Feb 26, 2019 City Council on 2019-02-26 12:00 PM

Welcome everybody to this meeting of the Dent City Council. On Tuesday, February the 26th, 2019, we do have a quorum, so I'll call this meeting to order. We are beginning at 1202 p.m. Our first item on the agenda is citizen comments on consent agenda items. Do we have any citizen comments? We do not have any citizen comments. Request for clarification on agenda items listed on the agenda. Yes, Councilmember Meltzer. I would just like to ask that we pull out items B, K, and M for brief presentations. I think the public would be interested in hearing. And M as in Mary? Yes. Okay. Okay. Anybody else? Housekeeping. Mr. City Manager, if I'm incorrect, I think we're pulling agenda item 5A and moving it to March the 5th, which was the motion to postpone to a date certain on March the 5th, is that correct? That is correct. Okay. And the other item I need to inform you about is we got contacted by Betty Meyer's family and they've requested that we move her proclamation back also one more meeting so the family can attend. They're apparently attending a TIBU function tonight. Okay. Okay. All right. Good. And Mr. City Attorney, on agenda item 5A, so we don't need to call it and do any of those things. It can just be pulled because the motion and second from the last meeting was to a date certain. Is that correct? That's correct. All right. Fantastic. Okay. Any other agenda? Last call? Yes. Councilmember Hutsbeth. Yes. Thank you. So I missed the first wave. Did someone pull B? Yes. Okay. Got it. Thank you. Okay then we will move to our agenda item 3, which are the work session reports. Agenda item 3A is receive a report, hold discussion, and provide staff direction on the Denton Development Code update and draft zoning map. Good afternoon, Mayor, Council. I'm absolutely delighted to be here again, and this is the next in a series of meetings that we're here to talk about the development code, development code update, and the draft zoning map. This being one of several that we'll have in the upcoming weeks. Each and every week we're going to come before you and attempt to spend two to three hours a time to walk through each of the items, each of the sub chapters, and certainly try to hit all of those items that have been discussed at great length or have concern in the community. While that's ongoing, we are continuing to meet with various stakeholder groups. We're hosting public open houses, and we're making presentations to community organizations, civic organizations, and homeowner organizations, so HOAs. The last presentation you received was from Clarion. It was at a high level discussing the major changes in the philosophy of how the development code is structured. Some of the items that are, what are significant changes from the development code that we have currently, and we're looking to just get a little greater detail in doing that. I think this will be somewhat informal, and we're going to try to work into the next several sessions and certainly try to be a little less formal in our presentation and try to make this a true work session where we can just collaborate to get where it is we're trying to go. I might mention that we continue to meet with the development review committee, so our three council members, three planning and zoning commission members each Friday. I think that from the input that we've received from the community and from the development review committee, everything is for the most part positive. We did have a couple of changes, and I do want to bring those to light. We had some concern with the draft zoning map, so as of last Friday, we made some slight modifications, and we wanted to make sure that we had a clear separation between the future land use map and the draft zoning map. So when we discussed last Friday with the development review committee, we were looking into our zoning classification of RD5X, which is a placeholder in our extraterritorial jurisdiction. So what we do is we have those areas that are not yet annexed. We have the placeholder assigned, and what we did is we made sure that those properties that have not yet had a zoning designation have a zoning designation of an RR, and in some instances, we had changed that zoning designation to maybe an R1 or an R2, looking at the environment around those parcels. So I just think it's important to note that with legal advice, as well as the direction of the committee, we made changes to the zoning map to reflect that. And I may have misspoke, and I may have said ETJ, the extraterritorial jurisdiction, and I did not mean to say that. It's those parcels that don't have a zoning designation as of yet. With that being said, I just want to make certain that we're aware that we had changes on the zoning map. They were not significant from the current zoning today, but they are a necessary change just to make sure we're consistent in not changing the zoning, whether we provide greater entitlements or lesser entitlements. It's just the least impactful land use that we have available to us in our zoning. Any questions on that? The other piece that we've heard an awful lot on is the landscape and conservation ordinance, and for many would be known as what everybody's concerned with is the tree code. And we had floated out a draft. We've had that draft out in the community for a couple of weeks. We fielded a lot of questions, concerns, comments, and we've made