Nov 27, 2018 City Council on 2018-11-27 12:00 PM

Well, good noon, everybody. Welcome to this meeting of the Denton City Council. On Tuesday, November 27, 2018, we do have a quorum, so I'll call this meeting to order. Our first item on the agenda is agenda item one, citizen comments on consent agenda items. I don't believe we have any cards. No? All right. Second item is request for clarification of agenda items listed on the agenda for today, November 27. Councilmember Briggs. I would like to request to pull item J just for a separate vote. Okay. And also, I have a question about a follow-up question on B, the consent agenda. We received an email with a question and an answer. And it says the recyclables market has had an impact due to tighter quality standards by our MRF and increased disposal of contaminated materials. And it was, and this has to go with the money that we're using, right, for the disposal fees for, it's my understanding that we have been accepting recyclables which were highly contaminated from Lewisville. And so those were directly going into our landfill. And now that that contract is, has not been renewed, will that actually help reduce the waste that we're getting into our landfill? Potentially could. I don't know off the top of my head, but we can certainly visit with our MRF partner, Pratt Industries, see what they're expecting in terms of recyclables coming in. Contamination rates for some of those entities are higher than others. I think ours is about 30%. So it does have an impact. It's not a noticeable impact on our waste volumes, but it has caused a bit of an uptick. So we'll visit with them. My understanding from recent discussions is that they're not necessarily interested in taking on a lot of new materials given where the recycling market is right now. But we can verify that and we'll also trim that out over time. Yeah. And just city manager, I would like an update on what percent of the waste from the, from Pratt goes, comes from other cities versus our contamination. Certainly. We can get that from them. Thank you. Okay. Any other clarifications for agenda items? Yes. Council member Meltzer. I'd just like to understand on item F, whether that, we've referred to it just in case (inaudible) whether that item obligates, that program obligates them to divert our resources to the work whenever asked. Afternoon, I'm Chris Summit with the police department. I'm a deputy chief over the investigative section. So the, that's our task force officer that's part of that program. So we're not obligated to provide any additional resources on demand for that. We can also remove ourselves from the task force whenever we see fit at no penalty. While the officers with the task force, the city does continue to pay their salary in full. Some of the overtime costs that that officer incurs are covered by the city. Some are covered by the federal government, depending on the operation that they're working on. Some of the benefits that we get out of it, while we're not required to provide additional resources, when our investigations spill into other jurisdictions or grow beyond our ability to manage, now we have the resources through the federal agency to pursue our cases and help us. So they bring resources to us and then, of course, we participate in any of the seizures that are awarded during the investigation of the drug offenses. >> Thank you. >> All right, any other questions for, at least on this topic? Okay, thank you. >> You're welcome. >> Appreciate it, thank you so much. Any other questions for clarification on the agenda? Seeing none, we'll move on to our work session item reports, which are agenda items 3A through C. Agenda item 3A, receive report from the Denton County Transportation Authority and hold a discussion regarding the agency services, provisions, budgets, goals, and objectives for its members, cities. >> Mayor, members of the council, Mario Canazares as the city manager. As many of you know, we've had a number of conversations with DCTA with concerns regarding declining ridership, and we were having those conversations with the previous president. But with the recent leadership changes there at DCTA, Raymond Suarez was recently appointed as the new president, CEO of the agency. And so he is here to present information to the council about their goals and objectives for the upcoming few years. >> Raymond, forgive us for eating while you're making your presentation, so I just want to say that in advance. >> I appreciate the distraction, Mayor. >> Thank you very much, Mayor and members of the council. >> Councilmember Briggs, did you have a comment real quick? >> Yeah, I just wanted to make an announcement because I had removed, recused myself for other DCTA items. I just wanted to say that I checked, and that since this is not a pending matter, that I have confirmed that it is okay for me to be here for the presentation and the ones later. >> Okay, good, thank you, Councilmember Briggs, sorry. >> So thank you, I appreciate being here today. Hopefully, I'll have an opportunity to address the council more often. As part of our strategy moving forward, I'd also like to acknowledge our board chair, Charles Emery and Diane Costa, our board member, for being here today in support. So to talk about the future of DCTA and where not only myself but our leadership team sees the agency going. There's been a lot of discussion about DCTA, its value proposition. How are we making a difference, what is our value to the stakeholders? And I want to start out by saying that we're spending a lot of time making changes. We're looking at everything we're doing. And what I want to do is walk you through what I see as our goals and our options moving forward. So needless to say, there's been a leadership change at the top. But we're also making organizational changes so that we can be more effective and get out in the community, meet with our stakeholders. It's critically important. One of the things that I'm trying to do with our organization is make sure that we're staying true to our core principles. And that's basically, we have four things fundamentally that we do. We need to improve mobility. Denton County's been a non-attainment area with regard to air quality. That's what transit authorities, part of our mission across the nation. As we receive federal dollars, a lot of those federal dollars come in to improve air quality. So that's top of mind. But most importantly, it's about development and livability and making sure that from a mobility perspective, we're making your stakeholder communities more mobile, more livable, and helping with economic development. So I'm making sure that just about every presentation that I'm doing, that we're sticking true to those core values. And that informs how we do business in the future, all the decisions we make going forward. Assessing everything that we do, we literally are. We're looking at our operating contracts, we're looking at innovation. There's a lot coming. Uber and Lyft have been making a significant impact. You can Google this and look at every transit authority in the country. Much like Amazon's having an impact in retail, Uber, Lyft, and a lot of microtransit providers are providing a lot of innovation. It can be looked at as a competitive force. It can also be looked at as a collaborative and a tool that we can use. And we are absolutely on top of those types of initiatives. And I'll get into that a little bit more as we move forward. We're looking at our service delivery strategies. It's a challenge finding operators to drive buses. And the amount of hours that they're in the seat, and how they work with customers, how efficient and effective we are in answering calls, and how quickly we get back to folks. And it starts with me. I want to make sure that we're being responsive to requests that come in and that we're always keeping those four primary goals in mind. And so we're expecting that out of our service delivery partners. We're looking at our contracts and how they deliver a service and what impact and how we get informed about the different types of technologies that are coming to fruition and how we vet those out in the marketplace because there's a lot of technology providers out there that are here today, gone tomorrow. And we certainly don't want to implement something that's not going to be here in the future to provide services to your citizens, so that's important. And we just need to become more effective, more efficient in what we do each and every day. The mayor and city manager, I've had several discussions with them. They made it very clear, I get it, and that's what we're going to be focused on for at least the next year, and we will continue to do this as we move forward. So some of the things that, so I took over in mid September, so that's roughly two and a half months. It seems like almost a year now, but it's been roughly two and a half months. And I wanted to talk about some of the things that we're doing that we've already accomplished and things that we're working on in the near future. So I talked a little bit about restructuring of the agency from a staff perspective, but we're also looking at restructuring some of the operating contracts that we have with our vendors. I had a meeting with the president and CEO of First Transit USA and let him know that we were looking at doing a cost benefit analysis and continuing to work with them, potentially taking some of what they do, maybe in house, such as customer service, so that we are directly responsible of knowing how our customers and frankly board members and council members, when they call in, I'm not sure that we're going to do that. But we're looking at every piece of our operating contracts to make sure that, number one, we're getting the value out of them. And if not, what we're going to do moving forward. Another key aspect in our ability to change the way we do business is working with our operators. And we contract all of our bus and rail service. They're different types of contracts and they're separate contracts. But there's a tremendous number of fantastic men and women that come in in the morning, work late in the evenings, delivering service across this entire region, if you will, where we serve. And they do a great job. And it was important to me and it's important as an agency that we treat them with respect, we value them and we show that value. They're making sure that we're providing competitive pay, competitive benefits. And frankly, we fall in behind. So that was one of the things that was important in our contract to make sure that a bus operator that comes in and works hours, and it's a hard job. And there's a lot of competition for people that have commercial driver's license. And one of the issues that we had and we continue to have is there's turnover across the industry that can exceed 25% up to 30% in drivers. So a tremendous amount of turnover that's very inefficient. And we need to do a better job of better pay, better benefits, but also reducing that turnover rate. And it's a challenge not only for us, but school systems across the country. So that's something that I'm proud to say that we work through. I had a sit down discussion with the head of the national ATU to help him understand that one of the key factors for us to move forward is we had to have the ability to hire folks that did not have commercial driver's licenses. And the reason for that is there's a lot of competitive forces out there like VIA and Lyft and others that are competitive with us. But we have a lot of really good operators that can do a very good job. But we also need to be able to retain people, and this is an opportunity for us to do that. So we need to have the flexibility to provide that. So we were improving our pay so we can be a little bit more competitive. Some of the benefits have improved, and then we needed to make a big decision. And it was something that we hold very important in our future ability to reduce our costs and be more efficient. And that was to be able to hire folks that don't have commercial driver's licenses. And the union ultimately agreed with that. So we're going to continue to work with our union, all of our operators that will move forward and start transitioning into some of these new and innovative services. >> Raymond, real quick question. >> Yes, sir. >> Cuz I think sometimes I get confused. So First Transit is the contract that operates the rail or is it the bus and the rail or? >> So there's two different contracts with First Transit. They were initiated at different times. The contracts come up at separate times. The first contract on the bus side is actually a contract for management. And then they develop a sub-corp and they hire all the operators under the sub-corp. >> Okay, gotcha, all right. >> So I'll move on. >> Yep. >> So we're evaluating that. Another big thing that we've heard from cities very interested in, and it's something that traditionally transit authorities don't do. Transit authorities typically take in sales tax from their member cities and they view the operations as a system. So they tend not to try to figure out how much cost or a portion for a particular city, how many miles and hours, and how much sales tax. And it's not that it's a bad thing. It's just that it's not customary. So one of the things that I want to make sure of, and the other thing that we heard, and we continue to hear, is how do we ensure as this region grows and DCTA is asked to play a larger role in the region to fill in some of the holes that we have in the system and to defray some of the operating costs. So that the three cities that exist today that help stand up DCTA aren't having to pay the full burden and carry the water in the future. How do we ensure that we're doing a good job of allocating those costs? So one of the things that we're trying to do is bring in industry experts. So we've asked TTI, which is a Texas transportation institute out of Texas A&M. They provide research nationally. It's an independent research firm. They do a lot of analysis and research around operating costs, efficiencies, all sorts of things, but they also do a lot of research around mobility and first and last mile. And so we've contracted them to work with DCTA. And I'm bringing in a consultant. He's really not a consultant. He's actually a gentleman that's worked for DART for over 30, I want to say 35 years, running the budget office. And he builds the budget and the financial plan for DART, presents it to their board. He's very familiar with ELAP programs, cost models, just about anything we could ever want. And we're asking him to come in independently, work with our cities, work with DCTA to provide input into developing a cost model that all of our cities and our contracting partners can feel comfortable in how we're allocating costs, not only direct, but indirect costs, so that as we continue to move forward as an agency, everyone in the region will understand this model and hopefully feel comfortable that how we're applying costs operating an administration is being done in the most prudent and financially acceptable way moving forward. As you can see, I've put dates on some of these. So evaluating our existing operating agreement, my plan is to have that complete with some decisions for our board in March. Our operating cost model, my hope is to have that complete in May. We will be setting up a series of workshops with the CFOs and other leaders within each city to talk about how we share those costs. I want to finalize an ELAP program. So it'll be looking at, and I want to say, go on record as saying that myself and I think our board will all agree that DCTA never expected to have the amount of sales tax that's being generated in the region being ingested in DCTA. And frankly, it would be likely inappropriate to figure out how to apply every one of those dollars to actual transit service. And so we're not at odds with the concept of remitting those funds back. And that model is going to change as we become more efficient, there'll be more dollars to spread around, but we also need to make sure that we're staying true to the original implementation when we were created with our Chapter 460, that the intent of those dollars that were voted in by the taxpayers in your municipalities that are used for the appropriate reasons. And there's plenty of history where ELAP programs have been implemented and effective and efficient. This one's a little bit different than some of the ELAP programs in the region in that the ELAP typically is put in place until a city actually gets rail in place. In this case, we have rail, but we're more than happy to look at that and we're going to work diligently with your CFOs and your city managers to make sure that we go through our financial plan, we make sure that one of the federal requirements is that we not only can operate what we put in place, but that we have what's called the Transit Asset Management Program, it's a federal requirement, that anything that we have, that we have the financial capacity to continue to operate and move forward in the future. So that's a big project, but we're hoping to have that completed by May of this year. And then I'll talk about this now and then at the end, but stakeholder engagement is ultimately the guiding path for how DCTA measures its value. And in years past, staff would work with our board, we'd go out and do a strategic visioning session, and frankly, that's a little backwards in my opinion, and I think our board agrees that we need to actually start with our stakeholders. So our intent is to start a process, we have a lot of things going on right now, this may be very aggressive, but I want to start the process sometime between March and May. And that would be setting up some transit forms where the cities have an opportunity to provide input as to what is the strategic vision of DCTA. We should not be guessing. What is the role that the council wants to see, each council that we work with and represent? What do you see as the future of our transit authority? What things should we be doing, what things should we not be doing? And that will inform our long range system plan. And so I want to talk about that as we move forward, not so much today, but in the future. So what are some of the things that we're doing, tangible things that we're doing in your community today? We filed for a grant application with the FTA. It's roughly $560,000 grant application that was actually introduced to us or requested by Ms. Briggs, Council Member Briggs, as a suggestion for, hey, there's some federal dollars out there. What can we do? So I sat down with the team and we actually contacted the United Way of Denton, and they've been working with a lot of other social partners in the area, and we submitted a proposal. Now, we don't know if we're going to win it, but this is just an example of some of the things that we can do. As a transit authority, we have access to a lot of federal dollars and there's a lot of, not only through the North Central Texas Council of Government, but through the FTA itself, there's a lot of different types of programs that I want to talk to you about just a little bit here today. So this program is, or proposal is roughly $560,000. The sub-recipient will be the United Way. We filed this grant on behalf of the United Way and the City of Denton. And ultimately, we filed it so if we're awarded the money, we will be the recipients, but then the sub-recipients will be the United Way. And the idea here is that we're looking to put in roughly 30 lockers to support the homeless community. So one of the biggest issues that's been identified and one of the criteria for this grant was that they wanted to figure out some innovative ways to help reduce the access to healthcare and improve the well-being of the homeless. So the innovation here is that we would put in roughly 30 lockers at Monsignor King. And what this does and what's anticipated, and we'll find out through this program if we're selected, is that many of the folks that are homeless don't go to healthcare because a lot of their belongings, they literally have with them. And so if they leave them somewhere, there's a fear of them being stolen or lost, whatever. And so these lockers would benefit them because they would give them a place to store their things and provide access to healthcare using transit and innovation. The belief is that through this program, and there's some statistics that have shown that with the homeless, one of the highest cost of healthcare is they come into the emergency room. So the belief is that through a program like this that they would see up to 80% drop in those types of emergency room visits and about 60% of the treat and release would actually be reduced as well. So the intent is to put these lockers in for a year. The cost, the $560,000, would also support a program manager to facilitate this type of program. But again, it's really focused on improving mobility and access for the homeless, providing a storage facility, and if this project proves beneficial, we would look to putting some of these around Denton to help facilitate improvements in healthcare and access to healthcare. Councilmember Briggs has a question. Well, just more of a statement. I just wanted to thank you for this. I came across the grant and shared it, and you guys in the city and United Way ran with it and came up with a productive solution for the money used, and I appreciate that. Thank you, Councilmember. The other thing that we've been working on with the City of Denton and the United Way is a program around inclement weather. So the concern is that when it gets incredibly cold that folks have a way to get to a shelter. So one of the options that we discussed is putting together a plan where we would designate areas around the city that they would know every hour on the hour when a temperature drops below a certain point where it's a concern for health and well-being, that they could walk to a particular location, know they will get picked up, and they will be transported to a shelter. So that's a program we're really excited about. And another initiative that I want to make sure that we launch in 2019 is working with the social services to figure out how to build a mobility plan specifically for the underserved and the folks that are homeless so that we understand where they need to go, what types of services they're needing to access, and making sure that we create a safety net of transit services that certainly they can access our existing routes, but is there other forms of transit they need that's not on an existing route that we can improve? The other thing I want to make sure of is that we're creating a dialogue, an open dialogue with the social services to help us actually plan and engineer our transit services in a better way. Typically when transit puts systems in, we hire consultants, it's done across the country. Part of it is so that we have some money to blame if it doesn't go well. But in a lot of cases, the reality is that they're looking at the traffic patterns and density and things of that nature, they're not necessarily looking at, again, staying core to our value proposition, and we're going to add value, what is the value proposition for your city? If you have a lot of homeless, if you have folks that need social services that maybe another city doesn't have, that needs to be core to what we do and we need to make sure that our transit services are being provided in the most effective way. So this is a lot about community outreach. Lyft and VIA, there's companies that are doing a lot of really great things, but it takes technology to make them work. So one of the things that we're looking at is making sure, and we hear this a lot, there's a term in the industry called access to jobs. Well, in reality, what we're hearing a lot from, and this goes back to our mission about economic prosperity, economic development, is you have Peterbilt, you have a lot of development manufacturing and facilities that need access to workers, and that's the new coin phrase that a lot of the folks that are setting up businesses are looking for, they need access to workers. We're growing so fast, not only from a perspective of people moving in, but businesses that are moving in the area. So I want to make sure that we're doing a good job of developing economic opportunity zones where you have homeless, where you have people that need jobs, and how do we get them from their house because they don't have cars, to places that need access to workers. And we have the ability to do that, but we need to work with your city, your economic development partners to make that happen. Question from Councilmember Armitage, I believe. So looking at that term, transit dependent, and that speaks to me, I think it's pretty self-evident what that means. What percentage of DCTA users in City of Denton, would you say, are transit dependent as opposed to recreational or- I wish I had that number, I don't know, and it's something I really want to get my arms around. That's where I think working with the social services, obviously we're not able to ask people, there's no way to determine based on our fair media today who's transit dependent, who's not transit dependent. We can survey folks, certainly, but I think we'll learn a lot more by working with the social services to figure that out. And here's the thing, if transit historically has been viewed as almost like infrastructure, you have water, you have electricity, to have a vibrant city that grows economically, one could argue that you need transit. That's absolutely changing every day with all the innovation that's before us. But a typical transit system that has fixed routes, we try to hit all the retail and grocery stores and medical facilities, but they don't always hit everything that, everywhere people need to go. And it's a very expensive type of service. It's a legacy type of service, big buses, run on schedule, a lot of times they're empty. And that's not DCTA, that's country wide. You can talk to anybody, they all have the same, everybody has the same issue with it. So it's not something that we're grasping and holding onto. We wanted to look at the innovation and how to improve it. I don't know what that number is today. >> Yeah. Can I follow that up? >> Sure. >> Yeah, so I'm not an expert in that kind of demographic study, but I would suggest that in addition to consulting social services, I'm guessing maybe I'd be wrong that a number of, that statistically significant percentage of users would be people who don't necessarily use the kind of social services that you're talking about. I'm not saying a majority, but so for instance, students or just people who a bus route happens to be on their way to work or there's not good parking where they live, something like that. So I'd be, it might be worth your DCTA's while to conduct surveys of the people who are actually using, people riding the buses, I'm not sure how you would do that. >> So we do quite a bit of surveys, we do them fairly often. I'd say at least every other year we're out in the community doing surveys. We're on our buses, we're on the trains, and we're providing, we're looking at origin destinations, students, how much they're using the service. But specifically to the transit dependent, I don't believe that's a question that we've asked. I'll have to go back to staff and see if they have that information. And I'm more than happy to bring our expert that does all the surveys to talk to you about the type of analysis that we've done. The social economic differentiators and who's riding our system, both bus and rail. >> Wonderful, I would love to see that, thanks. >> Sure, thank you. So let me move on. Last point here, so DCTA in March will award what's a fairly innovative type of RFP or procurement. And I think you're going to see a lot more of these, and the best analogy to this would be the statewide contract of the state of Texas where you can access different types of services. You have to go through a competitive process, you still have to select