Feb 10, 2016 Planning and Zoning Commission on 2016-02-10 5:00 PM

It is 5.02 and this meeting has been duly posted and we have a quorum present and first item on our agenda is to receive a clarification of agenda items today and I'll turn it over to Manal. Thank You Chairperson . Would the Commission like presentations on the plats that are on the agenda today? If not we can dive straight into the next items. Superb. We'll go ahead and discuss the presentation for the DME ordinance and I'm going to call... Clarification please. Yes. We use the plats. Those are among the consent agendas? The consent and the public hearing plan. We have a final replat on the agenda as well. If you have any questions related to any of the plots we can address this else we can dive into the rest of the agenda. Questions? Thank you Mike. This is the DCA 15-3. This is the proposed change to for the electric substations and switch stations. We presented in great detail last meeting, the end of last meeting. Just kind of give you a refresher of what we're doing. We're adding a new use electric substations and switch stations. With that we're going to add standards to subject 24 for screening buffering access and with that we'll create a site plan process for all substations to follow. Where an SUP in the districts with SUP is currently required we're going to add this new limitation that says you have to do all this public notification prior to council selecting the site. If you've done that then you don't have to do an SUP anymore you just have to follow the site plan process and we'll get into that in a second. The revisions that have come up since last time you saw it last time we presented it to you as we move the public notification from the site acquisition phase where they're purchasing it up to the site selection phase. What that does is allows you to notice all five options and tell them come out and give your input at that meeting as opposed to when they're going to purchase it. So we think that's a little improvement to the process. The second is now a site plan approval by staff we've added the word substantially comply with the site plan. It was already there for P&Z we just went ahead and added it on to staff. The fencing for the gates we changed from opaque to wrought iron. DME has some security concerns that we get into if you want but they need the visibility into the side in case of emergencies or fires things like that. So wrought iron is what we went with and lastly we... I have a question for you. Is that in lieu of the masonry? It's only for the gates so there's an opening for the drive ways it'll be a masonry gate. Okay so still masonry? Wrought iron gate, yes . Okay so still masonry screening just an iron gate. Right. Okay thank you. And that's clear in the... Commissioner Dudowitz. Is that clear in the revision? Yes it's changed to wrought iron or similar metal material. For the gate. Thank you. It's a gate, yes gate. And if it's to if it's across from a residence or something like that it's still opaque. Right. And then lastly there was some concern last meeting about the directors leeway and providing approving alternatives. We added some clarification to that note. I'd be happy to go over it if you want. Basically what we 've done is... I'll actually go ahead and just read it. It's pretty short. Minor aesthetic deviations to screening and buffering standards may be approved by the director of developmental services or his or her designee if due to the unique character topography or orientation of the site the overall design aesthetic may be enhanced by the deviation and may serve the greatest extent possible of the regulations where applying them would prove impractical. So that's in summary kind of what we've done to add a little bit more direction to when that can be used. And we've added if director denies that alternative then they can appeal to P&Z. Commissioner Beck. Thank you. Now is this something that's going to be enhanced or diminished when he makes a change? It needs to enhance. Okay. Did I miss that word in there? Yeah. Yeah. It may be enhanced. Right. So those are the major changes. There's also some little minor word tweets here and there but nothing of substance. I'm just going to show you what that process would look like again. The yellow is what we're adding in. Public notification. The 200, 500 feet, the signs and everything meeting all needs to be held before the PB and City Council meeting for the site selection. And what it'll look like is if you've done that notification per limitation and then you can go to the site directly to the site plan process. If you comply with all the design standards in 24 staff can approve it. If you need a deviation or cannot comply with it you go to planning and zoning Commission. If you cannot meet the public notification requirements for instance a private utility because they don't have City Council obviously they would still do the SUP as normal and staff would approve the site plan that complies with the SU P. Commissioner Beck. Thank you Chair. Okay. After going over this a little bit more I think I got a little bit more clarification. What we're essentially doing here is changing the process where SUPs aren't always required anymore. Correct? Correct. Except if they're... private utilities. Right. Now interesting to hear on one of three of the legislation taxes. Private utility companies or DME sites that cannot comply with the public hearing notification and neighborhood meeting process will still need to apply for an SUP. Will still need to apply for an SUP. Why is that written like that? Why I would assume if they don't meet these that would be the... So if they don't do this step here in yellow. Right. They don't send out notification for council to purchase a site. Right. Then you still have to follow the rules that are in place. The SUP notifications to all the sites. Then it says any proposed DME electric sub station or switch station facility that meets the public hearing notification neighborhood meeting requirements but does not meet the development standards would need to submit an application for review. That's the site plan process. So right here if you've done that notification. Yeah. Then you go into that site plan review. The sub tap for 24 and the site plan. Okay. And if you comply with all the standards we created on the face of them then you go staff can approve that. If you cannot comply with those standards in 24 that's when it comes to PMV. Okay. So what we're doing is we're am ending the DDC that allows this change so they don't have to do an SUP. I wouldn't say this they don't have to do an SUP. What we're really doing is moving that input and noticing that's required with the SUP up to the beginning of the process towards more impactful neighborhoods where they're going. We're requiring that notification to the neighbors that's not required now before the sites ever even picked. That's the whole intent of what we're doing here. Okay. So to say we're eliminating the SUP is not quite fair. We're just taking that notification and moving it up. Because by the time that if we do an SUP the sites already been purchased by council. It's already been it's already left the gate. It's already happening. And so we want to move that input up closer to when you're actually picking the site so that neighborhood feedback can be impactful. Okay. I don't mean to drag this out too long but I wrote part of this were these conditions and additional site considerations not codified anywhere is that right? Yes that's in 24 which it's in your backup we gave you. Right. Those are all the site plan considerations the buffering, the screening, the lighting, the NERC and federal standards. Those are all spelled out in 24. Okay. And those are a reflection of the seven SUPs we've already approved that were consistent across the board with the conditions that were applied. And so if you comply with all those then it's just staff approval. Okay so we're not recodifying anything. We're adding in standards that were approved as conditions of SUPs. We're adding those into the code. Okay. Thanks. Commissioner Hartsmith. Thank you chair. I don't know if now is the time. I have a question about the language in the limitations here in so L -43. Correct me if I'm wrong but the way it reads currently 12 days for the public hearing 15 days which is section C there 15 days for the public hearing. So would that does that mean you would have the public hearing before potentially the notice goes out? Am I reading that right? No your notice needs to go out 12 days before the hearing. Okay and so it go 12 days before the public hearing. Right to get the neighborhood notice that they're gonna be talking about it. Okay okay I read that to say that they ran they didn't they they ran separate but I I was that was my question. Right so B is a public hearing was required and then one and two underneath that is you have to have the notice 12 days prior to that public hearing. Perfect okay got it thank you. All right and that's really that's really it. It's always changed so. Commissioner Beck . Thank you. For definition electric distribution lines these are the lines that go from the power plant to the homes and businesses. Transmission line will go from the power plant to the substation. The substation the trans distribution line will go from the substation to your house. Okay thanks. Thank you Mike. Thank you Mike. Our next item will be presented by Ross. Ross is going to discuss DCA 150007. Good afternoon this is DCA 1507 a didn't cut amendment for it amending the historic districts district standards for adding cement itious siding to the historic codes. Let me give a little preface real quick. I have a background in architecture and I'm was kind of approached by our director to help kind of tie loose ends on this ordinance get the ordinance more into a written stage so we can put it into our code. Identify the the areas of interest within our districts and then just kind of close up the the work that has been done by our staff. I do want to kind of give credit to Katia Boykin and Cindy Jackson they are planners senior planners in our development services department that have done the legwork of a lot of the community meetings a lot of working with the historic districts and put all the kind of the data together that we are now tying together with this code amendment. Additionally the city has brought on board a historic preservation officer who will be starting with our department next in two weeks so he will kind of take the charge of anything forward and relate to our department on any further code updates coming forward but you have a staff report that kind of indicates there was a need based on some COA certificate of