that sort of analysis i wouldn't have i wouldn't have uh they wouldn't have gotten a good grade out of me kind of thing it's it's too thin the data is insufficient so you know and then then even that when i looked at the analysis i i was looking at some of the impacts that they they were saying that okay well if we close bell down these are the predicted impacts from the surrounding arterials collectors uh and and so one that i found or two that i found particularly interesting were greenwood and nottingham were were predicted to go way up and i can tell you from you know living nearby and the number of citizen complaints greenwood is already highly complained about the citizens in in idiots hill want greenwood fixed not additional traffic put on it so if you're trying to increase the density on greenwood because tw wants to shut down bell i mean i mean this is nothing against tw but i mean that that's sort of compounding traffic density safety issues and there along nottingham as well so um you know i i think if this unless i mean unless i hear sort of sort of something different and the community feedback i have is is is the reason we haven't told the city anything is we expected this to be temporary that we expected this is a you know a fix that eventually we'd be able to you know get back downtown again and without kind of looping around over into councillor davis's territory to get back into downtown so i'm i guess i have to say i'm my direction would be proceed with bingo at post haste but i'm not on board with uh with the bell avenue construction councillor maguire thank you mayor um first let me say that i'm fully undecided on this i'm going to listen to everyone's questions and i have i have a few questions and then i'll circle back to give my direction um so i i share council member davis's concerns about the design of those bike paths because they're and and i'm trying to sort of zoom out mentally and picture how cyclists would be approaching those bike paths um because they would be in share rows um coming coming from from north and south and then they would have to do this sort of crossing over maneuver for i mean what is 550 feet right and then like cross back um i feel like there must be a better way to to do that um either you know and and i know that the i'm looking at the mobility plan right now um and the mobility plan as it stands um does not include any other protected bike facilities except for just this one little tiny stretch so i guess i'm sort of puzzled at at why we would put this much effort into facilitating cycling just on this one little stretch of bell when for their whole rest of bell it's you're on your own you got to ride right in the lane with the cars um so i personally i i think that that um one solution to that should be um including protected bike lanes along the the stretch of bell from i mean at least from like university to to mingo um really uh well and you know all the all the way down well really all the way until it ends to be frank i think it should just i mean that's just really a thoroughfare and it needs to have bike facilities and i know that there are some areas where that's definitely a complicated proposition um but but just to narrow in on this area i think that it doesn't make any sense to be for those to be the only protected bike lanes on bell um so uh you let me go back to the the right of way so so we are requesting um 2.03 acres of right of way along redell and 0.85 acres of right away along mingo um i'm not i'm having a hard time picturing in my head like what that would mean or what that would look like um is that a large enough right of way for us to um you know bring it all the way up to arterial standards curbs gutters protected bike paths sidewalks on both sides of the street is that the kind of right of way that we're talking about are we just talking about enough for a sidewalk now we're talking about enough right away to fully extend expand the roadway um it's important to note though that we're at less than 30 percent design for both the mingo and redell widening project both of those projects are under funded so as we come back part of the reason that we had the bridge farmer contract approved they're bringing um the mingo redell intersection mingo widening redell widening and then that um quiet zone project all the 30 and then we're going to bring those projects back to you as a package and request some feedback obviously they're all important but they all have funding gaps and so we're going to need to get some feedback from you on which of those should we be proceeding with first and then work with the finance team and identifying funding so the main reason for putting this here is we just wanted to know at a minimum we know we're going to need about three acres and that's something that's very important to us that we partner with twu to get the necessary right of way in order to complete those future capital projects okay um i yeah that and that makes total sense to me i know that that council member beck dislikes the idea of linking bell with mingo and redell but if if bell were to close i mean there would need to be an alternative route around campus and i i think that that's what we're talking about here right when we're talking about um expanding mingo and redell um do you know um is is the university or the city planning to build any public either streets or biker pedestrian pathways through the land that's currently occupied by the golf course so that would be a part of the mingo and redell extensions we are looking at um potentially 10 foot side paths along mingo and redell so part of the thought process of course would be integrating that potentially with this bicycle pedestrian corridor along bell avenue but we are wanting to make sure that they're wide enough to accommodate not just pedestrians but also bicycles as well okay all right but no um no streets that would be open to cars are going to be running through the golf course no not that that is um as a part of twu's master plan they have plans for athletic facilities and other on-campus facilities but there would not be any public streets planned as part of that okay um so the the mingo and redell um projects are moving forward correct like regardless of what we do here they are moving forward but again they are underfunded and so that's something that as a part of next year's cip we're going to be having conversations with council on prioritizing those projects and then working with the finance team to identify necessary funding to complete those projects once we get to 30 design we'll have a better idea of how much funding we do need to bridge that gap okay um i'm gonna i'm gonna listen to um council member bird's comments or questions before i provide my my um direction but um i i i do want to say in terms of sequencing um if if it's possible i would really prefer that we get the the projects on mingo and redell done first before we close bell um that that seems like it makes sense but then again i i also hear you on on um not wanting to encourage patterns of traffic through bell but i'll leave it there and i'll i'll come back with my direction thank you council member i remember when i worked at twu for a number of years and i remember this conversation about closing that campus um was way back in the early 90s and so the idea of doing that it's just simply it's it's not a new idea we just have new people and uh that idea has uh you know just stayed around but then that's what the concern is is that it's been around for so long there's something that's amiss about this particular um uh idea or need or want from twu is just still here so there's a missing piece uh with that and i'm hoping that um this council today uh will allow tws just some more time i think we just still need a little bit more time on it um so i know that i i probably won't agree to it at this moment um i do i'm still very very hopeful about mingo and redell i travel that road like literally every single day and almost always very uh hopeful to see the little pink uh you know little pink flags come up and seeing the surveyors coming out and uh the concern is with me uh coupling those two projects together i know we have to work with twu i know i understand that we have to you don't have some agreements um but that mingo road is it's just growing and it's very intense uh and those those bicyclists on that road it is tight uh and there are a lot of bicyclists on the road and some are within that little bitty stretch of piece between the grass and you know where the cars are so it's a very very dangerous road uh so i would i'm hoping that we can find the the happy medium with texas women's university uh to know that the idea to want the need is not gone for me it is just not gone i just think that we need to i don't know it's something i think that we need to to find a missing piece a missing link in there for that so i'm not totally opposed but i just don't think it's right right now uh homeowners uh we say that we didn't hear very many much from them in that area uh i it's just a rental area it's around a university so there's not really a whole lot of homeowners out there i know there's got to be some some folks out there that would be interested in that call um that's where i am so mingo rudell absolutely um the middle piece we're gonna have to look for thank you okay um a couple of questions from me um i think that the thing the important thing to point out is and and i've not heard a lot of discussion about it but we don't have mingo and rudell is if correct me if i'm wrong are coupled because we're going to have to negotiate with tw state university and nancy university system congratulations to them it's outstanding but we don't have eminent domain options so absent an agreement with tw it does not look promising to effectuate growth on mingo and rudell am i wrong it would be very challenging um from our legal department and i don't want to speak for for catherine but it is not impossible is my understanding to go through the eminent domain process it is just very challenging with it being a state agency sure and then just to draw a straight line tw wants to close the the road and they're willing to that's why they're coupled because they're saying hey we'll work with you over here but we need you to work with us over here yes sir it's a benefit of that more programmatic approach we haven't just been having conversations about mingo rudell and bell we've been talking about all of the projects that the city and tw has planned across the entire general geography of the twu campus and then and then i just want to note the the importance of this to me is was captured in the new state law so and correct me where i'm wrong but it's i have it as uh sb 1055 makes it a class a misdemeanor a state jail felony for striking someone and injuring them in a pedestrian walkway and you have to yield now so if you're going down bell at every crosswalk i don't know if we've counted those but you would have to stop and yield um and if someone's unfortunately hit then then that that the consequences by state law have been bumped up as of september 1st and so that's that's a concern for me and just to understand we want to protect the it's important to me that we move forward because i've heard the same thing i understand people want to use bell avenue and i could get on board with something councilmember davis said about maybe open it up on the weekends you know that sort of thing like there's a there's a phase don't redesign in a way that it can't be opened on the weekend and we just kind of educate people during the week it's closed but um for me it's we're trying to do three things keep the the students and faculty at twu safe give them a safe place across the new dining hall which is now on the other side of the road that's that's a key component the dorms are on the side of road all their future growth will be on the other side of the road keep them safe then we need to widen rudel and mingo and so we're going to have to work with this with twu to to accomplish that quickly um versus going to long ray so that so to secure those streets that's important to me to widen those but then also to incentivize twu as they grow to grow in that footprint on the former golf course because if we don't then all of a sudden if they have to start growing to the south now you're looking at neighborhoods that we're trying to protect but they're saying hey we can't something's got to give right they got to feel comfortable and safe that their students and faculty are going to be across the street or do they feel like hey there's less traffic down here on the other end of bell so now let's start acquiring property down here and and make that that that cross across belt more not as deep i don't know what their their approach would be i'm just concerned about it and i think it's it we're striking the good mix of saying it's it's a segment of road that has no other kind you can you can access it just as easy and i guess that's my other question have we considered locust and elm in this study kind of if we're going to reverse some of those potentially um i'm not sure if i'm answering your question correctly but locust and elm were part of the traffic study whenever it looked at the net impact of the potential closure of bell avenue for the bite peg corridor got it so my question would be have we done a study to see if maybe we we reverse those so it's it's one way on locust or make it two way for a segment of the university or just have we looked at modifying the one way travel at all to to accommodate people because then you're only talking about one block difference either way but just not sure if we've looked at that at all um i don't know that it's been looked at in the context of the impact to twu i know there have been conversations on the one way versus two-way traffic in the downtown area on elm and locust but um that's something we could further look into as as we kind of look back into what is our downtown plan and conversations that we have going on right now about elm and locust with tex dot as well as the new streets which would be the next area we'll be focusing on after we get elm and locust reconstructed okay yeah so that would be that's kind of my phase approach i support us moving forward i've received again the same emails of people that's their way to get there and understand that but i also understand if we can widen rudell and widen mingo we keep a lot of people safe and those towers are important to me i just think it's important that we understand if there's an emergency you know to have that segment closed the emergency vehicle can do whatever they need to do and hopefully that never comes but at the end of the day we have to plan for those type emergencies we just had an emergency on rudell where it's only two lanes right and they took up a lot of the traffic with with emergency vehicles and so that road was was impacted and it just shows the importance of the fact that we need to expand capacity there quickly and the fastest way to accommodate that is to partner with twu and and their goals on keeping their faculty and staff and students safe at the same time they'll hopefully show accommodations and we can get a project shovel ready and and apply money to that to get those things expedited so out of that the students faculty visitors of twu are safe we've expanded capacity on rudell we've expanded capacity on twu and we've not had to work with a railroad that we're still trying to get quiet zones in place and it's been five years so you know it just that's how long these things can go and so to move quickly we can get to a point where we can apply money to it and if we need to add the slight variable to get a consensus i'm all for that let's just say saturdays and sundays it's open great let's let's make that accommodation let's lower the cost of we working the street but at the same time we're accommodating the twu request keeping everyone safe moving those other two roads which is my priority mingo and and rudell forward quickly so it becomes just a financing issue and not a right-of-way issue so that's my direction um council mayor portu melzer thank you mayor uh i'm all for uh the city and twu looking comprehensively at a relationship you know we're important partners to each other but i think the the accounting in this value comparison is is just entirely off uh first of all the assumption that twu is wouldn't see a benefit in the rodel and mingo you know and viewed and and and you know that this is classed as just a give by them we're putting value into twu in those improvements uh so and and it's not like the city contribution to doing to bringing those benefits to twu is zero as it's shown here that's you know that's not even funded now we know it's it's significant similarly or in addition the value of giving up one of dentin's streets is not the cost of doing the carter construction the value of of a street of dentin is at least in the millions what does it cost to build a street uh you know what is the value of a street so uh i i i think a much broader conversation to make this sort of equitable arrangement to you know uh meet everyone's goals uh you know uh is in order but um this is an entirely inadequate analysis i think it's a very large give up i love twu i love my family members too but i don't give them a street of dentin uh you know a very significant give up like that for good reasons i totally understand why they you know why they want it and uh even even though the actual pedestrian the actual safety records there it's below average for dentin but i understand why they you know would seek that and why it would be a good thing but to make it in any way equitable to the taxpayers of the city of dentin i think we'd have to look at something of of comparable value uh and the you know the fact that right away is involved in providing additional value to twu in rodela mingo that that doesn't compensate even close so i'm not supportive with the thought that you know with what's gone into it so far i'm a no i'm not a heck no i think it's possible to arrive you know at uh at something equitable between the you know the two great partners uh but i haven't seen it yet okay anyone else councilmember armater yes so uh my direction is it's kind of a mix of what some of what others uh have said um so first of all uh i'll say that i i do support um bel uh being a you know pedestrian bike and emergency vehicle only um access i was initially uh when i first heard about this um you know very much uh opposed to it um and you know hearing from community members opposed but as i came to understand that uh redel was going to be essentially the new the new bell um that uh you know appeased my concerns uh and also of course seeing the great advantage uh not just to the twu community but to the city of making that uh section safer uh for bikers and pedestrians i'll say that i i really liked councilmember maguire's suggestion uh about uh extending uh the you know bike lanes all the way you know across university and to mingo um i know uh you know i i myself i live in the noddingham woods area and uh when my daughter is biking from there to downtown you know uh her way to you know go through twu because it's great to bike through there will be even better when we get cars out but you know the the big uh point of concern is university um and i drive on university all the time and uh see accidents there um and uh and near accidents uh and it's just really really dangerous i i'm sorry not accidents collisions collisions they are not accidents um and it's especially dangerous for bikes and and pedestrians on on university so i'd love to see that extended i know that means working with tex dot um but i i think that's important uh for the dent community also for the twu community um i i really like uh mayor protem's uh point about um the uh the value uh of this deal um you know of course i disagree you know on um you know i i'm supportive of the uh uh making uh you know bell uh uh bike pedestrian emergency uh vehicle access area only um but i do agree uh that uh it is a pretty big deal and you know a lot of value this you know what we're doing to the street i wouldn't say giving them the street because we're changing the street um we're giving it away uh you know cars can no longer access right but pedestrians and bikes um uh from the community you know it's still open to the public in terms of pedestrian and bikes uh so i don't quite see it as giving away the street um but it is you know changing something really fundamental um so i would like to see you know more from twu in that cooperation um i think that uh messaging is really important um as far as kind of making sure that people understand that redel is going to be the new bell uh that we're not just shutting down access we're you know uh widening um in in a such a way that you know not only widens the street but to make uh sidewalks and uh protected bike lane um and so i think it's important that we that when we message we make it clear why bell and mingo and redel are being coupled and i might be misunderstanding so apologies if i am but there are some colleagues were had questions about why are these being coupled again i might be misreading those concerns so apologies if i was um uh but uh you know as as i see it they're they're being coupled um because uh redel as and the mayor and um councillor mcguire you know spoke to this too um you know redel is going to take over um for for cars you know where where bell is now what the role that bell plays now um so you know that's something that we can do with messaging um but i think and finally uh uh to echo uh what what council member mcguire said you know it would be really ideal if we could wait to shut down bell until uh the redel expansion happens uh that would be of course the best way to get people to see that this is what's happening um instead of just shut just being able to tell them oh at some point in the future redel is going to be expanded but that's not funded yet um so uh and anyway i would really like to kind of to try to work towards that goal um to have bell not shut down until of two cars um until uh redel is expanded and i would really like to prioritize that and make that redel expansion and the mingle expansion happen soon i did have a question um about uh the uh other piece of direction that staff was asking for i guess i need clarification on it um when staff was asking about the the uh close it whether to kind of temporarily close bell uh to traffic whether while uh work was being done um you know was my understanding that the question was uh not about you know are you okay or not okay with closing down bell in general of course you know people are uh free to you know uh weigh weigh in on that i support everybody weighing in on that um but as i understood it the question was about a temporary temporarily kind of opening and then closing depending on how the construction is going so i want to make sure that i understood that question and then once you clarify the question for me i want to weigh in on my answer okay sure no problem so just to hopefully provide a little more clarity we have really two asks so the first ask is do you want us to continue using city resources to pursue uh building the bicycle pedestrian corridor including completing the design so that's ask one and then if the answer to that is yes or some form of yes to the first question the second question is the water line is going to be completing in december of 2021 we will not have the design completed and will not have a construction contractor on board at the time that uh utilities is ready to reopen bell avenue so the question we have is do we maintain that closure so that people don't get used to using bell avenue again before we go to construction which would be spring summertime and we're looking at a quarter three 2022 completion date of that construction it's not a lot of construction it won't take terribly long to complete but really our concern is people getting used to using it as a through street again if we're ultimately going to close it okay got it so so then i did understand the question um but and now it makes more sense to me on why i wasn't hearing people answering because people uh you know who weren't answering uh were primarily i think saying no to the first part of the question so obviously i'm saying yes to the first part to the first question with some conditions um and for the second part of the question uh i uh i am okay with um opening and closing uh based on you know what's necessary for the construction i understand that it's confusing to people when things get open and closed but uh it's you know but i don't think people tend to get confused when they see you know if they see this street is opened up um they see okay it's opened up now you know and i can go through it and then if it's closed okay it's closed you know so there might be confusion about why um and when uh you know i find that it's kind of always the case with construction projects so i i don't i don't like the idea of the you know additional cost um uh to uh you know to keep it closed down just for consistency sake and to