companies. But our intent, and we've had an overwhelming amount of support from all the different types of providers, whether it be e-bike, and scooters, and e-cars, and autonomous vehicles. They all suffer from the same ailment, and that's when an RFP comes out, they have a really thick RFP, and they have to go compete, and one of them will be selected. And they're locked out for up to ten years in some cases, so they don't get an opportunity to compete. What DCTA sees in the future, and what we're hearing a lot of support for, even among the different providers, is that they'd like the ability to compete in a region. And I think it's very healthy to have multiple providers in a certain area. So our approach is actually to try to qualify all the different companies via, there's companies that are similar to via, but already have, there's one called Bubble that's actually either retired or off duty police officers. And they're alcohol, drug and alcohol tested, they're very safe and secure operators. And there's a lot of different options that we can use as a portfolio. So as we look at our communities, we can select different vendors. And that's going to be important for us as we move forward, because while I think it's important that we stay true to our operators and mechanics, we need to be competitive. And frankly, with a 30% turnover, 25 to 30% turnover, there's a lot of room for us to start providing these services with third parties. And as these companies come and go, the benefit with having a safety net of different providers is that we'll always have somebody to provide that service. So that's something that we're very excited about. And this will allow us to introduce new innovation into new services into this area. So the other things that we're working on is transitioning to a smaller fleet. Our fleet was predominantly 40, 35 foot buses. They require a lot of fuel, they can tear up your streets, they run over curbs. It's a challenge, especially with a lot of the development that's going on, to operate these effectively. And frankly, a smaller fleet means we can increase our speed on the streets, we're not tearing them up as much. And we can get into neighborhoods that we frankly can't get in today. So there's a lot of question around, can we put a stop in a certain place? And it's not that DCTA doesn't want to, it's just with our fleet, it makes it very, very challenging for us to put a stop anywhere and everywhere. >> I'm going to recognize Councilmember Armitage, but if we could, because we've got about 16 slide presentation, and we're on slide five. So if we could hold the questions through the end of the presentation, and then we'll answer them all at once, sort of for efficiency. So go ahead, Councilmember Armitage. >> Yeah, I was wondering, speaking of fleet. Have you done a study of what the long term cost effectiveness would be of electric vehicles and what would be saved in gas? I realize that the prices are high, but they're going down. >> Yes, yes, we definitely have an eye on the technology. We try to get involved when those technology providers come into the area. And nationally, we're engaged on a lot of different initiatives. And I'll answer that in a few slides on where we're going. So again, best value strategy, our intent is to become more of a broker of services to work with these different forces that are out there and be as cost effective and efficient as we can. And frankly, we need to do a better job of leveraging our assets. We know a lot of discussion around ridership, and there's no question we need to do a better job of increasing ridership. But there's another aspect of why a transit agency exists, and that's to make sure that from an economic development, what value do we bring? And this is something that I learned at DART a long time ago when we were building the light rail system, is that there's a lot of concern about the money that's spent on these things. But there's also a major benefit into building rail systems, and I'll talk about that next. And I'll go through these slides very quick, Mayor. So I want to start from the south end and move this way. So these slides are really focused on our rail. And rail is designed to carry a lot of people, a lot of density. And frankly, analogous to this would be putting in a brand new highway. TechStop puts in a brand new, beautiful highway. You had a lot of on ramps and off ramps. And the expectation is not that it's going to be three to five years before you see development everywhere. It takes time for development to happen. But in 2011, we opened the A train system. We don't have a lot of, we don't have the ridership that would be expected in year 15. But the thing that, the leaning indicator ridership is the type of density that's happening around this. And so some of you are probably very aware of this, so I'm going to move through these very quickly. But there's a 90 acre development, a Hebron station. It's a $300 million development that's literally adjacent to our station at the very top. You can't see it very well, but at the very top, next to that brown building, that circular building is our arch building is our train station. And that station is actually seeing some of the highest ridership that we've seen in over three years. So it's not only bucking the national trend of decreased ridership, we're actually seeing a reversal of that. Old Town, there's a lot of development going on. There's a green board all over the Old Town area. We've been working in partnership with the city on a lot of different things, the walkability, enhanceability. There's been quite a few dollars that have already been set aside and funded not only through the city but through North Central Texas Council of Governments has funded quite a bit. And there's roughly $30 to $40 million worth of development that's planned around Old Town as we speak. Island Village like Louisville Station, Tower Bay Lofts are going in, it's $40 million worth of development. So just south of the lake at those three development sites, there's over $400 million of development that's being created, that's planned. And ultimately, residents will be there. There's access and connections from this particular development to our trail system. So again, improving livability, walkability, and the densification is going to help. I don't know if that's a word, but I'm going to use it anyway. It should help ridership. I mean, if you believe that density is going to require better mobility access, then I think this is the precursor to increased ridership. And I'm moving past our Med Park station because frankly, there's not been development there. And it's something that I want to work with this council on to attract development around that. We can work with our university partners. We can work with NCTC. We can try to attract not only what's conventional mixed use development, which is some type of density of apartments and things of that nature in retail. But there's a lot of university systems from downtown on the Green Line, all the way to downtown Denton with TWA, UNT, and NCTC. So I think that's a great opportunity. And ultimately, the DDTC with the Martino Group, there's roughly $13.3 million that's been spent adjacent to our transit property. So again, I think there's a lot of opportunity to work with you as council to actually improve not only the economic development, but that will help with increased ridership. >> And then getting to electric vehicles, hydrogen vehicles, autonomous vehicles. I wanted to just stop on this slide here because the city of Frisco, the Star, the Hall Business Park, they launched. Actually, what happened was an autonomous vehicle company out of San Francisco was looking at roughly 13 different cities across the country. They were looking for a place to launch their first autonomous vehicle pilot program. And they selected the Star and Hall Business Park as a place to do business because the state of Texas is one of the most friendly states when it comes to insurance and other laws that prohibit in some other states the ability to try this service. So the service has been running for about three months. We had the North Central Texas Council of Governments actually reach out to DCTA because a lot of the programs that we've been working on with Lyft and others. And they said, hey, would you help just be a partner to this? We're not funding it, we're not involved in managing it, but we're just part of the team. And they have a Transit Management Association, the area that supports this AV program. So these are autonomous vehicles that are running around that area. We've surveyed the folks, there's about a 98% acceptance that people feel safe. This is not something, this isn't George Jetson, this is actually happening. And you're going to see a very fast proliferation of these types of vehicles coming into the marketplace. There's a great opportunity working with the University of North Texas, Texas Women's University to look at creating shuttles around campuses. And one of the highest costs of operating is our operators and the insurance and all those things. So there's going to be a contrast between technology and how fast it's moving. Just since we've launched this service, I say we, they launched the service. In three months, the city of Arlington has already awarded a contract for them to operate in the entertainment district. I think you're going to see a lot more of this, and these are the types of technologies that we're trying to stay ahead of. With respect to Uber and Lyft and those types of services, once we get to March, you're going to start seeing us overlaying different technologies. We've been testing this for over a year in Highland Village. We had Connect Shuttle community on demand, we had Lyft. And frankly, we found that the most cost effective way to move people around is actually using Lyft. And we'll save a lot of money. We've made the transition back in August, I think it's working successfully. And we'll continue to look at it, but that's the plan. And with the North Texas Express and Alliance Airport, there's an opportunity with Lyft. And we've had conversations with UNT about that connection, because it connects Fouts Field and goes all the way to downtown Fort Worth. And so there's a lot of innovation happening. UNT had a late night service that basically guaranteed a ride from parking lots to campus dormitories. They worked with us and they agreed to move to Lyft, it's saving them a lot of money. I'd say that Sir Alan Clark from UNT is here, he's nodding his head back and forth. I think they're very, very happy with the service. And so this is innovation that's happening right in your backyard. And we really see an opportunity to continue to promote those types of services. So final slide here, DCTA action plan. So we're going to focus on grant opportunity. There are several that are out there right now. The Volkswagen settlement is a significant amount of money, it's over a billion dollars. There's a lot of discussion about how that's going to be distributed across the country. We've been working with the North Central Texas Council of Government, ourselves, DART, the Trinity Metro. We're all looking at when the cog actually gets their apportionment of dollars, this is an opportunity to actually leverage that to buy clean air vehicles, electric vehicles, maybe some autonomous vehicles. And we'll keep an eye on that. And then there's an AV initiative that's somewhere between 20 and $30 million through the cog that is basically to help promote the introduction of new pilot programs. So there's an opportunity in Denton and Louisville to look at a potential autonomous vehicle program, much like in Frisco, and the cog would fund a significant portion of that. So we'll be putting in a competitive proposal once we talk to stakeholders and we find the right type of project. And there's always clean fleet and TCEQ dollars that are available every year. We chose not to get into CNG vehicles because we felt like electric vehicles and other types of technology were catching up so quickly that we didn't want to make a huge investment in that. So we're keeping an eye on that and we'll hopefully be looking at some initiatives that we can apply for changing out the fleet with regard to electric vehicles. I've talked a little bit about mobility as a service, but there's a lot of different programs out there. So what have we been doing around these technologies? We launched a Denton Airport zone, which is basically with our operators, our vehicles using an application very similar to Uber. It just launched a few months ago. Typically, it takes six months to a year before you really see the impact of that service. But ridership is starting to grow and we're going to continue to look at that. And frankly, if it's not competitive, we'll look at a different service option. We're also looking at a Lakeway zone, which is near Hebron because of all the density. And then in Louisville, how do we connect Hebron to other potential zones? And we'll be looking at the same thing with our two stations in Denton as well. And roughly around March to May, once we have our mobility as a service contract in place, our intent is to work with these mobility providers to do a lot of things that frankly our city manager has been talking about, which is some of our existing fixed routes, routes one through four, and maybe even routes five and six that run through TWU. We might be able to replace those, maybe not completely, but during off-peak opportunities, we could certainly go to more of a mobility on-demand service. So hopefully our costs will go down and we'll become more efficient. So that's kind of the direction that we're heading. And as I mentioned, I'm really interested in getting input from our three cities around, what is the vision and the future of DCTA so that we can build a long-range plan around what your goals are. So that's it. >> Questions? Council Member Briggs. >> So I have a couple here from individuals that sent in. They saw that there was a presentation today and just kind of wanted to say that I'm going to read them for you so you can be aware. The recent changes to the A-Train Dart TRE has made it cheaper to buy single tickets for each service instead of a regional ticket, which used to be cheaper and easier. It just makes transit more complicated for riders and I'm sure many do not realize that buying separate ticket for each metro is cheaper. So I don't know if you were aware of that or if you've heard feedback. >> Yes, so what happened is one of the major ways that people are buying or consuming transit on the train system, and I'll call it a system because it's not only the A-Train, but a lot of the folks that are going between Denton and other parts of our service area into downtown Dallas. You can go online and buy either monthly annual pass. You can also use GO Pass, which is an online application. The Dart took a fair increase to their board to increase the cost of the regional day pass. So you can buy a pass, a local pass, either for the A-Train, you can buy a local pass for the Green Line or the rest of Dart, or you can buy a regional pass. So the regional pass used to cost $10, it went to $12, that's what was contemplated. And there has to be buy in from the three regional partners, Trinity Metro, DCTA, and Dart, so that we can honor each other's pass. So depending on where you buy it, the other transit authorities acknowledge it and accept that as a transfer, a free transfer if it's a regional pass. There's a, not to make this long winded, but when you look at the price elasticity and consumer demand, we were concerned about raising transit prices when the cost of fuel is down, the cost of vehicles are down, and ridership is down. And if you just look at pure business economics in retail, do you raise prices when the economy is down? Probably not. So there was a lot of conversation around the board, and frankly, and we felt, and it's been proven nationally that when you reduce prices, you'll actually see a bump in fares. Because more people see it as a value and they start using it that aren't. So we launched a fare reduction pilot program in August, run six months. And we are seeing an uptick in our fare revenue, which means that people are buying those passes, as you mentioned. But it is a little bit more difficult for riders because they have to choose to either buy the monthly or the day pass, regional day pass, which is $12, or they can go online and they can buy ours. And they can buy a local pass for DART, and they actually see a value. So for people that see it as a convenience, they can buy the regional pass, day pass. If they see it as a value and money is important to them versus time, they can buy the two local passes. >> Just two more, pretty quick. The A train desperately needs better ways for riders to receive updates on train times. >> Okay. >> Like the DART has scrolling digital signage at stations, and I believe this person's, the only way is to find, hard to find a late update on your site. So that's just another suggestion. >> Thank you for that question. We have an application called Transit Tracker that they can download if they have a phone. And the Transit Tracker gives you real time information updates. We also have rider alerts that they can subscribe to. And it'll give them real time information on any delays on our trains or any bus that we have in the system. >> Okay, and the last thing is that I've seen on Twitter there are a few people having trouble with the new cards. They're not reading, they're full, but when they scan they say empty. And so that's the last thing that I have here. >> Okay, we'll look into that. >> Okay, thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> Council Member Husby? >> All right, so my first question, you kind of touched on the Med Park station. >> Yes. >> In your estimation, what is the right size for that? That's, one, there's too much parking lot. >> Yes. >> And so I want to understand your vision on what's the right size parking lot for that station. And then as a component of that, you talk about growing it, but there's an abundance of offices that are closing their medical offices. I mean, it's getting scary, the scarcity out there. So that whole area needs to be evaluated from our perspective. But from your perspective, I want to know, what's the right size parking lot? >> Yeah, I'll try not to give you a consultant answer, it depends, right? But it really depends on what the vision is, what's the strategy. There's a lot of folks that really believe in mixed use development. So it's more housing, a little bit more density, maybe a wrap around a vertical parking lot. We have too much, there is a lot of parking, and it could certainly be used in a more effective way. But it depends on what we put in there. If you're looking at attracting maybe a university that does have, and one of the things that we have to make sure of is when we purchased the land, there was a clause in there that said that we couldn't be competitive with hospital-like services. So we wouldn't necessarily be talking about putting in more hospital related services. But maybe it's a university campus that has a school of medicine or it's a nursing school or it could be any of a number of universities that are looking for a satellite facility. NCTC has spent a lot of time looking at how to grow and improve their footprint. But there's a lot of out of state universities that are interested in having a footprint in the US, I'm sorry, in the state of Texas. And having access to transit is an important thing. So I think there's a lot of options. We have certainly looked at that parking lot and said, yeah, there's too much parking there for sure. And one of the things that we've tried to look at is working with UNT to maybe use that as some of an outlet to get more students using the service. But it really just depends on what our shared vision, our shared goal is around that particular site. >> Okay, so I'll explore that further from our front end. The other thing that, the other kind of notes, not a question, just a feedback. It's troubling to me that we would have UNT Frisco. That we'd have the Dallas Cowboys, which is probably the premier sports organization, go to Frisco. DCTA, and I still don't understand your answer, and that's okay. The partnership with the autonomous vehicles, all that really just rubs me wrong. I understand the dynamics, I understand the financials of it. I don't understand the DCTA's role in it because you say there's not one, but they partnered to some degree. So a lot of moving parts that I'm not fully processed in a pragmatic way, I understand the words. But what I'm saying is, if we're going to move forward as an organization, we have to have connectivity and a plan. We can't just stick a flag in Frisco and say, hey, we're part of this autonomous vehicle. We're part of UNT, and there's no connectivity there. That's counterintuitive. So you have all these other organizations and all these other corporations that say, hey, this is a great place to be. And here Denton County Transit Authority says, hey, we're not going to make any efforts or they have not manifested to get there. So a citizen in Denton can't go to the star to see a Frisco game or Denton Ryan makes it to a playoff game or Denton Guyer. I mean, there's no, so just whatever the mechanism for planning that and not saying, hey, we're willing to partner with you on autonomous vehicles, but here's what we get out of that. I just don't- >> Absolutely. >> I don't understand what that is, and that's okay. I just want to let you know where I stand on that. And I was disappointed to hear that we don't have a bus, some route just to say, hey, we have some level of connectivity between these two entities that we have a stake in. We just don't connect the two, and so- >> Well, and I agree with you, and I don't want to take up the entire session. But I'm very happy to come back and have those conversations. I think that's what's been missing from DCTA's perspective over the last many years is why are we doing some of the things that we're doing? And that's a dialogue. And frankly, there's a decision to be made by our stakeholders as should we be doing them? And it shouldn't be just DCTA making that decision on our own. I don't disagree with anything that you say. I do believe that there are some answers. They may not be the exact answers you want, but there is certainly an interest from DCTA as we look at this as a region to address certain, some of these things. There is some discussion about connectivity to the A train through Old Town and a lot of discussion around that entire SRT 121 corridor because there's a tremendous amount of development. But people aren't, not everybody's gonna live in the colony, North Plano and Frisco. They're looking for places that are less costly, more livable, close to a lake, close to other resources. And want to be able to travel, but if that connectivity isn't there, then they can't get there. So some of the things that DCTA has been working on, but we haven't been communicating with you, are some of these initiatives. So I'm more than happy to come back any time during work session or other to have those conversations. I think it'd also be very beneficial to maybe have somebody from COG come in and talk about all the growth. Because there's a lot of discussion that needs to be had about east-west connectivity and where dollars are coming in from the feds. And do we want them to go between some of these places that you're talking about in Denton? Or do we want them to go from Plano and McKinney and Frisco into Dallas? And there's only a certain number of dollars that can be had. And if we're not focusing on trying to attract those dollars and attract those developers, if we're not working together to do that, we're going to continue to stand on the outside looking in. So I agree with you. Thank you. >> Did you say one more? >> Two and a half. >> So in your answers -- and again, I just want to -- I'll follow up with you. I'll schedule a tour so that I can understand it. Because here's the thing. In your answers you provided, you talk about more capacity during rush hour. But more capacity doesn't really necessarily translate to what I'm thinking as, hey, I arrived. People arrive at different times at rush hours. And I get it. The answer is, hey, the trains are stacked such that you can only go one way. And so at certain increments -- >> Fixed route versus on demand is another way to look at that. >> Yeah. And so I just -- here's what I want to do. I want to schedule a tour to understand the mechanics of why we can't run. Because look at the managed lane on I-35. It goes south when it's busy south. It goes north when it's anticipated to be busy north. More frequent, right? And so I don't understand why we can't adjust that way. But I'll figure that out during the tour. And then I advocate for express service, skipping certain stops to try to move people along. So, you know, if that's an option. And then just one thing I'd like an answer to while it's cold. We had a lot of complaints this summer on, you know, the heat in the cars. And then so the answer is, hey, the door is open and closed. There's got to be a better answer or better notification, whatever that is, in anticipation of the summer and last. I'd like to see us do something. You talk about Lyft. You talk about Uber. There's drivers. You jump in their Uber car. And they almost have a 7-Eleven convenience store in their backseat, right? So they'll give you water. They'll give you mints. They'll let you change the radio stations. And so you show up at a DCTA -- and matter of fact, we were just in LA at a conference. And they had a DJ the entire time. I mean, the entire time we're there, this DJ is playing in the lobby. And so what I'm saying is people are upping their service game and what are we doing? Are we handing out bottled water? Are we giving mints? Because that's the competition, right? That's -- not to say that it's -- I just think it's a higher level of service that we could offer riders. And so there's got to be some growth in that area. And in my estimation, I'm only one, but that's my thought. So thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Was that two and a half or five and a half? I'm not quite sure. >> It depends. >> Okay. Good answer. Good answer. We're going to go to Mayor Pro Tem and then Council Member Armitter. >> Thank you, Mayor. I've got a question on the third bullet point up there talking about potential transition to on-demand routes. >> Yes. >> Are we talking more of a last mile, first mile on the on-demand, or is it going to be a stop-based on-demand? >> Likely more stop-based. Think of a microtransit provider. I'll use an example of VIA because more people are familiar with that because of Arlington. There's Bubble. There's a few others. What this is is basically a smaller vehicle, a transit van, that can hold up to 10 folks, but you have an application. In this case, it's a virtual stop. You can have two types of stops typically. A designated stop, a physical hard stop where you can go to a particular bus stop and get on. Or what happens is when you summon a vehicle and you tell it where it wants to go, it'll say, "Walk over to the north west corner." And sometimes I get challenged trying to figure it out and I don't have a compass. And it's a little bit like Pokemon Go. You got to figure your way around, right? But eventually, you walk up to the stop and the vehicle comes and picks you up and takes you where you need to go. So the benefit of that is with the Buc-E's, with the, you know, as the developments happen, we're able to respond to more quickly 'cause it's not necessarily a fixed route. When we have a fixed route, you have to go through a process, federal process, titles, title 6 process to make sure that you're not adversely impacting particular individuals. With on-demand service, you're able to virtually change stops and move people around. The concern is with the universities having such a large mass of people, my daughter lives right