appropriateness for structures that were needing to be identified as a separate type of building material and we 'll kind of walk through that with this process and how that relates to our DENT development code. So the request before you is to make a recommendation to City Council regarding amending sections 35 795, 35 7105, and 35 7135 of the DENT development code to include additional facade materials being cementitious siding as architectural requirements on new construction only and that's highlighted there within the DENT development code for the Oak history Oak Hickory historic district, the Belle Avenue historic conservation district, and the West Oak area historic district. Some background the homeowners in the historic districts have inquired to the city and requested buildings such as these listed garages, workshops, storage buildings, and new and fill houses to be able to apply cementitious or hardy board siding for these new construction activities. Now new construction is separate as a building envelope and building activity than preservation items. The DENT development code follows historic interior interior the secretary historic guidelines for required materials and processes for rehabilitating historic homes based on those approved materials and the character and quality of the contributing structure. So what this code amendment is only to kind of codify new rules for new construction. Cementitious siding for your kind of benefit or hardy board or planks, hardy board planks are siding or cement fiber board products usually kind of spelled out within the parameters of the dimensional requirements there used as exterior siding to replicate wood and they are tested and fire rated for durability against fire, insect, wind, and water. And James Hardy is a leading manufacturer company of fiber board siding that you may see throughout your view throughout the DFW Metroplex and all throughout the United States. Now generally a definition for the application of this is kind of broad. You can see hardy board on new single-family homes, on accessory structures, and for infill homes within historic districts and that's kind of the application we're looking to to amend with our DDC. This little picture up here came from the James Hardy website kind of indicating all the different types of siding and trim and architectural elements that kind of meet the character of how those new materials and expression of those materials are made instead of just a wood siding product. And the just to kind of point out this was this is my house or was my house in Houston and it was in a historic district but it was on an annex side of the district where you didn't have to meet the full replication of materials and it was built in 1999. I lived in it from 2004 to 2008 and it to me represents a you know what we are looking to do with new infill development when you can get an architect that can you know design for a good product with that siding. Current DDC historic standards just generally do not differentiate between new construction and preservation activities. They require COAs to have brick, wood siding, wood, stone, and stucco which are general materials required for historic preservation activities and are not consistent. The language of this is not consistent within the Denton Development Code and you'll take a look at that. Now it's kind of again just another indication these are the kind of preservation activities where we are preserving homes in Denton and these are notable structures in Denton that are maintaining the strict standards of brick, wood siding, wood, stone, and stucco and we are not this code amendment doesn't affect the historic preservation of these activities. So if you take a look in the Denton Development Code these are how they read verbatim in each section and you can see that each under general one of each one kind of says the permitted the only permitted facade materials are brick, wood siding, wood, stone, and stucco and within the Bell Avenue Historic District there are opportunities for new materials to be expressed but they are kind of codified in all the other districts so we're kind of seamlessly kind of matching all the all these together. So looking at this one by one Oak History Historic District will read the white writing is the original language the yellow is the new amended language which we are including the use of smooth sided cementitious siding is permitted on new construction and accessory buildings artificial facsimiles of these materials will be considered on a case-by-case basis as material technologies progress and we did that language for each of the historic districts shown here and with that there was data provided for us to make some good qualified decisions quantified decisions of what to do and our staff as mentioned polled comparable cities and pretty much all of them allow for cementitious siding to be implemented on new construction and we found that pretty standard throughout and I want to point out that Fort Worth identified it as smooth sided versus a grained pattern and you can get these panels within with grain patterns and other things but I think for the content and the character of the buildings that we have maintaining it as smooth sided is the direction we were going and we are following their lead. We've got a question for you on that. Yes. So you you can't use a wood textured type siding then only slick. My experience with that is I don't think you're going to end up with the kind of look that you may be looking for with a cement board because you can't countersink the nails when you shoot a smooth finish hardy board it'll it'll break so what ends up happening you have to high nail it all the nails show on it and when you paint it and you drive down the road and you look at it you'll see that and I learned that probably 20 years ago the hard way with the client and I've never used smooth textured siding since because of that because you can see every single nail shot in it. I understand what the look is but from the street you can't tell the difference but you will definitely see a very different look in the way the finish is going to be when it's caulk putty and painted with a just a smooth finish and I would just draw that to your attention from many years of experience you may want to check with some other contractors but I think the clients or the owners will maybe not be as pleased with the finished product using just a smooth only versus a texture that just be a comment. Commissioner Dudowitz. Ross could you explain why you only allow smooth and not give an alternative because in any architectural design you would want to sure duplicate something that's surrounding it and give the client an option what would look best. I can go back to that you know there is precedent with you know those these multiple types and you can see there's lap board and you know I understand the single kind of type stuff but I'm just thinking that maybe the Jim's point that you have an alternative from an aesthetic or architectural design standpoint not to restrict it just a flat board but if there is great and I've seen it you get up close to that you know to a great thing you think it's grain wood painted over you get up to a flat piece it looks like siding. Well there's been conflicting viewpoints on that within our within our team so some of the it's a wood grain would have looked good looked the other way it would have looked more of a you know less quality material versus a seamless material so I'm not sure how to go about that. Can you explain artificial effect similes and what those are? That would be kind of the same thing if there's any other new product for brick for stone but those would be the artificial facsimiles of the main material and those would be looked on a case-by-case basis if they're appropriate to be implemented either as a you know skirt around a building or something like that if they're not going to do river rock stone on things like that I mean you would have to do it for preservation purposes but for new construction we would look at new materials on a case-by- case basis. Stone face cinder block you know they have cinder blocks and they can put a artificial facade on the front side of that that qualify for it? I don't know with cinder block I mean I wouldn't say. Well no I'm saying you have real stone and then you have facsimile of stone it's because it has a facade on the front that looks like stone but in fact it's not. Jim may be able to help explain what I'm thinking about. Cultured stone. Cultured stone, cement stone that is porous. That would be artificial facsimiles. So that's the term that can be approved case-by-case. Correct. Understand your point. Thank you. Commissioner Taylor. Thank you Chair. Along the same lines it seems to me that would be more appropriate generally to have the wood grange product because it would more accurately recreate the historic wood siding. I also have some questions about other shapes. I don't know how many kind of craftsman style homes are in our historic districts but common in craftsman style homes were shingles even cement shingles and asbestos shingles which would have you know were common in the 20s 30s 40s and so it seems like it would be better to get rid of the asbestos and go to the hardy shingle for example but those aren't smooth either I believe. I believe they're also yeah they have the same kind of textures that would that be allowed in this because it the way I read it it looks like you can only have the straight board. We weren't proposing any kind of dimensional requirement for any of these products. Some historical perspective this item evolved out of our historic Commission. They are HLC Commission and they wanted to they had received several and you can see that in the backup material for your report several queries as to what materials they can and cannot use and these are one of them came up. Of course obviously some very relevant discussion is coming out of this conversation in this presentation and the Commission at the PNZ is more than welcome to recommend adding or including the hardy board smooth finish and wood grain. So that is an option. Now to talk about the other materials or what you've mentioned why wouldn't we upgrade and eliminate the for instance the asbestos issue related to homes that were built in the 20s. If this was a existing home and they decided to tear it down and build it to that same character then we would as a facsimile or look at those other materials in that manner to determine the appropriateness of to comply with. But any new development that occurred on that site let's say they had the existing home with the existing materials and they chose and Ross correct me if I'm wrong and they chose to