Jul 19, 2022 City Council on 2022-07-19 2:00 PM

welcome to this meeting of the Denton City Council today is July 19th 2 p.m. we do have a quorum so I'll call the meeting to order the first item and citizens comments on consent agenda items of which we have none which would take us to request for clarification on agenda items listed on this agenda so questions and as we did before so I'm gonna just to keep everything orderly work the room and then I'll look up to the screen so I don't need reminders and Mayor Pro Tem will remind me if I if I miss him but otherwise just kind of help me balance and spin plates by not reminding me that he's not here so thank you questions for staff customer birth this is for consent agenda item H I just needed a bit more information about what exactly this is I wasn't very clear as to what's supposed to happen here can I have someone that put it more on kindergarten level warming is Danny or Courtney or Megan here to answer that question they may be downstairs okay we'll give them a minute good afternoon I think you had a question about our action plan I'm sorry I didn't get to hear all of it you wanted to find out what the next steps are okay great we will submit our action plan by the end of the month and then how it will have about 45 days to review and approve our action plan and so on the start of our program year which is October 1st that's what we'll carry out those activities that are mentioned in the action plan and tell them who you are oh I'm sorry Louisa Garcia with the community services did I answer your question or did was there any more specific information you needed can you tell us how does the city connect with HUD the housing and urban development give us a little background on the city of Denton is an entitlement city and a participating jurisdiction for both the city BG and home that just means on an annual basis we receive a grant an annual grant they let us know how much money we're going to be receiving on an annual basis and so we work with them on a regular basis to submit our action plan they do monitoring for us we request funding on a regular basis we meet with them on a on a monthly basis just to get updates on projects answer any questions this month we might have on projects so this is an ongoing relationship we have with HUD thank you ma'am okay any other any other questions councilmember McGuire no question but I need to pull F for recusal okay any other questions customer walks it's on agenda item H yeah there's no there's no funding this isn't about funding or anything like that as I was reading through it this isn't recommending funding or anything or it is recommending city BG and home funding for the activities that are listed in the action plan yes okay all right thank you you're welcome great any other questions counselor Davis thank you man I'm just not sure I caught it was that F that got pulled yeah thank you good great all right any others seeing none okay that takes us to our then for staffs purposes we'll only pull F just for recusals no presentations that takes us to our first work session item which is ID two to two four seven receive a report hold discussion give staff direction regarding FY 20 22 23 departmental budget presentations for customer service water and wastewater environmental services sustainability electric and solid waste good afternoon mayor city council members Nick Vincent assistant director of finance my pleasure to introduce this item to you today so as the mayor said we have five presentations for each of the utilities we also have customer service being presented to you today as a reminder to any customer service member that I'm sorry any council member that was not here in previous years customer service comes forward to the City Council because it is funded by the utilities customer service is listed first on the agenda but I think we'll actually start with water wastewater because they are here so we'll get that pulled up and then each each presentation mayor is a joint presentation so the first half of the presentation is the operational information will be presented by the department the second half of the presentation be presented by the finance department so I asked Stephen to come up and we'll start with water all right you should be ready thanks Nick good afternoon mayor and council Stephen gay director of water utilities so we're gonna start with a department overview of the utilities so Denton water utilities was established in 1866 the department is divided into four functional groups the water administration water treatment field operations and asset management and infrastructure the department treats surface water at our two raw water treatment facilities Lake Louisville and Lake Ray Roberts these facilities deliver water to our customers through a network of essentially right around 647 miles of distribution system piping and we have four elevated storage tanks three ground storage tanks and one stand pipe and two booster pump stations the department then collects the waste water and delivers it to our concrete water reclamation facility through a network of a roughly three hundred five hundred and thirty miles of collection system piping we have 31 lift stations and then when it arrives at Pecan Creek it's treated to TCEQ standards and then responsibly delivered back to the environment Denton water utilities also provides is is a regional provider of wastewater services to the cities of crumb Argyle and Lake cities and we're also a we sell wholesale water to opportunity water utility regional water district this is just a snapshot of our of our service area the Denton proper is roughly 98 square miles but if you include the ETJ and water and wastewater you can add another 140 plus square miles to that this is a snapshot of our production you can see where we're trending pretty consistently we're a little bit above that these months obviously it's a little warm recently this is a slide that we like to show that shows our capacity our production capacity and where we have improvements planned out so the hash line shows when we run out of treatment capacity if we don't make any improvements and those notches up are actually planned improvements and the first one is at the Ray Roberts treatment facility water volume forecast this just example to show you that you know how we are projecting the water use again that hash line if we do nothing and the bump up shows where we increase in demand and treatment capability we use this slide to show the matrix on the operation and maintenance of our of our distribution and collection systems you'll see the the the first graph the blue graph is is the breaks per hundred miles a pipe that's an AWWA standard so the AWWA states that a utility that experiences less than 15 breaks water main breaks per hundred miles a pipe is is a well run and a well functioning distribution system excuse me that the sewer main chokes per hundred miles there there's the benchmark there as well five is another industry standard so no more than five chokes or overflows sedentary sewer overflows per hundred miles a pipe hydrants flushed another AWWA standard we have roughly 10,000 hydrants within our distribution system and we like to flush them every year just to make sure their proper operation the last matrix in the in the bottom right hand corner is for our valve exercising this is where the utility is falling significantly behind on our matrix and that's due to some equipment issues and not being I would say being outfitted appropriately to efficiently exercise those valves and make the repairs in a timely fashion so we should be touching every single valve in our system once a year and we're not we're nowhere near that yet but we have a plan for that these are the drainage matrix I can't speak too intelligently about this I know drainage does fall under the water utility but this these functions fall underneath the public works team but if you can if you look at their matrix it looks like they're doing relatively well there and so as far as the departmental structure you have myself as a director of water utilities again those four functional areas we have asset management and infrastructure we have our treatment division we have our field operations division and our admin division and so is this the summary Nick that we're going to turn it over to you here or do you want me to go through this okay do you have any questions with regards to the department so department questions before we get into the finance any questions and I can't see the screen council member I see I understand what a break is because I was that was one of my questions and you said that and then I understand I think I understand what a choke is so when something is choked up yes ma'am is that at a corner I mean is it a yes so typically what you'll see is in the collection system it's a it's a non pressurized system and we'll get roots that will grow in between the unions of the pipe and then that collects debris and it chokes it restricts the line causing them back up and for sanitary sewer to flow on to under the street so I kind of that that's what will happen at a person's home it could happen at their yes ma'am also flush a hydrant how often do you all flush the hydrants well we attempt to flush them every year so we're on the cycle where we go through and we and and we also on a regular basis as part of our preventive maintenance we want to flush them every year but as we monitor our water quality and if we have any concerns with regards to water quality cloudiness debris in the line chlorine residuals we'll do flushing in those areas as well so we'll do it a little bit more aggressively than then the once a year but the goal is to flush every hydrant at least once a year and you all say that you had a plan for that I'm sure we're gonna hear about that would that include needing more employees no ma'am what we're doing is we're we're redeploying resources and what you'll see in this budget request is for some additional equipment and so those are valve exercising trucks and that and those those trucks are equipped to allow an operator to basically pull up to a valve it has all the equipment they need to act to clean out the valve can the riser operate the valve and then if there's any repairs that need to be made and we call it a nut it's basically it's basically a like a like a nut like you'd see on a bolt did the top of a bolt that's how we operate them from the above if that needs to be replaced we have tools that we can actually do that without excavating and getting down to the valve okay when um when I drink city water yes ma'am sometimes it's it tastes differently you know and so explain to us why does water taste differently from the tap what could it be well we run a surface water treatment facility and so we're under the influence of organics that so runoff so as water comes into that that reservoir it then goes over to a treatment facility so depending on those loadings so how many organics are in the water or if there is if there's an algae bloom in the lake or something like that that can affect the taste and odor of the water but we do maintain strict compliance with all state and federal regulations with regards to water quality this is not a question but a statement yes ma'am I have been to the water treatment facility this plant is the most interesting place excellent to be in the city other than the landfill of course other than the landfill I'm partial to the police department so but I have found it to be very interesting and if anyone's listening out there and you need a field trip for the kids please take them to the water treatment facility absolutely council bird we would love to receive them and take them for a tour we're looking for future operators that's right all right thank you any other quick councilman Davis thank you mayor I second that it's been a lot of time out there as a kid my dad worked at the what we now call the Lake Louisville plant was the only plant very cool place to go forget and I'm asking this next question because I know you have a lot of experience in other jurisdictions as well but I'm seeing and hearing that increasingly cities like ours that are conscious of water use conscious of wastewater capacity that when they do hydrant flushes there are their firms available or equipment available for price to reclaim that water so every time y'all flush a hydrant we get a call from somebody who says that hydrant is just blowing water out into the street and we know that it's for water quality purposes and maintenance purposes and all that but the technology exists to reclaim at least some of that water and not just be dumping it straight into the storm sewer so are you familiar with that technology Dean is that something that might be on the horizon for a town like Denton or is it so in your experience so prohibitive expensive that it's it's not not something we need to worry about until our water needs get much more drastic well thank you for for the question counselor Davis that that technology does exist it is still being refined it's pretty cost prohibitive right now and labor-intensive but we are keeping an eye on it and when it becomes more affordable and more appropriate for our use we will move down that path you're very welcome any other questions everyone Tim thank you mr. mayor my question several of them were answered but I had one about the water main breaks is and is is the what while you're you know at the standard or below for the most part which I applaud thank you for doing that for us the the question I had is do we see that sort of spike in 2020 is that an infrastructure age related thing or or why do we see a spike in the data right there I believe the can I give that was there the spike in 2020 and the number of breaks yes yeah I believe that that was more we need to get to pull this down so they can see sorry Nick drives better than I do I believe that that was that was more related to the winter storm so a one-off event that we're not going to we don't have aging infrastructure that we're you're gonna need a budget for that is a one more of a one-off event well no sir I just a point of clarification we do definitely have aging infrastructure that we're going to need to invest in and what you'll be seeing coming before you in the in the coming months or is going to be some comprehensive condition assessment of that infrastructure you know the the challenge that we have is with you know as you saw in those numbers you know 400 or 500 and 600 plus miles of pipe that's under the ground and we can't see it so we're going to be doing some money to do some comprehensive condition assessment of those assets to determine you know consequence of failure probability of failure and then develop some plans to to start addressing concerns should we should we identify them all right thank you all right any other questions I do have one quick question can you tell me state of the union on desalination I know San Antonio has a plant just obviously I hope there's strides being made there but do you know kind of where we are in that sign desal desalination sorry mayor pro mayor Stephen gay director public water utilities desalinization is a very viable technology it's cost prohibitive it is an energy energy intensive operation and one of the biggest challenges is dealing with the brine or the the highly salient water that is the byproduct of desal so I believe that San Antonio is making some some significant strides on that I was at a conference down there about two months ago and their general manager addressed the American Water Works Association's board and they talked about they were making some very very significant strides in desal but they're also diversifying their water supply portfolio not just in desalinization but leveraging water reclamation leveraging what we call ASR which is aquifer storage and recovery and acquiring additional rights to surface water okay all right is there a forecast that they have a forecast when in when the cost will is it dropping fast not dropping do you ever feel it's it's not really dropping much I think Poseidon was one of the largest ones that was done and that was in San Diego and especially with our supply supply chain issues and the current state of the economy those costs are actually going the other direction Wow okay thank you appreciate sir okay I'm gonna get you through the next 70 slides as soon as possible please do just making sure you're paying attention okay okay so this is the FTE for the water utility this summarizes the full-time equivalent employees for this utility so I'll walk you through it really quick so the current fiscal year that we're in is fiscal year 2022 you can see the approved budget approved by council this fiscal year includes 218 positions we are forecasting to come in at the 218 to Councilmember Byrd's question earlier we are looking to add some positions this fiscal year in the water utility so bringing the FTE account to 224 and we'll go over those shortly in a little bit more detail which you can see those positions listed here at the bottom of the slide so this is something that we are proud of we have shown for the last several fiscal years you can see the rate history rate changes for the water utilities over the last several fiscal years so this actually should be 1314 but you can see 1314 through fiscal year 2023 most notable since fiscal year 27 or 2017 18 we have not had rate increases in the water utilities actually had some rate decreases we had a 5% rate decrease in 1819 and a 2% decrease in 2021 so financial assumptions what's included in the proposed 2023 budget for the water utilities we have one of these slides for each of the utilities it really summarizes it if you have detailed questions we definitely get into it in more detail rates there are no rate increases being proposed for the water utility this fiscal year the forecast we are averaging a growth of 2% over the next 10 years we'll talk about that a little bit more in just a second we have two to three percent increases in expenses and non-rate revenues and then Hunter coal ranches accounted for starting in fiscal year 2024 we do have a water treatment plan expansion the design of that facility planned in 2028 there about 9 million dollars so the revenues this is the revenues for the water utility in 2022 you can see 52.2 million we are estimated to come in about 51.4 million one thing I will say this estimate was put together about a month ago before some of the heat that we've seen here lately so these numbers very well could change in the coming weeks but just want to make sure I said that moving into fiscal year 2023 you can see we have 62.2 million in total revenue that is an increase in the current fiscal year the majority of that increase is associated some cost participation so some construction projects we're rating cost participation dollars from developments so good things for the utility getting those developments and constructing those projects and then you can see we have a little bit of use of reserves planned the expenses for the water utility so on the current fiscal year you can see we have 51.2 million in expenses forecasting about 50.3 coming at the end of the fiscal year so it said these are dated about a month old they will change some in the coming months fiscal year 2023 we have 62.5 million in expenses so the pro forma is really the best way to look at the health of the fund what we're showing you here is a five-year pro forma we actually have a ten-year pro forma for the water utility so for space purposes we've seen you shown you a five-year pro forma today definitely make the tenure available if you'd like to see it but really looking at it won't go through all the numbers again with you but a high level this is the current fiscal year that we're in so fiscal year 2022 you can see those budgeted numbers that I'd read off to you we do utilize impact fee funding in this utility to fund impact fee eligible projects so as new development comes into the community they pay those impact fees we in turn take those impact feed revenue dollars and fund eligible projects so really utilizing it to the best of our ability and this is the end of your estimate so finishing this fiscal year you can see here in this column and then you can see we're finishing about 1.1 million dollars positive and this may increase some just based on water uses that we've seen over the last few weeks ending fund balance so twenty four point seven million is more forecasting for the end this fiscal year how does that compare to our fund balance target for this fund so down here we talked about this last year the Council on the Public Utilities Board and the minimum is 120 days the maximum is 180 so you can see we're well within that target of 16 5 to 24 8 move it into 2023 so we do have those revenues up here at sixty two point two and expenses of sixty two point five so using a little bit of revenue or reserves about three hundred and forty six thousand we're not forecasting rate increases for the current fiscal year then we did an ending fund balance of twenty four point three million so moving into the future years that fund balance does stay above the reserve requirement slightly dips below in twenty twenty seven you can see twenty point three so just barely below the reserve requirement keep going we come back this via questions so the capital plan you may remember Cassie actually presented the capital budget for the entire city a few weeks ago did a great job it's like a 60 page presentation this is a summary of that presentation presentation in that book that you receive so if you want greater detail in these projects please reference that book that you saw the Capital Improvement Book this is a high level summary we definitely answer your questions so in total the water utility has 54 million in projects slated for fiscal year 2023 we break that out in a couple different categories on this slide we show you how those projects are funded are they debt funded are they revenue funded aid in construction are we using impact fee funding to revenue fund those projects so it's really what this slide is showing you can't see some impact fee funding here about three point five million the majority of the projects will be debt funded but we do focus on cash funding as much as possible it's been one thing in this utility it's allow us to forego some of those rate increases so something to be proud of in this utility that staff looks at what can be revenue funded and what can be debt funded so and you can see it broken out by different operational areas within water utilities so this is the capital plan expanded this is represents 44.1 million of the 54 million in capital projects just point out a couple of the major projects that will be coming up this next fiscal year I do say Becky's setting over there but we do have some funds to support the 2019 Street reconstruction projects each utility does budget for that you can't see 11 million currently being accounted for up here in the top so having those cross-department meetings making sure we have everything accounted for you can see some capacity rerate projects we have here for 8 million and you can see the northwest transmission line of booster pump station I believe that was discussed during that work session a few weeks ago so change requests we'll talk a little bit more about the supplemental packages that are being requested for the water utility this fiscal year you can't see they have some vehicles in here and they have some recycling education budgeted some valve trucks I think Stephen and mentioned earlier about some valve trucks and maybe home to some proof some of those metrics and some testing around the city we are accounting for those you can see there's three of them for 500,000 and then we have a sustainability specialist we'll talk a little bit more about the sustainability specialist in their presentation here in a couple presentations in this meeting down the road so I'll get into water does is do you want to stop your mayor you want to go through wastewater and then take questions yes let's take questions on that that's okay questions on the financials he's covered thus far councilmember wire and counselor Watts can you clarify about the recycling education the supplemental request and why that's coming through water and wastewater instead of solid waste so it is so the recycling education is budgeted for water so a lot of the positions within sustainability report through sustainability I don't know if that's what your question is in general but sustainability is housed in several different funds so water funds of portion of sustainability wastewater and solid waste it is something we could move to the solid waste fund we received that direction this is where we felt that it fit in best just curious I'm not not not second-guessing at all all right customer what a couple questions refresh my memory on the me back to it the cost participation in the revenue side that's coming from where so great question for the let me get back to that page I got a note right here so cost participation for fiscal year 2023 for the water utility is coming from a textile I-35 water relocation project about four million and then we have a textile FM 1515 library relocation for two point two million and those would flow into the expenditure line would that be under the revenue funded capital that is correct yeah we bring those in as a revenue we spent something revenue funded capital okay that's correct and then the the budget presented the five year forecast does not include the supplementals is that correct no sir it does include the subtle it does okay yeah if you look back at the pro forma oh there it is right you should see the bottom okay and and so this budget which is let's see where is it 12 million dollars more than last year or the estimate am I looking at that right it's 50 50 51 million for total revenues that's 50 million total expenditures that is correct and now it's the budget is 62 million correct most of that is the water the cost participation and impact fees so that's why we don't have a rate increase is that correct because it's gone up about that's gone up about 20 something percent the budget but we're getting that revenue in from text dot and then we're supplementing it with the reserve fund of our impact fees what you can look at that way so we are in increasing the impact fee funding in fiscal year 2023 so we bring you in about 6.5 million in impact fee funding to this fund as a revenue we transfer out this next year about 3.5 million the rest of that's that 3 million delta will actually go to offset debt service okay so when you look at if we didn't have that funding coming in what we need a rate increase it is possible sure absolutely yeah okay all right yeah okay thank you any other questions mayor Patel mr. mayor so one of the things I noticed is we're has been going through and we'll go through all these presentations is there seems like there's a number of the supplementals will be coming in for the budget that that are FTEs and it seems like a lot of these are associated with growth you know we're not we're not 143,000 anymore I think the new estimates are 150 plus and you know that's that's understandable we we have more infrastructure we need more people to manage it so for these and I guess this is a request for future reports to the extent we can for these can we get an assessment for how much is growth related I know it's going to be challenging to do that in some things because there'll be particular reports for a particular plant or a particular truck or something that and it'll be a punctate stair step kind of relationship with the other FTEs but I guess what I'm asking for is is do we have an assessment for how much of this is really supplemental and how much of this is actually just required infrastructure growth because we're getting bigger sure this is David I think I can answer that question I think certainly with every supplemental that we bring forward especially for FTEs we want those to be tied to metrics to show the need for the supplemental so every supplemental you see will have some metric there to show what either what the new position is going to do or where the deficit is that we need the supplemental request so a lot of that will be tied to growth right where just the need is risen in this metric that we need to accomplish or this task we need to accomplish so I think that will be the offshoot of it so I think as you see the metrics you'll see that growth has a big impact on the need that we have not only in the utilities but across the general fund and across the entire city all right thank you I appreciate you guys doing that all right any other questions soon then one one question you mentioned it in the in the pro forma there's a static number what is it six point five million yes sir for why did you why did you hold that static versus obvious it's going to vacillate but yeah so great question so impact these come in from residents or you know new construction within the community to assess that fee and to get the amount of that fee what the city does is every five years we can conduct an impact fee study and that study looks and sees what the recoverable cost is over a ten-year period for the water utility that recoverable cost is 65 million so we simply took the 65 million and spread it out over ten years it's a six point five million a year one thing to note about the water wastewater impact fee study we actually engaged with the consultant this last week to update it to pull in the new hunter coal ranch development so really to look at the city and not just that development any development that's new in the city that wasn't contemplating a prior study is to recapture it so does that answer your question mayor it does and then what is the has that been pretty accurate those forecasts in the past in the previous years and I guess that would be ten years ago when you did it yeah it has been pretty accurate I will tell you that we seem to be getting more than six point five million a year and that's going into the impact fee reserve so if we're not spending what we're getting I think this year year today we've got up at 11 million it goes into a reserve we then plan to use that money at a future date for a construction project so as noted on that slide earlier our plan is is take from that reserve to fund the design of the Lake Ray Roberts design of that facility and then such in the future when that facility gets ready to be constructed we can take some more from that reserve to cash fund the portion of it so but yeah I'll answer your question we've I think we receive year-to-date about 11 million this year got it and and then and the fiscal year ends I'm sorry we're about a month so what September 30th yeah okay and then lastly where you have captured Locust and Elm if we're able to move forward I know there's some partnerships and there's some wrangling there how much of that falls on us none of it some of it I see that see David moving again yeah yeah I don't want to I don't yeah yeah I don't want to speak before that's a great jacket and tie by the way you've done well I was trying to impress you from a water wastewater perspective that all that funding comes from the city because that's our infrastructure so in the capital plan that you see over the five years it does include everything we need from a water wastewater perspective all of the cost sharing everything working with text dot and the county is on the roadway side so from a water wastewater perspective it's all within this and it is captured ready to go correct okay great thank you all right yes Councilman watts on that and the mayor prompted this question on that impact fee funding somewhere and I don't need it today or you know whenever but we do have somewhere that itemizes out that this money is being used for this project which been identified by this impact fee study for related projects is that yeah absolutely so we track internally where those funds are being spent so for the water utility there's different districts we receive impact fee funding from those dollars received from those districts have to be spent on projects within that district or that benefits the entirety of the city so it could be like for example a water treatment plant facility but we do track that internally you ever require about Texas state law to do that great thank you great okay yep okay so wastewater very similar to water so I won't take too much time up here we do have some rate increase scenarios beginning in fiscal year 2024 that we will show you we're not looking to make any rate increases in fiscal year 2023 but did want to bring it to your attention did want to note it and we can talk about it here shortly we are forecasting a 2% population growth over a 10-year period for this utility also something you'll see across the board for all the utilities and then the 10-year CIP does include a construction of a new wastewater treatment plant facility I think Stephen may have mentioned that earlier so revenues for wastewater you can see in fiscal year 2022 this column here this is the current fiscal year we have 38.6 million in revenues end-of-year estimate we are estimating about 46.8 million that increase is associated with a couple cost participation projects this fiscal year and I can name those off to you here shortly fiscal year 2023 so we're looking about 56.3 million in revenues we do have some cost participations coming into the wastewater fund also be happy to talk to you about that and then you can see total resource about 64.5 million so 8.1 million in reserve usage that reserve usage is associated with the cost participation project or review here shortly so I just wanted to point that out expenses so in 2022 the current fiscal year we are estimating to come in about 37.5 million so a little bit under budget about 400,000 2023 about 64.5 million in expenses majority of those expense increases are associated with that revenue funded capital or cost participation so wastewater very similar to water we do plan in a 10-year window we are showing you a five-year pro forma today we definitely can show you 10 if you'd like to see it but in fiscal year 2022 you can't see here this is the current fiscal year we did not have planned use of reserves in the adopted budget we did actually plan to make about 740,000 in the wastewater utility we are estimating to come in about 9.3 million so what we're doing and it does look like a large fund balance going to the fund balance that is a cost participation for a couple projects we had on the wastewater side we had 8 million for the Milam road project and we had a million for the decommissioning the robust and ranch facility or the treatment plant facility out there so bringing those into the fund will expense on next fiscal year as we go to construct those projects in 2023 you can't see here in this column we got a continuation of some additional cost participation projects about 13.6 million mayor here's the impact fee funding for wastewater about 4.2 million in the impact fee study for wastewater it's 42 million over 10 years hence the 4.2 million a year so total revenue about 56.3 total revenues is 64.5 moving down the page some we are not forecasting a rate increase in this upcoming fiscal year for wastewater and the reserve requirement is well