revisions based on what we've heard from, whether it's individuals, groups, or from within planning and zoning, all of our various stakeholder groups. So we're going to have a new draft out. We of course have an upcoming work session on the 5th. We're going to planning and zoning. But there are significant changes as far as when we talk about preservation, mitigation, and especially when we talk about single family residential and some other areas. So just keep in mind that we're hearing the comments, we're listening, and we certainly want to provide that feedback back to these bodies, meaning that of council and planning and zoning commission as we move forward. Just wanting to reinforce the fact that there is a draft ordinance and we wish to have that out there so we can get the feedback, and it was based on the comments we'd heard to date. We have further comments, and I think we've addressed most of those satisfactorily. >> Councilmember Armitage? >> Yes. Will that have a chance to go before the committee on the environment, before or after the most recent -- >> I don't believe we're going to go back to the committee on the environment. We've been to the committee on the environment several times, and we're going to try to work on that just to make sure that we've met the intent and the spirit of what it is. And if council is so inclined for us to go back to the committee on the environment, of course we can. It wasn't our intention. Our intention was to have a draft, take it to planning and zoning commission, then bring it to council. We'll bring it here and make sure that we get the feedback and direction that council so desires for us to do. >> Okay. Thank you. Obviously, the members of the committee on the environment are here on council, so if that becomes an issue, they can mention that at the time, et cetera. Thanks. >> Absolutely. And that's the beauty, kind of, of what we're doing with both the development code and the tree and landscape code, that we've got both bodies to work with. We just want to make sure that we don't get too focused. As we talk about the development review committee, the purpose in having these work sessions on the development code is that we've been working for the last -- going on close to a year with the development review committee, which is just a subcommittee of council, and council doesn't necessarily have the depth or the breadth. And we really don't want to take you into the granular detail that we went -- we got very specific with the development review committee, but we certainly want to provide more detail to you than what you would receive with Clarion. So the purpose in these work sessions for the next coming week, similar to that on the landscape and conservation code, is to make sure that you have a level of comfort and understanding and that we've truly listened to what our community and what our community needs are. I think, you know, we're very confident that we've listened and we've heard and we've garnered support for the most part on most everything that we're doing. I think the tree component has been ongoing for a number of years and still continues to be a little bit problematic, but I think we've got some good answers for that. The development code, we have the support of the community and the variety of stakeholder groups that make Denton as unique as it is, and I think we're going to be able to explain some of that here today. So with that, I want to introduce Mr. Ron Mangida. And like I say, this will be somewhat informal. I think that we're going to try to best answer your questions how we can, and Ron will be the first on that. >> Thank you, Scott, Mayor, members of council, members of staff. A couple slides here, just want to bring to your attention and remind those that are on council and also the viewing public. The reason why we're doing a Denton code update is really with the Denton plan 2030. With the Denton plan 2030, it is our guide into how we want to see the city develop or be in the next 15 to 20 years. It is really the actions, the policies, and the strategies that are within the Denton plan 2030 that really are in this process of the Denton code update. Within the plan itself is a community vision, which states again how the citizens want to see the city develop. In there, there are also four major things or major documents that I want to reference. And again, that's the future language map that we often refer to as the preferred growth concept that is often referred to as well. And again, the goals, policies, and actions are throughout the plan itself. Those goals, I've picked four elements of the ten elements of the plan. And how are these goals related, again, to the Denton code update? With regards to land use, it's really how we manage growth. We want to grow compactly, with purpose, grow with our resources, grow with character, as well, and also grow with balance. Community character is an important part of how we want to design our cities. So in the development code itself, there are design standards related to architecture, to landscaping, to even parking, streetscape. Those are all covered in the Denton code update, and it's really guided by these goals, again, from the plan. Mobility, there are actions. There I talk about connectivity, I talk about sidewalks, mobility with regards to mobility plan, but also multimodal, providing opportunities for pedestrians, bicyclists, as well as the motoring