add a garage for example then deciding on that would not be the asbestos it would be asbestos free and we could see that it matches the character of that neighborhood or that single-family home. So I guess a follow-up question I don't I don't really know that much about the historic landmark or the historic preservation and the kind of activities of HLC . So to me to my unexperienced eye it seems like a good facsimile that's of a quality product that's going to last 50 or 100 years would be good enough. Is there a reason or should we ask HLC to give us input as to whether or not a facsimile product is is there a reason why we shouldn't allow facsimile products ? I think the opportunity that the HLC wanted was to look at everything case by case in a CO COA for example to determine the appropriateness and the likeness and the historical perspective of that area as well. So I guess then what we're talking about would all fall into that facsimile clause that require a case-by-case basis. I see. Commissioner Beck. Thank you Chair. Following up with what you said, do they lose historical status if they do start changing certain materials is that part of the concern here? This is not yet. That would where preservation activities have to maintain original structure and form or indicate a break to the original structure so that new materials could be shown but I don't know the logistics of how that works. I'm not a historic preservation officer but again these are for new structures for garages things like that that people with historic buildings would want to include on their properties and to give you the background HLC has always promoted one-for-one materials to the secondary structures so it's become cost prohibitive it's called become kind of difficult to maintain a garage you know with you know four inch slat wood and kind of clad your whole building with that the durability of that the longevity of that when new materials could replicate it but yet be not would not diminish the historical nature of that structure because the original structure is the the item that that carries that weight. Well it seems to me if I may just add that the older these buildings get the availability of those original products seems to diminish and you're almost forced to look at substitute materials as long as it looks the same. There's different levels and I'm not versed in it but there's a level of and I may be listed it here there's restoration preservation there's a couple of other levels where you take the original material but we've got to kind of focus on just new materials and not you know. So this code amendment that's before you was specifically for new construction and the the issue was in terms of the definition in the ordinance this was a cleanup to the definition of the ordinance upon the upon discussion with HLC as well that we needed to refine the language to enable the ability to allow cementious fiber / hardy board as everybody likes to call it but your point as to you know should it only be a smooth finish versus a great wood grain pattern that is something worth considering and perhaps making that part of your recommendation. We can take that recommendation. Commissioner Rozelle. Thank you. In your question should it be limited to wood grain if that especially siding isn't wood grain at all? I would take you out any mention of that then and just say the use of cementitious siding is permitted and not kind of dictate pattern or form on that. Exactly. Make it a little more general. Yeah okay. Commissioner Taylor. One more clarifying question. Can does it need to match does the new building the new garage or accessory building need to match the main building? It needs to match in yeah. So there's that somewhere else in the ordinance? Correct. So we don't have to worry about. Yeah correct. Okay. And the COA process would enable that distinction. It would be reviewed. I have a couple slides left real quick. Just they our city staff worked with the HLC to and with the community to have staff to have community input for residents within the districts and we are looking at doing that again for City Council moving forward with your recommendation tonight but there has been some items done within October of last year to gain support and get input from the residents and so again kind of the background we are looking we're at the place where HLC did vote 8-0 in support but we can bring back your amendments to them or move forward with City Council with your amendments. Commissioner Dottovitz. Just to question that comment so we're going to be presented with this option tonight. Correct. We can amend it or suggest to be amended. Does it go and then go back to CHL? No. It just goes to City Council. HLC. HLC. Alphabet soup. The next step is to move on to City Council with your recommendation. You do have the option to postpone the item should you need more time. Just to keep your apprised we have scheduled a notification for the upcoming City Council meeting but your option is if you need more information we would choose to table the item that is your prerogative. Okay. I think from what I'm hearing is that this cementious siding leave it open-ended. Commissioner Rosell. Thank you Chair. I'm not sure if this question can be answered but there's different levels of historic design ations from the city, state, and federal designations of what is historic. That's is that on a building by building or is that the zone? What I'm wondering is any new construction is are we do we have to fall under any federal state historic designations or kind of new construction has some freedom? I'm not first on that. We can check with our Chelsea advisors on that. It would seem to be that there are those higher tier districts and this is a local these are three local districts which I've read the background on so whatever we're doing we're amending local districts with our standards. It's building by building. Building by building. But we do we have established specific districts within the city if you notice we have the okay create historic district you have the Bell Avenue historic conservation district and we also have a West Oak area which those designations that should you choose to follow that path you have the opportunity to. If I'm not mistaken. There's not gonna be any jeopardy to the primary structure if they have one of those state plaques on their wall by adding a new structure. New structure that's because that's to the building not to the property. It's not to the lot. It's to the building in most instances and that's what the C of A would establish you would have all that historical data with it to determine the appropriateness of even moving forward with in addition to that property or that development. Perfect. Thank you. Again this was new information to me I tried to cram and understand the concepts of what was going on to get it to where it is. Thank you. Just for anybody who may be waiting and listening and we have our final item that's D, DCA 16-001 in regards to tree preservation that that item has been continued to our March 23rd meeting so that will not be on our agenda tonight. That's going to cover our public hearing items. We have two other items in work session. I think what we're going to do is make a small change and here item B first which is going to be PZ 16-030 because I think they were here last time and missed completely so we'll make sure that you're able to get up and do your presentation and I think we'll take a short break to get food at 538. Okay welcome back it's 543 and we're going to call our work session back into order and we'll hear item B receive a report on DME's capital improvement plan. Thank you Chair Commission. This is an update on DME's CIP program and processes that we use in our CIP program. CIP's capital improvement program. I'd like to begin and give you just a couple brief facts about Denton Municipal Electric. We're an MOU that's what Mike Bill had shown up in his earlier presentation. We are the public electric company MOU. Some people call it public power as opposed to a private entity which would be an investor owned utility such as Encore or a cooperative like CoServe. DME is the electric department. We're owned and operated by the City of Denton so all the citizens of Denton do own us. Our peak electrical load is 350 meg awatts. We have over 50,000 electric meters that we serve. Our overhead distribution lines and I'll show you some pictures of distribution we talked about earlier is 328 miles of overhead distribution. We have 426 miles of underground distribution. If you do that math that says that our distribution system is 57% underground here in the City of Denton. This is executive summary. It's a little bit of a presentation that we gave to the City Council in a work session on December the 8th. If you look at the chart on the right hand side this shows the electrical peak demand that we've had here in the City of Denton. It starts on the far left- hand side over here in 1960 we had 26 megawatts worth of peak electrical load in the entire City of Denton combined. Forecast adapt to the year 2022 we're forecasting 436 megawatts. Our peak load was 350 megawatts in August of 2011 when we had the hot spell with so many consecutive days over 100 degrees and so it goes up when it's hot it goes down a little bit when the summer loads are not as much but you have to have the infrastructure to handle it because we never know when it's going to be hotter when the citizens are going to be flipping all the light switches on. So we do have a problem here in the City of Denton. We have a growth and agent infrastructure problem. We have a responsibility to respond to resolve that problem with both as the electric provider here in the City of Denton and also a regulatory responsibility. There are some words that have been passed around at the federal level Department of Energy. There's FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. They have NERC, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation that has guidelines that we have to follow. There's NERC compliance requirements that we have to submit . There's a report called a FERC 715 report that every year we have to analyze our entire transmission system. That means you mathematically model your entire electrical system and then you check to see under peak loading conditions how are you looking? What parts of your system or segments might be overloaded? Are you going to have any issues with that load? Then you start doing contingencies. You take each segment or each piece of that electrical system out of service such as if you had to switch it out for maintenance or if maybe a piece of equipment failed. You look at that for every single piece of equipment. That's one