above the minimum and actually above the maximum this year coming up debt coverage ratio we do look at this every year for the utilities currently we're forecasting about 1.71 debt coverage ratio for the wastewater utility as a reminder the goal for this utility is 1.25 so definitely above that goal moving forward into the future years we do have some rate increases so starting in fiscal year 24 through 26 we have a three percent rate increase plugged in remind the council like we talked about the public utilities board we're not asking you to adopt a rate increase this year we were just simply showing you what the possibility may be in the near future for the wastewater utility and so those three percent rate increases we'll keep going along here so drainage rolls up I know Stephen I mentioned this earlier this fund actual this department rolls up into the wastewater fund you can see in 2023 about six point four million in total revenues for the drainage department a majority of that coming from rate revenues so your drainage fees that you hear about in the community we do spend those we can have expenditures of six point four million planned in fiscal year 2023 and of course we set a million aside for the drainage department in case there's something catastrophic we need to address capital budget so as we're continuing to replace that agent infrastructure that Stephen had noted earlier we do have seventy point two or seventy point three million in capital projects plan for the wastewater utility as water you can see how it breaks out so about forty point nine million being debt funded four point eight million being revenue funded aid in construction you see twenty two point six million and I'll point those aid in construction out to you here in just a second and you can see how it breaks down by the different departments when the wastewater so a couple of the major projects so this list shows sixty four point two million of the seventy point three that is being considered for your approval or will be considered for your approval in August the largest projects here noted is the Milam Creek basin wastewater line that I mentioned earlier so twenty two point four million multiple funding sources and then we have the text on I-35 wastewater line relocation of four million it's one of those cost participation projects I noted earlier and then we have the robust and ranch decommissioning project of three million which is also a cost participation getting into the change request for wastewater we do have some positions here being requested you can see we have four FTEs in total we were looking to purchase some sand you can see that here for a hundred and thirty thousand and then you can see we have some watershed technician reclassifications that we're looking to do and then next steps so we have presented this to the public utility board several times I think we've printed it in them with three times I'll actually be seeking their approval next Monday and then of course bringing this back to you in some follow-up meetings and then definitely during the August 6 budget workshop and that concludes wastewater I will pull down for questions questions for staff on wastewater seeing none okay let me see if Krista yeah Krista's here so we may jump back to customer service that's okay sure Krista come up really quick you know sharing stuff there you go Mayor's City Council Krista Foster customer service manager and I'm going to give you a little bit of the background on customer service is this this is not the correct presentation yeah this is not the correct one I have my computer do you want to go ahead go through the Met is a metric slide different or okay well I'll give you time to get it up here yeah and then we'll go on to another presentation really quick I see I see Brian over there chopping at the bit to get up here too so maybe we'll maybe we'll move on to solid waste okay let me let me get it pulled up by Krista gets the right presentation hang on just a second all right Brian you want to make your way appearing or Eugene perfect even better well good deal come on up Eugene and we'll get started on solid waste now is this year's presentation gonna be dramatically different now that he has his master's degree congratulations welcome my name is Eugene McKinney deputy director solid waste and recycling it's an honor to talk about solid waste budget if you don't know I'll share that we are the exclusive provider for solid waste recycling programmatic recycling and residential services within the city of Denton which is a breakdown you know we often say the landfill right but we'd like to call it our disposal area as well because we have several functions there of course we have beneficial reuse that we partner with wastewater recycling drop-off sites home chemical collections and as well you can drop off appliances residential garbage recycling and the host mortgage border things as well we have our schedule chemical collections and home appliances at the curb commercial of course multi-family trash organics we have a downtown square area which we is a valet which we're gonna be expanding at through some organics as well and we got C&D didn't growing right so you see all the containers around so it's just fitting that we have containers and vehicle and personnel to service those areas so which you'll see here is our the monthly residential area service so this when this was prepared right we hadn't finished out a complete cycle so what you see is our estimates and we estimate it be about thirty thirty eight thousand customers and then when we forecast and based on the growth of the city for our next fiscal season about thirty more than thirty nine thousand you know our commercial multi which includes our multi-family you'll see again our estimates and then our forecasts our scale house our transactions if you'll see this and notice we got the same information but you see this is rising as well so it's part of our comprehensive strategy our management strategy we've developed the plan and the diversion goals and it's got it's got a nice ring to it right 30 for 30 40 for 40 75 for 75 years out right and we're gonna take a very systematic approach to minimize and minimize and maximize at the same time diversion is the key here not just the City of Denny but in the North Texas area so programmatic material with recycling right we want to make sure we up the ante on that and get as much product as we can from there right we want to look at non-programmatic opportunities to divert material here's a few things here most importantly we want to find reuse opportunities everything that goes to the landfill could have some things that go to the landfill could very potentially have another life and we want to explore them opportunities to find that life so implementation of this for our next fiscal season we have a chapter 24 that we'd like to update to make sure it is inclusive of all the things that we'd like to do you know research you'll find public education you'll find partnerships diversionary programs grant opportunities pilots and local partnerships right with our schools universities and other municipalities in the area 23 24 and beyond you know our programmatic improvements here that you might you'll hear some of the things I just repeated I said before so I won't go through all of them but you'll see the the continuation of diversion partnerships grants and opportunities for new life it's a metrics I won't go through all of them but here's some opportunities and some things we've identified and where we are now with our estimates and what's our goal goals are and our strategy will help dry help us drive everything you see here our department of structure of course they have our director in place here with us Brian Barna I'm the deputy director we have an assistant director Tammy Clausen and all the wonderful staff that make up solid waste here's an FTE summary so the chart prior chart here's just a breakdown and tells you where we are with those things we've changed this in numbers for various reasons but um you know as we as our estimates for the close of the fiscal season is a 128 and our request for next fiscal season is 135 and below is a breakdown scale our scale house some field auditors field service workers heavy equipment operators and a truck operator any questions before I go into Nick with financials just first of all I want to thank you all for I think it was implemented a couple years ago but the program that allows multifamily owners to call and pick up couches and mattresses that people dump that don't even live there it's just it's been so convenient and so helpful so really appreciate y'all service in that help me understand because I hear and I just need to know the timeline that we've got a landfill that's shutting down in this area when is that gonna happen and is it the one is it the Louisville one Louisville yes and what is that to take part well that's in process already okay so it's in process of closing so we're getting that traffic now okay um so one of the things that it did as well is um when you want to discourage traffic coming in you raise the rates so it's just more convenient for customers to bring it to us okay we're seeing that traffic now so in your FTE count could we go back to that slide real quick because I know I've heard anecdotally that right now you know to get into the the landfill and to to get in get get weighed and then to get out and get weighed is quite a long process as you know so to get in and out and so are some of these increased FTEs to help with this anticipated or current increase in solid waste coming to our landfill from the Louisville the great question some of these are to manage that plus we're we're you know we're bound by the Texas Commission of Environmental Quality so we have to set a certain standard but the wait times getting in and out we do have a road that frankly the road had to the old road where it was just a short throw well they had to be dug out to put the new road in plus the new road serves a valuable purpose by a little travel right so mud on rainy days when the trucks carrying a lot of mud what happens is you know the heavier trucks they bounce a little it gets rid of some of that mud before it's get back out to the street sure so once it's on the street you still responsible to I mean extra resources have to be on the street to take care of mud so we rather control it within the land sure okay thank you very much appreciate it yes sir all right cancer bird can you explain what a scale house is yes absolutely and some environments they call the way station we call it a scale house well that's what transactions are done says you as a contractor or as a citizen come in and you present your information it could be already logged into the system right or you provide your information they get an account of that information they provide you a fee or whatever you weigh you in more importantly the scale right so they can weigh the net times versus everything else the times when you come in our empty and we calculate a charge for that whatever that turn it is so that's where transaction this is a transaction house you mentioned something about diverting materials I'm you may have already answered this with his question in terms of I don't I'm not sure so I'll ask the question how do we divert materials what does that mean well and what I mean is material that really comes to the landfill that takes up space that's doing nothing that's providing no use to the landfill sometimes this is a we can find other homes for this so and some environments what we're trying to do here as well by diversion we're trying to keep that material out of the landfill so basically the only thing we want in the landfill is stuff that can be compacted buried and at the end result produce some methane that product but when you do furniture you know a piece of furniture that someone's throwing away right it might have use or value to someone else right so we want to look and find those markets so we can divert that keep it on the landfill and then find another life for it you all have an employee that's just specified for that task no so through the plan we want to make sure capture that before it gets to the landfill that's what that's what our education and outreach and everything is about catch it before it comes to the landfill are we doing a better job or good job or not so good job well with the comprehensive strategy all that be working to the strategy and implementation of different plans getting out of the street I mentioned an auditor someone getting out of the street edge of doing some education and outreach and things like that you know we talked about programmatic material for recycling right and then we talk about solid waste and we identifying so to give you an example and auditors on the street here's what part of the vision right instead of just throwing this all into the pile to come to the landfill educate the customer once we've had outlets relationships built for a company local company who can use this somewhere ie mattresses and things like that you all work with any of the nonprofits in the city we're getting there we're on that track to do that we're on the track to do that also I noticed that you had a position for safety that's on the same access level with yes the deputy yes what is their role there is that just specifically for the employees or is that out a community-wide well it starts with our employees it starts for the department we want to get that position a little more freedom latitude and voice and answer to the director with definitely with concerns but it starts with solid waste our guys in the yard making sure they're doing things safely but it's also outreach into the community you know we have a as didn't growing right there are a lot of right away issues out there low-hanging limbs there's just a lot of things out there and that person gets out there a couple of times a week and they find them things and they educate our people okay be mindful of this watch out for this now that in network with parks say can we get this trim back they network when we have bad streets can we get this patch things like that so they also help with that engaged didn't happen to help community-wide rather than just a safety for the employees okay just educational questions thank you absolutely any other questions so this isn't a question but you kind of glossed over it and I want to make sure that we're all like calling out and noticing how amazing the improvement in the metrics is I mean there have been you know improvements and diversion rate and recycling rate but the the contamination rate in the space of one year has improved like a lot so outstanding work to solid waste staff that is really really impressive that that much of a change has happened to just one year and thank you very much everything is high priority for us but that contamination and getting those numbers down and getting clean product in is probably the problem is premium so we have sustainability along with our solid waste team they're out every day making sure that you know they're probably looking for they educate me doing things so I think we're going in the right direction David and I have the opportunity to meet two of the people that are on staff during the summer they literally go out and look in the bins and do a count of what's in there what should be in there what shouldn't and so yeah we we got a good education we went out there and met them for a luncheon so yeah they're doing a great job and guess what there's a clean period right so once they identify like you just mentioned some some contaminants in they got a short window so okay let's see if we can clean this up to make this container a little bit better let's do it but but but the truck the garbage truck has not had to have come as of yet right so they'll put them in the garbage container and then they educate the customer this how this container should look so it's been very successful okay any other questions Councilor McGee thank you mr. mayor so one of the previous slides you referenced I think was 5.9 5.9 pounds of waste per person yes how does that compare with other cities in the area if you know I mean I'll have an answer right now however I have my director I'm here Brian's um he's a solid waste guru just a general estimate just trying to get kind of an idea good afternoon I'm Brian burner director of solid waste for the city of Denton and higher than most cities in North America and in the state of Texas part of that is due to just first and foremost the amount of material that that you know is thrown away but but we have a lot of very wet waste that come in a lot of a lot of organic material and that's going to be key as we go to working to implement our solid waste management strategies identifying how to first of all maybe not generate that type of material you know if you got what if you got you know food use it correctly donate it you know eat it up do what you have to do but secondarily once you have a waste product then you'll manage that material appropriately and by doing that we can drive that that number down and that's really one of our key metrics is from an education standpoint is you know first of all don't don't make that the waste if you don't if you can avoid that you said it tracks higher than the national average to correct what is the national average if you know I don't know that off the top of my head I mean we're we're about a pound ish above what the national average if my memory serves me correct thanks sir thank you any other questions seeing none I have a few so with respect to just this is a seeking information from you not today but going forward if there's ordinances we can put in place to come alongside you and help with respect to our city's mix of homeowners versus renters is changing and that's just a different approach mindset waste habit you know I just think we're gonna have some challenges there you know just because it's cost more to buy a house and some other people you know renting and you know colleges growing all those things and so just a multifamily or single-family rental community just I'd ask y'all you know continue to report back if there's kind of some ordinances or things we can levers we can pull from to support you and making sure we continue that trend of making sure we have clean recyclables as clean as possible then did we finalize the partnership with the colony on the sludge is that we're good okay great and then so thank y'all for working that up that's that's a great deal then I want to give a shout out to goodwill because they divert 100% of textiles that they receive so if people are looking for a way to make an impact and divert that's a great way because if they don't sell it they then break it down and sell it on the wholesale market but it never makes it to our landfill so people if you have clothes and you want to divert it goodwill is the place to go and so I want to continue to educate from that perspective other people that are doing the same thing then can do I guess it'll be a while but maybe in a month or so can you report back on how that's working reconfiguring the line so now you can go drop your recyclables off or you know you they don't have to go through the scale station is that is that right we change the line so that they go they don't have to wait in line is that that right yeah that is correct we're actually using the the infrastructure we have at our home chemical collection facility to bypass the scale house the information is still collected as far as address and that information but they will actually bypass the scale house get rid of their material and then they can leave so they don't have to set it set in the line so once that's been in place for a while you'll just let us know how that's going we will do and just again it's an interesting fact by grabbing this information which is extremely important right now even at the landfill 50% of the people that come in to recycle are not city of Denton residents they are residents of North Texas and that's why it's important for us as we implement this strategy is not just look at Denton we have to look much larger we have to look at the places like crumb and Justin and pilot point and Aubrey and our gal these are the areas that are gonna help drive a lot of the version that we're gonna be doing internally and really divert the material out of our landfill got it okay thank you thank you yes and then do you have an update on food waste collection or what we were doing there do we have an update or no I'm not sure if we ever update are you familiar with the program and what our thoughts are as far as doing the food waste diversion in the frost rate square area no sir I knew it was it was up and I don't so not the children to know yeah so so we are that is still the plan going forward we ran into some snags with equipment just to mark it right now we had an estimate a while back and you know it got hung up for a while and then we asked an update estimate the price went out the roof so we kind of kind of started from square zero with that but that is still the plan okay yes so that general frosted area kind of use that as a test case actually our ballet areas okay we will also run this tester yes collection program specifically bars restaurants things of that nature partnering with our beneficial reuse so we'll run it through channel grinder it'll be anaerobically digested it'll go into beneficial reuse turn into down or dirt and that way it benefits everybody got it and have we talked to that so another thing is I want to give credit where credits do saw the new trees new ever green greens out there looking great so thank you all for taking continuing to stay on top of that and then electronic vehicles Peter belt obviously has a new truck that's coming online it's not quite ideals it's a little still cost prohibitive but what's the forecast there yeah um great another great question a few weeks ago I was I went to a trade show and that's the hot thing out there electric vehicles you know but right now the consensus is um we need a little more time because um because you know it's got a huge cost associated but the performance so if a truck starts not only is the chassis electric the body's electric as well so when it starts out it gets pretty good mileage but the more you put on it and the heavier it gets the performance goes ways down in fact a couple estimates suggests that you need to you can only tip 150 cans before you need a recharge Wow now we have routes that have 1200 cans we need about what 19 trucks to finish one route so I kind of you know we tease about this but I kind of almost liken it to the cell phone so then we had mobile phones back in the day someone clipped here we had the big old and I look with now look at now you got a you got a handheld computer now so the technology is on the way now there's some there's a shining light here pick up trucks in our in our light you know three-quarter ton and under vehicles the market is great in fact if you are live in the city quite sure you do and you've gotten a cart delivered to your house the truck that delivers our carts we're actively looking at one of them trucks right now and the way that works is if the driver leaves out of the yard full he's going to get probably less the max but as he delivers and the truck becomes empty it's at maximum so we're looking at six to eight hours before recharge that's his entire day yeah so we are we want to integrate but the heavier trucks we need a little more time yeah that's good that's great insight thank you and then I just want to end with this the software system got a chance to see it at Thomas Rivera when you're for career day just dynamic so that's just money well spent so I continue to thank you all for your your attention to detail and and implementing either new practices and or technologies but thank you very much so appreciate it thank you yes all righty Nick thank you both and congratulations Eugene on a master's degree that is awesome that's impressive that is impressive okay so we'll go through the assumptions it's very similar to water wastewater we summarized on the same way currently the performer that you're going to see today includes the wholesale agreements we do anticipate these coming forward to the Public Utility Board and City Council within the next six weeks for approval or for your consideration so if those do not get approved they'll be removed from the financials and the financials be re presented to you but currently they are included we are projecting between 2.5 and 3.5 percent growth a little bit more than water wastewater just given some of the increased traffic we've seen at the landfill facility we are assuming 100 percent revenue funding of vehicle replacements I'll point that out to you on the financials here shortly and as you can imagine this fund is a large user of petroleum or oil so we have increased the budget about 53 percent in this fund and across the city but definitely impacts this fund since they use so much diesel we are maintaining the contribution to the closure post closures reserve so we just finished a study for this reserve and the city does contribute to a closure fund for that facility at some future date when it gets ready to close we can pay for those closure costs so great thing that the city accounts for we are requesting about 1.2 million in supplemental packages you can see how that breaks down between reoccurring cost and one-time expenses and of course we had to have some new full-time equivalent employees being requested and we'll talk about those here in just a second okay revenues so in the current fiscal year that we're in you could see that here in this column about 39.8 million in revenues was budgeted we are forecasting to come in about 39.6 so fairly close to what the budget was the preliminary budgets here in this column you can see we have 42.7 million in revenues forecast through this upcoming year we do some plain juice of reserves this is strategic what I like to say strategic we are revenue funding some assets this coming year that I'll point out to you here in just a second so we are intentionally drawn down on those reserves to revenue fund those assets these are the expenses so we had 37.2 million and adopted expenses in the budget we are estimated to come in a little bit under budget about 35.9 million and then the preliminary budget of 2023 you can see 42.7 million in expenses I'll also point these out on the pro forma but really quick going point them out to you again you can see we have some revenue funding capital here about 3.2 million we have some sale development and you can see the 100% vehicle replacement cash funding so some great things for the solid waste fund being able to cash fund those assets this is the five-year pro forma for the solid waste fund very happy to report we have a 10-year pro forma for the solid waste fund also just like the other utilities and you can see the adopted budget column here that I just read the numbers to you I will skip to the preliminary budget that's being talked to we're talking about today so in 2023 we have the 39.8 million in revenue 42.7 million in expenses those expenses do contribute about 1.5 million to the future funding of a cell development the next time that cells needed we'd actually pay cash that next cell a hundred percent cash funding of vehicle replacements is coming year and then we have some revenue funded projects we'll look at here in just a second so in total the 42.7 million in expenses what are the reserve targets for the solid waste fund and how do we line up so we are forecasting the ending reserve and solid waste about 7.6 million the reserve targets for this utility are 51 days or 14% the maximum being 65 days or 18% so you can see we're well within that reserve target in the five-year period so we want in the fifth year we're actually above the minimum also just reiterate really quick this does include the wholesale agreements so when you see those come forward to you for your consideration here in the coming weeks they're included in the financials this is the capital plan so we did see this a couple weeks ago 23.2 million in capital projects for this utility we did the debt-funded capital of 16 million revenue funding of 3.5 and then vehicle replacement of 3.7 and then you can see just a few of the projects here are some of the major ones we do have a solid waste fleet facility so working with the fleet department they do deem it beneficial to the city to have the facility out there so solid waste will be constructed a fleet facility about 10.5 million in 2023 and you can see just you know equipment purchases which are revenue funding 3.2 million I do believe there's a dozer purchasing there if I'm not mistaken then we have some vehicle replacements about 3.7 million and then change requests we'll talk a little bit about positions if you have questions about this definitely Brian or Eugene can return to the podium and answer them but you can see we have seven FT's being requested this upcoming fiscal year we have five vehicles being requested you can see what those vehicles are for a total request of 1.2 million and then when I was on the financials Councilman McGuire I just want to clarify a little bit on sustainability so sustainability is actually housed in the water fund solid waste actually transfers from their budget to some water to fund that that department so just want to make sure I clarified that why that supplement was included there and then next steps already review these with you the budget workshop of course is coming up on August the 6th and I will take any questions that you have regarding the financials. Financials for solid waste any questions? Seeing none oh Councilman Davis. Thank You Mayor. Vehicle replacement I'm glad we're cash funding I think I hear you say a hundred percent vehicle replacement or were you saying a hundred percent cash funded vehicle replacement? Yeah so so not a hundred percent of fleet right a hundred percent of what's being proposed to be replaced as far as collection vehicles in 2023 would be cash funded or replacement vehicle funded which is in essence cash. Okay and then on the assumptions page assumptions page I didn't see anything about rates are we gonna have a rate conversation in conjunction with the wholesale conversation because I see those things tied together are we gonna have a rate conversation I want to be careful when I say rate conversation I'm not talking about setting rates but when is the appropriate time to hear about the department's intentions for rates and recommendations in the coming the coming year what we might expect to see. Yeah great question so two parts the rates associated with the contract agreements or the wholesale agreements will be discussed with you and those agreements come forward then we'll also talk about them in the budget workshop and so forth any other rate adjustments or rate increases for non residents or commercial customers will be discussed in the budget workshop. There are some minimal changes to the solid waste rate structure just to do some landfill fees at that facility and a lot of the tonnage fees and so forth but those will be discussed on August the 6th on that budget workshop. Sure I guess what I'm asking is will we have the ability to have a holistic conversation about those wholesale contracts and the impact that those have on the ultimate rate recommendation from staff and the PUB and all that. Yeah I'm thinking I'm looking at Brian here I think he said those agreements are coming forward within the next six weeks or three weeks Brian six but but to answer your question yes if they don't come forward before the budget workshop then we can circle back with you in August and September to talk about it further and talk about what that rate impact would be but we definitely can include that in the upcoming discussion. I don't know if David or has anything else to say about it but hopefully that answers your question. I mean I think we can do that if we in when we come before counsel with those agreements we can show some kind of a table that shows the impact from a financial standpoint from for rates and I'll let David clarify. And even if it's just that 4.7 kind of plug number that we're talking about if we if we know generally what we're talking I just think it would be helpful to know in that rate conversation what impact 4.7 million dollars has on the overall budget. No it's a great question I think this is the time to have a discussion at the budget workshops the time to have a discussion obviously even in advance of bringing the agreements forward I mean I think you can kind of look at the fund itself the pro forma and see that the four or four point six million as we go forward is the reason we don't have rate increases if you take that out you're gonna have rate increases so I think we can certainly as we prepare for the budget workshop even next week as we come back with any follow-up look at different scenarios of what that could look like without getting too into specifics of what the actual agreements are from that high level we can certainly have that discussion I think I think it'd be very helpful great thank you okay any other questions okay mayor we have the customer service presentation so if you give me like five minutes I'll put it on the computer and we can pull it up it sounds great yeah yeah let me see if I can get it pulled up here. How's that in here? Okay does that look right? Okay perfect. yeah mayor whenever you get it's ready whenever got it gets back whenever you're ready oh we have okay we'll wait just for one so we have a quorum okay , okay. All right we can get started. Okay I will pull it up and Krista will present the operational information. Good afternoon mayor council give me one moment to get this presentation in correct mode there we go. Krista Foster customer service manager and I'm going to give you a little bit of the overview on the customer service department we are a division that consists of three different groups that manage the billing of all utility accounts as well as the collections and cash processes and the frontline customer service for utilities as well as some of the other basic city functions such as our operator line some of our main members this is our structure we have my position we have a 3-1-1 coordinator who is working diligently to prepare us for moving to a 3-1-1 we have a business information analyst and then we have our call center branch our collections and cash branch as well as our billing branch so wanting to look at some of our metrics you can see from 2017-18 to current you can see that we've seen consistent growth in the number of accounts we've seen it consistent decrease post and pre-pandemic in the number of walk-ins our call volumes have continued to grow substantially as our account numbers and our citizen base has grown you'll notice that our first contact resolution very satisfied and very dissatisfied customer rates are actually in exceptional ranges compared to private and public sector utility industry call centers these are customer reported numbers at the end of a contact the customer is given an option to rate the service and tell us whether we've resolved their issue first try and then you can see our e-bill adoption rate I'm pretty excited about that