avoid confusion again people are going to be confused anyway why are they shutting down bell i think you know getting that messaging out there you know maybe even in signage about rodell is going to be the new bell um i personally think it would be great if we could rename rodell bell and call bell something else but i'm not making that a formal proposal because i'm okay because that's complicated um but uh you know it will just really take some strong uh strong messaging and again and to echo what the mayor said you know i i you know i feel for people in the neighborhood who are concerned about bell being shut down but you know like the mayor said i mean the university is going to it is expanding and uh you know i'm very grateful to you that they're expanding into their own property in the golf course instead of in the surrounding uh neighborhoods um and and in making that air in making bells safer for bikes and pedestrians it really is um you know it is it is not just for students it's it's a it's a great gift for people for whom mobility doesn't just mean cars councilman beth thank you mr mayor i'll try to be brief uh the thing that concerns me is these discussions about rodell and bell and and uh counselor armator alluded to it uh just a second ago that's the new bell um you can't really go past university that's all shops and homes and we're not going to uh imminent domain shops and homes on that north side so the new bellness if we turned rodell into that would of necessity stop at university whereas if we just look at our google maps a bell goes from arguably north of windsor but we'll let's just say windsor uh all the way to downtown it's already a major connectivity route just consistently it's it's a straight path it is why it's one of our northeast corridors connecting and to to make it i mean it would be lovely to have additional mobility elements but i by i urge council to consider what it means to chop up what is already a straight path through the city uh we wouldn't chop up windsor we wouldn't chop up king's row we're not going to chop up brady bray why are we chopping a bell um i think we could make the kinds of improvements that counselor davis talked about counselor maguire suggested that would make this an even better road while still maintaining sort of the the thoroughfare nature of it so that it is a comprehensive idea that that contributes and and i don't want us to lose the point that um mayor protem mentioned which is the safety record for bell and accidents is actually less than the dentin average so i know we lost our bridge but the bridge was actually more dangerous than crossing the road so uh i know because we used to tramp back and forth across it um so you know maybe we can make a safer bridge or maybe there's all kinds of things i i don't want to preclude any future arrangements i i just think that um this this concept that it's the new bell is is not a good idea thank you um counselor davis thank you mayor i'll also be brief because councilman brett covered a lot of my my points uh rudell is wholly inadequate to be the new bell it just doesn't cover the same territory even as redesigned the the behavior patterns the way that we drive those roads it is simply not a replacement i also agree with council member beck that the tv's goal does not require this response the goal of pedestrian safety bike routes does not require um you know giving over 550 feet of city street and of course people are concerned about it we um i i'm not sure i really like the the messaging of you know let's make sure we get it done before we can give it back to them it's their road i don't like the the kind of bait and switch of let's if we're not going to give it back to them let's not open it up or let's get us kind of lined up in the project timeline in such a way that people don't get used to it well they're entitled to be used to it's their road it's a major north south thoroughfare if twu has pedestrian and bike safety concerns if they have campus aesthetic concerns let's be clear that's part of the conversation as well it's not always the best to have a major thoroughfare through the middle of your campus as you develop if they have those concerns let's address those concerns maybe with the controlled access during certain time periods like we've talked about um but even with the redesign we've looked at it's still a road we still want it to be a road we still wanted to have all the functions of a road we just want to change the mix a little bit let's focus on doing that rather than uh you know spending six hundred thousand dollars of city money to to redesign the road i think the next step should be sending it back to conversation with twu about controlled access during certain hours or some some other compromise and at the same time you know if they're going to hardball on right of way let's just do that let's just find out what the price is and if those things are tied together then let's let's make it very clear and put all that out out in the open instead of kind of working through it like the maybe we will maybe we won't scratching my back etc let's just put our cards on the table and see how much that we're actually talking about okay and i'll just say chancellor fainton is is is really good about trying to be in the meetings we've had just the city manager and i are their administration has been really good about trying to be a good partner and saying hey let's not spend a bunch of money we're both quote unquote government entities and let's work together and she's just uh so that really is is the heart of it and i'll just i just want to make sure i have the timing right we've heard some statistics about uh traffic issues but my my concern is the cafeteria it seems like people were thinking back before the cafeteria before there were probably one of the largest dorms understanding the towers is on the other side of the road right that that to me has been a significant change but do we know how long that's been i mean i just i think that's what's driving the traffic across the street at a greater frequency before the cafeteria was on the same side of the road but now it's grown to the other side of the road and the dorm over there i think those are the components and as the university continues to grow that's the new growth projections and so that's what has me concerned not reflecting back to what the traffic patterns used to be but other i just need to hear and ultimately where we are unless i hear something different is that the direction is not to proceed and there's a smattering of if if there is time controlled but i just need to hear from others if there's a time control opponent that matters i've not heard from councilmember mcguire i i'm not clear on councilman bird what you what your feedback was just full transparency but ultimately there's not enough traction to move forward and we're going to we're going to move on we're past our time for this so if there's not any movement we'll just communicate that the answer is we're not going to proceed so mayor just to be clear the direction from council is we're not going to move forward with the pedestrian bike efforts and then we'll just work with real estate on the acquisitions of the right away and easements that won't be needed when we do have funding for the bike sidewalk areas there is and that is that what i'm hearing i just want to make sure that's what that's what i'm hearing as well so unless there's movement and i haven't seen any uh that that we would that's the path we would go okay see none thank you very much all right that takes us to item d which is ID 211806 receive report hold discussion give staff direction regarding a nomination of members to a board of directors of the denton central appraisal district good afternoon mayor city council cassie augden director of finance here to discuss the board of directors nomination for the denton county or denton central appraisal district so um the board's role in um in the district is really um to hire the chief appraiser and set the budget similar to what the council's role for the city is um the directors don't have any authority to set the actual values or the appraisal methods um that's that's up to the chief appraiser oh i'm sorry i'm not sorry i forgot to share my screen let's try this again and so the current board has five members and you can see them listed on the screen um and michelle french does serve as an ex officio member the board members serve two-year terms and the the current terms are about to expire at the end of december and council may nominate up to five nominees the eligibility requirements are listed on the screen so they have to serve they have to reside in the district um two years immediately preceding the day that they take office so proceeding uh january 1st 2022 um city county and school district elected officials are eligible um employees of those districts are not eligible and then also um people that are closely associated or related to anyone in the appraisal district are not eligible either so the the nomination process so um we will be accepting nominations through next tuesday so october 5th and then we will bring back a resolution for council consideration to vote on the nominations up to five um we will submit that to dcad they will compile all the list of nominees received from all of the taxing units and send it back to us by october 30th and then we will have until december 15th to vote on the nominations and then by december 31st they will announce the new board of directors so the next steps from today are um we are opening nominations up i sent out the application earlier um and we will accept those applications through next week tuesday october 5th um we will bring back the resolution on the 12th to vote and then or i'm sorry approve the nominees and then in december council will actually vote on the board members so total votes for all the tax units is 5 000 city of ditten has 170 of those votes um disd has 654 votes this year ditten county has 567 votes um and just historically council has opted to to take all of their votes and vote for one nominee again that's up to council's discretion you have up to five that you can um nominate so that is the end of my presentation i'll take any questions questions for staff seeing none okay thank you very much appreciate it okay takes us to item e receive report whole discussion give staff direction apartment id 211419 receive report whole discussion give staff direction on the development of a comprehensive affordable housing strategy okay can we get confirmation if the consultants have zoomed in yet okay staff has the have the consultants been added to the line okay oh there we go i don't know how many there are one more hi emily are you able to hear hi i'm here emily from the investment fund okay just one second we're gonna wait on rebecca right yeah okay it's all right mayor just one yes thank you thanks good afternoon everybody good afternoon and i don't know who would be in charge of saying if there's someone pending to get in rachel or steward is there some or billy is there someone waiting to get in it might be nobody okay nobody waiting okay you guys moved really fast today yes okay well and we can take a you take a break is that all right that'd be helpful thank you great yeah so so let's be back it's 306 we'll take a break till uh 320 we'll take about 15 minutes and then we'll be back thanks so much so 320 we'll be back on thank you and welcome back to this meeting of the denton city council this 320 we're back on the record and uh i called it before we were on item e which is a report to hold discussion and give staff direction on development of a comprehensive affordable housing strategy good afternoon mayor and council danny shaw community services i'm gonna start off with just a quick introduction the presentation will be conducted by our consultants emily dowdall and rebecca rothenberg they worked on the strategies with us and we'll do the presentation today so we'll get through the presentation and then take questions after i'm gonna share the screen here and then for the consultants i'll have to run it so if you'll just let me know when to advance the slides all right the presentation is going to be on our dent housing strategies as most of you are aware the city did engage reinvestment fund and atria in a phase one assessment where we did an analysis of our housing needs and then we did a presentation in front of council in february of this year where at that point council gave direction to go ahead and move forward with a phase two to introduce some potential draft strategy toolkit so we're going to work through that today and the consultants are going to take you through some of that analysis of what the needs are over the next 10 years and then we're going to review some of those strategies get feedback from council on those and then take direction on next steps as we proceed through this process so with that i'm going to turn it over to the consultants hello everyone rebecca rothenberg i wanted to start with a recap of where we left off from the needs assessment based on the data and community engagement process understood that the greatest needs were for deeply affordable rental housing roughly less than 50 percent of ami i think at that time around 700 or 800 dollars for a one bedroom home ownership for moderate income households so that's roughly 80 percent of ami housing needs for seniors both for renters and homeowners who are going to be experiencing increasing housing costs for maintenance and then also the needs for supportive services for those who are at risk of homelessness extremely low income the working poor persons with disabilities and also a growing homeless population and then finally housing opportunities in what you know hudspeak is areas of opportunity or basically areas with access to quality schools and services and not necessarily a concentration of subsidized housing in one area and then since that time we looked at some of the changes that have happened in the market since we first did an analysis and what we're seeing and you know you probably see it every day but the increased demand for home ownership particularly in the in the dallas market from a national scale in the post-covid world when people are moving and have more flexibility to move to areas that they like to move to there's been even more of a demand for home ownership in the dentin market and so prices as a result have increased significantly i think the lower chart is the best illustration of that but the yellow bars show the distribution of sales prices in 2019 and then 2020 you see everything shifting to the right and the biggest loss are those homes priced between 150 and 200 thousand dollars so that that market is is going away so we're going to be seeing an even more demand for moderate and low-income home ownership opportunities next slide so from a from a high level we're trying to summarize the approach in a pragmatic way understanding that there are limited resources and there are ways to be practical and innovative to address the needs as best as possible so in in general it's finding ways to build at a lower price point and to be able to do that creating the foundation through zoning and by empowering your local non-profits and also your local for-profits that may have been priced out in competition with national developers wanting to use the land that's available whether it's infill or underutilized buildings also if you have key large parcels that can attract national developers to be able to have a seat at the table so that you can negotiate with them hopefully encourage certain types of development and also be able to preserve the the housing that you have that is priced moderately particularly now that we're seeing such a rapid increase in prices so this is a summary of the housing demand that we left off with and this has been slightly adjusted for a much higher or a much lower vacancy rate amongst homeownership opportunities and I want to preface that we are focusing on low moderate to middle income demand because based on what the market's doing middle income and upper income housing is being met by the private market and so that's not necessarily something that needs subsidy or support specific to housing affordability that being said we are also we the city of denton is also not the only entity that is building housing that's affordable to your workforce and moderate income households there are other partners the non-profit organizations you have your your state and you have some element of private market activity that can also address that need so it's not all the city's responsibility to meet that however the the strategies that we have laid out we do try to estimate or put out goals for what these programs can do so I think we sort of captured it in the approach but the strategies that we have laid out we have five and with each strategy we have action items a lot of these action items work together so they're not all in little bubbles and this action item does this and and that is a way to maximize the benefit so we have infill so using existing land that may not be developable right now because of zoning and or rehabilitation of existing buildings that may not be a priority for the development community based on their capacity and so the way that we can encourage that is to amend the zoning in certain areas that we want to target more diverse housing options and support developers who want to meet city's goals we also want to encourage non-profit developers to be able to use these parcels particularly because particularly in the dentin region your for-profit developers have the capacity to make a really good profit in greenfield sites so the infill sites are more difficult to build even if they are profitable they're not as profitable and so to find a way to encourage development particularly with non-profits who want to build within the built environment and then preservation of your existing affordable housing stock and finally being able to access the information or the tools or the education necessary to make all of these things happen so with that i think we can hand it over to emily to talk a little bit about the mba and get us started in strategies hi everybody i'm emily dowdle from reinvestment fund nice to see you all this afternoon so as you know we completed the mba at the beginning of this year and the mba is a tool that uses statistical analysis to inform housing and development strategies it classifies markets across the city of dentin according to general characteristics strengths and any signs of stress we also analyze the potential for displacement of longtime residents where prices are rising rapidly and also areas of opportunity and altogether the idea is to take these tools and use them to apply the strategies that we've identified in a way that most efficiently can add more housing choices in each market type as you can see there are different strategies that would be suitable within each market context next slide please so the first strategy is infill housing and and just orient you a little bit to the slide you'll see the same format throughout this presentation so for each strategy we have a set of activities and they're all designed to work together so both within each strategy and then across all the strategies and we'll give you more details about how these all interrelate and their respective timelines and budgets but we've saved all that detail for the end first we want to give you sort of the concept of the programs so infill strategies are include things like small homes cluster homes professory dwelling units and they really run the gamut from serving folks who are homeless to middle income families so they are not just a subsidized housing program and they actually rely on a lot of market private market activity to do the work and to get the bill so you see here we start with revisions to the zoning code and those zoning changes here relate to standards and design requirements for these building units that will allow small homes and adus to really add value to properties the idea is that while Denton already does allow for adus new zoning and design guidelines can ensure that they're going to increase the value for property owners and also create something that is appealing to neighbors as well they are something that can both increase housing options for young professionals and seniors people who maybe don't want to live in a multi-family building but need a smaller unit maybe people who are looking for something that is an walkable area but this strategy can also lowers construction costs because there are a lot of new prefabricated models for adus and for small homes out there for example like the company boxable which is based in Texas and therefore they can lower the cost of housing because they really significantly reduce the cost of construction next slide please so this is an example from Dallas that really demonstrates how when you create zoning that allows for this kind of development you don't have to have the city subsidizing development so these homes were produced by the private market and they are accessible to households earning the area median income and builders were able to build this at this price because those zoning changes so you can see here in the picture four units where typically there would have been just one and adding so not entirely changing the neighborhood character but adding more units at lower cost next slide okay and then this is an example of a small housing program this would be homeownership opportunities for formerly homeless individuals and it's done at a half or third of the cost of traditional multi-family supportive housing so you're getting a lot of units for your dollars and it also works really well for partnerships with churches and for other non-profits this example was done with a partner a non-profit called city square and as you can see they're actually these units look pretty good as well as costing not a lot of money these are small pretty small units and they also can incorporate some supportive housing features all right next slide so this portland example is to show is an example of how successful it can be for adus to add value to their owner to the to the homeowners property in this case it's a pretty mature program for the city of portland where an owner can go to the city for assistance with basic permissions with selecting a model with getting the financing which is a critical piece connecting with a non-profit builder developer to site the property the building and this is all at no additional cost to the city other than that staff that staff expertise there are some examples of adu programs closer to home in austin and elsewhere but we selected this portland program to highlight just because they've done really well at establishing relationships with lenders which makes the the process go a lot more quickly and smoothly and the city can can be there to sort of provide technical assistance but not be producing buildings itself all right next slide okay and here's an example of how you can think about targeting these different programs by the mba markets so you can see that these cluster cottages the small homes would be would go on larger vacant parcels but not in the highest vacancy areas so middle markets and transitional markets potentially they could go in distressed areas based on some of the contextual factors and site availability adus are a little bit different here we'd be targeting areas that have single-family homes with larger lots that have space for the adu and also areas with rising displacement risk where people are looking for different housing options where prices are rising all right all right and i'm going to turn it back to rebecca okay so for a lot of these programs to happen including small homes or cluster homes or backyard cottages the city needs to understand where they can go so the the first step i mean it's in strategy too but we'll see later on in the timeline that it's one of the first steps is to create an affordable housing overlay which shows where certain activities can go and then with that comes an incentive package that can further encourage non-profit developers or individual owners or landlords or larger developers to build the things that the city would like to have built in these parcels so that includes having staff available to provide guidance having resource materials and marketing having support staff to provide technical assistance to those developers and then also you'll see in strategy three if it's a specific targeted project additional incentives that that can be provided slide so here is an example of a mixed use zoning district in san marcos which this specifically offers density bonuses for affordable housing development and it also shows how you can have different types of development that lower the construction costs thereby lowering the price point without necessarily having subsidy so for your your very low income target market you can add subsidy but for low moderate income households you may be able to do this just with the programs in place and incentive packages so here we have the cottage