contingency. Then you start doing multiple contingencies where you look at that piece and another piece out. And there's a whole host of guidelines that we have to follow for the FERC 715 report. We have a public involvement process for our CFP program to resolve these issues that we discover in the FERC 715 report. And the public involvement process encourages citizen input. Brian Dascombe is going to come up in a little bit to talk about the public involvement process. We do consider all practical suggestions that we receive from the citizens and we desire to move forward with the most sensible approach that has the least impact and it has the most support. So our CFP program does address the two key factors here in Denton, system growth and agent infrastructure. Here is a system substation map. I noticed in your backup you had a copy of this. Let me kind of point this out. This is a more recent one. The green loop around Denton here. This is I-35 East and 35 W comes here. So this is the main core of Denton. This is our 69 kV transmission line that's 69,000 volts. That is what is targeted during this FERC 715 study to be upgraded to 138 kV or 138,000 volts. The reason we would want to do that is we do need more power requirements and there's a mathematical calculation that takes the power equals your voltage times your current in very simplistic terms. So if you keep the same current flowing through the conductors and you double your voltage you get double the power that you can ship around the system. So the red line is the 138 kV system that is owned by Texas Municipal Power Authority. Denton is one of the sister cities, a TMPA, Texas Municipal Power Authority and the yellow dots are the substations across the town. This is a photograph on the left-hand side, just a portion of our system operations center. This is a 24/7 operation that we man here in the city of Denton. It's located at 1685 Spencer Drive. If you have not had an opportunity to come out and visit that we'd love to set up a time with you personally, schedule a time and answer any questions that you may have. We're very proud of this. It has all of our substations are tied back into this one site across town in this one central location through over on the right-hand side. This is a picture inside of a switchgear facility at one of our substations. Each substation has a facility similar to this. These are microprocessor relays or solid state relays . This just happens to be a brand called Swatz or SEL. They send me one of the leaders in the industry and from these these all feed into remote terminal unit or RTU and that RTU goes through our SCADA system supervisory control and data acquisition back to the system operations center. So we can look at telemetry. We know how much current, how much voltage is at each substation on each piece of the electrical bus in the substation. We can check the status of breakers. Are they opened or closed? We can actually have control where we can open and close those remotely from this facility. These operators that are men in the desk, they're NERC certified. They have to go through a rigorous set of testing to where they can work with the state of Texas electrical grid which the transmission system is part of the state grid. Here's a picture of a substation. These are unmanned facilities. Those are those yellow dots that I showed you on the schematic. The one on the left is a picture of the Bonnie Bray substation. Bonnie Bray south of 380. The picture on the right is our Cooper Creek substation at Audre and East Loop 288. One of the things that we do when we begin to try to pick either new sites or how do we renovate existing sites to allow for growth is this is at Giesling and Black Road on the northeast side of Denton. These are some drawings that have been put together by power engineers, one of our engineering consultants. This is the existing site that 's here. It's kind of unique that this substation actually has three transmission lines that come into it right now and will eventually have four. Encore, TXU, they come in from the northeast side of town. We have TMPA line that goes up through here and then we have a line that feeds our Cooper Creek, McKinney, and industrial substations over in here. So there's three lines that come into this. Most of our substations have two lines, one line in one line out. So when you have a node or an intersection, we have multiple lines come together, it's really hard to move the substation to a much different location unless you move all the lines that are with it. Think of a pencil with rubber bands and you can move that, but all the rubber bands have to move with that movement of the site. This is an artist rendition of what this substation will look like when it's complete and it's taken from this KOP key observation point in this direction . Back to the point of what is a distribution line, this is the lines that distribute the power to their citizens, to their homes, and it steps down on a transformer to get it down to 120 to 240 volts so it can go into the house and supply the customer's needs on the right-hand side. So they're the typically 40- 45 foot poles that go down up and down every street, those are distribution system. It's 13,200 volts phase to phase grounded Y or 7,620 volts phase to ground on the distribution system. This picture in the middle is what we 've actually been constructing with our transmission process. This is one of the newest ones we completed over on Paisley Drive. You can see the transmission system at the top and then we have distribution system underneath it. And so it's a very clean look as compared to some of them like down Bonnie Brave where we had old wood poles and we topped them and things like that. So we're trying to consider aesthetics and all of designs and how do we have it look in the end. Well one of the things that we've come into is how do we modify and upgrade our electrical system and still keep the lights on and in. This is a pretty big task. Well we got to keep the vehicle moving forward. Sometimes you have a flat and you have to change the flat which is kind of what we're doing. So you have to kind of get innovative. You just kind of rock that car up on two wheels and you get some guys out you change the tire and you try to keep on moving down the road and that's what we're attempting to do. So how do we do this? Well we've never done this before. Quite like this with this large of a program. So we enlisted some help. Freezin Nichols is an engineering consultant that we brought on board to help us manage these projects and help manage the program. Once they came on board the end of year 2013 we spent several months talking to them, talking to other folks within DME and other seated apartments. How do we do these projects from start to finish and do multiple projects at a time? We're really good at building one or two substations every two or three years is what we used to do. Now we're trying to build three to five every year or two so we can meet these electrical needs that the first graph showed. So we we did some flow charts and process some swim lane diagrams . We came up with about 21 different processes that we have to go through and I'll show you just a few of those real quick. And they mainly worked around site and route selection, land acquisition, permitting, design criteria and construction methods as far as how do we build these projects and complete the program. This is very hard to see but there's a lot of steps involved. This is one of those 21 steps that we go through. This is just to pick a site or route. How do we do this? We have different players such as Tignall and Perkins, one of our consultants we use, Power Engineers that does this across the country, DME , Freezin Nichols working with the right-of-way department, our public utility board and our city council. So there's six players here and as you go from left to right you kind of look at each task that has to happen and maybe multiple players or parties are involved in each task. Every time you go from one swim lane to another you have to hand it off to somebody and you expect a review or some type of comment to come back to you or maybe you work hand-in-hand with them to accomplish this task. So once we get around to get into an open house where we actually meet with the citizens, talk about things that we need to do, we've had a whole host of people involved all the way through city council before we even have the first open house to say this project's needed. We need to get this built. How do we do this? Here's some options. Here's some things we came up. Let's take these in front of the community. Let's hear their input. Let's take the good suggestions that we hear back from them. Let 's see what ones seem reasonable and that we can accommodate and come back forth with an ultimate selection of where we get a site selected. And so this particular one has 49 separate tasks just to help pick a site. So it gets over on the right hand side then it comes back over to the left hand side and goes over to the end. And so there's a lot of tasks involved to help even pick the site. Once the site's picked, an ordinance is written that that's the site that's picked, we then go in and try to acquire that site. We try to buy the land, work with the landowners. This piece has about 30 separate tasks that are involved. Sometimes you have willing landowners, sometimes you don't. In the end, if you can't come to agreeable terms and conditions, then you may end up having to go through an eminent domain process. Luckily, we've only had to file a few eminent domain cases. We went to special commissioners here in one time. We got an award, but we've never had to go through the whole process at all. And so we I think when people really realize that the relocation packages and some of the things, they're very, very generous. It can be a good thing . They're like, "What? We didn't know that." And so that's the land acquisition process. After that, we end up and we have to go ahead and plait the land that we've bought. This is just a preliminary process to plait the land. This one has 13 tasks. It does involve the planning department, DRC comments. We comply with the DRC comments and we come back and of course that comes back to P&Z for some reviews and approvals. And the SUP process, which we're talking about trying to improve and maybe move some of this up earlier in the process that Mike Bell mentioned earlier, I think this is really a good thing to consider because it gets to hear what the citizens have to say about the site, how's it going to look, and they hear those questions before we ever pick the site, before we ever buy the site, before we ever plait the site, before we then could come see you as we do