that number had held steady at about 24% of our customers over the last several years but since we moved to the invoice cloud platform in February we've already seen an increase in electronically billed customers into about 34% now on the monthly average so over time I wanted to look at some of the things that are affecting billing so from 2010 to 2021 you can see that we've had a 34% increase in utility accounts and then a few of our like manual processes that are required to support being able to produce monthly bills have gone up significantly 70 to several hundred percent range and our billed revenue has gone up an additional 71% over that same 11 year period but the dedicated staff to actually producing the monthly bills has not changed we had seven staff members dedicated to to billing activities in 2010 in 2021 we took a very much needed call center resource and reallocated them to billing so that we could have that critical need met so I just wanted to kind of look at some of the growth that we've seen over that 11 years as it affects our billing and then to just cover some of our priorities for customer service we are looking to always implement new technologies and ways that we can better improve service and meet the expectations that our customers have we're still in competition with other utility industries in terms of what customers expect from us in terms of the way that they can interact with their services and manage their bills we are always looking for increase of self-service so that it can allow customers to take care of business at their own time and place most recently that was the incorporation of a solid waste self-service form where the customer can validate their account holder status and be able to do any of the services that they would schedule by phone electronically and then we process them the next day we've already seen a great adoption in that and we're seeing upwards of 70 to 90 contacts a week coming in through that and it's only a few weeks old and then we're also going to try to implement strategies to manage our account growth and empower our customers with better information and more information thank you Krista I only got a couple slides here so to talk to you about the full-time equivalent employees for the customer service department or fund we currently have 48 we're estimating that to be 52 for the end of the year we are forecasting 56 for 2023 so you can see the positions that are being requested here at the bottom and I'll turn it back over to Krista to talk about those here in a second so as I mentioned earlier customer service does come forward with the utilities because 90 plus percent of their budget is funded from the utilities so definitely has an impact each one of those funds you can see in 2022 we had seven point four million in transfers coming in to customer service to fund their operation end of your estimate we are forecasting a little bit of savings about six point nine million in transfers coming in to balance their budget and then 2023 about eight point two million and you can see how that breaks out by the utilities and then expenses so in fiscal year 2022 the current fiscal year seven point four million so it's the balanced budget we are forecasting a little bit of savings about six point nine million it's important to note if they do have savings we do pass that back to the utilities we do not have a fund balance for the customer service fund fiscal year 2023 we have eight point two million in expenses so four hundred and forty three thousand in supplemental packages that Krista will talk about here shortly okay so I apologize it's Krista Foster customer service I apologize that the slide is not in here so I will actually have to read this one for you so we wanted to provide a little background on some of the supplemental requests that customer service is asking about the first is billing staff you could see the amount of growth that we've seen in the workload required to produce those monthly bills and we're needing to make necessary adjustment we found that many of our staff were working greater than full-time jobs and last year we found a critical problem when we lost two of our tenured staff members so we've been very challenged in billing this last year and we need to go ahead and stabilize our billing operations to be able to be successful in the future the next one is a key accounts concierge desk so we've been working with DME to figure out how we can better service these customers our we have a total utility account numbers of almost 70,000 just about a thousand of those customers make up thirty three and a half percent of all of our revenues within the city and currently they don't have just a single dedicated resource who will act as that liaison to help with they have an account manager in DME they have someone in billing but we're wanting to create something so that they have a single point of contact if they need to speak with DME we're going to get them with DME if they need to speak with another utility we can create those handheld transactions for them but we will be there to be able to answer their daily billing questions have quarterly meetings with each of these different companies to go over their accounts it's about a thousand accounts and be able to help them better understand how their utilities are working and how their billing is done with the key accounts there are about 87 different combinations of rates that may affect these bills so it's very few and far between to find a key account that bills the same way as another and just doing a simple spot check on key account billing isn't adequate for quality control so we want to increase that to independently review 10% of all key account bills monthly so that we are going through each of those accounts on an annual basis independently to ensure that everything is working as it should on any of those accounts and then the last thing that we had is a bill modernization and redesign what we found is the bill matters the way you present the information matters our bill has not been looked at or changed in the last seven to ten years and we want to better match the industry standards so that it can better communicate the information on balances and the options that customers may have provide them the detail they need and reduce their need to call to ask those questions so we were hoping that we could look at something with that as well anything else okay questions with the Councilman Davis yeah a couple of questions and I appreciate I hope you know how much we appreciate it when a department and the city manager's office bring to our attention needs you know when when things have changed times have changed duties have changed and personnel especially tenured personnel I have a little bit of question about the key account folks realizing that each of those accounts is more more intense needs a different look than your average residential account for instance but can you tell us a little bit about how the workload would be different the day to day would be different from a person who is servicing primarily residential and basic commercial accounts versus somebody who is servicing one of these I just need to get into a situation where well if the key accounts had no problems this month so we're doing just fine you know and they they breezed through the work and then they're twiddling their thumbs that's being a little flip I know they're not gonna do that but can you tell us a little bit about that work absolutely so today our key account specialist is a biller and they dedicate about one week of their month to the work that's required just to produce that thousand bills the remainder of the month they're working on other cycle billing and helping to support that billing team so we get to go in there we get to work on them we look for things like if there's anything high level but they can't really dig in and review these accounts or proactively reach out to these customers so with the creation of a key accounts concierge we would have to increase the number of staff and what they would do is they would dedicate that week to making sure that the bills are produced during the remaining three weeks they'll be reaching out to customers they're going to be doing the research and prep for a quarterly meeting they'll be meeting with a group each month they will be doing an independent audit of at least one bill one account per day where they're bringing that bill down and off cycle looking at every single part of the rate making sure it matches what they should be billed by the rights because again they can be fairly complex doing some hand calculations to make sure everything is exactly as it should be we anticipate that meetings with these key accounts typically when we're hearing from key accounts we hear from three areas we hear from their management leadership we hear from their billing and accounting group and then we hear some feedback and things from some of like maybe their field and worker staff in terms of the things that they see maybe with solid waste services or with just service delivery in general so it would be meeting with all of those stakeholders reaching out in advance to see if they have things we need to prepare bringing in specialized resources as necessary to answer specific questions and then being there to work with them throughout the month I anticipate that it would allow each of those staff members about 30 minutes to 45 minutes a day that would be downtime and in that downtime we plan on utilizing them to help with some of the non like non-deadline type work helping to look and just check in on a leak adjustment that we're waiting on some paperwork for helping to finalize some things like that so that we can keep them busy and absolutely utilized but be able to create a much better environment for our key account customers thank you one other if I could mayor on the consultant and I always just double-check sometimes we absolutely have to have a consultant but I always push back just a little bit sure sure because I agree with you that the design of the bill and how you present the information is very important and how people receive that information and then how they act based on that information can change I don't know how many billing utility billing entities exist in the state of Texas but do we really need a consultant so compile the look at a bunch of different ways of presenting bills and figure out the best way to lay it out and then have our in the voicing cloud invoice or whoever actually produces the document figure out that that's the way that we need to present the information is it really that difficult so it yes it is what we looked at as we're looking at a consultant is we started looking at a bill redesign and we went to a couple of like workshops and we're looking at some things but using a consultant they actually have best practice practice standards and know what gets the wanted results I can look at something and say oh that looks really pretty that's very aesthetically pleasing but I can't know that this layout versus that layout gets 15% of your customers to pay on time versus others that they see the bill it's overwhelming and they put it down the other piece of this when you're talking about bill design is every single field that's on that bill has to be mapped to the billing system and you have to coordinate with that bill print provider so that you can create all of these documents that help us to be able to transfer all of the files the consultants would take on that responsibility to ensure that it's done and it's accurate otherwise you're talking about taking staff and this year customer service has a very large number of high-profile projects and it would be able to take those our internal staff members and allow them to focus and dedicate on the changes that we have going on right now so there'd be consultant and there'd be an implementation including that is part of that fee yes thank you mm-hmm any other questions customer bird a couple of simple questions here Mayor my first question is can we change the date of our billing on our bills you cannot change the date on your bill the reason for that is that when we have to go out and read meters and when we have to produce bills right now we have water meters that are not AMI so they have to physically go out and read them so you have to break that out into routes that are manageable for someone to be able to walk so we have to be able to produce the bill when we're getting the reads otherwise you lose that two or three weeks of accuracy so we cannot change the date but we do offer things like customers to be able to set up a pay arrangement they can set up a arrangement as often as they choose as long as they're meeting them to help them with being able to accommodate some of those changes is there any is there any kind of late fees or anything that's associated with a bill they can receive a late fee after a certain amount of time past the due date but again we work with customers so that if they have a set bill cycle we let them know when they can call and be able to set up arrangements so that they're not going to be able you know not have to receive a late fee you mentioned something about a kiosk mm-hmm what does that mean so we have payment kiosk so if you go to City Hall East you'll see right out in the front of the building there's a unit you can lift the the lid mm-hmm and it will allow you to enter your bill information you can scan your bill that's a new feature with our new kiosk and it will allow you to make a credit card cash or check payment so our customers can do that 24 hours a day seven days a week there's even with our new vendor there is even a 1-800 number on there so if it's 2 a.m. on a Saturday morning and for some reason something doesn't work right you call that number and you will get a live person who will be able to work on fixing the problem and or walk you through how to make that payment so that is something that we have added what we've replaced recently are there any thoughts on having additional kiosks that are lit that are located around the city there are as a matter of fact one of our mentioned we have a lot of projects one of our projects is we have another kiosk that we have been custom designing with our vendor and it is a virtual teller unit this particular unit we're going to house in City Hall for now but it will allow a customer to come in they can make cash payments that are exact it will give back change they can do their credit card and check payments they can scan documents if they need to present documents so they didn't have to go to a window and if for any reason they run into trouble they can press a help button and video conference a live representative so it will allow them to do literally anything that they could do at the window with the representative they could do at the kiosk I've already got budgeted plans in my existing budget to be able to try to expand those so that we can take City Hall to our customers yeah our intent is to look at maybe a heat map for our walk-up traffic to see what parts of town they're coming from and see if we can identify some locations that that may be served well by providing them that. That's wonderful thank you. Councilmember McGee. Thank you Mr. Mayor and thank you Ms. Byrd that was actually going to be one of my questions I'm glad to see that you have plans to look at where else throughout the city kiosk can be deployed correct so thank you for that just a couple questions if you don't mind why is there no fund balance for customer service I would think that you might want to have one for training or something like that just curious. So for several of our internal service funds we do not maintain fund balances if there's something that they need throughout the year we consider that as a supplemental package or we can always bring that back forward to council's approval but answer your question we we just don't we don't have one for customer service it just doesn't have a fund balance okay thank you and um last question came from the slide on financials I just want to know what accounts for the significant gap in insurance from the 21-22 budget to the estimate. This is in our backup materials okay let me pull that up really quick I can see exactly. That eighth slide financials expenses answer your question the the number reflected in 2022 budget was not correct so we've corrected in the estimate column so the 106 will be transferred to the insurance fund since the city's self-insured so hopefully it answers your question the original budget of 65,000 was understated okay it should it should have been 106 okay great thank you very much thank you Mr. Mayor. Okay any other questions in that okay okay next presentation we'll go to environmental services sustainability I'll make DME wait just a little bit longer I see Tony sitting over there he it's waiting patiently so Michael come on up for environmental services mayor members council Michael Gagne director of environmental services sustainability I'll try to go through this quickly just to give a general overview of environmental services sustainability to say what we're actually what we do we provide core environmental support for debt and water utilities primarily through our lab services and our industrial pretreatment program we manage our watershed protection program across the whole city for our stormwater compliance we do the environmentally sensitive areas program we provide regulatory support for the city's landfill operations we also do the city's gas well inspections where the group doing the actual inspections and we run the West Nile mosquito program as well and then a key component is the sustainability efforts we touch on everything across the city sustainability related so we do the simply sustainable framework greenhouse gas reporting natural resource consumption that'll be water use gas use electric consumption we do recycling auditing and education to support solid waste and then we also provide environmental support across other departments for working to increase that but such things as due diligence if we're buying property we help ensure that the transaction meets the regulatory requirements we primarily are focused in the city of Denton but as you heard through mr. gaze presentation on water and wastewater we actually are broader than that so our our industrial pretreatment or our wastewater side works with the four customer service customer cities and laboratory services actually supports 11 outside entities as well here are some of our metrics I won't go through every one there's quite a few on there just to cover the breadth of our group but IPP is industrial pretreatment program MSW is a municipal solid waste that's what we do for solid waste ESA I think most people are familiar with is environmentally sensitive areas and an a ESA is an alternative environmental sensitive area or an alt ESA and that's a new thing that was started having those reports submitted this last year that's why it wasn't tracked stepping over to the simply sustainable framework looking broader across city of Denton operations our municipal operations one of the goals there is to reduce our energy footprint and as you can see on these graphics the baseline year is 2019 we had a good little dip in 2020 due to mainly due to COVID with facilities not being used the same but we did see a nice little decrease as well in 2021 there is a city resolution where we're supporting state law state law asks all cities within certain non-attainment air quality areas to have a goal to reduce electric consumption by 5% annually that's not 5% each year that's just 5% against the base or the baseline year of 2019 so it gets a little confusing our structure it's fairly simple you've got the director and assistant director sustainability manager and then the gas well inspector sustainability we've talked about and within the under the assistant director we have the core services of lab and IPP or industrial free treatment our watershed our ESA program as well as our landfill compliance the reason the landfill compliance folks are in green is they won't be shown in the financials here they're actually funded and housed over in the solid waste fund so that's one component of my operation I guess that is not shown within the water or wastewater fund that we're discussing here or the gas wells the FTE summary I'll take that for you Nick if you don't mind we're showing again water administrations being reduced by two positions those are just being transferred out of that into our sustainability HBU to make environmental environmental services be kind of standalone so you can see where all of our costs are that transfer it's also going out by one additional through a supplemental request there's the rest are broken down all the way you'll see on the supplemental we're asking for a watershed technician that actually doesn't show as an increase in full-time equivalencies because we're actually looking to repurpose to to basically halftime FTEs into one full-time FTE so we need people here five days a week eight to five to manage the workload our part-time folks do a great job heavy lifting they're just not here every day so it makes it hard to manage and with that I'm up to financials I don't know if we want to pause like others are just gonna move into financials first any questions with respect to the department councilmember McGuire can you tell us a little bit about how you're handling the vacancy for gas well inspector is the city outsourcing that function our gas well inspections on hold how are we handling that great question that's actually twofold I'm glad to announce actually starting Monday we'll have a full-time inspector back the challenge is it's extended an offer to an internal candidate so I'm taking one out to create a new vacancy but we will have a full-time person we still have our third party contractor under contracts from modern geosciences is still doing inspections across the city of Denton as well that contract is up for renewal this year we're working on the scope of work and working that through to get it through the solicitation review committee to get it out on the street to bring that hopefully back through but the current contract expires in October we have extended it by six months because we have funds available and have that ability so we've extended that so that modern geo can finish this whole calendar year and do their annual report as in prior years so we don't change vendors midstream all right any other questions councillor McGee thank mr. mayor I actually like to ask about the interns do you have the the five interns that you have have listed do you have those currently all filled within the watershed protection group they're all filled so that's the group underneath Joe at a daily those are all filled currently we do have a couple there those two of those missions that will be converted if accepted in the supplemental they're targeted to leave around the end of September early October because of school commitments anyways so repurpose those in sustainability we have one full-time we have a halftime that has not filled currently that should help you be filled in the next few weeks great awesome thanks any other questions member Tim he's still muted there we go sorry about that you think technology guy would be able to press command ship day anyway so thank you mr. mayor my question is that similar to some of the other questions you've been having one of them is the the lab manager of vacancy how are we doing on that we're in we're in recruitment we have good candidates in we're looking to schedule interviews starting next week for that position it's okay so in then to follow up with the counselor geese question do we have is it that we are have a finite number of positions and we're going to repurpose some of those interns which is kind of what I heard or is it that you would really rather keep some of those interns and have additional positions to run those functions and then the reason I I'll put context on that question to help you answer the reason I'm asking that is we you know we have many lovely universities with environmental programs and I wonder if there's an opportunities there for more and additional synergies we're looking at both options a great question so we're looking at both options currently the need the demand would be to go to that one full-time to convert those because some of our interns actually looking for more full-time positions as well as a transition through so we need that capacity so we're trying to create capacity for those university students to also have a full-time position to transfer into so it's twofold next year as we work through and get fully staffed and have that transition we'll relook at that to assess if we need to come back and make any requests for additional intern positions okay that makes sense and then my last question it goes back to the the 5% decrease from the 2019 base for energy consumption can you give us a feel for you know I didn't do the math can you give us a feel for what what those were because it looked like we're you know just eyeballing about a three percent increase from last year if I'm if I'm eyeballing the the plots right and so if that is a if that's accurate sort of a three to five percent increase from last year knowing that we're basing our decreasing off 2019 can can you tell us how that plays on our overall long-term targets great question again the dip for last year was due to Cove it with less facilities being operated in that regard so that was an artificial decrease the goal on the statewide commitment is five percent per year against the 2019 baseline so we're very close if you look at the numbers from 2019 to 2021 we didn't quite get to five percent I think we're at 4.3 or 4.4 however that commitment is raw numbers on raw consumption once those go to the state the state will then weather normalize and look at those so there's a good chance we actually met that five percent reduction however the way we have to report it and our goal is just strictly on raw consumption it does not take into account weatherization or growth so if we added in additional bumps or booster boosters or any other demand within water or if we made any other facility changes that we're supposed to still shoot for having a five percent overall reduction even though you're having to build in additional consumption or demand for the new buildings yeah you you anticipated my question so so this is this is our our goals are raw consumption or our goals of per capita consumption based on that it's just it's raw for our city facilities only so it's just the raw consumption the overall the consumption for all of our facilities city owned and operated but and then the normalization is later all right I appreciate that sir thank you okay all right any other questions thank you thank you okay I'll be brief only get a couple slides and we'll be through this presentation okay so expenses for sustainability environmental services in 2022 4.9 million in expenses forecast to come in a little bit under budget about 4.6 million this fiscal year in 2023 so the preliminary budget that Michael just discussed with you about 5.6 million in expenses which does include 260,000 in supplemental packages you can see the supplemental request on this side so 260,000 includes one new FTE that's some recycling education we had a question on earlier and then you can see the watershed technician reclass position also being included and that is the future meetings coming up okay any questions seeing none great all right we'll pull up electric and I think Bill is going to present the operational information give me go ahead and share it for you and share what's that let me go and share it for you fix it a second okay thank you good afternoon mr. mayor city council members I am Bill Shepard I am the energy and business services actually executive manager of energy business service at DME and I am here to talk to you about the initial part of our presentation and I figured I'd start out with a little weather related information since it's been a little hot if you haven't noticed so you have to be close to the microphone oh I'm sorry our millions and millions my apology fans it's first time I've been formally up here in front of y'all so I'll get used to the awesome to the digs here so as I said it's been a very interesting weather year for us in the summer and as of about 30 minutes ago we've broken another record but initially Urquhart's record for peak demand was set back in August of 2019 at seventy four thousand eight hundred and twenty megawatts and since June we've broken that record nine times but I've got a scratch through the nine now and say ten because an hour ago we broke it again so as of 340 we're at seventy nine thousand two hundred and eighty five megawatts for Urquhart and for all of you that don't know Urquhart is statewide it's across the entire state so not only is Urquhart breaking records but so is DME so prior to today DME's peak was set at 370 megawatts back in 2018 and yesterday we broke it at 387 officially and then today about 30 minutes ago we broke it again unofficially at 390 megawatts so this heat's been very brutal being a recent transplant from Florida I'm gonna stop saying I left Florida because of the heat because I came into a lot of heat here in Texas so for all the people that have been hearing that drone I will never say it again see all those people have been hearing me yeah yes yeah counselor watts yeah just very quickly no no real explanation needed but in these times like this is the deck running I know it runs typically when we have winter load but is the deck running when we get to this kind of hitting these limits with with Urquhart yes typically speaking when we get to these max amounts of peak demand across the state the price is such that deck is gonna run okay if it's able to run it's gonna run okay all right thank you so another thing too with added temperature and added load become also comes added sales so as of July 11th this year we're about 9% ahead of where we were last year for megawatt hours purchased so just keep that in mind as we continue out through the year we are seeing added sales click what's wrong here there we go thank you all right so Denton Municipal Electric was established about 117 years ago in 1905 incidentally that was 39 years before the city itself incorporated which I thought was a pretty interesting fact we are the sixth largest of the 72 municipal utilities in the state of Texas and you are our governing body and our public utility board is our advisory committee to help us with guidance and direction too so we have a very defined service territory mainly the city core and then outside that city core we have extraterritorial jurisdictions and I will show you those not gone doesn't like me Nick okay so the the light blue in the middle that's DME only service territory the green you see there is double certified territory so in those areas we compete with either on core or co-serve for new development and then in the tan area you see on the outline we compete with both of those utilities for new development so we we certainly go in there with developers and try to gain their business and recently we were able to acquire the hunter coal new development that was going in west of 35 all right so DME's mission is to provide safe and reliable electric and excellent customer service and to that end we're proud to say that this year the American Public Power Association awarded DME with the excellence and safety award we're very proud of that award DME has really stepped up its efforts on safety we've got a three-man crew that has really been doing a really good job getting our baselines going as far as safety is concerned and setting some good goals for the organization we're also have a near-term goal of spending at least one percent of our budget on safety moving forward so at the end of the day we want our employees to go home just as good as they came to work so we want everybody to go home safe and sound okay another thing that we're extremely proud of is our system performance metrics this is called SATY or system average interruption duration index it's a mouthful pretty much to say what the average outages for our customers utilities across the nation use this same metric so it's a good way to compare with other utilities but that orange line on the top there that's the national average as of 2021 that national average was a hundred and thirty four minutes on a typical outage those bars below our DME so you've seen steady improvement years and the lowest we have right there is 2021 in our system average interruption duration index is 33 for 2021 so extremely proud of that and oh this is a good spot to say because I've meant to say it talking about the weather so you should be very proud of your DME staff they're doing such a great job keeping us going especially on these extreme weather conditions like the extreme heat or this winter storms that we've had everybody just does a fantastic job keeping power flowing for our customers here in Denton so we're proud of them as well okay one of the other metrics that we like to show is our DME rate comparison with other Mo use across the state municipal own utilities and if you can see that yellow line that's where we're at and this is using our average 1,000 kilowatt-hour bill so it's a monthly bill and you can see that dotted line that's the average across all the municipal utilities in the state that we compared with and we're about nine dollars below the average per month for those other utilities so we're proud of that there is no planned increases as of now for DME and I want to steal your thunder there Cassie but I think she's going to talk a little bit about that later on but also know too that every single one of those utilities that you see there have pressure to bring those rates up so wouldn't be surprised if during their next fiscal cycles that those bump up a little bit more but ours is going to remain right there for now another thing that we like to compare to since 2021 we've been a hundred percent renewable on the power we provide for our customers and you can see the rate compares for similar offerings across the state so our 100 or 1,000 kilowatt hours cost that same hundred and six dollars a month and the average for that segment is a hundred and eighty seven dollars so we're eighty dollars cheaper per month for similar products that have a 100% renewable power portfolio so you all should be extremely proud of that being able to offer that to customers here in Denton and then the last compare I wanted to show was competitive residential retail offers so this is customers outside of service territory that are in the competitive environment if they were to go lock in a 12-month rate right now they'd be looking at around 18 cents a kilowatt hour and just to contrast that with us we're at about 10.4 so once again I think the the folks here in Denton are very fortunate to be able to have DME service okay here's our sorry that might have been an echo thought somebody said something so here's our organizational chart it's been in place for about a year and a half our senior leadership group there is are the top five bars are led by mr. Puente who's sitting over there and through that senior leadership group we have