courts which we which emily walked through a little bit which are those cluster cottages within an existing parcel you have a little work spaces apartments above retail and then what this also does and as you can see here it's called a character district is it increases walkability it increases the ability to have more shops and restaurants and places together and collectively can increase property values of the neighborhood and this is an example of how cities can partner with housing authority to do larger development that's mixed use mixed income i i worked with shreveport on this project where they had acquired parcels of land in their downtown area and then solicited a developer to develop mixed use mixed income housing in that area with a commercial component with a retail component and also with a scattered site homeownership component so it shows what you can do when you have some control of the land when you have incentives so they had an incentive package and then you reached out to development teams with capacity and this is also a part of their choice neighborhoods initiative so there are a lot of other returns they receive from the developer including the developer building park space and partnering with their arts coordination next slide to show the ideal spots for affordable housing again we're not talking about necessarily your established single-family type neighborhoods this will have to be mindful of existing land use where there is already an element of rental housing demand an area that can support more infill development a more urban landscape and more walkability so based on the mva looking at the steady middle and transitional markets strategy three is enabling your local builders with your non-profit and for-profit to be able to use these identified parcels and then also increasing the capacity or partnership with the housing authority and where it's needed to be able to attract larger development teams and be in a position to set some of the terms with them so it's not just larger developers coming in and doing what they want so the first part is increasing the capacity of your local non-profits and and what we had heard from speaking with the non-profits and our understanding of the development landscape is that the pre-development costs for a lot of development are high and larger developers can put in their own money and get paid back once they close but a lot of our non-profit partners can't do that and so they often have to partner with non-profit larger national for-profit developers to get anything done or they have to do you know one house at a time and so to be able to enable non-profit developers to do a little bit more and use these parcels that you know some of the bigger developers are not interested in doing will require some support so as as an example you know your your tax credit projects that developers are putting in are hundreds of units well some of your infill parcels can't support hundreds of units and so to be able to get anyone to build there will create need a little bit more support and it's likely going to come from your non-profit developers or your for-profit developers that don't do that scale and aren't competitive in the tax credit competitive cycle additionally there's an affordable housing incentive package the city you know works with cdbg and home funds and there's the state housing trust fund so it's finding ways to pull resources together for specific development that is a priority for the city and finding ways to use that as a way to market to developers for specific development and then what comes a little bit later on but also identifying where those priority sites are so these are sort of your kind of larger development that's that has the capacity for mixed use and mixed income development and then finally working with your housing authority to do low income ownership low income home ownership using your housing choice vouchers which which is feasible and increases home ownership opportunities for hud assisted households and this can be combined with the small homes model using advanced technology that lowers the cost of construction and so the subsidy of the voucher plus the lower price of development makes this a very feasible model for a lot of workers who wouldn't be able to afford home ownership otherwise in dentin and a few examples this is an example in detroit for home ownership for formerly homeless or those at risk supported through a rent-to-own model and it was done by the city and church groups and land bank properties and so you can see that they're their modular construction are prefabricated designed to replicate traditional cottages in a cottage format and so this is a this is a pretty good success model for how this can be done effectively and at a low price point so looking at roughly fifty thousand dollars per unit and this is an example of a design competition that the housing authority of el paso put out for affordable senior development and this would be an example of an incentive package they had funding available for developers and architects to submit their design ideas and then they selected the winner and funded that project through co-development with land that they already owned in a pretty well integrated site near transportation hubs and some shopping district and also a museum nearby and this one awards and is lead certified some people aren't wild about the modern aesthetic so if that's not for you you can have other designs but the idea that you would have a design competition and and bring in other folks in second okay and this is an illustration of where this might make the most sense for low-income homeownership this increases homeownership opportunities for folks who earning less than 50 percent ami so this is most appropriate for transitional markets and in some cases the distressed markets particularly in a mixed income environment and then also your affordable housing incentive so where you want to encourage development of mixed income and and again this can range both in price points and area so this can even go up to middle income households in a mixed income development so some of these hallmark let's see larger developments that can be complicated to do that happen to be in highly desirable areas will have incomes from lower than 40 percent ami to market rate so there's a there's a wide range i should also mention the for low-income homeownership particularly in partnership with the housing authority areas that the housing authority already owns would be ideal sites and for our fourth strategy it's looking at preservation of existing affordable housing and expanding affordable housing options so the first is a housing trust this is something that nonprofits typically manage where if they're doing a homeownership program they will have a stipulation in the sale agreement to preserve affordable prices so the appreciation is limited to a certain amount per year so that someone who benefits from the program can't then go and sell it in in three years and make a huge profit so it's a pretty common sense tool but nonprofits typically need to manage it so it's being able to help those nonprofits to set that up also creating a landlord maintenance grant again this is something that cities already do but there are ways to do that to also increase the supply of landlords landlords who are participating in the section 8 program so that they are willing to accept vouchers or to reserve the unit for moderate income households in exchange for grant assistance we also have a a homeownership program for the city that you know can be with the universities or not but the the idea is that there are uh plenty of low and moderate income workers that work for the city and or for the state that are going to be priced out of the homeownership market so this is a way to retain your workforce and also increase homeownership among city employees and then among city employees and then finally being able to reserve land for target development so this is a strategy for retaining long-term affordability so developers don't come swooping in as prices increase and can charge what they want and what they want and it's also a way to leverage your own interest with developers if you have control of sites that they really want and this is pretty critical at this time when developers are very eager to get their hands on parcels of land within established communities and build very high-priced homes that may not meet the goals of the city and here are a few examples so this is a housing trust fund in boston it's probably the oldest and the one that is most cited because it was it was so successful but the the the premise of the housing trust is is very straightforward it was a non-profit that developed housing and then when they sold it to homeowners they had a cap on how much the home price can increase over time and so this has preserved affordability for decades and also cushioned the community against the foreclosure crisis as well this is an example of a reuse of an underutilized building this is a boarding school and it was redeveloped into multifamily rental housing in partnership with the housing authority and the city as a mixed income mixed use deal so four percent bond tax abatements and this is something i'm familiar with i used to work at a non-profit in west philly and worked with this program but it's a home ownership program for employees with the university of pennsylvania so non-profits would redevelop homes and then would be able to access down payment assistance and housing counseling funding to provide housing counseling services to university employees and then would sell the homes that they rehabilitated to university employees and most of this can be used in in nearly all markets they make a little bit more sense in some over others but land banking unlikely in strong markets just because of the price of the land but because we're looking at housing all the way from formerly homeless to middle income households it makes sense in just about every market and then the housing trust preserving long-term home ownership affordability that may be feasible in middle markets consider but the price of the land may be too high but the ones that are most at risk of displacement are the transitional and distress markets and then i'm going to hand it back over to emily to talk about our final strategy thank you rebecca that's right so this brings us to our fifth strategy which is increasing access to information and assistance which you can imagine does really tie a lot of the other strategies together so the first activity is a landlord and tenant eviction prevention program an education campaign that would consist of documents and outreach and training assistance for landlords and also some grant funding for non-profit eviction prevention services another activity is developing tools that would support the land banking that rebecca just described to you including an interactive online mapping tool that a lot of communities with land banks use that would help to identify sites and land for the land bank and then finally increasing housing choice voucher usage and areas of opportunity that we identified in the housing needs assessment and combine that with a landlord education program about renting to housing towards voucher holders this would require of course partnership with housing authority to develop such a program and this could include online training modules to increase usage right now the majority of subsidized households are located in southeast denton and this is also where the data show there's the highest likelihood of price-based placement right now where prices are increasing quite substantially compared to their historic levels and so creating more opportunities for use of voucher than other neighborhoods can both increase access to opportunity for households and also serve to take the pressure off southeast denton as the major provider of lower cost housing as it is currently next slide so here are a couple examples i'm just going to walk through a couple examples of what a mapping tool might look like and this can support land banking and other sort of development tools so this is an example from cleveland ohio and you can see how it layers together different types of data with the parcel level data about these vacant properties that are available including details about the physical details about the property and it also includes a link to apply in this website to purchase a property so this is a public facing site where the city decides what properties they want to make available for development and they can also set priorities for the types of development that they want to see at each type of site well thank you and then this is an option using the policy map platform which is an affiliated company of re-investment fund but it also allows for layering in different types of data the policy map platform includes thousands of data indicators drawn from the census and from other third-party sources it can be combined with local data at the parcel level for publicly held properties or for identifying properties you would want to put in a land bank and you can see that there's sort of different types of of and this this is a tool that can be used both internally for the city but it could also have the option of being a public facing tool so we're going to go with those ways but thank you just to think a little bit more about how a tool like this can help with the disposition and best and highest use of vacant land is we took a look at vacant land by market category in our in our market value analysis classification system and felt that there were a lot of vacant parcels actually available in these higher opportunity neighborhoods including all the way up to the a markets but also many of the middle neighborhoods the b's and the c's and the d's and e's and so thinking about where you might want to target edu's and infill development as well as some of the other housing types we talked about with these vacant parcels next slide and then sort of i think this really illustrates how much more powerful it is when we take it from the table and put it on the map and you can see the parcels how they fall onto the market categories and also where they are in the city so you can see that many of them are clustered in sort of the central areas of dentin adjacent to universities in these uh in the middle markets and the d's and the e's and the f's areas that are really ideal for this type of development and areas that already have a lot of mixes of income mixes of uses and are relatively high density compared to the city overall so they make for ideal targeting for land bank acquisition and then redevelopment all right next slide um thinking about how the nba can inform these strategies um the landlord tenant eviction prevention program would be focused on the traditional and distressed markets because you know evictions are very closely tied to incomes and are concentrated in these markets um the parcel the the mapping tool can be used sort of more broadly up into the steady and middle markets as well um as rebecca mentioned um land banking activity isn't typically happen in strong markets because of the price of land um but in some cases it can be used to um to achieve different types of goals in those otherwise more expensive markets um if there's already available land um and then also increasing housing choice vouchers um similarly looking to expand them to the b and c markets and the d markets typically um in areas that would be treat uh job adjacent transit adjacent um for folks who are looking to get to work um and sort of expand from the traditional sites of those housing voucher concentrations all right and i'll turn it back over to rebecca so this is where we have all the details which i apologize in advance if it is overwhelming um because it's a lot um but wanted to preface that um a lot of thought went into this and this is um these are general recommendations but the purpose of today is to um have the first look and um incorporate your your thoughts and feedback um to be able to refine this to something that is implementable um so there are a lot of activities and they don't all happen at once um we understand that and a lot of this is set up so that it's developing the program programs or guidelines or creating the zoning regulations to allow the private market and non-profit partners to then create um the units um and so the the goals are based on what um the city um the likely outcome um for what can these programs can do um and encouraging the private market to address it um so i think we can go to the next oh i just one second i just wanted to back up um and we we broke it out by uh very low income low income and moderate income again following um the hud brackets um so to to translate again um rental units below very low are um roughly i think 700 800 for a one bedroom so this goes down to like 500 for a 30 percent of ami um and moderate um low and moderate is you know 800 to a thousand or a thousand to 1200 um and so it's not the moderate income for rental housing isn't necessarily um something that requires subsidy but some of these programs can still add that in so as an example um backyard cottages if if um a homeowner wanted to create a backyard cottage they would be able to do so and if they didn't have any subsidy we know would be able to price it at a higher price point if they so choose so that's incorporated here um for home ownership because of the increase in prices um in all likelihood home ownership opportunities less than 300 000 are becoming less and less um frequent and so um those will be target goals that the private market is not likely to to meet and here is a high level um proposed phasing so again creating the foundations uh to enable these programs to take hold um and then increasing the capacity of the building community and having the resources in terms of um site control land banking and packaging of um incentives and then the third year is some of the more difficult projects like um the home ownership and partnership with the housing authority um the housing trust so this assumes um houses are already being built so you would need a housing trust and a home ownership program um for year one um i know that the city already has um increased staff um capacity or has that in their budget so this would be in creating in creating affordable housing overlays and the zoning um changes that would be needed on a parcel or district level um to enable infill development also the landlord repair grant it's a bit of a low-hanging fruit and then identifying the sites that are available through gis and um uh through um the land banking activity next slide and this has a lot of the details so i don't know dana if you want me to go through each one or if you want me to do high level i don't think we need to you need to go throughout each one okay um i think we can we can say that we um color coded it uh based on um general timeline um and it's numbered by strategy and activity and um wanted to emphasize that this is not the city creating units this is the city for the most part this is the city creating a program um and so the budget is for the most part related to um hiring someone or getting technical assistance or software to uh create the program that will allow the private market to come in or your non-profits to come in access state funding whether it's a four percent or nine percent tax credit housing trust funds um foundation support um additional grant programs through hud to be able to implement um also um further your very low um income goals church organizations non-profits have their own um grants that they can bring in um and national partners that they can bring in so that's sort of the high level um idea behind it and also wanted to um emphasize for for a lot of these um having the consulting services to create the program and then having the city be able to manage it um it has to do with ensuring that the design elements um and the um the guidance and the lending programs are in place so that it increases values for the neighborhood and for homeowners in the neighborhood um i know that there are concerns about um some of the mixing of um rental housing and homeownership um when it's done um correctly and there are lots and lots of examples um home values uh increase significantly so i mean it you may end up with a situation where the home prices increase too much because it becomes such a desirable place to be because you're increasing um the variation in your housing stock so once you have a lot of different types of housing that's all really attractive and cute and it's walkable and you have your cafes and your restaurants then it becomes an even more desirable place to be and so that was also a large part of um the thought process behind it also um wanting to use um lower cost construction methods for the skeleton of buildings so prefabricated modular construction and then having the aesthetic component be a part of the requirements that that would then be on the outside to give it that little i don't know and uh finally um you have a lot of vacant parcels um but the zoning that is in place um means that they're really difficult to develop um developers don't necessarily want to go in and build a single-family home or do scattered site because it's it's very expensive um to do that but for um infill of um smaller rental developments whether it's your cluster cottages or duplexes um and we saw a few examples um will require some zoning adjustments um within your certain districts um and um that in partnership with um increasing your non-profit capacity and also your local builder capacity so these are um builders who you know aren't building thousands of units per year hundreds of units per year but certainly can be competitive for these um smaller projects um so increasing um uh bidding opportunities for your regional um builders who are not necessarily in the um in the affordable or um moderate or even middle income infill development right now um danny am i missing anything no ma'am thank you okay great and so um the idea now is to um receive your comments and feedback um and okay yeah i'm gonna bring the presentation down now okay great thank you and and if i could just for the for the council um obviously there's a lot uh to say but if we could be if we could agree no more than four minutes a council member to to just kind of give direction it's coming back to us i just need to know if that if where we are as far as if that's enough time or not um so that we can have kind of an agreement on how we're going to proceed to keep this uh on track so is is that a amenable four minutes a council member one pass does that work seeing okay great councilman maguire thank you um so uh first of all this is outstanding uh fantastic work on on the part of everybody who put this together this is so incredibly thorough um i don't think that i saw anything in here that i don't think is a a good strategy that i don't want to pursue so my direction is um yes let's move forward with this um i i do have a question probably more for our consultants so um i just on a personal note like the trajectory of my family changed completely when my mom purchased a double wide in 1984 um right so i'm i'm very interested in those you know low income kind of alternative housing options for home buyers um which you addressed um quite a bit um and just looking at like realtor.com right now there are currently 55 single-family homes for sale in denton there are zero mobile homes for sale and there are four town homes for sale um can you speak to what you think has led to to such a heavy weighting of single-family homes in the buyer's market in our city so i'm so i think i understand your question the there's the zoning that encourages single-family construction more than other forms there's also the cost of construction for multi-family so right now the zoning generally encourages single-family or multi-family multi-family can be a lot more expensive because of the type of construction and also the pre-development costs associated with that um and right now i think it's a turning point for prefabricated housing right now manufactured modular and prefabricated are all almost interchangeable depending on how they're fitted to the lot um but uh manufactured housing that has a modular housing um uh completion so put on a permanent foundation with um uh the infrastructure in place the sidewalks the driveway um changing out the roof and landscaping requirements um in in most places is considered real property and is now um considered more modular um so i think that is becoming um uh more more popular there is a little bit of a um uh growing pains amongst the um the companies that have traditionally built manufactured housing to be competitive with the a little bit more cutting-edge modular um housing construction and so that's why the design requirements um are pretty critical um that way um they you can work and and this is this has happened in in several like states and uh communities um working with a um manufactured housing manufacturer to create design standards that meet um uh jurisdictions or estates design