Feb 15, 2022 City Council on 2022-02-15 3:00 PM

>> Good afternoon and welcome to this meeting of the City Council. It is 3 p.m. today on Tuesday, February 15th, and we do have a quorum, so I call the meeting to order. We only have one work session item for those following along, if you're looking. So it's only the one work session item. As we look forward, then I'll ask, do we have any citizens that have called? >> Good afternoon, Mayor. There are no callers. >> Okay. Great. And then so questions from council for staff, councilor Armitage? >> Yes, I don't have any questions, but I would like to remove Q from the consent agenda. I'm just going to vote no to that to be consistent. >> Q, you said? >> Mm-hmm. >> All right. Okay. Councilman Davis. >> Thank you, Mayor. My question is on item M of the nuisance violations. My question is, are those -- those nuisance violations that we're talking about, are those things that we can sometimes recover from property owners on, you know, like if we have to -- if we red tag a house and have to go mow the lawn and we have to do it for six months or something, we eventually can go recover from that property owner. Is any of this in item M something that we can reasonably recover on, and if so, what's the process for that? >> Councilmember Davis, this is Danny Shaw, community services. Yes, any time we do an abatement on a private property, we do build a homeowner or the owner of the property for the abatement and then can recoup those fees. If for some reason they don't pay the fee related to that abatement, then we would place a lien on the property eventually until those funds could be recouped. >> Thank you very much. That was my question. >> Okay. Councilman Betz. >> I have -- hold on. Let me skip me. I have to get to my notes. I apologize, Mr. Mayor. I'm discombobulated. If you'll come back to me. >> All right. Anyone else? Seeing none. Seeing none. >> I will hurry, sir. >> Yeah. >> Okay. I got it, sir. Thank you. I have questions on G and L and ask for S to be pulled. Okay, is there a presentation on S or just a separate vote? >> I just need a separate vote, sir. >> Great. Thanks. So item G, go right ahead. >> Okay. My question on G is there was apparently a misunderstanding about the RFP. Could staff clarify what they think the misunderstanding was? >> Hi. This is Christine Taylor, the procurement director. So when we were getting information back from the vendors, it was a misunderstanding on whether this would -- they would have fees associated with needing to remove items off the polls, taking them directly to scrap if this would be a revenue contract. So we needed to really tighten up on that scope so we can get a better response. >> So not anything fundamental, just sort of the overall scope of what would be required in the poll removal, okay. >> Correct. Yeah. The two responses were just widely different and what they responded back so there wasn't -- we weren't able to do a real apples to apples comparison, so that indicated to us we needed to tighten that up. >> All right. I think that answers that. And then on L, this is -- I'm not against this item. This is more of a curiosity. This is on the electrical tape contract, is $28,000 worth of electrical tape. I must be missing something because that feels like that's like six rolls an hour, 365 days a year kind of number. So I must -- I must not understand how we're using electrical tape for DME. >> Councilmember, this is Dustin Rolf, the logistics manager. That's based off of historical spend to the warehouse and they use that for all sorts of applications. And one of them that I did not know was actually marking out their primary, secondary legs in the electrical side. So it's not just used for shielding that wire, it's got several uses. >> So you really are potentially using that kind of linear feed. Okay. I'm impressed. I guess I'll have to go watch the workers pull it out someday and see how they're using it. So I appreciate that. Thank you. >> Okay. Anyone else? Seeing none. Okay. So staff, by my records, we're going to pull items -- let me get there just to make sure. Q and S, I do believe, but let me confirm that. Yes, pull Q and S and then for just a separate vote, no presentation needed. That'll take us to our first and only work session item, which is -- so I call that -- that's item ID 22006, receive report and hold discussion on the police department overview and annual report. >> Is there a sharing on your screen there? There we go. >> Good afternoon, mayor, council, Frank Dixon, chief of police and interim assistant city manager. Today I'm going to be doing my annual update on the police department as I committed to do over three years ago. This is going to be my third time doing this. What I want to do is the purpose for this is really to just walk back through the last year of some of our accomplishments and our data from 2021 and then focus on our 2022 goals as we move into next year. So this has been shared many times before and you have a copy of it prior to now, the mission, vision, and core values of the police department. Probably the most important here is the core values of professionalism, respect, integrity, dedication, and excellence. And then the department structure, it did change a little bit over this past year. Starting October 1st, we had the addition of deputy chiefs Rachel Fleming and Michael Rose and that was really in preparation of the south substation coming online hopefully at the end of this year where deputy chief Rose will be working out of and commanding and deputy chief Fleming working and commanding out of our main police headquarters downtown. So 2021 in review, some of our major accomplishments and this by no stretch of the imagination as all of them, there's too many to list really, but we launched our crisis intervention response team or our CERT team on May 16th of 2021. We implemented a department wide active bystandership for law enforcement or ABLE program, which we are also an ambassador agency and we have a number of instructors that not only teach our agency, but teach other agencies in North Texas specifically focused on the Dallas Police Department this past year. As you know, communications began dispatching for the town of Little Island Police and Fire Departments and of course our construction, our facilities that came out of the 2019 bond package started this past year as well and as I just spoke about, we reorganize our department leadership and preparation for that substation coming online. Early in the year, we submitted, we finished the submission of all of our sex assault kits under the Saki grant, which we got last year and we completed training for the chief of police advisory board late in 2021. So when we talk about the crisis intervention response team, just by way of reminder, that's where we have one officer paired with one clinician and we have four teams of two. They began responding to these calls in May of 2021 and as you can see the data and I'll talk about this a little bit more here in a minute, but just from May 16th to December 31st, they had over 800 cases assigned to them. They conducted almost 1500 follow ups. They committed 169 emergency detention orders. They responded to 346 active calls for service and overall, including our patrol officers, over 882. I think some things of note is we completed and submitted to the international association of chiefs of police, the One Mind campaign. We published our crisis intervention general orders and probably the most significant is both sergeant Lisa Howell and program manager Sarah Gower were certified as CIT program coordinators, which means that they are able to teach this program to the rest of our department and in addition of that, they're planning for department trainings coming up. So when we look at mental health data, and it's really interesting to note because we had a question about some other crime stats, if you look at May when the team was launched, the numbers prior to May were pretty low, but for May through the rest of the year, the numbers are very high for the number of mental health information reports and I liken this to the increased reporting for sex assaults, the increased reporting for other crimes. When you go out and you solicit, the community get involved and you give them mechanisms to call in and report things, the numbers go up very high. I met with the chiefs of UNT and TWU yesterday and we were actually talking about sex assaults and why those numbers went up really high and that's because we were really pushing to get some of our survivors that typically did not report to come out and report so those numbers just organically start going up. It's the same thing when you look at mental health. I think that our society is paying more attention to it, both locally and nationally. I think our police officers that are working the street, not just with Denton but with other law enforcement agencies, are recognizing the signs of potential mental illness and they're doing a much better job of documenting and capturing that data. If you look again for our calls for service, in May you see a sharp increase in those calls and those stayed pretty steady throughout the rest of the year. To have over 1,700 calls for service in the first year, not even a complete year of this team being online, for me it was pretty eye opening and it exceeded what I personally thought they would be looking at. The Chief of Police Advisory Board, it met seven times through beginning in June through November for training and some of the major topics, the high level topics included the local government code chapter 143, our internal affairs processes, our crisis intervention response and our use of force policies. To date the board has not issued any recommendations, but our first meeting for this year of '22 will be on February 23rd. One thing that we launched in 2020 but we really didn't see a lot of benefit to it until it started really getting going in 2021 was the Take Me Home program. Today we've had 72 individuals registered through our website and we have been able to proactively locate a young boy that is on the autism spectrum that was enrolled in the program. We were proactively able to, because of the information captured in his registration, find him at a gas station, safely recover him and get him home. In addition to that, there's been a number of other cases, one in particular where a young man went into a home that was not his. Responding patrol officers went over thinking that it's a call that comes out like a criminal trespass or a burglary. As they were standing there talking to the young man, one of the officers on scene who has a relative that's on the spectrum recognized some of the mannerisms and because of that was able to contact one of our SROs that was at home, off duty, was able to get information about this young man, get him connected and take him back to his home, which is a short distance away. His parents were very appreciative, obviously, but they hadn't heard of the Take Me Home program and ended up registering him after that. Some of our 2021 calls for service, our data, as you can see, from 2019 to 2021, we had an increase of about 1,200 calls for service, except for 2020 when the pandemic was probably at its height. Those numbers dropped pretty significantly to just over 101,000, but we are at just about 110,000 calls for service and climbing. Our top calls for service for 2021, which is something I like to show, because if you look at our total calls for service, traffic stops were the highest. If you look at our dispatch calls for service, these are ones coming in from our community members, a good bulk of those are impounding of vehicles, speaking with officers, and burglar alarms are top three. And then officer-initiated calls are obviously, traffic stops are going to be the highest. And then speak with officers and follow up investigations. Again, one thing to note, if you look at number seven on that last column on the right, for mental health follow ups, which actually number eight, over 763 of those this past year. And then our top 10 crimes reported between 2020 and 2021, although the first three kind of interchange, what stays consistent both years is assault causes bodily injury family member that's at number four, that hovers around 539 to 550 for that time period. One thing to note for the driving law intoxicated for 2021, those really have significant increase from the prior year. Again, we can contribute some of that to COVID, but I can tell you the numbers overall that you will see here in a minute really are contributed to our strategic plan focusing on DWI since 2019. Our annual part one crimes, this is a snapshot from 2015 to 2021. As you can see, again, the numbers continue to climb for a number of categories, aggravated assault being one of the most notable this past year between 2020 and 2021. Again, this is a national trend that hasn't just been here, but it's been across the country. What I can tell you is our police officers out every day, doing a tremendous job of trying to get these guns off of the street proactively. In 2021, we recovered 319 guns of various styles, calibers, and manufacturers off of the street, do the work that these men and women are doing. Motor vehicle thefts, we have seen spike at different times, as well as the offensive catalytic converter thefts. I don't know if any of you have been victim of it, but you get in your car and start it up, it sounds like a race car, you're probably missing your catalytic converter. There's been a number of organized raids in North Texas that have not just been hitting Denton, but a lot of other surrounding cities, and we have been working proactively with some auto theft task force and detectives in the Metroplex to get some of these crews off of the street, and we have been able to arrest at least a portion of one of them tied directly to some of our cases here. So violent crime, as we just talked about, the trend across the nation has been a pretty steady increase over the last couple of years. We're continuing to focus on that, specifically gun crime, and what I can tell you is we have a couple of pockets here in our city where most of our gun crimes have been concentrated. I can also tell you that most of these calls for service involving guns have been known people on known people, so known suspects and victims having arguments over a wide variety of things, but we are working with not just our state and local partners, but also our federal partners to get them into this conversation because what we have found in the last couple of years that some of those have been gang members, and because of that, we have a little more latitude on our side to hopefully prosecute them, not just in the local system, but in the federal system as well. Property crimes is one thing that has gone down pretty significantly between 2020 and 2021. Although we're happy about that, we're going to continue to focus on proactively just keeping neighbors involved. One thing that we push out is for neighbors to get to know each other again. I don't know about most of you, but we have kind of drifted away from us knowing the neighbors on our left and right and behind us and across the street from us, and people just getting involved when they see things that look out of place. They're opting not to call 911 and report it, but they turn to Facebook or other social media to kind of put information out there, so we're really trying to push for people to utilize 911 to call in when they see something out of place. Family violence offenses in 2021, we saw a sharp increase in October. We have no idea what contributed to that, but since October, we have seen those numbers kind of go down. What I can tell you is since the beginning of the pandemic till now, we have seen higher numbers of both family violence and child abuse cases. The courts are still backed up. Our detectives are working a lot. Our special victims unit has a lot of cases that they're working right now tied to child abuse, and our family violence detectives are obviously not looking for things to do as well. And you can see there's a wide range of these offenses related to family violence. They're not just your misdemeanor class A assault, which account for over 900, but you're looking at some tangential offenses like intimidation. Sexual assault can also be tied to some of these family violence cases where there's a number of different offenses committed, so we're looking at ways to proactively go out and target those offenders that are out on bond awaiting trial, because what we know over time is that that's when stalking and harassment typically takes place, when they're trying to get the victim not to testify in the cases, and they may go back in assault or worse harm the victim or any other witnesses related to the case. Our gun related crimes that I talked about a little bit before, our persons with guns has gone down 36% between 2020 and 2021. Our shots heard have a slight increase in people hearing gunshots or what they believe to be gunshots. And then the calls that come out as persons shot, they don't always end with people actually being shot. It's when people think, we think someone was shot in this case, officers go out and they fail to locate a crime scene and or a victim. You can see our trend lines for gun related calls for the last two years has stayed pretty steady with a slight decrease this year, or this past year. We're hoping that 2022 with more proactive measures that we're going to be working on we'll try those numbers down even further. I spoke about the 319 guns that were taken off the street last year. If you can look at the wide variety of those 39 rifles, well over 240 semi automatic handguns shotguns and revolvers, all types taken off of our streets. So we're going to continue to focus on gun crime, violent crime, aggravated assaults particularly while still trying to focus on this next slide, driving while intoxicated. The cases have shown a huge increase since 2018. The reason behind that is in early 2019, working with Assistant Chief Bobby Smith, we sat down and really created a strategic plan focused just solely on DWIs. And the numbers bear out that we have a significant problem with DWIs, not just here, but I think most cities, especially those that have two universities and they can probably relate to these numbers. The numbers have gone up tremendously in this last year from 637 in 2020 to over 921. And again, a good variety of those are coming from our community members again getting involved in calling in when they see reckless drivers, when they see people weaving, hitting barriers and driving recklessly. Our internal affairs complaints and this is data as of February 11th. Again, since 2018, when we kind of changed the way that we handle internal affairs investigations, given our community a number of mechanisms to call in, utilize technology, we've seen these cases increase over the last couple of years. And through those this past year, I issued four suspensions. I had one termination and there's really four. If you look at those resigned under investigation, that means they resigned pretty early on in the investigation and the one that resigned in lieu of termination, that was after they were noticed that during the disciplinary review hearing that they were facing up to and including indefinite suspension. So in reality, that would have been five that would have been terminated this past year. And then verbal counseling, documented counseling, written reprimands, and education-based discipline in lieu of suspension is one thing that we continue to focus on. We don't just want to have corrective action, but we want to make sure that we have a training component to make our police officers perform better. If it's a performance issue, we really want to find out what the root cause of that performance issue is and try to get that proactively fixed. And then as I spoke about between 2018 and present, the numbers have gone up and again, that's because we have been really pushing out to the community a number of mechanisms to call in. We've put more onus on our supervisors, frontline supervisors, to pay attention and to make those internal complaints as well when they see things that need to be addressed. And then our use of force complaints, we had 11 of them last year, nine were external, two were internal, two were unfounded, three were exonerated, and we have four that are still pending. So as you may or may not know from Texas state law, there's 180 days that we have from the time we get the complaint to the time that we have a disposition to do it. But I have an additional 160 days because of stipulations of the meeting confer contract. So I have a lot more leeway than most chiefs and civil service cities do. And there's still four that are pending out of that. Manhattan was sustained for use, probably a misuse, a training component tied to a taser. Not an inappropriate deployment, but educational-based portion of it. And then as we head into the middle of 2022, our goals to complete our implementation of our general orders, which we've been working on pretty steadily since December of 2018. The next big mission we're going to head off into is going back and redeveloping our standard operating procedures inside the police department, completing our TPCA best practice accreditation process in the next couple of months, and really focusing and tying everything together between fair and impartial policing, ABLE, and we're bringing in a consultant that we've been working with, the Brunel Group, to really dig into kind of the personalities of everybody from myself all the way down to our patrol officers so we can have a deeper understanding of how we coach and mentor and develop our future supervisors and leaders in the department. And then probably the biggest for this year will be launching our safety and wellness committee that will focus on all aspects of wellness for our employees, both our civilian employees and our sworn police officers. And that's going to be covering everything from mental health, physical fitness, nutrition, finances, injury prevention, just a gamut. So we're really excited about that, being able to give all of our folks more tools to keep themselves healthy throughout the rest of their careers. And with that, I will stop the... Great. Thank you very much. Questions? Councilmember Armitage? Yes. Questions in several categories, one about questions about CERT, the Take Me Home program, domestic disturbance, and if there's time for eight-liners. So first, I'd just ask about the CERT program. Can you remind me and the public, what are the hours, days and hours that the CERT team is operational? Sure, I have Sergeant Howell here and Sarah and the others. Good afternoon. I'm Elisa Howell. I'm a Sergeant in the Mental Health Division. The CERT hours, we have teams split between days and evenings, and the day teams work... They're all on 12-hour shifts, and so their days vary throughout the week, but the day team works from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and the evening shift works from 1 p.m. to 1 a.m. To 1 a.m. Okay. And so, thank you. And so, during the period where there's not coverage, what happens if there's a 911 call that appears mental health-related? Does that just go directly to MHMR, or how does that work? Well, if there's a 911 call, it's gonna be dispatched out to patrol, but our CERT officers are on call, so if an emergency detention order is needed, they can come in and facilitate that, or they can do an assessment. They're very great at talking to the collaterals, the people who have information about the person who is in crisis, and they do an excellent job. So there's the on-call component there to cover that. So an on-call during the non-coverage hours, the 1 a.m. to, or 101 to 6 59 a.m., I guess. Yes, ma'am. Okay, thanks. And then, so then kind of just a high-level question for, that I think is for Chief Dixon, but welcome to refer, if you feel better answered by someone else. So, you know, I've heard you say on a number of occasions, and I agree that, and correct me if I'm wrong in paraphrasing you, but that mental health should not be a police issue that police are swamped in, you know, responding to mental health, that y'all are not at mental health treatment centers. So, you know, how do, you know, as I compare a program like the CERT program to a CAHOOTS model, you know, how do you, and I'm sure you're familiar with the CAHOOTS model too, you know, how do we, you know, which of those models do you think takes the most of the burden off of police for responding to mental health, and why? So that's a great question, Councilmember Armitter. I can tell you this, I met with MHMR, I met with our MHD leadership, and I met with two of our biggest emergency service providers here in the city last week actually, and my charge to them was how can we get this out of the police department, and what I find fascinating is oftentimes people turn to the police department as the answer for these calls when we don't want to be, and I very pointedly told them I would turn it over today to MHMR, they won't go on these calls. I think that what sometimes gets lost in the conversation is no one has a plan yet. I think the CAHOOTS model is a great model. I studied that while I was kind of developing what our model was going to be, but trying to focus what I thought would be the best model overall for our community was we didn't have the bandwidth to go straight to a CAHOOTS model. I think as we stand here today, we still don't have that bandwidth because I don't think all of the stakeholders have the same understanding of what we're trying to get to you, and on the back end what I will tell you is we are severely lacking in Dayton County resources for us to take people that are in crisis. Both of our medical facilities here, they have no treatment programs at all. They have no psychiatrists in the medical facilities, and I'm talking about Presby and Med City. Both of their CEOs were at this conversation. Both great partners with us. They have absolutely no resources for mental health, so what happens is a police officer from a different portion of Dayton County will bring them down here, drop them off at Presby or Med City. All they can do is do a health assessment on them. Once they're cleared medically, they call us, and then what our officers have to do is try to find a facility that will take them. So Mayhill and UBH are typically both hovering at or at capacity right now, so we're seeing a number of challenges on getting them actually placed somewhere to get service, and not so much us facilitating getting them there, and I can tell you that not only you saw the numbers of our SERT team, they're already overwhelmed with what they're doing. Our patrol officers are doing a great job where they can. Dayton County mental health deputies are overwhelmed, having six to cover a community of 900,000. So we're, you know, the positive side I can tell you is a number of police departments in Dayton County are trying to stand up teams similar to our model. I travel across the country and I speak with chiefs across the country. I work with mental health and mental illness policy institutes across the country. You would be very surprised if you talk to NAMI of North Texas and Dallas, if you talk to Meadows Mental Health Institute, what we're doing here in Denton, Texas, is in the upper 90, 95 percentile of what's going on in the country. And I'm not talking about similar sized cities. I'm talking about Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Knoxville, Tennessee. We don't, we're not perfect by any stretch, but what we're doing, we are so far and above ahead of where other communities are. I think if you don't, if you haven't seen mediocrity, you can't really appreciate excellence. And while we have a lot to work out here, I'm really encouraged by at least where we're at now. But if there's anything that I could ask counsel for is help getting some service providers in not just in the city, but in the county, because we're really doing our community a disservice by having these folks and then having to defer to taking my county jail to get help. And thank you. And I'll just respond to that briefly to just say not so much to you, since I am in agreement with you on that, but just to the public also, because it's not it's not up to the police department, of course, to decide, you know, how funding is allocated, which is why you have to properly, you know, address counsel, I to see and recognize the scarcity of resources for our local mental health providers. And as you said, you know, like prez prez be and Med City Denton are general medical providers that just don't have those psychiatric resources. So, you know, I would just say to the public and just my fellow council members that we think about this when we think about funding mental health. It's not fun funding that goes directly to the police department, but it takes significant burden of police officers and really lowers the risk to everybody. There's a huge and I'm sure that our providers would acknowledge this to you know, there's a lot to make up for they're really stretched and along those lines, I'm just a question of those 763 follow up calls are what and I don't need to know exact numbers, but roughly, you know, how many of those are certain officers responding versus counselors or MHMR staff following up. Well, all the follow ups they got their teams, so it's the certain teams, okay, okay, thank you. So thank you so much. Yeah, you know, I'll say I mean, I'm a I've been pretty public about being a fan of the CAHOOTS model. I think definitely a certain model is so much better than as you said, you know, we're most departments are which is having just nothing but but I also acknowledge that a CAHOOTS model takes it's something that the police department can't do on its own, you know, it takes cooperation with other entities. So I understand why that couldn't come entirely out of the police model. And I hope that council will be open to something like that. So next question about take me home. So you know, I love hearing, you know, stories about, you know, kids who are registered and or even kids who are not registered who are recognized as you know, by officers as kids who would benefit from this program. And I know, you know, I've heard testimony of parents who have kids with autism who tend to run away. And so that said, I'm also I'm speaking as a not autistic, but a neurodivergent person, you know, who as a less as a child, but especially as a teenager, you know, like like many teenagers do, you know, I had my way of rebelling against my parents and that and, you know, doing what I wanted to do. And I wonder, you know, is where do you in terms of registering folks for this program, you know, how does the registration process draw a line between, you know, registering a kind of young child who has the capacity to run away to a parent registering a teenager who maybe happens to be on the spectrum, autistic, neurodivergent, whatever, who, you know, is going out to a party and they want to call the cops and have them drag the kid back home to the party. Where does the for an older child, a teenager, young adult, you know, where does their consent come in? And where's where's that that line drawn as far as registration? I tried and I'll just add to that, you know, when the program first came out, I tried just as an experiment to register my husband. I just asked him, you know, do you mind if I try to register for you? I answered the questions truthfully and it just said he's registered for the program. I don't know if he's still one of the seventy two or he's been, you know, taken off, but I was never I never heard back, you know, for any kind of verification or consent. So you could just speak to that. Absolutely. So if you're a legal guardian and you have legal conservatorship over someone, you can register them. I just want to make clear for everyone watching and for counsel, the Take Me Home program isn't something is it not a mechanism that you can call in and say I want you to go get my son or daughter and bring them home. It is only a mechanism that comes into play if you say my child that's on the spectrum left home and he likes to go to bodies of water or she likes fire trucks or he likes to go to construction sites. It's really only a mechanism for us to find and locate missing people because there we call we classify them as high risk missing because we're on a very short timeline to try to find them, especially those that like bodies of water. There's a number of tragedies across the country where children that are on the spectrum that like bodies of water very quickly find them and unfortunately drown. So I mean, that's the focus of the program. It's not so it's not like an extension of the guardian to be able to get the police involved to bring people home. It's really only for those cases where they're legitimately missing. Thank you for that clarification and two more questions, which are, I think, shorter questions than these others under the category of domestic disturbance, if you could just speak briefly to what counts as a domestic disturbance, what kinds of situations, how broad is that? So it can cover roommates, it can cover common law, what's typically referred to as common law, obviously married folks, siblings, in-laws, basically any kind of relationship based. So if you share a child with someone, if you were once roommates, if you were romantically involved, I think the definition is pretty broad when it comes to the relationship status, but it can't just be, you know, your friend came over for the weekend and spent the night. And thank you. That fits with my layperson's understanding, but I always want to check to make sure that I'm correct on that. And so my follow up question to that is then, you know, what would, what is required for a domestic disturbance call to count as a "hostage situation?" And you know, I mentioned that because there was recently something in the police blotter about a hostage situation. Without speaking to that at all, I just realized when I saw that, that's not a term that I'm used to seeing, you know, either on counsel or as a member of the public in the at least city of Denton police blotter. So what, you know, without speaking to any specific incidents, you know, what makes a domestic serve a domestic disturbance where, for instance, we've seen nothing that's come before counsel, but you see in the police blotter situations where one roommate won't let another roommate leave, you know, for instance, you know, how does that, what would it take for that word hostage to come in and how many of those domestic disturbance calls tend to be hostage situations? So the two aren't interconnected, you don't have to be in a domestic relationship for it to be a hostage situation. For someone to be taken hostage is that you're held by force, typically with a weapon present, typically being threatened by the weapon, and that would constitute you not being free to leave of your own volition, being an immediate imminent