about a hundred and twenty three years of collective experience for the utility so have a lot of experience and with our seven percent turnover rate we feel we have a lot of stability but there are still challenges that are left to deal with today's competitive market definitely puts challenges to us with the respect of certain areas when I'm on attraction and retaining of employees so we always have a near to the ground on that and this is my last slide so this is our employee count summary if you notice we'll start from the left-hand side this is prior to offering the VSP or the voluntary separation program we had 189 full-time employees at that point the following year through the VSP we reduced 20 employees the next year last year we added four more back and this year you're going to see through our supplemental packages we're asking for eleven more but even after that eleven we're still five below what we were start what we started with back in fiscal year 20 so with that I could turn it over to Cassie unless there's any other or any questions for me questions on this side on this portion of the councilman McGee and we got to pull that down so I can see briefly so I can see the screen yeah yes question go to council thank you thank you mr. mayor um just filled it a question from one of those millions of people that's watching us right now mr. Watts mentioned the deck a minute ago can you just explain the deck for the public please then when the deck is running or whatnot sure so the deck is our Denton Energy Center and it is a series of natural gas engines that run when economically the market is feasible to do so so when we purchase electricity for our customers we purchase it off the ERCOT market we don't purchase it from our deck we purchase it from the market so since we have the deck we can also sell into that same market so when our prices go up for our customers and we have the ability to do so we'll run deck and get some of that those dollars back that we spent on the customers and we try to to do different hedging strategies throughout the year and and make that a financial financially feasible option for us and if you need more explanation we've got mr. Terry Nolte there that can explain it to you as well okay next question if you don't mind can you just briefly kind of explain the role that wind the wind power plays and our electric grid sure so right now there's two renewables that are very prominent here in Texas it's wind and solar and if at any during if at any given day one or both of those don't show up it gets real challenging to supply the need of the grid the load which is what we saw a few days ago when the wind did not show up so normally we're used to seeing about 19,000 megawatts of wind capacity for the state last week we were seeing as low as 600 megawatts so you can tell when that when that doesn't show up there's got to be a lot of things filling in the gap and typically speaking those are plants like that across the state that come on or coal plants across the state or there's some nuclear as well okay and last question if you don't mind you said a seven percent turnover rate yes sir to what do we attribute such an amazing and low turnover rate with the employees on a DME yeah our fantastic leader mr. Tony Puente of course you want to speak to that a little bit I had to twist his arm to get him up here Tony point the DME general manager appreciate the question you know certainly I think our culture at DME is something that's unique we have a lot of folks that have very close ties with each other and we that's actually one way that we recruit a lot of our employees to word-of-mouth you know and so but just I think the overall culture at DME is something that that attracts people here I think also what you'll hear from from folks is that unlike a lot of other utilities that are very specialized in in just transmission or distribution we have kind of all all facets of a utility and so folks come here it's a great training ground you know so while we are very proud of the seven percent turnover I can tell you that in the last couple of months we've seen an uptick in that turnover we've seen employees get attracted to mainly the private sector and some of it has to do with some of the competitive advantage that some of those entities have in compensation and so it's that's something that we're actually looking at very closely right now to be able to fight that back as an example in the last six months we've lost about a hundred and six years of experience in our line operation and we've only been able to refill it with about 13 years of experience and so that's certainly putting a lot of pressure on our staff and it's something that we've that we're working very closely with both the finance department and our HR department and our CMO folks as well to try to bring attention to that but but again I think just overall I think the environment at DME is something that folks are very proud of I joke about this often but I say that I know that there's at least one person at DME that has a tattoo that says DME on their shoulder so I haven't found them yet but I know it's out there so well I just want to say I really appreciate the commitment to safety as a blue-collar worker that one percent that goes a long way toward making sure everybody gets home every day the same way they got to work so I really appreciate that thank mr. mayor any other questions seeing then I just want to give credit where credit's due also DME is is great about their community outreach etc they've they've been responsive when I've asked about Juneteenth parade and and for in the 4th of July parade Tony you'll get a bill for window and a frisbee but hey it's only hit one so yeah but yeah no so thank you all very much for what a great group as he as he said but always very plugged in in the community and in responsive and so thank you for that okay good afternoon mayor council Cassie Ogden I'm gonna give Nick a little break I'm gonna give the the electric financial portion of the presentation so let me share the screen so as you saw with all of the other utilities that were already presented today we have some financial assumptions the forecast as presented to pub in February is based on retail sales so megawatt hours our revenue increases just from rate revenue are two to three percent so that's looking at budget to budget comparison and last year what we were forecasting ROI we have the forecast the performer you'll see in a minute the ROI to general funds or what electric pays to general fund remains at six percent instead of going back to the three and a half percent and obviously this has a impact on the general fund budget so we'll be discussing that more in the upcoming budget workshop but did want to make note of it here as well as the the Texas municipal retirement system so they can the amount that the city contributes for our staff retirement fund is increasing this next year from seventeen point six five percent to eighteen point one five percent you may remember on June 28th we had the CIP but presentation and we talked a lot about the DME backup center project after that conversation and going back and looking at our different options we've we've removed that based on the feedback that we got from council we're looking at a more collaborative approach and other opportunities for synergy for the citywide need for backup centers as well as our outage insurance we know that the the market being what it is we're expecting an increase in our outage insurance so we've we have a placeholder in the budget for that increased expense and then as Bill already talked about the 11 FTE so full-time equivalent so staff that were requesting in this budget that reoccurring total for those staff are one point eight million and we'll talk about that more as we move through the performer and so just a quick overview of the revenues so you can see actuals from last year current year budget and estimate and then preliminary FY 23 budget I just want to note that top line the non-deck base rate revenue it's a mouthful but if that essentially means the facility usage and demand charges that we received revenue we received from the customers the ECA which is the energy cost adjustment revenue that is for all customers that's what they pay in for that that component of the rate non-rate revenue includes some miscellaneous income the data center revenue this is we wanted to put this on a separate line just so you can see what we're estimating for this year as well as next year obviously that's an estimate we're still waiting for that to fully come online but phase one is online and then as we've already talked about the didn't energy center which is the deck revenue that last line so we're preliminary estimating for FY 23 budget to be 399 million in revenue for the expenses and you can see that purchase power line really jumps out at you the 195 million from last year that does include some Winter Storm URI expenses that were not bond funded can remember we had 140 million that were bond funded over 30 years but again that's really based on the market so you can see the preliminary number of 107 million for this upcoming year we're we're seeing as higher temperatures prices go up it costs us more to operate and that's really what's part of what's driving this this forecast the data center purchase power that's an estimate only based on our the phasing plan that the Dana Center has provided us and then you can see all of the other type of operating expenses the personnel services a little different in this fund than other funds especially general fund it's really only five percent of their total operating costs are personnel so the staff costs in this fund are not driving the fund the purchase power the capital program those are what really drives this fund and the increases that you see and then the deck debt is broken out that's 20-year debt the Winter Storm URI debt like I just mentioned a moment ago that's actually 30-year debt so we've tried to normalize that debt over the 30 years but it does increase next year the payment and then we've taken a closer look at our capital program we've discussed this in previous work sessions but really trying to evaluate our funding mechanism for projects so whether the project needs to be revenue funded so cash funded or if it's appropriate to sell debt we've identified 1.1 million in electric projects that we feel like can be cash funded instead of selling long-term debt for and then that 2 million in supplemental requests that's the total reoccurring and one-time expenses that are requested and I'll show you those in just a moment so again as Nick mentioned we do we have for 10-year performance due to space and readability we only we only provide five years but we do project 10 years in the utilities so I did want to mention we we are in the middle of a rate study for electric and while we're not proposing any rate design changes or rate increases this year we will be bringing those back later in the year to talk about some of our recommendations and what the cost of service study is is showing so again you can see the the data center revenue and the data center expenses broken out I did want to point out this year preliminary estimate we are looking at going over our budgeted expenses in the fund again purchase power really driving those expenses but we're keeping an eye on that and we'll be bringing a budget amendment if we get to later in the year we we know we're gonna go may go over budget we'll bring a budget amendment back to council for consideration again no rate changes no rate increases recommended this year really because of the uncertainty with the rate filing that we're going through also the data center project not having a full year of operating we did not want to bring you a rate increase that may change based on the market for next year so we are planning for rate increases in the next three years and you can see that they're the average residential bill increases for 24 is 5% 5% and 25 and then 2% in 2026 and then I did want to know we are falling below our reserve target slightly in 24 and 25 but then jumping up again in 26 to meet that reserve target and we wanted to show you the deck perform a bill kind of already went over the deck and its operations but the deck has been operating since July 11th 2018 so again it's only one portion of our purchase power portfolio but as Bill mentioned if we didn't have the deck we'd have to purchase power from another source so while this looks kind of all over the place you can see from year to year it changes that's really based on the market changes and when the deck runs and when it doesn't run and I'll just briefly go over the the electric the proposed capital plan so the only difference from this plan then when you saw it in June is that that backup data center has been removed so the seventy nine point seven million is proposed for next year's capital program and I did want to note that council approved a line extension policy recently for electric and this policy has a hundred percent of developer contribution in a single certified area that allowed us to reduce the capital program by approximately 9 million so that allowing those those fees to really recover a hundred percent is what we're we're going for again no other changes besides backup data center being removed the last time you saw it so just a quick summary of the major project categories no substantial changes here again total of seventy nine point seven million the distribution substation category this 10.8 million is an increase from what we've historically seen in the CIP that but that's due to some substations being moved up in their timeline and then for FY 23 you can see some of the the major projects that make up that 79 million the Hickory substation there's two lines one is the transmission component the other is the distribution component of that substation we've already talked about the text dot road relocations in water and waste water but similar to water waste water electric has transmission lines that need to be relocated but that expense will be reimbursed by text up and then the underwood substation is related to the hunter coal ranch so that that has moved up in construction timeline compared to the current year CIP so moving on to supplemental requests as we mentioned we have 11 FTEs that we are requesting for electric in next year's budget the top two the GIS administrator GIS business information analysts and business information analysts are all related to tech services so those positions provide back-end support for the GIS function of DME and and do coordinate closely with tech services the next three positions were requesting are related to or from excuse me from the recommended the recommendation from internal audit so you may remember internal audit did a an audit of the emo group and those three positions were a recommendation from that audit in the control room relief operator this is really to help reduce the overall overtime at the deck so to fill in for vacation sick time training things like that the the engineering supervisor they currently have two supervisors in this division one for distribution one for transmission this third one would allow for focused on system planning so fill in the gaps where they need between those two groups the regulatory affairs manager this is something we've seen since winter storm Yuri there's definitely an uptick and more focused on ERCOT and the legislation around the electric utility so this position is really meant to allow DME to have a voice in that in that conversation as well as just really support the staff that we currently have that already have full-time jobs and can't focus on that a hundred percent so allow Terry to to do what he does to support him and give him time that he's not running back and forth to Austin all the time and then one other the two hundred thousand I wanted to note this the energy management organization application support services it's also a mouthful contract this is really contract services to support data analytics for the emo group so a little over two million dollars requested in supplemental requests for this fund and finally the next steps will be bringing follow-up of any of your questions back next week and then have more discussion August 6 during the budget workshop and with that I'll take any questions okay financial questions counselor wants yes if you could go back to the deck performer through that in there just for you I appreciate that and the ROI is not just we'll deal with that yeah right there's fine so and this might be somebody from DME that will need to answer this but based upon that estimate the 2021 - 22 column and the megawatts that that's pretty what is it costing us per megawatt hour in average to produce that you know all in debt service energy everything sure looks like Terry's coming up answer that question because I know this this is supposed to work where you know we can produce it lower than what what we would have to buy it for as a hedge so I'm just curious is that because the gas prices are so high that it's sort of dilutes that particular objective sure Terry Nalty assistant general manager so it's a great question one that we get asked a lot and we don't actually look at the all-in cost so the the debt the fixed cost burdened cost in the dispatch of the deck we only look at the variable cost and so of this slide here the thing that we would take out of the deck expenditures saying you that the fixed costs would be the debt service what would be the other the personnel services materials and supplies would come out as well okay so and and we will be starting to take insurance out because it's becoming a more significant portion of the the facility operation fixed cost on an annual basis right so on a variable basis with current gas prices and gas prices are up probably thirty to fifty percent yes right yes we're averaging between sixty and seventy dollars a megawatt hour to produce variable cost energy and you know we're selling it into the market last week you know it's five thousand dollars so yeah all that all that gross margin the difference between that variable cost and what we actually get is revenue goes to pay that fixed cost fixed cost correct isn't that and that paradigm of just dispatching based upon variable cost that's not unique to DME that's pretty much how most if not all of the energy producers that's that's how they're dispatching that powers they don't include their fixed cost they they look at their variable cost to see is it time to yes now you know some some private entities will include a return to shareholders and okay some other sure costs that are reasonable that are ongoing business costs to come up with what we call the strike price the price at which you'll run the unit yeah well even looking at this SESTA I mean I remember when all these performers were rolling around back because this has now been how when did when was that first brought online what was it 2018 2018 yes so it's been four years I remember that and to what I'm hearing you say is based upon that if we just said that that estimate in that column is exactly how how it happened then the deck net income after all your fixed cost is four point two eight million negative yet if we would had to have bought the purchase power without that offset that number could be that number could be quite larger good question so the four point two eight two million is a budget number at the beginning of the year which we look at forecasted forward power costs yes forecasted future natural gas costs and we calculate what that gross margin is going to be yeah and then take all the fixed costs out of it as well so that did not take into account the fact that gas prices were up significantly from sure April May of last year when we put the budget together and it also did not take into account the fact that power prices are up significantly as well to reflect the price of gas not to mention the conservative market operations that ERCOT has gone into since shuri so the bottom line is we anticipate beating that negative four point two and we'll probably end up with a positive great okay net income for the year can we tell you what that is today no because we still have a great deal of the summer yet to go and you know knock on wood the units out there run dependably and we don't have to spend a lot of money on emergency repairs and things like that we do have the outage insurance to protect against a major catastrophe for example so every year as we go into the budget we always end up looking at at a net income number that looks relatively negative you know negative yeah that's not necessarily a complaint because I mean when you really think about it you're getting the facility you know 20 200 megawatt facility that in the end you know it's it's used as a hedge so if you can break even on it make a little money here and that's all in fixed costs and everything does the insurance cover and a an event like the winter storm we had or is that is that an act of God and it doesn't cover that or is that too complicated so questions no that's a great question before I get to that that question though I just want to point out that even though we you know the positive net income that we might achieve that that's offset remember by the fact that this is one component of our power supply portfolio sure and so while we're selling to the market at a high price we're also buying from the market at that same high price and the deck as it was originally envisioned was a hedge against right when the wind doesn't blow and when the sun doesn't shine and it works great for that I think a year and a half ago or so I gave a presentation to the council about if we didn't have it what would it cost and about 18 million dollars a year two years ago it was about 18 million dollars per year yeah an additional cost that we'd have to pay right so even at negative four it's still a great deal for us so one last question mayor if I may and you don't if this is proprietary by the way the insurance it would have covered a yuri event but at the time we did not have outage insurance for the winter because the real demand period is in the summer now now we've changed that policy sure now and you saw nine hundred thousand of additional insurance expense it's to exactly ensure scar tissue I mean it's all it's all scar tissue just curious and it doesn't have to be this very second but like today on a day like today time similar to this what are that what are the what are the costs or what is the power cost on Urquhart right now not necessarily what I mean I guess if we're buying it we got to pay it but do you know have any idea what it is yeah right now I think the price even though we're kind of record demand because the winds blowing very very strongly in the market prices are probably in the hundred to two hundred dollar per megawatt range on on the day we asked for for conservation last week the two days it was running at five thousand dollars for about three hours so there's a lot of variability not really a spline man wonderful thank you so much appreciate it okay any other questions comes from a key thing mr. mayor so just one quick question is text not funding the the pipeline movement within the 35 expansion the are you talking about for water or wastewater electric so we will relocate if it's if it's required of Texas and I may need Becky to help me or Jerry we will relocate our infrastructure and then they will reimburse us a portion sometimes all of the costs Jerry do you want to Jerry filter engineering division manager so how it works with text odd is we have to go ahead and prepare an estimate and try to figure out how much is going to cost to do the entire work then we have to front the money and during that process we're negotiated with text thought about what they're gonna pay back for us if it's a one-for-one they pay back a hundred percent but they if something they say is better mint like I have a you know line that can handle a hundred amps and I want to put in a line that can handle 200 amps well they say well no that's better me we're not gonna pay for that portion we'll just pay for the hundred but yeah it's typically at the end of it everything gets kind of trued up and they reimburse us back for the cost of that project okay all right any other questions mayor for Tim thank you mr. mayor so in the sorry in the early part of the discussion the for the planning for the backup was to look for synergies with with other departments but certainly that that those those data backups are where necessary which is why you were proposing them we're gonna be able to fulfill that once I can't Billy can you turn him up at all it's a little faint yeah or maybe you can adjust your vote I don't know we can't hear you that well but go ahead turn it up there you go go ahead go ahead is that is that better better yes thanks all right so at the beginning of the conversation we were we were talking about the data center backups and those weren't needed or how if we're not if we're not doing that that data center renovation anymore we're pushing kicking that can down the road a little bit or looking for other synergies elsewhere are we still meeting our our data backup obligations in the next budget year I think Terry's gonna come answer that question yes so when we the original budget it envisioned quite a bit of money to go out and build a new remote data center backup center that center is not needed just for DME related items or other city departments that need backup data center as well and we also need to have that to be geographically remote from Denton so in the event that we had some catastrophic weather event that destroyed our current data center that backup wouldn't be affected so what we are doing working with other departments to determine whether or not there's an opportunity to use one of these commercially this commercial backup data centers that are in the DFW market and do that on a more on a expense annual expense rather than a capital expense to invest in that does that answer your question no that's perfect and that's wise and and I encourage you to do that I will say that any closer than this and I have a conflict of interest this issue so let me back up and then I have two more questions and one was do we have an estimate as as we've had increasing weather related events do we have an estimate for what those costs are to the to the budget in terms of maintenance costs the budget currently includes estimates up to mid-june so as conditions change through July August September we will continue to refine those estimates will bring bring you back another estimate if possible during the budget workshop in August but this this is our our best estimate for the summer months it keeping in mind that these these temperatures are record breaking right now right but yes exactly we have we have accounted for those summer months in our estimates all right and and the the last question I have is it gets to Michael Gagne's department sustainability a little bit and some of the five percent discounts are discounts decreases and that goes to when we're talking about the the cost for our strike prices that that Terry was mentioning earlier where you know when when we run the deck those don't really include the the impacts of additional they include the costs of the fuel but not the the long-term carbon impacts and so is is is there an estimate that we're having for the way these are impacting our goals and or and if the answer is no but we can get it then then I'd like to see that in our future budget workshop okay I think Tony's gonna come answer that question for you so Tony point the DME general manager councilmember I believe that some of those metrics are actually included in the reporting that Michael Gagne's group does when they're looking at total overall environmental impacts in the community and so they account for you know things such as the decks impact and you know things like rooftop solar that that they're being done and expanding certainly in the community and so those are all factored into the the reporting that sustainability does that's something that DME is doing independently all right thank you I appreciate that all right any other questions seeing none one thing I would like to see just from from a for the budget workshop because I think it's important on that and I would see it fitting in just after the slide that compares the other municipal electrics and I think it's a slide on the boards because for example we're compared to San Antonio but San Antonio again we're drastically underpaid because their board makes millions right and so I think that's a number that's important right because it's all ratepayer funded and so I'd love to see us capture that at least best we can whatever is available public knowledge but I think it's important to convey that to our ratepayers that here's millions of that we're saving you and it's going to the bottom line or going upgrades or whatever but I think that's an important distinction it's not apples to apples at least on that metric so I think that's important to to bake in to give give credit where credits do so okay very good thank you thank you and good job Bill by the way thank you very much welcome yeah all right yes I need to make one clarification if I could Krista Foster was panicked she and she's going to change it and put it in the Friday report but she wanted to make sure that she was clear and answering Councilmember Byrd's question regarding the pay agreements they had it already to implement but discovered that the pay agreements were defined by an ordinance so we're gonna have to take that ordinance that'll come back to you to allow for multiple agreements and to allow for arrangements prior to you know the receipt of a late fee so that we handle it and get it cleared up but she is she is kind of operating outside the ordinance right now but wanted we want to help people and that's why we're continuing to do it but we're going to clean it up and come back and let council approve it okay thank you anything else Nick all right very good so let's take dinners here so we'll take a we have the next three work sessions plus closed session so we need to do this pretty quick so you grab food you can eat in here we'll be back up and running at four fifty five we'll be on during our work session the next item is item B which is ID 2 2 1 4 3 receive report hold a session and give staff direction regarding the procedure for call-in comments and public meetings okay so this is just a brief presentation on call-in comments for public meetings at particularly council and planning and zoning and we're seeking some council direction at the very end to give it a little bit of a background prior to the COVID-19 pandemic public comment for council and PNZ meetings was received in person in person only and then of course in spring of 2020 we moved to virtual council meetings and moved to virtual meetings for our boards and commissions as well and members of the public could no longer come in in person so as a what was hoped at the time to be or what was expected at the time to be a temporary measure we implemented a process for people to phone in with their comments for council meetings at the time that process that we put together on very short notice you slot utilize a very complex soft phone procedure and required a dedicated staff person to manage it allowed for the calls to be received just prior to the start of the meeting and during the council meeting before any individual item was called or any item they want that a person wanted to speak on was called and that replaced the in-person experience that was not available at the time currently we still use a call-in system as of April 19th we deployed a more reliable system through Teletown Hall so we had ongoing issues with the soft phone again it was very complex it resulted in delays resulted in drop calls and it was challenging to patch them into the meeting on a regular basis without some sort of a failure or issue so in moving to Teletown Hall we have now a seamless integration into the meeting with no delays for any of our callers and we began using this for both council and PNZ meetings one of the things that we do want to point out with this technology is that it does allow for pre-registration and with that any community member who is interested in speaking on any item can pre-register ahead of the meeting and we have tested this out over the last couple of months where as soon as the agenda is posted on Friday a person in the public can look at it say I want to go talk on that item right there you would fill out an easy web form you would have instructions emailed to you in the system would call to you and when the meeting starts you pick up the phone it says you're about to join the city of Denton council meeting and when you join you can hear everything through your phone and the great thing about this is is that when it's your time to speak you get we actually unmute you you get a message that says that is your time to speak and you just talk and you might notice in the last couple of meetings we've not had the delays that council probably remembers from times before we call on the person and they're right there ready to go even with this we have some ongoing challenges with our council call-in process one of the things and we'll show some data here in a second is your low utilization and we really attribute this to the fact that we have not only gone back to in-person meetings where people can provide their comments in person which a lot of people prefer to do to speak to council face-to-face we also have e-comments so you'll notice that you know you get emails with comments on particular agenda items that was a feature that was not available before the pandemic that we rolled out within the last two years additionally another challenge is staff resources so a staff person when we take calls through the meeting during the meeting and and not with a pre-registration only setup we require a staff person to be on hand by a phone whether we receive calls or not that is often in the evening and as council knows that often goes to a very late hour and so it becomes an additional challenge as this one person who we have do this is tasked with not only receiving calls but also patching them into the meeting and being attentive to the meeting so that they know when to unmute the right person for the right item and when these two things happen concurrently it causes confusion delays another challenge that we've identified is the cost so the cost to use Teletown Hall is force 475 per meeting and that's unlimited meeting length and an unlimited number of callers the cost is the same whether there are zero callers or multiple callers if we keep things open so if we have a pre-registration only system we at a certain designated time we would say there are no registered callers we don't need to use this service this evening and we would pay nothing but if we continue to take calls during and through the meeting we would have to leave that open and pay that cost even if there were no calls for that particular meeting so I did promise some statistics these are since January of 2022 what you'll see are the calls that we've had for council meetings February 15th is notable that was I believe when we had our public hearing