standards um and then that can be coupled with even more design standards for fitting it out um so i think that i think we'll be seeing a lot more of that particularly as construction prices go up and also um as single-family builders are finding that they there's a market for much higher priced homes they're just not building moderate priced housing right now so a lot of um individuals are buying lots and putting those in did i answer your question yes yeah i answered i asked a complicated question you gave me a good complicated answer thank you um so yeah so my direction is um i i want to move forward with this i definitely want to i look very much forward to drilling down into what kinds of zoning changes and ddc amendments uh we can make to to facilitate um these priorities um and i definitely i know it's something that's that's already on our radar but i definitely want to put out there um that we always need to keep in mind um distribution of of affordable housing across different parts of the city and i should note that i say that as a representative of you know when when i look at the the um the market value analysis map of the city my district is is purple i have a lot of high value single-family homes in my district um and i think that we need more affordable housing in my district um so so let's definitely definitely do some distributing thank you okay uh councillor davis thank you mayor uh similar direction to proceed with next steps you know the devil's always in the details of course when we get down to some of the policy decisions and but i really appreciate the degree to which um that these five strategies they're presented in such a way it's difficult to disagree with them as five approaches and broad approaches to to addressing the issue um and and i like the emphasis on developing the market conditions acknowledging that city has a limited number of levers that we can pull to affect our housing market but really zeroing in on making us a kind of a force multiplier for the non-profit community and the funding sources that are out there with our limited funding as i say when we get down into the the details there'll be i'm sure plenty of lively conversations but ready to move forward with these broad strategies okay uh councillor batt thank you mr. mayor uh yeah i'll lead i'll like the others with my direction i really like these five strategy areas i particularly think that strategy four and five align with some of the goals that we recently talked about at our retreat so i think that's it's a good alignment sort of identifying patterns of preserved preservation or in this case expansion of of opportunities i think those are excellent and and i i too look forward to lively debate i i did sort of have one question and i'll i'm going to try to cobble together a bunch of questions into one question um and that is sort of how um if we are very successful um you know with making mixed use mixed income infill um we'll to some degree we will gentrify some of these neighborhoods and and and are there strategies that i didn't really see in the backup uh where we can avoid um that sort of element of of changing oh you know uh untowardly changing the character and nature of the neighborhood as we improve it uh you know i don't want to necessarily um you know i want to make it better for everyone but not necessarily change their quality of life i'll let the consultants address some of it but i think the goals around the trust and the land banking are all about preserving that and ensuring that it stays affordable for a long period of time so those are a couple of the very specific strategies towards that but we'll come alongside with our existing neighborhood programs to ensure that too but that will always be a risk in any transitional market that we just have to be paying attention to throughout the process i don't know if you wanted to add to it rebecca emily um i i might add that um it's something that would need a whole host of new strategies if the issue then becomes um pricing becomes too high because it's such a desirable place to be but then it's looking at some other um restrictions that um extremely high priced markets looking at now um including airbnb restrictions and um uh foreign investor restrictions um so it from a high level it's probably something that um to be aware of um but that it's you're i don't know if it's necessarily something to be so worried about just yet okay thank you right and it also speaks to me and you know get out in front of such market pressure and that's why we are looking at that you know displacement risk in southeast benton and why you want to start um acting sooner than later to um create more affordable options there okay thank you okay councillor berg it just all makes sense to me i think it's a uh great concept and i really appreciate the way that it's been proposed of course i just had a couple of questions and um just for clarification of what land banking is what what does what's the meaning of housing trust and also why are we particular to city of denton employee home ownership those three things okay so the housing trust is not um an ownership of land by the city but um a non-profit who would um develop homes for ownership and when they sell the home they um own the land beneath it and sell the home and through that um long-term ownership of the land they can have a restriction in or a covenant in the sale agreement where the owner cannot sell above a certain appreciation per year to preserve long-term affordability and the program that's proposed here is just to be able to put the tools in place for non-profits to be able to implement that um so that's the role that the city would have is technical assistance for a non-profit who is building home ownership opportunities to have a housing trust if they so choose um the land banking as it's proposed here is not um is a combination from my understanding is a combination of um uh purchasing property that may be held by a non-profit or even the public housing authority affiliate for infill development um and specific to the larger parcels it would be um proposed site control of the parcel without actual ownership so like a reservation to be able to transfer it to a developer but not necessarily a long-term holding of property um and i know there's a third one the third question again i'm sorry oh the city of denton ownership oh oh yes the city yeah the home ownership program yes yes uh so so this was an understanding of um how home prices are increasing significantly and a lot of your um necessary workers um will not be able to afford home ownership um and uh the city of denton just because um we're working with the city of denton so they i didn't want to propose a university or a large employer without talking to them first but it could be any employer but the concept is an employer who is rooted in the community can partner with uh the city and lenders to have home ownership uh priority amongst its uh workforce particularly its low and moderate income workforce and it can do that through home counseling um down payment incentive down payment assistance um and other incentives and they can also partner with some of the non-profits who are building so again showing the inter relationship it's like a volunteer employer fund is really what the premise is based on and that's it's an economic development strategy that helps bring in qualified workforce into the community and then allows them to live and work in the same community uh that we just target it in this conversation around to the city but again it could be expanded to a larger economic development strategy with large businesses here as well okay anyone else uh mayor pertin melzer thank you mayor uh obviously i'm really appreciate the fact that we're talking about this and that you're giving all these you know very rich and thoughtful examples and i really appreciate uh your uh first efforts here at the quantification and so you know this helps really clarify the next tasks and what i observe is that you know at least that in this first modeling effort if we do all 17 activities and 11 programs uh it doesn't come anywhere close to meeting the full need so you know that that's maybe a reality to accept or that suggests some things need to be scaled you know i said i suspect that some of these things just don't scale that much uh so you know uh one thought i have is that you know if just the reality is uh government efforts can't get close to the number with everything you know in the kitchen in the kitchen sink then then and you consider that i doubt we can actually execute 17 programs another not all at once i know this is time phase but i'd be very interested in staff's input offline you know uh in your next conversations with you know how many programs can we actually execute well at a time and then if it's less than 17 you know where is the need the most intense which part of the if we can't if we can't meet the whole need which part of the need is is it most critical for us to meet that's one question you know and so can we focus our attentions where you know where we can have the most impact and the other thing i'd ask is uh where can we scale and i don't totally understand how the unit counts on 34 tied to the activities later with the dollars uh and i'm but i look at the one item lihtc i gather it's low-income housing tc rental developments i don't know you'll have to remind me what what specifically that is that's the only thing that really has you know on the face of it the opportunity to scale with 200 per instance it strikes me that if we did something like one a year as a goal you would eventually meet that low low-income rental need you know uh because the scale is there so i'd be i'd be curious to know what exactly that is if you think that's what i'm saying is plausible but my direction would be uh okay let's see you know what actually can we execute what part of the need is uh you know the the most productive for us to focus on um yeah and just you know being being realistic about the fact that right if we do we do everything we don't we don't meet half the need uh so then what happens to the rest we have an opportunity to kind of pick our problems which problems do we have left i think that becomes the the next exercise so i'd address the the low-income housing tax credit is the litch so we don't control some of that aspect for example you have given resolutions of support or no objection to projects as early as 2019 that still haven't come online yet still aren't in the process of developing so that's a long-term um goal for um for that for that particular area to develop but it is large multi-family development so the more of those developments that are competitive in the housing tax credit process to the state the more likely those are to be developed and some of that could come through these incentives that we're talking about to help them be more competitive especially in the nine percent program which we are currently not typically competitive at this point and then overall we um i think we gave you the slide where we sort of laid out the proposal of a timeline for phasing and those initial phasing things are items that aren't necessarily scalable but they create that foundation for for policy that will then start to incentivize that behavior and so we could ultimately see exponential progress on those we're just not sure so they gave you some good um you know kind of cautious estimates they were very very conservative on those but i think once we give the tools to those the private market those non-profit developers and the for-profit developers and utilize the things that we have that we're not utilizing now like the infill does i think that's where we're going to start to see opportunities for that exponential growth we just need to get it out there and going so that's why it was phased that way and then as far as scale i think that because a lot of these strategies involve multiple departments i think we have opportunities like a lot of it would depend on real estate some of it will depend on development services so there's a lot of ways in which we can scale the city-wide resources to help cultivate these goals and concurrently and some of those will have to wait as we have resources and we'll we'll come back to you with that information well i really look forward to it and i and i you know i really love the clarity and the discipline of trying to see how these efforts would match up against the need thank you and i think to your other question the the next step conversation for for us for it with you all is just then what funding resources do we look at for each of these as we and which ones are you okay with how we're prioritizing the phasing so that'll be kind of that next conversation and then where we how we fund it yeah yeah if i may uh to the ad app i see it's 6.8 million but some of it actually is recurring some of it is one time you know might be interesting to uh you know try to sort of do a little time phase on that too what what's the total need you know per uh per budget you thanks and yeah then we're what are we going to use for money but that's the next obvious question thank you councilman roberter yeah several things uh first of all as others have said uh i really really like and appreciate this report uh so thank you for you know all the attention you've paid to dentin the data is so useful to have the maps um there's so much in there in here uh and i will be you know keeping my my printed color copy of this as a resource to refer to again and again um uh one uh first i wanted to say it um uh you know i i was surprised to see the uh eviction prevention program in the second uh priority list is instead of the first pardon my animal there um instead of the first uh you know given that uh you know this is what um at least what i'm hearing about most uh you know from constituents about fear of eviction um and uh including uh people experiencing homelessness who are homeless because they were either um you know evicted or or just kind of preemptively left them you know self-evicted uh because they didn't want to go through the humiliation of that um so um i would love to see that in the uh the first tier uh and i would also like to see it kind of beefed up and to include uh an eviction mediation program and you're probably familiar you know as the consultants in you know eviction mediation programs uh from elsewhere um but that can be extraordinarily effective kind of a little bit like what you're talking about in your first year with the dha housing authority landlord education program in this case it would be something for you know for all landlords where if there's going to be an eviction uh or possible eviction before you even get to that process we would have um you know it would involve either somebody currently on staff or a new hire but someone who's an eviction mediator or a kind of an ombudsman um you know that that those pro kind of programs prove really really successful and sitting down with this mediator preventing eviction so i would love to see that as as part of it and kind of moved up to that first tier um another thing that i don't see in here but which really fits so well with these the five strategies which i totally support and and these priorities um is a fee waiver program for nonprofits making affordable housing you know this is something that i've been kind of hammering on since i first got on council um as you probably know you know we currently have a kind of a limited fund that uh uh nonprofits can apply for but that only applies to owner-occupied single-family homes uh so you know i i see it very much meeting um these meeting these goals uh to expand it uh into a waiver program uh that is just an across-the-board waiver you know for which we could make up um some of that cost by you know raising fees uh for you know non-affordable housing fees and permits which we've we're already talking about doing separately outside of affordable housing you know talking about our our our permit permit fees um and uh you know impact fees being uh kind of behind the times um so anyway those can really balance each other out there so i would really like us to take that up as a council um and then finally something else that i talk about a lot uh is um about zoning i'm really glad for the attention to zoning here um i know that you know the the emphasis here is on kind of targeted zoning of targeted areas um i uh would really like to see uh for the greatest impact in addition in addition to that not in 70 targeted and opening up of all zoning of a single-family home uh area neighborhood to include you know town homes small homes uh tiny homes uh you know duplex triplex quadplex etc um you know we could do that uh with this with with the stroke of that's four minutes isn't the targeting um just to quickly i think it's just in the language so we're not using language like fee waiver but when we talk about affordable housing overlays with an incentive package that very well may be development incentives that would reduce the cost of development fees much like the development fee grant or an expansion of that which does already exist for non-profit developers so it's not left out of that conversation it's just not using that language of fee waiver that's the only difference and then with the eviction moratorium just to let you know it is deprioritized a little bit because we have so much federal funding right now available for eviction prevention so this looks at us kind of coming in later when that funding is no longer there and doing eviction provision programming after that uh to sort of start to fill in when we don't have that subsidy or support later on and in the in three years down the road okay and and then so i just want to want to touch on a few things uh more more for me just um questions or next next steps but so the gist of it is from from a just kind of a professional look at it i'd love to get more you touched on a little bit but how to balance the existing established neighborhood look versus more density infield just kind of how to balance that and identify the right places for that then i i really like the um the backyard rental component you know accessory dwelling thing so but maybe we come in and supplement that with some sort of uh security feature maybe background checks to kind of help people that may be less sophisticated or plug them in with services that say if you do this then we'll help you put it on you know just kind of i worry about that kind of that novice hey i want to help people but i got to keep them safe type thing but i like the accessory dwelling pushing that i really liked what you presented with respect to the i could see this so we're talking about infield development that has a commercial component or retail component at the bottom residential at the top because that helps solve when we're talking about food deserts that sort of thing we can program that space to say it needs to be fresh fruits foods this sort of thing so a small market or some kind of entrepreneur type focus on it saying we're you know reserve this space for a small business and we're meeting the housing need and kind of a neighborhood now has access to be it you know telehealth or something like that some kind of really really big community need that then they but they have to agree to partner and put something up top so i really like that idea of combining those two then how we be open to kind of hearing how to group that density with the with that commercial component you know how to how to incentivize that or participate in that we saw obviously the the 3d printed homes i don't know if that fits anywhere but i just like to understand what staff's thoughts are on that as an option if if you think it's something that we want to go forward with love to hear the the cost that you see or where it fits that sort of thing i watched a youtube kind of time lapse thing i just couldn't get my head around it so i had have to understand it better and then the i would like i could get behind incentivizing rent to own obviously that's a problem right the down payment down payment component so between the rent to own or the not not-for-profit down payment assistance program something that we could do around that anything to help people weather the storm of that that get over that down payment component would be important me like the city of denton connection because it helps us attract great talent and our non-profit same thing so that they could attract great talent but at the same time making sure we protect the taxpayers interest maybe there's a work x amount of time and get credit or something like that and then a process that helps us to incentivize accepting housing vouchers so that we can get that you know we have a backlog there so anyone that would want to participate in that space is great and then lastly if i could get just a note to ryan or you could help me get a note to ryan i want to try to create a a facebook post that has both links i mean it's dynamic reports so the first report may be updated information and the second report on the mayor's facebook page so if you can help me kind of communicate that and what you'd like to feature that'd be great all right thank you we will and that is everyone and that is my time so i'll turn it over to you anything you want to sum up with um no i just want to thank you like i said we will uh we heard some feedback today but we will come back then with some specific proposals for ideas for how to fund some of these projects and a timeline for your next view and then get additional feedback from you there moving forward with that i mean i guess i'm hearing consensus that at least the phasing seems okay as we kind of look at the structure of okay good i think i'm seeing head nods looking on the screen too yeah okay city manager just mayor one of the questions that that i was raised was you know can we can we really do 17 different programs and the question the answer is no not at all not all at one time but if you look at the months and how long it takes um and like danny mentioned the resources that we have internally marketing public relations and outreach um and the relationships we have with non-profits a lot of those may go in hand in hand others may not happen as quick because we want to get some of those right out front in the three-month period off the ground but we won't be able to do them all in all of 17 of them at one time but we'll be doing those in those chunks of time okay thank you for that okay well thank you very much make sure i get it right so it's uh emily and rebecca thank you very much as always uh great work thank you danny for what you do and um so we'll look forward to that coming back and and your your feedback okay so that concludes that item dinner is here for those that are us that are here in in city hall so let's and we have to go into closed session so let me take us in the closed session i won't call the item just yet but i'll take us in the closed session uh and then that way we can uh so uh at 4 45 we'll go into closed session i will convene the closed session at 4 45 we will consider the following items deliberation regarding certain public power utilities competitive matters under the texas government code section 551.086 consultation with attorneys under texas government code section 551.071 deliberation regarding real property under texas government code section 551.072 so we'll be in we'll take a break we'll be back in closed session at 5 15 that'll give us 30 minutes and welcome back to this meeting of the denton city council it is 6 34 and we will fast forward to our public hearing portion of our agenda which is scheduled to begin it it had a specific 6 30 start time uh partners for a couple minutes so uh um but i'll call the first item and for those watching just to note uh when we get to the second item item b we're going to continue that um until october 19th but i'll call i'll reopen uh this item that it was open for the last um from last week but just want to reintroduce it the public hearing is already open but it's um item a which is z21 00052 hold a public hearing and consider adoption of ordinance of the city of denton texas regarding a change in the zoning district and use classification for mixed use from mixed use neighborhood and residential r4 districts to residential r6 so good evening mayor and city council members i'm going to share my screen real quick okay okay so this is uh 418 robertson fourplex which you all have previously seen so just to give you some brief background so on august 3rd um city council remanded the proposed rezoning of r6 back to the planning and zoning commission um you all asked for a neighborhood meeting to take place as well as a review under the proposed mn or that mixed use neighborhood district that meeting did take place on monday august 23rd 2021 at the mlk junior recreation center with approximately 20 members of the community in attendance so then this went to the planning and zoning commission on september 8th and it was presented that rezoning of 0.3 to 6 acres from mn and r4 to the mn district um from there pnz did have a discussion where uh commissioner