danger of severe injury or death. So there's a number of factors that come into it. But it's not just because you're in a relationship and a roommate won't let another roommate leave. Of course, there's got to be something well and above that. Thank you. So can you speak to just roughly kind of what percentage do you think of, say, domestic disturbance calls last year were also classified as hostage situations? And feel free to follow up with that if you don't have it. None. Zero. None. Zero. Okay. Okay. So thank you. So it's pretty rare for a domestic disturbance. That was just my question. I can't tell you that it's rare. I can't tell you that since I've been here since 2018, we've had one, two legitimate hostage situations. Okay. Thank you so much. Two that I can think of. Okay. Thank you. And then finally, just an update on eight liners. I really appreciated the updates that council has gotten from you, and I know that it's this fuzzy, literally fuzzy area because it's this fuzzy animal or furry animal exception or whatever. They're supposedly banned, but there's this loophole, and yet these venues that operate eight liners tend to be magnets for crime, meaning actual crime with victims that it's dangerous. So any thoughts that you feel comfortable sharing with, not just council, but with the public on what can be done at the municipal level? Because I know that y'all spend quite a bit of time responding to eight liner venues, so you could speak to that. So we have a tremendous work relationship, obviously, with the city attorney's office, and we've been in coordination with the MAC and his office about how we're going to put forth hopefully a mechanism to curb it here locally. What I can tell you is there's a number of cases that are currently in litigation because some cities have crafted their ordinances different than others, and we're trying to wait to see how those come out so we can see how to best craft our ordinance here to be the most solid for us to stand on legally. What we don't want is to do something that's going to get the city in litigation without waiting for these other cases to kind of come out. Hopefully that answered. Yes, absolutely. Thank you. Okay. Time stamp, it's 40 in, and we allocated 45 minutes for this, just so everyone knows. Councilmember Byrd. Hello everyone. Happy Valentine's Day from yesterday. I hope everybody had a beautiful day, a loving day. I had a couple of questions. One about the take home program, I believe you all answered that question in regards to the children, and clarify just one more time how this connects to a person that's out there. An event has to happen for a person to call the law enforcement to come in and get a person, right? It has to be surrounded by an event. Again, someone can't just call and say, "Hey, can you take my kid from daycare to home," or something like that. Right. Is that the way I heard that? Thank you. How young will you all connect with ... I think I just read about a gentleman that found a kid into pajamas. No, that was my husband, that had encountered a child running down the street into pajamas. Obviously, it wasn't a normal thing to do, and he called law enforcement and told them what he was experiencing, and it just so happened that the parent came out and got the ... I think the kid was maybe 19 years old or something like that. That would have been an appropriate event for law enforcement to come out and deal with a situation like that. Right? Well, I mean, it could have been an event if the parent felt like they couldn't find their child. Yeah. Absolutely. Call us, and we'd be more than happy to respond to help and assist in that. I think what you find sometimes is you have kids that try to get out of their homes just because they're curious of nature, and then you have children that may have something else, like they're on the spectrum. But this also goes for older people, like my generation and older, that may be suffering from dementia, Alzheimer's, something like that, to where their mental faculties aren't there, and they get out. I mean, you see silver alerts quite often in the Metroplex with the description of a person and the description of their vehicle. Again, what that would do is if I was tied to my old house, maybe I flash back to when I was living there and I drive back there all the time, that would be great information for us to know so we could immediately start tracking along that route. Okay. For the DWI, I was going to ask you, do you all keep the data on the time of day that you all are capturing these DWI events? Do you all have specific times that you want that you're putting more effort into, you know, looking for DWI committers? So we do. We have a tremendous DWI sergeant and four officers that are specifically only working DWIs, but in addition to that, all of our patrol officers also work DWIs as well. And I can tell you that Sergeant Briggs, he gets together on a monthly basis and puts out the top locations where people were coming from, the times of days, and the days of the week. Okay. So we try to tailor the specific DWI enforcement around those times, but it's happening 24 hours a day. Okay. All right. For the wellness program, do you all require your employees, do you all have like a requirement program that they go through, a mental health check, particularly for your officers, but everyone else, I'm sure, I know you have an EAP program, but is there some type of requirement or does an event have to occur before they're recommended? So there's not a mandatory requirement for a number of legal reasons, but I can tell you since we started our peer support team in 2019, we've had a number of employees proactively reach out to them that have been connected to services to get the help that they feel like they need. Now, obviously, when there's a critical incident, and by critical incident, I can reflect on a couple of major crashes that we've had in the city, one in particular where a lady was driving and hit a support beam under a bridge and her car caught on fire and our officers watched her pass away. We bring them in and have a critical incident debrief with them that day, all the officers that were out there, but then we open up for a follow-up debrief and then connect them to whatever services that we think are appropriate for them. And we also cross train with the Denton Fire Department. So they have a peer support team, we have one as well. And what is really unique to Denton is we can cross those over and maybe bring in some fire personnel to conduct our critical incident debrief and vice versa, given the circumstance. All right, I appreciate that. And also, do you all ever connect with the Denton ISD in regards to high level, I know we got a HIPAA constraint or constraints for some things, but do you all ever connect with Denton ISD in regards to some beyond the lookout type individuals that may need to have some consulting with their parents to put them in this Take Me Home program? Would that be something under consideration? Does it seem like it could be up in the cloud somewhere? I know that you have your SROs that would know those students in particular. Talk to me about how you would think something like that could work out. So we wouldn't do that because in order for them to be registered in the Take Me Home program, that the parents would have already known about them having whatever we're talking about, whether it's being on the spectrum or otherwise, and they would have already had that information over to DISD. So we're not going to utilize any of the information that we get out of the Take Me Home program to pass it on to a third party. Outside of it being illegal, I think it would be highly inappropriate for us as the police department to do that, because we really want to hyper focus on getting people back to their family safe. Thank you. Councilman Betz? Thank you, Mr. Mayor. My question is brief. I'm always asking for data, and whenever somebody presents the data, I love it. So a couple of questions. How far back do you have these types of statistics just generally? And the context for my question is you're implementing new policies to try to improve situations with your CERT team and other things. And so when you're trying to analyze the impacts of those modifications to your policies, we're also in the midst of a pandemic and economic upheavals and political this's and that's and many externalities and extrinsic factors. So how are you, I guess, with just one year of data, you can't do much. So how are you anticipating judging the success of these various policies? So that's a great question, Councilmember Beck. We actually, before we launched the CERT team, we specifically sat down, Sarah, Elisa, and myself, and we talked about just that, making sure we had mechanisms in place that capture the data to be able to go back. So every six months, they're going back and they're looking at the overall CAD data to look at when we're having the most calls for service involving mental health so we can work around those times. Because we know we can't fill 24 hours a day, seven days a week, we would need at least four more teams to do that, but what we do know is where we're at now, we want to try to get the most that we can. The other part of this situation is you can really only conduct good follow-ups until about 8 o'clock at night, right? We don't want to be knocking on someone's door at 10 o'clock at night to do a follow-up on them because people have lives going to school, going to work, you have kids and such. So we're really trying to make sure we have one day team that's on seven to seven to be able to do a bulk of the follow-ups and respond to calls, and then that evening team, they can do follow-ups until about 8 or 9 o'clock at night, and then they're exclusively going to calls after that. So that's the short answer to your question. The long answer is as we look and review the data after about 18 months, and you will see in this next budget, obviously, some things, but how we're going to move forward with the team in particular. Okay. Thank you. I appreciate that. Councilman MacQuire. Thank you. I just wanted to grab on something that you just said about in order to provide certain services 24/7, you would need about four more teams. Are you planning to request more teams in upcoming budget conversations? As we review the data, we will be looking to grow the teams. Excellent. I'm glad to hear that, and I would be eager to support funding for that if you requested it. Okay. Anyone else? Mayor Patel-Melter. First, time check, Mayor, am I right that we're not going to do Item B because we covered that issue adequately yesterday? That is correct. Okay. So we have a little room. Thank you. Yeah, Chief, generally, well, first of all, I join with all the appreciation for what the CERT team is doing and the fact that they're diverting some of the load that would have otherwise been treated as on the crime path, and I hear clearly your call for more resources for mental health in the community outside the police. With regard to so many areas where we're seeing increases in the data in sexual assault family violence, auto theft, DWI, how can we tell - let me ask both parts of the question - how can we tell if we're winning, you know, if we're, you know, are we seeing there's more activity or we're doing better policing that is getting, you know, more cases reported? How can we tell if we're winning? And then the second part of that is to the extent where events, not just in Denton, but as you pointed out, nationally, where events are getting, you know, kind of ahead of us, are there other areas where there are resources in addition to police resources that you would highlight to us? You know, when I asked in my questions before this session, you know, what resources are needed? I didn't just mean police, so, you know, so are there other things that are clear to you are needs that would lessen the burden on policing? All excellent questions. I think how do you gauge if you're winning? I can tell you the data shows that our DWI-involved crashes have gone down about 20 percent. The number of arrests that we have made, the cases that we have worked, I think we have taken at least the opportunity for 935 DWI drivers to crash and potentially kill a family or themselves. So I think that that's good. The increased awareness that we're pushing out, the increased education that we're pushing out is driving these numbers up because we're getting our community more involved, which is what we want. So I think it's kind of it's a byproduct of us as a community moving forward together and getting more involved to keep the city safe together is driving the numbers up. We also can't discount the rapid growth that we're seeing. Just in the three years that I've been here, the city has taken off and we are already behind in keeping up with what that growth pattern looks like, which is some of the discussions you've been hearing about a number of things, infrastructure, public safety, water, wastewater, sewer, et cetera, et cetera. So I think if you're gauging what success looks like, it's our community is getting more involved. We're getting more drunk drivers off the street. We're getting more survivors of sex assault to come forward and disclose. So it would be my opinion as a chief of police that we're making great strides. I don't know if we classify it as winning, but we're making great strides at focusing appropriately where we need to be. And as far as resources, there's nothing that I or the police department would like more than to get out of the mental health business altogether. But until we can find something to fill the gap between what we want to move to and where we're at now, we have to do what's best for our community now. But really, like I talked about earlier, is getting someplace where we can actually take people in crisis that's not the county jail. Is there something like that that's sort of outside what the police can do that would relate to the family violence issue? And again, maybe if I'm hearing you right, you're saying there's not an increase or there is an increase in family violence, but we are already, I mean, you are already dealing with it more effectively, or is there something else that's needed in that area too? No, I think our partnerships with Friends of the Family, with the Child Advocacy Center of North Texas have been tremendous and they're still growing. I think the work that they're doing in conjunction with the district attorney's office, holding offenders accountable truly, is doing a great job. I really think we're just in a period of time where rapid growth and all the other things that Councilmember Beck talked about a little while ago, the pandemic, the social unrest, just the kind of the tenor of the country right now, we're just a microcosm of that. Yeah. Well, it'd be helpful when we hear from you, again, the future for you, I'd be looking for those things that are the measures that show, like crashes from DWIs, that just help us see that sometimes winning, if you will, looks like losing, right? The numbers are up, but there are some numbers that underlie those that show, yeah, actually we're gaining, despite headwinds. So I just put that out there as a hint about what would be helpful for someone in our chairs. Councillor Davis. Thank you, Mayor. I just want to really briefly touch on something Chief just mentioned. That is kind of on the back end of some of these things, like when you see the numbers go up for DWI arrests, most of those people are going to end up in a situation, unless they have a very serious history of that offense, they're going to end up on probation for that offense and they're going to end up under supervision of a court with a lot of resources and programs available to change their drinking habits. If they're an alcoholic, they can get into programs that are going to help them get into recovery and not fall into recidivism and commit the offense. Again, even folks who are arrested for multiple DWIs, it may be that they didn't receive those resources in some other place, but they're now going to be able to have access to those. Particularly with domestic violence, especially on the misdemeanor offenses, those folks, both the victims and the defendants, are offered resources that aren't available to them unless they're reporting the offense. Protective orders, classes, counseling, connection with friends and the family, all of those sorts of things. So when I see these numbers go up, I know that there's not an enormous number of sex offenders, for instance, that have moved to Denton and are praying for the people of Denton. I can see that these are victims that are coming forward because they're being educated on the resources available to them and the justice that can happen when they come forward. And when we see the DWI numbers go up, we know that's because of enforcement and because we're now connecting those folks with either the very serious consequences they need to face or resources that can help them not do that again, especially our student population. Resources to not make those kinds of choices as they graduate from the student time of life to being an adult, to being on your own, to making healthy choices and not endangering other people. So I appreciate everything you've presented here, Chief, and especially some of the insight you've given us beyond just the numbers, beyond just the data. Okay. Anyone else? Seeing none, I just want to close out saying, again, I echo that last part. Thank you very much for the presentation, for the information. Very helpful as we're kind of sharing that with the community and making sure our community feels safe under this significant growth. I'm so excited about the advancement in the construction of the other office. I forget the proper term. An indoor gun range would be amazing and an opportunity to partner with others, you know. So that being said, have a quick question on evidence room status. How's that going? So we're in a temporary facility right now. They built a temporary facility within the facility, if you will. So as the tricky thing about doing kind of construction on an existing building, you have to be very careful and delicate how you go through. This is what the engineers tell me. I'm not an engineer, but I believe they know what they're doing. So as they build out the new space, they'll transition all this stuff back into it, and then they'll continue through the building. So it'd be very methodical in how they go about doing the rehab of the building. Okay. And then how is, so you've kind of had a policy where you brought in officers from other departments to kind of help ramp up and get staffed up faster. Is that continuing to work well as designed as far as their acclamation to our community and getting hitting the ground running faster? So what I'll tell you, Mayor, that's a great opportunity. What I'll tell you is the letter program has really been working well. We have been very selective in who we allow to come in. Our recruiters are doing an excellent job of weeding out candidates that they don't think would be a good fit for our city. The laterals that are coming are now calling friends and neighbors that they knew to bring them as well. At least they have the opportunity. I will tell you, North Texas as a whole is a destination for officers looking to leave other less desirable places. But the city of Denton, I've heard time and time again, because of how special everything is here in the city of Denton, the great diversity, the live music, the two universities, how quickly the city is growing is really bringing people here. So it's an exciting time. We just have to be able to recruit and retain folks. Good. Every time I go someplace out of town and I see officer, I hand them a card and tell them if they're ever thinking about making a change. But, and then also, I'm curious, I did see this in the news and I'm curious about this. So do other communities, have you seen anyone that has kind of a gun sales ordinance that would require people to take extra steps to lock up? And the example I'll use is here on the gun store on Dallas Drive, they had a break in some years back and everything was locked away appropriately, no guns taken, nothing, no harm, no foul. Then you look at the pawn shop that was robbed recently and they got away with what, 31 guns? And so what are cities doing to try to address that issue? So I think there's some delicate legalese in there that Matt would probably be better at explaining than I would. But I don't know how much we could drive through an ordinance to force them to lock them up a particular way. Yeah. Okay. Got it. Okay. And that's what I was asking, if someone had figured that, if there was something out there that... We'll definitely look into it though. Okay. Great. Great. Okay. Well, other than that, thank you very much for the presentation. Thank you very much for your insight. All good? Thank you all. Appreciate it. Okay. So it's 4.09. We have a closed session we need to address. And so that's the last of the work sessions. So we'll take a, I'll call the closed item. We'll take a short break to get everyone in their rooms, give staff time to set those up. So we'll go in the closed session at 4.09 to talk, it's a deliberate regarding real property under Texas government code section 551.072. So it's 4.09. We'll reconvene at 4.20. Thanks. And good evening and welcome to this meeting of the Denton City Council. We will let a couple of seconds tick by and it'll be 6.30. I'll have to live until then. So it's February the 15th and we do have a quorum. So we'll call this portion of our meeting to order at 6.30. The first order of the agenda is to pledge to the United States and Texas flag. Please stand with me if you're able. Thank you very much. Y'all sounded great by the way. Good job. It's awesome. It's good. Good stuff. Okay. So that takes us to our presentations by the public. Do we do we have anyone on the line on the call? No, Mayor. We don't have anyone on the line. Okay. And then we have one that would pre-registered. That's Stephen Dillenburg. Is he here? Stephen Dillenburg. Okay. Then that takes us to our consent agenda. I'll take a motion understanding items Q and S for a separate vote. Councilmember Beck. I move approval of the consent agenda excluding Q and S. Okay. Oh, okay. We'll come back to that. I'm sorry, Rosa. And then Councilmember McGuire. I second. Okay. I have a motion by Councilmember Beck, seconded by Councilmember McGuire. And I still got to do this. So Councilmember Beck, I'll say you. Aye. Councilmember McGuire. Aye. Councilmember Armitage. Yes. Councilmember Byrd. Aye. Councilmember Davis. Aye. Councilmember Haynes. Mayor Pro Tem Meltzer. Aye. And Mayor Husspeth as well. That passes 7-0. I did miss two open mic cards. So I want to take care of those first. So I'm gonna go back and adjust that error. So here we go. Matt Ransom. Okay. Thank you. Appreciate your patience. Sorry I missed that. If you could give your name and address, you have four minutes. Yeah, my name is Matt Ransom. I'm from Denton in Texas. I first want to speak just a general comment about that cultural debauchery that we saw as a halftime show this Sunday. That was absolutely disgusting. I'm sorry, like I'm gonna speak as a black man right now. I just want to say how are we gonna go from Nat King Cole all the way down to Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg? Prancing around, a bunch of 50 year olds too. Prancing around on stage screaming bitches ain't shit and 187 on the Uncovered Cop. I'm sorry, that's just a quote. That's not my language. Okay. All right. So I apologize to the ears out there. But these are the people that are propagating this cultural democracy. This is absolutely obscene. And then we got this white liberal, what's his name? Eminem. He's like a billionaire. He's prancing around on stage dressed like he's homeless. I'm like, is this what we're gonna portray to the world? Is this who we are as Americans? I mean, that does not look good on us as a nation. I'm sorry, I cannot go along with this anymore. This is going just too far now. Is this is what we're gonna present to our children? Is this the kind of culture we're gonna leave to the future generations of Americans? Of all races and creeds. I'm sorry, I can't really go along with this. And it really goes back down to, I'm sorry, these liberals and these ideas that we're just gonna let all this stuff go. And all this stuff is like, that can be enabled, and it's not gonna affect society. It is gonna affect the society. This is a representative government. Whatever the society is, that's what we're gonna get in government. If we have people that are culturally debauched, we're gonna have a government that's culturally debauched. And I can go on to a lot of different things. I mean, like a lot of things that's going on around here. But I think that's enough I can have to say tonight. But that's the way I feel in my mindset right now. People are going to have to make a change here. And they're gonna have to start with individuals in their individual lives. Thank you very much. Have a nice day. The next speaker, wish we would have started earlier. Willie Hutzpah, come on up, you have to go around. Sorry, I love you. Give your name and address so everyone knows where to go and throw eggs and then you'll have two and a half minutes. Council, my name is Willie Hutzpah. I live at 623 Newton. Just some, just FYI, I don't, you can't know everything that's happening in the city. And so I just want to inform you of something and then you do what you think you can do about it. I appreciate the fact that you cleared some of the area behind my house where the creek is. You cleared some of it. But you didn't clear around, they didn't clear around the trees good enough. The reason I say that is the, let me just back up a little bit. We got to do something with the homeless. I mean good, we got to figure out what we're going to do with this situation that we have. And I'm going to start a movement to where I go around this city and I'm going to ask some of the people who are concerned about this, the people, what do they suggest we do? Just start talking. Let's try to figure out what we can do, something that's humane with them. Well, I was forced, not forced, I just decided to do something that's really not humane, but I didn't know what else to do. Back to my original statement. They clean around the trees, but they don't get right up next to them. And that's important because if you're cleaning around the trees, they have nowhere to hide so they don't do stuff. Now here's what I'm talking about in particular. There's three things that happens that has taken my grandchildren's freedom to go in my backyard. The cursing and the fighting among each other and when those guys jumped on that woman and beat her up. They didn't see that, my kids didn't. They weren't there. I saw it and I tried to intervene. That wasn't good. Then after you cleared away the trees, most of them, but you didn't clean up right around the bottom of the tree, there were two guys walking with the long trench coats on and holding hands. None of that's bad, per se. But then they ducked down behind this berm, this raised area. Both of them, they walked back where the trees were not cleared and then they ducked down together behind the trees. Come on. You know, what are they playing, tic-tac-toe? I mean, so I didn't let my grandkids go back there. You got to clean that up. I'm just saying, stuff's happening. I don't know what to do. My kids can't go in the backyard. Well, maybe it's okay for two men to kiss. I don't know. I'm not into that right now. Anyway, my kids ask me questions. Dad, grandpa, why are they doing that? Well, I can't let them go in the backyard. So I'm just saying to you, clean around the trees now so that they can't hide. Then I'll be all right with it. Thank you. Thank you. So that concludes open mic. Takes us to item Q. There's no presentation. So I'll read that. That's ID 22304. Consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton, a Texas Home Rule Municipal Corporation, authorizing the city manager to execute a contract with Wilson office and interiors LLC, which is an authorized dealer of the all steel through the only products contract number 8198 1802. So I'll there's no discussion. I'll take a motion. Councilor back. I move approval. Councilor Davis. Second. I have a motion and a motion by Councilor Beck, second by Councilmember Davis. Councilor Armitage. Yeah, I just wanted to say briefly why I will be voting no. This is a $2.5 million contract for among other things. Then you indoor firing range for police is a $5 million firing range. I've been consistent and objecting to it thus far. And so I'm going to continue to be consistent and vote no to this item, which includes this contract for the indoor firing range. Okay. Any other discussion? Seeing none, Councilor Beck, I'll say you. Aye. Councilor Davis. No. Councilor McGuire. No. Councilor Armitage. No. Councilor Burt. Aye. Mayor Potemelter. Yeah, I just want to add this is overwhelmingly approved by the voters on the bond election. Mayor Husspeth is a aye as well. Item passes. 5-2. Okay, thank you. Oh, Rosa, can I give you these? Thank you. All right. That takes us to item S, which is ID 22350. Consider adoption of the ordinance of the City of Denton, Texas, a home rule municipal corporation authorizing the city manager to execute a contingent fee agreement with McCool Smith PC, Ashcroft Sutton Reyes LLC, and Curran Tiller LLC for professional legal services, including litigation associated with non-payment of franchise fees by video service providers as set forth in agreement and providing an effective date. So there's no presentation here as well. So I'll take a motion. Council Member McGuire. I move approval. And is there a second? Councilor Burt. Second. Thank you. Motion by Council Member McGuire, second by Council Member Burt. Discussion. Council Member Bet. Yeah, just putting in a brief note that I support net neutrality and this is not about lines in the ground. This is about content provision. So I'm not going to support this. Okay. Any other discussion? Seeing none, Council Member McGuire, House of you. Council Member Burt. Mayor, sorry, the Mayor Pro Tem had a point of discussion. Okay. Mayor Pro Tem. Yeah, just to point out that this is a result of a change of business models. I mean, this is, you know, my view where franchise fees that used to come through one avenue have gone away and this is an attempt to recover them from, you know, from this ultimately from the same sources. Okay. Council Member McGuire, House of you. Aye. Council Member Burt. Aye. Council Member Armitage. Yes. Council Member Bet. Nay. Council Member Davis. Nay. Mayor Pro Tem. Aye. And Mayor Hutsworth. Aye. The item passes for three. That takes us to our public. No, right. I don't know. Five two. I'm sorry. Thank you. That takes us to our first public hearing. I'll call that item, which is ID, pardon me, PD 210001E, 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 on approximately 95.18 acres from residential R4 district to planned development PD district and approximately 5.25 acres of residential R7 district to plan development PD district totaling approximately 140, 100.43 acres to 100.43 acres. The 95.18 acre site is generally located northwest of the intersection of Deerwood Parkway and Grant Parkway. And I'm gonna open the public hearing and again give credit where credit's due before you get started. I thank the city manager and staff for moving. We adjusted the agenda so that these public hearings come first so that we can hear from folks like y'all today and more timely and makes it more predictable for you. So I appreciate your leadership in that way. Thanks, sir. Thank you, Mayor, Council, Scott McDonald, Director of Development Services. I would just like to address a couple of pieces in this before Julie begins her presentation. We've received a great deal of input and feedback related to this development, both the existing as well as this proposed PD. The vast majority of those concerns relate to traffic and mobility. I will say that the city has been working proactively with our updates to the mobility plan, our conversations with TxDOT and the county, and we're also having discussions as far as making updates to the development code to try to refine and enhance our access management or how it is that we provide access to our subdivisions. This was a pre-existing condition. The zoning requirements were already in place. And again, some of the changes that have occurred with TxDOT, I just wanted to be heard that at least that we are, we recognize that we have these challenges, again, not specifically to this project, but throughout the city. And we'll be coming forth with some changes and updates to the development code to try to refine this. I will say that we've been working diligently over the course of the past 24 to 48 hours and think that we have a reasonable solution that may help with this plan development as well as the immediate area surrounding it. And again, kind of look at this in its overall context. And we've been working with TxDOT to ensure that this would work as well. So I just wanted to make sure that council was aware that we're taking some proactive steps to try to address this so we're not having to go back through this to the future. Okay. Thanks. All right. Good evening. I'm Julie Wyatt, senior planner with the city of Denton, and I am presenting PD 21-0001E King's Way to you this evening. So before we get into the specific request, I just want to take a minute to talk about PDs generally. It is kind of a new or newish tool in our toolbox within the city of Denton. Under the 1969 and 1991 code, we did have PDs within the city. When we adopted the 2002 development development code, PDs were removed from that toolbox. And then when we came back with the 2019 development code, they were put back in. So it's kind of a new thing within the city of Denton. As they were reintroduced in 2019, we've got a couple of sections that address those PDs. And the intent of the PD is sort of specific zoning to allow for flexibility that wouldn't ordinarily be allowed under that base zoning district. So it allows maybe a different lot sizes or a different mix of uses within a particular property, but it might have other elements associated with it, and maybe additional open spaces or amenities. So it's kind of that flexible zoning on a particular property. The Denton development code does have regulations for PDs in terms of how they are managed and how changes to those PDs are processed. So we have two options. One is a major amendment, and that is really just the zoning process. So if a developer was going to increase the number of dwelling units by more than 10% or change the different mix of uses on the property, it would just go through the regular rezoning procedure with the public hearings. And that would be classified as a major amendment. A minor amendment is something less than what would be that major amendment. Maybe there are just small