community. With housing, there are goals in there that talk about providing an array and diverse types of housing. When it comes to housing that is affordable to just another type of housing, such as duplexes, town homes, those are the things that we want to see in the city, as well. We also are introducing another housing type in the form of a tiny home development. Those are in the Denton code update proposed. So again, going back to the Denton plan 2030, we want to make sure that we follow the vision and the goals of the plan. Yes, Councilmember Baum. Okay, so if you can move back a slide. So I have a question about the possibility of adding two things either to these goals in writing or just to the extent to which these goals are included in the stated goals here. And that is as far as mobility goes, obviously we need to be compliant with ADA because that's the law, but I was wondering if you would consider kind of putting something in there. Again, maybe that's too cluttered and I know that nothing in there prohibits, right, detonates with disabilities and being compliant, going above and beyond compliant. And same for -- and I'll just throw this out there because it's a similar issue for housing and neighborhood goals, you know, something about, you know, kind of compliance with fair housing, with the Fair Housing Act and understanding that we're -- something like that to kind of put on paper that we understand and that these issues are important to us and not just following it because it's the law. And Councilmember Armitage, I apologize, I went and summarized that fairly quickly, but the plan itself does have elements of ADA and providing those housing that you referred to. So it's all covered under the DEM Plan 2030. Awesome. And no need to apologize. You can only get so much on these slides. Right. So here we are. We're -- obviously, this is the first series of work session. I know we had one with Claren last -- a couple weeks ago, but today we really want to focus on the -- a little more detailed. So we're going to be talking about what's in the plan and how, again, we want to make sure it's consistent with the DEM Plan 2030. Local quality development is one of the major purpose, I believe, in making sure our code is updated, again, with the plan itself. We already touched on this. Scott mentioned it earlier. We're not going to be discussing specifically the landscape and conservation ordinance, the downtown design standards, or the collegiate housing. Those are going to be covered under a separate discussion, and we'll be coming forward to the -- to the zoning -- I'm sorry, to the Planning Zoning Commission, and ultimately to city council at a later time. What we will be considering will be the chapters that you see here in that are subchapter one, which is your general provisions, as well as chapter -- subchapter two, which is administration and procedures, and actually Richard is going to be presenting those two subchapters. I will follow Richard with subchapter three and introduce the zoning districts, the proposed new line of zoning districts, and we'll get a little bit more into details to what each zoning purpose is, zoning district purpose, and then get into the dimensional standards so that you all understand what those zoning districts are. On the far left here is just the list of the topics that we'll be discussing, but we'll just go ahead and get into it, and I'm going to turn this over back to Richard. >> Hi, I'm not Richard, but I'm here to administer the pop quiz, so everybody had received a homework assignment, and I trust that you read your prescribed lesson. If not, next week we're going to get into it a little more intensely. We're really trying to ease into this, so just make certain that you review the material, have a good idea. We want this to be informative, and we certainly want to make sure that we're able to answer the questions that you have, and we want to do that as soon as we possibly can rather than not getting very late in the game on this. The pop quiz I'll hold off until next week, and we'll pass that one out and make sure that everybody's got their reading assignments done. Thank you. >> Good afternoon. So, as Scott indicated, we're going to sort of ease into this, so I'll have the first two chapters, or subchapters, I should say, subchapter one, general provisions. There's seven sections, as you see, within the table of contents. Most of these are very standard, which you'll see in land development codes or zoning codes throughout the state of Texas, or throughout the United States for that matter. It really sets up just the title, effective date, the authority, appropriate jurisdiction, nonconformities, enforcement provisions, and then, given that this is a new code, those transition from prior regulations, excuse me. I wanted to touch on three significant changes that are contained within subchapter one. The first is making sure that it's explicit that any existing single-family or duplex property or townhome, for that matter, would not be made nonconforming by these regulations. And so that would have to do with the use, any site development, garage, setback, patio, lot coverage, any of that that currently exists today, once this code is adopted, it would not make any single-family property, legal single-family property, nonconforming. One of the others, one of the other items I wanted to touch on is- Yeah, I mean, I appreciate you