on the non-discrimination ordinance but a fair number of these are have no callers at all the vast majority of them are three or less callers the only other high mark is on June 28th when we did have the resolution and about 50 speakers total on the resolution for reproductive rights and I'll note it's written in there but I'll note that Planning and Zoning Commission they have not had a single call-in comment in 2022 but each one of those meetings twice a month we've had a staff member wait by the phone on the chance that someone may call because we continue to have we continue to leave open the ability for people to call during the meeting to give a comment and what staff is recommending is that we we focus on pre-registration that is something that's available from the time the agenda hits the website up until a designated time just before the meeting and we discontinue our in-meeting calls of course the benefits public has four to five days to register that is a lot of time to understand the agenda and we could set a standardized time like I said where it would that would be the cut-off it could be noon it could be when the work session starts we would develop that we would only pay for the meeting and staff costs if there are callers registered so again you know sometimes these are not salary staff doing this although they do pay a cost in hours these are overtime costs that we pay for staff to sit and wait by a phone it would be still a single simple call-in process for the public easy to communicate and it would be highly sustainable in the long term so I do have a summary slide that just kind of says the things I just told you but I'll pull this down answering a question for the council might have but this is staff recommend staff's recommendation to focus on pre-registration and discontinue in meeting calling comments all right questions for staff so to clarify residents who wish to comment on an item after the meeting has begun will still have the e-comment they still have the e-comment and they can come in in person as well okay thank you correct any other questions see you none may pretend thank you mr. mayor my question was really similar I was a little confused is it is it the the start of the meeting or noon or or when is the cutoff so we've not developed that yet that's something that we want to discuss discuss internally it might be a certain number of hours before the meeting start time since our start our meetings don't always start at the same time and but that would be something that staff would would look at the information we have and and and develop whatever that cutoff would be but if council has a particular direction they want to give us we can we can accept that as well okay I I think it's you guys are trying real hard to to be cautioned cost conscious and cost mindful while still promoting new democratic processes and I appreciate that I don't I don't have a particular direction at this time although I would think noon might be a little early maybe not for a two o'clock item but for a 630 item if we could somehow roll that back a minus four or something like that that's very ad hoc and not really my direction but something that is closer to the actual event item would be my preference that's good feedback thank you anyone else Councillor McGuire thank you I think I'm ready to provide direction I maintain some concerns about making it harder to address council but I think that if if we're I think that the e-comment system is really easy to use and I think that that since we're maintaining that that allays some of my concerns so my direction is is to follow staff recommendation with the caveat that the later the cutoff can be the better you know I recognize I'm sure that the vendor will have you know what we'll have some say in how much notice they need before they will not charge the city we don't need their services so whatever the latest time is that that we can give them that information that would be the better and then my other direction is just make sure that we're you know you're always great about communicating with the public but make sure that we're communicating this change to the public and especially to folks who who frequently call in absolutely and I it wasn't the presentation about our goal is when we get to this process if that is the direction it's it's a very simple process and our feeling to communicate and our goal is to do similar to what we had done in the past when we rolled this out in 2020 but to have a big push on communications to let people know that this is an option for them yeah. Anyone else? Councilman Byrd? I appreciate the the option as well Councilman Councilwoman McWire noted but I'm thinking about if we can look into at least about 430 so we can let the folks that are not salaried you know that has to take on this position so they can go ahead and go home if that's as close to that as possible that's what I'm thinking in my head right now gotcha but other than that that's the only thing I would have wanted to add to the conversation thank you alright Councilman Davis a little bit of direction one thing that's positive for me I think was the fact that PNZ was not getting calls and anecdotally I can't think of a time that we got a call on a public hearing item that was a PNZ type item that from a neighborhood or we had to have some developers that call in that's a different situation than what we're talking about they'll sometimes have an engineer on standby or something that calls in I don't know if we save anything by dropping the kind of standby for PNZ or if it's just a service that's out there that we use on a per meeting basis whenever we need it if there is a savings and not providing that for even kind of standby till noon or 430 or whatever for PNZ I'd be okay with dropping that as well because I know they're still getting lots of good comments and feedback they're just not getting it through this through this route thank you okay anyone else okay well then you you have direction that's and then I'll just add to that's a fair point Councilmember Davis makes because look at Ranch Estates which was a highly contentious issue and PNZ received zero calls that's that's noteworthy when you're talking about traditional council discussions and writing all right that's our bread and butter zoning issues development etc and we got zero calls to PNZ and that was the entire neighborhood mobilized so it's a great point thank you okay thank you very much appreciate you bringing that to us takes us to item C ID 2 2 I mean pardon me ID 2 1 2 8 0 5 receive an update regarding the Denton County Transit Authority from the city of Denton DCTA board representative hello Allison McGuire Denton City Councilmember district 4 and DCTA board representative I'm just here to give you a quick update on some of recent decisions that have been made at DCTA some things that are coming up for us so as I know that a lot of you know there have been ongoing staffing challenges at DCTA as there have been most places so I want to give you an update on the timeline for those hires we are currently in the middle of the first round of interviews for a permanent CEO we should have our new CEO onboarded in September at which point we will begin the hiring process for a new CFO and I think those are probably the key staffing issues let me have any I'm gonna go ahead and take questions as I go does anybody have any questions regarding staffing or the hiring timeline for CEO and CFO well and you could just well because we got to toggle back and forth I'm just gonna ask you to finish then come back to me I'm gonna go ahead and ask you a couple of questions I'll ask you to finish then because I can't see okay and that would take a lot of time all right so we are on the same fiscal year that the city's on and we have begun our budget process just a really quick like 50,000 yard view of the budget process revenues are anticipated revenues for the coming year approximately 71 million fifty five point seven eight percent of that is sales tax and for for the coming fiscal year I think it's noteworthy that two point two nine percent of revenues are farebox revenues from from the bus system and one point eight two percent are farebox revenues from GoZone just so that we're kind of understanding where the revenue comes from okay this is hey hey I kind of took photos and pasted them to try and condense just the most relevant information from 2021 fiscal year 22 and fiscal year 23 just looking at revenues revenues are were well up in 22 largely because of grant funding being being way up and the federal government making some exceptions regarding how DCTA can use that grant funding and then expenses capital sources debt service I really want to draw attention to ending fund balance minus our required fund balance and then net available fund balance so you know obviously we're going to be ending this fiscal year with a fund balance of nearly 90 million dollars we're looking to draw that down somewhat in the next fiscal year but minus the the required fund balance that's based on the operations of maintenance reserve policy we in this current fiscal year we have approximately 76 million and the next fiscal year we will have approximately 61 million dollars of fund balance that is not programmed that is not budgeted for and that is not part of our required fund balance trip so the trip program is essentially a a almost a refund program of our sales tax dollars that aren't getting spent so the trip budget is calculated in this way our fifteen percent of DCT is not available fund balance from the previous fiscal year goes into the trip fund and then the trip five percent of that trip fund is set aside for DCT and program administration and the remaining ninety five percent is allocated back to member cities which are the city of Denton city of Lewisville in the city of Highland village based on the sales tax contributions that each city made so this is a last year and the coming years trip allocations but we had a rollover of nine hundred and six thousand approximately so our trip budget for this past fiscal year was about three point nine million and we are using it at our last board meeting the DCTA board of directors approved trip funding requests from the city of Denton in the amount of three million nine hundred and eighty thousand five hundred and seventy eight for the following projects and I really want to shout out capital project staff for putting together a really a really comprehensive plan that draws on a lot of different funding sources I think that if somebody were to just look at our trip application they would say this is a lot of disjointed a little piece of sidewalk here a little piece of sidewalk there but it really is part of a comprehensive sidewalk connectivity program and I think it represents very savvy use of various funding sources we have a performance dashboard that is live and available to the public let's see if this link works oh let's try it so if you go oh no it's not going to work okay but you can just on your own device pull up DCTA net slash dashboard and and check it out you can it's a really robust tool you can look at ridership data across all modalities it includes not just go zone but also the denton connect fixed routes UNT fixed routes a train I believe vanpool is on there as well although I don't have it in front of me but it's a very comprehensive and thorough and I recommend checking it out here's a screenshot of the go zone portion of the dashboard just to kind of give folks a sense of where we're at well wait a second yeah so okay different order so that that's where we're at right now seat unavailability was up quite a bit prior to a funding decision that was made at the April board meeting safety update so we have FTA incidents and non-FTA incidents an FTA qualifying incident is one in which a vehicle is completely disabled and or an individual needs to receive medical treatment this is for for go zone only so we've had in in April and May zero FTA incidents I know that some of you are aware that last month this is this graphic is obviously a couple months old last month there was an FTA qualifying incident a go zone driver wrecked on Fort Worth Drive the vehicle was disabled but there were no injuries thank goodness we also are tracking non FTA incidents so fender benders where nobody goes to the hospital and the car can be driven off the site we're tracking those incidents as well so in March average wait times were go zone we're up to twenty eight point two minutes and just for clarification if a customer if a rider opens the go zone app and requests a ride and the estimated time is 30 minutes or more that that rider will be told that there are no seats available so an average wait time of twenty eight point two minutes means that like it's it's pretty likely that that a very significant number of the people who are requesting a ride cannot get one so on our at our April 28th meeting we voted for to one to amend the task order with via to provide additional service hours through the end of the first contract here we we will need to look again in the current budgeting process at how much we're we're allocating for that service in the coming fiscal year but we did pass a budget amendment of approximately 1.4 million with the goal of reducing wait times and seat unavailability we now also have service level agreements included in our contract with via which we did not have before so our service level agreements are now that we are expecting goes on to provide a 15 minute or less average wait time less than 5% seat unavailability messages and then less than five minutes average call wait time because via does handle customer service calls for goes on as well fewer than 2% of rides associated with a complaint and that means a complaint in the app and then fewer than one FTA qualifying traffic incident per 100,000 miles driven so to look at kind of what the progress has been since that expansion was launched the additional 1.4 million so van hours have increased from before the additional funding we had 3,224 van hours per month I'm sorry per week excuse me and now we are up to 4,174 ridership has increased significantly from about 11,000 per week to almost 15,000 per week as of about a month ago seat unavailability has gone down from 15% or for well from a high of 18% in early March to now it is at 5% per week those are not rolling averages and propose ETA is still we're not hitting our key performance indicators on that but that's where we're at I think it's very noteworthy that we're seeing an uptick in ridership at the end of the school year and I think time time will tell how the system will handle the influx of students in the fall and whether the requested budget increase for go zone will be able to to cover that increased demand so here's here's what the the request will be for the coming budget year for year two of the contract our current baseline is about 9.4 million it's likely that that via will be requesting an increase of almost a million dollars in order to increase vehicle hours by about 10 I'm sorry by about 22,000 vehicle hours all right we are currently in the midst of a comprehensive operations and fare structure analysis we are considering a new go zone fare structure and we're also considering changes to debt and connect fixed routes so first to look at fare structure this is just kind of an overview of what our current fare structure is so all fixed route buses and the a train cost $1.50 to ride you can get an AM pass or a PM pass local fare reduced cost is available to seniors and it's also available to social service agencies DCTA sells half price passes to social service agencies for them to distribute to their clients DCT also sells day passes for three dollars which are can be used on any modality and you can see the rest of the passes there goes on is still currently under the promotional fare of 75 cents per ride that was of course always intended to be a temporary promotional fare and so now we are in discussions regarding what that fair should look like moving forward so we have not made a final decision yet we will be making a final decision at our July board meeting regarding the go zone fare structure the majority of the board expressed support for maintaining the current fare structure for connect an a train there there has been some discussion about going fare free on fixed routes and on the a train but that discussion has been sort of put on the shelf for the time being regard in light of all the other changes that are happening across the agency the majority of the board expressed support for a hybrid fare structure on go zone so in the Louisville and Highland Village zone a majority of the board expressed support for a dollar fifty flat fare per ride the reason for maintaining that that flat base fare and not having a mileage fee in the Louisville and Highland Village zone is because the Louisville Highland Village zone now no longer has a fixed route bus service those that service was eliminated entirely in December so go zone is essentially the only option other than the a train for residents of that zone in the Denton zone we do still as of now have a fixed route bus system and we want to encourage riders in the Denton zone to use go zone as a first and last mile solution and the proposal that that the board is is pursuing in order to encourage that is charging a dollar fifty base fare and then for rides that are four miles or longer charging a per mile fee with a maximum of five dollars the reason for the maximum of five dollars is because span charges six dollars for a ride and we want to make sure that we're being competitive with those types of services and the reason for the the four mile cutoff is that our consultants at via have shared that rides that are longer than four miles tie up vehicles they make everyone wait longer and they make everyone's ride more expensive so the more we can encourage folks to take short rides on go zone and use goes on to transfer to the train or to the bus the more efficient our system is going to be so fixed bus routes the board will be making a decision at the July board meeting regarding fixed bus routes there was board consensus not to add any fixed press routes in Lewisville during this fiscal year there again we haven't made any final decisions but board consensus was to narrow our options down to what what we're calling alternatives C D E F and G with the the caveat that all options except for alternative G should include a cost neutral extension of route 3 to include a stop in front of the new our daily bread facility on 288 so the reason that alternative G would not include an extension of route 3 to stop in front of our daily bread is because alternative G involves eliminating route 3 so alternative C this is is the first option that the board will be considering it will involve a 44% reduction in the operating cost of the debt and connect system it would discontinue off-peak service after 5 p.m. on route 2 but increase frequency on on route 2 and on route 3 as well it would eliminate routes 4 & 5 on route 6 it would disconnect to discontinue Saturday service but run 33 minute headways on weekdays route 7 would not involve a change in the hours but would increase frequency to 30 minutes during peak times 40 minutes at midday and 60 minutes on Saturdays alternative D involves a change to the routing of route 2 and bring it down to 20 minute frequencies route 3 would extend hours and increase frequency and again it doesn't show it on the map here but board consensus was if we went with this alternative that we would add a stop in front of the our daily bread facility on route 3 routes 4 & 5 would be eliminated route 6 would increase frequency and extend evening service routes 7 would increase frequency and to 20 minutes throughout the day on weekdays and 45 minutes on Saturdays alternative E and is very similar to alternative D but it involves only increasing frequency on route 6 & 7 this is essentially that same proposal but with an extension to route of route 3 to our daily bread so really enough for the same at this point alternative G I'm sorry I had to like take a screenshot of from YouTube of this one this involves eliminating route 2 3 4 & 5 but running routes 6 & 7 on increased frequency there's kind of a summary of all of the the different options compared to one another are there any questions all right questions counselor watts and counselor McGee counselor McGuire on the options what exactly are y'all using as ridership data to make those decisions in other words what's what's the metrics so we're looking at a few different metrics and I can pull that up and give you a more detailed answer if I can pull up my good reader so we are looking at ridership boardings per hour total we're looking at boardings per hour by block of day and we are you'll notice that some of those some of the slides include a something called a productivity factor right alternative C is running on a 50% productivity factor and that's essentially comparing revenue hours to operating cost to current ridership now that that 50% productivity factor or 60% productivity factors as is the case with some of the other alternatives is based on the assumption that ridership will remain the same so so I guess because I pulled up the DCTA board packet I guess it was of the June meeting I guess yeah June meeting and so I see that they've got a table in there that describes each route with its average weekday productivity and then it breaks it out between the the times of day and so when I look at this and I understand that these numbers are boardings per hour they're not people per hour but and so boarding is defined as someone gets on the bus that's one boarding they get off that's you don't count it they get back on the bus at the boarding and they get off so typically if you're taking a bus to go somewhere conservatively you're taking it to get back so these boardings could almost be interpreted into actual people by dividing it by two so when I do that when I look at the routes and I'll just tell you I mean I think we need to give some direction here because I'm in total agreement with at least route three being maintained because route 3 has two main stops and that is served in or that area over there that does provide social services and the the junction which will be the new facility my only question about route 3 as I see it drawn is it takes this big loop around May Hill Road which there's really nothing there I mean there's some apartments but but it makes this big loop and then it comes back to the Transit Center I just I don't think and in route 3 is looking at 5.1 boardings per hour average well that's two and a half people or yeah about two and a half people per hour on route 3 route 6 goes out to it looks like Discovery Park it circles around TW which is North Elm to Bell which is walking distance pretty much for the school I have no idea why it goes out to Discovery Park because there's already a UNT route that goes out to Discovery Park and from what you showed on the fare box or the fare potential fare charges you can ride any UNT bus and you can ride any DCTA connect or ridership so I guess I'm just concerned how I mean when I look at this data I mean route 2 is I'm gonna reduce it to people per hour because that's really I mean it's two people per hour route 3 is two and a half people route 4 & 5 I think are being discontinued from all those options at least from what I can gather is that correct correct route 6 is three people route 7 is really the only one that I mean well I say the only one it's got about four people per hour on average at least according to the DCTA data so I'm not quite sure how other than just wanting to maintain some of the fixed routes which I understand what kind of criteria they're going to be using to make a decision as far as this is our metrics outside of these special services that we're providing out at the junction I get that that's needed in fact quite honestly I'm not sure where it fits in here but some of these show route 3 ending at 5 o'clock I think that's a mistake I think it needs to go to whatever time the junction and some of those places you know there's some time where people arrive that they either can't leave and come back in or something but you can't have access to that facility end at 5 o'clock so and just just a little bit of data for from the board packet in May believe is May DCTA connect had 6700 boardings which is about 138 people per day of course goes on is almost at 50,000 boardings which translates into some other people so I'm so thankful that you all spent the money to provide that amendment to help go zone meet their demand because we're experiencing growing pains with that and we need to find a way to do and we had the gentleman that came down to us and he talked about his problem goes on we had somebody get dropped off and had to walk back I think somebody needs to recommend is called a hot shot service in the construction business that's where if you're building a house and you're running out of lumber and your crew is standing there you can call that facility and you can actually get somebody to hot shot out to you that lumber I think they need to have a standalone set of vehicles that are upon a certain basis of emergency criteria they are dispatched directly to wherever this person is instead of having to go through the regular dispatch because I think that would provide some opportunity to alleviate some of these these situations that are really just not acceptable and that might be one of the ways to do it instead of having to wait for somebody else to come along get you because you already got forgotten at one time so I applaud the board for what they're doing and for how they're trying to really figure this out I guess my question to you as the representative is you've looked at all the data you've certainly been an advocate of no bus cuts there's no question about that I mean that's that's that's not anything which that's fine given this you know what are your thoughts on where outside of this council giving a specific direction which I don't think there's probably consensus to do that on seven alternatives but you know what are you using as your data to make a decision on something that you've certainly advocated against and to try to figure out what is in the best interest of the agency regarding the connect and I mean connect services in September of 2021 carried sixteen thousand five hundred boardings may sixty seven hundred and that's not all due to go so I mean it's just not so I'm just curious you know how do you how does this lay out in front of you and and what are you using as the criteria as you deliberate this taking into consideration you know council's input the community's input and things such as that absolutely I think for the question councilmember Watts so my concern and our consultants at via were really the the ones who brought this this concern to the surface with the the options that they were recommending or the or placing before us because they the our consultants did not recommend one of these options over any others but our consultants did let us know that although it is difficult to predict what the impact would be because the modeling is quite complex it's highly likely that any eliminations of any routes would result in lower ridership on the bus system and the reason is that a bus system is a network unless you happen to be traveling from a place that's very near one stop on one route to a place that's very near another stop on an on the same route you are going to have to make multiple transfers and the fewer routes that there are the fewer opportunities there are for people to make those transfers get where they need to go so essentially any cuts to routes any eliminations of any routes would be more or less slowly starving the system of riders what I would advocate for would be a complete redesign of the network but that is not a feasible option this fiscal year that's something that is going to take at least a year probably longer to implement so I don't have exact data to give you again because we don't have access to that kind of complex modeling related to what the elimination of routes would do to ridership but I think it's a very very safe bet that eliminating routes would discourage people from using the system because it will make the system harder to use and you know as far as folks who who need to use the system because they have to be at work at a certain time a lot of those folks do not feel like they can rely on GoZone because GoZone very frequently runs late very frequently doesn't show up very frequently strands them so you know if they're going somewhere just for fun maybe they can take GoZone but if somebody is trying to get to work and they know they're gonna lose their job if they don't show up on time they need to have access to a reliable and frequent fixed bus yes so do you have data on what you just described as far as how many people have been have got to get to work I mean because when you talk about ridership going down I mean I just have to be honest I mean when you're at two to three people per hour and four at the at the most on your most heavily traveled route even as it sits now in other words you don't make any changes that's the data so I guess is I'm just trying to understand what it is what the position is how many people not riding the bus or riding the bus warrants it either to stay or warrants it not to stay and if it's like hey I think if there's one person riding in an hour that's okay for me to keep funding that and that's all right if that's people's opinion I know that in the data to DCTA data of the June board meeting the cost per vehicle revenue hour for a connect is a hundred and basically seven dollars and the cost per vehicle revenue hour for goes on was fifty dollars and eighty cents so naturally if you got more people riding the bus that you're gonna it's gonna become more cost-effective right so that's my only thought I mean I don't have a decision in this you guys have to make that decision come I guess it's not this week but next week and those are just some of the comments I have because I agree route three needs to stay I think it could be configured a little differently I have no idea while route six is going out to Discovery Park and I just would be curious as to what the data where these people are coming from especially since you have a route that goes out there but you know those are my thoughts I think it's I applaud the board for taking the initiative to help goes on to and and it's done it's done its job from what I can tell from the data you know it's it's lowered the time the wait times are still a little high but it's lowered the seat availability and I think as you work through this you know you'll have to depend on how much money more needs to go in order to help lower that that wait time but there's more people riding public transportation now in the city of Denton than almost ever before especially I mean even before pre-pandemic and there's more people who are riding it who didn't have an opportunity or it wasn't convenient for them even with the full-fledged fixture out system that I guess the only one we're missing is what one one is the only one that's been cut right from recently yeah yeah so yeah so we're only missing one so no I appreciate I appreciate the presentation and it's good data and it's it's a it's a high elevation but I just needed to understand what criteria you're looking at to try to determine what does and if you say hey I don't think we should cut anything fair enough I got it yeah I mean I think I think another way to ask that that same question is we have a system that's ineffective do we want to make it worse or do we want to keep it as bad as it is now that's another way to think about it yeah that's it's that's assuming that the assumption that it will decrease ridership will will come to pass again and the only reason I have a response to that is when you're at two people per hour or three people per hour to decrease ridership to two people per hour or I mean you're almost now talking de minimis I mean it's just but I understand and and that's I mean I trust the board's decision in that regard I just needed to share some of my observations on at least the data I read yep okay so we are out of time for this item but I want to know about that no worries no worries it was presentation was was significant as well so here's I guess it's if there's questions that people want to note but we do have to keep it moving because we have three closed sessions and we have less than an hour to get into chambers so that being said do we want to if you have questions that you want to note and Councilman McGuire can get those answered via email staff can help email out everyone's questions and we can track those answers all together so I'll open the floor for questions and then we're gonna move on so questions to be noted anyone councillor Davis thanks mayor just a couple one of them is on the accidents obviously we're not going to ask somebody who's at fault because there are liability questions involved there but it would be helpful to know there are few enough of them be helpful to know a little bit more the dynamics of the accidents the collisions or I guess I should say FTA events because some of them aren't necessarily right then also on the alternative slides it listed revenue hours at $106 per hour and it read like that was bus system wide connect system wide that that's the the anticipated revenue for any annualized averaged out operating hour and my question if that if I'm reading that correctly on the slide but that's how much money is made in any given hour I'm sorry can you repeat that question yeah revenue hours so a revenue hour is an hour that a vehicle is in service not necessarily how much money it is taking in or costing but there was a number at the bottom of the alternative slides that was a revenue hour annualized and averaged out at $106 yes that is how much it costs to operate the vehicle cost per revenue per revenue I got it thank you and then my last one was if we could get some kind of summary of the discussion on Fairbox it was ironic that there is a newspaper reporting about how much money it takes costs to bring in fair receipts Fairbox receipts I've been saying this for years we're spending a lot of money to collect next to no money and the argument is that you can't let people ride free because then they'll ride it all day long for free and it's like if I'm paying for somebody if I'm myself tax dollars are already subsidizing it fine I'll subsidize to use it as a cooling center or a warming center or whatever let people ride the bus and we might actually see some ridership and maybe some better grant funding but just a little summary on the on that would be help thank you so much anyone else counselor McGee thank Mr. Mayor I'll be free brief thank you for your work on this committee so just for the record real quick four and five are gone in every option right all of the options that are being considered by by a majority of the board yes I I I recommended maintenance of routes for in five but I was the only board member okay no just want to be clear thank you that for that very much I'd like to know if there's been any discussion on the board among making those social service agencies who get reduced