refinements to the plan, but it still does require public notification within the City of Denton. So even a minor amendment, property owners adjacent to the property within 200 feet of that property would get notification. There's additional protection within our Denton development code, and if there is any opposition or concern with that minor amendment and it can't be resolved, then it would kick that request to a major amendment and once again would go through that zoning process and the public hearing process. So I just kind of want to lay that out at the beginning just to kind of talk through how we're approaching PDs within the City of Denton. So that said, now we want to talk about this request specifically. So before we get into the nitty gritty of this specific request, I want to take us back and talk about the background because it's been going on for a while. So the subject property has two current zoning districts on it. That zoning was established in 2002. It had NR4 and NRMU12, and that was that NR4 was the 95-acre piece of the development of this site, and then the NRMU12 was that 5-acre piece there at the intersection of Kings Row and Loop 288. Those zoning districts transitioned with the adoption of the 2019 Denton development code to the R4 and R7, which is pretty typical throughout the city. The applicant submitted this proposed PD about this time last year. It went through the public hearing to the Planning and Zoning Commission. They recommended approval in June of last year. It was originally scheduled for consideration at the July 20th City Council meeting. It was postponed indefinitely at that time. In that interim period between today and that postponement, the applicant did go ahead and submit a preliminary plat in accordance with the existing zoning, and that was reviewed and approved on November 3rd of last year. In December of last year, the applicant approached the city again, said he would like to go ahead and get a final decision on this proposed PD, and so that's why we're here tonight. So now we're going to get to the specific request. The total site is over two tracks of land, 100 acres. As I mentioned before, that 95-acre piece there on the north piece has that R4 zoning, and that's that kind of tan color. And then the southern portion of the site has the brown color on it. That's that R7. There are four easements that span the site, and those are existing easements, and they're shown in about the location on your screen. They're those red dash lines. So those do sort of set some parameters within that site. And there are surrounding roadway networks, Loop 288, that, as you know, is a text dot road. Currently, it just has the four travel lanes on the road. There are future frontage roads anticipated to be completed in the next five to ten years within this area. And then Kings Row is a collector within the city's mobility plan. It's currently constructed as a two-lane undivided roadway. So the applicant is proposing 378 single-family lots. It includes, the plan includes three lot sizes. The smallest lots, the 4,400 minimum lot sizes, there's a proposed 170 of those lots, and those would be closer to that Loop 288 corridor. The next size of lots is 6,000 square foot minimum lots, and they are proposing 178 of those, and those are kind of in the middle of the site, that yellowish color. And then the third lot size, they are proposing a minimum lot size of 7,800 square feet, and that's the 30 lots adjacent to that existing development on the east side of the property, as well as the south. And then that five-acre tract to the south, we've got both all three variety of lot sizes, with the smallest lots adjacent to Loop 288, and then getting larger when it gets closer to the existing developments. They're also proposing three connection points, and we'll go into that a little more detail in the presentation. The proposal includes an extension of Deerwood Parkway. That's in conformance with our 2015 mobility plan, and that would be extended as a collector to the property to the north. And that would be that second point of access that would be extended in the future. And then an access point to Loop 288, and we'll talk about this one in a little more detail coming up. There's also some open spaces associated with the proposal, and we will talk more in detail in some upcoming slides. So the criteria for approval for PDEs is in subchapter two of the Denton Development Code. I won't go over all the criteria for approval, but the proposal, just in summary, is consistent with the future land use in the Denton Plan 2030. That residential use is compatible with the adjacent residential uses. They are proposing some additional amenities associated with this development, and then there are some proposed conditions to address those traffic concerns. So first, I want to talk briefly about the Denton Plan 2030. The property's designation is low residential. As you're aware, that's kind of our suburban development pattern. That's that one to four dwelling units per acre. And they are proposing an overall density of about 3.8 dwelling units per acre, so it's consistent with that future land use map. The low residential also talks about contiguous development as well as walkable neighborhoods. They are, this site is located adjacent to Loop 288, so it is adjacent to that, this emerging area, residential area within the city of Denton, and also to those residential neighborhoods just to the south across Loop 288. They are proposing an off-street trail as well as some additional pedestrian improvements within the site, as well as those sidewalk connections to allow students to safely walk to Hodge Elementary. And then they're also proposing a variety of housing styles, and that is in those three lot sizes, to add that variety and dimension in those different product types within the development. So I want to talk about briefly about some of those amenities or some of those additional elements associated with the development. So first I want to talk about open space. So they are proposing about 21 acres of open space. As part of that, there is a five-acre park, a gateway park, proposed for the entrance of the neighborhood off of Deerwood. So Deerwood extending to the north, that five-acre park would be just on the northwest of that intersection. That would include a concrete trail within it, tree plantings, playground equipment, and a pavilion. They are, all development within the city of Denton has to comply with our drainage standards and regulations. They are proposing, as part of their drainage improvements, ponds that will stay wet and that will have an aerator in it so they become a neighborhood amenity. And then they're also proposing open space areas along loop 288 with trees to create that green screen along loop 288, as well as a six-foot masonry wall to help buffer between that highway and any future residents. There are some trails associated with the proposal. First, if on the western side of the property, there is an off-street trail proposed for one of the existing easements. Through the discussion of this property, we talked about how they could oversize some of those easements to allow for trail connections through those and some additional landscaping to really create neighborhood amenities within those existing sort of hard boundaries. So they are proposing an off-street trail here in the center of the site. They are proposing crosswalks and traffic control near those trailheads because we want to make sure any pedestrians could cross safely. They're also proposing a bike-ped trail along Deerwood within an existing easement there. That would be 10 feet wide and would allow, like I said, for bicyclists as well as pedestrians. Both of those trails would extend to the property boundary to the north. So just in summary, we want to talk about three items associated with the open space. And I want to frame it in terms of what would be permitted under current zoning and what would be permitted under the proposed PD. So under current zoning, we do have park dedication requirements within the City of Denton. A similar neighborhood would require about 2.66 acres of parkland dedication or payment in lieu. The Denton Development Code actually does not require any minimum open space for single-family residential developments, so that would not be a requirement, nor would recreation amenities be required in terms of a single-family neighborhood. And then, as I mentioned, while drainage is required for all development, their proposal includes those wet ponds. So in terms of what would be permitted under current zoning versus what they're proposing, they are proposing additional open space, that 21 acres. That does include four acres in those existing easements. And as part of that, they are proposing some recreational amenities. That five-acre gateway park with the playground equipment, the trails, and the pavilion. Those oversized existing easements with the trail and additional plantings. And then that buffer along Loop 288 to provide that green screen for neighbors. And then in terms of the drainage improvements, they are proposing to amenitize those to create design elements with those detention ponds as wet ponds with those aerator fountains. And I want to talk about transportation. And I want to talk about three things in terms of transportation as well. And just to kind of organize this, we'll talk from the south of the property to the north. So first of all, I want to discuss King's Row. So there's two, two interventions associated with King's Row. Development of this site will require, first of all, a right-of-way dedication along that, that five-acre tract on the north side of King's Row to allow for a dedicated right-hand turn from King's Row to northbound Loop 288. So that's a requirement. As part of the PD, we also discussed with them those concerns related to traffic moving along King's Row and turning onto Deerwood Parkway. So as part of the PD, they're also proposing adding additional pavement on the south side of King's Row to allow for traffic to free flow toward the east on King's Row, leaving room for a left-hand, a dedicated left-hand turn onto Deerwood Parkway. So those are the first two traffic components associated with this. And finally, I want to talk about that connection to Loop 288. And I know Scott kind of set the table about the challenges we have adjacent to these textile roadways and the access associated with it. So we originally talked to them about getting emergency access somehow along Loop 288. There were two solutions proposed. One would be through an emergency-only access easement through that adjacent property and connecting to an existing driveway on Loop 288. The second option would be to construct a roadway within the existing right-of-way connecting to the map on Loop 288. And so these are really those three elements I talked about. First of all, the first one, under the current zoning and the approved preliminary plat, they do have to construct that right-hand turn on King's Row onto Loop 288. That's a perimeter street improvement and it would be required. With the proposed PD, that would also be required. And then with the current zoning, there would not be any additional pavement for that off-site improvement on King's Row to allow that free-flowing traffic toward the east and that left-hand turn onto Deerwood. However, with the proposed PD, that is something that would be associated and would be required with the PD. And then the third element I want to talk about is emergency access. And I kind of talked about those two options. Option A would be the emergency access through that brown track, that existing track adjacent to the property, connecting to an existing driveway. It would not allow egress for residents. It would just be for emergency vehicles only. The second option would be that connection to the Loop 288 access road going toward the northwest of the site. That would allow emergency access to the property as well as resident egress. And so that is an additional item for your consideration. And I do have those three elements labeled. We've got the proposed elements along King's Row as well as the 3A solution to access to Loop 288 and the 3B solution. And now I kind of want to show you, we have been talking with the applicant today. And that is something that they will be willing to construct as part of the PD. And so it's a little bit difficult to see, but Scott highlighted the road to kind of show where it would connect. So the applicant provided an exhibit here showing the connection to the existing right of way in Loop 288, connecting to that access road here. And that would allow residents to leave the neighborhood not only for this proposed PD, but the surrounding neighborhood. That would be open to the public, and it would allow egress from this area. Then cars could then access Loop 288 and points beyond. Public outreach was done. This slide has changed a little bit since the presentation was provided earlier. We did receive some additional letters this afternoon that withdrew their opposition. Those letters were emailed to you earlier today. And so it has reduced that opposition from the previous 23 percent to 18.95 percent. Under the previous opposition, it would have required a supermajority for approval. Now with the current opposition, it would not require that supermajority. The applicant has held neighborhood meetings. They do have a presentation, and they will be here to discuss the neighborhood meetings in their proposal. So as I mentioned before, the Planning and Zoning Commission recommended approval of the request. Staff has two conditions associated with the approval. One being those improvements to Kings Row with that additional pavement grafted onto the south side of Kings Row. And then that other would be that access to Loop 288, and in particular, that access connecting to the north, to the northwest of the site. And that concludes my presentation, and I will be happy to answer any questions. Okay. Thank you, Julie. Do we have any questions for staff? Again, short, concise, as possible so that we can get to the public hearing component and get the applicant presentation going for the public to see that and then comment. So I want to try to be as concise as possible. Councilmember McGuire. Thank you. So you mentioned that construction of a left turn lane from Kings Row onto Deerwood is contingent upon the PD. Can you explain why that is when it's not even adjacent to the property in question? So as the review of the PD, they also submitted a traffic impact analysis, and we also listened to the neighborhood and the concerns regarding traffic, and particularly the elementary school within the neighborhood, and a lot of concerns regarding the drop off and pick up. And so our traffic engineering group worked with the applicant and his engineer to come up with solutions to try to minimize those impacts associated with not only their property, but also the existing development. So because it's an off-site improvement, it wouldn't be required with just that straight zoning. But as part of the PD, we did talk about it, and the applicant agreed to provide that. So by that, do you mean that the applicant has agreed to fund that improvement beyond the roadway impact fees they would already be paying? Correct. Okay. All right. Thank you for that clarification. Councilmember Armitage. Okay. Just three brief questions. So can you confirm who conducted the traffic impact study? Was it someone selected by the developer, the developers themselves? It wasn't done by the city or an independent party, correct? Correct. Okay. Thank you. And second, in much earlier iterations of this proposal, the developer had referred to this as affordable housing and then has not recently referred to this as affordable housing. But I just want to make sure, just for the record before we hear from the developer, this is not affordable housing, correct? It is not. My understanding that it is an affordable, it would be market rate housing. Okay. Thank you. And then this third question, and it's fine if you don't have a neat answer for this, this is kind of at a higher level. But when I look at the amenities that are required with the PD, such as sidewalks and recreational space, which are, as I see it, I don't see those as amenities, just those are quality of life essentials. And given that the developer is not required to pay for those under their regular R4 zoning by right, what concerns me about this, and I'm wondering how you would respond to this, is couldn't it be said then that a PD could always be said to be theoretically better along these same lines than the ordinary zoning by rights if a PD is required to carry with it all these extra, these extra, let's call them amenities? I don't know, could you could you refine the question a bit? Well, I just wonder, I mean, you know, okay, so to put it another way, are the advantages of these amenities unique to this PD or true about any PD? You know, every PD is probably unique. You can have commercial PDs or residential PDs. So I wouldn't, I think each of them is going to be, would have to be looked at on their own kind of accord. And so I don't know if that would be a universal requirement of all, even of all residential PDs. So all residential PDs don't necessarily require recreational space and sidewalk. I'm going to have Tina come up. Hi, Tina Farians, Deputy Director of Development Services and the Planning Director. That's a great question with respect to plan development districts. You know, plan development districts can be utilized to be able to take into consideration unique development considerations associated with property. But in this case where the developer is proposing to offer up additional amenities associated with the development, this is the way that we are able to ensure that those amenities get constructed. Because you're right. As Julie pointed out in her presentation, the existing development code doesn't require this additional level of amenities being provided, but the developer is proposing to add that. And so we can codify that as part of the plan development district. So in this case, it is a better outcome. Okay. Chancellor Bet. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So it occurs to me for your earlier slides that we could do ourselves in the city a great service if some variant of the zoning bootcamp was put up on the website to help educate the different, because certainly a couple of years ago when you provided that to me on PNC, that was extremely helpful. So I'm encouraging staff to put some version of the bootcamp out on the website for education, outreach and training, because I think there was some confusion in the community about certain elements. I have a couple of questions. Do we have the ability in either of these particular approaches to regulate landscaping types in terms of tree types or the structure of the landscaping when we get to the later plans? Or is it just anything in our catalog is available to the developer? We typically look at things within our catalog. We've got tree lists and shrubs lists and grass lists that do outline what are desired within the city of Denton. As proposed, they've got some tree plantings as well as those sizes of trees. So we certainly look to those low water usage plants or those others, and we would encourage developers to use those. Okay. And then a second question, regarding the water, especially with or without the water features. It's my understanding that we're pretty much following ice swim standards for all of our storm water runoff, for all of our developments. Is that correct? I believe so, yes, sir. And so in this case, regardless of what plan, if any, is eventually approved, if there's development on the site, that we would follow the ice swim storm water runoff standards. I believe our criteria manual does require that, yes, sir. Yeah, that's what I was confirming, is that it would be the case regardless of what development. So in terms of storm water runoff and drainage, whether there's a pond or not, we would require the developer to compensate and not have storm water runoff into the surrounding properties. Absolutely, yes, sir. And then I have a couple, and probably my biggest questions are on the traffic and the traffic impact analysis. Can you pull up the proposed exit onto 288? I bet. Does that help? Flip my screen here. So okay, so do we have sufficient right of way and capacity in the development and for the future expected tech stock growth of the frontage road that's going to be right there? That was actually something that we talked about through this entire review, is to talk about what tech stock was going to need for those future roads and frontage roads. And so that was something that we worked with the developer to ensure that those houses and those amenities, the masonry wall would all be set back out of any future right of way needed for those frontage roads or any easements associated with that. Okay. Is there, and I think I hinted at this earlier when we talked, but is there sufficient space given the development that is proposed potentially occurring on the corner of 428 and 288 there at the exit ramp, is there sufficient space with this plan for appropriate acceleration/deceleration interactions with the two roads? Ralph? Yes. Ultimately what Julie was referring to is that they've done the dedications as required and then additionally they've provided a reservation. So they still own the property until tech stock comes through and is going to widen that section of the roadway. So this is accommodated for in whatever that ultimate build out is going to be. Okay. And that will be the case at the off ramp as well for whatever is to be developed at that point. So anything that may be created today you could think of almost as temporary. This may not be the final iteration because this will be on tech stocks right away as they rebuild the loop, they'll make whatever corrections necessary to make sure that that's just a contingent roadway. So in the future, in that regard, if we get a frontage road and a controlled access way around 288, is there sufficient right of way and space to construct an actual real entrance? Let's forget about whether tech stock would approve it. Let's live in the magic world where tech stock approves things we ask for. But is there sufficient space just an area wise for an actual, not just a right turn exit, but a proper full ingress and egress at that location? There'll be a service road and they'll connect to the service road. So that'll be a fully built out system. Okay. And then for the east west corridor that's running from the Deerwood extension out to the west, Versailles, Road J, it's called different things and different maps. That is a two lane collector in the current proposal? It is a two lane section today and I'll let the developer speak or address any of the concerns related to as far as TIA or the traffic and the width of that roadway. He's prepared to speak to that. Okay. Well, then I'll mostly wait for a second then, but do we happen to know with the actual exit there now as a non-emergency exit what hypothetical traffic impacts might be, knowing that we haven't had time to actually do a real traffic impact analysis of this plan since we haven't seen it until recently, do we have what on paper would be a hypothetical change in the traffic impact analysis? I think the developer's design engineer ultimately understands that TIA very well and probably can answer some of those questions. Okay. Well, I'll wait for the developer then. Thank you. Okay. Thank you very much. So this is a public hearing. So I have a number of blue cards that are already filled out, but if you have not filled one out, please do so. Pass it to the city secretary. We'll get you in queue to speak. I do have white cards already filled up of people that wanted to be heard but did not want to speak. I have six against and two in favor of those. So those will be provided and added to the record. And so the format will be this. The developer, the applicant will come speak. They'll have 20 minutes. If there's two speakers 10 aside, then we'll have the public comment. There will be an opportunity for some rebuttal questions, et cetera, et cetera. But I want to get through this and then we'll get to the public to make sure we allow time for them to be heard timely. So if you can set the timer for 20 minutes. Hey, Jim, if you give your name and address, both of you, if that'd be good, and then we'll get started. So and then we'll adjust the time to 20 minutes. So we'll be all good. Jim Strange, 3613 Falcon Court, Denton, Texas 76210. Thomas Fletcher with Kimley Horne, 2160 Warren Parkway, Frisco, Texas. Good evening, Mr. Mayor, council members, Jim Strange. I'm the owner of Marker Stone Realty Partners for the developer. It's been a while since we had the opportunity to come here before you. And I want to update you on some of the things that have changed since that time and up until this day. There's been some questions as to the ownership. We purchased this property from the Brown family last October. We did unfortunately, based on kind of the public comment, have to take a step back and we did a preliminary plat for the quote unquote existing zoning. And to get that secured and approved, we have since we had a large number of builders that inquired about this property due to its location and its visibility, proximity to the school, church. And through that process, we have entered into a developer agreement with a builder. We do have a confidentiality agreement with them, so I can't get into the specifics of our agreement or who that is. They're going to be the ones that make that final announcement. But we are moving forward with this project as quickly as we possibly can. We have had numerous meetings, both some were online, some were in person. The last meeting we had was last week. We did make some final adjustments, mostly on the five acre track due to some comments that we got from some of our one on one interaction with the residents as to what was important to them, which things they liked, which things they'd like to see changed. I would tell you that the support that we have gained over the last couple of weeks are the people that are adjacent to our property. They're going to be the most impacted that we'll have new neighbors across their back fence. I'd say one of the main ones was the folks that back to the five acres. It was the denser track that was the NR7. Due to the size of what those lots were by right, they were concerned about setbacks off the back fence, the number of homes behind them. So if you've been following our program or our concept plans, you'll see that we did change those lots from 40 foot wide in our PD to 60 foot wide. And then we put a 15 foot buffer that will be maintained by our HOA. So they will have some additional quote unquote green space between our new development and their back fence. And then they will have fewer homes directly behind them. Some of the concessions that we've made along the way in addition to continuing to refine the concept plan or to put a deed restriction requirement in and our builder has agreed to that. It was one of my selection criteria for them was to find someone who would honor the things that the neighborhood told me were important to them. So they have agreed to allow up to 25% of the homes to be purchased for rental to ensure that this property is not going to be a turnkey off the start to begin with an all rental neighborhood. There will be opportunities for people to be first time homeowners and step up homeowners with some of the sizes and it won't be able to be marketed and sold as an all rental community. Some of the other concerns I heard from some of the neighbors that were mostly adjacent to them as I have lived here for many years, we understand that. And we're concerned about their privacy. So we have worked with builders to make sure that they have agreed to not have two story windows in the backs of the home. So if there is going to be a two story home, it will be a two story front and it will be a shed roof in the back. So people that do have swimming pools and things like that and have enjoyed their privacy against these open properties for many years can continue to do so. We have also increased the what is required in the development code. So as part of a PD, we always are trying to do something better than what is by right. So currently there is no Mason requirement with the DDC. You want to do a hardy board siding house all you can. We believe we are at a 50% requirement that it must have stone and brick on this home. And then you can do the hardy board if you'd like. So there is some efforts to try to assure the neighbors next door that these are going to be nicer homes versus they are just bare bones and the least expensive thing that could be built there next to them. Some of the neighbors do have fences. Some of the neighbors do not. So we worked with a builder to get them to agree to put fences. These things are all specifically lined up in our PD. You may have been able to read and see some of those so that folks that don't have fences won't have to have the expense of putting one up. The builder will have the expense of putting that up to put the privacy in the barrier between them. If their fences are falling down for whatever reason over time or whatever the cause, they will have the opportunity to have that fence updated and again have a nice privacy fence between them and their future neighbor. I will draw your attention that we did go through in some of the sizes. Those are all minimums. So we may get into some of the greater details if you'd like, but those are the smallest. We do have homes that are actually or the lots that are actually larger than what those minimums are. Speaking about house sizes, we did also have our builder agree to square footage minimums. Currently in the city of Denton, the square footage minimum is 900 square feet. I believe we did 1,300 on the 40-foot wide lots, 1,500 I believe on the 50-foot wide lots and 1,700 square feet on the 60-foot wide lots. So again, the neighbors have some certainty and some assurance of what is going to be built in this plan development. You can't do that in a regular by-right DDC, but we are doing that as part of our PD to again provide amenities and additional benefits to the neighborhood. Some of you asked questions about whether we needed to do certain things or not. We voluntarily agreed to make that improvement offsite from the five acres to Deerwood. We understand the issue there that's prior to us. We didn't create, but it's coming in trying to be a good neighbor. We've listened to what the comments are and we have continued over the last eight months to continue to make changes to the project, to update it and try to respond to the feedback that we've gotten, one of which was to add that through lane. So one of the issues with the school, if you're over there, there's two lane roads. When the road does back up, if it does right there about three o'clock, sat over there many, many times over the last number of months watching what's going on, there will now be a through eastbound lane and there is a dedicated left turn lane. So if there is a backup that comes off of Deerwood, there is a stacking lane that's available in Kings Row there and then eastbound traffic can continue on there. So that is a fairly significant amenity that we agreed to and again, trying to mitigate an existing issue over there. I know there are a number of folks that are, no matter what we've done, have been opposed and we've had good conversations with them and respectful dialogues and as I've told them on their front porch on the phone, it's great that we can still live in a country that we can talk and at the end of the day, we may agree to disagree and some people have agreed after they've gone through and seen some of the things for themselves and said, you know what, this PD is a nicer project, a better project and the amenities and the protections that we're going to get for it far exceed rolling the dice of what we might get with a buy right type project. So we did bring this back to bring the PD before you because I do believe it is a better project. It was my original intent was when we purchased the property and I think it is a superior project. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Thomas and make sure he can get through our presentation and I'll stand for questions and add some additional information. Thanks, Jim. Thanks, Mayor and council members. Appreciate the opportunity to present to you all tonight. Really the question we're wanting you to consider is does the PD, the proposed PD, create a better development for the city? Does it create a better community for the future residents than what's approved with the preliminary plat based on the current zoning? And we would hope that if you find that your answer is yes that you would support the approval of our PD. Here's the Kingsway PD land plan. Really what I wanted to point out here is kind of the diversity of housing and kind of how we set the neighborhood up upon design. We really looked at transitioning from the denser lots adjacent to loop 288 to the larger lots as you get further away from the loop and you get closer to the existing residents. The brown lots on the west signify the 40 foot lots. Typically when builders build houses and set up a community, they build it based on the pad size. So this shows the three different pad sizes that would allow the builder to provide three different product types. So you have the 40s, the 50s, and then the white lots around the perimeter of the larger lots. One of the things we did, and I know Julie did a great job in her presentation going through kind of comparing the two, but we tried to put together a comparison. The approved preliminary plat's 328 lots. What we're asking for is 378 lots. The approved preliminary plat, R4, has a minimum 7,000 square foot lot. R7 has a minimum 4,000 square foot lot. We're asking, we called it R4A, R4B, and R4C, but we've got 7,800, 6,000, and 4,400 as the minimums. When we looked at the average lot size, the Denton Development Code doesn't have a requirement for average, but on our approved preliminary plat, our average for the total is about 7,900 square feet. When you look at the planned development, the larger lots, our average is just under 9,400 square feet. The middle size, the 50 foot lots, is just under 6,900 square feet. And the smaller lots, the average is a little over 5,000 square feet. So while the minimum may be 4,400, the average on that small lot size is over 5,000. And then the average for the overall development is just a little bit over 6,200. And in a lot of that, the averages account for the fact that we are putting a lot of open space into the development. The typical pad sizes, we have a 40 by 75 and a 40 by 60 in the standard zoning. And as I mentioned, the diversity of houses, we have a 30 by 70, 40 by 75, and then a 50 by 80, which allows the home builder to provide different product types. The other thing about the diversity of housing, it also gives a diversity of price point. So while this may not be, while this is a market rate development, it will have diversity of housing prices because of the different lot sizes. So there generally would be a gap between what a 40 foot lot in home would cost, a 50 foot lot in home, and then the highest, which would be the 60 foot lot in home. So we think that's important because it attracts, it's good for the builder so that they can get absorption and have the development move forward faster, but it's also good for the buyer because there's that diversity. The lots along the eastern boundary within our approved preliminary plot, those lots are 50 by 140 and 56 by 125, and that's so that we meet that minimum square footage requirement. But within the PD, all of those lots are 60 foot wide by 145 foot deep for 8,700 square feet. So they're actually 1,700 square feet larger than the lots in the approved preliminary plot. One of the other things that we've written into the PD is that we've got enhanced architectural elements. So there's a section in chapter, sub chapter 7 of the Denton Development Code where you have to select at least three items from a list. We added additional items within our PD, and our developer not only has to select three from the Denton Development Code, they also have to select three from the PD, so you're getting six architectural elements on every house versus only three. Here's the existing zoning map. It just kind of shows the surrounding land uses and that it's compatible with the surrounding land uses. Here's the open space park buffering landscape architecture. Within the approved preliminary plot, there's no buffer required when you're residential against residential. But within our PD, we have a buffer, so the five, the five acre to the south within our adjusted PD has a 15 foot landscape buffer. It also has a much deeper lots. On the north side, with the south side of the 95 acres, but on the north side of Deerfield Road, we have a buffer in there so that there's no lots backing to that portion of the development. And on the eastern boundary, we have deeper lots. As Julie mentioned, we are proposing living screening along with a masonry screen along loop 288. That's not a requirement, but it is something that we've written into the PD. We've gone through the parkland dedication. Julie did a good job with that. But we're proposing just under 10 acres of public parkland dedication. So that would be developed by the, that would be constructed by the developer, deeded to the city, and it would be open for public use. And there's significant improvements within that with trails, with landscape, with playground, with pavilion. So that's a significant improvement for the, for the proposed development. The total open space is just under 22 acres. The minimum tree preservation within the regular code for by-right zoning, you have to meet a 30% preservation, but you can reduce that down to 20% with 10% mitigation. Within a PD, you cannot make any changes to the tree code. So we have over 30% preservation of the existing tree canopy. So that's important. With the tree plantings, we've got within the PD 1,445 trees provided, whereas the requirement in the approved preliminary plat is 1,311. At maturity, we would have 42.2 acres of mature canopy versus 38.5 when you compare the PD to the, to the approved preliminary plat. Here's the entry. We've got a really nice enhanced entry plan, so that way you have a nice sense of arrival as you're driving up Deerwood Parkway into the development. Here's the area. Everything in green is what we've discussed with the city with regards to public dedication of park. It allows for the regional trail access up to a tree preservation area along the northern property boundary. And then there's also the green space on the eastern side of Deerwood Parkway that allows, it was important when we were discussing with the city because there's a nice upland habitat on the property to the north. As that property comes in and eventually develops, the thought would be that maybe there's an opportunity to there to continue that parkland to that property to the north. Here's an aerial kind of exhibit of the park. You can see the playground area, the pavilion, the trails, the trees. We've got a nice open space kind of up there by the pavilion area for play fields. We've got a retention pond so that we could put, you know, fish and make that an amenity. Here's the entry again. Transportation. So Julie kind of talked about the transportation improvements. I won't go through all of this. What I'd like to do is kind of go to the Kings Road. So as part of the PD, Julie mentioned that we have a perimeter road improvement requirement adjacent to the five-acre track. As part of that, we would have to add that right turn lane onto Loop 288. But as part of the PD, we're actually adding two lanes. We're adding a dual left turn lane, an eastbound lane, and then the through right turn lane. So it's actually getting widened for four lanes, not three, which would be required. So with the PD, there's significant improvement there. Here's the exhibit that shows the left turn lane from eastbound Kings Road onto Deerwood Parkway. That's another obligation of the developer within the PD. Jim went over kind of the building materials, the additional developer concession, so I won't spend any time on that. But that kind of goes through and lists the requirements that the builders agreed to. And then that goes through the rental and then also the single family dwelling unit sizes. So just kind of in conclusion, before I stand to open, I would like to say that if there are questions that come up once the public speaks, we'd be happy to come back and answer any questions that we can. Appreciate the opportunity to speak before you tonight. We think all of these elements that are drafted within the PD document and all the PD exhibits does create a superior neighborhood to what's been approved by the preliminary plot and would stand for questions. And that's our presentation. Thank you. I want to get to the public so that we can, you can note those questions as well and then we'll get them all at once and move on. So that way we can get to them so they're not having to wait any longer and you'll be able to hear the questions and as council has questions for you, we'll be able to address the citizens' concerns as well. So again, fill out a blue card if you want to speak. We're on agenda item 4A. It's our first of our public hearings if you're following along on the agenda. So the first person, Walter McGovern. Yes. If you can come down to the, yeah, and then you'll have, give your name and address. You have four minutes. Yes, thank you. My name's Walter McGovern. I'm at 3110 Hartley Field Road, Denton. This is in respects to the brown track which we were just talking about. Yes. This is a document that my wife and I created and this is, this somewhat, we'll talk about what this gentleman just was talking about, but what concerns my wife and I since we live close to the brown track. Nothing proposed by the developer in this plan development including the very minor traffic improvements merit passing of this PD. In fact, the R7 density sets a bad precedent for other future development including the Reeds property which is right behind our seven acre home. In fact, if you look at the properties north of this development, they are all larger acreage lot properties as part of the Denton 2030 plan and future land use map. This was to all stay rural. Additionally, although the developer proposes a limited number of rental houses, how would he be able to enforce this? With a single entry point in and out, there will also be conservatively safety issues, not only with traffic but with emergency services. Ingress and egress would need to be created first before safely allowing this development. Until that is built, no future development should even take place as a city is putting the citizens at risk. The city instead should honor its covenant with its existing and future residents to provide safe and functional roads. I am therefore asking this council to please deny this PD. Okay. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Okay. That takes us to our next speaker which is Jacob Vingren. Do I get it close? Thank you very much. I want to thank you all for your service. Jacob Vingren, 3213 Deerfield Drive. I'm here speaking in opposition as well to the PD. Certainly the presentation that we heard today was very nice and eloquent, but it doesn't fully embed or what the impact will be in our neighborhood. One of the big issues that has been brought up before is traffic. Deerfield Drive is already now backed up before this development. It backs up around school. They're going to put another almost 3,000 cars up and down this road every day. It's great to see that there's now going to be an egress point at the back. That is certainly an improvement, but we all know people are not leaving our neighborhood and going that direction on the loop. They're going and turning towards the city. Most people probably will not be going that way. Also, everyone else has to come in through Deerwood Drive that now is already blocked for parts of the day. Literally, you cannot pass it legally. The other thing that the developer talks about is this diversity of lot sizes. Well, it seems to be really a diversity of smaller lot sizes. 93% of the lots are smaller than what an R4 would allow for. It's not really a diversity. A diversity means some are bigger, some are smaller, about an even amount. 93% of them are smaller than what the code allows for. I know Julie gave a great presentation, said that the density is 3.8. Well, that's 3.8 of the whole acreage. If you look at only the buildable acreage, because there's quite a few utility lines that run through there, there's the pond, which obviously is not buildable. If you look at the buildable land, it only comes down to about five houses per acre, not one to four, but five, if you do the math on that, and 21 acres of open land space or open space. Well, the majority of that is also non-buildable. It's under utility lines. It's in the middle of a big drainage pond. They're going to have to control drainage one way or the other. So it's not like they're saying they're adding all these amenities. A lot of these are really things that they have to do one way or the other, and they're not really adding them. It seems that we're giving up a lot to get a little. It seems the developer should, there should be more give and take between the city and the developer, so it's more of an even switch, if you will, or tradeoff. So thank you. Thank you. Next speaker is Deborah Mills. Not quite as tall. Okay, Deborah Mills. I live at 3907 Whitetail Drive within the Deerwood neighborhood. As mentioned, I think that planning and zoning and the developer did a great job of promoting this new development. However, those of us in the neighborhood have strong opinions against this development. I sat down and I did some calculations to try to put some numbers behind this, and we already heard that it's estimated that 3,500 cars, thank you, per day, additional traffic per day, but if we go with the R4 zoning, we can save at least 561 of those trips in and out of the neighborhood. That's 16% savings. It may not be a lot to you, but it means to us. One thing that I did feel strongly about is compatibility to the adjacent neighborhood. They talked about it being comparable with this, as he mentioned, kind of like 3.8 homes per acre or something like this, but if you really look at it, 45% of the homes are the area that's with the 40 wide lots. It's 9.8 homes per acre. If you just take an acre and divide it by the square footage of those homes, we're talking average of 9.8 homes per acre. In the 50 foot wide, another 47%, it's 7.26 homes per acre. Then there's 30 homes, which is 8%, which is 5.58 per acre. If you just take them and divide them by the square footage in an acre. It tells you, our homes, we're zoned R3 and R4, basically. It's kind of a combined in the adjacent neighborhood. This is not compatible with the adjacent neighborhood at all. It's from a density of home building. We also mentioned about the 25% rental property restriction that somehow is going to be enforced through an HOA. That's 94.5 units. That's 100 homes that could potentially be rental right off the pot, coming out the door as the properties are sold. Then there was one other thing. Something else that our neighborhood felt strongly about was tree preservation. The developer has mentioned, you know, by right, and he said this to us multiple times during our meetings, by right, 20% of the trees. I only have to save 20% of the trees in the R4 zoning. But in the PD, I'm saving 30%. But by right, as a developer under the existing zoning, you could save as many trees as you want to. It's your decision. It's not a limitation of the code. There was one other point I wanted to make. As far as adjacent neighborhoods are adjacent directly within the 200 feet, there are many of us that live in Deerwood that are directly impacted by this, even though we're not within 200 feet. Where I'm at, I already have cars drive down my street as they circle around Hodge. With this, it's going to be extremely multiplied. And the one entrance coming out to get to the school area is going to be a nightmare because people will be sitting in line at the stop sign to try to get out of their neighborhood, this new PD, for 30 minutes at a time, then to get on to an already congested area to go out to the loop. It's going to be bad. But anyway, I'm asking for you to rule against the PD, keep the R4 zoning, and do the right thing by the neighborhood, the existing neighbors. Thank you. And keep with the Denton 2030 plan. Thank you. Thank you. Next is Roger Cox. If you could give your name and address, please, and thank you. Good evening, Mayor and City Council. My name is Roger Cox. I reside at 3912 Deer Forest Drive. I'm coming to you because I know that each and every one of you have heard the ongoing saga, if you will, of this plan development. And we have repeatedly voiced our opinions about things that we don't agree with within the plan and things that have been discussed with the density by acreage, if you divide these, are way in excess. And my number one concern, besides the transportation issue that's already existing, is the fact that if we were to approve this, we're setting a precedence for all the surrounding properties that are around the existing neighborhood. And just so that we're all clear on that, every piece of property around our neighborhood is for sale right now. So if we allow this to set the precedent of what is being proposed, then what's to keep the next piece of property to go from R4 to R7? You allowed it over here. Why can't you allow it over here? And there's nothing that makes us feel like anything's going to get taken care of and things are going to get magnified. That's our concern. It's not a matter of that we're opposed to change like it was said when it was in P&Z. There's just a bunch of people that are worried about change. Well, no, not really. We want good change. We don't want substandard change. And so I urge you to please consider the ramifications of what you're trying to decide tonight going forward, what that does to that entire portion of town. You're setting a precedence by voting for it, and I strongly urge you to vote against it. The R4 as it stands right now gets us less density, but it doesn't mean that the developer couldn't put all of these amenities that he's speaking about if he gets the PD. If he wanted to, he could do that too, and he could still preserve the lot size that's adjacent throughout the property, and it sets a precedent for the rest. So again, I appreciate your time in listening to our comments and wish that you make a decision of denial. Thank you. Thank you. Robert Tickner. No, thank you. You're good. Thank you very much. Robert Tickner, thank you. Madam Secretary, I have some photos. Can you put them on for me? Three there. Can we place, can we display them right there? Mayor and members of council, I am Bob Tickner. I live at 3900 Deer Forest, and I thank you for listening to all the concerns. As many of the previous speakers have said, they've done an excellent job in presenting a lot of the issues with this, and so I want to basically ask you to deny this request for the PD and stay with the current zoning R4. Kind of wanted to get that up front. I don't feel it is reasonable and prudent to change the current zoning to a PD, and the reasons for that is two or three items that have already been mentioned. It's really like adding fuel to the fire, and we've got a problem there right now with wood traffic, and I've asked him to put some pictures up here the other day. I walked down. It was a nice day. I took some pictures of the elementary school traffic at 3 o'clock, and we already know that the TIA is showing us that we're going to have 3500, up to 3500 or more, cars using deer wood, and as you can see, this happens every day in the morning and also in the afternoon, and in the afternoon, it's even worse because they show up early to sit and wait for the kids to get the light out of school at 3 o'clock, and so as you can see, really, for a neighbor to get around this, we have to drive on the opposite side of the road like that white car is doing to get to our homes, and if we -- and you can see this is the intersection of deer wood and Grant Parkway, and so if we're starting to bring all of that -- this new Kingsway traffic through there, I don't know how it's going to work. I don't see how it's going to fit, and I don't think that we have done enough study and enough thought to go ahead and improve this PD, and because the improvement on King's Row is going to always help, but it's not going to solve this problem, and so -- and I know probably many of you are very familiar with that. So there needs to be a lot more thought and a lot more consideration and engineering work done on off-site improvements and how this could help. The second one that I'm concerned about is this one-way in and out for the 300 -- I thought it was 380, they're saying 378 now, because the last I was told was that TechStop Dallas engineer had denied the access request to get to the loop, so -- and I didn't hear anybody say tonight so far in this presentation that that had been approved or that was okay. I think this is still a lot of speculation, and so I don't think you should approve this PD until you have some more firm stuff. This is all -- yeah, it looks okay, it looks good, but there's no guarantee that TechStop's going to permit this, and so, you know, it's a thing that the city -- I think if we want that, the city needs to get their engineering group going, the council needs to put a little pressure, and our neighborhood group would be interested in supporting that if -- whatever development, because even if it's R4, we need that. So -- but we don't need to produce the -- pass the PD to see if we can get it. So the other one is, as mentioned, 93% of these lots are going to be smaller than the R4, and we worked hard over the years going to plenty of planning meetings to keep what we got near our neighborhood, and so it's shrunk over the years. It used to be 10,000-square-foot lots, now it's down to 7,000, and now we're wanting to even get it smaller. And I don't think that this is good planning, and we're not sticking with the comp plan. And so our neighborhood feels a lot more secure, as Roger mentioned, with the standard zoning, and it sets sizes. That's your time. Okay. All right. Thank you very much. I appreciate your time to listen. Thank you. Okay. And then we have Larry Whitten. Is that right? I'm sorry if I got that wrong. I'm sorry. Larry White. I'm sorry. I didn't -- I got to make the words bigger. That's okay. My power ship isn't always what it should be. I'm not going to take the time to go over everything everybody else has told you, but you know what the -- you know, numbers can be made up to make them look like whatever they want to be. Mr. Strange has told you that, you know, there's a 3.8 houses per acre. We've come back and said if you take out the acreage that is undevelopable, it's much less than that. I was really stunned to see Julie make a sales presentation on behalf of the staff for Mr. Strange over here. It's almost like she was on payroll. It stunned me that she would do that. And I -- it's -- anyway. The DIN plan for 2030 has identified this lot that we're talking about, the brown track, as a low density housing. One to four units per acre. We showed you in the -- with the numbers that they're really almost seven to eight homes per acre. If you take the buildable acreage that we're putting it on. So this has nothing to do with the 2030 plan. There's a lot of people that were in your position years ago that spent months and months and years coming up with the 2030 plan. This is what we want our city to look like. Just as like you're doing right now for the 2040 plan. You're spending a lot of time, a lot of effort to tell everybody this is what we want our city to look like 15 years from now. Why you would let somebody from the city staff come over and say we're going to throw all that out because the developer wants to make more money is beyond me. I'll give you time back. But I got to correct something. You got to understand city staff doesn't have the flexibility that the council does. They don't get to ignore the rules like we do and make decisions based on kind of where we are. They have to -- if something is able to be done by right, they have to present it that way. So I just want to correct that. I let the first one go. But the second time -- Point of order. Pardon me. I have the floor. And so you got to give -- point that at us. We'll take it. But staff has to present the facts as they are on the ground. Thank you. Go right ahead. You have two minutes. Go right ahead. Okay. They're wanting to allow an extra 50 homes in this development. Mr. Strange has failed to tell you that he has now already purchased the brown homestead which is southwest of the property and continues to it. So if we're going to allow an extra 50 homes on this PD, he's going to come back and want the same thing on the next PD. Now we're talking about 100 homes. We've also got a development going in just to the east of us. And they're going to want to be able to do the same thing because precedents have been set. Now we've got an extra 150 homes. It's almost like a brand new development we're letting come in there. I guess the last thing I want to tell you is we have told you over and over and over again we do not want this. It's not good for our neighborhood. We want less density, not more density. Less traffic, not more traffic. All this traffic is going right by my home. My home is on the corner of Grant Parkway and Dearwood, right where the entrance to this land is. I sit there and watch the traffic every day. I see what's coming in, what's going to be coming in on here. And it's not going to be pretty. They told you that there was a traffic study done, it wasn't done by the city. And they put those traffic meters out about 10 o'clock in the morning and picked them up at about 4 o'clock in the afternoon because it was right outside my house. I watched them do it. So if we're going to do a traffic study, let's do a real traffic study that takes the time the traffic coming in early in the morning when kids are going to school and late in the afternoon. Having said all that, I want to tell you guys when I got involved in this, I didn't realize how much you have on your plate. All of a sudden I started reading the paper and you're involved in this and this and this. Is that my time? Yeah, but you can finish your statement, go right ahead. So I appreciate everything you've done that you're doing on there because I didn't realize how big the scope was. So my final thought was just, you know, thank you for everything you're doing on here. When you guys, when the new city council was elected, you told the newspaper, we felt like we were elected because we want to listen to our citizens and they told us that. We're asking you one more time, please listen to your citizens. Thank you. Thank you. That takes us to Daphne Miller. We have one last speaker and I'm going to take that speaker. Then we'll have council comment. These people have been waiting patiently and I want them to be heard. So this is the last speaker. Then we'll have comment and questions from council. Daphne, can you give your name and address? You have four minutes. Daphne Miller, 5045 Oak Bend Circle, Denton, Texas. Just real quickly, one of the things that has not been talked about tonight is that also in our area, we have a mobile home park that is basically doubling in size. So we're going to have all of that traffic on those roads as well. And so also with these extra 50 homes, that's just so much traffic on those old roads. So whether or not you agree or disagree with the PD, right now is not the time. We don't have the roads, we don't have the structure for all of that traffic and all of those people every day. I would urge you to look at that area and see what y'all can do because whether the PD comes in or not, something needs to be done for that area for all those people coming and going. Trying to get off of the highway, you have to go off of the side to slow down. If the light's green, there's no slowdown area to turn to go off around and onto Ferris. So I would just urge you all that no matter what you do, that you be sure to take a look at that and see if there's something y'all can do. And I would vote no for this PD. I don't think we need the extra people in that area. We've already got a lot of people coming that we already have a problem with. Thank you. Thank you. Councilmember Davis. Yes, are you ready? Yeah, I'm sorry, I didn't ask to speak. Okay. I just, you have the, if someone else speaks and gets the floor and then makes a motion. Okay, great. Councilmember Guara. Thank you. So anybody who's listened to me talk about development knows that I, I love density. I'm generally very pro density. And I know that a lot of times when people come before this council to talk about traffic, what they're trying to communicate is I don't want cars driving past my house, but that's definitely not what's happening here. The traffic situation in this neighborhood as it currently exists today is extreme and dangerous. It's a uniquely bad situation. And any amount of development at this time with the, the infrastructure as it exists is going to make it worse. A few turn lanes will help some, but I haven't seen anything in the PD that's going to help that significantly. So before this council, we have two options. We can allow the by-right development plan or we can approve the PD plan. But those aren't the only two options that exist on the table. Jim, you have more options than that. You can choose to consider the, the safety concerns of this community and hold onto your investment. You can also choose to build fewer units on this land. Those are options that you have, but they're not options that this, this council can, can choose. And, and Jim, I would just encourage you to consider that, you know, you're not some, some outside developer, you're a member of this community. And I would ask you to please consider the safety concerns of the neighbors here. Councilman Armitage. Go ahead, if you want to respond. Yeah. We have spent a tremendous time. We've done two TIs out there now. We're going to have to do a third one. So we will continue to study the traffic. Safety is a significant issue out there. I've sat out there many times personally, backed up in that little dead end of Deerwood to watch and see what's going on. It's better now than it was. The TIA we did originally recommended some changes to the signal light timing out at the loop. Those have been made. We've made recommendations to the school to do double stacking. Those have been made. So they're now currently mostly traffic that is on Deerwood and not all the way down Kings Row and out on loop 288. So it has changed. We'll tell you something else that I don't know that anybody has considered is currently one of the reasons you have such an issue at the Hodge Elementary School is there's a hundred existing homes there. We're going to have 300 that we're going to be adding there. And the Hodge Elementary zone goes clear out to Ray Roberts. So there's a lot of driving that goes on when there are now families living in those homes and kids can start walking and riding bikes. You're going to start eliminating vehicle trips. So we have spent a lot of time. Pardon me. Pardon me. We have to be respectful of the speaker. We didn't interrupt. So I'd ask you not to interrupt Mr. Strange, please. And thank you. Go right ahead. We did. Staff came to us and asked about the concern along Kings Row. So I voluntarily stepped up and agreed to pay for something that's not even on our property to make an improvement there in Kings Row to bypass Dearwood. So we have spent, to your point, a lot of time trying to address safety. We've been even working this week, trying to come up with another, which we have. And we have talked with Texas and I'm going to let city staff speak to some of the other concerns over here as to whether it's approved or not to now have another public egress, another way to get out. So we have worked on that. And and you're right, I am a member of the community and we have spent a tremendous amount of time meeting with people. We've worked hard for the support of the people directly adjacent. There are other neighbors out there and there are differing points of view, but we have done that. And we'll continue to do so that as we work through this process. Okay. Thank you. Council, council member, uh, uh, council monitor. Uh, yes. Uh, so a question for the developer and, uh, and then comment. Um, so, uh, can, can you speak to, uh, roughly, uh, the range of the housing prices for this development from the low end to the high end? Um, I say that John joking, cause we are obviously in tremendous inflationary times and I hate to sit here and tell you something and because these homes will probably not come to market for about two years. If, if you asked me today, I think the homes will probably start, unfortunately now in the upper two hundreds, uh, maybe 300. My initial hope is I came before you all before my, when my quote unquote idea to do this was to try to provide closer to an affordable, which is closer to the 200 on the far west side. And I unfortunately due to all the increases in costs and supply chain issues, that is, that's not a reality. So we are not going to stand here and tell you that it's affordable housing. So I would say you usually are going to look at about a $50,000 range. So upper two hundreds to, um, um, low threes on the start, uh, you'll step up about 50, so probably three 30, three 40. And then those upper, uh, sixties are probably going to be, uh, upper three hundreds to low four hundreds in today's market. Two years from now, uh, my guess is, um, they'll more than likely be even higher than that. Unfortunately. Thank you. Thanks for your, uh, your honest answer to that question. Um, so I just want to make some general comments, uh, uh, to the public and my fellow council members for thanks to everybody who has spoken and, and, uh, written to council, um, I have gotten to know, uh, this neighborhood and this area, um, through your, your comments and through the issues that you all have directed me to. Um, I, uh, I feel very strongly, uh, that no, uh, dense development of housing development of this kind should come to this area until the text dot road improvements have been made, uh, to mitigate the, as a council member McGuire said, unusually dangerous, even for Denton, um, traffic situation. Uh, we, as a council are, uh, are committed to the 2030 plan, which is now becoming the, uh, uh, 2040 plan, um, with a very, very, uh, similar, uh, future land use map, which emphasizes, uh, preservation in the more rural peripheries and, uh, more density, uh, towards the center of town closer, uh, to, uh, services and the, uh, in the town sector. Uh, so this, uh, development, uh, unfortunately this plan development, the PD, um, does not help with our, uh, affordable housing shortage, nor, nor does it claim to anymore. So I appreciate the honesty, but just to, to state the obvious, it is not contributing to our affordable housing, uh, commitment. It is not contributing to our, uh, future land use map vision of Denton for the 2030 or 2040 plans. Nor is it, uh, uh, helping at all with our commitment to vision zero, which is members of the public might not know is a commitment to a goal of zero traffic, uh, fatalities, uh, that we have, uh, committed to as a goal in, um, and as a kind of a, a, a mantra, uh, guiding our, this new mobility plan that is still in progress. Uh, so this, um, uh, is, you know, not only not helpful towards these goals we're committed to, but I believe is harmful. Um, and I would like to see in, you know, future PDs, uh, I think that, uh, there should be consideration, um, to, in, in fact, it should be a requirement, uh, that a PD, uh, contribute in a positive way to the, our 2030 plan or what is to become our 2040 plan. Um, and that it, that it contribute in a positive way to our vision zero plan. Uh, I don't think that a plan development should contradict, uh, those goals. Uh, so, uh, you know, those are essentially my, my comments for now, uh, and they have been informed by listening very carefully, uh, to the concerns of the residents. Uh, and I hope that my colleagues will listen to those concerns as well and vote accordingly. Council member Davis. Thank you, mayor. I just a couple comments to, uh, first of all, thank you all for writing into us and those who I've, I've talked to in person. Thank you very much for that time spent. Um, I've, I've been where you are. Be careful. You might end up up here if you keep coming to enough of these things, uh, cause the way it starts is showing up like you do and, uh, and talking to your city council, talking to your planning and zoning committee that I'm serious. Be careful. Um, and I'm very familiar with this area. I, I grew up going to Hodge Elementary, um, actually, uh, until we were, I was about six years old. We lived, lived in what's now the Woodhaven mobile home park. Very familiar with this area. Um, and, uh, what's now known as the tree folk farm that used to be my house. I lived there, uh, when, before we moved in into town here. So I'm very familiar with this traffic. I'm very familiar with the Hodge Elementary traffic. Um, and y'all have brought some things to light that I was not aware of previously, but I, uh, with all due respect to my colleague at the end of the, the, the dais here, I don't appreciate the characterization of, you know, well, Mr. Strange, you can stop doing the thing that you're in business to do and continue paying taxes on the land and not developing it. Um, that's not an appropriate thing for