reading my brow. Yeah, I don't completely understand what that means. I mean, it might be nonconforming in the sense that it wouldn't conform to what's prescribed. So when you say it wouldn't be made nonconforming, do you mean just that it wouldn't be subject to being made to conform? Correct. And it wouldn't be subject to the nonconformity provisions. So if it were greater than 50% damaged, they would still be able to rebuild what exists there today. Okay. So it's like grandfathered or something like that? To an extent, but it's just considered a legal use. I got you. Thanks. On the pending application approved projects, this is what I wanted to point on this one is what we're really tying it to. So if there's any existing preliminary plat application that's deemed complete or building permit that's deemed complete, I should say preliminary plat or final plat, it's deemed- you have a complete application submitted, it's in the process of review, then you would fall under the current code that's there today. Anything new that's submitted after would fall under the provisions of the new DDC. Although we did include within this sub-chapter the ability for those sort of in transition, if you will, where they're given the option where say you have submitted for a preliminary plat under the old, but for whatever reason you want to, you like the new provisions of the code for a variety of reasons. There's the ability then to during that transition period, we're looking at I think an effective date of from adoption 180 days, so there's sort of this six-month sort of trial period, if you will. And so if someone wanted to go under the new code, they can do so in writing, and then they would be able- you can't sort of bridge the two, it's either one or the other. So you would either go under the old, or if you requested in writing to go under the new provisions, then you would fall under that. Quick question. Some of the pending applications approve projects that would be allowed to move forward under the current code, and if those projects get completed after the adoption of the new code, what keeps some of those from automatically becoming non-conforming? And you don't have to answer that question right away, but I think it would be helpful if we look at that question and inform the people who might fall under that category. If number one, it does create a non-conforming because they're building it under the old code. If it's changed, there may be some things that changed that would impact them, and just the implications of that. You don't have to answer that now, but that might be something to look at. And it might be more- that might more- if it's a single-family subdivision, I think we've got that taken care of with that exemption. I'm thinking more commercial. Yeah. If there's an SUP, that would be sort of covered under that approved ordinance, but yeah, for commercial numbers- Yeah, just take a look at it, just to see if there's anything that might fall into that, and if not, that'd be good. Oh, good point, thank you. And so really, that's it for subchapter one, unless there are any other questions. Yeah, I hope you don't mind, you know, getting sort of basics, but I imagine if I don't understand some of these things, others might not as well. On page eight, it talks about amortizing nonconformities, and I just don't understand the use of the word in that context, but amortizing- I understand amortizing a debt, but is that for what purpose, for valuation for property taxes, or- it's page eight of the- 1.5.8, amortization of nonconforming uses or structures. A lot of times, what you'll see a lot of municipalities will do is they'll set up an amortization, you see it a lot of times with signs, when there's a new sign code adopted, and so they'll amortize, they'll give a certain amount of time before you need to comply. And so while that's put in here, it wasn't specific to any one thing, it would just be up to counsel to decide if there was something that wanted to be amortized. So amortizing means creating an extended time. Before you would need to- Before you have to take action. Before you need to come into compliance. Okay. That's very helpful. Thank you. Subchapter two starts to dive a little bit deeper, sort of nine components to this subchapter. I won't go through all of them, but this is really where kind of the meat and potatoes, if you will, of who the review boards are, what they're tasked for reviewing, and what those procedures are. There's also some new provisions within this subchapter that are sort of significant changes from where we are today. One is we've created a summary table for the review procedures, which is right at the front of the chapter, and so depending on which procedure you're following, it's sort of all laid out there, step by step by step, who's responsible for doing what review and who that appeal would go to. Yes. Now, on that table, I think I found a note somewhere that said that some of these situations would now be left to the director that presently would have to go to P&Z or counsel. Am I right on that? I'm just wondering if that's right, would you mind pointing out which are the situations where you're proposing that the matter would not go to P&Z or counsel? Where it would not go to P&Z or? Yeah. I think the only change would be the minor modifications where we've eliminated the ADP provisions, and so within minor modifications, there is some