behind Buc-E's and I write a check every month for not only her rent but she eats and entertains and I come here and I spend a lot of dollars as well, right? And it's a matter of how do we move these people around most effectively and efficiently. And there's an issue that when you have a thousand people that need to go to a destination, the concern is how do you do that with 10 or 15 vans, it just-- there's not enough capacity. So I think even the CEO of VIA was quoted just recently in a national paper saying, "We're not a replacement for transit, we're an addition to transit." In some cases, we can take the off-peak when the buses are not as heavily packed and we can move a lot of people a lot more efficiently with fewer vehicles and I believe that to be true. So that's the intent is when we look at routes 1, the mall traffic has definitely gone down over time. A lot of that's because of the construction, Unicorn Lake. We realize that the ridership isn't necessarily where it needs to be but there's also transit dependent folks that need to be able to provide-- have access to service and there's kids that are trying to get to school every day and so we need to make sure with a lot of those apartments, my daughter being one of them that goes to school at UNT. She lives in that area, right? So how do we serve those most effectively? I believe routes 1, 2 and 3 for sure need to be looked at could probably go to these type of services but frankly we're gonna look at all of it. And part of this is to get them in, to consult, to run their models, to tell us which parts of the service that they can actually run and run effectively and that's the intent. It would not be to do a sweeping change and really disrupt transit service today but it's to take a hard look at and how to make it more efficient. >> Well and having-- I mean, my start in city politics was over bus routes and-- >> I like to have you come help us. >> And it was because we moved to an area that had routes specifically because my wife does not drive and needed that and it would get pulled out of the area, we go down and fight it to get back in and it's the consistency is the most detrimental thing to any transit service. If you don't have consistency, you've got problems. >> Yes. >> And if you're doing it on demand, does that mean they'd have to show up at that stop and then order it so that you know that they're there and what's the time delay in that or what's the-- you know, if they're having to walk that first mile to get there, they say, well, I know it normally takes you 10 minutes so to get that over there, I'm gonna go ahead and order while I'm halfway there. You show up five minutes early, we got a bus stop, a small bus stop on Teasley waiting to pick somebody up. >> Yes. >> That's-- those are the problems-- >> There's no question, I agree with that and I think that's the challenge that we're gonna have to walk through as we look at these technologies and not one-- we can't peanut butter spread a technology and say, oh, this is a-- this is gonna work for everything. >> 'Cause time is money and time cost people jobs when they can't get their-- to their job on time. A second question on-- this relates more to the train ridership. >> Yes. >> I haven't ridden it a lot but I've ridden it a few times and I've never been asked to see a pass. >> Okay. >> And then we're-- I don't-- that may have been changed but, you know, I don't know if it was just, well, you look honest so I'm not even gonna check you or what the deal was but it-- >> It's a fair statement. >> But that's something that, you know, if you wanna make sure you actually get the revenues. >> These very-- >> Are you referring to yourself when you said you look honest? [ Laughter ] >> Well, I said I don't know that I look honest-- >> Okay, all right, I'm sorry, Mr. Herjee. >> But that might have been what they do. >> I'm sorry, okay. >> That's at least a 30-minute topic but I'm more than happy to have that conversation with you. I don't disagree with that. Barrier-free systems are very challenging to check every person every time and you start weighing the cost of having-- as we did at DART, we had a lot of fair enforcement folks. They still didn't get to everybody all the time and so I don't disagree and happy to have that conversation with you. >> Councilmember Arbiter. >> So several questions. First, I wanted to do a shout out to one of your employees. >> Oh, thank you. >> Nicole Recker, the new VP of Marketing and Communications. I haven't yet to meet her in person but I just wanted to share this really quickly with the public. As you surely know, that this year there were-- there was free DCTA provided free rides on election day to the polls and that came from somebody in the public asking me, "Can DCTA do this?" And honestly, I can admit now, I thought the-- and by the way, this was about three weeks before election day I think, maybe a month before, you know. I figure the answer would be no, it's-- >> Nicole's very persuasive. >> Maybe for next year. She was amazing, yeah. And she responded right away and she said, "You know what, we've never done this before but I think it's a great idea. Let's do that." And I should say, you know, Mario or Assistant City Manager was implemental in that. So it was really a kind of a dream story of, you know, from the grassroots to, you know, council and staff and DCTA and it got done like that. >> Thank you. >> And you don't usually see government working so quickly, especially on something that had never been done before. >> Well, I appreciate that and again, that's our interest moving forward is to be more responsive, effective and listening to our stakeholders. I mean, you're putting in a lot of money into DCTA, we want to make sure that we're providing that value back to your communities. >> Well, that-- I mean, that was a great sign of-- that you all are really wanting to change and to do that. So I was positively impressed. >> Thank you. >> So several questions. One, how would on-demand work for people, you know, since-- I suppose that a number of your-- at least as I know anecdotally, people using DCTA at least in city of Denton are people who are low income and kind of moving in and out of homelessness and number of them have phones, you know, but sometimes just finding a charger, you know, when you run out of juice, tend not to be people who are kind of download the latest apps, you know, but are kind of just using it at the most basic level. Would there be, you know, for people like that and for anybody whose phone is out of juice, a button, some sort of button, you know, that one could press and like an intercom function? >> They typically can call in. There's a number they can call and we actually can book the service for them until-- >> So I want to make sure we keep our questions to a sort of a higher level policy discussion because those are very specific sort of technologically based questions on issues that obviously there'd be much more discussion if they implemented those with the member city. So I think that's sort of outside the scope as far as just the detail of it. I just don't want us to get bogged down in those kind of details. So just ask you to-- I mean, when we're talking about buttons on a car on an on-demand when he just mentioned that on-demand is something that may be considered and may not be considered, I think there's a ton of questions around the implementation of that program that we all would have and I just don't think this is the time necessarily to delve into that level of detail on the service that they're not providing right now in the city of Denton. So if you have questions and so that's how I would like to handle that this part of the meeting because he's certainly going to be coming back as different things get implemented. >> Sure. And so, yeah, I didn't need a dissertation on it. I thought you answered that question. >> Title 6 requires us to provide a solution for transit dependent. So we will find a technology solution as we move forward to address that. >> Wonderful. Yeah, that was my-- it was actually pretty simple question so thank you very much for answering. Another question, do you provide-- what kind of ADA training do you provide for bus drivers and, you know, I've heard, you know, some anecdotes and I don't know how many of them are true but that, you know, people saying, well, I wasn't let on with the service animal or-- so regardless of whether or not those are true, it makes me wonder-- >> Some are true and some aren't. Every transit agency struggles with that. But we do continuous retraining reinforcement of not only ADA but safety regulations, I mean, safe transit. One of the top priorities is that we operate safely. It's not being cost-effective, it's not being efficient. It's first and foremost, safety is the primary responsibility of every driver. We have a dedicated trainer that reinforces training so every driver is required to go through training. If there's a complaint, sometimes depending on severity of the complaint, the driver will be pulled and they go through additional training so that's something. And again, I think customer service is imperative to DCTA that we get that right and we always have it so making sure that we listen to a complaint. In some cases, there's not a substantiation for what the complaint is but in some cases, we follow through and we retrain folks. >> Sure, yeah, because I know that, you know, a number of people who have reached out to me who are what I would call transit dependent happen to be disabled and so for them, it's-- you know, they can't drive and because of their disability. >> And we actually have a person that not only qualifies people based on their disabilities but actually trains people. We go through a process of doing transit training for ADA folks so we look at the different types of challenges they have. We do ride-alongs with them. We show them how to use the service so it's something that we do quite often. >> OK, that is wonderful and actually that-- and that's something I would love to-- if I could come along on one of those, I would love to do that. And let's see, covered stops and benches, you know, what can be done to ensure that, you know, with under the budget that you have to ensure that bus stops are covered and have a bench for people to sit. >> So we work closely with city staff when we get requests for those. We could certainly create a strategy around it, making sure that we have budget earmarked every year. We have-- we do 20, 30, sometimes 45 stops a year. The challenges as we're thinking about changing our approach to transit is making that kind of investment. I have talked to Mario and to other folks in the city about this is that this is where communication and strategy all come together. If we're thinking about going to a virtual stop, then we shouldn't be making large investments in some areas to put more benches and shelters. My hope is in the future that we'll figure out where should we have fixed route. Certainly the services that run Route 7, 8, 5 and 6 that serve from the DDTC going through the-- or to the universities and through the square, certainly we should make more investments around infrastructure there. But I think to do that right now, and it's a bit of a challenge because we do get calls from the city saying, hey, so-and-so wants a new shelter, can you put one out? And we're thinking, well, should we? It's on some of these routes that we're talking about in the next six months maybe re-evaluating and going in a different direction. So it is a-- it is something that we do budget. We don't spend a lot. It's roughly 150 to 200 thousand dollars a year, but that supports not only bus stops and shelters in Denton but also Louisville. >> And how much-- so 150, 200 thousand a year, what's the cost of putting out-- >> Ventures are typically 700 dollars, but by the time you pour-- because we have to make sure that we're pouring a pad and that they're also ADA accessible and that there's sidewalk and so there's some engineering costs. So you're looking at about 1500 to 2000 dollars, rough-- typical. It just depends on where you're trying to put it and how much sidewalk, how big a pad it's going to be. And it can cost up to about 8500 on average I would say for a shelter. >> OK. And that budget is for the entire-- that's not just for city of Denton, that's for all of DCTA? >> Correct. The majority of the benches and shelters that have been requested and that we put in have been in the city of Denton. >> OK. And then one question/suggestion to close this off. So I love-- so thank you for this inclement weather transportation plan you're working on that's so essential. And I'm wondering if this could-- this transporting people to shelters in inclement weather for those who need it could also serve another purpose of helping to provide identification for people. In other words, having some sort of pass, special pass, you know, that people could use. You know, maybe that's not a good idea but I-- people who use-- who would use those inclement weather shelter services. One reason why I suggest that is because I know that not having identification is a big problem for a number of people who are either, you know, homeless or cycling in and out of homelessness for people who don't drive, who don't have that driver's license. >> And that's my hope with building more of a coalition between these service providers so that we can create a forum and a dialogue about what types of services, what types of-- we'll need to vet all of these out. Some of them are available through technology, others are just not. But I think working together, at least there's transparency and communication and we can take a better look at how we re-engineer the transit system throughout Denton, Amherstville and Highland Village frankly. So, all three stakeholders are getting more benefit from the service. So, I'm happy to continue to look at that. >> OK. Well, thank you so much for answering my question. Thank you for being patient. >> Council Member Melper. >> OK. You know you're going to get this much help today, huh? My comments are, you know, after your-- yours but I have my like a little short and I'll be very efficient, you know, tick list of little things to put on your list that have probably already been raised or maybe uneconomic but, you know, when I just look at declining ridership in a, you know, in a very quickly growing population area, you got to say, well, all right, somehow, we're not meeting, you know, the customer's needs for schedule, route, comfort, convenience, something. So, things that I'm sure come up all the time on A train, will it ever be economic to have nights and weekends and better coordination through Carrollton? I'm probably not the first person to raise that. And you don't have to answer me but you can if you want to, you know, I'll just get through the others. And on the bus, I definitely have on my tick list also, you know, bus shelters where we determine that there is a need for fixed route, you know, to have it be something where you don't fry or get soaked for people who don't have other options. But also on the bus itself, I know many other systems have those enunciators in English and Spanish. I'm sure many of our riders would appreciate knowing where they're-- where to get off, you know, in Spanish or English and visually and also for safety cameras on board. That's my short list. Thank you. >> We're working on the last two, we're definitely working on the-- and some of the funding is available to do that. The ridership issue is always an issue. You even have it on highways, right? You build all this infrastructure, spend billions of dollars for what? For peak, not off peak. So-- but without having that, are you really a transit system? Are you really-- do people-- will people really use it? So, there's an inefficiency-- an inherent inefficiency in a lot of things that we provide. Water-- you know, people aren't always using water every minute but when they need it, it's got to be there, right? So, it's every transit system. I've spent over a decade at DART building out the light rail system in operations. I was the Chief Administrative Officer of the TRE. I can tell you it's the same conversations that we've been having for 30 years. It's a matter of understanding and the willingness and do we want to spend the money to make sure that we have an excursion train that meets so that we can get people back from the stars game and I can tell you at DART, the most costly service we had was the event trains because there's maybe three, four hundred people that want to go there but it goes there and you have to wait and wait and wait until the game is over to bring it back. So, we call that the shoulders of the service, right, at the ends and that cost-- that cost is the most expensive because you don't have very many people riding it but then are you really providing a full transit system because I'd have someone else standing here saying, "Well, how come you're not providing late enough service for us to connect into Dallas and to the entertainment district?" So, it's a conversation that we need to have but probably not now. >> And I'm not trying to draw you into it, just a parting, you know, thought on that. If we hope to give people the option of thinking of a car free lifestyle. >> Yes. >> You know, that's where it kind of fits in my mind and I totally get what you're saying about the per ride economics but it's like, can you really choose to live, work, and play car free, you know, if you can't meet your-- you know, sort of needs to. >> There's a lot of statistics that are showing that this next generation will not own cars and people are going to choose to live where there's connectivity to transit and entertainment. >> There you go. >> All right, well, I'm sure we'll talk more. >> Yeah, Council Member Briggs. >> So, a few of my fellow council members have mentioned the shelters. >> Yes. >> Of course, that's-- I've been on council almost four years and that's been a pretty big issue for me, mostly driving and looking over and seeing our residents sitting on the ground, standing in the rain and the heat and it just-- I get angry about it, you know, and I know that we did implement some and then I guess a year ago maybe council passed a resolution asking DCTA or saying, you know, you please spend at least this much on shelters for our community. Now, we haven't had a follow up on that. I don't know if that was done or if that's being done but I just kind of wanted to bring that back to the forefront and I know that we do-- you do move stops but there are stops that are fixed like you say and if it's possible, I don't know if there's temporary shelters where, you know, they may not be as fixed but as you move your locations or stops, maybe they could go with them. >> So we've done a very thorough vetting process and I'm happy to provide a follow up report on all the stops that we look at. Again, we need to make sure that when we touch a stop, there's a requirement to make sure that it's accessible if we're going to make an improvement to the stop. So putting a sign in the ground is okay but if we start making decisions about putting shelters, then we have to make sure that there's accessibility and the ADA is really stringent upon not just putting a pad and a ramp that the ramp goes right to the middle of the road because then we're encouraging folks to actually travel in the road as opposed to in a safe and secure area. So Ann Bolden is our project manager and she-- it's near and dear to her heart. She works a lot with your city to look at where we can actually get permitted to put shelters in place but you're right, we have moved some of the bus stops around. I'm always happy and as Ann is, again, it's a two-way communication. So I want to make sure that we're putting these where they need to be. Sometimes we'll get a call from the city and say, hey, we have a particular business that wants a stop and we want to put it there and then the business will say, well, I don't want this here, I want it over there and we're literally in some cases moving the stops around. So in this case, I will say that we're more than happy to work with the city to identify areas. We already have-- we have a lot of pictures of where-- literally where people are standing but in some cases it's a text dot street, accessibility isn't that easy for us to put in a stop. The city will tell us whether we can and cannot in certain cases. And so there's just a lot of complication there but I'm happy to provide a report on what we've looked at and follow up with you. >> Yeah, that would be really great, thank you. >> You're welcome. >> And just one last comment, not really a question or anything but we were talking about technology that works and I just wanted to bring up streetcars because I've been to several cities and it's an old technology that's coming back. People are implementing it and you want to talk about sparing growth. Now, that is something that will spur growth along that-- >> I believe one of the Denton leadership groups did a study on streetcar. Not sure where that wound up, happy to look at it. >> Thank you. >> Okay, any other questions? Seeing none, thank you very much. >> All right, thank you very much. >> Appreciate it, thank you so much, thank you Raymond. Let's go ahead and take about a 10-minute break and then we'll move on to our next agenda item. Oh, that's my cue. Welcome everybody back to this meeting of the Denton City Council on Tuesday, November the 27th, 2018. It is 1.40 PM. We're moving on to our work session agenda item 3B which is receive report, hold a discussion and give staff direction regarding public outreach and communication for city construction projects. >> Good afternoon Mayor and Council, I'm Jessica Rogers. I'm the Deputy Director of Public Affairs. I'm going to start the presentation today and then I will be turning it over to Todd Estes, the Director of Capital Projects to go through some specific project information. So today we're going to give you an overview of the construction communication roles and the strategies that we use. We'll review the improvements that we've made to the construction communications process over the past year, talk about whether the next steps and the ongoing improvements and then we'll also review the upcoming construction projects and the plans associated with those projects. So construction communication sort of at its core here in Denton is a collaborative effort between two departments, Public Affairs and Capital Projects. And we work to ensure that citizens are engaged in the process, that businesses and stakeholders have a role to play in the communications, that there's a feedback loop. We also want to make sure that they have sufficient and timely information. We also want to make sure that they understand what the impacts and the benefits of projects are and the value that they're getting for those infrastructure improvements. And then we also want to make sure that we're available as citizens or businesses or stakeholders have questions about what's going on that we make ourselves available and that happens between both of our departments. So we try and stay connected as much as we can on projects. So just a brief overview of what the roles and responsibilities are. Capital Projects is of course inclusive of drainage, water, wastewater, street maintenance, all types of repairs and maintenance and construction projects that are managed through the program management office. And they're also in charge of providing those project timelines and the impacts. They attend public meetings. They have the technical information. They're coordinating with stakeholders. Where they rely on us in the Public Affairs Department is for project messaging, communication strategy development and execution, helping to coordinate neighborhood and public meetings. My kind of joke is that we sort of take that engineering schematic and try and make it to something that a normal person can understand. We love engineers and we love what they do. But if you've ever seen one of those, you know what I'm talking about. Man, I'm so thankful that they do that. But we also manage the communication platform. So we help them get information out to the public, whether it's through websites, social media or any of our other channels we'll go over later. So just to give you a quick overview of the strategies that we use, it can really be boiled down to three. And you'll hear me kind of use the term communication a lot generically. But when I say that, I really mean probably one of these three strategies. The first is education. This is what we'd want to do when we're introducing a new concept. We're going to be asking drivers or pedestrians to really have a significant change in behavior or we're going to have significant impact. So we need to work on impact reduction or mitigation. The second strategy would be to engage. This is when we're seeking public input. This is the dialogue, the conversation phase where we're trying to close those feedback loops and we're addressing concerns that people have out in the community. And the last phase is just inform. And that's when we're going to affect someone's daily habits. There's going to be a detour or a closure. There's going to be probably something in your day-to-day life that you're going to have to make an adjustment on. And so at any point in any project, we may be engaging in one of these three strategies. Underlying all of these, no matter what we do, no matter what phase strategy we're employing, we have to communicate in a way that shows empathy. Construction is frustrating. We all understand that it's frustrating for us and it's frustrating for the residents. We also have to communicate value. We don't do projects for the sake of doing projects because we enjoy doing them. We're actually creating value for our residents and we're actually putting their tax dollars to work and we have to make sure that we're keeping them informed about that. We also have to instill and build trust. They have to expect that we're going to carry through on the promises that we make and the projects that we put forward. And we also have to make sure that we're meeting the needs of citizens and businesses and stakeholders. So what are our basic goals and any communications that we do? And that's to answer basic questions. Those five W-1H questions, if anyone remembers that from composition class, who, what, when, where, why, and how, we always try and answer those basic questions as best we can. Projects get complicated and they get very detailed and very technical quickly. The average citizen is concerned with pretty much a basic set of information and how it's going to impact them. How will the work get done? How do I get more information and how do I speak to someone about this project? And we try everything that we do to answer those questions each and every time as clearly and with as much information as we can. So in terms of general communication planning, we provided an ISR in September that went through kind of how we break it down by the level of impact of projects. We have a custom planning approach instead of a one size fits all approach to this. And the reason for that is no project is alike. If we say this segment on this street needs a particular type of communication, it's likely that a neighboring segment might need a different type of communication based on the residents that are there, stakeholders, the routes that are being used. And so we really try and adjust based on what we see on the ground. Our planning includes identifying what's the project scope, who are the stakeholders, what do we have in our toolbox to reach those stakeholders, how are we going to implement and execute on those communications, and then also evaluating what worked and what didn't and making adjustments when we get those feedback loops closed. So what's in our toolbox? This was also provided in the ISR. This is what I would consider a super kind of high level view of everything. This is certainly not every communication method that