us to say on this dais. The appropriate thing for us to do is to make the decision between the options that we currently have. We don't have the option of telling somebody what to do with their land other than the reasonable zoning restrictions that we have in place. So the choice that we have to make is between the PD or as it stands right now. And I think staff has presented very good reasons why from that perspective, the plan development is an improvement upon what the developer could build by right. And I know most people in the room right now are going to disagree with that, but I'm telling you, we see, we see these things come through. We see what people are able to build things that never make it to the city council because they don't ask for a PD that they're able to build by right. Uh, I understand that people are running their own numbers. The staff is calculating the numbers the same way we calculate them for every other development across the city. Every, every bit of your property counts towards those, those calculations, whether it's under a power line or not. And I can also tell you that people are buying lots this size for a reason. People are asking for this product. They're voting with their dollars and they're choosing to live in houses that are these sizes lots that are these sizes and to make use of public amenities rather than take care of their own yards and have smaller lots. So, um, I've yet to hear from the council if we want to improve mobility in this area, I've yet to hear what it is that we're going to do to improve mobility. Uh, it's not just this development that's going to be going in out there. It's the development across silver dome mobile across from mobile home park on silver dome. Uh, and I'm telling you for the last 40 years, we've all been looking out there knowing there will be development in this area. So we are a little bit behind the ball. Uh, the city is on, uh, planning for mobility out there and making those changes out there. That is not on this developer to solve a problem that has been brewing and known to all of us for the last 40 years. So I think that they've made some reasonable concessions in the PD. I think they've done some things that are responsive to the neighborhood. If it was my land, I wouldn't be putting houses on it either, but it's not. It's their land and they're doing things are not required to do. It's a trade off. And I feel like the city is getting much more out of the PD. Then we get out of the zoning by right. So I intend to vote for the PD and I'm happy to keep talking with you all about it. Councilman Burt. I lived in my home for 22 years in a fairly new neighborhood and it was, uh, considered a cul-de-sac neighborhood and behind my home was just pristine property with trees on it. My kids would play back there. We kind of extended our backyard. We did not put a fence in our yard. And one day I saw those pink flags come up and I was so devastated that I called my city council member, uh, Kevin wrote. And I believe he was the, the gentleman at the time. And I did what you all are doing. And we made a case where there's drainage problems back there. There's nothing you could do. And we made a case where there's animals that we need to protect everything that we could do. We threw it all there. And in the end there were 98 homes built there. I went to the developers and the, uh, LGI homes and secured a loan because I was going to buy the house. I wasn't going to come up behind mine. I mean, my husband thought I was nuts, but I was eligible and I was going to ask someone to live there or have them to purchase it from me of someone that I knew. So I was really, really into this. But in the end, uh, yeah, they did put some homes back there and I'm okay. I'm not totally okay, but I'm okay. Like you said, you end up here on the day as if you speak loud enough. I am going to say yes to this PD. And this is why I was, um, I was going to say no initially because of the technicalities, but I started observing that it became more along the lines of, uh, someone noting that the homes were going to be smaller and we know what that's going to bring in. And that touched me there because, uh, my, my platform was affordable housing and having homes that people can afford to purchase and not necessarily rent all the time. And if we have a developer here that is going to provide the type of housing that is going to allow, uh, this middle-class city, we are a middle-class city. We're not an upscale plain, no, whatever, whatever, all out there in the cloud type city. We are casual people. We love people. We are connected. We are a community. We are a family community. We do so well with our homeless organization. We're top tier homeless, uh, caretakers out here. We're known all over the country right now. So we do a lot for each other, but I just don't appreciate the idea that you have a problem with a neighbor coming in whose house is smaller than yours and you think a certain way about them. We have to give our neighbors an opportunity to be able to purchase a home. 3000 cars. There's, uh, there's 600 kids in the elementary school. There's, I can't imagine, I can't imagine three or 4000 cars in a day coming through there. So I've, I'm a former teacher. I've served at hodge elementary school. I've done long-term subs. I've put people on the bus and I put people in their cars. So I know that there's a concern there. Uh, but I just feel like more along the lines, other than the technicalities, the connectedness of other others out there that need to have an opportunity to purchase a home, then there's a 36 largest, 36 fastest growing city in the nature, in the nation right now. And we've got to really, really be able to capture the opportunity to, to have places for these people to live. We just approved a significant number of apartment complexes coming up here so they can have a place to live and work and play right here. So let's go in, look at our, our, our connected side, our family side. And for you all to are old enough to have children that have children and those folks have got to have somewhere to live, work and play as well. So yes, I'm going to say yes. Thank you. Okay. Councilor back. I'm Mike, Mr. Mayor. Can you address when we're going to have open public comment? Open public comment. You, you just took a blue cards. You didn't, you didn't request for open public comment. No, I did. I said a couple of times, I said, if you want to speak, fill out a blue card. So I did that twice at least go, go right ahead. All right. So I'm going to address some of the comments that I asked to staff earlier and, and, and Jim and your engineer, could you, could you address the, the newest plan that we've seen with the egress concept and, and, and hypothetical traffic impacts. And then I, you know, there may be comments to staff or questions to staff along this line as well. I'm going to let my engineer speak to it and maybe a city staff wants to, as, as they were the ones that work some of these things out with tech start and I'm going to let them provide some of that background and how we come along to try to help provide a solution. So as Jim mentioned in his presentation, we've done a couple of different traffic impact analysis. And one of the point of clarification when we do those, those tubes that go out, they're out for greater than 24 hours because they have to get the AM and PM peak. So just a point of clarification. Those were out for a minimum of 24 hours to get those counts. When we did the traffic impact analysis and we submit that to the city, another thing to point out is that it's based on the traffic control manual or the transportation criteria manual, the city of Denton. So it goes through and outlines all the things that we have to look at. And when we begin that TIA, we have a scoping meeting with the city and we talk about what intersections we're going to look at within the, within the impact area. So all of those are taken into account. The other thing when we went through and did the TIA is the TIA incorporated because it was known that the mobile home park was expanding. The city had us include those traffic, those projected traffic counts within our study. So we went through and we looked at the background traffic and we looked at the intersection. We looked at how King's Row was performing at Loop 288. We looked at King's Row at Deerwood Parkway. We looked at Deerwood Parkway, Grant Parkway, and we did all our analysis based on the different, the different intersections. Also talk about the other development when we had to redo the TIA for the second time, the one that has the other single thing that's included as well. The one that was correct. Correct. There was, was it Windsor? Windsor Oaks. There was a development Windsor Oaks that was coming before the city with the preliminary plat. Those lots were also included. The traffic was included in the TIA. So we went through and did the initial analysis. What it showed is that King's Row was operating below a level of service E. So it was not up to, the city has a minimum level of service of D. So what we did is we looked at with the PD, what are improvements that can be made? We listened to the neighbors. A lot of the feedback was that there really needs to be a left turn lane from King's Row onto Deerfield. When we went through and did the initial analysis, because the perimeter road requirement only required us adding the one lane adjacent to the five acres, that still didn't bring the development up with the PD, the 380 vehicles, didn't bring it up to that level of service of D or better. So that's when we looked at the signal timing, adding the dual left and then adding the through and the right. So when you look at the proposed improvements along King's Row, that's taking into account the trailer home, the mobile home development, the Windsor Oaks development along with our development and providing improvements to bring that up to a level of service of D. So what happens from there with the emergency exit added, what that does is because it's exit only, it's going to affect your AM peak. So now you'll have the northwestern portion of the development having easier access to that, we'll call it a frontage road, to go to the intersection of Sherman and Loop 288. So instead of them driving through the neighborhood to get to Deerwood Parkway to go down and pass the intersection with Grant and go to King's Row and then go over to King's Row, it's going to be faster for those vehicles to go out the exit only to the Loop, go up to Sherman Drive and either do the U-turn to go southbound or if they're going to go northbound, then they can just go across the intersection and get onto the Loop. So the AM peak will improve because less traffic will go to the King's Row Loop 288 intersection. The PM peak, when everyone's coming to the development or coming home, it won't change. Because that's exit only, when the vehicles are returning to the development, they're going to have to use the King's Row intersection at Loop 288. So that traffic pattern will not change with the added exit only to Loop 288. - Do we have a feel, because the presentation was with your improvements at King's Row intersection, the additional lanes extending out towards past the church and all that, but do we have a feel for if you are required to put that extra egress lane, not the emergency exit, so I assume when you said emergency exit, you meant that right turn only thing that we just saw today? - Correct, yeah. - Okay. - We just call it the exit only frontage road. - Is there even a crude rule of thumb for the reduction that you would expect just from tables? - Yeah, I mean, looking at the development, when you look at the number of lots, that's the higher density of lots. I would say that you would probably, in the AM peak, expect about 40% of your traffic to go that direction because it's faster. People want to go, generally, people want to find the fastest path, the path of least resistance. With Hodge Elementary, with the other internal streets, with having to go to Dearwood Parkway all the way down to King's Row, it's going to be much faster for those homes located in that northwest area to go directly to Loop 288 and then up to the Sherman intersection. So I would guess that about, in the AM, about 40% of those trips would end up going that route versus going through to King's Row. And then, so I have concerns, and maybe this is a development services or a capital projects question, but for the piece, I'll ask anyway, and whoever is appropriate can answer it. For the piece of Dearwood that remains, we're not expanding that, we don't have additional right away. We have reductions, potentially, by having an egress, which is beneficial. But what do we imagine the traffic will be on that piece, even after the changes? Because honestly, that's what we're talking, I mean, this is the limitation of that section right there. Right. And I would say this, that Dearwood, when it was constructed, it was constructed as a collector. At the time, the city section, I believe it's 44 feet back, it's either 40 or 44 feet back to back. So one of the things that we put within our traffic impact analysis is there's probably some striping that can be done to improve circulation along Dearwood, because the pavement width is sufficient. So if you add striping, the striping can help direct the travelers on, and maybe it's a parking shoulder, with two through lanes. That's something we would look at with our traffic impact, our traffic transportation engineers and get them to provide recommendations. But one of the recommendations that they did provide was to add striping on Dearwood to help better guide travelers. If you're coming from the school, this is the area that you need to queue. If you're coming in and out, these are the designated lanes for you. So the width of Dearwood is such that striping could be done in order to improve the traffic movements in the area and into the proposed subdivision that were, you know, the King's Way. And this is, and I just don't know the answer to this. Do we have the opportunity to control motion during certain times of day? And I'm thinking of like where lanes are normally a turn lane, but they become one way in particular times of day. Is that something in our code? Is this related to this? This is related to the traffic impacts. Thank you to Vinnie, City Engineer. Staff does not normally recommend controlling patterns of traffic just typically because folks use the mode that they are most used to and get comfortable with. So we would not recommend that type of a pattern to say that during certain hours of the day you would use this roadway section versus certain hours of the day you would use an opposite roadway section. People are by, really just by habit, they use the same pattern over and over. Okay. Maybe we don't recommend that, but do we have the ability to do it in our code? I'm not proposing it right now. I just want to know whether we have that ability. I would say that we have any ability that we need to evaluate a certain situation. It would just be that coordination between the development services planning team, transportation planning, and then of course our engineering team to make the best recommendation based on the pattern that the traffic is moving in that time frame. It's just not a typical situation. We've been asked a similar question before. It's just because people are used to using the same travel pattern throughout the time frames of the day. They become creatures of habit. All right. And Becky, since you're standing up here, I'm going to ask the tech stock question to you because it would probably summon you up anyway. If we were to require this new right turn egress concept that we're seeing today, that would require tech stock approval? Yes, sir. That would go through the city permitting promises that ultimately we review the tech stock permit after the development provides that tech stock permit to us and that'll all run through Julie Wyatt with the planning and services group. And then we will work through that process and ultimately it'll be submitted to tech stock for review. And we have had conversations with tech stock about this situation that you've seen today. So if one of the things that we're bumping into is we had on again, off again, stub outs and concepts and driveway access. And so I think one of the concerns that I heard from comments and from email responses was the lack of clarity on what tech stock will, will they, won't they do? And so do we can, I would like to understand if we can require that any sort of future development must have. So it's a tech stock roadway. We cannot. No, I mean not required tech stock, but require that the development can't proceed without like some sort of firm commitment from tech stock. Tech stock will review the permits that are submitted and work through that process. I will tell you that multiple individuals had conversations with tech stock yesterday about the plan that you saw today and tech stock is in alignment with the plan that you've seen before you. Can I have one less question, Mr. Mayor? And this is probably for development services. Can I get a little clarity on the alignment with the, the comp plan for the area? It's as succinct as possible. And so I want to confirm a statement made by Councillor Davis is that we're, we're looking at, we're, we always calculate by gross acreage in terms of the densities. In terms of density, yes. Okay. And the, the other thing in terms of alignment, generally what, when we're looking at whether adjacency is compatible, do we, do we have a rule of thumb sort of up or down, you know, certain levels of density is compatible? You know, it is context sensitive in terms of the, the type of development and the, and the general character of the area. In terms of residential uses, typically the activities associated with residential uses are generally compatible. You're not introducing new activities to a site if their residential uses are abutting each other. In terms of density, it is something that the comprehensive plan and that, that comprehensive plan is that guide for that. So, so within those areas that are low residential, it does have that range of one to four dwelling units per acre. And the comp plan is generally, the vision for those areas should be consistent with that one to four dwelling units per acre. You know, we do have other instances where a moderate density would then come up against a lower density. But in terms of just compatibility with certain densities, it really is that, that project specific and we do look to the comprehensive plan. And given that this is gross overall less than four dwelling units per acre, it's staff's, it's staff's analysis that it is consistent with that future land use. Okay. All right. Thank you. So before I get any other questions, I have two more speakers that have signed up. Yeah, I have two more speakers that have signed up and I'm going to, anyone else you need to hustle. I'm going to close a public hearing after this. So if there's anyone else that wants to speak and this is the third time you can go back and check the tape. But any other questions before we take the callers, I mean the speakers, any other questions? Seeing none. Okay. Then these last two speakers and then we'll move towards a vote. I have Amber Briggle. Good evening. My name is Amber Briggle. I live here in Denton. Councilor Beck, thank you for- If you could give your address. I really don't want to say it out loud because I'm going to speak on the LGBTQ ordinance later. I did write it down on the card though. Okay. Thank you. Councilor Beck, I just wanted to thank you for mentioning, because I've been in public hearings before and it was just kind of mentioned like, if anyone else wants to talk, come on up here and you fill out a card later. So thank you. I did fill out a card. Councilor McGuire, I agree with you. I'm all for density. Councilors, arm and turn, bird, I'm all for affordable housing. But I'm going to side with the neighborhood on this one. I didn't prepare anything. I was actually going to talk about something else, but y'all have just moved me. I was watching the presentation on the Denton 2040 plan that y'all had this week, last week, recently. And kind of the big takeaway that I got from that was that, well, we have the 2030 plan and I worked on that, both on the task force and the latest planning and zoning commission. I worked on that. And we had a clear vision that we wanted for our city. Well, now the 2040 plan is kind of updating some of these land use policies that we kind of set aside in the 2030 plan, but things happen. Development comes along and now we're just going to kind of update the plan. Well, what's the point of having a plan if you're just going to update to whatever the development does, right? And I think that the residents here made some really good points. You made that point, like you approve this and then what's a slippery slope to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing, right? We have an opportunity in Denton for density, infill development, that preserves our natural areas at the edge of the city, that preserves established neighborhoods. We have an opportunity to work with the Denton Housing Authority and other organizations to bring in more affordable housing. And I'm not sure that the Denton 2030 plan or the Denton 2040 plan or this neighborhood need to be sacrificed in order to meet those goals. Those are my comments. So thank you. Or the next, it didn't say. Okay, if you if you come down, give me your name and address, you'll have four minutes. My name is Ray Stanisłewski, I live at 3605 Antler Circle. Hey, Mr. Stanisłewski, how are you? I'm good. You play uniform, you phoning anymore? No, sir, but I sure appreciate you. You never really did. No, I never did. You're awesome. Great to see you. And tell Mrs. Stanisłewski. Hey, you know, you've advanced beyond my expectations. Sorry, go right ahead. So anybody can be mayor now. Only if you're from the proud of Bronco country. And I took exception to Jesse being from Hodge. That's Newton Razor is the way to go. But go ahead. All right. I wasn't prepared to speak. I'm a little bit nervous right now. First thing is, I was extremely upset that somebody on the council characterized us as being those people who don't want those kind of people in a neighborhood near us. Because none of us think that way. We have no problem with small houses. Our first house was a small home, like maybe 1500 square feet. Okay, so I just that one of the council members said, this is what people want. I kind of disagree with that. I think small houses are what a lot of people can only afford. If they could afford more, they'd get more. I really believe that. And they need to have a place to live. I don't have a problem with that. We have neighbors. The mobile home down the street, which is another thing y'all need to think about. Okay, my biggest concern, as some people have said, is infrastructure. Okay, you saw the pictures of the cars on Dearwood. They're double stacked. That leaves one lane for people to get in and out while schools, you know, coming into session and when they're picking up their kids. I was driving down that one lane one time and had to almost gotten a wreck because some person came down zooming by, you know, almost up on the curb next to me. That's dangerous. We have to take care of infrastructure. And I've always felt that Denton was behind in that respect. Our growth is outpacing our infrastructure. We've got to do something about that. You're going to have to do something about Silverdome because we're adding people there in the mobile home park. You know, you said that the property is all for sale. There's going to be more and more homes. You better do something about Silverdome because we drive down that street. If someone's coming towards you, you better hope you don't end up in the ditch. And we see kids walking home from the elementary school down Silverdome where cars and things are going back and forth. We dealt with that out at Ryan. No sidewalk for how long while, you know, Ryan was there and kids are walking to school. You're going to have to do something about that. And it should be done before we have add 378 homes times probably at least two cars per home times the number of trips made daily. Now, a lot of you don't live where we live. And you can say, well, I've seen it and I've seen that you don't. I've lived there for 26 years. Okay. We see it every day. People have told you that. And it just concerns me that some of you are really not listening to us and our concerns. Well, y'all just have to get over it is what it sounds like to me. As far as Jim Strange, I talked to him on my front porch the other day. He's a very nice man. I think he's doing his best to have a nice development there. But somebody said something about, well, why can't you do that in the R4 right to build? You could have those amenities in there. You could still do that intersection at Kingsrow and loop 288. The PD doesn't require that. He's willing to do that if y'all vote for the PD, but he could do it for the right R4. I don't understand, except it's kind of like, well, if you want this, you're going to have to do this. And if you don't want to do that, then you're not going to get those extra things. I don't like that. I don't like being treated like that. Okay. We know since we moved in there in 1995, we know that that property, which we love having that and watching the cows come by all the time, we know that it's going to be developed. We've known it since we moved in there. We just felt fortunate to be there at the time. At one point, we were the only house, but we want something that's going to be safe for our kids and the people that drive, have to drive through or walk through that neighborhood. I hope that all of you will keep that in mind. If your kids were walking to school and you were going to have to deal with cars from an additional 378 houses and nothing is going to be done with Dearwood, how would you feel about that? Thank you for your time. I appreciate everything you're doing for us. Thank you. Okay. So I'll close. I'll close the public hearing. Council Member Davis. Council Member Davis. Thank you, Mayor. I move approval of the item with the staff recommended conditions. And could we put those on the screen just so folks know what those are. [Pause] Just a point of clarification with that. So here are the staff recommended conditions in the backup material. That change did happen with the 3A and 3B options connections to Loop 288. So I just wanted to clarify if any changes to that second condition for that 3B with the access. What's on the screen is 3B as presented this evening, correct? It is not. Let me go back to the 3A and 3B. My motion would be for the staff recommended conditions in 3B as presented tonight, the connection to the off-ramp. And the reason why I ask for the slide to be put up is requiring that prior to first phase of development. That has to be in place prior to homes going in. Okay. That's your motion. Okay. Is there a second? Is there a second? Okay. Motion dies for one of a second. Mayor Proctor Meltzer. Yes. Thank you, Mayor. I'll make some comments first and then I'll make a motion. I just haven't had an opportunity to weigh in yet. First of all, I think it is important for the members of the neighborhood that are here to understand that not having development there is not one of the options, or at least preventing development there is not one of the options. There is a right to build under the current zoning and then there's the request of PD. As far as the issue of, you know, has anybody put forward anything to address the transportation issues? Well, we were just here yesterday and there's, I think, pretty clear agreement that this is an area of the city that requires a small area plan. So we didn't say what's in it yet, but that's for sure coming. As far as the substance right at the heart of this, I too also favor trade-offs for, particularly of density for greater open space. And I'm not persuaded that there's significantly more open space being created, more than what is minimally required. But again, we're talking about undevelopable land area that will be needed for detention and so on. So is it a good trade-off, you know, in terms of getting significant conservation by clustering? I don't think it really is that. So I'm not seeing the compelling case for the density there. As we go through the process of looking at small area plan and so on, if council ultimately feels this area should have greater density, I mean, that's a conversation that could be had, but I don't see that in this deal. I would also add that to me, Mr. Strange has an incredibly great reputation as a quality builder. And I believe that many of the pluses that have been added in dialogue with the neighborhood are things I can't no motive, but I would suspect that he perceives benefits to the marketability and just generally to the quality of the product. And I would hope that some of those are still going to pencil out even in an R4. So I'm moving denial of the PD. Okay, is there a second? Councilor Armitage? Yes, I second that. Okay, we have a motion by Mayor Pro Tem Meltzer, second by Councilor Armitage. Any other discussion before we vote? Is this okay? As briefly as possible, we have another stack of people that are okay. Councilor Beck, again, we have another group of folks that want to speak, want to try to get to them before it gets too late. I appreciate that, Mr. Mayor. I'll try to matter on as limitedly as possible. So the problem that I'm running into and why I couldn't support, I agree with what both Councilor Davis and Mayor Pro Tem said. I think you do have a superior product in a lot of ways. And I think that Mr. Strange is trying to make enhancements and improvements. And I don't, I actually don't agree with a lot of the audience that he was being nefarious or tricking you in any way. I just, that's not the observation I've seen. And he does have a reputation for making better quality products. I laud all of that. I keep coming around to the traffic over and over and over and over and over again. And that is, you know, if we assume something like 3,500 trips, 40% is still 1,400 trips. And then this is what boils down. And the numbers we were hearing were 40%. Great. Okay. That's still 1,400 trips on level E, maybe F, possibly as high as D. If we're lucky with striping, I think we need a mobility solution. Show me a mobility solution that does not make this place any worse. And then I'm good with the rest of the things that we've seen. And I appraise Mr. Strange and his team for all the amenities. I said at the beginning that it was about traffic and I'm ending that it's about traffic. Okay. So that's where I am. Councilmember Davis. Thank you, Mayor. I'll be brief. The issue I have with what I just heard, and I agree with Councilmember Beck on so much of what he said, the issue I have with that is that the preliminary plat that's already approved does nothing to improve mobility. What not just Mr. Strange but a future buyer can do with the land as it stands now doesn't let you out onto the loop. It makes you go down Deerwood and there's no requirement for any additional turn lanes except for coming back here and asking the city to carve it out of the budget for everything else. So one, we expect that next. Two, the whole point of the PD is exacting that change out of the developer and making the developer's pocket and the future buyers of those lots pay for those improvements to the roads. So now we will do that. Now that's going to be on us, potentially some future developer in some other part of this area. The problem I have with the current zoning is it does nothing to address mobility. The cars will be there. The cars will come. The traffic impact that we know is going to come is going to come and there's not going to be anything to address it. Okay. Councilman Burke. In addition to what Councilman Davis said, you have to have development. Development comes in front of infrastructure. This is why it's taken so long for the county to get started on that dreaded 380. Well, we've seen that development out there explode and now the funding is there to make the necessary changes. And I do understand that those changes are going to run right up into Denton and up and around 288. And so that is going to satisfy what you're asking for. And that's going to take some years for it to get here. I can't imagine it being closer than the next couple of years or so before they even, we even can see some light at the end of the tunnel. So I think the timing is probably going to be perfect with the building of the development and the roadway being connected to that, to the frontage roads and all of that. I know the state of Texas is working very diligently to get the city of Denton up to speed with what's going on and where we need to be. But the funding has to be there. I was learned that development needs to come on in to start putting those funds into some coffers so that infrastructure can be corrected. I don't want anyone to think that I am, I mean, I'm just a family-oriented individual and I think that young folks need to have an opportunity to build their family and have a decent place to have their kids. Their kids need backyards like your child had backyards. So front yards and a close school. And, you know, we need to have more stores. We have a shortage of stores where we can go to. We're already, so there's a lot of things that we need. But on top of all of that, we need homes that people can actually be able to afford to live in and raise their families. Thank you for the opportunity. Okay, and so I just want to say one thing, a couple things. So I think it's one great discussion. Thank you for the neighborhoods coming out. Thank you for Mr. Strange and I forget your name, but Kimberly Horne. Thank you very much for your presentation, your hard work and diligence. I think really, I think the one thing that jumps out at me that I want to say is from a kind of housing cost setting affordability aside, I just want to, there's just a fact that I think is very interesting and kind of helps us all get on the same page so that we can serve our community as the best as possible. So Habitat for Humanity has built, just finished their 105th home in Denton County and they, in a perfect world, they'd like to, their houses to appraise for $100,000 so that they can keep the costs low and make the payments easier for families and they carry the note for families. Why that's relevant is because it's amazing that it would be put before us that a house would come in hopefully around 250 at this time. Obviously that won't hold, but I'll say this, that's interesting to me. First I've heard it because of Habitat's 105th home appraised at just about $220,000 and that's without a garage and that's free, that's free labor and that's donated appliances. So our housing issue is, I mean you're about 300 to start right now and so for a for-profit entity. And so I think that's just important when we're having these