reduced fee vouchers making those free available available not something that we have discussed on the board but that's something that I'd be happy to discuss with staff and see if we can bring that before at the board okay thank you and and I'll just tell you real quick background the reason why I asked is because and perhaps you can speak to this and an email form if you like as well the perception of DCT and the community is that this organization is not financially solvent but the reality is that they look like they're in pretty good shape based off information you have you have showed us I would just like to know what the difference is between the perception and the reality in the community why it exists from a board member in your own estimation so feel free to respond whenever however you you you see fit about that thank you mr. mayor this this may be a bit speculative but I would guess that that the public sees that not a lot of money is being spent on provision of service especially in regard to fixed bus routes and and they are assuming that that is because funds are not available okay any other questions okay yeah may I pretend thank you mr. Merritt yeah I'll just sort of say my questions and let in the interest of time also you feel free to answer whatever the mayor and you two feel like it seems with the elimination of four and five we're just writing off North Denton which hey magically I represent and and so I will just say the that's a lot of the comments that I've been getting from our constituents in North Denton is um well I guess we don't matter and and what's going on there and and I guess that that if so if we if I could get a summary of what the thoughts of the board were on why we're building lots of thoughts of multifamily in certain areas of Denton County and and and not attempting to connect network up of those multifamily folks that would be most in need of of fixed route and then I guess the other question that I would have is it seems like to solve the problem we keep throwing more and more Gozone at it and but but as I recall one of the board members meetings as well as an article in the paper that was essentially what we're having is is goes on creep where to solve a problem we have to throw another million and a half at it and to solve the next problem we have to throw another million and a half at it to the point where you know although that was the budget for the fixed route in the first place that weren't that we're getting slowly starved to death and not not directed to routes that would connect them up between retail and multifamily is so so yeah I'm getting to my point mr. mayor and and that is if I could get if you could you know relate to me the the board's thoughts on these alternative routes that you discussed earlier as as well as the creep of goes on to fill in the gaps all right I'll do that all right anyone else thank you I'll just email mine we got we got to go so thank you very much item D ID two two six eight to receive report hold discussion give staff direction on pending City Council request for a work session to discuss an amendment to the mobility plan to reflect a direct connection between Windsor Road and Marsh Branch Road north of but separate from Hampton room okay good evening mayor and council Monica Benavides assistant to the city manager this evening I'll be presenting the City Council pending requests for information as a reminder up to seven requests will be reviewed per meeting one per council member staff will introduce each request they have up to two minutes to describe and justify their request and the remaining elected officials will then have up to one minute to provide feedback and indicate their support staff will respond to all requests where a consensus of council is established as a reminder council members have the ability to prioritize high moderate or low their their request to assist the agenda committee with scheduling today we have one item it's a work session to discuss an amendment to the mobility plan to reflect a direct connection between Windsor Road and Mosk Branch Road north of but separate from Hampton Road whenever you're ready councilmember Davis thank you this will be pretty brief we had a lot of commentary on kind of around this item when the ranch estates project came forward a few weeks back the main issue is that right now our mobility plan reflects a dotted line for Windsor Road west of 35 and that dotted line swings down to catch Hampton Road which is an established right of way but the longer that that dotted line hangs out in that spot the longer that we start planning for that particular alignment of Windsor and we plan in that area around it but we know from those residents that one they do not need their driveways and their residential surface streets opening up into a secondary arterial you do that you put a secondary arterial in on the backside of a neighborhood like that and you get things like we have on Sherman Drive where you have residential driveways coming out into the roadway where you on Carroll Boulevard where we have residential driveways people backing out into a secondary arterial rather their primary arterial the other thing that you get is if you connect Windsor at that spot that's going to come all the way over the highway it's going to connect to Mosh Branch on the other end on the west that will be a truck thoroughfare and we know there's a lot of logistics going in there the one thing these folks told us when we heard from them was these roads are not rated for trucks we are out here walking without sidewalks please don't send more trucks down through our neighborhood so all we have to do is just scoot this road a few hundred feet up off of Hampton Road if we do take it down Hampton Road we're gonna have to remill that entire road and we're gonna pull the whole thing up and repave it anyway we're not saving any money by running it down the top of Hampton Road in the long run we're saving lives and saving road miles to have to be replaced by not running trucks over Hampton Road rather just let Windsor be Windsor all the way across over to Mosh Branch it's better flow it's better mobility it's better safety for that neighborhood okay Councilmember McGuire I agree I support this medium priority given that that you know we're not dealing with mobility plan updates right this second but I totally agree that it's it's just good planning and good policy to have short blocks and and this would be conducive to better mobility okay anyone else Councilman Burke is he I can't that's quick mayor this sounds very reasonable to me it's just a very sensible thing to do and particularly if the if the community is on board with it and they're the ones that's making the recommendations I think we need to accommodate that thank you all right anyone else Councilman McGee thank you Mr. Mayor I too agree I would say low to moderate priority for me thank you okay that's that's for the rest you can email in comments or whatever however you want to share those that takes us to item thank you that takes the item e ID 2 2 5 5 8 receive report hold discussion give staff direction regarding audit project 0 to 7 network management security controls hello mayor and council I'm Madison Rorschach and city auditor and I need to share my screen right then I'm here to present our findings from phase one or audit of the city's technology network management activities which focuses on security controls as mentioned in the agenda detailed findings from this audit are considered confidential and so will be converted in closed session however I wanted to just share the purpose of the audit and work session and mention that there is a publicly available redacted version of the audit report on the city's website so briefly this audit generally evaluated the strategies and practices implemented by the city to protect its technology network most simply a technology network as a tool that allows employees and an organization to share data and technology resources such as software applications printers data storage and the internet within user client devices like computers and tablets in a large organization these connections are typically created and managed by a server technology networks are often the backbone of an organization's operations so it's critical that it be adequately safeguarded to minimize the risk of operational disruption so specifically this audit evaluated the city's information technology management framework network user account and access management and general network security activities so the rest of the report will be shared in closed session but if you have any questions about why it's confidential anything I can answer those now all right any questions on confidentiality see none okay so at 555 so I will convene the closed session at 555 if somebody can hit the light switch we will consider the following items consultation with attorneys under government Texas government code section five five one dot zero seven one deliberation regarding security devices and security audits under Texas government code section five five one dot zero eight nine deliberation regarding certain public power utilities competitive matters under Texas government code section five five one dot zero eight six if you're able I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God and individual with liberty and justice for all honor the Texas flag I pledge allegiance to the Texas one state under God one indivisible next on the agenda is proclamations for Parks and Recreation Month so if you can join me if you're here for that item excellent what a great group are those surfboards you brought or no is that oh there you go was that close thank you all right well so Gary if you want to explain what we're recognizing and then we'll just have everyone introduce themselves Gary pack and director of Parks and Recreation I'd like to thank staff we're here to celebrate July is Parks and Rec month so thank you for everything you guys do to help run our park system to get kids outside get families outside we have representatives from our pools our rec centers athletics throughout the entire park system it's obviously very hot outside so we're here to try to make it fun for people while they're outdoors enjoying the weather whether it's hot or cold so we're very excited for what we do we're very proud of what we do for the community as servants for the public and we're here to celebrate on behalf of our staff city staff and City Council so thank you just echo Gary's words Parks and Recreation really plays a vital role in our community and offering a quality of life and we can't do it without of all of our staff and the support of Council so that is what July Parks and Recreation month is and just thanks guys great well yeah and thank you very much and so I have a proclamation but I'll just say it's it's amazing the different areas of the city that the Parks Department touches it's almost there at almost every event at some and have some function at it so really appreciate you and and here's my hard sell to get all your friends to come work you know how tough that is so all your friends that need some work bring them but thank you all very much means a lot so I have a proclamation that reads to all whom these presence shall come greetings whereas Parks and Recreations programs are integral integral part of communities throughout this this country including the city of Denton and vitally important to establishing and maintaining the the quality of life in our communities improving the health of all citizens and contributing to the economic environmental well-being of our community and whereas Parks and Recreation programs build healthy active communities that aid in the prevention of chronic disease provide therapeutic recreation services for those who are mentally or physically disabled improve the mental and emotional health of all citizens increase a community's economic prosperity through increased property values expand the local tax base increase tourism attract and retain businesses and reduce crime and whereas Parks and Recreation areas are fundamental to environmental well-being of our community ensure the ecological beauty of our community and provide a place for children and adults to connect with nature recreate outdoors and whereas the US House of Representatives has designated July as Parks and Recreation month and whereas the city of Denton recognizes the benefits derived from Parks and Recreation resources now therefore I Gerard Hutzpeth mayor of the city of Denton Texas do hereby declare and proclaim the month of July 2022 as Parks and Recreation month in the city of Denton and encourage all citizens to to acknowledge this importance of the importance of parks and recreation and benefits it provides in our community we can give him a hand Thank you very much. I appreciate thank y'all for being here. Have a great evening. Okay that takes us to public publications from members of the public if we can review the procedures. The Denton City Council has adopted rules of procedure including a code of conduct that applies to the public as well as council members. These rules were enacted to promote an orderly process and to preserve decorum. Speakers will have four minutes to give a scheduled report and four minutes to give an open mic report. A bell will ring when time is expired. If the remarks are not concluded by that time the speaker will be asked to stop speaking. If the speaker does not cease and a second request is made the mayor may request to have the speaker removed from the chamber. Speakers should not approach the dais. If a speaker has materials for the council please notify the city secretary in advance. For scheduled reports the council may initiate discussion or ask questions. For non-scheduled open mic reports the council may listen. However because no notice of the subject of the open mic report has been provided to the public in advance the Texas Open Meetings Act prohibits discussion or decision by the council on non-scheduled items. As a result the council may only proceed as follows on non-scheduled items. Propose to place the item on a future agenda, make a statement of factual policy, or a recitation of existing policy. Speakers are asked to direct all remarks and questions to the council as a whole and not to any individual member. Please refrain from making abusive, personal, impertinent, profane, or slanderous remarks. Anyone who violates the council rules of procedure may be immediately removed from the chamber. Thank you in advance. Copies of the rules of procedure are available from the city secretary. Great first is Mr. Steven Dillenburg. Steven Dillenburg. One more time. Steven Dillenburg. Okay then the next person is Steven Leach. Thank you. If you can give your name and address you will have four minutes. Alright. Thank you. Thank you. My name is Steven Leach. I live at 900 Willowood Street, Denton Texas 76205. I'm here to bring before council a solution to a bipartisan issue. Low voter turnout in City Council elections and since every member of council has to take this into account when running for office, I'm sure you're all very aware of what I'm talking about. But to present the problem more clearly, there's not a single election that's received more than 8.62% of the vote before 2020, in which it jumped to almost 45% and then immediately dropped down to its third lowest point in the last 10 years at 5.26% in 2021. There are several ways that we could help impact turnout. We could send voter information guides like this one from California out to our voters. This guide has all the information a voter could ask for, including the last day to register before an election, vote by mail instructions, polling locations, sample ballots, and more. While this would have an impact on our turnout simply by letting voters in Denton know that there is an election and how to participate, it is not the solution I'm here to discuss. Now I'm here to ask you to amend the city charter and move our elections from the uniform Election Day in May to the uniform Election Day in November. The three most recent citywide elections actually illustrate the problem in more detail. Although all of the seats follow the same trend, the mayor's race jumped by 644% from 2018 to 2020 and then plummeted by nearly 70% from 2020 to 2022. This massive shift comes down to one detail. The 2020 election was in November because of COVID-19, which is once again on the rise. If we do this there will be benefits beyond City Council. Our elections would share odd-numbered years, state constitutional amendments, and would increase voter turnout for those elections, which typically do worse than the city. But most importantly, it will consolidate our elections and respect the voters time, especially that of the working class in Denton. You're likely aware, but for the sake of clarity, an amendment will require a proposition vote by the citizens of Denton. There are two ways to do that. A ballot initiative, like the decrim initiative, or council can vote to put a proposition on the ballot. I'm here to ask you to do the latter and to look at Austin as a guide to making it happen. In 2012, Austin moved their elections from May to November and did so by using competing propositions. This method is important because there is a major question about what would happen to the term limits of City Council members if we move the elections. With the terms limited to two years and three consecutive terms, moving the election would mean that terms would either need to be shortened or lengthened. With competing propositions, where the highest passing yes vote becomes the amendment to the charter, it leaves the decision up to the voters. I suspect that some council members will oppose moving the election altogether, but since Republicans and Democrats have stood in this very spot raising this very issue, I'd urge you all to give the voters the chance to make that decision and put this on the next work session and then the next ballot. Thank you and I yield the rest of my time. Thank you very much. Councilmember McGuire. I would like to provide staff direction to place this item on a future work session. I don't believe that there's time for us to do it at the next work session, but perhaps after the budget process is wrapped up, we could we could discuss this in a work session. Yeah, so you'll just need to follow that with an email. That's our process, so if you'd be so kind. All right, thank you very much. That takes us to Mr. Eunice Husband. Am I close? All right, thank you. Yes, my name is Eunice Husband. I stay at 316 Fry Street. If you could just, it's not gonna make it all the way up there, but you can extend it as far as it'll go. Thank you. I stay at 316 Fry Street, Apartment 259 here in Denton. I'm here before the mayor and the council to propose policy changes to employers or companies hiring policies in regards to people with criminal records. So my first proposal would be there should not be a length of time since the charge or conviction that the job seekers should have to wait before being considered for the position. Let's say I have put in like 70 applications over the last six or seven months. Okay, okay, the conviction was it seven years ago, ten years ago. If it's not that long, no, we're not messing with you. Okay, the next one should be the severity of the job seekers crime. What kind of crime was it that the job seeker committed? Okay, a drug charge, someone knocked the window out of the car. Okay, so that's the second one. And then the last one is did their crime occur at the job seeker's workplace? Okay, was the job seeker convicted at his place of work? Okay, if he was at a sporting event or the mall or somewhere and he got into a physical altercation or something with another individual and was charged or has a drug charge and is not at the workplace, okay, why are these employers holding this against the job seekers? Okay, just to give you a little experience, I was just interviewed this past Friday by a person that had a death charge and they told me this out of their own mouth. And they are hired at the place for stealing from another business that they were working at. But I have drug charges and when the HR called me, they said we cannot hire you because you have drug charges. Okay, I had drug charges. Did they happen here or at a workplace or something like that? Okay, if they happened at the park or down the street or from a car or telephone calls where you was meeting up with people or something like that, okay, versus somebody that was stealing from the workplace where they was working at committing fraud and this person get a chance to be hired and I can't get a job. Like I say, I've been here 11 months now and over the past six or seven months, I had to put in like at least 70 job applications. I put one in, I was at an interview today, two interviews last week, Monday, Friday, today. Criminal record, criminal record, criminal record. That's a sticking point here, I'm saying. I moved here from Illinois and I'm just honest, Texas is a tough state. So that's when I'm here. Those are, I'm saying, my proposed changes regarding employers, companies, work policy that this stuff should not be considered or, like I said, the severity of the crimes. You know, the person, you know I'm saying, okay, criminal trespassing charge and okay, the criminal trespassing charge, how old is it? Three years old? No, it has to be seven or ten years old. A criminal trespasser, come on. So this is what I'm here for this evening. Yeah, Ryan, if you can help me out. So the gentleman there in the top corner, if you'll talk to him, we'll talk to, get you connected with maybe United Way or maybe, I was also thinking Scott Weisenbaker with North Texas Solutions, because he, so yeah, if you'll talk to him, he'll get you connected with a couple people. Thank you very much. All right. Next, Mr. Philip Young, please. If you can give your name and address, you'll have four minutes. I'm Philip Young and I live at 2041 Scripture Street in Denton. In the previous council meeting, I expressed concern about Denton's incoming chief of police reporting to an assistant city manager, as opposed to reporting directly to the city manager. Having investigated this matter further, I have changed my position to one of support for the current structure, since it appears to be the best solution for the time being, to a difficult situation resulting from the sudden and unexpected departure of our former city manager. At a time when the city council has suddenly injected itself into the issue of law enforcement priorities, I think that it is best to make as few changes as possible in the administration of the city. I have a very high level of confidence in the abilities of city manager Sarah Hensley and assistant city manager Frank Dixon, and I am willing to defer to their judgment in this matter. I am more concerned at this point with the state of public communications regarding city council members. The Denton Record Chronicle provides an indispensable service in keeping council members honest. However, I find the current attacks upon council member McGee to be deeply disturbing. Using a newspaper as a means of intimidation and coercion to achieve a specific outcome in terms of how the council votes on any issue, as opposed to merely informing the public of the pros and cons of an issue, is not a trend which I am happy to see. Although council member McGee did not support my position on the abortion issue, in his remarks during the last city council meeting, he showed the kind of thoughtfulness and gravitas which I always hoped for in a council member by recognizing that there are no easy solutions to complex issues and making it clear that when the weight of actual governance rests upon one's shoulders, decisions become far more difficult than one when one does not have that responsibility. And it is far easier for me to believe that a campaign worker was either careless or deceitful in his creation of campaign literature than it is to believe that one volunteering so much time to serve the city, with so few perks accompanying the job, would try to mislead the public. I simply do not at this point see any motive for doing so. And if the Denton Record Chronicle would like to investigate misinformation, I have an email message from the former Chancellor of the UNT system which states, falsely, that Patsy Patterson, mother of publisher Bill Patterson, was an alum of UNT. The Chancellor, too, was the victim of careless support staff, and while there is no substitute for personally proofing the work of staff members, the sort of thing, this sort of thing, can happen to anyone who is forced to depend upon other people for help, especially in running a political campaign. And I will end with a brief prayer for the council. Almighty God, I pray that you will bless the work of this council, giving them wisdom and understanding, and bringing peace and harmony among them. Amen. Okay, thank you very much. Alexandra, Alexandria Hayden. Listen, council, with the overturning of Roe versus Wade, what is happening now is you are limiting what I can do with my vagina. First of all, you dictated where I could take a number two. You tried to tell me that, "Oh, I couldn't go in a woman's dressing room," but now you have Governor Abbott saying that I can't have an abortion. I can have an abortion. You don't have to take your hands off my vagina right now. You do not own my uterus. The uterus is mine. It is a clump of cells in there. We need to take that clump of cells and destroy it. Like this paper. Just take the clump, 'cause it has no life. It has no meaning. That's what is inside my body. But Governor Abbott is trying to get inside here and trying to dictate what you're doing to my body. You don't own my body. Governor Abbott doesn't own my body. I deserve safe access to an abortion. You know that. I know that. I want an abortion now. And I want it right now. I'm dead. That's what I want. I want an abortion. You don't control my uterus. You're trying to say I can't get an abortion. That is a crime. I'm going to kill the clump of cells in my uterus, and you're trying to stop me. And you know what? I get raped all the time. I'm very sexy. People put stuff in my drink all the time. And you don't know what happens to them. I deserve safe access to an abortion. If you're watching this out there in the media, I need your protection. Oh, versus Wade, my sister AOC, I love you, AOC. I love you so much. You protested. You got arrested. And I don't get arrested with you, AOC, because I love you. You're my queen. You're my queen, Ada. Oh, I love you, AOC. Please have me kill the babies. I want to just murder all of these cells inside my body. You're nothing but a clump, a waste of time. You don't dictate it. I need to have control of my body. Having a baby is actual slavery. So I beg you, if you're watching out there, please repeat to change the federal law. I can't get an abortion if my life is ruined. You're trying to make a right to change the federal law? That's your time. Baby, can you please help me-- Clean up on aisle one. --on Instagram to help with the process. Can you take that paper with you? Thank you. I appreciate you. You're like a clump of cells, nothing but trash. Thank you. Throw it in the trash, in the trash. Ms. Greco, if you can give your name and address, you'll have four minutes. Eva Greco, 802 West Oak Street. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I first came before, at that time, mayor and council in the city of Denton. It's about five, a little over five years ago now. I came before the council to talk about your bus system. Chris Watts, you were mayor at that time. And here we are, fast forward, five years later. And our bus system has completely gone downhill. I am from New Jersey, mass transportation. Anywhere else you go, go to Dallas, go to Austin, you have transportation. Chris Watts, you sat here and spoke against fixed routes, openly, publicly, as mayor of this town, and totally ignored the citizens of this town that put you up there. You have worked very hard to sabotage our fixed routes in the city of Denton. And I hope you're proud of yourself, because nobody else is. Alison McGuire, thank you. My heart goes out to you for the burden you bear. You can only present the information you are given, be it factual, be it false. I attend all DCTA board meetings, and I bring them reality, and I correct them. They have asked you, on this information, they have asked you to make decisions for the citizens of Denton. So they asked you to compare a fixed route that, in five years, they have made later start time, earlier stop time, longer wait times, and no bus on Sundays still, shorter times on Saturdays, possibly eliminating. To compare that with GoZone, which they have now put millions of dollars into promoting GoZone, get more GoZone vehicles here, give them more hours, stay with this promotion. I've never heard of a promotion, like 10 years. 10 months, excuse me. A promotional rate. But they're asking you to compare this to fixed routes. Yes, you're going to get less people boarding per hour. You're changing my route. I can no longer take that bus. It does not accommodate me anymore. Fixed routes need to be not so much where you're picking the individual up at, it's to the destinations. You used to have a bus stop right here on McKinney, OK? I took it a few times a week. I used to take the bus, go to the library, come to City Hall, post office. Totally eliminated that bus route. When I came five years ago, the CEO from DCTA, right around that time, left. Why? Money mismanagement. That's how you term it. They termed it legally. Then you had Raymond Suarez there. I've heard it all from him. The story out and out lies to the public. And here we are. Bottom line, you have a bus company that is not holding up to their mission. They are sabotaging their own company. A bus company that's sabotaging the bus system. That's what you have in DCTA with these back room illegal deals that they're making with VIA. Thank you. Christine Bray? Is it Bray? Give her name and address, she'll have four minutes. Is this mic working good for everybody? Yes, thank you. Excellent. My name is Christine Bray, and I live at 1204 Cordell Street. I want to start off by thanking Eva for her comments from the perspective of a rider on DCTA. I think it's very valuable to hear perspectives from riders, because DCTA does not have many of them right now because the service is so poor that they have chased most of them off. So many people don't feel that there is a point in coming, and I appreciate Eva's dedication to showing up. I want to come at this from more of somebody who is a transit activist and enthusiast and understands how systems should be run. DCTA's bus system is not run the way that a system should be run. And when we talk about low ridership numbers, I think that's very important. The industry standard for a bus is that a bus should come every 10 minutes. DCTA's bus has come every 45 to 60 minutes. Given that a lot of routes require transfers, for example, if I want to go to UNT from TWU, I require a transfer there. There is a bus that runs north-south on Locust and Elm, and there's a bus that runs east-west on Oak and Hickory. So looking at a route map for the system, you might think, "Oh, I can just transfer there." Google Maps will tell you to walk it because of how infrequent the bus service is. You cannot make that transfer. You will be standing there in the heat for like 25 minutes. So when we're talking about how ridership is falling on the system, we have taken a bus system that is not up to any standard in the industry. Our routes don't make sense. They don't run in ways that are convenient. In general, the industry standard is that your route should be as close to north-south, east-west as possible. We have routes that just kind of meander all over the place and are not easy to use. Again, we are not running our buses every 10 minutes. If you look at the bus stops that are on our town square, which you might think would be some of the nicest bus stops that we have because that is the heart of Denton, we should have good bus stops there. We have poles in the ground. We don't have benches. We don't have shade. There's nothing there to accommodate riders. And so then we come along and we take GoZone, which is a system where you can go from point A to point B. There's lots of discussion. You heard it in the work session of it being a last mile solution, i.e. it takes people to and from the bus route. But why would I want to ever go on that bus route if that is the quality of service that I'm receiving? And then we give it a promotional fare so it's cheaper than the bus and then say, okay, well, riders are waiting 28 minutes for their GoZone. So we need to put more money into this failing system and we put more money into it and then it improves service quality for a moment. But the thing that's keeping people off of GoZone is that the service quality is bad. The wait times are long. So once you fix that, more people start to use it and the service times go back down again. And so that's just not a sustainable service. There was concern at a previous DCTA board meeting about advertising the service because they didn't want more people to ride it. They said, we are already at capacity. We don't want to be advertising this because we don't want more people to be using what is in Lewisville, the only public transportation that they have. That's a failure. Saying we don't want people to ride public transportation because it is not sustainable to get more riders onto our public transportation is an utter failure. So thank you. - That concludes the open mic segment, takes us to the consent agenda. I'll take a motion but for F that was pulled. And we could just disregard the buttons since we're not all here. So Council Member McGuire. - I move approval of the consent agenda accepting item F. - Is there a second? Council Member Davis. - Second. - Motion by Council Member McGuire, second by Council Member Davis for the consent agenda but for item F. Any discussion? Seeing none. Council Member McGuire, I'll say you. - Aye. - Council Member Davis. - Aye. - Council Member McGee. - Aye. - Council Member Byrd. - Aye. - Council Member Watts. - Aye. - Mayor Pro Tem. - Aye. - Mayor Hutz with his aye as well. Passes seven zero, takes us to item F. Let the record reflect that Council Members McGuire and Davis have recused themselves. It's item F, ID 221398. Consider adoption of ordinance of the city of Denton authorizing the city manager to execute any local agreement in the form of a memorandum of understanding between the city of Denton and Denton Independent School District for reimbursement to the city in the estimated amount of $811,154 for compensation and benefits of student resource officers assigned at DISD for the period of July 1, 2022 to June 30, 2023 and providing an effective date. There is no presentation, so I'll take a motion. I move approval, is there a second? Council Member Byrd. Okay, so motion by Mayor Hutz with second by Council Member Byrd, discussion? Seeing none, aye. Council Member Byrd. - Aye. - Council Member McGee. - Aye. - Council Member Watts. - Aye. - Council Member, may I pretend back? - Aye. - That passes five to zero with two recusals. That concludes the consent. Takes us to our public hearings. First