mcday did mention the residents along robertson street's concerns for a two plus story development and denser residential types um we there was also a discussion of building height and scale differences um the applicant did speak about the august city council hearing in the neighborhood meeting um there was also a discussion of residential versus commercial use in that existing neighborhood and then lastly there was a mention of a potential r7 rezoning um which did not get seconded and those dgc development standards so ultimately pnz voted for recommended approval of an r6 district so the recommendation um from planning and zoning is that r6 district and staff recommends approval of the requested r6 rezoning as it complies with the criteria in sections 2.4.5 e and 2.72 d and then these are the options for city council approval of the proposed rezoning as an mn or r6 anything more restrictive than an mn district postpone or denial and i'm free to take any questions great i'm gonna i'm gonna start by just um moving denial um and then i'll look for a second seen none one more time great so that that dies for want of a second question for staff councilmember bar thank you um could you refresh my memory on um what the the feedback from the community was regarding mn versus r6 um and why pnz voted for r6 over mn so ultimately what the applicant gathered and what staff was told via the applicant and sitting in on the meeting was that the neighborhood wasn't looking to do commercial um on that property they were still looking for it to be residential therefore they weren't interested in doing that mn they were interested in doing um an r6 or lower so when it went through to pnz pnz um kind of had the same statement as you know if the community is not looking to do commercial anytime soon let's just look at an r6 rezoning so that if they're looking to do commercial in the future or that property owner wants to change that you know zoning in the future then they can come back and do that commercial rezoning to that mn or higher okay thank you welcome mayor protein melzer yeah if you could refresh my memory uh would mn uh prevent the developer from doing what he was proposing as i recall it would work with either mn or r6 is that right yes that is correct so they could um do the four the proposed fourplex um under mn as well as the r6 uh eric i'd uh like to make a motion with that would you want to do questions first or can i do that let's know you can i have i have some comments and questions but i can do that during the discussion period and obviously you know where i fall yeah yeah i was actually curious to hear more about your point of view so i hope i will but i'll move approval of it as an mn to mn yeah okay is there a second councillor beck i'll second okay motion by mayor protein melzer for mn second by council member beck discussion um so could you the the zoning is needed for what they want to build right correct and so to me help me understand why that's not spot zoning you're you're changing the zoning so that you can specifically build a particular product how is that not spot zoning well currently the as which was presented back in august i don't have that in my presentation i apologize about that currently the property is split between mn and r4 in such a way that is it's basically impossible to develop currently as it is well i'll disagree a little bit just because mn is 0.3 and then it's two-thirds r4 if it's a point third of a third of an acre so only a third of that is mn so they could develop r4 across all of it but there is that right um i'm not sure in terms of if it would be able depending on the footprint that would say if they were going to do a single family i'm not sure based on the footprint and the parking requirements if they could actually do that just with the r4 portion got it okay could someone i think they can but i want to confirm that mayor tina fergens planning director and w director of development services so in response to your question regarding spot zoning you asked a good question in terms of with the mn requests before you whether or not that's considered spot zoning i mean somebody could make the case that it is i think the challenge we have with the property in order to develop it because you have two zoning districts that are applied to it um you start to it makes it difficult to figure out which standards to apply for you know with the planning and zoning commission's recommendation for the residential zoning district you know some of the discussion related to the whether or not mn was appropriate also was from the perspective of you know if we're to consider introducing commercial uses that maybe we need to look on this on a broader scale and they felt that um that having mn applied to the entire property was not appropriate otherwise the the property is surrounded by residential zoning and so hence why they felt like the r6 zoning was the most appropriate but again if we're going to consider a strategy for introducing commercial uses within the neighborhood that maybe we need to look a little more holistically instead of just on a one lot basis so it's hence some of the additional reasoning behind their recommendation but you know you're right someone could try to make the argument that this is you know spot zoning by having one zoning district much different than than what else is surrounding so hence why the the r6 zoning district seems to be a better option for consistency at least in a residential district compared to a spot zoning well but and then also i'll take that a step further and say for consistency right so we have a southeast denton neighborhood where we're going to consider changing existing zoning to r6 but then by comparison we have a neighborhood north of denton on kings row that wants to change from r4 to r7 and we've come out strong against that so from consistency purposes and geographic locations gives me lots of concerns and i talked to the i've talked to miss ruby cole i've talked to miss betty kimball the staples in the community and they were hard against it and that's going to guide my decision it's unfortunate that again i just find that southeast denton becomes the area where we test infill projects and so that's why i move for denial early on i just don't think we need to spot zone in the southeast denton neighborhood i just don't think that's that's the optics we want to provide especially given the the optics we provide in other areas of the city we we don't do that so again i'm just one vote but just wanted to make sure i understood it right thank you councilmember davis thank you mayor and i i appreciate that perspective and insight i i think i find it consistent with uh say the the kings row harley field kind of area because um we're talking about city center versus almost into the rural fringe and all sorts of things like that and you know i i don't know about the particular optics of this zoning case but i'd have the same conversation in basic principle over here in in district three and say there are some established neighborhoods where some additional infill and density i think would be appropriate we just had a presentation earlier today about affordability and appropriate infill and all sorts of things but that conversation we just had earlier is kind of exactly why i'd prefer it to be r6 as opposed to mn if our goal is residential infill and if the neighborhood says you know we're not big fans of that kind of density but we sure as heck don't want additional commercial i think it's easy for us to kind of play sim city and say well you know there ought to be more commercial available but when there's a developer with a shovel ready project that adds to our housing stock and they're ready to go it's not really the appropriate time to say well you know i sure would like this to develop as a little corner store over here and one day we'd like to have you know grocery store over here we kind of address it as it comes so i'd prefer to see it as r6 like the pnz sent it up to us okay any other questions councillor monitor yes did planning and zoning discuss the existence of clara's kitchen right there on robertson can you repeat your question sorry did planning and zoning discuss uh the existence of clara's kitchen yes they did right next to robertson okay and um did they get input from uh the owners of clara's kitchen uh did pnz no they did not okay um i i is there somebody uh from staff from um development services here ron or scott who can speak to uh who remembers uh the clara's kitchen discussions um and the reason why this is relevant if you know anyone listening of course is because it's robertson this is the street of clara's kitchen they're right there um you know they uh had to uh they went through a lot um to get their zoning uh changed uh to commercial zoning even though they had only been a restaurant uh for even before their the current ownership you know since the 1930s when that uh building was established it had only been a restaurant and so uh you know after seeing um the after going through what we what we went through and coming out of that with as i understand it there was going to be a kind of a reconsideration on redoing some of this uh zoning in southeast denton that shuts out uh people from starting businesses there um you know which many myself included felt like were old uh you know racist policies designed to you know uh back in the day to hold back uh black owned businesses who were relocated from uh quaker town park area to solomon hill um so um i i do understand you know the mayor is kind of concerned about spot zoning um i would if i had to pick a zoning for this location of the ones on our menu i would say i would say mn because uh this is an area you know that has that is not exclusively uh residential you know it has been a mixed use area um and uh but but i am concerned you know why we are going about this kind of on a one by one um basis why we're not uh doing what i thought we were going to do which is to uh you know redo uh just reconsider uh the zoning in this area with input from the neighborhood so that it would be easier for local for local business owners people who live there um to have their businesses and to have them be legitimately zoned okay so do you is there so my question is like someone can scott or can scott or ron like answer my question about where are we about that in that process um so miss city attorney so she's asking about a small area plan sounds like but i don't want to read i don't want to characterize it incorrectly i just need your no yeah no like the discussion at the time was you know when the zoning is reconsidered so not so much a small area plan but just you know reconsidering the zone city initiated zoning that's what i understand but whatever it is i just i just need an update from staff so i can put this in context um because last time as well i you know i was when this came before us i was surprised because of what we had been through with clara's kitchen you know that reporter motor let me please let me let the city let me hear from the city attorney on to make sure we're on we're on i think i think it's very close to being off posting to the extent is there something else that's that's currently pending in planning that affects the zoning that would affect the zoning for this that's probably appropriate okay so any other questions for seph seeing them the the motion before us is uh made by oh wait wait can i get that answered she had just said that it's appropriate no it's could you rephrase i'm sorry she said she said it's appropriate to ask is there anything underway uh anything underway that would affect this plan going forward correct and i think that scott mcdonald did answer that question you just weren't able to see that councilman armater the answer is no no the answer is no council member armater and we can certainly answer any more of your questions you may have offline okay well so so if nothing has been done um point point of order i'm gonna ask the city of city attorney is if we're going down this okay or just could you give some guidelines on where we are with this topic in front of us along with your understanding of the question i think that the specific question is off posting if it were received for example in an email that may be something that staff could provide an update too in the friday report okay yeah i've had the answer the question answered to my satisfaction it was no okay the answer no so okay so we have a motion by council member pardon me mayor pro tem melzer seconded by mount council member beck to proceed with mn uh and so we will vote on mn um mayor pro tem aye oh it's do we have any speakers the applicant is here and they do have a presentation if you wish to receive it goodness yes sorry okay sorry about that put the car before the horse sorry there you go and and i believe you'll have 10 minutes yeah um yeah so you can just apologize i wouldn't prepare no it's okay so i can assist you i believe you are all very familiar with the property and the subject so i won't waste any of your time um if anybody does have any questions please stop me and ask uh the property is at 418 robertson street um and it currently carol carries the dual zoning um we would love obviously to have it zoned uh mn and if not mn we'd love the r6 um our proposal is to put a fourplex on it we do see the need for housing and there's plenty of available lots over in this area that i think could really enhance and and support and strengthen the community this is a the concept of what we are proposing uh for the for the site which is similar to one that we built over on oak street just a mile or so away um we did have our neighborhood meeting we felt uh like there was a lot of good discussion at that meeting there was a lot of uh misconceptions or clarification that we were able to provide um i think you know the those items are are listed here but i i think it by the end of it we had a pretty good understanding of of where things sat um these were just some questions that were asked during the meeting and the responses that we provided and then one thing that we did note just in in looking up and down robertson street is of the 14 residences that are on robertson street about half of them appear to be non-owner occupants so it's not like we're going to be introducing anything new into the area and when we expanded that out we found the same thing it was about 50 of all the lots were uh non-owner occupants so with that if if you have any questions i'd be happy to answer councilor davis yeah can you kind of speak to the the issue that's before us mn versus r6 and pluses and minuses for you i mean is it six one half a dozen the other or are there items in our development code that are impediment to your project if you're mn as opposed to r6 the we can accomplish our project under either zoning the mn zoning does allow us a little bit more flexibility as far as setbacks and whatnot um but it's not going to make or break what we'd like to do one way or another one way or another okay any other questions councilor mormonter yeah i had a question about rent uh how you know how do you establish uh that that rent range if you could speak to that so the uh that duplex that um that i showed in there which is what this one is based off of you know and that one is it uh i'm trying to remember the address it's it's over on oak street and that one rented out within 24 hours both halves of it at i believe it was 1350 a month so it's based on that is where we're coming up with it so so it's not based on rents in the neighborhood in which you're proposing in the current location the location where this is going to be you weren't comparing it to southeast denton area rents yes uh well the the oak street duplex again is only about a mile away and so we felt like it was going to be comparable is there is there someone from oh sorry i was going to ask a staff question i guess i should save that for after okay yeah any other questions any other questions for the applicant councilman burke i remember being at that meeting that public meeting and i remember uh the the residents ask about the the rent cost the proposed uh there in cost and you mentioned that number and there wasn't any objection to that uh so i would definitely support mn i was just wanting the clarification of if can we can this be done under an mn yes ma'am and so that seals it for me thank you great any other questions for the applicant stand on council member armature your question for staff yes just question for staff um if there's someone on staff uh who can speak to uh rent ranges in the area i don't know if that might be more someone from community if there's someone from community development there i don't know if that's a something that that you uh have an answer to but i know there are people in community development and unfortunately council member armature we do not have someone here that could give you that information i'm sorry we can though try to look at you know get the information to you but we don't have someone here tonight that could answer yeah i i would just be curious uh you know it is meaningful to me that you know what council member bird said that nobody kind of raised questions about the uh nobody seemed concerned from that meeting about uh the rent for property that size that was just kind of my one remaining concern okay and i'll wait council member bar so i just want to point out that there's a three bedroom two bath across the street that's currently listed for one thousand six hundred ninety five dollars a month um it's about eleven hundred square feet um so maybe slightly bigger than what we're talking about but um pretty comparable um so i'm inclined to support our six over mn i agree with some of my colleagues that in general neighborhood scale commercial development is something that i want to promote but my opinion is that we we need to to do that by looking more broadly at our zoning map and our development code rather than trying to nitpick at individual parcels um the developer is here he has a plan he can do it with r6 the the community has said that that they would prefer r6 over mn so that's why i'm planning to to support r6 okay um so staff could you speak to the parking requirement differences between r6 and r4 and mn so in terms of the parking requirement for um sorry i apologize so for uh if you're looking at a specifically broken down into residential types so if you're looking at a fourplex and a triplex you're looking at two spaces per dwelling unit i mean if you're looking at anything below a triplex it'll be four spaces per dwelling unit right so in in what's proposed r let's say mn proposed as two spaces per yes so and so four plex is two spaces per dwelling so how many total spaces is that so it'd be six six total spaces and then if you have a residential single family you'd have four right so and you know so again that's that's my concern is that we i just want to have a clear record for when for when this i mean i i understand the lack of feedback right i i struggled to get it myself but i was at the meeting myself and the concern was around taxes and and also just i just i have to be an advocate for my neighborhood lived there 14 years and and i just um all the norms and adjustments to me not speaking for everyone else just personally seem to happen in in southeast in and so there's other areas of the town where that doesn't seem to happen and i just i'm going to be again just one vote but wanted to add clarity wanted to have a time stamp as to i think the project is is fine i don't i don't think it fits i don't think it blends into the neighborhood i think it's under parked uh but that's that's not my um so nothing against the applicant i just don't want a spot zone in this area um in this instance if they can build a single family home they would make the same or more rent and it would just take longer to recoup but at the same time i believe that's a better fit for the neighborhood sends a better message across our community that we're going to start being actively our policies and actions are going to line up with we need diverse housing in other areas not just in one area so we'll get there but that's that's my that's my concern with it again nothing against an applicant just the wrong fit they can build what they need to as is and and we and so that's that's why i'm going to vote no so with that see no other questions no other presentations i don't do we have any callers or speakers no callers on this one mayor perfect then i'm going to close the public hearing uh the motion before us is mayor pro tem melzer made the motion for mn councilmember beck seconded that and we're going to vote so councilmember mayor pro tem melzer how say you aye councilmember beck aye councilmember bird aye councilmember mcguire no councilmember davis no mayor hutzpeth is a no councilmember armater so i had actually had a question before voting i understand but i didn't get called on for my question um so anyway um i just want i i will say then i'll as a statement um it's still not clear to me we have got um the i've got the council member for this district who i know is closely in touch with this neighborhood who is okay with with this um and then i've got other people saying this is not what the neighborhood wants um i'm listening you know to the council member from this neighborhood and also point of order councilmember armater i understand your concern but i i did look i i am working the best i can with the everyone being remote and and some being remote some being here i'm doing the best can point of order is we've already begun to vote once we've begun to vote so i will i will i will go with the um the local the the business owners right next door of claris kitchen who have told me that they support uh commercial in this area and i will vote yes okay okay mn passes four three thank you uh that concludes item 6a thank you um and then on 6b i will take a uh motion to continue till october 19th mayor i move that we continue that item to october 19th okay that's a motion by council member davis is there a second council member beck i'll second bless you motion by council member davis second by council member beck any discussion seeing none council member davis i'll say you aye council member beck aye council member maguire aye council member bird aye uh mayor no no mayor hudspeth is a i mayor pro tem and uh councillor marmotor yes passes seven zero thank you okay that concludes our uh public hearing and that will that one will remain open we we left open since before that takes us to our the beginning of our agenda and uh i think where is it i'm sorry the finance yeah we have a finance presentation and i don't i don't know that it had a number associated with it that's it perfect so it's uh thank you it's item a id two one two zero recognition of service by finance so i'll come down yeah so um mayor while while you're walking down we don't get the opportunity very often to recognize one of our own but our staff uh took it on their own accord to nominate david um gains for the general finance government finance officers association hero award the the hero award recognizes finance officers that have demonstrated extraordinary actions during a time of health financial natural or even a human-made crisis which we've probably experienced most of those already in one year so while david did not win it actually he was one of the nominees and they sent a wonderful certificate that i wanted we had put in a nice frame and i just wanted to recognize david for all of his hard work especially in the area of finance and budgeting yeah so congratulations david if we can uh give him a hand give him a hand yes yes and i i think i thank staff for um making it's a credit to you right that they made that nomination uh watching you you work hard watching you get your steps in up and down to answer questions and so they you know so and shout out to the city manager so what we have for you is a a frame to kind of just kind of commemorating the fact that you were nominated were considered and and the city manager help me it's the it's the area that's considered to it's quite significant yes it's a government finance officers association there's an executive board that that looks at all the applicants that come from across the united states so this is a pretty big deal when you look at cities and county government and they look at people who are in the area of finance and um you know it's quite frankly it's an honor just to be nominated and i'm surprised he didn't win but we're proud of him yes all right so another hand for david thank you very much appreciate it congratulations yes oh here we go um thank you and that takes us to our consent agenda um and and so just i'll take a motion but just to kind of give a uh some pretext the item a basically will come back to us um sit miss city manager yes our city secretary has already worked with sarah keickler to redline um what we heard tonight and how you wanted it worded it'll go in in the friday packet with that red line so you can look at it and then it'll come back as a consent item next week or the next time we have a council meeting so is there