conversations, not advocating either one way or another, just saying when we're having conversations about affordability and this council has to get aggressive about how we allow houses that come on board and help address that issue. That being said, that's just to normalize the conversation. I think it's, again, a great discussion. Look forward to the vote and we, I thank everyone for coming back out. And with that, Mayor Pro Tem, you made the motion. I'll say you. Aye. I'm sorry? Aye. Councilor Armitage? Yes. Councilor Maguire? Given the option between two bad choices, I prefer the option that includes a few turn lanes to ease congestion in the area, so I vote no. Let's see. Councilor Berg? No. Councilor Davis? No. And then Mayor Hutsmith is an aye. Who am I missing? Councilman Beck? Aye. Okay. Motion passes 4-3. The PD fails by that same number. So that concludes item A, takes us to item B. Mayor, I wasn't clear on the vote. Are you sure of the tally? That the ayes were me, you, and I. Yeah, it'll be great when we're all back, but it's you, Councilmember Armitage, myself, and Councilmember Beck. That's four. I gotcha. Thank you very much. All right. We're gonna press straight through, so those on days, if you need to take a break, then take a break and come back, but we're not gonna keep people longer than we have to, so bye everywhere. So item B is ID 22135, hold a public hearing and receive comments for the public regarding a proposed comprehensive nondiscrimination ordinance for the City of Denton and provide any direction to staff on the proposed ordinance. And we'll give a second for things to clear up. Okay. And so, no, I'm good. Thank you. Thank you very much. So just to set the table so that we can move through this efficiently, this is a discussion to hear from the public primarily and to then give direction in summary, but I just think it's important that we maximize the time to hear from the public and get staff that information so that they can process that, come back in a future work session for us to review those notes and kind of their findings, but this is not something we're gonna, there's no action to be taken tonight, so there's no putting a fine point on anything tonight. It's simply direction from our public hearing from the public to then inform staff's next iterations of this conversation. Good evening, Mayor, City Council, Sarah Kuechler, Deputy Director of Human Resources. I do have just a very brief informational presentation for the public so they understand what is being considered for the draft non-discrimination ordinance. I know Council has had a few work sessions on this already, and in the interest of time, I will make this as quick as possible. And while you're doing that, I'm gonna open the public hearing so that that's out of the way. Okay, sounds good. So jump right in. How did we get to where we are today? This was a request from City Council in June of last year to request more information on a non-discrimination ordinance. Over the fall and winter, we have held a number of work sessions to present research on non-discrimination ordinances, received direction to begin drafting an ordinance in a process. We've presented that draft a couple of times and received revisions from City Council to where we have a draft non-discrimination ordinance that was opened up for public input. That's currently the stage that we are in. We opened it up for a public input online in January and have left that open till today. And then we also have the public hearing today. And then by way of reminder, staff will be seeking at the end of this item today direction if this should be placed for consideration of an ordinance on an upcoming City Council agenda. The ordinance would not be effective immediately. It does have a delayed effect of a date in the current draft to allow time for education and the current and the necessary processes to be established. So what is a non-discrimination ordinance, or sometimes referred to as an NDO? This is something that some local governments have decided to pass, and this is to add protections for those classes that may not be expressly covered under federal or state law. This is often in most reference to sexual orientation and gender identity. In the state of Texas, there are five cities that have NDOs. And we have reviewed this information with City Council to provide a lot more detail on each one of these five cities as there's a lot of differences amongst the five. But the cities are listed here on the screen. And in general, they kind of fit into two categories. Dallas, Fort Worth, and Austin. They are larger cities. They have full civil rights offices. They have personnel that are trained and experts in this area. And they're actually certified to enforce federal law by HUD and EEOC. So they can hear those cases on behalf of those federal agencies and have met those appropriate standards. The other general category, that second category, is Plano and Arlington. These ordinances rely heavily on referring where they can, and then also focusing on conciliation. And Arlington's was recently adopted in June of last year. So moving right along, in the draft NDO that was open for public input, what is covered or what is protected? So what is protected are the classes listed here on the screen, as you can see, in the three areas of housing, employment, and public accommodations. This chart just briefly defines them for the public, what that means in terms of housing, employment, and public accommodation. There's a lot more details in the ordinance. And just one thing to highlight that we get asked often, what is public accommodations? That means any establishment that is open to the general public cannot deny facilities, benefits, services, or goods to someone on the basis of a protected class. So this does include restrooms and other similar facilities is defined a public accommodation. And how we define each of these three areas does generally mirror the language that you're going to see in federal and state non-discrimination laws. And that was done very strategically so that we can refer as much as possible to the appropriate federal and state agencies. So moving along, what is not covered, what may be exempted from this ordinance? There are broad exemptions, and then there are specific exemptions in each of the three areas. So this slide covers what are the broad exemptions from the ordinance. So there are three. Religious organizations, the federal government, and the state government, and any of its political subdivisions are entirely exempt from the ordinance. In addition to these broad exemptions, although it's not explicitly stated in the ordinance, there is a law in the state of Texas called the Texas Religious Freedom and Restoration Act. And that prohibits government from infringing on someone's substantially held religious belief. So even though we don't state it explicitly in the ordinance, if an individual has a substantially held religious belief, that could be a claim of a defense from being in violation of this ordinance. So just wanted to highlight that as well, because we've been asked, I see religious organizations exempted, but what about individuals who have religious beliefs? So what are the specific exclusions? It gets a little bit more detailed, but just for simplicity, employment and housing, it does have exemptions that you're going to see that are also in federal law, exempting small employers, those with 15 or less employees, and then exempting some small landlords. And then for public accommodations, it does not apply to any private clubs or private organizations. So what is the process defined in the ordinance if someone believes that they were discriminated against in violation of the ordinance? The person must file a complaint with the city that must be made within 90 calendar days from when the alleged violation occurred, and it must be made on a form prescribed by the city under oath or affirmation. Once we would receive that complaint, we would have 10 days to review and decide on one of the four. The first would be if we can refer the complaint, if it is within the jurisdiction of a federal or state agency, we are going to automatically refer it. And I'll go over that in the next slide. The other options, two and three listed here, would be to deny the complaint, and this is if it's incomplete, untimely, and so forth. The last option would be to accept the complaint for further investigation, and I'll go over what that process looks like in a map here in a second. So as I mentioned previously, if we can refer it to a federal or state agency, we will. At this time, based upon judicial cases heard and based upon what federal and state agencies have come out to explicitly state, they will hear anything on any complaints on the basis of employment or housing on the classes defined in the draft non-discrimination ordinance could be referred to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Texas Workforce Commission, or for housing to the U.S. Housing and Urban Development, to HUD. So employment and housing would be referred. The only area where we would be looking at currently, which we may have to handle locally and accept for investigation locally, may be under a claim filed in regards to public accommodations. That's not explicitly covered by any federal or state agency. And so this is a kind of a process map that we've shown before to city council of what this process looks like at a high level. So just as I stated, if we receive a complaint and it can be referred, it will. The process ends there. If it cannot be referred, we're going to check as a city staff, does it meet the ordinance criteria? If it does, we're going to accept a complaint and proceed to investigation. The investigation, as we've talked about previously, would be handled by a third party. And this is to have somebody that's independent and also has the expertise to conduct these types of investigations. And what they're going to be looking to determine is the reasonable cause that discrimination occurred. If they do not believe there's a reasonable cause, they're going to provide a report, they're going to conclude their investigation and prepare a final report that would be delivered to city staff. If they do believe reasonable cause, if there is reasonable cause discrimination occurred, they're going to make that report and then there might be a recommendation to proceed to conciliation. And then it would proceed on to conciliation, where another third party mediator is going to try to mediate or conciliate that if they are able to. If they are able to, there'll be an agreement that's prepared. And if they are not, it would conclude and it could be a final report would be prepared and it could be referred to the municipal prosecutor for review for potential criminal prosecution. This does not mean that it will always be referred and handled. It does have to meet certain standards that are necessary in order to take that forward in prosecution in municipal court. So that's that last stage there. And there's some more information on the slide in terms of what is the process, but I believe I covered most of that in walking through the map. So as mentioned, we had the Discuss Denton online survey open in January 18th and it has been open until through today. We had the slide when we posted the agenda on Friday that showed the public feedback we had received through last Thursday. And as you can see here, there was almost 59% in support and 41 opposed as is currently drafted based on that total of 107 responses. We also included in the backup all of the comments that we received which may indicate further why someone supported or opposed the ordinance as drafted. We've updated and included an additional slide and this was sent to city council today as well based on the feedback we've received through today. So we did have more responses coming in. We had 159 total responses now and that actually has flipped. Only 42% are in support as drafted and almost 58% opposed as drafted. So just wanted to provide that to city council as well. So the next steps are to open up for the public hearing. And then lastly, staff at the end of the conclusion of the public hearing will be seeking some direction from city council. If you want to have an additional work session or if you want to place the ordinance as drafted on an upcoming agenda, we're just looking for that clarity of what you would like the next step to be after today. So I'll take down the presentation. Okay, thank you. Again, this is a public hearing. You just need to fill out a blue card if you want to speak. We do have one caller I'm going to take. If that caller is ready, I'm going to take them first. Mayor, we do not have him ready. If you'll take the in-person first, we can have him ready at the end. Okay, sounds great. Thank you. The first card I see Brandon McGee. I'll give your name and address. You have four minutes. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Brandon Chase McGee, 1610 East McKinney Street, Den Texas 76209. So I rise tonight. First off, thank you all. I appreciate it's been a long night. I rise tonight in support of passing an NDO. We've gotten a lot of comments about this, so I want to talk about the economic impact, if I might. I'm just a truck driver. I'm not that smart, but I do know dollars and cents, and this makes dollars and cents for this city, just as you've seen other cities do it. Earlier today, I spoke with a member of the board of the Denton Black Chamber, and he reminded me that not only do black businesses want this, but it's the right thing to do. One recent article from an in-state economic think tank noted that between the years of 2021 and 2025, this state stands to gain an estimated $19.8 billion in annual tech and tourism, along with 180,000 jobs being created, and in particular, $900 million in local economic revenue to cities all around the state. $900 million, that's a big number for me. In this city right now, where we are in a situation that is currently untenable going forward into the future, looking at a council that needs to be more aggressive in development and making sure we have the things we need to pay for, we just heard an engaging discussion tonight about making sure infrastructure is there for future development. That $900 million is a big number that could be used for that infrastructure that we know is needed as this city continues to grow. I don't think that this council wants to be the ones who go to city, to small business owners, to medium-sized business owners alike, and tell them why their earning potential is capped when people decide to vote with their dollars. See, the generation, my generation and the generation behind me, we're a little smarter in the way we do things. Not so much protesting and shouting, but more economic boycotts and bicots. The city needs to think about that. I want to live in a city that is leading in terms of affirming the rights of all Dentonites. There's no reason why we can't do this. This city should be leading the county. There are other cities in this county, in this community that are doing that. I hate to see business creation go there when it should be coming here to this city that we all know and love. The truth is that we should be protecting everybody. We should be protecting everybody. I want to live in a city that puts the full weight of its laws behind protecting everybody, regardless of race and color, creed, sexual orientation, and what have you. It's the right thing to do. We can rise to the occasion and do this together or we cannot do this, but the truth is elections are coming up and the people have to decide what they want. Do we want to live in a city that protects people or not? It's just really that simple. I urge each one of you to remember the poem, "Then They Came." You see, I've heard people in the Twitterverse saying that we don't need this. We don't need this. Well, the truth is we do need this and you don't need it until it's you, right? This could be us. Any person who has historically been otherized understands that it might be you. I'm a black man. I've been black for 36 years. It's important for me to protect other people because when they're done with them, they're coming for me. Historically, that is what we have seen in this country and other countries around the world. I urge all of you, counsel, please pass this NDO. I yield the amounts of my time. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Amber Briggle. Good evening. My name is Amber Briggle. I've been a resident of Denton for about 13 years and I own a business located at 531 North Elm Street. My family has experienced discrimination here in Denton because one of my children is transgender. So this ordinance feels personal and gives me hope that my trans child could have the same protections and rights in Denton as your children do. However, I'm not here to speak to you today as a mother. Instead, I'm here as a small business owner, a member of the Denton Main Street Association, and a member of the Denton Chamber of Commerce to make the economic case in favor of a comprehensive nondiscrimination ordinance. 82% of Americans and 70% of Texans support laws that protect the LGBTQ community from discrimination in all aspects of life. An NDO reflects the values of our community and of your constituents. According to a recent Forbes article, quote, "In Texas alone, a recent economic study found that a statewide LGBTQ nondiscrimination law could potentially lead to 180,000 new jobs, $1.2 billion in annual state revenue, and $19.8 billion in annual tech and tourism gross product." Now, despite these economic benefits that I just mentioned, we still don't have a statewide bill here in Texas that would do essentially what this NDO could do for Denton. So this is our opportunity to do something bold and visionary to state definitively that Denton is open for business for all. Denton already has some great assets. We're an educated populace with lots of land, close proximity to transportation options like I-35, the rail lines, and major airports. We own our own utility company and provide 100% renewable energy to our customers. We have a unique Denton vibe that can be felt pretty much anywhere across the city. And we have a lot to be proud of and lots to offer businesses and people, lots to offer to businesses and people looking to relocate or expand their operations here in the Dallas area. However, Texas doesn't have the best track record when it comes to protecting marginalized people, including those like my son, who are LGBTQ. And I'll be honest, had I known I would end up having a transgender child, I never would have moved here. I would love my child no matter where on this planet we lived, but we wouldn't be living here. Now, imagine countless more families like mine. Capable, intelligent, compassionate, hardworking people who refuse to even consider Denton because they, their loved ones, or their future employees could legally be treated as second-class citizens. Our pool of qualified candidates automatically diminished. Our business opportunities, like the successful downtown business that I own, wouldn't exist because the innovators and entrepreneurs aren't here to get them started. Instead, businesses will choose to locate in Dallas, Plano, Arlington, or Fort Worth. Communities that share a lot in common with us from a geographic and cost-of-living perspective, but who all have one major competitive advantage that we don't, a city-wide non-discrimination ordinance. Adopting a similar NDO in Denton will benefit literally every person and business here as we realize our potential and become even more attractive to families and businesses, bringing more opportunities and innovation to our community. Lastly, treating LGBTQ people fairly costs nothing and would improve our city's brand while creating long-term economic benefits. It's a smart business decision, and one that I'm in favor of. Thank you. Okay, Adam Briggle. Hi, my name is Adam Briggle. I live in Denton, Texas. I want to thank Sarah and all the staff and all council for all your work on this issue, and just begin by providing a little community memory. The timeline that you started with is only the most recent timeline. Folks in the community have been working with members on city council who are no longer here and members of staff for over four years on this, and it's worth asking why it's taken so long. There's been a couple of reasons. One is we're repeatedly warned that there's broader political consequences that we risk if we do this, even though other cities have done it. So we shelf it, and then when we take it off the shelf, we discover there's a lot of nuances and complexities to be worked through. But I think now is the time. Now is the time. It's been a long time. So I think it's worth reminding us what we're doing here. We seek to express in the law a principle that I think is enshrined in our values as a people. And that principle is no matter who you are and no matter who you love, you deserve fair and equal treatment in all walks of life. That's what this is about, at the heart of it. And I don't want us to forget that. So I think this NDO is not perfect, but nothing we do is perfect. But I think it's right, and I think it's good, and I think it's time. So I urge you to vote for it. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. And then Nathan Goldsmith. Good evening. Good evening. Okay, so I haven't been here since the redistricting happened, so I do apologize for not being more fluent with participation. I grew up in Texas back in the 70s. Was raised during the time where I believe it was Mayor Whitmire in Houston was trying to get a non-discrimination policy passed, and it did pass, but yet it was overturned. And then there was a mayor, a previous mayor, that tried to take advantage of that and run against her in the next election, in which at the time we had grid that was going around, which became AIDS. And the guy made a horrible statement to say the way to get rid of this disease is to kill the queers. Completely unacceptable in that time or this time today. Growing up a little bit more, back in '91, there was Montrose down in Houston where they had the individual where a group of people went in, just like they do in Oakland, and beat an individual to death because of his sexual orientation. That, too, is wrong. Fast forwarding a little bit through the '90s due to time, we'll say that back in 2013 I had the opportunity to work with people such as Adam Medrano in Old East Dallas, an impoverished community. It was really good to see the efforts that they had protecting the community and putting up community organizations. But I think what ended up transpiring from that after the equal rights on marriage passed was that city adopted the human rights campaign and their municipal equality index, which is ever-changing. It's not set for what is voted on today, but what is going to be required of the city to maintain that for the years to come as it changes. It's very concerning to me because you're now taking the voice away from the people again, dealing with the progressives that are trying to push an agenda to silence the voices of others. It's a little alarming to me. I'm not black. I'm white. I am a Christian. I'm a God-fearing individual that believes that only through Christ has my salvation been confirmed, and that gets to be a little bit hard to deal with at times because you are persecuted against in this country for that. In 2017, I believe it was Plano that adopted that HRC plan. That was the time that I moved to Denton, and I was amazed by the welcome-ness of the LGBTQ community in Denton. I don't understand why this is happening five years down the road again. I think there is a time-matter thing here, but it is my deepest concern that what we're doing is forcing a belief into different cultures, and it's alarming that that's happening. I'm going to look at my time. With the seconds that I have left, I will say that just as with what we just spoke about with all the King's Row stuff, there's no survey that's going to be listened to. People are going to vote on the council the way that they see fit, and that's discouraging. In the redistricting, I'm no longer with Alison. I'm over in Jesse's district now, and that was forced upon me and the people that said no. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Walter McGovern? Walter McGovern? Okay. Jennifer Bates? Hello, Mayor and City Council. I live in the 2400 block of South Interstate 35 East in Representative Bird's district. My name is Jenny Bates, and I'm here to speak in support of the city's non-discrimination ordinance as drafted, which includes protections for people based on gender identity and sexual orientation. I support the ordinance and encourage the City Council to continue with the work that it's doing. I appreciate the city staffer's work in researching similar ordinances and creating a draft. As Denton continues to grow, we need protections for all the people who call our city home in regards to housing, employment, and public accommodations. As a person born and raised in Denton for almost 30 years, I spent many years watching the city grow and become a space that is trying to be a city for all people. We haven't always got it right, but we continue to try. When I returned to Texas after graduate school in 2017, I could have easily moved to Dallas or Fort Worth, cities already with NDOs, but I wanted to return home to make my city better and get back to the city that gave me so much. I returned to Denton because of hard work by Denton activists that are making our city a safer place for LGBTQ people. Now it's my turn, our turn, to continue the tradition of being a city that encourages kindness, beauty, and diversity. The NDO expands protections, which also keeps the already protected rights of businesses and religious organizations that are already protected under federal law and states in place. As a Christian and a candidate for clergy, I do not find this ordinance detrimental or limiting to my work in ministry in the community. The NDO gives clarity on what people in Denton can do when they've been discriminated against, what procedures they can follow, and what actions the city will take. It also gives business owners clarity on what they can expect when a discrimination claim is made against them. I know the city council and city staffers will continue to review and tailor the policy as best for Dentonites. I encourage staffers and council members to learn about inclusive language and accurate wording for transgender and gender non-conforming people so the language presented in the NDO and supporting documents does not misgender, cause someone by the wrong gender, or use other harmful language when referring to people the NDO was trying to protect. You can find information from that online with groups like The Trevor Project. Once again, I'd like to thank the city council and the staff for the work on this ordinance, for my fellow Denton activists for working on this NDO for over the years. I do believe Denton is working to become a place for everyone, and this is part of the work, and I encourage the city council to support the draft. Okay, thank you. Logan Nyquist, 1001 Alice Street, and I guess I'm going to begin a little bit more inductively and with a question, and that is would anyone in this room consider themselves a discriminating person? If so, is that a good thing or is that a bad thing? Well, in the English language, it depends on context. It can actually mean both. It can be a positive thing if I'm discriminating between taste, discriminating between art, discriminating between sports. Should I go with Chardonnay or should I go with Cabernet? Should I go with Picasso or Rembrandt or should I go with Jordan or Lebron? And we all know the answer to that. It's Jordan. But it also has a negative meaning. When doing something that is wrong by eliminating those who ought not be eliminated based on racial and ethnic discrimination. My moral concern, and I think all of our moral concern, is to avoid wrongful discrimination. Not the positive kind like discriminating between who is allowed or not allowed to babysit my children, but the wrongful kind like who I should sell my property to on the basis of race, skin color, or ethnicity. It seems that we as a society can no longer navigate between rightful discrimination and wrongful discrimination. And everything is cleverly lumped together, resulting in the change of the meaning of the word discrimination so that whenever it's stated or whenever that it's alleged, the response should be nothing less than outright moral outrage. This is because it's riding on the logic of anti-discrimination policies from the civil rights, which are good and that we should all seek to uphold. And so here's my point. A Christian church, Boogeyman, a Christian church established on historical Christian convictions thrives today, made up of people from all different places and all ethnic backgrounds, and has thrived for thousands of years on virtually every continent on this planet and within every culture on this planet. That is because it is non-discriminating. That is because it is inclusive. And that is because there is a theological foundation upon the premise that every single human being has inherent dignity and has inherent identity. And so finally, the teachings of Christ, the very reason why I stand here today, the teachings of Christ have an expectation. The teachings of Christ have a demand, and that is of moral consistency compatible with scripture. When a Christian institution, when a Christian institution with housing or a Christian business owner or a Christian governing body surrenders or is forced to surrender by being strong armed into hiring those who openly oppose and reject the very institution it's seeking employment as this article, this ordinance would demand, then that institution ceases to be historically Christian. And one wonders if that is not the objective. And let's be honest, religious exemptions are not easy to come by these days. Look around. And so I go back to my original question. Are you a discriminating person? Well, there's two kinds. There's the good kind and there's the bad kind. And this ordinance is the latter. Thank you. Thank you. James Jackson. You can state your name and address. You have four minutes. Please. Hello, I'm James Jackson. I live at 2007 Teasley Lane. I support the non-discrimination ordinance to protect the LGBTQIA+ community in Denton, specifically the trans, non-binary and gender nonconforming and intersex. And really, as others have said, all Denton residents. Many people I've spoken with have agreed that they were surprised Denton didn't really have an NDO. And I wanted to share with you a real world example of how a non-discrimination ordinance could seriously benefit Denton residents. Now, I'm not the kind of person who likes to trot out my trauma, nor do I feel like you need proof to make the smart decision to vote yes. But I'm also not looking for pity. This story is just a thing that happened, and I think it's important to share it. Four years ago, after being on hormone replacement therapy for two years, a judge granted my petition to legally change my name. I was also a patron of the Planet Fitness on University Drive. I literally just changed my name, so I hadn't had a chance or any time to update my name on my membership. For weeks, if not months, though, I'd been using the men's locker room. I'd started getting looks in the women's, so I thought, "It's time." Confident, I headed inside, and when I came out, an employee was waiting for me. She said my name didn't match the fact that I'd gone into the men's room. I explained that I'm trans, and I just legally changed my name. I'm on hormones. I clearly can't go into the women's. She said, "Well, you're going to have to keep using the women's locker room until you fully transition." Fully transition. I asked what she meant by that. She gestured toward her crotch and said, "You know, the surgeries." I didn't know what to say. I was flooded with anger and shame. Imagine how you'd feel in a situation like that, in public, with a stranger. Thankfully, I'd never been discriminated so obviously like this in public before. What did she expect me to do? Prove my gender by dropping my pants and showing her what genitals I have right there and then? I took up the matter with the manager, who allowed me to continue using the men's, but ultimately any other mediation was accomplished through corporate. Not the franchise owners or the employees themselves, so I have no idea if they received training. I didn't even know if cities could have a process to handle discrimination like this. I stopped going to Planet Fitness, even though they promised they would talk to the managers. I did stay a few more weeks because I thought the employees should see me come in every day, regardless of what she'd said. I didn't want to be defeated. Can you believe that? All over a locker room, or public accommodations, where I wasn't harming anyone. I needed protections four years ago. And Indio is essential to the safety of the residents in this town. They deserve to feel safe and supported. They deserve to have instances of discrimination reported and investigated with consequences for those instances. And if you vow to support diversity and inclusion in Denton, then you will vote yes. And can I ask a question also? Certainly. Okay, so does the Indio under section 142034, where it sedates facilities in accordance with public accommodations, does that, is that understood as restrooms and locker rooms? So in the presentation staff said yes. Yes? Okay, just checking. So okay, other than that, then I wanted to thank all the activists in the city for working on this and making this a city for all. Thank you. Next is Donna Metz. Thank you. My name's Donna Metz. I'm a longtime resident of Denton. I am here to voice my opposition to the non-discrimination ordinance. Since early January, I've communicated my opposition to all of you through the website and have received some mixed messages to which I believe Denton residents need answers. Number one, since employment and housing discrimination are already protected by law, why do you need to codify what is left in the Indio? Councilor McGuire in communication with me said current evidence shows discrimination in Denton is rare. Councilor Beck said, quote, statistically, you've been sharing bathrooms with transgender individuals your entire life without even realizing it because everyone needs to pee, end quote. Councilor McGuire also said, quote, we don't currently have a reason to believe that it's commonplace for places of public accommodations to have employees standing outside of public restrooms trying to deny people access, end quote. While there may be an atypical prejudice person who probably won't be affected by an ordinance anyway, the majority of Denton residents are fair with all people. Number two, will you specifically exempt educational institutions? In multiple back and forth communications with Councilor Beck regarding my school concerns, he never once mentioned that schools were not a part of this Indio. Since then, Councilors McGuire and Davis say it does not apply to schools because they are government agencies. A case can be made that public school districts are funded by local taxes and run by local government. Private schools are neither and therefore should be addressed as well. In the definitions section of the current draft of the Indio, it defines educational institution with a list of the schools, but basically summarizing it's a all public and private schools. That term is not addressed in the Indio again. To define a term in a legal document is to say it is part of it. I contend the vast majority of Denton residents don't want biological males in girls' high school showers, et cetera. So again, I say, will you specifically exempt educational institutions? Why pass an ordinance that introduces unsafe and inappropriate conditions or situations, particularly for children? Number three, will you restore the public accommodations exemption removed from a previous draft? That exemption said, quote, "It shall not be a violation of this ordinance to deny the opposite sex access to facilities inside a public accommodation, segregated on the basis of sex for privacy, such as restrooms, shower facilities, locker rooms, dressing rooms, or any similar facility." There are many reasons besides discrimination for exempting public accommodations. Among them is to eliminate confusion and chaos that provides an inroad to those with devious and malicious intent, no matter their gender identity. Because of time limits, I will close with these statements. Chuck Colson once said, quote, "Ideas may be true or false, but they are not neutral. Ideas matter. Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims." End quote. Somebody needs to stand up explicitly for the rights, privacy, and safety of women and girls. That, among other things, is what I came to express. Thank you for your time and attention. Thank you. Dale Metz. Dale Metz, 3400 Tuscan Hills Circle. I'm here to oppose the amendment and you can record me, although I don't think anybody recorded any of you guys. Here's my point and my question to you. Does this ordinance allow a person to enter a girl's locker room shower when they are still a male? Is that a true statement? Okay, well, staff will speak. They'll come back up. You can go ahead and finish your comments and then we'll circle back. Okay, this is my concern. First off, Mr. Beck over here, his comment about, and this amazed me because I thought he answered our question. He said, "You've been in bathrooms with transgenders your whole life because people have to pee." Well, first off, I find that offensive and quite juvenile to say to my wife. Okay? That's inappropriate and it's arrogant. All right? So, the question, and to further clarify it, he said that the deal in South Carolina was just simply social media garb. Virginia, I'm sorry, Virginia, was simply social media garbage. Well, it's not, sir. And as a 72-year-old man, I don't get my information nor make my decisions off of social media. That young man professed to be a girl, went into a locker room, raped the young lady, was sent to another school, and raped another one. And what ordinance did they have? Well, whatever you feel like you are, you can go into that bathroom, that shower, or whatever. I'm extremely emotional about this because this is about protecting children. Denton is a good place and overall, Denton is very accommodating to everybody. Now, is there examples of bad stuff? Absolutely. Well, guess what? I feel discriminated right now because I'm white. Okay? Period. And it's time to stop this madness. It's about safety, folks. Two young ladies were raped because of an ordinance like this. And for you to say it's about social media, that's insane. You're uneducated to say that. And I think you have daughters, do you not? And you pass this ordinance and some guy takes his opportunity because there is evil out there. It's a proven fact right now that gangs are going into apartment stores and taking children. In fact, recently almost took the mother with them and they're putting them into sex trafficking. So now you're going to open up this possibility for there are evil persons to go in there, say, "I feel like I'm a girl today." And two or three of them go in there and walk out with the young lady because maybe their parents aren't paying attention. And if one child, one child is harmed because of this, that whole NDO thing is stupid. And as far as this economic input, to think that someone's going to make a decision about, "I'm going to have a business because there's an NDO in that town," quite frankly, that may turn a few people away from coming here. It's about making money, folks. If they can make money, they're coming. And it doesn't matter whether you have an NDO or not. So let's stop with all this garbage and let's protect our children because that's what it's about. - Here, here. - Thank you. Okay. Adrienne Ortega. - Good evening. My name is Adrienne Ortega, and I submitted my address on the Blue Comment Card. I live in District 5. I'm here to speak in support of a comprehensive non-discrimination ordinance. I believe non-discrimination ordinance is essential for the city to affirm its commitment to inclusion as a core value of the city of Denton. I have chosen to call Denton my home for the past 17 years, and I am a proud member of the queer community. This ordinance is critical to the protection and livelihood of all LGBTQ+ community members who live and work in our city. I believe we should embrace and welcome the diversity of our city and individual identities of those who live here. I believe all individuals should be able to live their full, authentic lives with dignity and feel able to move freely throughout spaces in our city without fear of discrimination or prejudice. A comprehensive NDO which provides protections for all individuals, regardless of their identity, is vital for the city of Denton and our city council members to adopt a non-discrimination ordinance that includes accountability and protection for every resident, not just a select few. Sorry, it's a little hard to breathe through my masks. I want to make it clear this is an issue that affects all races, all ethnicities, all age groups, all economic classes, all folks of all abilities. Denton has the opportunity to provide protection for all who live here, will live here now, and in the future. As a community, we have a due diligence to protect individuals and reduce harm. And I want to speak to all the city council members here and in the past who have worked to make where this moment is where we are today possible, and to all of the individuals speaking in support of the NDO tonight here. The strength and resilience that it takes to come stand here and to listen to some of the other public comments is a lot of strength and resilience, and I appreciate everyone who has come and is speaking that, and I also appreciate all the activists who continue to work every single day to make this community safe for everyone of all identities. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Kevin Schinberger? Did I get it right? Yeah, no, I appreciate that. More of that. Yeah. Hi, how's it going? My name is Kevin Schinberger. I live at 2225 Emerson. There's so many great things that I'm speaking in favor of the ordinance to start. So many amazing things that the people before me have said, so I won't talk about those things. I agree with all of them in favor, but I've kind of just been thinking about this and reflecting on it, and, you know, it's Black History Month. One of my favorite members of the founding generation is a guy named Benjamin Banneker. If you don't know about Benjamin Banneker, please look him up. He's incredible, but he was a free Black man. In 1791, he wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson. Basically, at this point, the ink is still dry on the Constitution. It's 1791, and he's confronting Jefferson with the hypocrisy of having said, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain privilege." Sorry. You know. Yes. Inalienable rights, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. And basically, why did you exclude Black people from that? Why haven't you done anything about that? He lays that case in front of Jefferson, and this is 1791. So this isn't... He's basically saying, "You know what you said when you said it. You know what you meant when you said it, and you know what it means to feel discrimination, to feel oppression, and yet you chose not to do it." And Thomas Jefferson acknowledges this in a response and says, "Yeah, I agree with you." So I don't want to stay too far in the history of it, but I think a lot of these things that get brought up, and I'm not at all trying to compare anything to slavery because that has its own horrible chapter of our history that isn't comparable to anything else. Just to say that if you pledge allegiance to that flag today, either flag, both flags, you support this ordinance. The words of the ordinance are no different. It's not creating new rights. These are the rights that we all know. And throughout the history of these struggles, it takes a long time to say it loud enough for the people in the back to understand what these rights that we all know really mean. And so, you know, I think that it's just, you know, when we have all these questions like, why do we have to codify something if it's already in the law? Well, it wasn't until the year 2000 that Alabama actually took anti-miscegenation laws out of its constitution. There's a benefit to putting something down and saying that we as a people support this, even if we know it's already true. We just have to say it loud enough for everybody to hear it, and I think that's why this is really so critical. So I'll close with something that Benjamin Banneker said to Thomas Jefferson was just, you know, he was quoting Job actually, but he said, "Put your soul in their soul's stead." That's all you have to do. I'm a white, straight, married Christian male. I have not experienced discrimination, but I can put my soul in the stead of others, and I can understand that their discrimination is valid. And if they're telling me that things are feeling like discrimination, then I need to listen to them. And there's no harm in just reiterating what's already been written down, what's already been codified, what's already in our constitution, because we stand for those things. We pledge allegiance to them. And that's all I have to say. Thank you. Last card I have, so if there's anyone else that wants to speak, I'm going to close after this, close a public hearing. Matt, bring it on. Matt Ransom here. Ransom, sorry. I should have that right, round two, but it's late. How are you doing? It's Matt Ransom again from Texas. And I just want to say that, no, this ordinance is absolutely disgusting. I'm sorry. I'm going to have to break it to you, everybody in this room. I don't know. I don't know where they came up from with the birds and the breeze. We all kind of learned this really. There are two genders. There's only two of them. You're a man or you're a woman. There is no in between. I take all your DNA right now. It's coming back either a man or a woman. That's it. Marriage is between a man and a woman. If you don't like that, that's too bad. You take it up with God. That's the way it came out. Know what I'm saying? That's the world we're living in. You need to get with that. And I'm speaking as a black man too, that was raised in a black church. My first years of formal education was in a black church. And I am totally disgusted with this. You try to tell me, you're going to tell me you're going to vote for a party over 95% claim to be Christians, but go against two fundamental tenants of the Christian Bible, gay marriage and abortion. I'm sorry. You lost it. That is not our culture. It is not. I'm sorry. That's not the way I was raised. I don't care. This is, this is Texas too. The belt buckle of the Bible belt. And you're pulling playing this game in Texas. We got a serious problem. I have no tolerance with this at all. What this really is, this is a discrimination against Christians. That's what this is about. You want to discriminate. What it is, these people want to fight to come out the closet and they want to put Christians in the closet. No, I'm not going in that closet. You're going back in. I want the sodomy laws reinstated. I want the gay marriage repealed. I have no tolerance for this at all. I'm not going along with this program. You Christians and you Christian conservatives, you need to start fighting for your values because this type of garbage is going to destroy the nation. It will destroy the great Christian nation. You Christians better fight back against this crap because this is garbage right here. And we have one caller I do believe. Yes, thank you mayor. Okay. We received several calls on this item tonight. 11 in support and five opposing. We also directed callers to utilize the contact all city council function on the website. We have one caller on the line and I'll patch him through. Thank you. Are you there? Hello. Yes. Yes. If you could give your name and address and then you'll have four minutes to speak. First and foremost, in regards to this provision, I haven't had a chance to look at it all and complete, but I did read about it on the website. And so the information that I'm referring to is what has been given to us on the website by the city. First and foremost, I am completely opposed to this and I'm going to give my reasons. First of all, I want to know what data that has been obtained to require this implementation of law that in my opinion is going to use up resources and end up with probably a lot of litigation that taxpayer money is going to have to pay for. I know that we all want to treat everybody equally and treat everybody right. As a minority in this state, I can truly understand that. But I think that we need to think logically and understand that this is going to open up a can of litigation that the city does not need to involve itself with. Look outside, look at our roads, look at the homeless issues that we're having in the city, right? There are a lot of other things that we need to put our energy for forward to except this. I also believe that if you're going to come up with another law and put it on the weight of the citizens and property owners and taxpayers, you're going to put that kind of weight on them that it really needs to have the data to back that up. So again, we are living in times right now where people are kind of very sensitive about more government interference in their lives. And you can just turn on the news right now and see that. So again, please take in consideration these laws and these things that you're trying to put on the taxpayer and citizens of this city. Lastly, there is a concern that I read in the provision that has to do with the bathrooms. And as a parent, that is concerning to me. Just speaking again, just objectively, we can all see a scenario where somebody deceitfully uses this provision in the law to harm a child. You're opening doors that don't need to be opened. And at the end of the day, can at some point or another cause harm to a child. I mean, would we just eliminate crosswalks for no reason, right? We, you know, some of these barriers are put in place to protect our children. And so just think, think about that and think about the fact that not everybody has the best intentions and that people will be deceitful at times to try to hurt children. So again, just a quick summary, where is the data to support this new law? Why are we, are we understanding the litigation and the resources that this is going to take? Are we wanting to put more weight on the taxpayers and the citizens and more laws right now? And again, lastly, think about, again, the way that this could be used to harm children. Thank you. Thanks. Okay. That's a lot of speakers. Saf, you want to come up and if you can fill out. So Saf's going to come up and answer your question. If you want to speak, you can fill out a card real quick and then. No, sir. We're going to get your answer to your question. If you can fill that out, because I'm going to, I'm going to close that out. Go right ahead. Sure. I think I heard two questions. So correct me if I missed one. There was a question in regards to educational institutions and if they're subject to the ordinance. The ordinance does broadly exempt the state of Texas and its political subdivisions. So by that definition, any public school district would not have to follow or abide by this ordinance in addition to any state funded state university. So that would include UNT and TWU in the city of Denton. And there was also a question in regards to public accommodations and restrooms or other similar facilities, including a locker room. And if you could deny someone entry. So you could not deny someone to use that public accommodation if it is open to the general public, if it is on the basis of their gender identity. So if someone, if an individual born male, but identifies as female, wishes to use the female bathroom, you would not be able to prohibit that. Or that could be under the ordinance, a complaint that may be filed of discrimination and not being allowed access to that facility on the basis of that individual's gender identity. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. And so anyone else that you would need to fill out a card to speak? Otherwise, I'm going to close. Yeah, I'll take it. Sure. Thank you very much. I appreciate you. Okay. Yes, my name is Angela Ford. You have my name on my blue card. There's so much I could say on this. I came from a small town in Texas. I was harassed as a child because I was gay, period. I think today, some of the things that have been said and comments are why we need this. Just plain and simple, plain and simple. Seriously, Denton is a vibrant, amazing city, but at the same time, there are pockets and there's issues and we need help. It's not for financial reasons to sue people. This is about treating every single person fairly. That's all this is about. It's about letting people live their lives, period. And if we want to get into God and Christianity, I have a God, I do. Does he disagree with you? Does he disagree with you? So just stop. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Okay. I was quiet when you spoke. I was quiet and I let you speak. You let me speak. We need an NDA because of this. No, stop, please. When I go to the square in Denton and I am called horrendous names and told that I'm going straight to hell because who I choose to love, that's why we need an NDA, period, period. What this all boils down to at the end of the end of the day is that we all have a chance to live a free, happy life. I've never done anything to hurt anyone. I've never been malicious to anyone and I operate on the golden rule. That's how I was raised and that's what this all boils down to. There is no reason that in 2022 we should have to put up with harassment and that's what this is. It needs to stop, period. People need to be free of this and if you don't like that I'm living in your city, you don't have to live next door to me. It's that easy, that easy. So I hope and I'm glad and I'm thankful that you are looking into this because I can't think of any other groups that are not covered other than us. So I hope that y'all go forward with this and put this bill through. Thank you. Thank you. So we have Laura Bird. Name and address and then you have four minutes and then after that I'm going to close the public hearing. Go right ahead. Sure. Thank you so much. I just drove in from Dallas so I'm a little winded but my name is Laura Bird. I am an interim pastor and worship leader at First United Methodist Church of Denton, Texas. I am here, I'm here because I heard that there were Christians speaking on this and so I wanted to make sure other Christians were heard, other opinions were heard. I identify as a Christian person and I believe that Jesus stood with those on the margins of society and that we as people of Christ, if you identify as a Christ follower, should also stand for the people on the margins of society that are oppressed, that are discriminated against. Jesus stood exactly for that which is love and not just some Valentine's Day love but love in action and when we say we actually believe in love, like I'm guessing most of you do here believe in love and believe that God is love. When we stand up to a person and say I do not respect your identity, I don't want you to be part of this community and in fact I want to openly discriminate against you so you don't have the same rights that I do. I'm sorry to say you are not a Christ follower. I hope friends that you look deeply within your soul today to understand what you think is important. Politics of Denton, Texas, all the ins and outs, all the things that make you feel powerful and needed and wanted in this world or to what really actually matters to a God you may say you believe in, that you are an embodiment of love in the world. Thank you. Thank you. Okay so with that I'll close the the public hearing and again this is to for staff to gather notes it's there's no decision to be made today just kind of feedback so that they can process that information and bring it back at a future date. So with that context and it is 10 o'clock we do have another section of our agenda. I want to give it its due but also want to be concise with direction while staff is here so that they can note those those things. So let's let's focus in give them direction. Councilmember Arbiter. Yes I want to give my direction in support of moving this forward to a vote as soon as possible and I want to say a few words about why. First I want to thank the people who came out and were brave to speak for this NDO. One of the speakers already addressed that bravery and I felt that here from the dais. I also want to uplift the comments of the last speaker who commented that all of the hateful comments against this NDO are proof of why we need it. Civil rights is not up for popular vote. This nation we did not ask the Ku Klux Klan to vote on whether this nation should be desegregated. Similarly I quite frankly you know I do not listen to the opinions of people who are bigoted against queer people who are and by the way I am a queer person. I'm also Jewish although I and many of my friends closest friends are Christian and many of them are in fact all of them are pro-LGBTQ for the reasons that the last speaker mentioned including our two local methodist church which churches which have flown the pride flag very proudly and they're not the only church here who supports LGBTQ people. So there is no comment no matter how bigoted that could sway me from this it only makes me that much more resolute that queer people in Denton need protections because it is a civil rights issue and and our civil rights are not being respected. And so sorry I want to say also to the comment about the all the comments about protecting our children you know if you listen to the children the voices of the children and the voices of the people who were children and are now adults who talk about needing protection these are the queer children who need protection they need protection and this ordinance gives them protection. So it is you know it is also as a parent that it is so important to me to that that we pass this NDO and ensure civil rights. Again civil rights are not a matter of popular vote. I do have just one kind of a editing type comment to throw in there and you know staff doesn't even have to answer it right now already kind of written this by the city attorney just or just not so much run by but to give you a heads up that I was going to be bringing it up and that is I really like that I really like the part in the ordinance that mentions that a source of income is protected against discrimination in housing except whereas limited by state law. I really like that part and that is and for people who don't know that protects against people being discriminated against in housing for because they have a housing vouchers. In the state of Texas unfortunately the state of Texas has preempted those kind of protections except in the case of veterans and so while I disagree with that preemption I think it's important that we protect those classes of people who are protected that is veterans who do face source of income discrimination. So anyway I approve of that as it is in in the ordinance. My editorial suggestion is just in addition and that is that I think that because of that really powerful statement in the ordinance that in the definitions in the ordinance and elsewhere veteran status and source of income should be listed among their protected classes especially in their definitions 23 and 24 when we have the list of when it's for protected employment characteristics shall mean individuals race, color, national origin, age, religion, disability, sex, sexual orientation or gender identity and then number 24 protected housing characteristic very similar. I think we should also add to that veteran status and source of income and then that subsequent mention that says as it should that you know except whereas limited by state law would serve as a footnote to that. I don't want that protection to be buried so deeply you know in the ordinance that people who have held housing vouchers who are veterans and veterans who might be discriminated against for any other reason would not know that they're protected. So anyway that is sorry it took me so long to say that but that's something that you don't have to answer right now but I would like to see that and it wouldn't change as I understand it the substance of this ordinance and who it protects just kind of make it a little clearer and that who all we're protecting here. So thank you. Councilman Burke. I just want to just commend everyone for coming out here and having a say in this very important with this very important topic people that afford people that are against it got to be brave to get up here and say what you said. I'm a retired teacher I used to teach elementary school and one of the first things you have to do as elementary school teacher is you have to set the boundaries and the rules for the class that happens in the first second third we take a whole two or three weeks to get it settled and the first thing that we talk about is the golden rule treat all others as you would expect to be treated and that has to go from day one to the very last day and it's expected and that is the way that I think that adults should be reminded to do. We have to be reminded that we're not the only ones that live in this world we don't live in a utopia everything's not going to be just the way that you want it say that. Also the other thing about I don't know why I don't know where this is coming from about me and going into the women's restroom men that are identifying as women and going into the women's restroom just to go and rape girls and little girls you don't have to be identifying anything anybody can go in there can do that at any time because sexual assault is not based on sexuality but it is a power move it is a criminal act. Being sexual is not a criminal act sexual assault is a criminal act let's define that so I just put those couple of things on the table there so meanwhile what I'm going to say is that I want to direct the staff to place this on the the draft ordinance for city council consideration and adopted adoption on an upcoming agenda preferably in March I like to see us get beyond this or or April thank you. Councilmember Brewer. Thank you I also want to thank everybody who came out to speak it's it's important for us to hear the perspectives of of all different folks in the community regardless of how we end up coming down on it. I think that this ordinance is a simple low-cost common sense extension of existing civil rights protections. It is illegal to refuse a seat to a customer in a restaurant because they're black it is illegal to refuse to rent a hotel room to somebody because they are wearing a cross necklace and you want to discriminate against Christians and it should also be illegal to deny someone access to a public restroom because they are transgender. That is discrimination of the same sort as those other two examples. To the point about and all the talk that there's been about children I just want to establish that that you know parents people with children don't have a monopoly on on opposing rights for transgender people and just because you have children doesn't mean that you should oppose rights for transgender people. I'm a mother of two young kids one of whom is a girl and I want my children to grow up in a community that values everyone and that respects the rights of individuals. So my direction is for staff to please place the the draft ordinance as it exists on an upcoming agenda for consideration. Councilman Bet. Thank you Mr. Mayor. Yeah I know want to concur with a lot of what you heard and I really appreciate the statements from Councillor Byrd. There's a lot of false relationships that were stated tonight but I also really applaud everyone who spoke tonight to talk about the strength of everyone who's come up and respectfully discussed their ideas. I wish more people would respectfully discuss their ideas. That would that would have been a preferable dialogue tonight and so just not double down too much. I'm just going to say I concur and my direction is to put this on the agenda. Okay anyone else? Mayor Pro Tem. Thank you Mayor. Yeah on the way to giving direction I'd like to respond to some things that I heard. I'm against crime too. The data is pretty easy to get that crimes against people who would be affected by this ordinance including children in Texas vastly outweigh anything like what was described by opponents here tonight and every bit of criminal behavior raised today is concerned stays criminal and enforceable within this ordinance. As to whether it will be a big legal burden I've asked in a number of ways a number of times what does the data look like from other cities because Denton isn't forging new ground here you know we're we're laggards on this it's been implemented in many other Texas cities and the answer keeps coming back it's been very light impact. I also keep asking you know has there been a big burden on businesses to comply it's like it's kind of not really much of anything and the particular mechanisms that are in this ordinance are very streamlined you know most of it involves escalating to federal authorities when when complaints are raised. I hear a lot about strongly held religious beliefs and if you have strongly held religious beliefs that's constitutionally protected no matter what council says although I pray your religious convictions lean toward loving your neighbor as yourself. So I think it comes down to just answering the question what kind of city is Denton? I'd say we strive to be a live and let live city we get better and better but just not hassling each other. Is there an economic argument? Yes companies want to know if their employees are going to be discriminated against in Denton and I say our answer should be we protect everyone's rights equally here so my direction is put it on an upcoming agenda. Okay anyone else? I have a couple of notes so let me get to where I can see so I saw the answer to this in our update or pardon me in our emails but I just want to document it via staff here so there's no clear difference between firing someone from cause and firing one someone because of a protected class right there's no clear kind of trigger to differentiate those without some type of investigation is that your understanding or Mac if you want to speak to that Mr. City Attorney? Yeah we sent our responses earlier and I'll have Michael Kronick from our office come up and discuss that. Yeah and I'm just going to power through those just because people didn't have a chance to see them so I'm just going to power through a few that that jump out at me so if you could speak to that. Deputy City Attorney Michael Kronick can you I'm not sure I mean you can fire someone for cause stealing lying that's separate and distinct from discrimination which is illegal so you can if you have cause you can fire someone. What's the bright line between those two? Good question it's going to be a real kind of fact specific. Right so there's no bright line. There really well if you say you stole I'm firing you but you're also black you you can't do that I mean you've got to have a non-discriminatory reason for firing someone. But Texas is at will so I don't even have to tell you why I'm firing you. That's correct. So someone could fire someone not articulate it and there's no bright line between the two. Yeah yeah. Okay and then the other thing this is for state bear with me but staff the note I would have is I would I would have the same we have to have the equal punishment for filing false claim so there's no punitive dollar amount for following a false claim but there's a punitive dollar amount for someone that violates the ordinance so it has to be equal in my mind. Again you don't have to you can tell me that doesn't work email me you know I don't I don't want to hold this up. I don't think the ordinance intends to impose a fine for filing a false complaint. No no that's my that's my preference that's what I'm asking for if if what's good for the goose should be good for the gander right because if someone no different to the night we had a we had a business that was mentioned tonight we don't have the other side of that story right we have and and I respect it as true right I accept it as true but I'm sure curious to hear the other side of the story and so if someone's watching this video they've heard once one one side about a business and we don't have the other half and and the the saying is no matter how thin the coin there's two sides to every story right and in every case I've been in there's a defense and a plaintiff's attorney and they both same set of facts different look at it I'm belaboring the point if it can't be done that's great just a request let me let me if someone files a false complaint against someone I think the uh respondent the the victim so to speak could turn around potentially and file a defamation lawsuit against that person if they wanted to that's a maybe a civil remedy but if they lie in a sworn affidavit or a complaint they could go down to the the county attorney or the district attorney and try to file perjury charges under the penal code if they wanted to I understand that but in this in this ordinance as proposed a person that raises a concern doesn't have to do any of that right they don't have to go anywhere the city does it all we hire we hire the attorney we do the investigation we take the case to municipal court we prosecute the case they don't have to do anything but then you're saying on the other side if the if the evidence is presented falsely to trigger that then that