exists out there and that we have ever employed. But these are where we generally start. One thing that I will say on this -- >> Jessica, real quick, I think Council Member Briggs has a question. >> In a committee on engagement and also mobility, we have spoken of ways as a way to implement some of this. Can you speak to that, and is that kind of included in here in our toolbox? >> It's not currently included in here. We had a preliminary meeting last week, I believe it was, and we got all the stakeholders together to talk about investigating that and moving forward. But we haven't gotten to the part where it's shifted out of the technical group into where we can employ that as a strategy just yet. >> Okay. Thank you. So I will say that's kind of back to my point is that this certainly isn't the universe of options that are available to us. This is just what we start with and then we go from there. So this is kind of very hard to see. It was included in your backup as a presentation. This was also included as part of the ISR. This is sort of our starting point. When we identify where a project falls on this here, and I'll kind of use the mouse to show that. When we identified that a project is an emergency repair service interruption, we're immediately going to see if these five items are actionable, if we need to start, you know, are we going to put construction signage out. Certainly there are going to be situations where that's not going to be possible. A repair happened so quickly that by the time we'd get signage out to the site and activated, that the repair is dead. Other times it's going to be a long-term repair. And so we really evaluate on each thing as it comes up. What do we do? And we mobilize pretty quickly. We're really connected even on the weekends if, you know, if there's a water main break or something. We're all talking about it and seeing what we can do to solve the problem. Sure. Go ahead. Sure. Just on this before you switch, what if it's like there's a major thoroughfare, but it's also multi-phase. So like Mayhill, we have different phases. How do you do notifications for those? Do you send out in your original one like it's going to be in this many phases? And then how soon do you send out the second phase? It really depends on the project. Sometimes when we're looking at a big project like Mayhill, when the project kicks off, we really want to start and notify everyone who's going to be sort of in that realm of notification. In that case, we're probably going to notify in our more general communication methods, and I would say because Mayhill's not something where it's just a resident, it's not isolated to a neighborhood. It's a thoroughfare in the city. So we're probably going to do a press release. We're probably going to hold a public meeting. We're going to get the word out as best we can to everyone. Then as we enter into the phases of the project, we're going to look at specifically what are the impacts of that phase. It's possible that six months of construction could happen before you see an immediate impact maybe in front of your driveway. So when that happens, we want to make sure that those residents are specifically notified. That's when we may go out and do letters to a specific area, door hangers to a specific area. We may even go knock on doors. If it's going to be something major, it's going to maybe impact their utility or their utility service or something like that. We do take a phased approach in our communications as well. We try and let the communications match what the project demand is. But say, so like the Elbow Home Park there that's on Mayhill, they would all get notification of every phase and everything that would come through, just as if- Depending on the method that, yeah, if that's what we decided to do, if we were going to send letters, yeah, we would pull all of the service addresses in that area and they would get notified. Okay. Thank you. Okay. So quickly on to what improvements have we implemented over the last year. So one is that the project management office has been created. They are our liaison, really between capital projects and public affairs. They're communicating with us weekly, if not more than weekly. One of the things that we've set up is that we actually have a weekly meeting where we go through the street construction report, that document that you get every week, and we talk about what are the upcoming projects, what are the impacts, what are the status of ongoing projects. Have we done updates to a neighborhood? I remember Briggs and I were just talking about a neighborhood project that's a multi-phase project. Have they been updated if there's been progress made on that project? And then we compile the street construction report, make up the necessary updates, and provide that to you each week. We've also, as you see here, launched the Improving Denton brand and webpage. We launched that earlier this year in a goal to kind of brand all of our construction projects under one umbrella. We do talk a lot internally about water and wastewater and drainage and streets and all that. To the average resident, it looks like an orange cone on a road, so we really want to make sure that we're kind of connecting with them and saying, "Yeah, we understand that we internally have to have those conversations with some level of detail, but we really need to talk to you at the level of we're improving Denton on a whole, regardless of where that project is." We're also doing regular updates in the resident update, which is the newsletter. It goes to every household in Denton, and that's also available online, as well as mailed to everyone. And then we have increased contact with citizens, businesses, and stakeholders through providing everyone a letter if there's a project that's going to be happening on their street, making sure that they get a note of an actual address letter to them, going door to door, putting door hangers out when we're going to be blocking driveways or we're going to be doing immediate work in front of a resident business, holding public meetings and encouraging those face-to-face interactions and having people come in and talk to us, or us go out and talk to them if they have questions about a project. So what are the next steps? We're going to be working to expand the Improving Denton brand. We're going to be using it on more and more communications to really create this idea and sustainable communication standard of we are improving Denton and we're here working for you. We'll be working on updates to the existing website, which is ImprovingDenton.com, which is where right now it's a catch-all of all of our construction communication. We're actually overhauling that right now. We're exploring project blogs, which will give us the ability to give more dynamic updates on projects, and then we're also, again, working on branded communications. We're focusing on increasing the use of the items that are in our toolbox, especially in the areas where we've both capital projects and public affairs have identified that there are gaps. Social media is one. We have strong neighborhoods that are highly active on social media, and that's great. A big part of being effective at communications is meeting people where they are, where are those conversations happening. We need to make sure that we're engaged in those conversations. And also increasing neighborhood and public meetings. We have six, I think, planned for December, so if you have anything planned for Wednesdays or Thursdays in December, come join us. We also are increasing, again, our GIS map capabilities. We've been working on a project with our internal tech services department, and then one that I'm really excited about is the 2019 construction guide. So we are working on a specific mailer piece that will look very similar look and feel to the resident update, but it will be 100% dedicated to construction projects and give people an overview of what we expect to accomplish this next year. And so we're really excited about that, and one of the components of that will actually be a timeline that's going to show all of the projects that are in progress and proposed to start in the next year. So we're hoping to have that out in January. Yes, I'm just curious on the neighborhood public meetings, you mentioned that there's a lot of them coming up. What staff will be at those? There'll be both capital project staff and public affairs staff, but I don't know if you know who specifically will be in each one. I'm just curious. I mean, you know that that's a lot of extra time, and I just wanted to say thank you for that. So typically the encouragement is that the project manager of that project will be at those meetings, and they would lead that public meeting. They're going to have the best information possible. They'll also bring the consultant along who's doing the design work so that some of the more technical questions can be answered, and then any other pertinent staff. Who we think we need to have there, we'll absolutely bring there. If we've got some update conversations that lead us to believe they're specific folks other than just the project manager and the design consultant or contractor, if we already know who that is, we would bring them with us as well. Is there generally a presentation or photos or something that it will be easily? It kind of depends. I don't know that's Todd's favorite answer for me. It depends really where we are in the phase of the project itself. So for instance, a buying break phase six where we're just getting into the early stages of design, we would want to have more open house style project or public meetings where we would entertain a larger group of folks into one setting and we'd have multiple stations so that really what you want to know is how is this going to impact me. I want to get as much personal information from you on what that is, how do we incorporate that, what are you seeing, how do we engage in that and make some tweaks to have a better project both during the construction phase and just the overall end product. We get a better assumption or we get a better understanding of what that really is when we have those personal conversations and if we have more of that town hall style feel where we do a PowerPoint presentation and open it up to everybody, some folks are not as willing to talk in front of that large group so we miss out on a lot. I know there are a lot of avenues that Jessica and Public Affairs are looking at where we can capture that online through other resources but in those public settings we look at different styles based on where we're on the project. As we progress to construction, say a buying break phase six where we really get our chance to start here in the early phases and go through like I would envision us going long term, we'll have multiple public meetings throughout that design phase so we can come back after that initial meeting where we're just talking about the project and what we think can happen and get a better understanding of what the public in general expects to get out of it. Then we come back taking that information, incorporating into what we have to achieve from basic requirements, financial constraints, whatever other issues are out there, we lay that out so they get an understanding of where we're headed and what's the next step, how do we get into construction, what does that really mean because I won't know that until I get all of those other questions answered. We go back and that's when we might have more of that formal presentation of the project on a PowerPoint and then open it up to everybody. I know now what construction looks like. There's various ways to get there and not every shape or size fits every project. So the larger projects will have more than one? Absolutely. Sometimes several neighborhood meetings starting out with how is it going to impact me and then bring back suggestions? Yes. You may have one of our best friends when we're working on some of these larger projects become our homeowners associations because you can work with the board to then ask them what is your community more in line with working with our neighborhood police officers, a variety of connections to where we can reach out to them and figure out what's the best way to communicate with them. That's always going to be something that we juggle, not every project is going to be exactly the same. So the way we reach out to the public, the way that we reach out to the stakeholders has to adjust to what the scenario is. Thank you. So I actually had a question exactly along the lines of what you were just saying. When that is about, and I brought this up when we've had these discussions on the Committee on Citizen Engagement, it's especially difficult I know to communicate with tenants, residential tenants and the bigger the apartment building, someone who's just renting a house might be a little easier. And of course we communicate, the point of this communication is you're communicating with people, not properties. And so many of these construction projects end up affecting the tenants more than they would the property owner or the landlord. So I'm wondering, what can we do, or do you have any ideas kind of built into this about how the city can either communicate directly with tenants or work with landlords to ensure that even those who are not, I mean, I think the good landlords will want to communicate. But then you've got some who don't and you can't change people's behavior. But what can we do to ensure that they're going to communicate if they normally wouldn't, unless their hand is forced in some way? I just can't answer that. So one way that we do try and reach tenants as opposed to the property owners that we actually have the service address for the utility accounts. So when you have a multifamily unit, then we're going to be able to pull the actual service address to contact the person that's occupying that residence or that has that utility service account to let them know that work is going to be done. But we do also reach out to the management companies that are the on-site management. It's not always the property owner that's on-site at a larger complex, so it's usually a third-party management company. We've provided in the past developed actual specific project sheets, information sheets, contact information, maps of the projects. And given to the property management companies electronically, a lot of the larger units can then distribute that through an email system that they have through their residence. But we certainly do everything we can to make sure that we are talking to the person that's going to be impacted, not necessarily talking about the property. So yeah, and there was, and thank you so much. And I know that's a big challenge. And there was recently a case where the city did exactly what you said, did the right thing, it was the property manager, a company, actually property managing company. And they had had, I believe, a month's notice, at least a month of a major, it was a water infrastructure repair project, but had not notified their many tenants that their parking was going to be displaced. And the city, you probably know the case I'm talking about, ended up, I mean, was doing amazingly, at the last minute, kind of working together to come up with a last minute fix. And so, in other words, the city ended up doing extra work. I still would like to see something that would require property managers, owners, landlords, whoever's getting that notification. >> To directly communicate with the tenants. >> So much of the time, I mean, I'm not aware of any law or ordinance that allows us to put that requirement on them. But what we can do is very similar to what happened over at EGLE. We had a project manager involved in that project who just, innovatively coming out of a scenario where the communication didn't go very well with the apartment complex for very same reasons, came up with an idea, well, what about, you see those open house signs on real estate projects, why don't we just put those out sometime ahead of time or around a public meeting. Apartment complexes are notoriously difficult for us to really get to all the residents as much as we would like to. We post notices around the mailboxes, anything you can think of, we try it. As with any place, you get some folks that actually respond to it, some folks don't even look at it. So we're doing everything we can, this is a learning process, as Jessica said. And we are certainly welcome to take any suggestions out there and evaluate that. Not saying that we can use all of them, but we will definitely evaluate those as we learn and we get better. Technology definitely moves faster than we do at points, so we're a lot more aware that their avenues we haven't explored yet. Potentially because we're just not aware of it. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> Councilmember Meltzer. >> Yeah, first I'd just like to comment, I'm so relieved really to see that there's this level of activity in the organization. because we're taking on, what is it, I think 150 road segments in the next year and a half. So it's like a historic level of activity and I really hope that our residents are impressed with just how considerate we're trying to be in keeping them informed. I'm just going to offer a comment that, from a communication challenge, when you've got 150 different things to communicate. And also as a driver, I've got 150 things to know that aren't in the part of my brain that I need when I need to get somewhere right now. So I add my encouragement to what you're already doing with coordinating with Waze. I'll just suggest that to whoever is managing that relationship, if we can negotiate a co-branded version. And improving Denton Waze, now you've got one main thing to communicate. Instead of 150, that if they get that, they're going to get the information they need at the time they need it. I think that could be a real, you know, co-hearing element of the plan. >> Waze is definitely a great avenue. One of the things that you, I don't know how many people are really aware of this. But the North Central Texas Council of Governments really has pushed this across the entire metropolitan organizational region. Denton came a little bit further behind the fold into them. But we're very close to being able to push that information live out there, at least on the planned projects. Just getting that update from our program management office earlier today, we're very close to having that. >> We should be able to get you a timeline on that soon. I don't know that it'll be today. But we should have that soon where we can share when that would actually go live. >> That's great, I'll be happy to help spread the word when we have that. >> Mayor Pro Tem. >> Thank you, Mayor. Got a couple of questions and comments. First two are on social media. Do we use Nextdoor? >> We do use Nextdoor, not to the fullest extent that we should. We're actually bringing on a new staff member who will be dedicated to digital communications. And one of her first responsibilities is going to be expanding the city's use of Nextdoor. We've found that to be particularly useful when we do have those neighborhood projects. Denton does have a very active Nextdoor community, so we are looking at that. And then the other part of that is that we're also bringing on a staff member who will be focused fully on construction communication. So the two of them will be working together to tackle that, both of those. >> Okay, and kind of on the social media end of it, I know it's not possible on an emergency case to have an idea of how long it's truly going to be. But if they could put some type of an estimate, and I used Teasley as an example when we had that water main break. I saw it that morning on Facebook. I assumed by four o'clock that afternoon, we'd be good, and two days later, we were finally good. So if there's a way to kind of put something on there that says expect delays for 24, 48, 72, we're unsure it will be at least 24 hours. That would really be very helpful for people that use those items. And then on the public meetings of the six that you all have, I think I've got three of them already on my calendar. And so it's kind of up to the rest of the council if this is something they're interested in or not. But to send out an invite to council members, if we accept, you know that we're going to be there. So you've got time, if there's four or more that accept that it could be posted. So that we don't have to have somebody stand outside and alternate who's in and who's out. >> We can also, I'm sure Erin will let us post all of them as potential quorum, so. >> Okay, but also just so that we know, because as I scroll through and I found three that I wanted to attend, and to make sure that we're all aware of when they are, because you do get a real good feel for what the public is thinking on the item. And I want to give you all a bunch of kudos. The improvements I've seen over the last two years have been dramatic as to how the public perceives these meetings. It used to be they're going in there with their pitchforks and ready to attack staff. And now they're coming in and they're realizing that we're wanting to work with them, we're really wanting to get them the information. So, I greatly appreciate the efforts there. One, something I had discussed with staff this past, I guess two Fridays ago, is on our detour plans. And I know, I believe we've got an ordinance coming about non-government entities using use of right of way for shutting down roads, and so this might be something to be incorporated in that as well. But the detour routes, recently when they were tying in the Fulton Project for water and wastewater into Oak, they detoured onto Greg Street, which is parking on both sides on a 26 foot wide street, did not work real well. So, I think it would be a good idea policy wise to consider having all detours run through someone in our traffic department so they know which streets are detoured. In case you get a shutdown on one of those streets, you end up with, you know, you detour from a detour to a detour. And as much as we've got going on, that's very possible that that could happen. One more on here, and that's kind of on that same line as, and I see we're working with our GIS people. I'm looking forward to a map that handles both the construction and the detours, and I just hope that that can be worked out. I believe it can. So you still got half another presentation, right? Okay, yeah, let's go ahead and let him move forward with that. Well, yeah, because I think you're, is yours? I'm finished with my part, so I'm going to turn it over to you, and I'll still be available if you have specific questions about what we're doing on communications on any of these projects. So I'm going to be brief, I promise. So upcoming projects, especially where we're going to have some of these public meetings coming up, just give you a brief rundown. With the public meeting for US 377, this was a conglomeration of really having TextDOT and the city staff working together. Normally, TextDOT doesn't engage in a full-blown public engagement piece unless they're working with one of their major roadways, like an I-35, I-35E, or I-35W. When it comes to the farm-to-markets or US highways, where they consider it to be a lower volume than what they're typically using on the interstate, they typically leave that to the communities themselves. So our folks stepped up and did a fantastic job at least putting together some information, putting together a public meeting to let people know what's coming, and then the public affairs office put together a website that's standalone. TextDOT would normally do that for large projects, like the Textpress lanes, the I-35E express. They put those things together, they don't budget for that on smaller, what they term, smaller projects. So that's something that we took on to update. This is a little out of date, you see it project coming early November. There are some delays on that project, and if you would like to see where that project's going, please go to the website. Dallas Drive and Teasley Lane, we did reach out to each of the business owners individually to let them know. We are learning every time we do this. There are a lot of things that we learn. One is that if we had gone to the business owners themselves earlier, it would have been a better project all the way around, just because people would have been more aware and we would have had a better way of communicating what we were thinking in the delivery. Pack four, so this project has a public meeting coming up Wednesday of next week, so December 5th, from 6 to 8. And that's a chance for us to talk about, this project will be moving into the construction phase next spring, late winter, early spring. This is a chance for them to see what does our construction phasing look like? What do those detour routes really mean? How does that impact me getting to work or getting to home from work on a daily basis? We would definitely want to hear that. Any time we get into an active construction zone, there are things that we just don't anticipate, because I can't control the everyday driver to the degree that you would love to. People make their own decisions. So we find out things that we could have thought through, maybe, but we also find out a lot of things that we couldn't have. So we are actively engaged in the construction phase of adjusting those detour routes, detour maps, getting the signage in the appropriate places where we find those holes we could have, maybe we could have found them. Maybe we would not have had any chance of finding it until the public just found an avenue that they felt like was the easiest way to get there. So we will adjust those actively. Please contact us and let us know. Magnolia Drainage, another project kicking up very soon in construction. So this is another chance for the public to get an understanding of what this project looks like and what the timeline looks like. We will have staff there December 12th to talk at the North Lakes Recreation Center to visit and talk about this project and what it entails. Hickory Creek Road West, so south of town, Thursday, December 6th from 6 to 8 at McNair Elementary. Another project that will be kicking off in construction in the next 60 to 90 days. North-South Water Main over off of Bonnie Brace, so it's actually the segment here in red, phase three. That public meeting will be Thursday, December 13th from 6 to 8 at the Deany Recreation Center. We'd love to get a chance to visit with folks about that one. It should have less impact than the actual roadway because the vast majority of the construction will be off the main lanes, but you will see an increase in traffic when it comes to delivery of materials, construction work. There will be an impact and we would like to get that feedback from the public on where their concerns are. Quick question on that one. Yes, sir. When I read the construction and phasing. Yes, sir. Phase three says along Bonnie Brace between Scripture and I-35, but that red line. This is the water line piece, so this is the roadway map. Oh, that's the map. That's the roadway map. Okay. I'm sorry. I thought that was, never mind. I'm sorry. That is a bit confusing, yes. No, no, my fault. This is the roadway map. That roadway phase three coincides with phase two of the water line. Okay, gotcha. If we could make it any more confusing, I promise we would. No, no, no. That's fine. I just wasn't reading it right. That's my err. All right. Just to give you a brief overview of the level of construction we anticipate over the next two years, our GIS team put together just to look at what's coming. So if you were to look at it today, what you see in red are projects that are in design. They're projects that we anticipate going to construction on an orderly basis. But over the next 12 months, they will start going through the bidding process and start construction. If it's in yellow, then we are bidding it. Or I'm sorry, if it's in orange, it's hard to tell. In orange, we're bidding