ability of staff to approve some minor adjustments of 10% plus or minus on certain. I think it's on lot size, lot area, or lot coverage, setbacks, I thought there was one other. Administratively approved plat with the other way, send it to P&Z. Right. Yeah. An administrative approved plat, well, that's even in local government code. If it's an administrative approved plat, staff cannot deny an administrative approved plat, and so if for whatever reason we were to deny it, we could not do that, we would have to kick that to Planning and Zoning Commission to do that. Thanks. Do you have a question, Council Member Riggs? Yeah. Just a comment, wasn't there proposed changes for the way the historical, that process was proposed to be changed, but I don't know that it made it in here, but it's something we talked about. Correct. Correct. One of the provisions now within the, in order to landmark a property, and where this really becomes sort of a concern or an issue, is a single family house that's designated as a landmark. While it doesn't necessarily change any use provisions, it still follows the, in order to have that designation, it follows the rezoning procedure. So, which also kicks in noticing and advertising. And so, we have one that's coming up, and while we don't charge an application fee, there is a fee to the homeowner, I think the last one, I think it was around $500 or $600 for that homeowner to have that designated on their property. And so, there's been some that have raised a concern with having to pay for the mailing and for posting the large sign on their property, given that it was a designation of a single family home. And so, that's what we're going through now, whether or not it actually has to be a, has to follow those zoning provisions for single families, since it's not really a change in zoning, but again, we just need to, we need to vet it out a little bit more. Okay. Couple others I just want to highlight on. We included a section on common review procedures, which really provides just sort of the step-by-step process of sort of generally what's involved and what are the steps for going through an approval. And two main components of that are pre-application conferences and, of course, the citizen participation. If you recall, we brought that forward a few months back, and so that now is incorporated into this section with a slight change. There were some concerns with vesting if we were going to require a citizen participation meeting. And so, again, while they're not required in this, part of this code, it is strongly recommended that those be held. I can tell you after we initially brought that forward to council a few months back, I would say nine out of ten projects have held their meetings, neighborhood meetings. Ones that may not have, it might have just been an isolated area where they didn't really have any neighbors around, but for the most part they have been, they have been falling through with that. Pre-application conferences, this is something where we've been working on. Council Member, yeah, I'm approached and had a question. Segways into it well, because on page 26, the effect of the pre-application process, in paragraph one, it talks about pre-application conference shall not be binding on the city. And in paragraph two, it says that everything expires from the pre-application conference after 45 days. If there's nothing binding, what is there to have expire? I think that was almost a belt, belts and suspenders, just to make it clear that because it was a pre-application, if you were to submit something different when it comes in, it could change some of the input that was given. But whatever process was spelled out, there was an expiration that way it wouldn't trigger the vesting, but we could, we could look to maybe clarify some of that, that language. Okay. Yes, go ahead. If I may. Sure. Moving on into citizen participation, when that came before the review committee, I think we had kind of two sections that were in there and we just said, hey, send it back to Clarion, let them clean it up, and then we'll take a look at it. So this really hasn't been strongly reviewed by us yet, and there seems to be some confusion to me as to whether it's encouraged prior meeting, and then when you get down on page 27, it talks about a required meeting, required meetings, and the second one says it may not need to occur. So I guess we really need to come up with, in my mind, a policy that is this a strongly encouraged or this is truly required? Because the biggest thing to me that's missing on the required is location. We don't say it even has to be within the city of Denton, so you could have, you know, have your meeting down in Addison at Humberdanks and say, well, I had my, I had my neighborhood meeting, so we probably want to have a distance requirement or at least say within the city limits. Yes, Councilmember Meltzer. Want to respond to that? I was just going to state that absolutely, I think that makes sense, and we captured those changes. They weren't going to be required, so the citizen participation piece would not be a required component, and we're still going through the vetting process of the pre-application, but we're leaning towards the pre-application conference being a required component within the review. So try to get everybody on the front side of the model to talk about what they're looking to do, give them the information, and then