of which is DCA 22-1. S0002, hold a public hearing and consider adoption of ordinance of the city of Denton. Amending the Denton Development Code, specifically amendments to sub-chapter two, administration and procedures, providing for penalty in the maximum amount of $2,000 for violations thereof. - Thank you, Mayor. Members of Council, Ron Megiddo, Principal Planner with Development Services. As introduced in the introduction, this is a code amendment to sub-chapter two, which is our administration and procedure section. These code amendments have been in the years making. We actually started this effort as soon as the development code was updated back in 2019. As soon as it was effective, staff started to compile some of the items that we felt needed to be improved. In the screen that you see in front of you, primarily the last three bullets or last checks, what this code amendment that you have in front of you really does is align regulations and requirements with state law. It also codifies the continued improvement of development services or development review processes that we do at the city. And lastly, it responds to the input received by various stakeholders that use the DDC. I'd also like to mention that during the process of collecting input, we did put a pause on this code amendment coming forward, primarily to address some of the priorities that we had in place. However, last year, late last year, we started the Development Code Review Committee, the DCRC, and their efforts helped put this code amendment that you have in front of you in place. They recommend that it be moved forward. It did move forward to the Planning Zoning Commission just this past month, and they also recommended that this item be forwarded to the City Council. So what is the subchapter two code amendments made up of? Primarily, it's to update table 2.2-A, which summarizes the development review procedures. It revises the pre-application conference from required to recommended. Provides additional information to operation procedures for boards and commissions. It updates references to development review documents. It also adds clarification to subdivision procedures, as well as the certificate of appropriateness. In addition, it establishes new applications that were not included in the 2019 Development Code. It includes application reference in the 2019, but not detailed in subchapter two. It expands the procedures for certain applications. Again, it aligns regulations and requirements with state law. And lastly, it includes minor amendments that are related to subchapter two to be more comprehensive and clear. With that, the Planning Zoning Commission, as I said earlier, did hear this code amendment and did vote six to zero to recommend approval. Staff also recommends approval of these code amendments to subchapter two as it meets the established criteria for which code protects amendments are outlined in the DDC. With that, I'll stand for any questions. - Okay, I'll open the public hearing and I will ask, do we have any questions for staff? Any questions for staff? Seeing none, I have no one registered to speak on this item, but you are welcome to speak. It's an open item. So if you would like to speak, you can just come on down, speak, and then we'll fill out a card after the fact. Seeing no movement, I'll close the public hearing. I'll take a motion. Okay, motion by Council Member Watts, second by Council Member Davis. Let me get there. Okay, so motion by Council Member Watts, second by Council Member Davis. Any discussion? Seeing none, Council Member Watts, I'll say you. - Aye. - Council Member Davis. - Aye. - Council Member McGee. - Aye. - Council Member McGuire. - Wanna thank staff for a lot of hard work over a long period of time. I vote aye. - Council Member Byrd. - Aye. - Mayor Pro Tem. - Aye. - Mayor Hutz with the aye as well passes seven zero. Thanks Ron. (faintly speaking) (faintly speaking) - Okay, that takes us to item five B is our last public hearing. Again, similar process. If you've not filled out a blue card, please do so. This is a public hearing, anyone can speak on it. The item is ID 221196, hold a public hearing pursuant to article four, section 4.07. The Denton City Charter have deliberations and give staff direction regarding the certified initiative petition and adopt an ordinance to eliminate low level marijuana enforcement by creating chapter 21, article five of the Denton City Code to be titled Marijuana Enforcement. - Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Let me share my screen. - Oh, and let me open a public hearing before I forget. Thank you. - Good evening, Mayor and City Council. My name is Rosario and I am your city secretary. I am here to present the agenda item read by the mayor. So to provide a little bit of background, on May 4th, the city secretary, our office, received a hand delivered petition by a representative of committee of electors with a desire to initiate a new city of Denton ordinance eliminating the enforcement of low level marijuana offenses. The petition was determined to be sufficient on May 24th in accordance with a 20 day verification deadline. It was certified to the city council on June 7th, 2022 with a public hearing being required now under the city charter article four, section 4.07. So the processes here are for city council to consider in compliance with the city charter to consider the petition and the ordinance within 60 days after the petition was certified to city council, which again was June 7th and considered to submission to the electors again under city charter provision during that 60 day period following certification by the city secretary. So the next step is that if the ordinance is not adopted as is, then city council must order a special election within that 60 day period earlier referenced under Texas election code 41.004, the first authorized uniform election date is November 8, 2022. For right now, we have tentatively scheduled a special election on July 26. However, we will move from that process based on city council direction this evening. And what I'm gonna do now, so I'm gonna stop sharing my presentation and we will now move to the reading of the ordinance as is required by the city charter. It'll just take a few minutes to bring that up. - Okay. Section one, chapter 21, article five of the city code is hereby created to be titled marijuana enforcement and to read as follows. Article five, marijuana enforcement. Section 21-80, ending citations and arrests for misdemeanor possession of marijuana. Subsection A, Denton police officers shall not issue citations or make arrests for class A or class B misdemeanor possession of marijuana offenses except in the limited circumstances described in subsection B. Subsection B, the only circumstances in which Denton police officers are permitted to issue citations or make arrests for class A or class B misdemeanor possession of marijuana are when such citations or arrests are part of one, the investigation of a felony level narcotics case that has been designated as a high priority investigation by a Denton police commander, assistant chief of police or chief of police and or two, the investigation of a violent felony. Subsection C, in every instance other than those described in subsection B, if a Denton police officer has probable cause to believe that a substance is marijuana, an officer may seize the marijuana. If the officer seizes the marijuana, they must write a detailed report and release the individual if possession of marijuana is the sole charge. Subsection D, Denton police officers shall not issue any charge for possession of marijuana unless it meets at least one of the factors described in subsection B. Section 21-81, citations for possession of drug residue or drug paraphernalia shall not be issued in lieu of a possession of marijuana charge. Subsection A, a class C misdemeanor citation for possession of drug residue or drug paraphernalia shall not be issued in lieu of a possession of marijuana charge. Section 21-82, prohibition against using city funds or personnel to conduct THC concentration testing. No city funds or personnel shall be used to request, conduct or obtain tetrahydrocannabinol, THC, testing of any cannabis-related substance to determine whether the substance meets the legal definition of marijuana under state law except in the limited circumstances of a police investigation pursuant to subsection 21-80B. Subsection B, this prohibition shall not limit the ability of Denton police to conduct toxicology testing to ensure public safety nor shall it limit THC testing for the purpose of any violent felony charge. Section 21-83, prohibition against city police using the odor of marijuana or hemp as probable cause for search or seizure. Subsection A, Denton police shall not consider the odor of marijuana or hemp to constitute probable cause for any search or seizure except in the limited circumstances of a police investigation pursuant to subsection 21-80B. Section 21-84, training and policy updates, community involvement. Subsection A, the city manager and chief of police shall ensure that Denton police officers receive adequate training concerning each of the provisions of this ordinance. Subsection B, the city manager shall work with the Denton police chief and other relevant stakeholders identified in subsection C to update city policies and internal operating procedures in accordance with this ordinance. Actions that may be necessary include but are not limited to, updating the Denton police department general manual, updating the training bulletin, training officers, and updating internal databases and systems. Subsection C, the city manager shall arrange regular meetings to discuss the development of policies, procedures, and practices related to this ordinance, which shall include community stakeholders, including the police chief's advisory panel, other interested stakeholders and community organizations, individuals directly impacted by arrests within the city, immigrant communities, and communities of color. These meetings shall be open to public participation, have minutes and agendas publicly accessible, and have audio and video recordings uploaded to the city's website. Section 21-85, discipline. Subsection A, any violation of this chapter may subject a Denton police officer to discipline as provided by the Texas local government code or as provided in city policy. Section 21-86, reporting. Subsection A, within three months of the adoption of this ordinance and once per year thereafter, the city manager or their designee shall present to the city council at a public meeting subject to the Texas Open Meetings Act a report concerning the city's implementation of this ordinance. Section 2, this ordinance shall become effective immediately upon its passage and approval. So that concludes your presentation, Rosa. Is that right? Great. Any questions for staff? Seeing none, first speaker, Deb Armitter. If you can come down and give your name and address, you'll have four minutes. Deb Armitter, 2003, Mistywood Lane, Denton, Texas. Hi, everyone. I just want to add my voice to the chorus of voices that are going to come to urge you to place this ordinance on the ballot and let the people of Denton decide. This is an issue that has big public support, and I think we're going to see that. You already know it's an issue that's really important to me personally. And when I was on council, I tried twice and maybe even three times to get this done on council. But I'm really proud of the work of members of the public. I was really proud to join them in getting signatures for this ballot petition. This is such a popular issue. It is, of course, absolutely within council's authority to give the city manager direction on prioritization for police. That is totally within your authority. Of course, it's not asking council not to-- sorry, it's not asking police not to enforce the state law or federal law, just asking it to make these certain instances lowest priority among the laws that are already prioritized by police. Finally, I want to say, and you might hear this echoed by some other speakers as well, that I know that you all are selecting a new police chief. And I hope that there will be some question or consideration of this issue as you talk to finalists. And I hope that any finalist who expresses any kind of refusal to support an ordinance like this, that if it be the will of the people in November, should not be considered for a police chief. That is how I would urge you to, or specifically the city manager, since of course it's city manager who is our police chief, but I know that council's opinion matters. And I would hope that you would weigh in that way. And I would hope that you would all ask applicants if they would agree to support this ordinance, if it is indeed the will of the people in November. Thank you. OK, this is great. Come down and you'll have four minutes to name that list. All right, mic check again, working good? Yes. All right, I just wanted to say-- Christine Bray, 1204 Cordell Street. I just wanted to say that I support this ordinance. I recently learned that 80% of the people in the Denton County jail are pretrial and just simply unable to make bail. And so I see this ordinance as one part of a solution towards that issue. I think it's very inhumane that we have that many people locked up who are presumed innocent. And I'm glad that the city is taking a step towards reducing that number. I of course understand that that is county jail, not city jail. But I do believe that this may help reduce those numbers. Thank you. Thank you. Everett Gray, I'm coming down. You have-- if you can give your name and address, you have four minutes. Can y'all hear me? Yes, thank you. Hi, I'm Everett Gray. I live in the 76208 zip code. And I want you guys to support this item. And I think it's a really easy win for y'all. Like, we're not even asking to legalize anything specifically, just make it a lower priority like we did here a couple months ago. I don't think I need to explain that communities of color, the LGBTQ community, and veterans tend to be those who are more targeted for using marijuana. And that's not radical. I would like you to support this bill. That's all I've got to say. I yield my time. Thank you. Javier-- is it Weems? I don't want to say it wrong. If you can give your name and address, you have four minutes, please. All righty. Thank you. Can you hear me OK? Yes, thank you. My name is Javier Cavazos Weems. I live at 500 Inman Street in Denton, Texas. I am entering my fourth year of classes at the University of North Texas and have had family members also at the institution in the past. We are a family that's very connected to Denton. Specifically, what I'm here for is asking you to let the people decide when it comes to this decriminalization initiative. I'm asking you this because I personally know that a lot of people have expressed interest not only in this initiative, but as one of the main deciders of them going to vote in the first place. I have knocked on hundreds of doors. I have talked to hundreds of people about this initiative ever since last year when I got on board with this initiative. I think it's very important. And these people have shown so much enthusiasm for this initiative. We talked earlier today in the session about low turnout in city council elections. I remember even hearing some of you speak last year, or really earlier in the year, during the candidates forum regarding low turnout and low engagement in city politics and city council meetings. If you want people to get more involved, showing that you do stuff like this that listens to the people here would do that 100%. One of the things that I learned in my Texas public high school government class was that 95% of the law that actually impacts you as a person, as a civilian, is local law. It's kind of self-explanatory at this point, but that means that you people here have a huge amount of responsibility in the lives of everyone in this city. And I really hope that you will use that power responsibly by, again, letting the people decide. You have seen from our text of the initiative that it is not a radical thing at all. We have a really strong plan laid out for it. And additionally, there are dozens of other cities in Texas looking at this initiative as well. This is the first signal that we want to be on board with something that could go through state legislature and that the tide is turning for marijuana legalization and decriminalization. And if you want to show Denton as a city that is with the times, then this is an excellent way to do that. With that, I yield my time and I thank the council for their support. Thank you. Grace Martini-Young, you can come down and give your name and address. You have four minutes. Please. Can you hear me? Yes, thank you. I'm Grace Martini-Young. I'm at 401 South Locust Street. I'm about to move, though. I'm about to be in your district. Let's go. I'm a UNT student, so clearly I'm a transplant. And coming from a placeless suburb, coming to Denton has been so wonderful. Like most students here, I've gotten to get involved in my local politics. I've gotten to have community. I love the local businesses. I love the people here. I love Denton. And it makes sense for Denton being the place that we are with our unique culture, which all of you like to bring up when you were writing about our culture and how great we are, which we are. This is a part of that. We don't need-- we have so much policing that's-- there's so many other people are going to say things way smarter. I'm very nervous. It's way more intense up here than back there. But we don't need this. There's so much data out there that shows that it's way more safe than alcohol, which you can go to any bar, and go to Fry Street, and do that. And we don't-- people are getting hurt by this. I know people in my personal life who've been hurt by criminalization, who are college kids, who love Allen Ginsberg more than anyone I know, but they're getting-- because the police officer suspected they saw a baggie in their car. It was insane. So yeah, I'm going to give the rest of my time to somebody else who needs it more. But I cannot wait to continue contributing to the city that I love, and being a productive citizen here. I do not need you coming into my personal business once the end of the night. Whatever I choose to do with my time is my thing. Thanks, y'all. Thanks. Last name, Singh. All right, yeah, if you can come out. I didn't want to mess up your first name. If you can give your name and address, you have four minutes. Sure. Can y'all hear me? Yes, a little louder, please. OK. Is that better? Perfect. Great. OK, so my name is Priya Singh, and I live at 5201 Parr Drive. So I just wanted to lend my voice in support of this issue. And you've heard a lot of people talk about different things. I'm obviously in support of this issue. But I wanted to specifically talk about the effect of decriminalizing marijuana on housing, especially here in Denton. I moved here to Denton about a year ago, and specifically to work in sort of, I guess, broadly the social services sector and in housing. And something that I've seen is that Denton has a tremendous amount of support for housing compared to other places that I've lived. However, there is still, of course, a housing crisis here. There is still a tremendous amount of homelessness. There are still families and people who are facing eviction, facing just the inability to get into a new place to live. And of course, a large portion of that is economic. But a portion of that is definitely due to having past drug charges or past criminal histories in general. And even though the families in question may have, in some instances, turned their lives around, have children, have full-time jobs, are still not able to find that housing that they so desperately need. I also want to say that marijuana, as others have said, is a much safer drug and is in a very different category than other forms of drugs, but is often penalized or viewed as having the same sort of severity as other drugs. And that also leads to difficulty in getting jobs and having a way to support their families. People who are affected by marijuana are generally of lower socioeconomic status. There are specific racial groups, specifically people of color, that are highly targeted when it comes to marijuana criminalization. And those are the communities that we need to be coming together to support as a city. And so that's something that I think that we should really be taking seriously. I'm going to yield my time. Thank you. Thank you. Nicholas Stevens, you can give your name and address. You have four minutes. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] - How are y'all doing? - Very well, thank you. - You don't look as excited we're talking about weed tonight. This is great. My name's Nick Stevens, 417 Amarillo Street. I know you can't answer me, but you can maybe raise your hand. Raise your hand if you've ever smoked weed before. OK. Well, some of us are being honest tonight, because some of you have definitely smoked weed. And I believe, Sarah, I'm a city manager, Hensley. So I'm a board member of Decriminalized Denton. I'm one of the five electors that brought this to the city. And if there's one thing maybe all of us could agree on, despite political ideology, democracy is not in a good spot right now in this nation. President's approval ratings, Congress, both major political parties, the Supreme Court, their approval ratings are at an all time low. When you ask Americans, are we headed in the right direction, about 90% say no. I would propose, and I think you would all agree that one of the reasons is because many people are waking up to the fact that we're told all of the time to vote, but very little gets done. It often feels like politicians don't have our backs. And so there is a lack of trust and faith in the democratic process. And I hope that's something that keeps you up at night. Respectfully, that you take seriously as a part of your job. You've got to work for the people. And Mr. Watts, you and I talked about that actually a lot when we talked and you got into the weeds, no pun intended, on this ordinance. And one of the things that I said was as Decriminalized Denton, we were nonpartisan. We didn't want to endorse anyone no matter who tried to grab our message for political purposes. It didn't matter. What we wanted to do was reach out to the people, and that's what we did. We went to Republican and Democratic polling locations and to their houses. We went to churches and grocery stores. We went to the courthouse lawn and we shared our message for what would be a better, freer, kinder, more just Denton. And the polls back up what I'm saying. 83% of Texans support at bare minimum decriminalization. You might have heard the news just a few days ago that our Republican Agriculture Commissioner of the state of Texas endorsed this movement and went further by saying at bare minimum, we need to legalize it medically because teacup that's in place right now is insufficient. I know that there's going to be some that say that you can't do this. I would ask, I could go for a long time and talk about why you can. I would encourage some of you to maybe talk to Austin city staff and the Austin legal team and ask them why they were able to do it and the state never sued them. And so I wanna close by giving you my ask on behalf of decriminalized Denton 'cause I have a few and I want you to write them down and talk about it at the end 'cause it's very important to me. Number one, conveniently, you're hiring a new police chief right now. I'm asking that you commit to only hiring a police chief that will enforce local law if this passes. The second thing I would like to ask you, someone next week, any one of you, make a two minute pitch, get rid of the drug testing program. You have that's randomized for your staff. It is unfair. Quite a few have reached out to me as how heartbreaking it is to work at an organization that continues to do that. So someone please do that. The last thing is a very easy ask and I'm gonna steal the words of Sid Miller, our agriculture commissioner. Get out of the way. You had your opportunity to vote on this and you didn't. And so respectfully, I think it's important to use Mr. Watts' leadership. When he discussed fracking, he said, yeah, this is a good idea, but the people need to decide. And so it's important today that you vote to allow the people to decide the legal status of this ordinance. Thank you. - Thank you. Is it Stanton Brasher? - Yeah, close enough. - Thank you, sorry. - It's actually Brasher, but other than that, she got the first right, so we're good. - 50-50. - Yeah, yeah. - If you can give your name and address, you have four minutes, please. - Yeah, 13 Finley Circle, and that's out in Crum. But I do live in Crum right now, but that's because the police, hey guys, kept arresting me. I sold weed out here for years. I also put myself through college twice. I have a master's degree. And then after I sold through college, I went to California and Oklahoma, and I've done consulting, and I've done legal sales, legal growing. So I've been in this industry for a long time. And it blows my mind, because the people that I sold to out here, I wasn't selling to these boys in the hood or half-baked or what, it wasn't like that. I was selling to lawyers. You guys probably know some of my customers. I sold to teachers, nurses, construction workers, restaurant managers, servers, artists, Republicans, Democrats. These people had nothing on their criminal records, nothing at all whatsoever. They had to smoke a little bit of weed. They weren't hurting anyone. Like you guys, are y'all down to put those people in jail for doing something completely victimless? Because that is so 1920s. That is so reefer madness. And that's, you know, stoners love that movie. We love that movie, not because we think it's true. It's not a drama. It's a joke to us. It's a joke that they try to put on the population back in the 20s, and we still believe this stuff today. We still believe it. And it's completely untrue. And just like Nick said, get out of the way. This is my third time to speak to you guys. And both times we tried to make it something that you guys could pass because we thought, well, maybe we just, we get to the right people and they'll pass it. But the right people are Dentonites. The right people are the ones that live out here. And they want this, overwhelmingly. This is a political slam dunk for every one of you. Think about it. If we pass this, the next time you guys go for office, the next time you go for reelection, you can say, hey, yeah, I was a part of that. Even though the people, honestly, would be the ones that did it. Still, I'll let you guys take, I won't step in your way from taking credit for it. Just let it happen. Let us vote on it. 'Cause I promise you, that's what the people in this city want. That's what the people in this state want. That's what the people in this country want. It's bipartisan, and it saves money, and it protects our most vulnerable people. I've got about a minute left, so whoever hasn't heard my story about Peggy, I'll tell you. Peggy was a 65-year-old cashier at the truck stop, the Loves truck stop, not Loves, the one across the highway from it, right at the edge of town. And Peggy used to buy from me all the time. And she came over, it was, I would say 2013, 2014, around Halloween. She came over after leaving her oncologist. And she had a brain tumor, it was inoperable. She wasn't gonna make it. And I gave her free weed for the rest of her life. But I often thought, what would happen if Peggy left my house and didn't turn on her turn signal early enough? You know, didn't quite make a full stop. I've been arrested, I've seen other people arrested, I've known other people arrested. You get pulled out of your car, you get searched by a dog, you get put in handcuffs, all the stuff removed from your pocket. You get put in a cop car, taken to the jail, possibly strip searched. You sleep on a cold bed with an itchy blanket. And then you pay a huge exorbitant fee to get out. Peggy was a cashier. (bell ringing) We don't wanna put Peggy's in jail. Thank you. - Thank you. Ms. Greco. - You can give your name and address, you have four minutes. Please. - Eva Greco, 802 West Oak Street. Good evening again to all. I'm gonna start off by facts. Unlike DCTA, I'm gonna give you facts, not averages, okay? Fact. More people die from alcoholism than they do from marijuana smoking. My personal family, I have lost dear. Family members to alcoholism, okay? My mother being one of them. I have lost no family members to marijuana smoking. Fact. Fact, marijuana is not a gateway drug. That's a fact. Fact, every state that has legalized marijuana at this point, the economy has skyrocketed. Those are facts. Thank you all. - All right. Robert Head. Give your name and address, you have four minutes. - My name's Robert Head, can y'all hear me just fine? - Yes, thank you. - My name's Robert Head, I live at 201 Lamonts Drive in Carrollton, Texas. I'm here to speak on behalf of veterans in the city of Denton who are using cannabis. I'm the executive director of a nonprofit called Hemp for Victory, and we educate communities, leaderships in communities about how cannabis is helping veterans in a positive way. Some of the things that I think most people don't understand is most veterans, about 83% of them are supportive of medical marijuana legalization. A lot of veterans are using medical marijuana right now in the city of Denton, and it has reduced the amount of pills that they're getting from the VA. A lot of veterans will get 12, 15 pills from a VA every day that they have to take, and cannabis is allowing them to reduce those pills down to two or three, managing their lives, managing their families. And I'm telling you, I got involved in this, and I was on the front lines in Iraq from 2002 to 2007, and I lost about eight or nine guys just in one unit. And I have lost more guys from my units to overdoses and suicides than I did in the front lines in Iraq. And I think it's getting ridiculous that it's getting to this point. And I'm not saying marijuana works for everybody. No, it may not, and that's okay. But you do have the right to choose your medication. And if a veteran's gonna choose his medication to reduce his pills, to have more of a family life with his family, to be more interactive with his kids, to be more interactive with his wives, or her husbands, or whomever their significant others is, that is their right to do so. What we don't wanna do is we don't wanna see the veterans getting pulled over and risking losing their jobs, losing their families, losing their pay from the VA over a felony charge just because they chose a plant over the massive amount of pills that they're getting from the VA. And these guys are 5% of all the counties in Texas are veterans, right? These are just your everyday guys, police officers, fire department, city council members, nonprofit organizers, right? So I think this is a good bill that you guys should look at. I think this is something that you oughta take in consideration. Everybody up here knows there's nothing wrong with the plant in general. There's no safety issues with the plant and the person who uses it. The safety issues are the markets that it brings and the reputation that it has. But that was made by bureaucratic governments such as themselves, which can now take the same step in saying we're not gonna go ahead and throw people in jail, arrest for this. We're taking the stance again. So we got more important things to do. I believe the veterans in this community are gonna say, thank you for this. I appreciate you getting my back. I don't wanna say anything 'cause they don't wanna speak up about this. They can lose a lot. But they're willing to risk that over being a zombie in front of their families. I think it's something you oughta take in consideration. Thank you. - Thank you, and thank you for your service. Alejandro. I'm sorry. Where is, last thing? Got it, sorry. Got it. I appreciate you. No, man. - 50 to 66. - And is in sight. All right, my name is Alejandro Galindo Juarez. I live at 2325 Northway until August 3rd. I'll still be in Denton afterwards. Just moving out of Jesse's district into Allison's. So I'm looking forward to that. Well, you've been good too, don't worry. That's some good, that's some things. But representation is never perfect, so nonetheless. But yes, I am speaking to support this movement. I wasn't sure if I was in support of you guys voting for or letting the people vote for it. But after hearing the people before me speak, I am more inclined to say that we should let the people of Denton vote on this. There's an overwhelming support as people have listed. There's also many people that support this, veterans like the last speaker spoke, thank you for your service. There's a community of color are mostly targeted of this, are victims of the kindergarten to prison pipeline, where you start early on. People punish you early on and get severely more punished in a counter white student. And so this is one way that the pipeline is benefited from targeting minorities is targeting them using marijuana. So we want to make sure students don't end up in prison starting from kindergarten. So I don't really have much to say. I spent most of my day trying to get my AC fixed. My house was at, I think I remember it was almost 90 degrees inside my house. So what was worried about all about that all day. So a little scattered, but we're working on it. But yeah, I'm, I support this movement. I personally don't partake in smart marijuana. I might be the only one in this room that supports this movement that doesn't participate in it. I mean, that's okay. But yeah, just let the people vote on this. I appreciate it. Thank you for your time. - Thank you. Okay, and we have two callers and then there's anyone else in the room who wants to speak. You just need to fill out a blue card and take these last two callers and then we're going to move on. Let's see. So Jared, Jared, can you hear me? Okay. - Yep, I can hear you. Okay. - Great. If you'll give your name and address, you'll have four minutes. - All right. My name is Jared Panico. I'm moving into 2411 West Hickory street, Denton, Texas. I'm just calling to voice my support for this movement. I am a student at UNT studying psychology and drug addiction, drug research and whatnot. I recently returned from a study abroad in Europe, studying drug policy. And while I was there, I visited the European monitoring center for drugs and drug addiction, which is a advisory board to the European union that conducts research and works with Europol and other international law enforcement agencies. So as part of that, one of the research papers that they showed us there was on like a dozen different European countries who all either increased or decreased marijuana penalties and the chart that they showed us looked at how those changes in penalties in those countries for marijuana possession affected actual usage rates in those countries. And the result was that in all of these countries changes, whether to increase or decrease penalties for marijuana possession and consumption had absolutely no effect on the usage rates of cannabis in those countries. And I bring this up because