now. So I think there's some real opportunities to improve that process. Power engineers helped us with some site evaluation criteria. Some of the things we looked at were engineering considerations, aesthetics, land use, ecology, and cultural resources and there's many items under each one of these subcategories. With that, I'd like to ask Brian Das combe, he's our external affairs manager, come up talk about some of our site selection and public involvement process and I'll come back up and conclude this. Thank you, Brent. Good afternoon, Commissioners. As Brent mentioned, I 'm going to quickly go through our public involvement process and I'll try to do that quickly. Please ask any questions that you have. So here it is real simply, deceptively simply, these are the steps we go through. So we start with an open house and then move on to a hearing with the Public Utilities Board and then with the City Council. Now you're, I'm sure, very familiar with public hearings and how those go. I know that you conduct those on a regular basis. That open house though, if you haven't been to those, those are meetings that we have with the community. They're informal in the sense that there's no central presentation. Instead we have about a dozen exhibits set up and the public's invited in to come check those out and say what's the impact going to be on my property, what's the impact going to be on my neighborhood, and try to get an understanding of how that works. And so some of those exhibits that Brent showed you earlier, for instance, an artist rendering of what the substation is going to look like, a map, an aerial map that shows where it is. We found that that allows people to come in and talk to us one-on-one. They don't have to get up and stand in front of a group of people and try to present their question or something like that. So those are helpful. So we have that open house. That's followed by a hearing with the Public Utilities Board. Hey then they can get up and make a statement in front of everybody if they want to, right? So we've had it informally, we've had it formally at the public hearing with the PUB, and those tend to be in the morning, the Public Utilities Board meets in the morning, and then an evening meeting with the council for another public hearing. So we have formal and informal, we have a couple of evening meetings and that one morning meeting. I said this was deceptively simple, and one of the reasons is that at any point in this process we can get kicked back to the beginning of the process, and I really think that's a good thing. As much as it can slow things down, sometimes things need to be slowed down. For instance, we could have the open house, we present five different options, let's say, and the public says I don't like any of your options because you should have picked a sixth option, you should have showed us a sixth option, and a lot of times we'll look at that and say you're right, that is a good option. However, it includes a new group of people, so we're gonna have another open house and we'll start the process over. There have been a number of instances where just that has happened, and that can happen anywhere along the way. We can get kicked back to the beginning. So that's the general process. To notify people for those open houses, as well as the public hearings, we send out mailed letters and we put a notification in the dinner record chronicle, we do on-site signage, and we create a web page for each of the projects so that people can get more information. Now those mailed letters are similar to what the planning department does. The dissimilarity is that they send out a 200-foot legal notice and those are certified mail. None of these are legal notices for us, it 's just our process, and so ours we send out to the 500-foot courtesy area and those are all just standard mail. So that's currently our process. I also want to say on on-site signage, I want to make sure that I communicate those. We try to do on-site signage, but if we don't own the property, there may be no opportunity for us to do that, and so we do our best to do on-site signage and sometimes it's practical and sometimes it isn't. So here's what somebody could get in the mail. They would have a narrative along with this. There's some typed out information, but they would have a map. This is a subst ation map for our Locus substation that we did, and we said, okay, here's these five different options and instead of numbering them, we use colors just because we don't indicate that there's a preference. We don't know it seemed to be a rank, but we are saying, okay, there's five different options that we're looking at. You can see the existing site and then we're going to draw, and somebody knows more about geometry can tell me, but it's a buffer of 500 foot around these, around each polygon, and so those are overlapping somewhat. I don 't know if that's a radius or a, I call it a buffer. I feel safe calling it a buffer. All right, does anyone know, is anyone going to correct me? All right, it's strange how we started talking about geometry there in the middle of my presentation, wasn't it? Sorry. Okay, so there they can see, here's the sites that are being considered, and a lot of times somebody can look at this and say, do I care to show up for this meeting? If it's some, if they're, you know, if they're thinking about putting a substation on the courthouse lawn, buddy, I 'm coming to the meeting and let them know what I think. You might wonder where we got the 500 foot notification. That was through two different sources. We talked to the planning department and they said the furthest we ever go out is 500 feet, but we also talked to Power Engineers, which is an engineering consulting firm that does public involvement across the country for electric projects, and they said the furthest we've ever seen anyone go out is 500 feet . So for projects that are bigger than anything the Denton's ever going to do, 500 feet is the furthest we've ever gone out, and we said, okay, we're going to hit the maximum for both our planning department and for what this consulting firm has seen. So citizens that are included on a project, they have the opportunity to influence us and the final decision makers through web comment forms. We put surveys on those web pages I mentioned. They can talk to us one-on-one in the open house and get information, but also give information there, and they have a hearing both with the PB and with the City Council. So those are their opportunities for input. So that's all I have on public involvement. Are there any specific questions that I can answer? All right. Oh, yes, sir. Commissioner Beck. Thank you. Signage. Yes, sir. You get a lot of complaints on the size of the signs. How big are the signs? Are they your typical yard signs? So those are, I think those are 24 by 36. Okay. Commissioner Hatchbuth. Thank you, Chair. Following kind of that same thought, the green card, you sent out certified mail? Is that what you said? No, sir. Just regular mail? That's right, because it's all courtesy mail, so it's non-certified. Okay. Is there, so there's, but there's a spreadsheet or something, some sort of distribution list of some sort? Absolutely. And we send those out to, and I appreciate the opportunity to clarify, we send that out to any resident within the 500 feet and also any landowner. So if you're a renter, you get it. If you're a landlord, but who doesn't live there, then you're going to get it as well. And then is that list subsequently posted or is that, I don 't know if you can. I don't know what the rules are. But here's, along with Larry, I think most often I hear complaints about, well I didn't get it. I was never notified. Yeah. Yes. And so I think it would maybe be in my mind just , hey, we sent it and here's a spreadsheet that's posted, you know, that people can check periodically. I don't know what rules kind of govern that, but I just, I hear that a lot. Okay. That I didn't know. And one thing we've batted around is the idea of including that in the backup to the city council and the public utilities board so that it's technically a public document and people can find it if they need to. But we're not, you know, we're not putting people's public, even though it is public information, we want to respect their privacy as well. And so perhaps that's a good middle way to do it. I think that's a good concern. All right. Thank you, Ryan. Appreciate that. This is our entire CIP program. This is a Gantt chart. On the left hand side, there's over 2000 separate line items that we have to accomplish to do each of these projects. We've rolled those up into these individual projects, and it has a timeline across the top. The blue line is, it shows where we at in all of the projects that we have to do . I think kind of an interesting thing to note is there's some of the projects that we've completed, some that we're in the middle of doing. And of course, there's others wrote that have rolled off the top that just because you can't read it, we close those up. Don't show them on this chart. And there's some projects here that we have yet to do in the future. I think this next chart is a little bit easier to read. It 's the same type of chart, but we broke each of those horizontal lines into four different categories. We broke them into route and site selection, land and eas ement acquisition, permitting and construction. So at a glance, you can look at a project and see what phase of that project is it in. So these are some that we've completed construction on. These are some that are either beginning or in the middle of the construction. And these are some that the construction has not begun yet. We do hold project meetings for all of these projects and for the entire program every single Thursday at 1685 Spencer at the DME Operation Engineering and Operations Center. We meet. There's about a dozen DME staff, engineering consultants, some legal consultants, other city of Denton departments such as legal, right away, purchasing. We all get together to talk about each and every one of the projects. And we have a sheet where are we at on this project? What have we done? What do we have yet to do? Is there any roadblocks or any things that we need to maybe reallocate resources so we can try to keep the project moving forward? And so we do that every single Thursday. It becomes rather lengthy. We start at 930. It seems like it rarely gets over before 130 or two. And so it's very in depth every single week on these projects. This is a different way of looking at some of the projects. We did the open house here, the route site selection, land acquisition, permitting and completion date. The green items have already been completed. The blue items are in