it. If it's in yellow, it's in construction today. So this is what it would look like today. Six months from now, this is how we anticipate the construction picture looking citywide. So you've got areas where we're complete. That's the green. We're done. And then you have some other areas that are now moving into the orange. We're bidding like McKinney. You move out 12 months, we're under construction in those areas. You start to see some of these other areas start to fall into the green. Then 18 months out, similar. A lot more in the green. But we're still moving through the design, bid, and construction phases. And then out 24 months, that's our anticipated schedule. Ultimately, we would have similar views for the public to be able to see. But we would also have more of a calendar, excuse me, not a true calendar, not blocks and squares calendar, but more of a timeline of where each of these projects fall in regard to each other. Some of what we also look forward to is as we progress through this, we'll be learning what is the most beneficial way to the public, to ourselves, and communicating on what does this look like, what will need to be adjusted. Not all of these things will follow exactly in that sequence. So that is something else we'll have to adjust as we move along. Council Member Armitage had a question. This is a small point, but actually you kind of brought it up when you said, oh, it's a little hard to tell. They recommend high contrast colors. Yes, and the scale of the map is small, too, so it doesn't matter. Yeah, but also people will be looking on their phones. And it's a process and development. Yep. So absolutely, it's the kind of feedback we need to make improvements and make it something a lot more usable. Council Member Meltzer, yes. I think this is correct. This doesn't include the simultaneous textile projects, right? Not at the moment. We will be adding those. We're incorporating all projects that we're aware of into this similar style matrix, so that one, we as a group can look at what do we anticipate under construction with our current schedules. It may make some adjustments in the priorities at which we let these projects. Once you start seeing them on a map, which has never really, not really been looked at, when you start seeing them on a map, then you start to better understand the impacts that you're putting the public in when they're trying to drive or bicycle or walk to wherever they're going. All right. Other than that, questions? Any questions, comments? I've just got a couple of comments. Anybody else? Well, first of all, I want to say thank you for a very informative presentation. And I know that there's been some comments recently about whether there's good coordination going on or not. Everybody's entitled to their opinion, but I think what most people don't see is what's going on behind the scenes, which I think you're demonstrating for us here today, that folks three years ago, four years ago, we were getting the heck beat out of us because our roads weren't being repaired. We passed all these bond packages. Nothing was being done. And now we're full speed ahead taking care of business. And that does mean inconvenience. I experience it like everybody in this room experiences it. And what I have to tell myself in those moments, first of all, is there a different route that I know of, but also that this is progress, that we're doing what the citizens have asked us to do. And it's challenging to balance all those interests, but I really appreciate the work of staff and management to get these projects out and to begin and to continue to facilitate communication and to learn. I say everything is scar tissue. We learn from our experiences. And I think you guys do a great job at that. So I appreciate it. And the one thing I know that gives me great comfort is you are trying to do your best, and that means you're going to continually look for ways to improve. And that's all we can ask. And so I appreciate that. I appreciate the map that shows how much work we're putting into the projects and we're getting things fixed. That's not including TxDOT. If we were a dying city, we would be having a different conversation right now. But we are a city that is growing tremendously with what? I think when we add TxDOT projects and city projects over $100, $150 million in sort of economic activity, just in road and sewer and water infrastructure, we'll think about the economic impact that brings to our community. So I, too, experience those traffic jams and those frustrations, but that's just that's part of growth. And if I didn't think that staff was doing the best that they could, that would cause me a little more frustration, but it eases my burden because I know that you're moving forward, you're trying different avenues, looking at all different ways, and you're open to suggestions. So I really appreciate your commitment to getting the projects done, number one, and also communicating the progress of those projects to the community. So thank you so much for that. Councilmember Briggs. You may have mentioned this. On the map, if a citizen resident wanted to go or even a visitor to find out which street was under construction, would they look under the engineering department, the street department? Will there be a quick link on our home page? How can we get that map easily accessible? So the GIS map that a resident can go look at now, you can get to it by going to ImprovingDenton.com. There's actually a link to the street construction map that exists today. When we roll out the new Improving Denton website and the new map, they'll both be integrated in. In terms of the static maps that Capital Projects has put together, we're looking at kind of refining those a little bit and then also including a map in some capacity with that same information in that construction update. So we want to give people, some people are more visual and they need to see it on a map, and then some people are more timeline, and so we want to give people the options to see how those projects relate to each other in different ways. Did that answer your question? So somebody goes to CityofDenton.com instead of Improving Denton. Will there be a quick link to Improving Denton? Yes, there is. It was featured, I actually don't know what's featured on the home page right now, I apologize, but it was featured on the home page for a while, and as we kind of make those updates, we can re-push it out and feature it on the home page, either in the landing, the main hero of the page, or in one of the feature boxes that are below. We can also add it as a quick link. It might actually just be a quick link right now. Sarah says yes, it's a quick link. Now that I'm going to talk my way through it, I'm sorry, I don't know where everything is. Okay, thank you. I'll just add to that conversation, I just went to Google and searched Denton GIS, and it took me straight to it. So I think whatever optimization works, because it's the first thing you hit, and you don't have to find anything, I just plugged it in and clicked. Great. All right, any other questions, comments? I think that's all I'm going to appreciate it. Good afternoon, Brian Langley, Deputy City Manager. This is our continuing monthly discussion about prioritizing work session topics. So just jump right into it, have a short presentation for you. As we talked about before, we did have a retreat with council back in August, and we talked about identifying our key priorities and developing a process for prioritizing work session topics. As you may recall, there were lots of topics at the time, we were trying to figure out which ones needed to come first. And the way we've been prioritizing it from a staff perspective is looking at the key priorities that are listed here that you identified in the retreat to say, these are the ones that we're going to try to bring forward to you over the next 12 to 18 months to address these priorities. And then future topics to try to look at from a priority standpoint, first, do they meet those priorities and kind of where do they need to be slotted in the schedule. We've also, we heard from several of you about the process in general, there was some openness to receiving more information as an informal staff report. So as you've noticed, we've started to provide more of those for topics that have come up either through concluding items, emails, different topics that have come up in work session discussions, we've been providing more of those to you as well. We've had several of you concerned about the length of the meetings. And so one of the things we wanted to do was to try to have a work session that started somewhere in the 12 to one to two o'clock time period. I think there was one notorious meeting that started at 10 in the morning. And we got a lot of feedback from council at that point that the meetings were just too long, there was too much information. So one of the things we're trying to balance is the number of work session topics that we have with the priorities that we are seeing from you to give a balanced meeting schedule each each week that we have for you. So with that said, this is the planned work session topics that we have over the next two months or so, you can see that the luncheon meetings are generally meant to be a little bit shorter, we typically start those around 11 to 1130. Typically have as the first December 3 luncheon that we have here, then we have one in January, February, a little bit lighter on the schedules just to accommodate something around the lunch hour that you can get those meetings in. For all the other times, we typically try to have no more than three to five topics listed. Again, to get you in and out of here between 12 and one and in the beginning of the regular meeting, which might start around 630. We've also began using a work session priority survey to you. And we've asked you to rank the items that we present to you in terms of whether you have high interest in receiving a work session topic on them, a low interest or no interest. We did send that out to you recently, there were five responses and I'll go through the responses in just a moment. We've, we included the items that had been sent out from October 23rd through November 9th, as well as the ones after that fact, so or before that fact. So you can see all the ones that had been there before that you'd seen previously last month, as well as the new ones that were here. And this, as I've mentioned to you many times, this is a survey that's designed to facilitate this conversation. Does no way mean that there's something that wasn't on the survey that can't be added, but just as a starting point to help us kind of prioritize the discussions that we're having to give you a starting point for moving that forward. So with that, here were the survey topics that we have. The ones that are in blue are the items that were from the October 23rd strategy session that we had. Again, these are ones that we're going to, I think the idea was to continue to keep these on the list until at such a point that you said, A, they should be brought forward to be discussed or that we want to bring some kind of action item forward to the council to resolve these and say that we're no longer going to consider these to be items that we're interested in discussing. And then the other items in this green color at the bottom were the ones from October 23rd to November 9th. And there have been some requests that we've had for some informal staff reports that went out after November 9th. You could certainly bring those up to this during this discussion today for it to be discussed, or we could simply get that the next month when we do the next survey. And these were the survey votes that we had. Again, the ones that have high interest, low interest, and no interest, the total number of responses that we had. It's interesting that you see some of the ones consistently kind of ranking low, consistent from this survey to the last survey that we've had. These are the number of votes. Another way to look at it, one of the things that we talked about doing was weighting the scores of these to help you try to understand what might be the priority ranking of the different topics. And for this particular example, it could be done anyway, but we put a three for a high priority survey response, a two for a low interest, and a no interest received one point per vote that was done in the survey. And then these are the summary scores that are listed here on the right to help you prioritize. So with that, you can see the topics that kind of rose to the top of the scoring in that particular system. So the purpose of this discussion is to see where you want to go next. If these represent the highest priority topics that you have, if this is helpful to you, or if there's other topics that you want to add to the matrix to see where you want to go from here. Keely. So those, the top seven now, will they get thrown into the mix? And I guess my main question is what does the agenda committee do now? Well, we present this list of the planned work session topics. We present that based on what we think is ready to come forward from a staff perspective, what matches up with the other priorities that I articulated to you earlier from the council work, the retreat that we had, the other priorities that we have, what's ready to go. And when we have those topics that are ready, we indicate that to the agenda committee and try to slot those in when they're available. And if for some reason something happens and an item needs to be pushed out or there's a priority discussion that you have here in this meeting and these work sessions where you say, as an example, we want to talk about the new tax credits, new market tax credits, and we will try to prepare that information and then be ready to bring it forward and indicate that to the agenda committee when it's ready. Most of these, the ones since we've done the informal staff reports, they should be ready to go. We might need to format a presentation and get the materials ready in that format, but this should be pretty easy to bring that forward to you for at least a discussion. So I guess what I'm asking is because you showed a chart of the days and what items were going to be that day, is that something that the agenda committee worked on or is that what staff has done? That's what... Ryan, let me sort of comment. Let me tell you what the agenda committee does not do. We don't sit there as a committee and try to from scratch figure out what's going to be on each agenda. Typically what happens is staff will bring us in draft agendas and we'll discuss what's on the agenda. We'll discuss things that might have come up that would cause some of those to be moved or not to be moved or to be combined or things such as that. So the agenda committee doesn't create the agenda from scratch in those meetings. They're presented. We are presented with a proposed... I think it's probably sometimes it's two agendas out, so you've got quite a bit of play in there and then we're presented with a matrix that sort of gives something like this chart that says here's what we're anticipating and then of course as time moves forward different things come in to impact that that that staff is either aware of or we might be aware of or that we get if we get some comments or some suggestions or recommendations from some of our colleagues. So that's sort of how that process works and it really doesn't work any different even having this because sometimes things are ready sometimes they're not. Sometimes we think something that should go before this because it's it would be too premature to have certain pieces of information before others. So this is just like this is sort of a tool for this council to have a discussion like what we're going to have. It's really a tool for the agenda committee. Is that is that helpful? Yeah it is. I appreciate that because I never really know and people you know sure blame the a lot goes on the agenda committee and so then I see this and I'm just kind of curious how how you guys work together and how this integrates because in the past before you know council would request things it would show up and then eventually get put on and so this is a like a new step so I'm just curious how that played in to y'all's decision. Yeah and in the past before this it was still a very similar process. Staff would bring the recommended agendas to us and then we would discuss those in light of either discussions in council or discussions offline with either staff or citizens or council members so this is just another tool. I would just say that I think the number of of work session request topics that we've had is different perhaps than maybe what we've had in the past too. There's there's so many more items that are out there and I think that was really the genesis of the discussion is there's just so many what is the priority and how do we fit those into those the scheduling parameters that I gave you. Yeah so it's just another tool. I think just to add on to the mayor's points Brian's right I mean we've got through March now we've got four or five workshops on virtually every agenda and so the other thing that we talk about frequently is you know if we know that we've got something's going to take two or three hours and we're trying to start no earlier than noon what's that right mix of items to make sure that we have adequate time to get through all of them before the regular meetings start so what we like to do is as we get openings if something gets put back whatever we start pulling these up because we know that we the council is most interested in this but we're really trying to manage the time as well we don't want to we we heard loud and clear not to be starting meetings at 10 o'clock so it plays a big factor in in how we put these together. Gerard did you have a question on this? Yes. Okay I think I saw him before. Sorry council member. Thank you so first request I'd like to I guess it would be the next survey but I want to understand the process best because I really want the zero energy home people to come present to us or I want that to be considered or at least poll whatever the word is I don't want to get everybody worked up but that's a fair word poll or survey to see if that ranks high amongst people to do so I'd like to whatever that iteration is that process is to move that up through because we have the informal report and I thought that was great but I I would like to have that considered in the survey just as an ask and then I I'm okay with without the weighted view but just this straight vote to see the straight survey I'm just I'm just giving you all that it's rough out there but yes yeah I'd like the I'd like to see the survey results I'm fine with how that works I just think it's again it's I said this last time and I'll say it again it gives the individual members their ranking I mean you can't you can't get a clearer look at someone's thought process or how they're waiting topics and the citizens can then go look and say and take them to task hey you did not you're not ranking this as high as I would like you to you're not ranking it at all and I'd like you to it gives you enough it gives the those that would watch and and participate in the process an opportunity to look into your thinking and make sure it's representative and I can't think of a better way to then prioritize what we're talking about so I'm fine with the with the with the survey I'm fine with the order of things I just want to understand the roadmap best so that I can continue to work things through that process that's a fair point I think you know there's so much information that we're sending you as a council whether it's the Friday report items which there may be a short paragraph in the Friday report it may be an informal staff report something that happens in a meeting if there's any of that information that you want to have included in a future survey let us know we'll put it on the next survey we we've tried to streamline it to say it's informal staff reports only but it could be anything if that if you think this is helpful for you we can put that out there for you so you as a council can see kind of where the where the where the body is on wanting to hear the topics I agree that 10 o'clock is not a good start time I'm okay with nine I think I think this is a fair process as we communicated offline I think what we had iterated to last time with the weightings being two one zero makes more sense though I don't know it doesn't really make sense to add to the score for someone having no interest in it so but I don't think it actually with what you produce I don't think it changed the rank order now so I'm just saying I think it's a fair process and helpful and I particularly like the fact that we redo it with things that we haven't talked about yet because you know levels of priority can change based on events or you know move to the public or whatever thanks okay so I have a question on one of these yes sir I didn't see any hand up here's that go ahead on back-end parking on hickory I remember getting the informal staff report on that I believe what what what is the are we I know there was an enforcement component do we just do we continue to enforce it as far as from a parking violation if somebody pulls head in but is there a component of people saying we want to change that up like redo the whole street I think that was a question is what could what could we do could we do something differently other than just not enforce the back-end parking I think that was okay and we addressed both of those items in the informal staff all right I'm just curious because I didn't I mean I know what it cost to do that and I'm not saying that was necessarily one of the best decisions which unfortunately I was involved in but I know what it cost to put it back too so yeah all right yes we'll go with mayor pro-tenant council member okay Brian do you remember how many items we there's 13 on this list you remember how many we had the prior month don't it was probably somewhere in that same range in that same range I suspect I'd have to look and see look back at the sheet where you've got planned work sessions I'm only seeing if we don't want to exceed four at a meeting we've we've got roughly one a month so I would like for council to have a discussion whether we want to take the lowest rankings and put them on a consent agenda to have them removed from this list whether that's the lowest two or one or the bottom 10% just just so that they don't we'll never catch up with all these if we've only got room for one a month and there's 13 items up there unless nobody puts forth anything else in the near future okay I'll go with the council member oh I'm sorry well he asked a question let me come back to your question John so I'm recognized because you asked a question I'll come back to that after yeah go ahead council member and I'd be happy to answer my view that I don't like that idea of getting rid of any of these because if it happens that you know under this system we never get around to some things then then that happens but I don't want to see you know anything taken off because of the way that this this this council body is is constructed is to make sure that that you know each district has a representative we've got at-large representatives and so we've got a number of different viewpoints we're all listening to our constituents and so you know I want to make sure that you the minority views are are included and not voted out so a couple of things so number one I would love to see kind of going back to you what a council member Hutzpeth was saying about how the this is an opportunity for the public also to look and see what you know how each of us is ranking certain certain issues I think it would be neat as an experiment to for these items to be put on the website somehow and for there to be a link whereby the public could be pulled I'm not saying that the public's polling would have any effect on you know direct effect on how we rank those that's up to each individual council member but I certainly would be interested to know how members of the public would rank this these these different items for instance I mean I was I was the only these every one of these these items let's see the one two three four five six items that only got one high score vote that's under the survey results weighted score yeah previous slide or no no no actually it's right here it's right here it's all the same it's just yeah it looks it looks differently on our backup it's flipped and but those those those six at the bottom that's all me those are high interest for me I know that there are a number of people in the community really concerned about confederate monument on the square a number of business owners who have expressed concern to me about smoking smoking ordinance the project name for economic development you know I mean we've had articles in the front page articles in the in the paper on this on this issue about the code names so I think that that it would certainly be interesting to see how members of the public would would would rank these and then that would be also a good way to get them aware of that we have this process which a lot of people don't know about and so anyway I'm suggesting that I also I want to say a little something about the MHMR funding I was disappointed that I was the only one who ranked that top priority you know considering that we've got that our council retreat priorities you know one that we all agreed on was our master plan to make homelessness rare brief and non non-recurring and I can't imagine that any one of us you know would deny that our underfunded public mental health facility which yes does not only serve the city of Denton but it is the main facility that serves all the people of Denton you know what an effect that has on on homelessness and how many low-income people they serve so I wanted to put a plug in for that and and I know that that everybody on this council cares about that issue I wish that that more people would would would rank multiple items high priority if it's something you care about and so I just wanted to to mention that and and I then finally I wanted to say you know I've noticed that for the past two of these kind of meetings that we've had you know two of us both you know council member Briggs and myself and this was not you know coordinated to have done that would be violation of TOMA but I've noticed that in both cases I ended up ranking everything high I think the last one I'm ranked maybe one was low interest that that is just how I feel about each about each of these items and council member Briggs has ended up not answering and I think that the the survey and each of us even though it might seem like these are opposite responses I think at some level it comes from a very similar feeling I I don't want to speak to council member for for council member Briggs but but I would love to to hear from from her about why why she didn't answer but I have a feeling that it's very similar to the reason why I ended up ranking all of them high this time so that's all so I'm going to go to council member Husbeth I think you're going to respond to and I think were you cued up okay okay all right well then I'll just if you want to answer that fine if not that's okay yeah yeah I don't know what what direction or what the where the consensus is yes I I would think that we could move them to the consent agenda because that doesn't prevent anyone from bringing them back I mean it just it just the survey is supposed to be short succinct and there's and I think that's just there's not a better word that's the process I mean that's unfortunately there there are a lot of things I would like to do independent of consensus but that's not the world we live in and so I think if there is a consensus to truncate the list understanding there's been staff reports understanding there it has not gained traction then it then it becomes a all these items could be town hall meetings for any council member correct like any