I think it's important. It's an important thing to consider something that's often talked about as like, oh, well, if we legalize it, then a bunch of people will start using it. The fact of the matter is that it's already very prevalent and common in our society. And this does nothing to change who is using it or how much of it is being used, but rather it's just changing how it affects those who are most vulnerable. - Okay. Anything else, anything further? You have a couple of minutes. - Sorry, you cut out for a second. And so the point of this measure is not to legalize. It's just to help people. What I have learned in my time as a student at UNT is that amongst all of my friends, I've had many who have had their lives threatened or nearly ruined by a small marijuana possession charge who have trauma from these incidents as well. And the main difference between my friends who have used cannabis for their whole lives and never been punished. And those who have used cannabis in the same amount or less and have been punished is simply privilege and their class and the safety, their place where they use it, like my friends who were able to smoke at their house have been just fine, but those who had to smoke in their cars are the ones who get arrested. So this will help to protect those people and reform us to make more common sense. And I yield the rest of my time. Thank you. - Thank you. Okay. And Morgan, are you there? - Yep, right here. - Great, you can give your name and address. You have four minutes, please. - Yep. My name is Morgan Rawlinson and my address is, sorry, 2411 West Hickory Street. I call today to voice my support for the measure and kind of speak about my personal experience with cannabis criminalization. I'm a student at UNT and last year I was a freshman and right at the beginning, when I had very little direction, I was pulled over for going five over the speed limit and given a class, a misdemeanor because I had three baggies and less than a gram of weed in my car. Really intimidating tactics were used against me. I can never look at cops the same after the experiences that I've had in Denton with cops regarding cannabis. Thankfully I could get my class A misdemeanor dropped, but I was told by the cop that it was likely I could go to jail. He could put me in handcuffs. And I was just an 18 year old freshman college student. And the only reason my charge got dropped is because of, as the previous caller was saying, you know, my privilege. I was able to get a lawyer, thank God, or I would have a class A misdemeanor for less than a gram of weed on me and going five over the speed limit. So, you know, you guys have heard from students now and scientists, me a victim of unjust policy. You've even heard from a seller. I think you guys, like you guys have all the information you need on this topic. If there's a clear, there's a clear right way to look at this. And I guess we just have to leave it up to you to make the right choice, but you know, all the facts are there. All the information is there for you guys. And I yield the rest of my time. Thank you. - Thank you. Okay. And so I'll close the public hearing and, and then I will, what? Okay. Yeah. Come on. I, did I get this one? - Anyone else that wants to speak before I close the speak? I guess that's. If, if you could indicate if you're willing, if you're going to speak so that I can make sure I get this right. One. Okay. Go right ahead. Go ahead. - Okay. Yes. - If you can give your name and address, please. - Jennifer Lane, the Denton Texas 76205. And this being a public hearing, it's been my understanding that one can, after the, those that have filled out cards, that the rest of the public is able to speak if they wish to. But I did fill out a card and so did James. I wanted to simply mention that there's a suffering aspect to all of this, as well as a kind of a, there's another side sitting here, listening to people. I remembered that just even four years ago, there was a candidate forum. And one of your recently former colleagues, Paul Meltzer laughed because his opponent at that time, Don Duff, was to the left of him on the marijuana question in terms of decriminalization. And that was just four years ago that Don was highly in favor of decriminalization. So that does point to the broad support that this has. And also just kind of was a really hilarious moment in the forum because no one was expecting that. On the suffering side, you have the younger people, the younger users, and even not so young users whose lives are wrecked by having a criminal record that they really don't need. And this we have seen for decades now, particularly in states that have moved towards legalization but saw so many cases of young people. For example, there was a New Yorker article not long ago about a young woman who was in a car accident and in her purse was found a small amount. And so the unfolding of disaster for her life, that this became lost her scholarship at school, ended up the only job that she could really do was ultimately to be a grower, to work for one of the farms in the legal places to have it because the record and her life was really damaged. And then also slightly older people who are just sort of in and out of homelessness and jail over this topic is truly awful. But then that doesn't necessarily speak to the older people like Penny, his story there. There's so many older people who, it's been eye-opening to me because I'm not a user but who knows if I will be when I'm older because it's one of the few things that really addresses pain in a particular way, rapidly and fully. And so I think the majority of us who are non-users may want to use it later and hope that it will become legalized throughout the whole country, not just in certain places. But in the meantime, if decriminalization on the local level passes and or is turned over to the public to pass, this will have a profound impact on people's lives, young, middle-aged and old. Thanks. - Can you give your name and address, please? You have four minutes. - Hi. Yes, hello, my name is James Carr. I live at 1526 Willow Wood Drive in Denton. Willow Wood Street, I guess it is. Well, all I really want to say is that I've had friends who were born in Denton, even though I wasn't, who were very adversely affected by arrests for small amounts of cannabis. And one of them is still in and out of homelessness and he's a middle-aged man now. And his descent into that life really began with arrests for cannabis. In addition, I'd like to mention another thing, which is that I'm one of those senior citizens that uses cannabis edible, not the smoking kind, for pain. And I was really disabled by pain for a long time, but I found an immense amount of relief, particularly at the end of the day, with medical cannabis. I purchased it in many states. And when I, I've lived part of the time in Hawaii, when I go there, I often bring some back here to Texas. So if you want to come search my house, you can arrest me. Okay. I hope you'll let the voters think about this and thank you for hearing me. - Thank you. Is there anyone else that's planning to speak? Okay, I'll close the public hearing. And that will take us to questions for staff. And just to spotlight what is needed, we need either direction to adopt as written or direct staff put it on a ballot referendum, is my understanding. And if we could manage the soliloquies to a manageable level, that'd be greatly appreciated. Rosa, did you have something else to add before we go? Okay, great. Questions for staff or direction? - Just real quick. - Councilor Watts. - Thank you, thank you, Mayor. Real quick, 'cause I've heard two different characteristics of this ordinance. One is a deprioritization, similar to what occurred, I guess a couple of weeks ago, and then another one. Then I hear the word decriminalization. So when I look at the ordinance, and I guess Mr. City Attorney, when I look at that ordinance, or that proposed ordinance in the petition, the state law still is that officers can, at their discretion, I guess, exercise their duties as a state certified police officer to exercise the law. And whether that be Dent Police or a sheriff's deputy, or UNT or TWA police, or DPS, they have the authority to do that? Okay. - Correct, yes. - So I was not here on council when council considered this in a work session. I think either a two minute pitch or something. I think the police chief at the time had spoken on this, and that there was some sense that they were already practicing some form of this in their practice. So my only question to you, Mr. City Attorney, is if, I use the word if, if there are any deficiencies in this, whether it be something we ratify and adopt tonight, or whether it be something that the public ratifies or adopts, it's still gonna be the same issue, no matter who adopts it, if there are any issues. - Correct, yes. So if it's given to the voters, they step into the shoes of the city council and have the same powers as well as the same limitations as the city council as far as what is adopted. So it would not be any different as far as the effect, whether the council adopts it or whether the public votes it. - Yeah, and I will certainly echo the comments that were made about me. Yeah, I don't have any issues in this with the voters. I think that's where this thing lies, because it's an important issue for our community. And everybody needs to have a chance to weigh in on it, similar to, as it was mentioned, when we had our fracking ordinance that came before the city council. So my direction would be to call a special election and put it on the ballot. - Thank you. Anyone else? Councilmember McGuire. - Thank you, Mayor. I've been very open about my position on this ordinance, this position. I support it wholeheartedly. I signed the petition myself, and I agree with Councilmember Watts that I would like to see this placed on the ballot in November. - Okay. Anyone else? Councilmember Burt. - I agree to have this placed on the ballot. However, I do have some concerns about the way that this is written anyway. And there's one particular area that I am very concerned about, and that's the part where you're not allowing the officer to investigate further if there's a smell test. That's what the probable cause is. So that's the issue that I have with this particular, this particular notation here. So I would not have supported it if it were to come, if it were for us to make that statement, but, or, you know, approve of anything. I wouldn't, would have been against it for that particular thing. I think officers would do a fairly decent job in their discretionary actions. Now seeing that, I do have a problem with the idea that we allow our officers to have that particular discretion, because that's where I think the issue comes in. That's where the racism and the discriminatory acts, you know, against people of color or people that are in certain locations in the city. I will be, I will leave the charge on whoever our next police chief is, on the types of people that are being hired by the city, what their idea is about this particular subject matter. Very serious about that. I want our officers, I want us to have good police officers here in this city. I want us to have non-biased police officers in the city that will treat everyone the same. But there is that step that if there is an issue, they are the ones that are going to have to deal with it. And I think that if we're taking away their authority to further investigate a probable cause situation, then we're setting ourselves up for, you know, something that we might not be expecting. But I do agree that the people need to go ahead and make this decision for the city. Thank you. - Okay, anyone else? Councilman McGee. - Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'll try to be succinct. Thanks to everyone who came tonight to speak on this. Thanks for those who emailed and Facebook messaged and text about this issue on both sides of the issue. This was initially a people-led movement. This is a people-powered movement. And the people need to have the opportunity to finish this off with a ballot initiative. So I fully support that. I would just simply add, I will encourage all members of the public to show up in a couple of weeks to meet the candidates, the finalists for police chief, so it can have some direct dialogue and ask him or her what they think about this to make sure that they are being held accountable in addition to those of us up here to do the same. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. - Thank you, Mayor Pro Tem. - Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And I'll also be brief 'cause it's public that I support this, that I'm also one of the signatories to the petitioner, although not an organizer, but I appreciate all the efforts the organizers went to. I do think that it should go to the ballot because the petitioners wanted to go that way. They want this to be seen as an effort by the city of Denton. So I support putting it on the ballot rather than immediate adoption. And I will say that regardless of where some of the elements may or may not stand, there's a bully pulpit value proposition to making it very clear to folks where the citizens of Denton stand. So I encourage that. - Okay, anyone else? Councilor Davis. - Thank you, Mayor. Yeah, ballot initiatives belong on the ballot. That's how it works. Little surprised that some of my colleagues are ready to send it right to the ballot and instead of kind of taking ownership over the issue. I know some folks signed the petition. The fact that y'all asked it to be there is one thing, but when you talk about people using your message and riding your wave, think about that. There are four votes up here for this thing if it was just a little bit different and they're choosing not to do that tonight. They're choosing to put it on the ballot. But there might be four votes up here on the dais for your initiative. The other thing I'll point out is just to respond to the commentary about the police chief candidates. There will be folks here in our community interviewing for a job. For some of them, probably it's a job they want. It's potentially a promotion from where they're at and you're proposing to ask them a question that our city attorney has been very clear on, that our city manager has been very clear on, that most law enforcement and attorneys who advise law enforcement have been very clear on. And even if you nail down the city of Austin folks, they'll tell you they are out over their skis on this particular issue. They just haven't been sued yet. A police officer will tell you they are bound to uphold the law, that they have to follow the law. So it's not really fair to ask them, hey, if the city law presumes to trump state law, which it does not, presumes to tell an officer to disregard the Code of Criminal Procedure, which one would you choose? The only fair answer they can give is the Code of Criminal Procedure, the thing they're already sworn to uphold. So not exactly a fair question. A more fair question might be, how do you feel about Denton's current policies under existing law that we've been working under to try to curb the number of arrests and to relieve bail pressure on folks in that situation? So you might ask that question instead of the unfair question about, which law are you gonna choose? - Okay, any other comments? And then I'm gonna, I have a few questions and then we're gonna move on. So any other comments? Seeing none, great. So my question is, and I don't know if this is a Rosa question, a city attorney or a Chief Smith, but my question is, this document doesn't speak to drug-free zones. So my question is, offenses included in, offenses included in the ban with marijuana, are they allowed in parks, outside schools, playgrounds, et cetera? I'll take a swing at it. There's no distinctions in the proposed ordinance. Now, whether the ordinance, there's a broader discussion and it's probably a confidential discussion to a certain degree, but there's a broader discussion about the potential applicability of the ordinance if it was adopted, but there's nothing in here that distinguishes or breaks out school zones or anything like that separately. If it was going to be faithfully implemented by the police chief and the police officers, they would not make a distinction between school zones and otherwise. - Right, that's exactly right. So this makes no distinction between protecting school zones or those protected things, so great. Then the other question is, are underage individuals included? So for example, can a 16-year-old say, hey, you can't, it's just a marijuana charge, you can't charge me? - Right, if faithfully implemented by the police and the police officers in chief, it would not distinguish between age of offender. - Okay, and then the ordinance specifically prohibits citations and arrests, but not investigations and filing cases directly with the DA. So is there anything that prohibits someone from just directing it directly to the DA's office for prosecution or to investigate? - You'd need to work with the DA's office to see whether they'd be willing to accept direct complaints that didn't come through a police department. That would be up to them, whether they were willing to accept those. - Got it, but it's not prohibited from, unless they, it's a discussion to be had, it's not prohibited in the document as written. - Right, this relates to police enforcement and police actions. - Got it, okay, and then this is a Chief Smith question. If you can come down, please. I'm one of the rare ones up here that doesn't purport to be a police officer or understand a day in your life, right? So I need you to educate me on, you encounter someone and you have an investigation, you stop 'em, do you know all the charges? How does an investigation unfurl? - Right, you don't know the charges that are happening right then. That's what the investigation is for. You conduct a reasonable investigation and determine if there's criminal activity afoot there. - Right, okay, and so that's a concern for me. This prohibits that process from playing out from the very beginning. It says hey, you know, you can't go to the next step and investigate, it may be a felony, but if you're prohibited from taking step one, you don't know that. The other thing that I wanna ask you is, from a 9-1-1 perspective, if someone calls 9-1-1 and says hey, come, it's emergency, and you show up and they say hey, it's a marijuana issue, this would direct you to turn around, right? I mean, that's what I'm saying. It's like, do you always get good information when someone calls 9-1-1? I guess 9-1-1, that's my question. - Right, not always you get good information, but yeah, the way it's described here in the ordinance that if that was the determination to what you were dealing with, then you would have to follow the ordinance. - Yeah, and so that, and just to put that in perspective, for me, that's a concern. If one of the citizens of Denton calls 9-1-1 and says hey, police, I need you to show up and investigate, this is applied as written, pits one neighbor against the other because you now can't investigate per the request of the neighbor at 101 Street because the neighbor at 102 Street has a marijuana charge. You can't then say, well, you show up and you say, hey, what's the issue? Oh, that's the issue, I gotta go. That would be bad. - Yeah, if that was the only issue we're dealing with, it would limit our ability to try to get to the root of the problem, what the actual problem is. - Yes, okay. And so were you, did the police, was there a meeting with the police and consulted with this or give an insight or opportunity to speak to it while this was drafting? - Not that I know of. - Okay, great. Thank you very much. And I'll conclude with this. The fact is, and the city manager said it, and I want everyone to have a clear record going into this. And so I wanna be abundantly clear. I absolutely support it going to the citizens. I absolutely think it won't pass. And that's my job to have a pulse of the city of Denton. The entire city, that's my job to understand the pulse of the city. And if I'm wrong, then I'll be wrong. But if I'm right, you're gonna cause a lot of confusion. I didn't wanna ask the young lady on the phone that spoke, but hear this. She said she was at UNT and left UNT. UNT can enforce whatever rules they want. Police officers can enforce whatever rules they want. It's going to cause confusion. And that's my concern. It also, as I said, every time something comes up that this council wants to take up that's outside of our control, we, I took an oath to support and enforce, it's in the application. You have to enforce the laws of the state and the United States. This one goes a step further. The city charter says you cannot interfere with direct reports to the city manager. The police chief, the police department reports to the city manager. By charter, we're prohibited from doing that. And it's abundantly clear. So to do this, and the citizens can't do it. As the city managers, I mean, city attorney said, the citizens vote for it, they don't get some superpower to usurp the city charter either. And so the city charter is the document that will carry the day that says this council, nor the citizens of Denton can usurp the charter. They can't usurp state law. And every peace officer is, takes their office through the state. So I support it going to the ballot and I think it won't be successful, but that'll be determined in November. So with that, thank you very much, Rosa. Thank you for everyone that worked hard on this. And thank you for everyone that spoke. Appreciate your time. And that concludes item B, takes us to 6A, which is ID 221245. Consider adoption of ordinance of the city of Denton, amending the code of ordinance related to chapter two, titled administrative articles 11 titled ethics to update the composition requirements of the panel, clarify what is included in the content of an accepted ethics complaint. - Hello, mayor and council, Madison Rorschach, Denton city auditor. I'm also the staff liaison to the board of ethics. Forgot I need to share my screen one moment. I just have a brief presentation just to talk about what's in the ordinance to change. As you may remember, this was originally presented in a work session in June. There were six proposals that the board of ethics presented and five of them are included in this ordinance and in the following item for the rules of procedure for the board of ethics. So just to go over the five items, they will do the following. One, they remove the requirement for a board panel, a report of ethics panel to have an attorney or retired jurist as the board is no longer required to have individuals with those qualifications. Two, it clarifies what is considered to be the contents of an ethics complaint for a preliminary panel's assessment to be clear that media submitted with the complaint that is not on the complaint form itself can be included in that review. Three, it clarified in the ethics ordinance that the preliminary panel may recommend that a hearing be held to determine if an accepted ethics complaint is frivolous, which was previously only referenced in the rules of procedure. Four, it adjusts the composition requirements of a preliminary panel to prohibit a board member from participating on a preliminary panel if they have previously submitted a complaint against the respondent, unless most of the board members have also done this. And five, it clarifies the timelines and reporting process for the board's staff liaison and processing and advisory opinion request in the rules of procedure. Now I'll stand for questions. - Okay, any questions for staff or I'll take a motion? Councilman Byrd? - Motion for approval. - Thank you, is there a second? Second by Councilman Watts. We have a motion by Councilman Byrd, second by Councilman Watts, discussion. Seeing none, Councilman Byrd, I say you. - Aye. - Councilman Watts. - Aye. - Councilmember McGuire. - Aye. - Councilmember McGee. - Aye. - Who else? Councilmember Davis. - Aye. - Mayor Pro Tem. - Aye. - And Mayor Hussbett-Style as well, that passes seven, zero. Thank you, takes us to the next item. This is ID 221246, consider adoption of ordinance for the city of Denton confirming the proposed amendments to the board of ethics rules of procedure and required by the code of ordinances charter two, pardon me, chapter two, article 11, section two dash 227K to update the composition requirements of a panel, clarify what is included in the contents of the accepted ethics complaint. - That's basically the same item just to do it for the rules of procedure. - And I have, and so I'm gonna back up one, one. We're gonna have to revote on A, 'cause I forgot there's a speaker. Dana? Dana, are you? D-A-N-N-A? Okay, well then we're all good. Okay, great. So we're good on A, that we are B. Any questions on B? - I just have one. - Councilor Watts. - Madison, when we had this work session, there were some other things that were talked about, but this is just limited to sort of like we talked about, should the chair only have exclusive right to review additional evidence. That's not either part of this in its denial. In other words, they're saying, we deny that. This is just, they just haven't considered that. And some of the other things that we talked about. - Correct, yeah, everything, this is just to codify what you gave direction to codify during that meeting. The other direction for them to consider, they just haven't considered that yet. It's not as part of this. - All right, thank you very much, appreciate it. - Okay, any other questions? - I'll move to approve. - Thank you. Motion by Council Member Watts, is there a second? Second by Council Member McGee. Discussion? Seeing none. We have a motion by Council Member Watts, second by Council Member McGee. Council Member Watts, I'll say you. - Aye. - Council Member McGee. - Aye. - Council Member McGuire. - Aye. - Council Member Byrd. - Aye. - Council Member Davis. - Aye. - Mayor Pro Tem. - Aye. - Mayor Hutspeth is a aye as well. That pass is seven zero. Thank you. - Thank you. - Takes us to our last item. ID 221416, consider approval of a resolution. The City of Denton adopting the 2022-2023 City Council priorities and key focus areas for the City of Denton and providing an effective date. - Good evening, Mayor and Council. Monica Benavides, Assistant to the City Manager. This evening, I'll be presenting to you the key focus areas and, oh, I'm sorry. Let me try that one more time. This evening, I'll be presenting to you the fiscal year 2022-23 key focus areas and council priorities for your consideration. Each year, the City Council conducts a retreat where priorities are established for the upcoming year. This year's retreat was held on June 24th and June 25th and was planned and facilitated by Julia Novak with REF TELUS. During the retreat, the Mayor and City Council worked together to refine the following key focus areas. Pursue organizational leadership and collaborative and respectful leadership. Enhance infrastructure and mobility. Foster economic opportunity and affordability. Strengthen community and quality of life. Support healthy and safe communities and promote sustainability and the environment. After refining the key focus areas, council then deliberated on potential priorities for the next fiscal year. Of the 36 proposed, eight priority projects received a majority of council support, including a new city hall, which includes a potential for retail lease space or partnership opportunities. Form a municipal housing corporation to focus on workforce affordable housing. Execute the housing affordability program. Increase tourism. Develop and implement small area plans. And partner with Vulcan Materials to relocate the concrete plant and expand the vehicle fleet and infrastructure. This slide denotes the key focus areas, new projects and priorities in bold, as well as the continuing projects and priorities. Because many of them are multi-year projects, staff will continue to report milestones and provide status updates via reports to the council. In summary, once affirmed, the fiscal year 22-23 key focus areas, including the ongoing priorities, will serve as a foundation for budget development and strategic focus for the upcoming fiscal year. As previously mentioned, staff will continue to track the progress of all priorities in the form of council reports. And with that, I will take any questions. - Okay, questions for staff? Oh, you have to pull that down for me, please. Questions for staff? Seeing none, I'll take a motion. Council Member McGee? All right, I don't know what's going on. Council Member Byrd? - I wasn't, but I can. Motion to approve. - Okay. - I'll do the second. - Thank you. Motion by Council Member Byrd, second by Council Member McGee. Discussion? Anyone in the room? Seeing none. Mayor Pro Tem. - Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I really appreciate the efforts that staff went in to lead into this. And I appreciate my fellow councilors and their priorities that they put on, what's essentially slide five. I have to say I have great concerns with the middle. The process that we used with Reptiles, I think was, did not service well, was higgledy-piggledy. And I think if it wasn't for the fact that we had a number of items that this council brought forward that we do feel passionate about, I'd have grave concerns about moving forward. But I am heartened by the fact that we will have opportunities to refine this in subsequent meetings and dial down to what a consensus will be. So while I support my fellow councilor and their councilors and their priorities, and I support staff in going into this, I have great concerns about how we did this. But I will be supporting this motion. - Okay, any other discussion? Councilor McGee. - Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Just real quick, I know that we all agreed to meet more frequently, perhaps quarterly. I hope that staff will help us facilitate that kind of meeting in a more informalized conversation among us. So thank you, Mr. Mayor. - Thank you. Okay, anyone else? Okay, very good. Then let's vote. So Council Member Burt. - Aye. - Council Member McGee. - Aye. - Council Member McGuire. - Aye. - Council Member Watts. - Aye. - Council Member Davis. - Aye. - Mayor Pro Tem. - Aye. - Mayor Hutsbeth is aye. Did I miss someone? I don't think so. I think that's seven, zero. Thank you. That passes. Takes us to concluding items. Any concluding items? Council Member Davis and then Council Member Burt. - Just wanna remind folks who may or may not know that this Friday at five o'clock, five to seven out of the Explorium, which is, some of us know it as the old outlet mall, but Stonehill Center at the north end of town, they're going to be hosting the Denton County Friends of the Family Giveback Market. And that is a way that you can go out and support local vendors. There's about 15 vendors out there. It's a family-friendly event, but also help support the work of Denton County Friends of the Family, which is really instrumental in really helping victims of crime in some of the worst moments of their lives and help them get onto the next step of their lives and succeed in those. So you can help them out all year round, but especially right now as they're getting ready to do some of their back-to-school activities, especially by going to that Giveback Market second annual at the Explorium five to seven on Friday. - Okay, Councilman Burke. - I have a few items I wanna share with the public that I think that are important. The first item is I'd like for you all to please leash your dogs. There are a lot of dogs out here. I know that we are very sincere about the well-being of our animals, but there still are a lot of people out there that are letting their dogs roam around without leash or any identification. I hear about it. I'd like for you all to please stop running red lights. I know that we had a big discussion about red lights running and getting rid of the red light running issues around here, but I have witnessed just too many times, particularly on University Drive, people just running lights, as a matter of fact, I almost got hit by a car the other day, so that's why I'm bringing it up. Slow down on these roads. We know that we are having a lot of road construction. That's helping to slow down temporarily, but once those roads are fixed and they're nice and smooth, we're gonna continue to have these issues. So please slow down on the roads. Also, please be kind to your neighbors. I've been looking at the little neighborhood app. They have a little next door app. And there's just too much stuff going on out here. I know we got some new people in town and we wanna preserve the nice elegance in the hometown feel, but we're just not nice to our neighbors in some instances. Now that we're being able to carry guns and all this other stuff, it's just a new boldness that's out there and I don't appreciate it. Also, please secure your vehicles. This is just a reminder to not leave things that are of value out in the open in your vehicles. It's just an invitation for someone to just break into your vehicle and take your items. I think the police officers would prefer to do something different than taking a report on stolen items out of the vehicles, although they have to do that. So that's just kind of my little thing that I have been noticing here lately, but particularly the red light running is just becoming an increased issue as I go around the city that I'm noticing. Thank you. - Okay, is there anyone else? Ms. City Manager. - Just a couple of things. I will be at the office Wednesday through Friday, one more little last trip with my family before school starts in August. David will be in charge, but I'll be accessing emails and certainly, if necessary, taking calls. I've got some things I need to get done. The other thing is you got an email today about the selection of Sarah Keekler. I wanna say to you that we did a national search. I mean, we sent information out all over the place and had two very qualified candidates in addition to Sarah with years of experience in human resources, but to her testament and certainly her skills, she just wiped the floor. I mean, she did a great job, so we're so thrilled to have her and just wanted you to know it's so nice to be able to keep our employees here and promote. Thank you. - Okay, anyone else? Yeah, I wanna echo that. I think the world of Sarah, Sarah H. So, and both Sarahs, but yeah, it's always, that was always fun sending emails to the wrong one. But so congratulations to her. She'll do a great job there. Then also want to recognize our firefighters. If you look at the report from the person that the drowning report in South Lake Park, they arrived in minutes, had them to the hospital in minutes. I mean, it's truly phenomenal. I mean, you can't see in that water. That is just impressive. That, and then also, if you did not know, one of our firefighters was off duty in Salina and rescued a kid that was drowning and had been in the water for awhile. And they, so they did CPR and brought that young man back, which was phenomenal. So lots of great things going out there in the city. And so thanks to all our first responders, but wanted to call those out. So at 8.32 PM, we will conclude the night's meeting and see you in a couple of weeks. Thanks.