explain to them that we're looking for traffic analysis. We may want some sort of a fiscal impact and the like. We had a work session, I'm not going to remember the exact captioning of it, but it was related to this whole issue of public participation and the meetings, and we kind of laid out provisionally how we'd like that to go, but said let's have it be kind of a trial thing for now since we'd be at this point now, we'd incorporate it then. Just two things I didn't see from that incorporated here, page 27B, affected parties, we talked about defining affected parties to include when there's a sort of identified whole neighborhood with a requirement to notify the known neighborhood leader or contact person. Anyone else remember that we had that conversation? So that seems like a place to catch that. And then in item four, the citizen participation report, we batted around who writes the report, and as I recall, we agreed that the city planning representative would write the report. So item four seems like a place to capture that. Yeah, I know one reason that we left that while we didn't have that. We do unfortunately have times where we have multiple meetings, and so there's times where a staff member cannot attend, but the majority of it, staff. Maybe express it as a if possible kind of thing, but as a preference. Councilmember Arbiter. Yeah, I think the key is, and of course that makes sense, we have a finite number of staff members and time. The key is, for me anyway, going back to our last discussion, is that I would like to see that it's not the developer that writes that summary of the report as far as establishing the effect being to increase communication and establish trust. So if we could have some sort of backup plan B for if a staff person can't, then the neighborhood leader, community representative, something like that. We could work up some language. Go ahead, Councilmember. Yeah. Help me understand your notes on the neighborhood leader component, because that's very interesting to me. I mean, we have, I mean, that varies block by block. And so how do you, how are you envisioning capturing that? I think if there was a HOA, we can obviously reach out to the HOA. I know some of the communities we have, they have individual homeowners, there's a master association. So I think it's just identifying who those individuals are. If there's particular groups that have a neighborhood association, I think it would be reaching out to those individuals that are, whether they're registered or we just have their contact through something or other. I wouldn't want it to not then to take the place of not mailing, you know, or contacting the residents within that area. But I think if we have somebody on sort of an on file representing that area, then we can just incorporate that into that list. Yes, go ahead. And so help me process their, that function would be to what? They're welcome to attend the meeting and learn what's going on and provide any input or concerns that they may have. But I wouldn't, unless there was a formal action taken by the, by an organization, there, to me, they would represent that was their opinion from that individual unless there was some formal action or something taken on behalf of an HOA or a landowner's association. That would be my question as a body if that needs to be there. I just think if we're trying to streamline things to add something that is non quote unquote binding and, and I just, my experience with neighborhood groups is not everyone is excited about that individual at that time and if we're gonna, if we're, if we're touching everyone anyway, I think that's the greatest common denominator is contact the neighborhood. It's that 500 foot radius. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. I'll listen, but that's my concern is that I don't, I don't know that it adds value and I think it adds to something that we're trying to make lean. Okay. Council member Briggs, do you have a comment? I'm just trying to understand, understand that. What he just said. What who just said? Yeah. Council member Hesbeth. Well, for me, if we're talking about neighborhood meetings and, and developers and there have been some situations in the past where these meetings are held and they say things to make the neighborhood feel calm and comfortable and then they don't continue down that path with the promises that they made and so it's then they don't show up and then that what they said happens doesn't happen. So are we addressing those situations in, in this code or when we are requesting that they have neighborhood meetings, are any of those promises going to be captured and implemented? Yeah. So as we, one in particular, they ended up ultimately withdrew their application. But it really comes into play with respect to SUVPs where there are some meetings and, and things get discussed whether it's a fence or an additional buffer and, and they start to address concerns. That's when we capture that and as we review that, that the site plan that goes with it, we'll try to make sure that those, those are always incorporated within, within those conditions, either within the condition or already within the changes to the plan. Okay. I think where it gets difficult is, is on a, on a straight rezoning application where, it might get into really detail on a project and it's kind of hard at that point to, to narrow it down, but, but with the SUVPs, absolutely. Okay. Thank