process. So we have many different ways to help manage this large CIP program and all these projects. I think that this little animated chart will kind of show you how much progress that we've made in just a short amount of time. This was in 2013. We'd already began some of these projects before Freeze and Nichols came on. After they came on, we came up with the swim lanes, the process flow diagrams. At the end of that year, I'm going to hit this next mouse click and you can actually see how different projects have moved from category to category. And here we go. So that's what we did in the year 2013 to 2014 on the entire CIP program and some of these projects. This next slide will start off where the last one just left off. And this is what we showed council on December the 8th as well. We do this past year from 2014 to 2015. And here's this mouse click. If you stop and kind of reflect on all of those process swim lanes, those 20 different processes, I just showed you four of them. You think of all the tasks that have to happen. We're very, very busy. We really want to get these projects out in front of the public. We want to get their input. We want to consider their comments. And then we want to comply with all the DRC comments that we get back from them and get them built. So with that, I'd be happy, Brian, I'd be happy to answer any questions that you might have about the electric side of things on any of our CIP projects. Commissioner Taylor. Thank you, Chair. I just have a couple of questions on that very first map, the very first system diagram. And kind of the very first slide and the very last slide kind of tying together. So basically there are stations and there are lines. And you said everything green is being updated and everything yellow, basically. Is that correct? All of the light colored green lines is our existing 69,000 volt system. And that is all being converted to 138 kV. And then every basically every yellow dot that touches the green line, is that those are the substations? These are the substations if they have a number on them. These are the projects that we have approved CIP budget funds for to implement. And we look at a five year program when the Public Utility Board and City Council reviews our budget each year. And so as you get closer into the five year program, you know of some new things that you didn't really realize the first part. And so that's kind of a constantly evolving process. But these are the projects that have been identified that do resolve the FERC 715 issues that we've noted. And on the last slide there appeared to be about five projects. I think it was two or three stations and two or three lines that were in site selection. We're kind of early in the process. I guess six. This Mayhill substation actually we have a site selection public involvement hearing with the City Council next Tuesday. On this on the 16th we've already gone through the Public Utility Board site selection for that. The reason that that stayed there for a while is we've been working with the landowners one landowner that has all these possible sites we thought we were going to come to an arrangement. We're picking the site that they wanted us to put where on their property. We just haven't been able to arrive at the actual dollar amount. So we'll be having that on Tuesday. Next week, a pockers dispenser. That's another segment that we're looking at trying to get done. Underwood substations on the southwest side of town over by the Coal Ranch property. We're working with the Coal Ranch people and also Hillview, I believe the Ross Perot folks have a lot of land out there as well. Eagle substations, one you've probably seen on the front page of the paper several times. That some sites have now been removed off of that. It's actually a good move to do that. There's some other opportunities that we're pursuing to see how we can accommodate that. North Lakes to Denton North. That is an existing route of a transmission line. We're going to rebuild it in place. We'll be having an open house with the citizens just to rebuild that in place. And then the Spencer Locust line. That's going to be a very complex project. And it's much needed, but it's a very dense area between those two stations. So is whenever it went from the previous year to this year, probably 15 or 20 new items slid on. Are there additional items in a backlog that are not yet on this slide? All of those would be shown on some of these Gantt charts right here. Like I said, there's over 2,000 line items that have been rolled up into these projects. So there would be some of these projects that we might not have moved into those categories. But some of those, if you actually look at this diagram, some of these we don't have to do an open house or site selection because they're small projects within an existing station where we just reconfigure it, add some new equipment. And so it's just take an existing site and there's not any of these really time involved tasks that are involved in that. Great questions. Yeah, so that's really my question. Are there any more, apart from those six that you have outlined, do you expect any more kind of major public involvement, like site, site, what do you call it, site? Site selection. Site selection and public involvement processes outside those six? Or is that pretty much the last on the list? From the very first slide that you talked about here, there 's some that are way out in the future, such as this 18, which would be a new substation possibly on a Brazos Electric Power Cooperative line out over in this area. We're working right now with the landowner on the hills of Denton or the Long Road substation. And so, yeah, there's some that are way out there, but they 're actually on the approved budget list. And I guess my final question. So you do have a coal ranch, future potential development kind of west of coal. Sorry, yeah, coal ranch. Coal ranch would be right here in this area on the southwest side of town. And you're already building a substation for it, basically? We already have a site designated for it because of that low growth. We'll have to have a substation in that area. And of course, just north of there is the Artie Wells, and it's a heavy industrial area. We need these to back up each other being that close. And then you have Hills of Denton North, number four, future growth. And then number 18, I don't think there's a specific large plan, but there's growth in that area. Those are just some areas that we have the capability through the Public Utility Commission. They're either dual or triple certified that we can serve new customers out there. And at this point, are there any in the next five, 10 years , are there any areas where not on this map that there's growth that you think will be a challenge? Or have you all planned out for this is a 10 year or 20 year kind of plan? Yeah, as I mentioned, we looked at the chart above here as far as the forecast 436 megawatts in the year 2022. That's a lot of growth considering we've had 350. And if you look, if this was a linear graph from 1960 to now, which it's not, because as you notice, if you go straight here, it starts to slope up. If you go straight here, it starts to slope up. It continues to kind of trend upward. So it's steeper. So it's not linear. But if it was linear, it'd be about a six and a half megaw att increase per year. And as long as it takes to build these stations, we have to have several years ahead of time to go through this process to solicit citizen input and get it built. It's always better as hills of Denton up north when it's one landowner and no one lives around it. They want to get you a site. We want to jump on that opportunity. We want to select the site. We want to get it built there. So once it's there, people go, well, I want this vacant land around this. But if it wasn't there and people have that and you try to put one there, it might be a different story. Commissioner Danowitz. Back to the original chart. You're talking about coal ran ches. Isn't there a Hunter's Ranch sub-agency in Los Alam itos? It's too big. Arizona? No, it's just to the south. To the south? No, it's worse. Oh, over here in this area? I believe that's down here on this area. And that has adequate region to feed off of? It feed off this Underwood substation. Now down in this area, there are certain areas when you get south of 2449 right here, there's only a small section that the City of Denton or DME can serve being an MOU. Part of the public utility commissions, they have some boundaries and some of this becomes single certified for co -serve to where we can't serve that far down there. Commissioner Rossell. Thank you, Chair. How much megawatts does one substation increase to the capacity? For each of these, I'll say the typical substation, we have two substation transformers in them. Each size of the transformer is a 15, 20, 25 MVA transformer. And what that means, if you take the middle number, it's good for 20 megawatts, or the top number is 25. The reason there's three numbers is one is with it running without any fans blowing across it, just the normal base rating, low rating of 15 MVA. If it becomes hot enough, the unit gets heat, then you might kick on the first stage of fans, it blows air across the cooling radiators, because transformers are a thermal device, you have to keep them cool. And that's the second rating, the 20 MVA. If it becomes a very hot day and the fans run and they run even all night because it's trying to cool it off from heating up during the day, then you have the capability of running 25 MVA through that. And that's at 55 degrees C. And there is another rating that you're allowed to use under emergency loading conditions, that's a 65 degrees C rating that raises that 25 number up to 28 MVA. Thank you. Commissioner Rosbeth. So from the public awareness perspective, does DME do some sort of outside of the meeting, some sort of educationals, because for me, I understand the numbers, but I have nothing to quantify the numbers. So a one megawatt might as well be a one mega giga. I have nothing to associate that with, and I think that is where the, if I'm reading the tea leaves right with the people I speak with, that's the disconnect, right? Because your warning of something that, hey, we've got to get in front of this, but what is this? What is, what, you know, there's nothing tangible at the end of that warning. Obviously, I get it, that it's bad, but what does bad mean? You know, so that sort of thing. So does the, I guess the trunk-created question is, does DM E offer some sort of outside of, hey, we want to come see you because we want to build something, just hey, we want to come see you because we want to build relationship, and we want to educate you, we