anything we need to do miss city attorney for that one just to reload it great so item k was pulled as well there's no presentation but we'll take that up individually so i'll take a motion excluding items a and k council member davis i move approval of the consent agenda accepting items a and k okay is council member beck i second thank you motion by council member davis second by council member beck any discussion seeing none council member davis i'll say you aye council member bet aye council member guire aye council member um bird aye council member armature yes uh mayor pro temelter aye and mayor hudson aye as well that passes seven zero great and so we'll take up item k let me find that it's id 21 1784 consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of denton texas home rule municipal home rule municipal corporation authorizing the city manager to execute a power purchase agreement between the city of city and orally hotel partners denton llc so uh we had a closed session discussion there is no presentation but i will um take a motion or question it will reduce the motion in a second then we'll take questions uh council member davis i move approval of the item councilman beck i second back great so we have a council a motion by council member davis second by council member beck uh any discussion question for staff council member armature i just wanted to just kind of make a state public statement before i vote i'm going to vote yes to this uh any uh large-scale uh commercial solar is a great gift uh to denton and for for the environment in general and we should be doing everything we can to encourage that um i will say you know i my ambivalence uh had to do uh with just concern uh that i didn't want to limit uh future possibilities in any way for other companies also wanting uh to get um discounts on solar uh so i just want to you know encourage uh any uh companies big users who either have solar or are interested in getting solar to you know reach out to the city if you feel our costs are prohibitive in any way um you know reach out to to council uh and i hope this council will be considering in the in the near future uh special these special deals uh so that this is not an outlier type situation uh but that we are doing everything we can to incentivize large-scale commercial solar in our city okay any other questions seeing none councilmember davis how say you aye councilmember beck aye councilmember maguire aye councilmember bird aye mayor potem melzer aye councilmember armater yes mayor hudspeth as well that passes seven zero that concludes the consent agenda okay takes us to items for individual consideration and the first of which is item a which is id 2 1 2 0 1 1 consider adopt uh a nomination and appointment of the board oversight committee good evening mayor council gassy argan director of finance i have one slide to share with you tonight so you um you may recall we brought a resolution forward earlier this year um regarding the appointment process for the bond oversight committee the original resolution um spelled out the seven um members of the committee by name and so with the um with uh the eric pruett left for he went to serve on the pnz leaving one vacant um seat on our bond oversight committee and so we're here to um review the applications that you've received james wells and tamsin price so the member the bond oversight committee really evaluates the progress of our capital improvement program including the 2012 2014 and 2019 bond programs and with that i'll take any questions okay uh councilmember davis mayor i move our appointment of james wells to the bond oversight committee okay is there a second uh i'll second so motion by councilmember davis second by mayor hudspeth questions for staff seeing none um so uh we'll vote councilor davis i'll say you what oh sorry again um just trying to juggle uh both the hybrid mode so forgive me councilor bet thank you mr mayor um both both these candidates are strong and and i know mr wells is is uh in my district um the uh that but uh this price is my nominee and i think that uh while both of these uh candidates are strong um i think that uh uh we'll uh be supporting that my nominee councilor davis institute yes thank you mayor now i i agree both very strong candidates uh mr wells i uh i was very pleased to see that he applied and i'm happy to nominate him former auditor of denton county a good kawanian very involved in the community but also uh knows how to ask those tough questions when they need to be asked and i think that's the role of the bond oversight committee they meet infrequently and so when they do meet they need to be able to get the work done and ask those tough questions before we end up spending up a bunch of money okay any other questions comments seeing none uh councilmember davis i'll say you aye mayor haspeth is a aye councillor beck no councillor bar no councillor bird no mayor protein melzer i'll be happy if uh mr wells uh gets in i'm holding my vote for uh miss price who uh i've uh seen up close in her volunteer committee capacity in the community say a high quality person i'm voting no um councillor marmotter i feel the same and i'm voting no okay that fails five two i'll take a motion councillor beck i motion to nominate uh tamerson price is there a second councillor bird okay motion by councillor beck second by councillor bird uh councillor beck i'll say you aye councillor bird aye councillor marguer aye um mayor protein melzer aye councillor marmotter yes councillor davis aye may haspeth as well passes seven zero thank you takes us to item b which is id2o and cassie i think i've met your parents did i meet them at their reunion yeah they're outstanding good people thank you they're great sorry i forgot that mentioned that later your parents are great too well thank you yes i think so too you gotta bring them around more often that's it okay uh item b which is id212107 consider adoption of ordinance adopting and schedule of fees for the use of the denton police department training facilities good evening mayor city council members nick vinson assistant director of finance um i have a presentation if there's questions otherwise we're just seeking your approval for the police fees for fiscal year 21 22 okay we'll just pull them up as needed questions for staff seeing none uh i'll take a motion councillor beck ah there we go i motion approval councillor bird second have a motion by councillor beck second by council member bird discussion seeing none uh councillor beck how say you aye councillor bird aye council member maguire aye mayor protein melter aye councillor armatier yes uh council member davis aye and mayor hutspeth is a i as well that passed seven zero thank you um takes us to items item c which is id212109 consider adoption of ordinance of the city of denton adopting a schedule of fees for cemeteries and use of certain park facilities good evening mayor city council members nick vinson again same thing here if you have questions we have a presentation otherwise just looking for your approval great questions for staff seeing none uh i'll take a motion council member beck i motion approval okay is the and then is there councillor bird okay there's a motion by council member beck second by council member bird any discussion questions seeing none councillor beck how say you aye councillor bird aye council member uh maguire aye and i had a question but i can ask it via email it wasn't going to impact my vote okay thank you for that sorry um mayor protein melter aye um councillor davis aye councillor armature yes mayor hutspeth is a i as well passes seven zero takes us to item d which is id212110 consider adoption of an ordinance adopting a schedule of fees for denton fire department good evening again same thing here mayor thank you um questions for staff seeing none seeing none councillor davis move approval of the item thank you councillor maguire i second thank you there's a motion by council member davis second by council member maguire discussion seeing none councillor davis i'll say you aye councillor maguire aye council member back aye council member bird aye council member uh armature yes mayor protein melter aye and mayor hutspeth as well that passes seven zero takes us to item e id21211 consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of denton amending the city's fund balance policy related to the utility fund reserve levels good evening again nick vinson assistant director of finance this item is a little bit different this item is meant to formalize the changes to the utility fund balance policies that was discussed with you during the fiscal year 21-22 budget discussions as you recall or may recall in the spring of this year the finance department completed a detailed analysis of the city utility fund balance policies and what those reserve targets were uh staff did not recommend any changes except for electric utility and we were recommending to increase those reserve targets okay questions for staff councillor back yes thank you mr i'm just uh just going to be pedantic that these are the rates that we previously had discussions over there there's no difference is that the fund balance targets council member back yes correct yep the ones we're reviewing the pro forma and i'd be happy to pull those up no no no i i just i'm 99.9 sure i'm just confirming thank you sir okay any other questions for staff okay so um i'll take a motion councillor back i motion approval a move approval thank you councillor davis second okay motion by council member back second by council member davis discussion seeing none councillor back i'll say you aye council member davis aye council member guire aye council member bird aye mayor portin melzer aye councillor marameter yes mayor husbeth is a i as well that passes seven zero item f is id 2 1 2 1 1 2 consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of denton texas establishing the rates for water and water service providing for repealer for a repealer providing for servability clause and providing an effective date good evening again nick vinson the water utility rates that were discussed the city council this year does include a new rate structure for residential customers who you recall those conversations council elected to go with option four establishes two new tiers residential customers first tier from zero to five thousand gallons and that second tier being from five thousand to seven i just want to make sure that council knows that's what's in the rate ordinance all right questions for staff so i do have one question here want to confirm uh to your point just now uh this is this is this what was decided is different than what the consultants recommended and what staff recommended based on the consultant's study of of our rates correct mayor um what the council decided uh direction we received from council was different than the public utility board gave us it was uh different than what the consultant gave us so we introduced an additional tier that the consultant did not introduce in their study and could you give me an overview of kind of or give me a kind of a bird's eye view of that study how long was it what did they look into or just kind of can you give me some structure there yeah so the study for the water utility uh was about an eight to 12 month process they looked at all the rates within the water and wastewater utility and looked at what cost recovery would be for those uh customers uh one thing we did task them with was looking at the rate structure and identifying additional tiers that could be developed between zero to five fifteen thousand gallons and their recommendation was to create one from zero to five thousand gallons so that's where that came from uh staff did bring back an additional option for council based on your direction to establish an additional tier on top of that from five to seven thousand gallons got it okay so and and just so i can understand because you touched on just the nuance there but so what was what were the consultants task what was kind of their scope they were looking into um so the consultants basically were tasked with looking at the revenue requirements for each of the rate categories so for example they were looking at the residential rates commercial rates any dived into the wholesale rates a little bit most of those are bound by contracts but their main goal was is look at all the operation expenses of the water waste water utility and established cost recovery rates and of course that direction if those rates are established or at the discretion of council and the public utilities board and the direction that the rate ordinance reflects today is that direction we received from council so great thank you uh any other questions not i'll take a motion councilman beck i move approval is there a second councilman davis second okay there's a motion and a second discussion uh so my concern is simply uh so i won't be some just my concern is that the small farmers are just different people that fall under these categories it's just not it's just i think it's important to do these studies to follow those studies because you can look forward and the next thing you know we have to adjust the rates because of something unanticipated and it just kind of causes a a vacillation verse so i just think we have to be careful about those those decisions so that's what gives me a little concern um so if there's any other discussion seeing none council member bett how say you aye council member davis aye councilman beguire aye councilman bird aye mayor pro tem melzer aye councilman armater yes and mayor hutspeth is a no passes six one uh takes us to item g id 212113 consider adoption of ordinance of the city of denton texas establishing the schedule of rates for wastewater service good evening again um same as water just looking for your approval if you have questions we do have a presentation today for you got it uh one question does this is this in that same this was this study do we have any guidance here in these rates so for the for the wastewater utility if you recall we did not make any rate recommendations this fiscal year it is just for the water utility that had those rate changes perfect okay any other questions for staff okay i'll take a motion councillor beck i move approval is there a second councillor bird i second thank you a motion by councillor beck second by councillor bird discussion seeing none councillor beck i'll say you aye councillor bird aye councillor beguire aye councillor davis aye mayor pro tem melzer aye councillor armature yes and mayor hudspeth as well that passes seven zero takes us to item h which is id 2114 pardon me id 212114 consider adoption of ordinance of the city of denton texas establishing the rates for solid waste and recycling collection service good evening again so solid waste rates uh most notable change for residential customers in the solid waste rate structure was a discontinuation of the subscription fee for that yard waste service so it discontinued the the dollar per month craft back subscription fee and the 50 cents for a cart there were some several other changes that was discussed with the public utility board and city council if you'd like to see those i can pull them up otherwise we're just looking for your approval okay any questions for staff mayor pro tem melzer yeah can you just if we've heard it before can you just clarify for anyone listening do you need to call the city if you have yard waste um correct uh well council member melzer um christopher foster's here from customer service and speak to it a little bit more let me ask her to come up and give direction on what customers should do moving forward this next fiscal year thanks mayor council christopher foster customer service manager um and uh council member melzer to answer your question no customers will not need to call us to schedule yard waste collection they will still need to call us if they're scheduling bulk collections or hazardous home chemicals or things of that nature just put the yard waste within six feet of your trash carts within four feet yep and just right there on the curb following the same guidelines you would today thank you for clarifying you're welcome excellent any other questions okay council member maguire i move approval of the item thank you uh council member davis i second motion by council member maguire second by council member davis any other discussion seeing none council member maguire i say you aye council member davis aye council member beck aye council member bird aye mayor pro tem melzer aye councilman armater yes mayor hutzpah is uh as well that passes seven to zero takes us to item i which is id 2 1 2 1 1 5 consider adoption of ordinance of the city of denton texas amending the fiscal year 2021 budget annual program of services of the city of denton to allow for adjustment for fleet fund of 500 000 dollars hi good evening mayor council members i'm heather gray budget manager so just give you a quick break from nick here um so we have a couple of budget amendments for you this evening and i'll start off with the one for fleet services this is for the fiscal year 2021 so the current budget year and they are needing an additional 500 000 due to increased expenses related to fuel and parts so basically just looking for your approval to give them additional budget authority it would raise their total budget from about 10.8 million to 11.3 million okay questions for staff councilman beck and just to confirm thank you mayor uh just to confirm this is just for operational expenses not for vehicles themselves or it includes vehicles this is just for operational expenses okay thank you very much any other questions for staff okay i'll take a motion council member beck i motion i move approval council member bird i second thank you motion by council member beck second by council member bird discussion seeing none council member beck i'll say you aye council member bird aye council member mcguire aye council member davis aye mayor pro tem melzer aye council member armater yes mayor hutzpah is a aye as well that passes seven zero takes us to item j it's uh id 2 1 2 1 1 6 consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of denton texas amending the fiscal year 2020 2021 budget and annual program services of the city of denton to allow for adjustment to general fund of four million dollars declaring a public purpose providing a servability clause and open and open meetings clause and an effective date good evening mayor city council members nick vincent assistant director of finance again i just want to say starting off saying thank you to heather and the great team that her staff have done putting this year's budget together so i just want to take this opportunity to say that thank you agree so a really quick shortage presentation you may see tonight well cassie's is one slide also so the proposed budget amendment will increase expenditure authority for the general fund in total of four million dollars and this will raise appropriation authority for the current fiscal year budget from 139.5 million to 143.5 million and there is a table of any of your projects that has gone through the budgeting process that staff did decide to fund this fiscal year after talking to the city management team having conversations with city council during the budget adoption process so most notable the biggest one you can see for parks is athletic field lighting at 2.6 million we have some generators about 300,000 and then some capital maintenance about 200,000 so total about 3.9 million in capital projects and that is the conclusion of the presentation kathryn roguer thank you um so i know that we've had um some discussions recently including before i was on this council um regarding um dark skies and and lighting um could somebody perhaps from parks um speak to uh whether these athletic field lights are dark sky compliant or anybody who knows the answer to that question gary is on the line from parks and recreation mayor city council gary pack and director parks and recreation can you hear me yes sir are they all the lights that we're proposing to install which we're bringing to council if this is approved will be dark sky compliant okay okay thank you okay any other question any other questions for staff seeing none i'll take a motion councilor davis i move approval of the budget amendment councilor beck thank thank you so motion by council member davis second by council member beck any other discussion seeing none councilor davis i'll say you aye councilor beck aye council member maguire aye councilor berg aye mayor fortin melzer aye council member armater yes and mayor hutzpah is a i as well that passes seven zero takes us to item k which is is that h is that a l let me see i gotta make it make it bigger hl 21 0002 b consider approval of a resolution of the city of denton texas approving an application for partial tax exemption of designed historic sites good evening mayor and city council members karen robertson historic preservation officer and principal planner again so this is for a historic tax exemption at 10 15 west oak it is located oak hickory historic district is on the south side of west oak street east of the intersection of fulton and west oak streets the owners are sonoma and todd taylor so this is a local historic landmark circa 1929 it was previous coa for historic tax exemption approval was on april 13 2010 the request is for an application for historic landmark tax exemption as i stated and their crest they did h vac system and chimney damper updates for a total of 17 877 dollars and 74 cents so these are just some photos of that chimney damper update as well as the h vac system updates and a historic landmark commission made a favorable determination for the expenses and staff recommends approval for this partial tax exemption and i'm free to stand for questions great okay questions for staff councilor marmotor yes so i i support this because it meets the you know very clear guidelines for what uh you know the kind of uh uh improvements that that uh qualify my question is just if you could explain why this is something that needs to come before council i understand what needs to come before the historic landmark uh committee is is this uh is this uh some sort of state law that we don't have control over or is this uh just city city law um so i don't know if uh the city um lawyer wants to speak to that but currently it's just written in our ordinances that way that it does have to come through hlc and then through city council but um i'm not sure if um okay yeah so it's just it's part of the ordinances correct great yeah it just yeah it just seems i'll just mention for future you know since it really is we're kind of checking off um boxes here uh it i i would be fine with um this just going to staff after historic uh landmark committee unless there's some irregularities or the historic landmark committee votes no something like that anyway just my just my thoughts on that i don't know how others feel similarly okay any other questions for staff seeing none council member davis a move approval council member beck second motion by council member davis second by council member beck any other discussion council member davis first and council member just to say real quickly i think it's important that anytime we exempt someone from taxes that the elected body be the one make that final decision if there's any way to streamline this process very much in favor of that hearing from residents that's something they'd like to see as well but anytime we sign off on exempting someone's taxes i think we have to be the ones to do it council member i think this also allows us the opportunity to um make sure that we are we have that standard there i remember us having a meeting very early on in my senior year about you know a porch and some steps uh and we kind of went back and forth as to is it connected to the house or is it you know still but this right here is very clearly evident that it's just an upgrade to the interior and it's not affecting the exterior of the home i think that should also be considered so uh just remind us you know what we what we need to be mindful of as we're saying yes and no to these types of things uh whether or not it's an aesthetic upgrade that's not permitted or you know something to that effect okay so uh any other discussion great councilor davis i'll say you aye councillor beck aye councillor maguire aye councillor bird aye councillor councillor yes mayor pro tem melzer aye mayor husbeth is a aye as well passes seven zero thank you takes us to item l which is id 2 1 2 1 0 5 consider adoption of ordinance of the city of denton a texas home rule municipal corporation authorizing the city manager to execute a contract with primaris td services llc is that right that's correct good evening mayor council members i'm chris lutrick the executive manager of operations dme looking for my presentation here but compared to mr vincente it's very lengthy so i could just skip to questions now i may have to uh there we go all right well i'm here this evening to give you a brief presentation on a proposal for you for an overhead maintenance construction