you. So correct me if I'm wrong, it seems like we're talking about two different things. One is this is an informal meeting sort of in the pre-development process to give everybody an opportunity to sort of have a first look. And so I may be incorrect, but I think what Councilmember Briggs was referring to that in our code, there are neighbor, there's going to be neighborhood meetings required when they get into the official process of zoning and SUVPs. Is that correct or am I? It's still within this. We looked at actually having, having sort of two meeting, one having one right up front. Right. So, you know, a lot of times what had happened in the past is we would have the neighborhood meeting, you know, two weeks before you're ready to go to a public hearing. Everything's been reviewed and then all of a sudden there's a lot of changes that need to be made. Sure. And then we kind of start back. So the intent is like a lot of, let's just address it head on right at the front. Make sure the neighborhood's aware of what's going on. Work through the issues and then when we get ready to go to public hearing, take that back to show how those, how if any of those concerns were addressed. Okay. And that's my point is if the meetings themselves and as much as I hate to say it, any promises made those aren't necessarily binding until it gets to the governmental organizations like planning and zoning where those conditions can then be placed upon it as part of a motion or something that becomes officially binding. So in these reports that are supposed to be drafted, it's my understanding these reports are simply to memorialize sort of what happened, what was stated, if there were things that were promised or stated that they would take a look at. So I think it's important, I mean, staff drafts them, developer drafts them, it really doesn't matter who drafts the initial one, there's still going to need to be a collaboration to make sure, comparing of notes, if you will, to ensure that there's not some glaring disagreement about what happened because the reports are supposed to be as accurate as possible, not reflecting any particular sentiment on the development, but just what occurred at the meeting. Am I correct on that? Correct. It's supposed to be, you know, it's not going to be a detailed mix, but it's going to touch the high points of what was discussed, what were some of the neighborhood's concerns, or what they liked about the project. Okay. All right. Council Member Armitage and then Council Member, I tell you what, Mayor Pro Tem was in line first. Let me call him first, Mayor Pro Tem. We have the developers, when they file, they put up a deposit towards the costs that may be incurred by the city, is that correct, as part of their fees? No, because I think that had to do maybe with the signs, because we used to post signs, and so now I think that's switched, we're there now, responsible for paying the signs. The only requirement would be, in addition to the application, would be the mailed notices. I think previously we used to take a deposit, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, and that's still in here. I remember reading it somewhere in here, so that kind of takes that out of where I was heading with this is, you know, I think I would prefer that staff, so we've got consistency of the reporting, be the one that writes the report, and if it's possible and it may need some other legal aspects to get to this, that the time of that staffer being at that meeting would be charged to the developer to write up that report, so I don't know if that would be something that we need to go into our fees schedule or something to that extent, but I think that's probably the better way to have that consistency, not have any bias on it and moving forward from there. Councilmember Baumstreet. Yes, so I was trying to remember, but didn't have the time to go back and dig into it without missing too much of the conversation that was going on. Is there a, you know, some sort of guarantee in writing that these meetings will be recorded, either, you know, audio or video, the developer meetings now? We don't have any requirement. Yeah, that's, I couldn't remember anything stating that, and I think that would be a good idea. I know videotaping can be costly and complicated, I mean, that would be ideal, you know, I think to have all our meetings videotaped, but I know that there's a cost to that, but for these neighborhood meetings, I think it would be nice to have it recorded in case there's some dispute, say, whoever writes up the review, you know, if somebody says, oh, that, you know, a developer, member of the public, I didn't say that, that wasn't said, you know, then at least you have this to go back to. And that may be good to do as a policy, I don't know that we want to start writing all of this detail into the code, we can put it into an administrative manual. I think, really, for me, maybe the policy discussion is whether we want to have the neighborhood meetings and then maybe the level of detail we can get into a little further if it's going to be required of every project for a city employee, so to have staff at every one of these meetings, we have to think in terms of that we're attending city council meetings for whatever hours, we have planning and zoning commission meetings, historic preservation, there's just a lot of evenings that we ask city staff to attend. So now