want to give you a day in the life of our world, and here's this, touch it, feel it, you know, shock yourself, you know, all that good stuff so you can understand this is what we're helping you with. That sounds like an external affair question, and our manager of that, Brian Dascombe, probably would have an answer for that. No, sir. You just stand in the light right there. That's good. Oh, yes, you do. I hope this will answer your question. So I remember a few years ago, we said, you know, we do need to be out more in the public eye, we need to be accessible to the public. Let's have a town hall meeting, we'll invite all of our customers, and we'll say anything that you want to talk about regarding electricity, please come talk to us about it, right? So we got all the staff, we had plenty of engineers there, we had plenty of program managers there, we really had everyone we needed. And maybe there were a dozen staff members or something like that, and then two members of the public came. So this is a little embarrassing, right? We threw a party, and it was an awkward party. People didn't really care. So we thought, okay, well, that's interesting. We did a couple of those awkward parties. And then we built a transmission line that was going to impact people in their homes, right? We were going to have to buy additional easement from people. In some cases, homes potentially were going to have to be demolished for this transmission line. And we thought, well, we've had meetings before, and we know that no one really shows up to them. And so we booked a space. It was a church. It was plenty big, it seemed to us. We had room for probably 60 people. Well, about 250 people showed up. They flooded that meeting, and it was overcrow ded. And we've learned since then, and we have plenty of space for our meetings. I tell that story to say, I would say that a lot of people, if we say, come here tonight to learn what an MVA is and how it relates to a megawatt, they're going to say, you know, I think I'm going to stay home and maybe watch TV or something. They're not that interested in the technical part. But when it starts to impact their home, it becomes suddenly very interesting to them. What we found is in our open house meetings, the most popular exhibits are the ones that have an image that shows , here's what we're talking about. Here's what we're talking about putting up. They're not as concerned about the size of the transformers in the substation as the visual impact of the substation. And so we do have that information available as far as we have a, for each project, we have a multi-page description of what this thing is, how it impacts the electrical system . And while I don't have the exact numbers on how many people read that, I'm going to guess that those aren't on the nightstands of a lot of our customers. Instead, they want to know from us, how's this going to impact my property? Does that answer the question? >> It does, and I agree. But I think it's more, there is no connection. So when you're talking, people don't want to know the numbers, I agree, but why is it important to know the numbers? I guess that's, I think that's the emphasis, and maybe it's not the adult crowd we're shooting at. Maybe it's the young college kids, or maybe it's just a day at the mall when people are walking around. And I don't know, I'll think about it and ask some questions in the area. But I think, I just think that there is an appeal. There is a, because I had an issue at my home with the transform outs, the lights were flashing, they were blinking. And I just thought it was commonplace. And I call and there was something out on the pole. I mean, so that's just, I didn't know who to call. I didn't know what the symptoms were. I didn't know anything. Okay, well, it keeps flashing. I should probably look and see what it is, or call and see what it is. So I think there's some of those kind of almost outreach type things you could do kind of in advance. But I'll frame that a bit and maybe I'll get your email address. Absolutely, and that's helpful. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Any other questions that we can answer for the commission while we're here? Okay, Commissioner Hutsmith. One last thing that I wrote down. Your first slide, did it say reasonable requests from the practical? Yeah, there are some things that we receive like, well, we don't even want to indent and put it up in some other area. Well, as you noticed, the substations have to be somewhat close to where the electrical load need is. And so we may get all kinds of suggestions, but from an engineering perspective, it's really not practical. Right. But they're good comments, and if we can help them understand why that is, we want to help the citizens understand that. Again, outside looking in, that would be, if I were sensitive, to say that my input's not practical. I mean, I don't know if there's a better word. I'm not a wordsmith at all. But if you find a good word for us that means similar to that, we would be more than happy to start. Yeah, I mean, because the only option is it's not practical . My idea is not practical. It's hard to change the law of physics. Electricity only behaves in certain manners, and we just tried to accommodate that. Sure. OK. Thank you. Any other questions? Thank you all so much for coming. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We have one other item I think, unfortunately, we're going to run out of time, is to finish up the report we started last time on our pedestrian and bicycle linkage. I think what we're going to do is we're going to close our work session and reconvene in council chambers in public. I don't know if we're going to be able to, depending on how quickly that goes, we may be able to come back and finish that item. And if our meeting runs long, this evening we will have to come back and have this at our next meeting. So if-- How long is that presentation? Because I'm looking at a deck here. It's told 20 minutes. I think it's going to take hours to go through. I'm just wondering. I was told 20 minutes. I'm just relaying. Really? Congratulations on getting through it. I'm about halfway. I had a slow night. I've got a little more-- I mean, I'm just saying, is 20 minutes going to be enough? Well, I think another issue, I think maybe one of our commissioners that's not here would like to have some additional time to talk about that. I think we may have somebody that needs to get out this evening. So I think what we're going to do is for tonight, we're just going to ask that that ought to be moved to our next work session. And I think the other question that's come up is if commissioners would be available possibly earlier for our next work session, since we-- it's our last two now. We've run over and haven't had to come back. If we can come in at-- 430. 430? And I guess staff will send that out and let us know, and we'll just have to poll and see if that's possible. What's that dangerous curiosity? 24. 24. I think we'll have-- staff will get back to us about possibly our next work session starting at 430, and commissioners can check their schedules and see if that will work or if not. We'll have to deal with it at some point here in the future . So at 626, I'm going to close our work session for this evening. Thank you. Good evening, and welcome to the City of Denton Planning and Zoning Commission meeting. It is 635. Our meeting was duly posted, and we have a forum present. And I call our meeting to order, and our first item of business is to stand and say the pledge of allegiance to the U.S. and the Texas flag. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. I pledge allegiance to the Texas flag and to the United States of America, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. This is a point of order on our agenda tonight. We have one item that has been continued to March 23rd. That is going to be our item D, DCA 16-001. So if anyone's here for that item, again, that item has been continued to March 23rd. With that said, we will move on to our consent agenda. Commissioner Dudowitz. Thank you, Chair. I move to approve the consent agenda. Commissioner Taylor. Second. A first and a second, any discussion? Seeing none, I will call for a vote on the board. Motion passes 6-0. Next item we have will be a public hearing. So I will open the public hearing for item A, FR 15-0013. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'll ask Julie Wyatt to make this presentation for this final replat. Good evening. I'm Julie Wyatt, associate planner with the City of Denton. I'm presenting to you FR 1513, Country Lakes West. The request before you is to consider a final replat of two lots within the Country Lakes West subdivision, NPD. Here is the plat here. The lots in question are here. It was originally platted as two lots. They are removing that lot line. So that's why we're having the public hearing to look at that. It does meet the technical requirements of the Denton Development Code, and therefore staff does recommend approval of the plat. The applicant is here if you have any questions. This is a public hearing. So anyone that would like to speak on this item, please come forward. If you do come forward, we'll need you to fill out a card. And when you approach, if you'll give your name and address , we would appreciate that for the record. Anyone else that would like to speak on this item? Okay. Seeing none, I will close the public hearing. Commissioner Taylor. I move approval of the final plat. Commissioner Beck. I second the motion. We have a first and a second on this item. Any discussion? Seeing none, I'll call for a vote on the board. The motion carries 6-0. I'm going to now open the public hearing for our item B, which is DCA 15-0003. Thank you, Mike Bowman, Senior Planner. We'll make this presentation. Thank you, all members of the commission. We covered this in pretty good detail in the work session, so I'm going to skip to this slide here. We had a very informative presentation from DMA members. They saw the big, long workflow that they have. I hope that helped illustrate to you that all that process is the SEPs, they start here and end here, and the SEP is right there at the end. It's really kind of adding that input too late in the game, and we think this process helps bring it forward, makes that input from the community more impactful, and creates a process where we can get quality design in our substations. So with that, I'm just saying pretty questions. Thank you, Mike. Again, this is a public hearing, so anyone who would like to speak on this item, please come forward at this time. Seeing none, I will close the public hearing on this item. Commissioner Dudowitz. Thank you, Chair, again. I would recommend approval of the amendments as presented. Commissioner Rosell. Thank you, Chair. I second the motion. Seeing no request for discussion, I'll call for a vote on the board. Motion carries 6 to 0. We'll now open the public hearing for item C, which was DCA 15-0007. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Ross Culbertson, our senior planner, will make this presentation for us tonight. Thank you, Mr. Menon and commissioners, Ross Culbertson, senior planner. Development services work with the HLC, Historic Landmark Commission, of the City of Denton, to come before you with a DENT code amendment for the inclusion of additional façade materials for new construction, and I can work that through with this presentation. A recommendation for you is to, or a consideration for a recommendation to city council regarding the sections within our DENT development code that relate to our three historic districts, Oak/Hickory Historic District, Belle Avenue Historic Conservation District, and the West Oak Area Historic District, which are found in 35795, 357105, and 357135. As we want to consider including cementitious siding as an architectural item for new construction. The request is precipitated from homeowners and citizens in the historic districts who want to add these items, listed garages, workshops, storage buildings, and new infill houses within the historic district to incorporate new materials such as hard y board siding that is not under the auspices of historic preservation guidelines, and we're going to kind of see some of those through some of these slides. A definition for you, cementitious siding or hardy board pl anks or siding are cement fiber board products used to replicate wood. They come in a variety of widths, a variety of lengths, and as you can see within the slides there, they're attached pneumatically or within a regimented system for installing based on the manufacturer's instructions. This is a tested material that is durable against fire, insects, water, and wind, and is kind of one of the best replications of wood as a new material at this point. General applications of these are typically shown on new construction within new single-family homes. T&D, traditional neighborhood design, which are smaller dense neighborhoods with open space and such, they kind of replicate hardy siding on a lot of their products. Accessory structures, that's kind of the intent of where this request is coming from for some of those garage and accessory structures to main dwelling units within historic districts, and then infill single-family homes in historic districts that are new construction only and are not intended to be bound to historic preservation guidelines. So our current DDC, within the three districts that I mentioned, do not differentiate between new construction and preservation activities, and that all COAs are required for any kind of structure, this would be any for those new constructed items like gar ages and workshops and such, would have to be brick, wood siding, wood, stone, and stuc co. And with this amendment, we are wanting to introduce cement itious siding as a new technology material that meets the intent of the ordinance but does not relate one for one to historic preservation activities. These are just some slides of notable historic structures within DIN that are complying and have been rehabilitated with the standard materials to replicate the pattern and the time period of those homes. And as listed here for you and for the public, this is how the current DDC standards list, and you can see that there is a mandate for only permitted facade materials are brick, wood siding, wood, stone, and stucco. And we want to--and for each of the three historic districts, the Oak, Hickory, Belle Avenue, and West Oak districts, a caveat there in the yellow is Belle Avenue Historic District, which you'll see off just a small section of Belle Avenue north of 380, gives for the flexibility to have artificial facsimiles of materials to be considered on a case-by-case basis. And with that, that's what the directive and the direction we want to do is to implement that within the other two districts also. Here's what the language will look like within the Oak, H ickory Historic District, within the yellow italicized, to include smooth-sided cementitious siding is permitted on new construction and accessory buildings. Artificial facsimiles of these materials will be considered on a case-by-case basis. In the presentation we gave in the work session, it was a good indication from the chair, Mr. Strange, that not limiting--and Mr. Dudwood's also--not limiting the strict use of smooth siding, and we will make those corrections and recommendations moving forward and see what the council has their purview on that. But I can certainly bring that forward. Same thing for the Belle Avenue Historic District and same thing for the West Oak Area Historic District. Public survey and input, we did have dedicated staff within the Development Services Department, specifically Cindy Jackson and Katia Boykin, worked with the Historic Landmark Commission and did a lot of the fact-finding on the ground by surveys within the historic districts and with a survey to adjacent cities on their specific use and their application of cementitious siding, which gave us an indication that most cities permit that on new construction that do not conflict with preservation activities. And again, staff did some outreaches throughout 2015 to solicit information and response from citizens and residents within those historic districts, and support was in favor of introducing this, which coinc ides with the information we received with some of the surveys. So let me indicate to you that a couple of days ago on 2/8/ 16, the Historic Landmark Commission did vote 8-0 in support of the amendments. They are a recommending body, but yet we take both HLC and Planning Commission to City Council for the approval process, and it is slated for a public hearing on 2/16 for the City Council meeting. So we are recommending approval. We will adjust the recommendation based on the outcome of your input tonight. And again, I'm a senior planner with Development Services, but yet not a historic planner. I'm just bringing forth information based on the findings of our staff at this point, and I'll look for your recommendation at the end of the meeting. Any questions for staff? Okay. This is a public hearing. Anyone who would like to speak on this item, please come forward at this time. Seeing no one else here, I'm going to close the public hearing. Commissioner Dudderwoods. Thank you, Chair. I would like to move to approve the amendments as submitted to the DDC, with the exception of removing the word "smooth" from the asymptomatic siding. Thank you. I think staff, I mean, staff legal is going to give us a clarification if they want just "smooth" or they may want a different wording in there. It's written as "smooth sided." The use of "smooth sided" is in the recommendation. So the deletion would be "smooth sided." Correct. So it would read the use of "cementitious siding." Mm-hmm. Okay. It's permitted. Yeah. I think that's as we discussed in workshop. Legal says good. Thank you. Okay. Commissioner Hussbett. Second. Thank you. Any discussion on this item? Commissioner Taylor. Thank you, Chair. I just wanted to clarify with legal, the way this is worded now, it's the permitted facade materials are brick, wood siding, wood, stone, and stucco. The use of "cementitious siding" is permitted in new construction in the accessory buildings. Does that always mean that the primary materials are allowed in new construction, or should it say is also allowed in new construction? So basically there's a list of five items allowed in the district, and then new construction is allowed one item. I just want to make sure that that doesn't overlap or does overlap. Just to clarify, Jennifer, we're trying to incorporate that as an additional building material, exterior facility. So you would like to make a friendly amendment to "is also permitted," correct? Yes. I would advise that. Yes, if necessary. That's a great suggestion. Okay, then I will-- I agree. If you're in agreement with that, then we'll have that amended motion. Okay. So any further discussion on this item? I'm going to chip in and just say I appreciate the friendly amendment and the ability to do both smooth, textured, and then all the other items, and it gives the homeowner the choice of what they feel like will match their structure the best versus just being limited only to smooth. Thank you for indulging me on that one. With that, any other discussion? Seeing none, I'll call for a vote on the board. That motion carries 6-0. Again, our item D has been moved to our March 23 meeting, which moves us into our project matrix and concluding items . Commissioner Dudowitz. Forgive me, I'm trying to find my place in the matrix. I had a request and I see that it was stated it was completed, and I would like to redefine what that meant, and it was with regard to allowing P&Z to review any changes to city streets, et cetera, et cetera. And I thought I had it, but I didn't have it. I see. I believe it was on the last page, discussed potentially allowing planning and zoning commission to review and make recommendations to city council regarding street execution and mobility plan. It said completed. I had sent to legal staff of this commission a document, or at least a draft of how that should be worded and asked a question of the process in which we would actually present to city council a change to ordinance. And I haven't received that, or if I need to do that off this commission, then I can do it separately. That's not a problem. I just want to note, I'd like to have direction. You said it to me? You said you sent an email to me? Yes, ma'am. You would ask for? I'd ask for a clarification of what? Correct. What I was implying? What details that you would like to review, not you, but a commission would like to review for the streets and the mobility plan? Correct? Correct. Okay. And then you responded with some itemization. Right. But that's as far as we got? Correct. Okay. So you sent an email expecting either a response to the next step or what? Because you asked for that and I gave that to you. I did. Okay. So now my question is what's next? So we have to have an internal meeting, which we have not done, and legal. Okay. And once we have that, I'll get back to you. Okay. So then I would like for staff to remove the word complete and either say give me some direction of what that process or where we are in that process. Thank you. Okay. Anybody else for a concluding item or question on the matrix? Okay. And at 655, I'm going to close our P&Z meeting tonight. Thank you for coming.