contract some background on this request is this is a contract that dme maintains over the years we have several of these contracts that we keep in place which supplement our workforce capabilities as well as our construction capabilities this particular contract before you tonight has three main focuses the first being emergency response i think of that as catastrophic system damage usually caused by mother nature and in an event that the uh the restoration efforts exceed our capabilities uh this contract would could be used the second is large projects and i'll go into that a little bit further detail further later and uh unfortunately staff shortages caused by covid so as we've come through with our quarantines our field crews were hit pretty hard by covid and this contract could be used to supplement our workforce in the event of of lots of of quarantines so the city of denny issued an rfp for construction services these services include but are not limited to the installation of new or replacement of existing overhead and underground electric facilities and i should note that this contract is for labor and equipment only as the city of den will supply all materials for the projects the main utilization of this contract will be a large project and that's our pole replacement project so we brought the item before council before the dme initiated a pole inspection project in 2019 to inspect all 12 000 poles on our system we're inspecting those poles for uh broken equipment and structural integrity uh to date uh the consultant has inspected about 75 percent of those poles and has identified almost 1200 poles that need to be replaced so of those 1200 poles that have been identified we've replaced about 170 of them to date using both dme construction crews as well as our existing contract so what's a typical pole replacement so if you look on the left uh that's that's a pole being replaced by dme crew and the reason we do that it's a very complex uh orchestration of equipment and our personnel to replace this pole while keeping the line energized so the challenge here is the the conductors you see in the air must remain in the air and we actually have the capability to do this energized so there's no interruption to our customers so it's a very proactive maintenance approach to increase in the reliability of our system on the right is a is a picture of a typical pole failure this pole fell at the ground line as you can see it's broken uh the cause of this failure could have been rot which is is a big a big cause of pole failure insect infestation or it could have been storm damage but as you notice this pole kind of leaned over a little bit it does not fall down the actual conductors have enough strength that if a single pole fails this pole will remain in the air so with that we're seeking approval of a five-year service contract with primorus tnd services for a not to exceed amount of 15 million dollars and with that i will answer any questions okay questions for staff counselor rebecca thank you mr just real quick so we're doing we've got about 170 out of 1200 so roughly you know just north of 10 10 12 is this going to enable us to double or triple or whatever the rate you know to get the rest of the 1200 in yes sir will council member beck so actually our contract we had in place we had utilized all of those funds so we're running low so we've been kind of on just a an emergency basis the last couple of months this will allow us to get in several primors crews that can attack each each attacker pole so yes it will speed up that process yes sir we're looking to try to have this done in three years to have them all done yes sir just a simple question here how long does it how long is the lifespan of a a pole generally that's a very good that's a very good question and a very tough question so as we have some poles on our on our system that were installed in the 60s and they're still good so it depends on the um the soil condition um insects the weather the weather is the worst on them lightning strikes are very difficult on them so we have some poles that fail at a very early age but our mean expectant life expectancy out of a pole wooden pole is 30 to 40 years is there any any uh opportunity to maybe place something at the do they generally fail at the bottom or it just can be anywhere it can be anywhere lightning is really tough on the on the upper parts of the poles but generally the poles they fail at the ground level so we do use a creosote pole which works best in our soil conditions and it's just you know was there a defect in the pole it's just there wouldn't there they're basically trees so it's kind of hard to tell from from one to the next but we generally we expect about 30 to 40 years out of the pole yes ma'am questions for sir any others so real quick can we blame squirrels for this too or no yes sir you can sweet okay and then and then uh so but i do and also i am curious how do you inspect that many pole like what is the process for them to inspect and kind of report back is it just kind of as you do work you you inspect them or is there someone that has a process that they're able to just kind of systematically we have a consultant they're called um osmos is their name so they've been since 2019 they have done all of the pole inspection so they physically they take a core out of the pole that they excavate down about a foot or so to see the ground the ground line conditions and they also inspect the top of the poles as well so that's that's a service that we have that a consultant is doing all of our poles for us they provide us a report every week they identify priority poles that are that are what they term imminent failure and we and we strive to get those poles replaced within a week wow okay great thank you yes sir okay uh counselor bet and i move approval particularly because there's lightning strikes going on right this second it's gonna be a long night counselor davis i'll second thank you motion by council member back second by council member davis discussion seeing none counselor back i'll say you aye counselor davis aye councillor mcguire aye councillor bird aye all right council member armator yes mayor pertin melzer all due respect to squirrels i may have to put this on as well pass a seven zero thank you thank you sir yeah uh takes us to item m which is id 2 1 2 1 1 9 consider adoption of ordinance of the city of denton texas denton texas a home rule uh municipal corporation authorizing city manager to execute a contract with invoice cloud ink so council mayor krista foster customer service manager and i'm here tonight to uh share some information on a procurement that we're working on for customer service one moment all right all right so i'm going to start with just a little bit of background first off everybody tonight is going to make me look really bad because i don't have a two slide presentation sorry about that but i'll try to make it as brief as possible um just a little background several bullets that basically say we went out to bid for this contract in 2013 we got it implemented in 2017 and it was time to go out to bid again so that's what we've done this is for our utility payment processor the utility payment processor is the company that allows us to accept credit card payments it is the company that allows us to take online payments whether that's check or credit card or debit card um i put up a little bit of information on the difference between a utility payment portal and a full uh service customer portal just because we will be coming back within the month with a full service customer portal as well this will integrate seamlessly into that what you have is when you have someone who processes your payments they always provide a basic payment portal because their focus is to make sure that customers can make those payments they focus on financial security the safety of the data for the customers and all those transmissions to and from the banks they deal strictly with the financials and the financial security where we will be coming back with a utility provider portal which is going to focus on that customer experience and full account management beyond the payment so i just wanted to give just a little bit of background on that so our rfp results we actually had five proposals two of those vendors were meeting our specifications of the two one we found we had known support issues we had known performance issues the other candidate offered us a lot of great functionality which we do not have today the main one being pay by text they offer things like pay through google through apple pay venmo and paypal so it will greatly enhance the amount of payment options and channels that we can offer our customers one of the other great things with this provider is they do not have login walls they actually remember if you've registered your email address they send you a secure email with a link so that it takes you directly into your account so that you can make your payment without having to go through two or three authorizations it does the same thing for pay by text it does the same thing for ivr payments so on an ivr payment what now takes a customer to two and a half minutes to complete a payment should take them 30 seconds so there's some really great features one of the things that we're anticipating is with this particular vendor they have a proven track record of very high adoptions in e-bill which is very likely to allow us to see a reduction in our cost on bill print and mailing we also would expect to see a reduction in calls related to some of those problems we have with our current portal and payment issues so that we would see about 10 hours a week of staff time that can be dedicated to those more complicated issues that customers can't take care of on their own then we have user impacts the contract that was negotiated in 2013 did not include any data ownership provisions and our current vendor in order to migrate some of our customer data and payment information would cost in excess of two hundred thousand dollars to rate payers so we are opting to move forward without that customers will have to re-register and sign back up on their scheduled payments if they're scheduling them themselves strictly for the fact that it is very expensive the one thing that i can say with the vendor we're recommending is they make that process very easy they'll simply send all of our customers an email that has that link they'll already have the user ids so that they can get in there they'll just need to update their new passwords and set up their recurring payment and we even have a list of those who are on paperless currently and then as soon as we gain approval we are going to begin communication immediately unlike the troubles that we encountered with our current vendor last year which required re-registration of payment methods this time we have four months of advance notice so we can do an even better job of trying to make sure that we're communicating with those customers our implementation timeline would be to kick off just early as we can in october and begin our customer communications you know through some of our standard channels social media newspaper phone calls emails letters bill inserts messages on the payment portal and with a go live of january of 2022 and we are just here seeking recommendation or presenting a recommendation to approve a five-year contract not to exceed 1.5 million dollars to continue online payments councillor davis thank you mayor i've got a few questions so you mentioned the issue that we had before uh with the current vendor and then did we approve uh not an account migration but um a different payment processor back in 2019 was there something about our um maybe credit card processing and we addressed some fees back then i believe that we when we moved from our gateway provider so there are several steps in the payment processing methods here right we used to use a different company as our merchant service provider and they dealt with all of our gateways as well as the approval process we transitioned from elevon to wells fargo merchant services as part of the citywide contract with wells fargo that is something that is different than the company that actually does the payment portal and deals with the collection of that data sure so there's the actual financial transaction and then the payment portal is a separate piece so the credit card fees and things we talked about in 2019 are an additional piece of the puzzle correct what we're talking about yeah um so will people if they have uh they're going to get instructions on how to sign up with this new payment portal if we're rolling out an additional utility management portal you say integrate seamlessly does that mean that users will already be registered for that their user experience may change but they're already set up to get that when we put the new the only thing that they may experience is that when they go to log in it'll ask them to change their password just because we don't want to decrypt all of the passwords so that we can transition them and then re-encrypt them because that's a huge security issue and we don't want to do that to our customers to potentially put them at risk but other than that yes when they log into the the full comprehensive portal as soon as they click on payments they'll be presented exactly what they're going to see with this payment portal okay and then last question a number of constituents i've heard from use third-party platforms most of them web-based mint.com or quickbooks or something to uh some of those actually will allow you to pay your bill you know the interface with your you know whatever your your bill you're paying uh some of those just allow you to track things for budgeting purposes or whatever our current uh i'm not sure which piece of the puzzle it is that would be communicating with these third-party platforms but our current system does not communicate very well with a number of those i know they're third party i know they're not really our responsibility but do we know about the ability of the new platforms we're talking about to communicate to those different tools people use for family budgeting for their commercial budgeting paying their bills all those sorts of things um i don't know that one right off the top of my head because i have not encountered someone paying that way but i can certainly find out and be able to work with that vendor to to let you know that information yes there's maybe a module or something that that some percentage of our our folks would our rate payers would get benefit from and i know y'all are thinking along these lines i know customer service and public affairs work very closely together but this is going to have a whole lot of visibility and just hope we kind of keep that front and center yes okay councillor back thank you mr mayor so so along similar lines um and both you and and councillor davis are addressing as we transition from um from platform to platform from gateway to gateway to dashboard to dashboard there's a data integrity issues that that you alluded to for one reason that you we don't want to play uh database de-encryption games um but at the same token what are our um policies with regards to um uh data security post contract with our private previous vendors uh you know we don't want uh data losses to to hacking as we transition and then forget about older databases and transition to newer databases those are all prime time uh for shenanigans to happen so so what is our policy and plan for these kinds of events well one when you're transitioning from one payment processor to another they have approved secure methods for transitioning data um in terms of this migration we won't have to worry about that because we won't have access to that data we won't be moving that data across so it would be a non issue um additionally i have ensured that with the contract that we're looking at with invoice cloud that the data belongs to us there would be no cost for us to transition that in the future if we choose to leave them for another service provider so you know we would have that but they they have lots of protocols that are in place for managing that tokenized data and and i understand that our our vendor are existing and prior vendors um i'm sure they have contracts for um for data scrubbing um but we you know we're that that data whatever is not legally mandated to be kept is will be deleted scrubbed so that you know we're not we don't have old versions of people's data running around to potentially be hacked because some of our older residents have had the same data for you know decades and decades right um i'll be working with them in terms of what that data retention policy or plan is the things that are housed on that site is just authorization information and things like that so it's not things that we would have to retain for open records purposes because our billing system is that system of record so all of the information is in our billing system but we'll make sure that in terms of customer sensitive data that we'll be working with that that vendor to ensure safety okay thank you any other questions for staff i had a couple uh just is there any way for us because i do recall the last time we did this and it was really bad uh and so is there a way for us to test with some maybe identify some key users to test that transition to see if what we're absolutely um because we'll actually be fully changing our provider we'll be running full test scenarios prior to go live and we do that first with internal and then we also look for customers who are within the organization but not in customer service who will also be running through some of those test scenarios and making sure that things function as they should okay and then um is there an option for a third party to handle the data migration so for example like a coder or something that would do it you know fractions of a cent to code documents to then get no fortunately this is digital data that they house on their servers and we would not have access to got it and then uh my other question is how does that affect someone that owns multiple homes so if i'm a renter and i have 100 homes is that 100 clicks 100 new utility bills 100 that that is something i will also get back and provide in a friday report um and the reason the reason i say this is we're working like i said on this project as well as the other portal i know for a fact with the additional portal that it links everything together immediately i can't remember right off the top of my head if it did it with just the payment processor portal i believe it did but i cannot say that 100 yeah because you know you're talking about 200 000 for the universe of records but if we narrow that universe down to a select few multiple homeowners if we set a threshold that says 50 25 so that you don't have that many times that you have to have a staff member click it just needs to be uh we just money shouldn't be a reason to uh prevent or make it difficult on business owners to transition right i mean so if there's a if we lower that threshold to a select few and that number drops down from 200 000 to 50 000 and and we're able to to then help those people with multiple homes i can certainly look into it i will tell you that with our experience last year that we found that the current vendor had trouble producing complete and accurate lists of certain records for us so i would have some hesitancy in saying that i have confidence in asking them for partial lists but it's something that we absolutely can explore if council would like yeah and yes so for me personally i don't know when everyone else but when we get to that point if we're saying hey i'd like to know what that process is going to be for each of those kind of those people so that we can understand if it's something that we would want to supplement or help or provide services or make that transition easier before we pass that cost off sure uh without any support sure that's just my thought so any other questions or staff okay uh i'll take a motion councilor beck i move approval councilor bird okay motion by councilor beck second by councilor bird uh further discussion questions seeing none councilor beck i'll say you aye councilor bird aye councilor maguire aye councilor davis aye mayor protomelter lock aye and councilor armater yes may have put the eye as well that passes seven zero thank you thank you takes us to item n which is id 212020 consider approval of a resolution of the city of denton providing the removal for cause of member of the committee on persons with disabilities good evening mayor and city council my name is reza rios and i am your city secretary and let me bring up my presentation okay anybody see it yes so i'm here to present um the possible removal of a member from the committee on persons with disabilities so to provide a little bit of background marcus park park was appointed to the committee on persons with disabilities on august 10 of this year and his current term does expire august 31st of 2023 he was nominated by council member armenter and holds the at-large member to position so under the boards and commissions had book there is a provision that a member has to submit the post appointment paperwork within 14 days as of being notified of the appointment and there's also provision of the city charter that provides that members can only be removed for cause and after being given notice by the city council and again that provision is permissive but not mandatory so dates of interest was set on august 11 the city secretary's office did send the new appointee their packet which included the post appointment paperwork and other items of interest for a new appointee on august 25th was the deadline for submission of that post appointment paperwork and um september 13th there was no paperwork submitted by the member we did make communications with a member via email as well as phone call live voicemails but the member failed to uh to respond to any communication method so your item for consideration here is um the to either remove the member or deny removal of the member and i'll take any questions you might have questions for staff councilor armenter so no question i just wanted to just say i'm going uh to move uh in favor of removing this member this is somebody who uh no longer wanted to be uh on this committee and for whatever reason uh they refused or i shouldn't say refused they did not uh resign go through the process of resignation um but they let me know they did not want to serve on it anymore so i'm sorry that it had to go through all this i don't know why that they have not been responsive to me uh so anyway i all right is that a motion yes thank you uh is there a second councilor davis i'll second most by councilor armater to remove uh and then there's a second by council member davis any other discussion councilor armater i'll say you yes council member davis aye councilor beck aye council member mcguire aye council member bird aye mayor pro tem melter aye mayor hertha as well that passes seven zero thank you rose texas item oh id 212019 consider adoption of ordinance of the city of of ordinance of the city council of the city of denton a texas home rural municipal corporation approving a negotiated settlement between the atmos cities steering committee and atmos energy corp good evening mayor and council rachel ball through mendoza assistant to the city manager and if you'll allow me while i get there it is i found it and sure there we go this evening i'm going to present our annual atmos rate increase to you all for a little background for our new council members and anybody else uh that may be listening that needs one then as a member of the atmos cities steering committee um and the acsc is a 172 member coalition of cities that represents over 1 million customers over the state atmos has over 20 000 accounts in the city of denton the rate review mechanism process allows acs cities to review and validate the costs recovery expenses and avoid little litigation over rates and it over the past has generated significant cost savings for acsc cities this year's rm filing um it they began the process back this spring and they originally asked for 43.4 million as a system-wide recovery rate and uh we the the increase ended up being 16.8 million after the recovery process was uh settled 22.78 million of that is the final realized increase to all the acsc members after the negotiation and that represents about a 3.8 million dollar savings to the acsc members system-wide where we incurred that two-month implementation delay all of this information by the way just wanted to go again is in your backup and has even more information in detail for you so like i said this year's negotiated settlement the effective date is december 1st and we did get that two-month delay realized so that value to the consortium of cities is approximately 3.8 million dollars and the average customer impact based on an average monthly bill for a residential customer is going to be about a dollar 28 which is a 2.2 percent increase and for commercial customer that's going to be about four dollars or a 1.61 percent