Feb 13, 2023 Public Utilities Board on 2023-02-13 9:00 AM

Okay, good morning and welcome to the Public Utility Board's meeting for the City of Denton of Monday, February 13, 2023, hard to believe, isn't it? I'd like to welcome our newest member, Thomas Plock, welcome. We try to do things as quick as possible and get everybody out of here as quick as possible, and that is our goal. The first item is presentation from members of the public, are there any? You guys look like you work here. Okay. We'll move on to the consent agenda, would any members like to pull any items for discussion? If not, we'll entertain a motion to approve, sorry, so moved, all right, A, B, C, and D, way to go Lee. I have a second, Thomas, would you like to have your first second? I second. He seconds it. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? None. Now, we will consider approval to January 23, 23 minutes, so moved, kind of motion. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Okay. Now, I would like to nominate Devin Taylor as the substitute chair for this next item because I have to recuse myself. I move to approve, second. All right. Move. Move. On the substitute. On the substitute. No, aye. Call the vote. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Sorry. I'm sorry. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. All those in favor, say aye. The scope of the work is full-depth street reconstruction, including curb and gutter. There's limited sidewalk improvements, and then these are the street segments that you see before you for the overall project. We received five proposals. This was advertised as a competitive seal proposal, a CSP. We had five proposals with Jago Public Company coming up on top with just over a not-to-exceed amount of $3.7 million. The schedule for this project, it's 100 percent design documents were completed in Q4 of 2022. Project bidding is Q1, 2023, with construction initiation and we're looking at Q2, 2023, with a final completion of 270 days. With this, staff recommends an approval of a contract between the City of Denton and Jago Public Company and a not-to-exceed amount of just over $3.7 million. I don't take any questions. Thank you, Chair. When you say limited sidewalk construction, you're just talking about repairing what's there or are we going to be adding any? Repairing what's there. Okay. Not adding any? Correct. Okay. Great. Thank you. Any questions on the evaluation page? I was curious the way the evaluation numbering works out. Is that something that a committee of persons does or are you responsible for that or how does that work? It's done by committee. Okay. And how many members are on the committee? Five. Five. And they're primarily people from your department or from other city agencies or how does that work? I guess so. All right. Good morning, board members. Seth Garcia, program manager with Capital Projects. Yeah, so typically we have five members. Normally three of those members are from our department, so either program managers such as myself or other project managers. And then we typically get two of these stakeholders. So we had a representative from street department as well as a representative from utilities that sit on the evaluation committee as well. Okay. And so everybody scores per this sheet based on the information that you receive? That is correct. And so the only piece that we don't score is the pricing. That's done by purchasing through an algorithm. But the rest of the scores are the average of the five committee member scores. Okay. Well, I mean, clearly the winning company had the lowest price and in addition had the highest score. So that's a pretty easy call. Correct. Yeah. And we had pricing that was 60%. By law, we can go down to 40%. So with the simplicity of this project, we felt pricing should be significantly higher than normal for the CSPs just because it was a pretty simple straightforward project. So this was one we really were looking at one of the lower prices. Okay. The thing that caught my eye was the things like key personnel, quality, ability to compete, similar projects, so on and so forth. And the way the scoring went on that and then the way the pricing went, it was like it was almost flipped over, if that makes sense. Right. So let's see. So key personnel, what we kind of ask for in that specific category is the personnel proposed specifically for this project. So we're looking at superintendents, foremen. Some of the things that the evaluation members look at is time with the firm, how much time are they actually allocating to the specific project. Exactly. So it can be a little bit subjective per evaluation member. So for instance, those are things that I look for is do we have a project manager that's been with the company for one year or 10 years, and kind of the history with that. So those are things. So it is a little bit subjective within there, but like I said, it is an average of all five evaluates. Okay. Again, the price was obvious, so it wasn't really a problem. Ed had the highest overall score, so that seemed like an easy call, but I was just curious. It's something I've wondered about. You've shown us these many times. I've never really quite understood the background behind it. So thank you. Yes, sir. Not a problem. Any other questions? So I have one last question. I keep bringing it up and I'm hoping we can get it eventually added to the slide deck. The limited sidewalk work, where is that? What is that? Is it reconstruction? Is it any extensions? Just on that map where you showed, sometimes there are like four colors on the map. These are reading road only, these are getting utilities, if it's possible to add the layer of sidewalks, like what areas will be getting sidewalk work in those spots? Understood, yeah. I believe it's reconstruction. I do believe there is a portion here that's being taken out and replaced and then other places that are deemed not suitable that were in the project area based on aging and current conditions. Right, yeah. And I think this neighborhood is maybe a little more straightforward than some of the other ones where it varies block to block a lot. So, like I said, if possible, we could start adding that in as a layer of what the work is. Yeah. All right. Seeing no other discussion, consider a motion. Second. Ryan McLean. Second. Larry Beck seconds. All in favor, say aye. Aye. Opposed? Now, we'll call back in our chair. Okay, Thomas, do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself? I'm sorry. I meant to do that earlier. Yeah. My name is Thomas Plotk. I recently moved to Denton about two years ago. Prior to that, I lived in the central Texas region in Bell County, assisted in various capacities in Bell County. Currently, I work with Thomson Reuters and Legal Cells. Welcome aboard. Okay. We'll move on to item C for individual consideration, which is management reports. That's you, Tony? Yes, sir. So, Mr. Chair, members of the board, the first item that we have for you is an update from solid waste on a comprehensive diversion ordinance. You received that in your backup. I see that Mr. Eugene McKinney's here. If anyone has any questions, he'd be happy to go through that for you. All right. I'm glad to see what we're working on now. Eugene will come on. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. My name is Eugene McKinney, I'm Deputy Director of Solid Waste and Recycling. How can I help this morning? Yes, sir. I have a question. I noticed on the timeline for this ordinance that we're going to get a work session on the 27th of March, which would be our last meeting before the City Council gets a chance to look at it. I would like to see this, if at all possible, even if in draft form, the meeting before that, so two weeks prior. You'd like to see it two weeks prior? Yes, sir. OK. I think we can accommodate that request. Just an overview. Where are we at? Where does the draft look like so that we're able to get a little sense of it before it actually arrives here for us to say to the board, yes, please do this. Absolutely. I believe we can accommodate that request. That was it. Thank you. Yes, sir. Mr. Beck. Thank you. Just curious. You mentioned that a percentage of the commercial enterprises were working with the city on their recyclables or they had third party individuals, but that left a lot of people who didn't have anybody. So I'm assuming that the recyclables went to just trash as landfills, is that correct? And that will be a fair assessment, and part of this process will identify those where they have nothing that's going to trash to kind of pull that out of the trash and find a source, i.e., a Pratt facility or a third party processing. So part of this process will help identify those who don't have anything and provide something. So I'm assuming the goal here will be to get those people on the straight and narrow path of recycling their stuff one way or another. Absolutely. Because when you talk about diversion, and we know the customers that we service and some of the third parties, but the question mark becomes the other products that's out there, where is it going? Yeah. We like to account for all of that because all of that fits into our diversion strategy. Okay. Good deal. Thank you. So I read the article in the paper, of course, the paper online or whatever, but it looks like you guys are headed towards a mandatory recycling program for a commercial company's businesses. You know, when you go into, you know, on the municipal side, when you start saying mandatory, we want to strongly encourage. Yeah. It's about the environment, right? It's about landfill space. There's so many things that's involved. But we believe that a lot of these items that are being disposed of has a natural recycling process, right? That's through some bio that we can put in our astride landfill, but the other products, there's a processing for the third life, first life, second life, third life. So we strongly, strongly encourage. Very good. I think it's a good idea. I appreciate it. I know it's going to be very difficult to enforce or move forward. Yeah. So, you know, even that, when we say enforce, from the customer perspective, right, compliance, they love compliance. How do we comply? You know, how do we help you all comply? You know, it's about the approach, right? You know, I say it often within the department, it's honey or vinegar, right? We want to use some honey here to draw those customers and get their buy-in from the community. Get some education going. Absolutely. You bet. Thank you. Anybody else? Kevin? I look forward to seeing the draft. I'm really curious. I think, you know, Peter Biltz and Tetra PACS already have programs. All they're going to do is give us their reports, you know? The small businesses, I think, will be the ones where they lack the infrastructure or the administrative capacity to go find a third party or perhaps they don't think they have room for a recycling dumpster or something like that. And those are the ones where I think we need to help them comply, right? Give them, you know, the reason our recycling rate for residential, like everybody gets a residential cart. Every house. Every cart. You have a blue cart. And not everybody has to use it, but just having it there creates an education, creates the opportunity for use, that kind of thing. I know a lot of small businesses on old buildings with limited dumpster space, you know, we might need some creative solutions on the -- to provide them the infrastructure they need. But I do look forward to the plan. I think this is a great step in the right direction. And we understand that infrastructure is going to be a challenge for some of the smaller businesses, right? So, you know, we're here. We're partners, right? We're community partners. We'll work with them. You know, container sizes, carts, whatever, whatever would -- we want to sit down and talk and kind of work these things out to come to that, you know, that agreeable solution. Thank you all. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right. So, going on to the next item that we included was feature agenda, a matrix, where you have a couple of items coming up for you, principally, just wanted to put on here the dates of budgetary related items. Certainly, Nick Benson is here if you guys have any questions regarding those. But hopefully, they'll kind of plan out for you over the next coming months what may be coming in the agenda. If you see a blank there, it doesn't mean that there's nothing on the agenda. There'll be plenty on the agenda. These are just items that we've tried to highlight for you. And then the final item is just the new business action items. As you can see on here, we've completed three of the items that were on there for some time. And then we did have, at the last meeting, Mr. Ryback did request some additional information. I think he's spoken with Becky and Steven, and they're working on that. And we'll be planning to bring that back to you in a work session or a memo. They'll have that information back to you, hopefully, for the next meeting. So with that, that concludes the manager report. Happy to answer any questions you have. If there's something new that you'd like to add, just let us know. Nothing yet, other than Mr. Ryback's request, which was a good request to get a little headstart on the Solid Waste program. So since I usually do this, who's going to entertain a motion? I'm going to be adjourned, all right. All those in favor? Aye. That was quick. Adjournment just requires a second, right? I can really-- I can adjourn it. You can actually adjourn as the chair. It's just more fun, this one. [AUDIO OUT]