council member could take this topic coordinate with staff and hold a town hall meeting and present that data am I wrong no that's correct yeah so so there's nothing to stop each individual member from disseminating this information and creating a grassroots effort to to get that information out there and get that information to to get the traction you think it deserves or get the public up to speed that you think needs to know what's going on there's nothing to stop any of that from going on but this body the process is there has to be a consensus to get through these things so for me I don't know how that decision shakes out but my my feedback is yes if it if it is on the let's establish some sort of rule that says if for a period of time it's right this number or lower higher however that's that whatever that mechanism is then it would go on the consent agenda and roll off and then someone could bring it right back next week someone could take it and do city town hall meetings every week to um carry that flag forward whatever they whatever each individual decides they need to do to to fulfill their obligation for those that supported them that's a member now sir I guess I just don't really understand what you would be putting on the consent agenda right like if the if it's like let's talk about you know mhmr funding what would the item be on the consent agenda it would be to remove it oh okay and then to that I say uh I don't see that it benefits anything uh as far as I know the electrons are relatively free didn't cost anything to keep something on the list uh you know a duly elected person wants it on there and it's if if at some point it becomes more urgent becomes more urgent I would also say that you know part of our task here this is sort of a second point is you know you may remember early on when we discussed this I talked about urgent and important if sure everything's important but we don't do the task of helping us figure out what to do first unless we also weigh in on urgency so so just having something ranked higher than something else doesn't necessarily means it means it's more important may just be more time sensitive that that that's how I look at it and some some of them are also jurisdictional issues or where uh or I may feel that uh if something is already part of our uh retreat priorities I know it's already going to get covered because that that's sort of not on this list those things are already scheduled so if it's duplicative you know that that's another you know consideration so those are my comments thanks council member breaks so I I did not take the survey I didn't last time I refused to take it um I think that each council member has a right to bring up um an item that they want to hear and I'm in favor of listening at least giving it whatever time that I can even if it's five minutes and in that five minutes I will say yes I'm interested or or no I'm not um this is not a real due process to me it is a process but it's not the way that I think um it should work and so that's why I don't I don't participate in it and I would like to have um and I do agree I mean these are different items some are educational some are actionable and um you know maybe dividing the two you know having different um different ones in that way for timing I mean I don't really have much input to put into this system because I'm not participating in it currently um so but to to your question I I think all of these are important because they came from somewhere um and so that that's it council member uh mayor pro tem thank you I don't see it as a matter of whether it's important or not I see it as a matter of whether we've gotten the proper information through the informal staff reports to satisfy our needs is there something that we can do about it if we're going to listen about things that we can't do anything about then it is a waste of our time in my opinion some of these we can do things about individually we can go and lobby our county commissioners personally we can go and count lobby our state officials personally on MHMR funding there's nothing that we as a council can do that can change that that amount of funding unless we're using actual city dollars and that's part of the budget process that we would look at at that point and so I again I'm not saying that anything's unimportant I'm saying you know if if we're going to pull something up there back in parking on hickory becomes an issue of to change that at this point the amount of money we put in that project to begin with is is not something that that I see is anything that could move forward we've got too many other street projects too many other broken up streets that we need to spend money on before we worry about whether or not back in parking is is right or not whether we try and correct the decision of a prior council in that that manner and so I'm just concerned about if this list keeps growing the reason we have this list to begin with is because we've grown to so many items that we don't have enough room in our agenda to fit them all so as this keeps growing we're going to get to a point where we'll have 30 items up here too so that's the reason I'm looking at just and it probably really needs to be an item for individual consideration that's how much consent agenda to to remove those that have been low scoring for multiple months in a row council member obatran then council member briggs yeah so I just wanted so thank you council member briggs for answering my question I just wanted to um you know to state that that is what I had um intuited um and gathered from comments you had made before um so I want you know our uh our colleagues and the public to note that you know both council member briggs and I believe that all of these items are uh high priority items we've each in our different way registered that um I share her views um that that that I will if any one of you wants to put an issue up there because it's important to your constituents it is worth the time to me for me to discuss whether I think uh it's a great idea it's a bad idea or you know even if I don't quite see quite why it's up there um uh that's what representative democracy means to me uh so I do understand we've got a lot of um of of items and a backlog um and the simple fact that we can only discuss so many things in a single meeting does you know quite a bit to take care of this issue when I ran for office I knew I'd be putting in a lot of time in addition to my having a full-time job and uh and young children um and uh you know our our staff however much time you know we put in and I know our staff is putting in even more um just for the for the day to day so that's that's just my plea for um uh you know considering that you know maybe all of these are uh are high priority uh and just wanting the public to know that you know at least two of us that two of us feel that way thanks I need to respond to that that's that's that's uncalled for to sit there and try to impugn that the rest of us that none of these are high priority at the summit this is a system that this council whether you decided on it or not which that's your right to do council member Briggs totally respect that but then to try to draw inferences and make conclusions about those of us who for now are going along with this system I think is out of order and um these are priorities that we set doesn't say that they're not priorities or they're not important to us we have to find a system in order to figure out how we approach these on a day-to-day week-to-week basis of our work session report so whether or not you want to say that the rest of the council members that don't agree with you or necessarily your position or your assessment or your judgment doesn't find these important I reject and no no I'm not going to recognize you right now you've had your say I'm going to recognize council member Briggs but we've got to do something because until recently we didn't have all of these things that are coming up and some of them are things that are social issues that this council really has no jurisdiction over so we can talk about them but we've got to figure out which things do that we do have jurisdiction over that we have to take action on and that we have to consider so the notion that because they're lower numbered means that well I can only speak for myself I can't speak to anybody else means that somehow I think that they're unimportant to the citizens or to me I reject there's just some things that in my opinion I have to talk about sooner than later just like in your opinion you have some that you would rather talk about sooner than later council member Briggs yeah so I just wanted to bring up mayor pro tem's point about MHMR right with funding that might not be something we could do but we do have a legislative agenda and he did bring up the fact and if they are underfunded a discussion or something about adding that to when we go to den county days if there's something we can do to advocate for them it may be a good discussion and that's not something we can do individually as city council members we need to agree to that as a body so that's just something I wanted to go out there and I appreciate you bringing it up in that way and form so and that that's all I wanted to make comment on anybody over here oh thank you so it seems like there's misunderstanding I just meant since these categories we were asked to rank high interest and low interest and as you may not have heard me said say I know that every one of us cares about MHMR and MHMR funding I did say that so I didn't mean to imply that people didn't care but it's we were asked do you have a high interest or low interest or no interest in getting this item onto a work session and that that is literally what we're being asked so I'm not putting words in anyone's mouth no that's not correct that is that's not correct that's not correct we're being asked to rank these things in our opinion of comparatively to the list that we have before us on what we want to talk about that doesn't mean that you can't get something else on the agenda so it's not about saying that those it's about ranking them from each individual council member's perspective of what they believe is the most critical at least at this point to talk about in doing the city's business but just because you say low interest doesn't mean you don't want it on the agenda you're just saying that I would rather talk about x than y sooner than later I agree okay and but no interest means no interest in getting it on there correct sure yeah I mean so I mean I I agree with with what you just said it's just different way of wording it um so I I just wanted to make that clear um yeah thank you yes council member hudspeth I so look forward to these conversations but I'll just say this I take it at its at its truest sense it is absolutely do I believe that staff's informal staff report and whatever information preceded that right satisfy answers to the question yes or no then it looking forward it's then hey like the zero energy thing that I'll use that example it may get zero traction and you know what I'll do I'll schedule the time for them to come down to one of the awesome rec centers or the or the stope building and anybody that's interested meet me there we'll videotape it so I can disseminate it that way and we'll move on because ultimately this body decided it wasn't worth or didn't rank or didn't warrant a full presentation and that's okay I'll it's not going to stop me from sharing the information because I'm passionate about the information and I think it's valuable to those in our community on a few different levels and so I think that's how I look at it I don't look at it as this is our I've got to get it in this room for to be of public good I can do a lot of public good outside of this room and do every week and so I think that is the key thing it's did the informal staff report give me enough information is it actionable for this body I'm big on that that that is almost I mean anything that we can't directly affect I'm not big on writing letters to people and telling them you know where I fall because I think there's there's that's just not high on my list of things to do I understand we do it I understand it's necessary I just think I I want to focus on actionable things that I can help the citizens citizens of Denton get done and and that's just that's what I've been called to do and everyone has their own marching orders that's just when I talk to to people that have elected me that's what they talk about is brings the most value it's getting stuff done and moving that moving the ball forward so for me that that's what it is it's not it's it's comparative it's did the informal staff report satisfy answers matter of fact I had something on there that I voluntarily pulled off I said hey I didn't like the answer it was it wasn't how I drew it up in a playbook but it answered the question and I took it off the list because it satisfied what I what I needed to know so I think that's hopefully others will get there I'm not looking forward to a you know 30 question survey I mean again it's three minutes and I think megabytes are cheap but it's just I don't think that's the intent I think it's the the intent was to evaluate it make a decision no one I don't think anyone operates their their day like that you have to make decisions there's 30 items when if they're all important then to put that into action and if they're all mandatory then we should just what over Christmas break start on Tuesday and go until because they're all important no obviously we're going to go home and so you there is a vetting there is a ranking that has to kick in or people would legitimately advocate that we never go home because they're all important you know so I think it's it's it's important to keep it in perspective and just analyze it for what it is it's a great process in my opinion and again it adds a level of transparency and thought process that I like I'm fine putting this these top seven that have been highly ranked into some empty spots if that's what the feedback you're looking for I'm I'm fine doing that so let help me understand that the coloring the blue are the ones we've already had informal staff reports on going back to this so the blue ones were the ones that we had in the October 23 strategy session and then the other ones are the ones since then now and I do want to preface that with saying we do send you informal staff reports that are just more factual information right X has happened here's what this information is we've excluded those from the list you could certainly add those to council member hospice point if that's something that you wanted to hear more about let us know we could do it but we've tried to give you the policy related what we think are the policy related items that aren't already scheduled so that's kind of what those are we it really is just trying to bifurcate what you saw last time from this okay that's all we're trying to do okay gotcha so then if you go back so when council member Briggs says I'm okay with taking the top seven and working those into a work session somewhere okay so from a process perspective so let's say that's direction we haven't really taken a consensus of that but let's just for discussion sake say that's the case so then if we're looking at one of these per work session or two per works anyway how long would it take to work through those top seven if you go back and you look at at the schedule that we have again looking at the constraints of when we'd start trying to have no more than four to five depending on what the topics are there could be some up here where we have three or four topics with their very long items it could be four or five hours of work session that's probably not a good candidate so we'd have to try to find a time where we could slot them in it'd probably take us a few months honestly to get all of them through unless you think those are more important than some of these that are already listed so then if you'll go back to that list because I'm trying to understand because this is supposed to be a tool for staff to get some help on how are you scheduling work session items based upon council's whatever you want to call it the survey preference discussion debate doesn't matter just how how did they get on the list right so when you take so when you schedule these then they're going to come off of this list is that correct that's right we'll go ahead and get them scheduled so my suggestion is is if you think at this point the top seven are you're interested in we could look at scheduling the next three to four of these but by the time we have our next strategy work session item and we come back it looks like we're probably going to come back in january to do this again because of the scheduling in december will be difficult but come back in in january with these already scheduled three or four of these scheduled and then you can see where you are on a list okay so then when you come back when you show us the the schedule that you just showed us yeah you want to go back if you could code the work sessions that are ones that were selected from this survey list we could so that we know that okay here's here's what we're looking at so we can so i maybe not we i'm using the wrong problem so i can understand all this thing these things are what we need to do to run the city day to day the other ones are probably more policy discussions that have been initiated by the public or the council or both uh and i just would like to be able to see how many of those we get okay um because then the problem that i see or the challenge is if you go back to the top seven list let's say we pull full four of those off then that means the three are going to be included together with all the ones below it together with some additional ones right in a new survey that's correct so some of those that we're saying hey we want those in a top priority we want those uh may begin to filter down so that's possible yes yeah so this is this is my thought if we say schedule the seven we schedule them and and when we come back next month that doesn't mean they have to be scheduled for that month but we get we get them scheduled or we tentatively get them scheduled or something we put them on a list of these can't filter down they can't they don't come back to be rescheduled yeah these these are ones that are going to be talked about um and and i know that that list may grow but the truth of the matter is we don't unless this council makes a decision to start meeting twice a week or something like that then it'll take us even if we did this whole list it'll take us six months to do the whole list probably at least but if we're saying we want to hear these based upon whatever criteria we're using then those are the ones that i think need to be earmarked to be heard in a sequential order does that make sense because if we say we want to hear i double f cemetery improvements now i guess somebody could argue that well but then if things come up there might be more priority over that so do we say the priority just sort of goes month to month or we make a decision and it's a decision that's made and that's to me the challenge in in taking those that we just know we can't get scheduled by the time the next survey comes in well i think if the if the council is directing us that these are the top seven that you want to schedule them we can put them on the schedule and each week each month these move around somewhat just based on again like i was saying before what may be ready different types of demands that we have on us there may be something else on a staff perspective that comes up that we need to get in front of you and we have to figure out what how do we balance that but if you're saying these are seven as a council that you want to look at we'll put them on a schedule identify them so you can see them and they won't come back on their and take them off the future surveys okay if you want to see it that way that's certainly this is meant to be a tool for you to work through this yes sir you know i'm looking at these and some we've given friday reports but i'm looking at the qualified voter board member requirement that all that require i mean we provided a friday report there's no requirement that your board members and commission members need to be qualified voters if you all want that to change the ordinance we can bring that's a quick consent agenda item and that can be removed from that list that's all they would take doesn't require a work session i don't even know what that means qualified vote board member right now under chapter two all your board and commission members that you appoint for the city are required to be qualified voters a qualified voter someone who's registered to vote under in state of texas that is a requirement goes back to 1966 it's i for whatever reason i it's never been changed because you don't have to be a registered voter or a qualified voter as the state calls it to be a board city board or commission member and so that we can simply just bring forward with a consent agenda item to remove that requirement just make it that they must be a dentin resident or um you know or uh per the ordinance that applies to a particular board some of your boards you don't have to be a dentin resident but you have to be a dentin prop uh business owner i think i'm adp board is one of those and so that's something that's very quick and easy i don't know which other ones we may have done that in this list but that one i know for certain all it takes is just a consent agenda item if you all want to change that and that's what you're saying that is changing the requirement from requiring you to be a registered voter yes qualified voter under state law it comes from the election code and it just means somebody who's who's a u.s citizen and registered voter and other qualifications you don't have to there's nothing in the law that mandates that your board and commission members be u.s citizen registered to vote in the state of texas on a national level okay i mean all right no i wouldn't be in favor of putting that on a consent agenda item because that's i think that's that makes me even okay yeah because i wasn't aware that it's up there to try to change it so council member hudson well and i think that i think that thank you and i think that is exactly succinctly what we're talking about right all the information is out there it doesn't need to be on the list right that that's the that's the essence of the list it's is there has the information been disseminated is there more to discuss or not and and so the this it doesn't need to come back that's the thing where i'm talking about we compare the list down if the information has been shared there's no new information per erin's insight so why is it on a list to have some to get fill up a slot to get presented to us further it should be in a different mechanism to say hey i want to try to get this changed or done or acted upon but that shouldn't be on this list for further evaluation what would someone talk about for an hour you know or 30 minutes it just so that i think that's exactly what i'm talking about as far as looking at the list as it is as it's intended i think you know it's it's to be to be actionable what do we think should come back for further presentation so i i got a little sidetracked on attorney's comments but i want to go back to council member has said that they're okay with the top seven on this being scheduled to go to work session who's opposed to that you oppose to it i'm not opposed to the top seven i'm looking at the breakdown of 10 points on that scale that it would need to be the top five or the top 10 in order to in order to treat all the topics equal based on okay gotcha all right okay all right so you're saying you can't split the 10 that's my opinion that's my opinion okay i understand that council member yeah and i would i would just also like to ask staff if say like the cemetery fence improvements if there's something that's coming up other information like from parks or money or grant if there's other things that come up with these topics that those also be included in that so that we can have more information that that's just a request that maybe those with the work session item you're saying if there's new information oh absolutely sure right because i know that you know the landfill expansion that's being worked on you know constantly there's stuff going on so you you know there may be staff that have information that they want to present to us that it may not just be our importance it may be something that wants to new information that they have that they could add to it as well or you know to make it for timing say the the bonnie bray in scripture i don't know if that's if that's a a time sensitive thing because of the the expansion or or what so if it was an operational issue we've already tried to schedule it but i think if i understand correctly if we present something to you as a work as an informal staff report in september and it doesn't get scheduled to let's say march if there's new information in that period we'll certainly add it to you and bring that back so you have a complete discussion about the topic so you can see it okay but then we're going to i'm going to go back to the split at 11 or 10 because i want we're going to get this work session if we need to have a policy discussion about this process we're going to have it but to combine it with this it just it really creates a lot of confusion and if we need to revisit this from a policy perspective we can do that but go ahead your comments are okay yeah so so two things number one thank you erin i think that's a great idea about having that and just using that as an example the qualified voter board member requirement having something like that as a consent agenda vote that would be that's a case where we got a staff report i thought it was a great staff report provided the information we need we needed it's a you know i read all this the staff reports and sometimes and i know that i i didn't feel like i myself needed a discussion to make up my mind on that um but i know that or i i assume that maybe others might want to but if others feel comfortable putting certain items on the consent agenda for a vote um you know whether whether you're for it or against it uh i'm i'm fine with that if indeed we we've got all the information that we need in the staff report so i'm what you're what you're saying is if we get a staff report we got to decide you just can't put things on the consent the consent agenda are just sort of business things that aren't going to necessarily be and anybody can pull it anybody can pull it but to put that i'm going to use this as an example to put that on the consent agenda okay a staff report came out on it correct you put it on the consent agenda you're assuming that everybody's okay with that information and i don't i haven't heard really i mean it's the first time we've even talked about that one specifically but so okay so i was just using that as an example but that said if there's something like that in the future an item like that in the future or everybody's okay with it and it's something where it's a voting yes or no as opposed to an something that's informational then having it on a consent agenda as erin mentioned would be a good way to save time and if it is something at first for instance on that issue i might be the only one here who who would vote yes on that i don't know but say there's some other and you know maybe nothing here fulfills that but in the future i think that's a really good time-saving measure to keep in mind as an option see what i'm saying for these kind of issues as as as erin mentioned the second thing that i wanted to to suggest as far as kind of scheduling these kind of multiple items that are more heavily are more heavily weighted one possibility might be to attach to that item in a traceable way the the names of those council members who rank the that item high or low interest so that therefore you