increase so tonight the action item before you is an ordinance that would approve the negotiated settlement and the new rates and just to let you know if it was denied the city would be responsible for appealing that rate increase to the trc ourselves and i'm here for any questions should you have any thank you questions for staff seeing none i'll take a motion councilman beck everybody's too afraid to put that in i'll make a motion move approval councilman bird i second okay motion by council member beck second by council member bird any other discussion seeing none council member beck i'll say you all right council member bird aye council member guire aye mayor pertin melzer aye councilman armature so i i sorry i raised my hand for discussion but i'll just uh mention it in my vote i'm going to be voting no um the rates were too unreasonable um and they're still unreasonable so that's why i'm voting no to this they're still unreasonable council member davis aye mayor hanspeth as well passes six one thank you thank you okay uh item last item of this evening is item p i d two one two zero four nine consider adoption of ordinance of the city of denton texas amending the chapter 25 of the code of city of denton texas by adding section 25-15 related to new procedures for naming and renaming streets and providing for a savings clause and a effective date thank you mayor ms council ron mongito principal planner with development services give me a second to pull up my presentation it's great heck of a year this year yes my daughter goes there so if i if i'm paying for it i guess i'm going there too you're not old enough to have a daughter in college i have two i know it man all righty good evening uh members uh members of council this is an item that was requested by council earlier this year um just way back around there were a number of street name renaming of some streets that were presented to city council earlier this year january february to be specific so what we're bringing forward today is a formal procedure and process for naming and renaming streets here at the city of benton so this request is a city staff initiated amendment to chapter 25 of the code of ordinances specifically to formulate a procedure for naming and renaming streets to provide a clear understanding and expectation of the process of doing so specifically section 25-15 is going to be added to the code of ordinances in that section is drafted and it's included in the ordinance that's including your backup so i won't go through the whole procedures but just to let you know it again it addresses again procedures for naming and renaming streets i also want to make mention that we also have a street naming and renaming standard or standards that will be published on the city's website that is referenced in the procedures and it's a standard list of how names are either chosen to be considered and also some of the other requirements for street naming excuse me just way of illustrating the process the top illustration here is for new for new streets you have a new street and typically those are proposed during the planning stage of a development so as a development occurs they dedicate roadways and roads and streets and there's a name that they provide or propose as part of that proposal or part of that planning exercise and through that there is a process in which we review it against an index of street names that we have available or currently in the city so we want to make sure there's no duplication we want to make sure that it's it's readable it's understandable and also if it can continue the street name adjacent to the proposed site or just around the area we want to make sure that we have that continuity in terms of renaming a street it's a little bit different obviously the street is already named and there's got to be a reason for its renaming so we've set us a standard of how and what is considered for renaming typically that is brought forward by a particular property owner or property owners also the the city county or state can propose a renaming of a street that application or that request is brought forward to staff we we review it we notify the property owners within the area that abut the street it is then proposed proposed and brought forward to city council for your consideration if the council approves it it then of course gets approved through ordinance and then it is filed with the county and then the name is changed through our gis system that's pretty much it that concludes my presentation and i'll stand for any questions okay council member davis thank you mayor so overall i think this is fantastic a way to to give folks the ability to either us the ability to kind of administratively talk with the community and find ways to improve signage improve wayfinding all those things that we find confusing you google a way to get to someplace and it sends you off somewhere you ought not to be we have tons of those in the city on the 50 percent of landowners is that by area by number of lots is it 50 percent of the street numbers on that street it just says 50 percent and it seems like we ought to qualify that in some way i've been trying to look and find and i didn't think about it ahead of time how we do it with uh zoning cases you know for we do by area there i think right zoning case is a little different it's a little more specific you know it's by area uh within 200 feet of the subject property what we're proposing is really just 50 percent of the property owners that abut that property or that street similar to any um overlay districts you know that we we consider or historic district we you know we want to make sure that there's at least 50 percent of that area or in this case the property owners abutting that street is okay with it and of course when you still notify those individuals um and so they would have to make sure that they're in in included in some of that discussion sure but i guess my question is if one entity or or property owner owns one side of a street and 15 people on the other side of the street own different lots on the other side of the street one person is 50 percent by area or maybe even by parcels depending on how that is subdivided but they are not 50 percent of the owners and then uh you know you could have properties owned by multiple people that changes the number of owners i don't think as written it's exactly clear how you hit 50 percent of the owners um and i'm concerned about that not because i'm not trying to nitpick but these kind of changes that they come up could be very visible and they could potentially be controversial and one side of the street might want to change and the other side of the street might not want to change so i wonder if there's not an easy way to inject some particularity into what we mean by 50 percent of the people 50 of the owners of property abutting the subject street i think there's some ambiguity there that we need to nail down councillor bett thank you mr mayor so uh my constituents uh wanted me to ask a couple bunch of questions and i know they the the doc and i've referred to them to the public document that you're providing but there was sort of confusion over two things you know if you could not not reiterate this but sort of give a contextual feel for for how similar naming conventions could be again don't don't reiterate this document because i've referred them to it but um also in the same context um what do we do about existing street names that don't quite match our our ordinance uh and then i have one more question after that okay so i guess the first part is you know how it's how staff looks at as far as the the similarities of the street names um you know we do it we do it now you know we look at you know proposed streets we look at you know what we have existing to make sure that there's some differences in it um i think just understanding if it if it is confusing then then something that we want to address if up front and and recommend something different in that case and working with the working with the applicant or the requester in making sure that that there is no confusion as far as the naming and how it's how it's pronounced um in terms of the second question can you repeat that second question real quick uh the second question is sort of the the existing roads that we have um how how are you reconciling these new rules with the existing so thank you for that question or comment commissioner beck our council member beck that is we we haven't gone to that point yet i think that if there are concerns or there are traffic related issues and concerns related to the naming we will certainly bring that forward as a staff initiated street renaming request to the city council and then my i guess that was two so this will be my third third question and it's the last one is um if we retire a name because we've renamed it we've done a community issue and you know everybody's happy and you know we've changed beck street to minguida street does does beck street go back in the hopper as as an available name that we could reuse or is that uh now confusing because it used to exist if it doesn't exist already or if it's not confusing to another street we can certainly bring that back okay thank you council member what about streets that uh have barriers to them and then it's picked back up on the other side of town is that the whole entire street renamed or is just a particular section of a street well we certainly want to avoid you know this the splitting of street names so if we can avoid that um and someone proposes something in between i think the recommendation would be not to change it unless it's a significant uh request or uh you know reason because we want to make sure that there's continuity you know throughout the city yeah i'm thinking of a street like hickory street that runs from one side of town to the other side of town but that's straight but there are some streets that have you know buildings and barriers and they kind of twist and turn oh i can name a few yes yeah yes okay thank you okay mayor pertin mouser yeah i think uh this is the result of my ask and uh you know i i totally get and appreciate the sort of practical issues that this addresses but really where the request came from is that we put a lot of thought and effort when i say we have really you know the city staff a lot of thought and effort into renaming of parks and buildings you know there's and i i know for sure there is interest in uh renaming for commemorative purposes and kind of community recognition like the you know there is schools and and then and i guess my question is uh well actually one more point i want to accept i clearly get that the people who live on the street have an extra interest in it because it goes on all their mail after that but there's a general community interest and my question is uh are there steps that are in our other processes like park naming processes and building naming that would be appropriate here i i i apologize i'm not familiar with some of those steps but what i can tell you is in addition to the property owners that can request there is also the ability for the city to to make some of those recommendations or make a recommendation or request for a renaming of a street i i guess you know i would just uh ask i'm not quite sure what you know motion uh uh would be appropriate here but i would just at least ask for a review by uh by staff to see if there's alignment between the processes you know because if they're meeting the same purposes i mean it's sort of fine i imagine people are ready to vote yes but i think later we're going to go huh why are these processes completely different and if nobody here is ready to address that there's no particular rush on this i would say just take take you know one more look at it and see if our processes are aligned okay okay any other questions um so i'll take a motion well i'll accept some help in crafting the motion to do and i just suggested there uh you know i move actually i just want to sort of remand it back to staff for another look does that require a motion and a vote miss specifically to address if there's if there's no motion then it would just die in this meeting and it could be brought back subsequently by staff your other option is to do a motion to postpone that would be to a date certain which that's certainly something you could do i think i'll i'm going to suggest that you know we let it uh dive without a motion just so they can respond to this request i hope nobody thinks it's okay so then i'll take notes for for ron and i'll just say i i take uh council member davis's point i think the simple point is for staff to keep you out of to to make it clean on your side it's just here's the threshold to bring it to council council can then make a decision right and so it's just if half of this or that agrees then that meets the bare minimum requirement to bring it to council then council makes a decision and then it they can you know we take each one up on their own merits but any other notes for staff before we leave this to come back to us if i can be real clear we're going to do two things we're going to take this street naming back and kind of compare it to the other naming park naming particularly but also look at the issues that council member davis raised in regards to one owner on one side of the road and being the 50% and that should be no problem as addressing that and bringing that back for your your um direction okay councilman matt thank you there i i take i take mayor pro tem's point that that we we probably want to clean things up but there is there any major impediment to doing a thing and then fixing it because it's going to just take 15 minutes at a meeting one time it feels like i mean uh i guess let me let me put this in a phrase of a question is there any urgency uh that that or or um are we facilitating anything by passing it now versus tabling it sort of thing i mean what are the pro cons of of tabling it versus not tabling it but are delaying it versus uh versus passing it so so uh we do have one request but i don't think it's an urgent request obviously we have spent some time drafting this version we can certainly bring it back um at a later time um and i don't think there's anything that's urgent that we need to do but we do have a request uh in place to that would need to have these rules to enact we would like to have these rules because it sets up the procedures uh in order to make sure that whatever submitted with that request follows the same procedures moving forward well okay i i was going to lean towards not but if we're establishing a protocol that we want to carry forward maybe i'm going to lean towards mayor pro tem's uh delay on this if we're for establishing a best practice council member i think what what i'm getting here is that we have the just the process for doing it but i don't see anything in here that gives us the connectivity and the why would we why would we want to change the name of a street maybe if we put that in here as to why people do that which you know we know what it is you know maybe honoring someone or you know to that effect but it just seems like it's just something missing uh so i would agree to uh table it until we have a little further discussion to kind of clarify like maybe in the parks you know uh renaming process as to why someone would want to do something like this council member there there is there is a section in the procedures that identify the reasons providing a reason and there's a list of why someone can propose a street name change but again back to i guess some of the discussion of course yeah the 50 i think needs to be clarified and then just to make sure that we look at other processes we can make sure that we can get that reviewed and then if we need to implement something in addition to it we will do so okay great so it'll it'll die for want of a motion and that concludes that item thank you ron appreciate oh councilor davis sorry i mean i was on the board but there was a i guess it's hard to hard to tell if that was old or new on the board yes um so i wonder if it's not better to to go ahead and and kick it to a date certain because i just want to make sure if there's somebody pending that we don't lose don't lose track of it i know staff is very good about bringing things back along and i just want to make sure it stays stays front and center because i don't think that i think we're going to see more of these once we have a policy in place i think people are going to pick up some interest in it and then i had an additional thing that we might want to look at we have the 50 but then sub b of that section is an officer or attorney representing a governmental subdivision it's important to me and i'm one one vote it's important to me that that does not include council members you know we're not an officer but somebody could make the case i represent something or other the way it's worded to me is sufficient to not include council members but i think it's it's important to me that it's if you feel strongly about something that you go and you whip up 50 percent of the landowners to or 50 percent of the budding owners you know literally along the street 50 percent however we decide to find that that those are the people who are invested there and that there's not some not some groundswell to change somebody's street out from under them uh because a council member comes up with it or a you know some elected official comes up with it so again that's just me maybe it's something that the staff and the city attorney needs to kick around or think about some more um but i like the i like the stakeholders that y'all have in there bringing forward the change as opposed to i have a bunch of streets i would change the name of but it's not it's not up to me it's not up to me to go and change somebody's address on them because it makes more sense to me looking top down at the map does that make sense yes so sub b the b part is what you're you're talking about and um for for the council it's it's more having the stakeholders the property owners be the main requesters in these street naming changes right right the way i read sub b you're talking about an officer attorney representing governmental subdivision it's like a unt representative it's like a text dot representative that's a a government entity the way someone else could read that could include an elected official of some kind and for me it's important that it's not an elected official but again i'm only one person and and i don't know if staff has a perspective on if we ought to formally table it to a date certain than you know two weeks or a month or something because i don't know who this other applicant is or um city manager uh if the agenda committee has an outlook on an upcoming couple weeks or month and it feels like we're we're full up and we need to just leave it at staff's discretion on when to bring it back i just want to make sure we don't lose the thread because it seems important no and i actually was going to say i've taken good notes and and what you've asked us to do shouldn't take that long because we already have the standards set in the parks naming all they have to do is kind of compare i think addressing the 50 issue is something that we just have to change the language a little bit that has a little more clarity so there's not a problem there and then a little more clarity to the language about the officer attorney i.e. meaning not a government official so to speak so i would think we could come back within two council meetings not counting next week because we don't have one we have a luncheon so you'd be counting uh what would that be we'd have the 19th one the 12th and then the 19th isn't it so probably come back on the 19th so do staff prefer a motion or staff prefer it the way that it is now that we we move forward and it comes back as it comes back it would be helpful just to have dates certain so they know that's when they're coming back thank you council member davis you want to make a motion i see a button push by my colleague from district four so i'll defer to the button council member maguire i i move that we postpone this item to a date certain of october 19th i uh all right bear with me okay council member davis i'll gladly second got it okay motion with second motion by councilman maguire second by council member davis any other discussion seeing none council member maguire aye davis aye uh council member beck aye council member bird aye mayor pro tem melzer aye council member armature yes mayor hutzpah says aye as well that passes seven zero thank you ron thank you uh and that takes us to our concluding items any concluding items council member maguire thank you mayor um yeah there are um several uh community events coming up uh this weekend is the return of jazz fest at a strange time of year um uh come on out they're they're taking um good safety precautions it's it's always primarily an outdoor event but it's going to be even more outdoor than usual this year um uh you know please uh take the train take the bus while you still can um because parking is crazy um i'd also like to note that national night out um is is uh this coming tuesday a week from tonight um i will be attending the the the one at joe skiles park uh in southridge um sorry deanie i'll get you all next time um and i encourage you to um to to look on the city website to find your local event for that um i'd also like to wish a happy birthday to my son who will be turning five on thursday okay councilor bett thank you mr mayor i i just want to encourage the community uh that both this saturday and next saturday are uh you can see our local high school bands perform with the middle school bands and and it's a fabulous opportunity to be outside and and watch the development of this uh artistic bent of our community that we're actually so well known for here and um i really encourage uh people to show up to these kinds of events uh particularly don hanna coming up a week from this saturday to support uh the ryan high school band great uh the city manager so um next week is the international city county managers association conference in portland oregon david and i will be in portland so you'll have sarah keickler and frank dixon here on monday chief dixon to um host you for the luncheon meeting that has the audit plan and the trails and parks update so um we both arrived back in town we leave on saturday i leave on saturday he leaves on sunday and i come back tuesday night and so does david so just to let you know great thank you anyone else uh okay i have uh miss city manager if we could take a look and just follow up with parks uh i was saddened by the news of the purse the the young the child that died from the amoeba contracted at the splash pad in arlington and it's coming out that they weren't tracking kind of the chemicals and how they're treating the water so if we could just make sure we have a process in place for that that's kind of checked and triple checked uh and then uh went to the denton county health clinic opening councilmember davis i expect you to be using that regularly to make sure we got to keep you tip top uh but uh but if any learnings we can get from that is from our from a city perspective i'd love to kind of hear from you if there's anything you recommend i hope everyone is having a great uh hispanic heritage month i know there's a program coming up at uh mlk i forget the date uh but i know that's coming up and so just want to be mindful of that check the website um and then everyone's touched on it we just want to make sure everyone knows no council meeting next tuesday um there's national out and then just lastly there's a former council member his name's joe alford i don't know what year he served his wife is bet betty she was a doctor she earned her doctorate cw very active there and in the sciences and so anyway joe was on hospice so i was able to visit him and i'll try to get back by but just wanted to let those that that know joe to to reach out to him uh outstanding man and and betty's as well so um my thoughts and prayers go out to them and and uh please reach out to them if you know so mayor just run quick i i asked the same question that really disturbed me this morning when i read about the young 11 year old child that died of a brain eating um i don't even what you want to call it amoeba that was uh but i checked in with staff per texas health code our splash pads are checked each morning before it begins to operate water chemistry is tested the filter is backwashed and we record those testings daily and look at the hydro absent system more importantly though we have a uv system which is a secondary sanitation system in addition to the chlorine and that uv will kill additional organisms that may be found in that water that's left after chlorination so the good news is we're thank goodness we're in good shape and we have the uv system which does take care of that outstanding thank you for looking into that that is great news and yeah i share your concern but for the for the family affected but want to make sure we we uh learned from that so thank you okay at uh 843 we'll conclude tonight's meeting thank you very much