individual that's damaged has to then go through outside the city and do I just think it's equal right I just think it's fair on both sides and I could be absolutely wrong and I could be alone in that I just want to put it on the record we can I don't want to eat up too much time okay the other thing that I asked you is is there a clear difference between denying service legally and denying service because of a protected class so a private business has a right to not service not not access service so a private business has right to refuse service for whatever reason and they can't do it because of protected class what's the bright line between those two you know I'll give you the legal answer it all depends I mean rarely are you going to have a business say I'm not going to serve you because you're black or you're this or that you know a lot of times people were infer that they the reason they refuse service is because of my skin color when in fact it's because you didn't wear shoes into the store and that's a health issue everything is fact specific I hate to say that but that's really what it comes down to yeah so so yeah that's that's that's my thing is just there so the short answer is it's fact dependent there's no bright line unfortunately there isn't I think if there's a complaint filed I think that's part of what the investigator will look into to try to make that determination of what the motivation was okay and then uh so non-intentional violations let me see you answered that I'm good there so and then I know the answer to that second bear with me as I work through my notes I think really for me there needs to be something in the ordinance that then protects against those unintended and intended benefits I don't know what other effects I don't know what anyone else is doing but I just think if the if the ordinance is to address intentional acts great if it's to address malice great but if I have no idea that you know if if I say you know it's just I don't see how this that's productive we're trying to go after people that are purposefully and maliciously acting not someone that made a mistake right and so there's no there's no give in there it's it next thing you know you're you're getting investigated by the city to then find out how that plays out but there's no there's no exit before you get down that path and I just think there has to be some kind of way to to or a focus to say hey that's not what we're after we're not after these unintentional consequences yes and in a previous work session with city council staff had presented those options of what was the goal where did you want the process to end is conciliation the focus maybe where education and mediation understanding of the the differences or did that is a penalty you wanted to be included as part of the ordinance which is that class c misdemeanor and council had directed us to include that enforcement penalty aspect so there is different ways of approaching the city of arlington does not have that class c misdemeanor penalty provision in their ordinance and has said their focus will be primarily on that education and conciliation between the two parties so if you could just make a note to send me send me a red line version so that I can see what's what's been stripped out over this process is that okay yes yeah we can do that it's minor changes from the draft that you last saw in january 4th it was really just minor clean up no no from the original you said like that was taken out yeah we can send you the drafts in subsequent yes yeah and then i can see what was stripped out and just so i can kind of have that in my mind uh and then um i really take an issue with this and i and i have to hear you on this in the ordinance it talks about the the um the the subject of the complaint has the right in in the answers you provide it has the right to not testify not participate but then it has a punitive nature to it in that it may lead to a decision against them because they don't have the other side of the story that how is that possible well i wouldn't say it's punitive and i mean it could be but if i'm the respondent and someone files a complaint against me and i didn't do anything wrong i think a reasonable person would want to give their side of the story and to what happened but if you don't and it goes to an investigator all they're going to have is the evidence that's in front of them and it's not your your version of it so what are they supposed to do if you if they don't have your side of the story they have to go with what's in front of them but isn't that a presumption of guilt right you're saying i don't have anything to go by so ergo i'm going to assume all these other things are true uh no i don't think it's a presumption of guilt uh it's that i don't have your side of the story so how can i if you're not defending your actions then if this person says this is what happened and i give you the opportunity to refute that and you don't what's the investigate i think is there a preponderance of the evidence or reasonable cause at that point to determine that it happened so it's part of the the problem is since there's a criminal component into this anything that you say could potentially be used against you in the in the criminal prosecution absolutely that's why someone may not want to say anything and i understand that yeah but then we make it punitive i mean again that's just a fatal flaw for me i don't know how you unwind that but for me that's a deal killer because no different than if i get a speeding ticket and the officer doesn't show up they don't just go by based on hey all i have is this ticket right and that's what i'm going to call in the evidence to charge you that ticket's dismissed yeah you know so so there's one thing that let me just say this and sure i didn't mean to cut you off i'm sorry no no in a criminal trial the defendant has a right not to testify that decision that decision the defendant does not have to testify in a criminal trial the refusal to testify cannot be used against the person to assume their guilt i think the judges typically even give and jesse would know better than i do may even give instructions about that that the the prosecution can't say well he didn't testify so he's he's guilty or something i think it's the same type of thing i don't think an investigator would automatically assume that you're guilty because you don't want to give a statement you would hope that the investigator would look at all the evidence and determine whether or not there's reasonable cost to believe a violation occurred okay we won't we won't fix it today but but we'll spend some time in subsequent weeks uh and then um so to to that point could the the the document allows for future litigation and so and our documents in the investigation are public documents right so could the public information we gather investigate be used in future public unit so for example the complaintant decides to file a case in civil court and they harvest the documents they use the information we gathered in a in our process to then leverage against the person in in in in court uh in civil court is that possible unless a judge excluded it yes the citizen investigation could be used by potentially either party so we would use taxpayer dollars to build a case for someone to sue someone in civil court theoretically yes yeah i have a problem with that uh and then um yeah and then i'll just i said this and i understand staff's response but i'll just put it on the record to say i think we should strip out all the stuff that we don't that we're not going to that the city of denton is not going to act on if we're just referring something i think putting it in the ordinance causes confusion i think no different than the mask mandate i get a number of emails saying hey you're not enforcing the mask mandate and i have to send them a snippet of the of the ordinance that says yeah we said we're not going to do that and so i just think there's a problem with the messaging i think it should be is refined to what staff said public accommodations that's our that's our area of focus that's what we're going to tackle and address and then outside of that then it would be just maybe by site by reference but i just think adding all that in there adds confusion i understand staff's response not trying to change your mind i will say that the exemptions are i understand them it's just a problem right so the city council can do things we don't we're not it's like do as we say not as we do as far as being subject to investigations i don't i don't like separating myself from other people we had the same issues or should face the same challenges and then i'll just close with this as as the first mayor that looks like me this ordinance isn't going to do anything for the emails i receive it's not going to do anything for the the sideways looks i get it's not going to get do anything for the the interracial relationship and all the crass things that said and i live it every day so i you know and no one has asked me a question no one comes up to me and says pardon me sir are you black you know i don't have those issues on site they kind of figure some things out and so for me i have a unique perspective i get scrutinized every day this isn't going to help me not one lick i think the city of denton's outstanding i think we have great people we have less than great people certainly like every other city but as i said before city of dallas has a non-discrimination ordinance and unfortunately it has resulted in not it in itself but the city has had more murders in this space than we have and i think for us it's we have an outstanding police department i think we need to do messaging i think we need to do a lot of things around making sure we keep people safe but this document is not we've not addressed the the cost no one's touched on the cost and so we're going to hire outside attorney they're going to want to retain her they're not going to they're not going to take it on a case-by-case basis and charge us 50 bucks an hour a bad attorney costs 300 an hour and they're going to want to retain her so uh and then we don't know the process so you're asking me to vote for a document that has no identified process now we've had two four work sessions we worked two years on a um on a um update to the to the master plan that has all the details in the world we're looking at all the details here and here we don't have a budget we don't have how things are going to be processed i pointed out two three things that don't have a bright line there's no examples in the document how that's going to be processed we can't communicate that to the citizens because we don't know so that how do i how do i go to people and say support this if i don't know the details but will i ask for the details on the comprehensive plan on the mobility plan and all these other things how much is it going to cost we'll scrutinize the 20 000 for this the 100 000 for that so for me it's it's missing a lot if you're asking for me to support it i need the details i need the information i need the data so that i can communicate it to people and that's really my key and i and so in closing this i find it interesting that the city of denton maintains i double o f cemetery right i do it i've developed and those that don't know look it up i double o f cemetery has a deed restriction that says you can't bury black people in there the city of denton has never changed that deed they came out with a ordinance or a statement or a whatever it was and said hey we're not gonna we're not going to abide by that but that deed exists today so if the city of denton is serious about eradicating racial behaviors that sort of thing let's start there let's start with the cemetery that says you can't bury black people in it and we're not interested in digging up that deed and fixing that so we have real problems that we should probably deal with prioritize problems they're all real i want i want everyone to feel comfortable in my city but i also don't want to turn a blind eye and say this is work doing and that's not worth doing right that's it's equally a slap in the face to say hey we understand that the deed says you can't bury black people there we understand it's 2021-22 but we don't see a need to change that document but we do see a need to to work in this space let's work in all spaces let's make city great and let's address issues all over the place and so for me i need the data i need the i need the details if i'm going to support it and and i understand very well and anyone that wants to see emails that i get and messages i get i'm happy to share but this isn't going to stop those so i'm not i want to make everyone feel comfortable at the same time i want to tell you i'm getting scrutinized in this seat more than anyone ever has in this seat and when you go look at that wall outside as you're walking out when mine when my pictures up there there's going to be you won't know bob casselberry won the lottery or the publisher's clearing house you won't know mayor burrows is an outstanding attorney you'll say all these pictures look the same except for this one no questions asked that's where that's that's the challenge that i face and happy to embrace them love every minute of it but uh it's it's a challenge all the same so i understand and i get it i empathize with everyone here thank you very much for your comments wish they were not as combative but you know that's that's the world we're in and so i want to embrace everybody make sure everybody feels welcome it's my hometown it's an outstanding city we just got to we can always get better no question thank you very much appreciate your answers and your candor thank you very much uh it's 10 40 we'll take a 10 minute break come back at 10 50 and finish our uh items for individual consideration good evening welcome back to this meeting didn't city council it is 10 52 we are back for our items for individual consideration uh and so the first is id 22131 consider adoption of ordinance of the city of denton authorizing the city manager their designee to accept on behalf of the city an offer from the text department of transportation to convey a 0.668 acre oh sorry oh i got it i wrote down i had a note so we'll go back so we'll call 5a which is id 22181 so again uh 5a id 22181 consider adoption of ordinance of the city of denton determining the public use need and necessity for acquisition of various permanent waterline permanent sanitary sewer easements and temporary construction easements generally located along loop 28 us 77 good afternoon mayor and council janna cody deputy director of development services real estate i have with me chris singleton running the slideshow and staff from the water utilities department will also be available to answer any questions if you have any regarding the project this evening's presentation is regarding easement acquisitions needed for the northwest water transmission main and proposed booster pump station the project boundary extends along north elm street next slide please the project boundary extends along north elm street from necosia on the southeast over to the elevated storage tank on the northwest just across where loop 288 and i-35 meet and it anticipates the needs for easements along the properties as shown on this map and that will be displayed at the end of the presentation in 2019 kimley horn was contracted to design the project and to acquire the easements needed to construct and install the improvements the planned improvements are expected to more efficiently move water to the elevated storage tank at loop 288 i-35 and to improve the city's water quality and delivery in the service area so staff intends on the next slide staff intends to work with the contracted firm to assist in the successful negotiation of the property interest needed and the staff recommendation to approve this item will authorize the city manager and the city attorney to acquire the needed property interest by negotiation and to use eminent domain to acquire the property if negotiations fail upon the reading of a favorable motion and second chris will begin displaying the 60 pages of legal descriptions for the property interests needed i will move through them as quickly as possible as well okay questions for staff or i'll take a motion i move that the city of denton after having made the offers required by state law use the power of eminent domain if needed to acquire various permanent water line easements permanent sanitary sewer easements and temporary construction easements located generally along loop 288 in us 77 between interstate highway 35 east to necosia street situated in the nathan wade survey abstract number 1407 bbb and crr co-survey abstract number 141 all in the city and county of denton texas and more particularly described in the attached exhibit a to the ordinance now under consideration and on the screen to be displayed to the audience all of which are for valid public use necessary to install a transmission main and pump station as part of the water distribution master plan to move water to the elevated storage tank locate located at loop 288 and i-35 to interstate highway 35 to serve the public and citizens of the city of denton thank you as you'll see um i didn't hear a second but yeah i was waiting i wasn't sure if we needed to see if you needed to flip through everything first before the second or no no no no if if we could get the second then we'll go ahead and continue councillor davis second thank you councillor mcguire second by councillor davis thank you okay chris let's proceed with these slides and there's the map again uh we're showing parcel two and there are several uh pages to each description as you're familiar with at this point parcel three nine parcel four parcel nine and parcel ten so that concludes oh there we go that concludes the list of parcels um for your consideration this evening okay any other discussion seeing none councillor mcguire how say you aye councillor davis aye answer bet aye councillor armater yes councillor berg aye mayor pritchett melzer aye and mayor hutchpeth as well aye as well that passes seven zero thank you takes us now to items for individual consideration first is 6a and that is id 22131 consider adoption of ordinance of the city of denton authorizing the city manager of their designee to accept on behalf of the city an offer from the texas department of transportation to convey 0.668 acre portion of property to tex dot in the bbb and crr co-survey abstract number 141 thank you again good evening uh diana cody deputy director of development services real estate and again i have with me chris singleton on the slides as we discuss the potential sale of a portion of city-owned property near the northwest corner of i-35 and loop 288 next slide tex dot is currently actively pursuing private property along the i-35 corridor from south near pockers page um up to the milam road on the north end this particular phase of their project impacts city-owned property at the elevated storage tank at loop 288 i-35 interchange as uh tex dot needs to acquire approximately two-thirds of an acre of land from the city track to accommodate the state highway improvements they have offered a praised value of 220 810 dollars for the land and an additional 10 for a possession and use agreement that would allow them access to the sign until the sale closes water utility staff have reviewed the tex dot purchase request and have no objection to the sale subject to the continued operation of the existing water line until until it is relocated into a new easement the map depicts the northwest elevated storage tank site where you see the solid purple indicates the area that tex dot needs for the right-of-way staff recommends approval of the item which will authorize the city manager to accept tex dot's offer and to execute a possession and use agreement and all documents necessary to convey the 0.668 acres to tex dot that concludes the presentation this afternoon are there any questions okay questions for staff or i'll take a motion counselor back yeah i'm just confirming i think you said this a couple times it was in the document but just confirming we're not losing the use of the water tower this is this is going to be maintained once we get the new infrastructure and that's correct okay that is correct yes okay uh counselor davis i move approval of the item counselor bird okay motion by councilmember davis second by councilmember bird any other discussion uh seeing none counselor davis i'll say you aye counselor bird aye councilmember wirer aye councilmember armater yes mayor pertin melzer aye mayor huts with his eyes well passes seven zero great takes us to six b it's id 22 201 consider approval of ordinance of the city of didn't authorize in the city manager's does it need to enter into a development agreement between the city of denton and u.s alliance prominent prominence venture llc for dedication of park land for a city park and the purpose no no pros prominence development authorizing accepted acceptance of land and providing an effective date mayor uh city council gary pack and director parks and recreation also have drew huffman on the line as well very short powerpoint for you in regards to park land dedication staff has been working on a park agreement with the developer located at the intersection of 380 and loop 288 it's an apartment complex of 360 units the proposed dedication is roughly 6.75 acres uh it's it's along the future cooper creek linear trail that we're planning so this is a long-term plan to acquire land as as feasible and one available for future trail benefits again as development happens it occurs out in that area it'll be available for neighborhood park it provides access to cooper creek it is part of the the parks recreation and trail system master plan as well as meets the goals outlined in the denton 2040 plan and it's part of our 10 minute walk acquisition and i'll stand for any questions okay questions for staff councilor bet so gary if for some magical reason the project doesn't go through what happens in that context do we still get the the land dedication i presume no um as of right now we would be getting the land dedication that's correct oh so we regardless of the the status of the project continuing or building or anything this we would get the land i'll do shaking his head so maybe he knows something i didn't no sir what you're asking is if the the developer completely drops the project yeah exactly no we no we would not get the property we would only get the property if he continues with the project which he has spent a lot of time and a lot of money already um developing the project going through all the necessary um development steps to get to this point we're typically we bring you land dedication like right before they get started and right before they get all their permits so all right thank you guys i appreciate it yes sir okay uh any other questions seeing none councilor armature i move approval councilor beck i second okay motion by councilor armature second by councilor beck any other discussion seeing none councilor armature how say you did you have a discussion oh i'm sorry councilor reward well i i just wanted to thank staff um because i'm seeing a pattern now of this approach to development where um we're we're um separating out those those esa areas and riparian buffers and heavily treed areas and and those are becoming parks and um i really appreciate that this is the approach that we're taking to parkland dedication thank you councilor armature yes councilor bett aye councilor maguire aye councilor burke aye councilor davis aye answer yeah i i'll just quickly say i echo council member maguire's comments and it and it really shows that when we are very explicit about our goals that it just makes it easier for staff to do a great job and and uh have things end up conforming to those goals aye mayor has put the i as well passes seven zero takes us to item c thanks harry id two two two three two one consider adoption of ordinance of the city of denton texas home room municipal home rule municipal corporation authorizing the city manager to execute a contract with north rock construction llc for the construction of outdoor tennis courts at north lakes for the parks and recreation department again gary pack and director parks and recreation drew huffman is on the line as well assistant director of parks and recreation i'm here to present to the north lakes tennis center we have had some discussions on this in regards to a prior council meeting just a quick summary it is a 2014 bond program in 2018 staff began public meetings and engagement with focus groups in regards to the development of the program during that time we did add the pickleball feature to it based on feedback from our community we did go out and get bids in the fall and we came back to you with the permission to reject those and we went out to bid again and that's what we're presenting to you today the entire master plan calls for 18 tennis courts those future courts would be built as needed so but they are planned so it gives us stability to grow into the facility construction of the bids came back a little over 5.2 million after the baffo the contract is reduced by about 13 000 so that gives us about 5.19 million dollars for total contract and the tennis center as planned so and stand for any questions got it questions for staff councilor armature yes will these tennis courts be fully open to the public yes okay so anybody who wants to use them and they don't have to pay well we'll continue to uh i mean we we have courts right now that you have to pay for for reservation um the the way it was proposed is the courts they're they're closed for reservation and then after a certain time there'll be x number of courts available for general walk-in so if you want to reserve a space you want to play during times that are open there's a nominal fee for that okay and and what is the uh time of day that i mean you said x like yeah with the new facility yeah with the new facility we haven't exactly set the time of operations at this point in time but we're generally open from dawn to dusk and then into the evening with lights okay okay thanks you're welcome councilor beck as much as i would have liked racquetball course or something else i guess we can go for tennis and pickleball so i move approval of this okay is there a second councilor reguer i second motion by councilor beck second by councilor mcguire any other discussion seeing none councilor beck how say you aye councilor reguer aye councilor armature yes councilor berg aye councilor davis aye mayor france melzer aye mayor hudspeth as well passes seven zero thanks to gary thank you takes us to item 6d id 22323 consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of denton texas a home rural municipal uh corporation authorizing the city manager to execute a contract with tech line inc for galvanized steel transmission poles anchor cages and associated hardware for denton municipal electric here good evening mayor and city council cody senorio can you uh click it into the like the full screen that which had a pointer either the play or the little tv looking thing at the bottom by the zoom yes there we go sweet thank you i'll start over good evening mayor and city council cody senorio dme engineering here to discuss your consideration for a contract to purchase steel transmission poles for various projects throughout the city we've identified four major cip transmission projects the first two are hickory the locust and bonnie brayard arty wells the last two are i-35 projects at loot 288 and oak street the two i-35 projects will be reimbursable through tmpa and tech stock the first two have some recoverable costs through puc and tcos we'll need 52 transmission poles for these projects on the slides a breakdown of those as well as a map showing the location of the construction rfp 7873 was advertised to obtain steel transmission pole pricing for the projects it was based on price delivery compliance with specs and probable performance as you can see here tech line was the lowest cost and also the highest evaluated after the review of the proposals was completed it was determined that tech line was a preferred vendor they received the highest score and also were the lowest priced staff recommends approval of an agreement with tech lining for the purchase of galvanized steel transmission poles in an amount not to exceed four million seven hundred thirty eight thousand eight hundred seventy three dollars okay thank you questions for staff councillor vett so the the four million is for our portion and it's five million total or it's four million total and one million will be paid by uh tmpa i i got confused is it what the total was the the total is the four million eight hundred seventy three or seven hundred thirty eight thousand and our portion will be less whatever tmpa is paying correct okay thank you okay uh any other questions i'll take uh most customers back move approval councillor bird okay motion by councillor beck second by council member bird any other discussion seeing none uh our brony oh sorry okay no just want to make sure okay councillor beck how say you aye councillor burke aye councillor require aye councillor armature yes councillor davis aye mayor pretend meltzer aye mayor hutsmith as well passes seven zero thank you thank you uh uh takes us to 6e which is id 22132 consider adoption of ordinance of the city of denton author ordering an election for place five place six and mayor to place seven to be held may 7 2022 and if required runoff election to be held on june 18 2022 prescribing the time manner and conduct conduct of the election in accordance with the joint election agreement and contract for election services with election administrator of denton county and providing an effective date okay good evening mayor and council my name is rosa rios and i am your city secretary and i'm here to present the item calling the general election for may 7 2022 and a june 18 2022 runoff in the event one is needed so the general election day will be may 7 2022 general for the purpose of electing city council members for places five six and seven seven being for the mayor's seat for a full term ending may 2024 the contract will be with denton county for administration of elections that will come to you for the future agenda item the cost at this time is none although when the contract is presented there will be a cost involved that estimate is unknown at this time because we still don't know who the participating jurisdictions are how many locations there will be so again all of that will be defined at a later time when we present the contract you can see here what the early voting period is this was presented at the previous work session where we discussed polling locations and we will canvas on tuesday may 17 and again order runoff for june 18 if one is needed you can see here the early voting polling locations that were selected at the work session along with the early voting hours again these are just the denton selected locations more will be added as other jurisdictions that will be in the joint contract order their election and identify their locations for election day of course the voting is in may seven seven to seven and you can see here the locations that we selected the precincts assigned to these locations cannot be determined as yet until we know all of the participating jurisdictions and what locations they have and denton county does take care of that so i'm here um and i'm happy to answer any questions you may have questions for staff or i'll take a motion councilmember guara i move approval of the item okay is there a second councilmember beck second okay motion by councilmember mcguire second by councilmember back any discussion seeing none councilmember mcguire i say you aye councilmember beck aye councilmember armater yes councilmember bird aye councilmember davis aye mayor petun melser aye as well passes seven zero thanks for your work on that rosa and that takes us to item f which is id three one id two two three one zero consider approval of a resolution of the city of denton providing for removal for cause of a member of of the health and building standards commission in accordance with the article uh what is that 1014 section 14.16 of the denton city charter providing notice and providing an effective date thank you mayor again my name is rosa rios and i'm your city secretary to provide a little background on the on the item the member current statistics or cindylle adison was appointed to the health and building standards commission which is habsco on december 14 of 2021 for an unexpired term 2020 through 2022 of course the term expires august 31 2022 and she was nominated by councilmember armater for the at-large alternate member one position to provide previous statistics on the member on the member she would she did have previous service from november 2018 through august 2421 again nominated by councilmember armater to the at-large alternate one position and she was removed for cause on august 24 2021 so the boards and commissions handbook does provide that in the event that a member fails to submit the required post-appointment forms within 14 days as of receiving notice by the city secretary's office that would provide for possible removal for cause and article 14 section 14.16 of the city charter does provide that members of boards and commissions of the city shall serve at the pleasure of the city council and members of such boards may be removed by the council only for cause and only after being given notice by the council and this permission this provision again is permissive but it is not mandatory you can see here dates of interest from the time that the city secretary's office sent notice to the member that they had been appointed and all of the subsequent notifications so the item for consideration is that the member failed to submit the post-appointment paperwork or respond to written phone and phone communications you have the option of removing the member for cause or deny member removal and i'll take any questions you may have councilmember armater oh yeah this is not a question just a comment and a motion just to say that i did i reached out to miss edison and she unfortunately is a unable to continue serving on this committee because of she is not able to participate online and she she can only participate virtually so so for that reason you know she understands she can no longer serve is is disappointed about it would like to continue serving but that is what it is so i will move approval of this council member sadly okay motion and it's by councilman armater second by councilman bird any other discussion seeing none councilor armater i'll say you yes councilman bird aye councilor beck aye councilmember maguire aye councilmember davis aye mayor pretend melzer thank you for the background councilmember armater i uh may have spent the eyes well that passes seven zero takes us to concluding items any concluding items seeing none i'll conclude tonight's meeting 11/21. Thank you.