know say something it comes up in march an item that was one of the top ranked but uh you know it had because of backlog postponed to months from now right that way in march staff can then or agenda committee whoever can't reach out to those specific council people and say hey right say it was something that you know that the mayor and mayor pro tem and account and councilperson briggs you know wanted on there could say hey um chris john keely do you still want this on here um because maybe people's minds change or or would you right then they know who to reach out to that's just a suggestion or you could just remember and check with people um but that might be a way to to deal with the problem of or you know the the inevitability that certain kinds of issues might seem really pressing at one moment then months from now they're not as pressing does that make sense brian um i think i understand where you're going i think what we're looking to do though is is have the council as a whole tell us what's important to you and if these are important we'll put them on the list and go with it and i'm not sure it needs a uh my opinion i'm not sure it needs another iterative discussion i think it's if you tell us it's important to you we'll schedule it and move and move on okay we're just trying to understand where is the council on these topics and i think is is we're you know we're approaching an hour on this subject is hard yeah so as far as scheduling so then let me just to follow up to make sure i understand as far as scheduling okay so when we get these items on um so an item that is scheduled for february okay let's say that's one of these items um will that automatically come forward or will you do some touching well i'm saying you but will staff do some touching base or the agenda committee with those we'll put it on the schedule and and we would bring that forward to you that schedule of all the work session topics it's sent to you every week we send that out and you'd see where that was and unless there was something unusual that happened that's when it would be okay brought forward okay so it would just be okay great okay it's pretty simple from our standpoint if you guys tell us you want to bring them forward we're going to bring them forward okay so you're satisfied in other words with this system and again i don't mean just you but staff is satisfied with this system as it is as far as having those monthly calendars you don't want any you don't need any tweaking on that that's not a problem did you have i think we're fine and i have a council member break suggestion i think you know we we have started reaching out to council members asking if it's something selective leave on the list or pull off and just trying to cool it down so we did actually have a few pulled off in the last couple of months but brian's right this is you know we're trying to identify what is the most important one of the most important topics to the most of you and just move and if we if we did if we asked you not to give us not to ask for another uh workshop we'd still need through april to run all through all these so it's just one of those it's one of those issues is completely up to you we're going to do with most of you the majority of you want done and we'll do our best to get it scheduled okay thanks council member uh melzer yeah a little brain freeze there um uh why don't we just go ahead with the top five when we're done with those we can relook at the list right and then uh is there a way to maybe incorporate as an option in the survey like move to a vote right because it only asks it isn't obvious otherwise how you get something to a vote because this is saying how pressing is it for a work session but if if people say no it's not pressing because we're ready to vote on it how would you know well i think certainly in this discussion if several of you said we want to have this item any of these items on for a vote we would bring it forward for a vote but i think that's what you could have this this discussion the survey is meant to be a starting point in our minds of getting you to a place where you can start having some discussions about priorities it doesn't prevent you from having other discussions in the work session itself and just lastly uh um why don't we resolve the issue of this uh idea of something of whether things should automatically move to a vote like with a nose count because we just keep going around and around on it you know like some people favor that idea some people don't i'm not sure what you're saying uh the the the idea that uh i think uh mayor partem uh introduced it first i'm not sure just this idea that after so many times on the list that something ought to automatically move i mean why don't we just sort of have eyes and nays on that and either we're going to do that or not you know i mean because maybe i'm wrong i thought we kind of kept returning to the topic so maybe maybe it just went away and i'm wrong did it go away did that topic go away i'm not even sure honestly i'm not sure i'm confused i'm not sure what you're talking about nose counts votes and i think the question was is if there's these bottom two subjects are on the list for a couple of different uh surveys should we bring forward an action item to remove them yeah that automatically goes oh yeah okay so that's what you that's what i was talking about yeah i i don't necessarily have a big need to do that to to stick it on a consent agenda to remove i mean so the list gets so you come in here with 20 on the list we're going to have a 13 through 10 or 9 or 8 and you know right now to me it's manageable and if it gets to be where it's not then okay you're still going to however even if there's 100 on there you're still going to pick where do you drive first yeah right yeah yeah exactly because i think you brought that up i mean when i think you brought that up as a comment to his that you didn't really have a need to get rid of it so let me go back to the five and then i want to recognize you don't and if you could answer this too is everybody okay with the top five getting them scheduled and then we'll come back and are we okay with that okay all right so we've got that so that means we're going to let don have a question and a comment and then we're going to wrap this discussion up because we've given staff direction oh i just have a comment sure what i would be good with is this is you know and i think it would take less time than we've taken here today go down the list have an up or down vote by all seven members and we would get a ranking on there because we'd have some people some of them four three five two okay i'm not sure we can i'm not sure that might be polling that might be that yeah well that's what makes sense to me but i understand that's just me yeah we operate within the confines of state statute um okay so you've got direction top five yes sir yep we'll get them scheduled all right okay uh i think this concludes our work session reports from house cleaning housekeeping excuse me house cleaning four million slip there um we're going to move the closed session items to the end uh so that we can take the open public work session or public items in our special call meeting first and um i know that we've got a uh you look puzzled council member ryan our mayor protein well don't we have one item that we have reaction on we we do but i think we've got that result okay so i'll address that when we get to it okay yeah so let's take a about a five or ten minute break and we'll come back and start with our special called meeting welcome everybody back to this meeting of the density council on november 27 2018 it is 3 33 we have completed our work session items and we will now convene in a special called meeting uh and consider the following items the consent agenda and i believe the city attorney has a statement on the consent agenda so that's their first item on the agenda consent agenda item j has been pulled from for individual consideration i am going to be recusing myself and filing a conflict of interest form on that items first assistant city attorney larry colester will be sitting in my stead when we get to that so if you see me pop out and him replace me that's the reason why okay so you're going to be sitting here through for the the regular consent agenda motions and yes sir okay all right so um consent agenda mayor pro tem i move approval of consent agenda items a through i all right and you're with j being pulled for individual consideration correct all right we have a second council member brig seconds it uh so all in favor of the consent agenda items except for agenda item j which has been pulled please signify by raising your right hand motion carries seven zero we will now move to agenda item j which is an item for individual consideration i don't believe we have a staff report on that um i'll read the caption considered option of ordinance approving a salary increase of three percent for city attorney aron leo and the performance review provision of his employment agreement etc and i believe if i'm not mistaken there was an addition an addendum is that correct uh okay all right so any motion that would be made would need to include the addendum that has been uh as exhibit one i believe has been proffered to be attached yes council member husbeth your mic please move approval including the amended information provided today okay we have a motion do we have a second second all right motion and a second for agenda item j everybody in a for approval please signify by raising your right hand all opposed by like sign motion carries what um what's the vote five to two somehow it wouldn't count myself all right if we could go ahead and retrieve the city attorney city attorney yep yeah all right we are going to be um pulling uh we're not going to be considering agenda item d which is the reconsideration of the denton's primary representative to the dent county transportation authority board uh mr huckabee attended his resignation from the board this afternoon so there's no need to consider that item so we'll go back up to individual item a which is conduct the second of two readings and consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of denton texas voluntarily and acing approximately 86.47 acres of land good afternoon mayor council this is the um this the second and final reading of the ordinance for the annexation generally located between creek creakdale drive hickory creek road east of the railroad tracks it's the area that's highlighted in in yellow and with that i'll go ahead and and read the read the ordinance an ordinance of the city of denton texas voluntarily annexing approximately 86.47 acres of land generally located between creakdale drive and hickory creek road east of the railroad tracks more specifically described in exhibit a and illustrated in exhibit b providing for a correction to the city map to include the annex land lands providing for a savings clause an effective date okay uh is this an action item no no second reading yes it is the second reading and adoption of the ordinance okay all right okay may I move approval of agenda item 2a second we have a oh councilmember briggs yeah just a question on the on the process so um this is approved this doesn't mean that anything um beyond the annexation has been approved with this right because i know that there have been some preliminary um drawings just that the annexation is included on this only correct that is correct they have they have a pending uh zoning initial zoning um for the property uh that'll be heard um most likely in january by council um but right now it's what's existing on the property today can continue but other than that that's it but the zoning will go through the the correct notification processes all of that neighborhood meeting i mean all that stuff later on okay just for clarification thank you because it once it comes in it defaults to is it already five already five x and then if they want anything besides that they have to initiate a rezoning process just like anybody else does and goes through the normal process that's correct all right okay so we had a motion and a second all in favor of agenda item what is this for uh 2b i won't say it please signify by raising your right hand motion carries unanimously moving on to agenda item oh the last one was 2a so do we need let me let me let's do that vote again if i don't if you don't mind so this is for a vote on agenda item 2a scratch that last vote i stated the wrong agenda item so we had a motion by council by mayor pro tem for approval of agenda item 2a and in a second by council member hospice for agenda item 2a is that correct council member all right so all in favor of agenda item 2a please signify by raising your right hand all right agenda item 2a carries 70 i apologize for that agenda item 2b which is consider an appeal of the historic landmark commission denial of an amendment to an existing certificate of appropriateness for the expansion of a mural to the front facade of a local designated landmark building located at 12 at 122 north locust good afternoon richard canoni development services uh as the mayor just stated uh this is a a request to uh consider an appeal on a um a denial of an amendment to an existing uh certificate of appropriateness uh this is the andy's bar building also known as the paschel paschel building um at 122 north locust um just to just to highlight a couple things uh the 2017 certificate of appropriateness approved the mural uh on on the north wall here and and i'll get into that again but just wanted to um to to bring notice to the the appeal is really for this facade here which is the the front facade facing the uh the square or the west facade um just a little bit of history on on the building on the on the designation 2008 this was uh designated uh by city council uh as a as a local landmark it was built in 1877 it's the oldest building facing the courthouse and the only one to survive the the fire on that block in in uh 1890 uh it's also a contributing building uh within the uh the denton county courthouse square historic district and uh just a a highlight of pictures yeah it this thing has been it's had it's had many faces i remember that actually i was a little kid i just remember the building but yeah that's that that's just so funny it's it's got a colorful history yeah i was wondering if you could tell us the full title of that movie it's cut off no we don't want that yeah okay incomplete information i can't vote on this it was actually cut out yeah yeah that's yeah um just a little bit of background because i since you know we don't we don't get a lot of these appeals or what a certificate of appropriateness is so i thought i would just highlight uh what it is and when it's required uh and it's anytime there's an alteration or change um that that affects an exterior architectural feature and and that's defined below and it's pretty broad in in what that is but anytime that that's that that necessitates a certificate of appropriateness it has to go to uh hlc or historic landmarks commission for uh for approval so in 2017 uh hlc did approve um uh really two different things one was was just an overall maintenance restoration and improvement uh this is what it was before this is sort of the after um on the on that front facade of the building and then they did the mural on the uh on the north and then again on the um and carried that through to the east facade and so this is just sort of a before uh before and after and so that that that was approved in 2017 uh five zero by hlc it came back in in 2018 and sort of had two components to the request one was um to have a to continue that that sort of uh a mural around the south facade of the building which you can kind of see you'll see here and then from the street you just kind of catch a corner of it depending where where you are hlc approved that uh four three um in october again as part of that that um that that request the west facade which you see here the front of the building facing the square that was actually denied uh at a vote of seven uh seven seven to zero uh which is which is subject to the appeal i know there were some questions uh in in the minutes and there are a number of votes um that were taken um just to kind of explain a little bit about that um the initial the initial motion was to deny the request um there was a a friendly amendment that was requested that ended up going to a vote to amend it to make sure that the to clarify that the denial was only for the west facade that was approved five two so that was the initial vote then they called the question for the denial of the west facade that was the seven zero vote and then for the south facade that was the four four three vote so that's why there's the three votes in the minutes there was a comment in the minutes that had the request for the certificate of appropriateness come before the painting was actually done on the on this facade that that it would have passed and i i wonder if you can parse out or if it's even possible to parse out whether the committee was ruling on the appropriateness or the their sort of desire to in effect reprimand the uh you know the applicant over not having over having done it without getting the certificate in advance is there a way to pick that apart somewhat i mean it's a little challenging uh if you you know the minutes capture just sort of a summary but if you go back and it you know i had to listen to it a couple times to really get the gist of it and the conversation it kind of went around and you know it went around and took a couple couple different turns when the motion was made to deny there was no there was no specific finding tied to that you know tied to that denial there was a discussion about the adverse effect that it did have and so shortly thereafter that's when that that first motion was made but i know there were some members that had commented on the fact that they were upset that that it was done prior to prior to coming in front of them so you know if i can follow up sure yeah where where that leads me is if in fact there are other appropriate responses to someone not following uh you know a city ordained process a fine or i don't know what we do it seems like you're not supposed to do things you're not supposed to do you can't just flout the rules if we have it we have it for a reason uh and if if if that were made apparent to the commission i'd almost be inclined to send it back to them and say rule separately on these issues you know if you want to you know impose some kind of a you know response to the fact that that the uh you know the ordained process was followed do that and then rule on the appropriateness you know i'd rather personally i'd rather do that than then substitute my judgment for theirs on on the mural itself councilmember braves do you have a question well mine was the same too i mean i'm just kind of not really sure if if we're voting on the appropriateness and if if they're um historic roof roman is here if he wanted to okay you have it right yeah so so what they're so in order to to and what's interesting and usually there's there's criteria for approval in this instance the code sets a criteria for denial and so there's there's essentially three criteria and and you don't have to meet all it's it's one or or you can meet all three but but you really just need one and it's whether or not the proposed work will have an adverse effect on the external architectural features of of the landmark the features of the properties in the block or in the historic district as a whole or the future preservation maintenance and use of the historic landmark and district now there were some of the members that that that when that discussion ensued explicitly stated that that they felt that it would have an adverse effect on the the features of the landmark itself as well as the the block i want to make a comment to your comment because i read the minutes but i guess if because the whole thing was painted the facade and the south side at the same time so if the if if it really was about you broke the rules we're going to be punitive and punish you then the south the south side got approved albeit four to three but it got approved so i think for me i i don't necessarily i mean gosh if i went back and never been tried to figure out everybody's mind of why they did something if they hadn't made that comment i think you would have probably felt differently about it but because somebody said that but when i think about the south side the same thing happened but that wasn't the result i think for me a lot of it has to do this is the front-facing facade of the square and so i don't have any problem with you know moving forward with this i don't have a need to go back and try to figure out where they're trying to be punitive because i think for me the answer is they weren't or they wouldn't have approved the south side that was also painted at the same time it was painted outside of receiving a certificate of appropriateness yes yeah they were the the south side and this front were painted at the same time if am i correct in that yeah so okay so what yeah they had painted the front here and then the the west facade and then the south south area that you see and the south side was approved four to three correct and then the west was denied was denied seven zero correct yes okay yeah all right okay any other question oh i'm sorry you still got no that was that's it that was a presentation okay yes councilmember roger i uh i have some questions for uh for uh roman mcallan hello roman mcallan preservation officer so and for some reason i think these kind of questions it'll sound like um like a a trial attorney saying what did you mean when you said such and such in the minutes but it's generally i just generally mean what did you what did you mean because i'm curious and i find uh so when you say um so i'm going to be reading some things from from the minutes um uh and just kind of asking you to elaborate um uh it says here um commissioner stripling asked if there's a difference with respect to code between paint on a building and a mural um and you explained that at this time there's not and stated that uh from a preservation uh point of view this is this is just paint can you explain i think i know what you mean by that but if you could just explain yes for us yeah the uh painting with preservation professionals usually isn't something we look at now a mural is clearly different from from paint we don't have in the city a specific anything specific about murals other than i think in one of those reports that was attached there is that we do have some downtown guidelines we use for awarding those grants that come through the main street program and in there we talk about how we we want murals and we want them on the side of buildings and there's that that information is there but when we talk about paint we don't um from a preservation point of view it's just a non-issue if there's no paint on a wooden building and it's decaying then you have a preservation issue but paint and paint colors aren't something that that uh most actually all the preservation professionals that i know get into and that's why i have that reference from the texas historic commission who said if we had seen this we would have been okay with yeah yeah so in other words so you're it's a paint is not architecture you're seeing it it's the historical commission is it um and the preservation issues have to do with the actual architecture um yes okay so thank you and that's that makes a lot of sense to me and that's as i understood it um so uh let's see the the other item um oh and this is the other item i wanted to ask you about um it says attorney drake asked mcallan to clarify what the standard is that should be applied in this situation mr mcallan explained that the city of denton does not have a law requiring the application of the standards in our nationally registered district but the city has property appearance guidelines that have been used for review those are the guidelines i'm referring to which are in your in one of the uh the one of the attachments there you all have seen those before oh yeah but they talk about um murals being important and art is being important and so they uh they sort of they don't say specifically whether or not you should put one on the front of a building facing the square that's where we're left um without any guidance what was the first part of that sorry yeah i mean you answered the it was um you mean what was the first part of the quote that i read i mean i i think you addressed it all you said uh mr mcallan explained the city of denton does not have a law requiring the standards the standards so the standards which is what the texas historic commission does all decisions from and they're the ones who are saying we wouldn't have any problem with this yeah okay well thank you um thank you so much so and that that was this is the end of the of the presentation correct and i guess yes sorry go on well with the texas store commission they also did say however if the building had a lot more her had more architectural integrity so we know from those earlier pictures it had a cornice across the top probably pressed 10 and then we know it had uh double double hung windows two over one two top panes and one with a curve to match that curve and so those windows were gone and then the only architectural integrity it has that's really great are those cast iron columns there's four black columns and so the original side there is all missing if it had all that integrity they might have felt differently about the paint but what they saw it as is a canvas that could be used in this way councilmember breaks thank you so on on that i guess what i my thing is so if he goes back and um if the a pill goes just is denied yes right and so what would he be required to do like i'm in the process because would he go back to all beige or could he choose one of those colors would a solid color be better i'm just when we start talking about paint colors i get confused because there's a purple building right next to it you know when we're talking about it's pink and purple what's appropriate um well i think to avoid any punitive thing which i don't think there should be the applicant who i've tried to keep on notice we changed the order here he's in a recording session uh somewhere here in town so i let him know that we changed the order he may make it over but he's always said from day one if if in final appeal i don't get it approved i'll put it back the way it was so he would probably the beige color which is it's the same in the upper left corner that he probably would pull that cream back across just exactly like it was and he's always said he would he would do that the reason that he made the decision to paint it was that he had a piece of heavy equipment that he was using to paint the texas bank building that he's also involved in and they had repainted all the windows there and also the the artist apparently travels around a lot and he happened to have been available and they scheduled a slot and so he wanted to take the risk and paint it across there's a theme to it there's a there's a motor something to do with bonnie and clied and then they go around and on the south facing facade there's an airplane and that's the fine that i there's a theme to the artwork i'm not sure what it is but that does that answer the question yeah well yeah i just didn't know because there's like three colors to choose from there and i didn't know what if if if he went back with the same i don't think we would take it back to hlc if he took it back to blue or something i guess i'd go back and ask but i i've you know and i think um uh council member melter that the quote you you gave about the uh that it would have been approved i'm i don't think that was in our staff work that might be from the applicant because he did think that had he in the original c of a asked to paint the way it's painted today that he thought that would have been approved and i have to say i probably agree to that because we have three new landmark commissioners that were um that have been appointed since that first c of a was approved and one of the things i've done ever since i've gotten here is to talk about that paint is not something that preservation commissions should be concerned with it's something that kind of gives preservation commissions a bad name because they see that they're trying to police people's color on their buildings and things like that so it takes a while for people to realize you go to a few preservation conferences and you find out that we have a lot more serious issues there are a lot more significant threats to historic buildings than paint council member robert yeah and then council member hudson yeah i'll just say so thank you for that explanation i support the applicant's um appeal uh for that reason because it doesn't make sense to me um that a historical commission who is supposed to be looking at issues of architectural integrity is making this that um is making a decision about uh paint colors that seems to be based on everything you've said everything i've read um you know really not within their um i don't want to say jurisdiction i don't want to imply that it was that i mean nothing illegal or anything but but just not not under not part of uh historic preservation um so if there was any evidence that the paint damaged the building um that it did anything you know if this was one of those painted lady victorians and we had a city ordinance about you know you need to go back to the original um so that's why um i i support that appeal um but i i appreciate uh council members council member melzer's comment about kind of wanting to separate the the issues of the um the uh the fact of the paint uh versus the the uh a sequence of it uh in um in the uh permitting process and i would encourage um the historical commission you know i would kind of leave it up to them to discuss it and um to see if do they want to i don't even know if if they're able to suggest that there be some sort of fine or penalty but that that be kept i think it's important that that be kept separate a finer penalty for if somebody jumps the gun and gets something done before an approval that that be kept separate from uh you know to approve or not to approve council member hudspeth thank you roman could you orient me on the um the fence on the square that's covering the uh where minima used to be did hlc approve that no they just who the reason you're seeing this item is this particular building is a individually historic landmark originally designated historic landmark so anything else on our square as under our current ordinances uh as interpreted by our legal department doesn't require a certificate of appropriateness got it so that sign that that wouldn't apply got it okay and so that for me not that they didn't hear it but it's hard for me to reconcile this versus that they're both facing the same way and i have a distinct uh feeling um about one versus the other and and i'm not an artist so i you know there there could i could be losing a little just because i don't have that eye but the fact of the matter is if i'm not mistaken and i know i'm not that fence can be there in perpetuity it there's there's nothing to make that fence come down and that artwork is there forever until someone decides to take it down and so when i'm saying okay well that's facing the square and that was funded by a local institution and everyone likes it then and i look at this and compare and contrast it is just a couple of buildings down um i i'm having a hard time understanding the difference right they're facing the same way and you know i'm not going to judge art and and then i struggle with the war i lock in with what you're saying about uh the paint aspect of versus the historical aspect of it but so i'll continue to listen with that that's kind of where i am is just kind of reconciling these two on the same side of the square both painted both facing out and both can be there until the end of time first of all to uh council members hudspeth's claim that he it doesn't have sort of jurisdiction on artistic things look at that tie come on that's a fantastic tie secondly um if it's the case that paint is not a subject for historic preservation why was there even a question of asking for a certificate of appropriateness for any of this okay richard's got a real concise answer to that that it's better than me i think you've articulated that but it was that but let me see if i can hit it's a local landmark so then we we as staff have to decide is the work being done on the local landmark worthy of work that needs to go to the landmark commission or can we approve it internally and so my i'm sorry and so we had this and so we said we better take it and we took it for the first one and then when it came back we had already gone with we better take it back so if i may was the was the instruction to the historic landmark commission we're taking this to you but it's paint and this is not in your for you to consider well in the face 2017 can i can i look i'm you can tell i'm visibly frustrated we just need to vote on this what the historic landmark commission did is what they did i mean we shouldn't sit here and criticize them we shouldn't sit here and say whether they should or should not have gotten instruction they made a decision it's coming to us we have a decision to make so let's make the decision and because to go back and to question them and to say that you don't understand it or to say that were they given instruction we've all got the minutes obviously we all have an opinion whether what happened was appropriate or not but guess what we have a chance to weigh in on it so that's what i want us to do because i don't want to waste a bunch of time talking about the historic landmark convention uh historic landmark commission deliberation so i'm going to go to council member i'm going to let you finish yeah um but yeah well i'm not saying it's not legitimate i'm just saying that we weren't there with the recorder not that but we've got a decision to make here it seems like everybody's got their own opinion already about what they need to do so i just want to let's talk about the deliberations before this council not what the deliberations of the historic landmark commission did or didn't do and whether they were right or wrong because that's really irrelevant right now well it's it's i mean if i uh if i may it's relevant to me just to understand what is under the cities to decide if it's not up to sort of anyone well that leads me one way well that's a that's a different question because what you're asking is what can this city council decide on appeal this guy's appealed it so what can we decide and what are the standards that we use to decide that and i think you've described it there are no standards right now that we have covered by ordinance you've described that paint necessarily isn't that but even if he says that each council member can still decide for different reasons whether they want to approve this or not so um council member armator did you have a question if not i mean if you're not that's okay i was just going to kind of just defend um no i don't i don't there's nothing to defend i mean there's nothing to defend you've had your way about wait to find it no no no no i don't think you know what i'm going to say council member melzer's right to ask that question which i believe is relevant question it is help anything that can help any one of us decide uh what i'm saying is i was interested to hear what the answer was i council member armature you sat here and you basically said that the historic landmark commission didn't do their job or that they did the wrong thing basically is what you said you said that about this council when we talked about their priorities before and our our job is not to decide who did their job in the underlying border commission we have an appeal before us yes and you're deciding to appeal a decision so you want to know is this decision do i agree with this decision or should it be you've already said that you don't agree with the decision i know you've already said that yes i was defending a colleague's right to fair enough defended note taken council member duff i'm pretty simple you know i like it i think it matches i mean it matches you look at that that view i'm good with it okay council member mayor pro tem well and i would agree i like it but that still doesn't necessarily make it appropriate in in my opinion in that if we don't have a definition of mural that that's pretty well standard that if you're using multiple paint colors to create an actual scene it's a mural that's i mean that's pretty basic we most of us learn that by the third grade so i i just cannot uh in good conscience approve a request to appeal okay um all right so uh yeah i uh i'll be voting against this not because i don't like eric eric's a great guy he's obviously done a great job with his building um it's on the front facing of the square i understand about the fence the fence did not have to come to anybody for approval whether it's historic landmark commission the city council which i think this goes to show our deficiency in our code which we need to work on on the square because now if we want the entire square every facade to have something like this that's just a matter of personal preference obviously based upon at least the standards that we have in place right now um so i i'm going to be opposed to it not because i'm opposed to the look of it not because i don't think it's attractive but because i don't necessarily want to set a precedent that i have an opportunity to take a vote on in order to send that message so that's the only reason that i'm doing that has nothing to do with anything else other than that any other questions discussion council member yes council member melzer um you can oh you might want to already say not appropriate but uh i'm at least curious to know uh if the coming downtown design standards which have not been approved but have been discussed you know how this would fit in that framework because that's a world that we may be coming into right right so i i don't know if there's anybody here can speak to that are you talking about what's the timeline for them coming forward no just uh would would this fit with what is being proposed what and you know i think the difficult i think the difficulty of that is is that those if they haven't been created and they haven't been voted upon or even discussed with the council it's not it's not it's hard to yeah well it's hard to influence me well to me it's it's speculative because if he says they are included then you're saying that might influence you if he's saying it wouldn't be included you're saying that would influence you i don't i mean my point is you know to your point we can kind of vote whichever we want for whatever reasons we want you know and it would influence me sure to know that we're coming into a world that might you know have a particular look that uh you know that i might vote for yes and no there you go right like the consultant now we're back to neutral but but it's it talks the guidelines currently under under um that are being developed or under uh under consideration are it talks about buildings being painted or unpainted obviously if it's a brick building it would you would want to paint paint a brick building but it doesn't explicitly talk about murals now that's something that we could we could address and then resolve resolve this issue as it comes up in the future um just to point out the building um the opera house does have a mural i think on on the side of their is that and that is not a historic it's on the side right it's on the side and so that's not a historic uh landmark locally or or anything else so that's why there's no regulation okay all right yes councilmember huskett erin i need you to fix this for me i'm going to move that we table um this until the next council member a council meeting because i'd like the applicant to be here and understanding we pushed it up uh i just want to i want to hear from yeah that's fair enough yeah we have a motion for a table do you have to do that to a date certain next yes an event okay a date certain which would be next year yeah all right i'll second that okay mayor protem we have a motion to second the table everybody signify approval by raising your right hand motion carries good deal all right we've got uh is that it no one more yes uh since this was okay this doesn't take a super majority no i've already asked him that okay yeah all right it's it's just a simple majority and it's a it's being heard fresh anew okay we're going to go to agenda item c consider approval of a resolution of the city of denton adopting the city of dentons 2019 state legislative program for the 86th texas legislature hi again richard right now we'll have a very quick presentation all right good evening mayor and council members still jessica rogers deputy director of public affairs hasn't changed in a few hours um i'm going to be presenting um quickly the 2019 state legislative program um we'll quickly review the program and then seek approval of a resolution adopting the program um most of the slides you see are the same ones that you saw at the work session but just as a reminder that the legislative program serves as the policy document of the city council and provides clear pre-vetted position statements on potential legislative issues it also provides direction to staff on how to respond to proposed and filed legislation during the session that's upcoming in january again just a reminder you don't have to articulate a position on every single issue we'll certainly bring things back as we talked about before about 6500 bills get filed each session so we do our best to anticipate but if something comes up that we didn't anticipate we'll certainly come back um the program includes two um general statements the first is what we call our statement of preservation um essentially that the city will oppose any legislation that it views as detrimental to our strategic goals to our authority um or that we feel is contrary to the health safety and welfare of our citizens we also have a statement of support and such that we will support any legislation that advance the city's interests or improves the health safety and welfare of our citizens changes that we've incorporated as feedback from the work session and we included a statement um to seek introduction and passage of legislation to change the composition powers and responsibilities the board of directors of the denton county transportation authority and then we also included a statement to support legislation that allows regional infrastructure planning organizations to use alternative funding mechanisms including such things as public private partnerships and toll lanes um to accelerate project delivery other than that the general categories and the statements remain the same and sort of notable changes this year of course is the tourism public improvement district which is included in the economic development section and then again the dcta board in the transportation section and support a statement um seeking not seeking instruction supporting legislation that would um encourage funding of an additional driver's license office or expansion of the current office um but other than that um i'll stand for questions and staff like you had 20 slides i have do not i have the actual program um in the backup of the slides but i told you there was going to be very short jessica yes do you have the you said you have the actual program i do can you pull up page seven on the bottom under community development community development human services yeah sorry the pages aren't the same but this community the text is the same and based on a earlier conversation today that third bullet point that reads support legislation that would provide state funding to assist local nonprofits so on and so forth uh i'd like to know the council's pleasure on saying uh would provide state funding to assist denton county mhmr and local nonprofits on the third bullet point yeah i mean that's yes okay i'm making it more specific yeah making it specific okay okay it's an easy change yeah okay yes council member husband can you how is this is this delivered to the representatives does it just serve as a guideline just how's it how's it we do provide we do provide copies of our legislative program to all of the denton county delegate the denton delegation so our representatives our senators we absolutely send them a copy of it we also use it um if we're going to meet with any committee members of which an issue that affecting that's affecting denton might be before to help guide us and set our position um so we know whether we're going to write a statement of support or opposition to a particular bill and we might reference back to our legislative program and say the city council has directed us to take a position on this statement in the legislative program and we can make that available to any legislator so my question would be do we supplement that what so for example that that that entity do we then supplement or have a one page a paragraph that has some statistics that would then support that or give general information about that when we make um when we write letters or we testify anything we do provide additional information we don't provide that information as part of the program itself okay so i mean that would be a thought of mine just because i want to i want to wet the whistle right i want to tell them hey here's here's why we're supporting and here's some quick stats i mean i'm not saying a complete narrative just in my mind i think three four bullet points that would say they they know the size of the county presumably but this many people are affected this many people you know that's just i'm thinking it may entice them to look further or make it easier for them to uh get on board or research whatever but i'll yield to your experience that's just that's my thought is something that would then supplement that briefly that would kind of at least get them curious to go sure um research when we when we provide this to the legislators perhaps you know we could have a cover letter that explains you know a little bit more narrative of why the council has taken positions um that might meet your purpose but again when we go on a specific bill we certainly provide additional narrative as to the background of the city's position thank you yes and to that in the process so our lobbyists also get a copy of this and they keep up with what bills come in and what bills go out and how they translate to what we support they do and don't and so is that it's kind of like moving yes they they also get a copy of it and they also um understand what our positions are and will alert us to bills um or movement or things that we're not maybe generally aware of they're a little bit more you know inside baseball than we are um and they'll let us know hey we saw that you know this affects something that's in your program you might want to pay attention to it so it is used in that capacity as well and you may want to come speak to it absolutely or something like that yes okay thank you okay anybody else any other questions comments so do you need we need to approve this right it is a resolution resolution okay all right so chair would entertain it okay move approval with changes requested councilmembers we have a motion and a second all in favor please signify by raising your right hand motion carries seven zero thank you thank you all right now we will move on to our closed session i will convene the closed session at oh is there another one oh no were you not including items the what oh concluding item yes yes yes yes sorry yep concluding items apologize concluding items yeah we're going to start just come around the horn councilmember riggs so i have it but i you guys weren't okay so i'd like to review the city amendment to um our fire code regarding fire pits at this moment they are not allowed in backyards and um i think that maybe we should allow them except for when there's a fire band our local home stores sell them and people have them and use them and they aren't aware can i ask you for clarification on that when you say a fire pit and i know what a chimney is it's an enclosed thing that you put fire in are you talking about something different than that they're the little bowls okay you put out and then they have a top on them okay all right i just because i i don't know if it's people digging a hole in the ground and putting wood in there so i'm just trying to understand well there's all sorts it's any it's anything and all of that is not allowed in any backyard within the city limits yeah and i'm sure you could walk in any house right now almost and there would be some sort of um so just just to have that even if it's for notification for our residents i mean um i also um we talked about it when we were talking about the reinvestment grant downtown is adding another type of thing for small businesses but i would like to maybe think about creating either a small business or a corridor reinvestment grant driving down university i noticed there's some that could stand you know maybe new signs and some paint maybe specifically targeting those um corridors first and um see what we could do i like that uh mayor pro tem thank you mayor um i've got a couple of items here the first one is i'd like to have a informal staff report on uh horses on city streets in particular carriages i know some other uh cities around this area that have uh historic areas use carriages uh with requirements and to the best of my knowledge from what i've seen in our code we do not allow those like for us to consider whether that's something we want to look into in the future uh and then i've got a couple of uh thanks uh items first one is uh served it um uh i wanted to thank the people of the community uh we were trying to raise two thousand dollars for uh the wheeler house for giving hope and we've raised over three thousand already today uh then my last item uh i want to thank five of my fellow council members for their appropriateness and not putting up signs on private property for not uh claiming one thing on a facebook page and then denying it later in comments section uh i'd like to thank y'all for not having put up on my private property to where i might have to consider in the future a uh trespass warrant that's what i've got yeah thank you council member armature gosh uh so first of all i'll just say um it was an award and it uh the business owner uh gave me permission to put it up and was happy to have that award so i would never do anything like that on our private property um anyway um i uh first i wanted to say um um that you know there's a a dent in city firefighter who uh recently had to have a leg amputated and i know our thoughts and prayers are all with him and his family i wanted to to mention that and um to thank him for his his service and we're all all thinking of him um i had two uh requests for a staff report um number one um uh i'd like to see a staff report on uh photo ids for um uh for uh homeless people people who are unhoused experiencing homelessness um ids you know we we take out our driver's licenses all the time those of us who have them um uh and use them for a number of purposes many um people many but not all like people experiencing homelessness don't have uh a driver's license and it can be a real barrier um you know not having a form of photo id um so uh i'm wondering what we could do um staff could look into kind of other uh look into what what other cities have done um to have um having photo ids it can help people with with jobs can help people um enter into um uh you know any any you know place where where uh where you get asked to to show an id um and i uh i would like um to be included in that kind of talking to dcta you know seeing if maybe a a bus pass a photo id bus pass for um uh people who are people experiencing homelessness or or who are designated um uh people who i forget the dcta term but basically people who are dependent on transit dependent um anyway um and uh the second uh thing i'd like to see a staff report on i'd like to see a staff report um on the welcoming city initiative uh dallas city council that recently unanimously um passed a resolution to designate uh dallas as a uh welcoming city uh to uh and to uh guide the city's efforts in the economic inclusion and social integration of of immigrants in the community uh so i'd like kind of a staff report on that and what uh the uh city of denton would would have to do if if we wanted to adopt a measure like that thanks mic on i'm surprised the light didn't come on give a shout out to uh billy mathews uh he uh he's probably back there cussing me right now but he uh competed in what's called camp gladiator games down in austin he won in his age group with four other uh three other team members here regionally and qualified to go down to austin and they won it all and so i think that's worth recognition because that's that's tough i mean uh and i know and and i know billy's old so uh and i work out with billy every almost every other day and uh so anyway i just really congratulate you on that billy i know how hard work it was and just congratulate you on that so i wanted to give him a shout out on that yes yeah just just a quick one uh a while back there was an issue with uh streets that were failing in three years when you know much sooner than was expected and uh we just like an update on that in an informal staff report and whether we've learned something from the core samples it's just what we've learned since council member husby thank you uh i would like to see if uh the parks department could develop a program for uh parents not out maybe once a month uh that citizens of denton could utilize our you know after school care but in the evenings kind of a there's different private businesses that do it but i was curious if that's something we could achieve here just to give parents a you know evening out and then that would also by proxy hopefully more money being invested local restaurants shopping etc etc so just an understanding if that's an option and then two wanted to point out that the veterans have put together a uh a wall of just information and kind of a display that the golden triangle mall has allowed them to display for the next few weeks and uh that's where i picked up this book and got a tour of it today it's just outside jc pennies so uh i would encourage anyone that has not stopped by really really interesting fun facts there uh they're volunteers there to kind of give you a walk of it give you a tour give you share the information with you uh and kind of where they are on their um hall of fame efforts uh to to honor honor hall to uh it's kind of an understanding where they are then um during the dcta presentation they mentioned cog and kind of some efforts going on regionally i i would like to ask that somehow that gets worked in to see if we can maybe informal staff report that then triggers a hopefully a full presentation to understand what is going on around us kind of some different parts to have just kind of an update on where that is and then can last thing is that i too would like to and i'm going to say his name wrong probably but the dentin firefighter it's so it's gary wyland and um just uh i appreciate that organization and all that they do and and and wish him speedy recovery and and and um just that next chapter of life you know that sort of thing so just looking forward to to uh hearing the great things that have come come out of uh what is a what is a tough moment so thank you you're good all right now we will uh convene in close that concludes our public work our public council meeting we'll convene the closed session at 427 we will consider the following items consultation with attorneys under texas government code section 551.071 deliberations regarding real property under texas government code section 551.072