when we talk about participating in each one of these meetings, whether we want to augment the workforce or how we want to just consider that and then the degree of detail of what we're asking staff to do, just something else that we would like to have consideration under. >> All right. Okay. Yes, Councilmember Huss. >> Mayor, I have a form question. So these suggestions, how do you best suggest getting the body to make a decision or see if there's a consensus for it? >> Sure. >> Is it going to come back to say here's items we discussed, here's what we proposed, and then make a decision at the end of this presentation? I want to understand that component better because I think at some point we're getting punitive for someone having an early meeting. It's almost like, hey, this first meeting has to be concrete and resolute, and if you change your mind or enhance it to the good of the neighborhood, then that's somehow a negative thing. I think we need to maintain that fluidity to allow them to better the project for them to respond. If you say you're locked in, then you can't react to the feedback you get because then all of a sudden you change the project and that can be perceived as negative, and so I don't want to paint that picture. I want to have a free-flowing conversation early so that when we get to planning and zoning, those things can be implemented and it makes for a smoother process when it is memorialized. There's less work at the dais and more work done in advance. That's a good question, and that is because if we're going to need to take a consensus on every one of these as they're coming forward, then we need to start doing that now. So how do you propose it would be the most efficient way to handle using this as an example? We've got some that want recordings, some that want a staff member at every meeting, and these are logistical issues that really fall outside the purview of the council as far as on a day-to-day sort of implementation basis. Well, if there's a subject matter area such as this where the council wants to discuss it again and make sure that expectations are clarified, we can certainly bring back that one item in a next workshop, and staff gives us the ability to do some analysis for you so you can consider the pros and cons of an issue like that. Right now, I think generally as long as we know what types of meetings we want to have these pre-PNZ meetings at, that's important. We can vet it out a little bit more, but right now we don't have the staffing for the video recording or the ability to make these kind of commitments right now down the road. We can certainly schedule those out. It's something that gets even more complicated with the city attorney's office constantly reminding us of when the shot clock is on in terms of the Texas statutes and their rights. So I think it's something that we can bring it back to you, have four or five decision points on it and integrate it in, and that's probably the cleanest way to do this so we're not jumping around. And we'll just basically exactly say issue number one, are you there? Issue number two, what do you think? And we can be right at the next meeting for that. And I would say that the need for the neighborhood meetings could also be, we could possibly create some type of a schematic like what we have for buffer zones. If you're putting industrial next to multifamily, then you need this much. If you're putting next to single family, it's this much, but if you're putting NR3 and next to NR3, there's probably not going to be that much controversy. So the need becomes less. It's a good point. I think we need to remember why these meetings were held. We spent time in Southlake and looking at this, the point was really to try to get as many of the controversial issues off the table as possible up front. It's not a contract. People can change their mind. Interpretations are always very, there will be people that didn't participate in the first meeting that show up and with different issues. So it's just this continued attempt to build a record towards a good faith development in terms of holding the developers through on their promises down the road from a regulatory perspective. That really is staff's job. So I think we just need to be conscious of what we're asking for and why. And there's only so much these neighborhood meetings do is it starts that iterative process. We can memorialize conversations, how the developer has adjusted, and there is still going to be on highly controversial developments, there's still going to be additional input that's in. So there's nothing that a pre-meeting is going to do to resolve a lot of these issues. That process, it sends a very strong message up front that the citizen input matters. And we can sort of track how they're responding to citizen input for you and maybe give you a better record at P&Z. But I think any expectations above and beyond that just aren't realistic because people are going to join the conversation when they decide to join the conversation. And I will just add to that that it also helps developers not feel blindsided by the time they get to the meeting. Again, there can always be something new that comes up at a meeting. But it's really, and that's what I love about this process, it's really the best for all the stakeholders involved to get this on the table early. And I would also encourage, you know, we as council members can, of course, we have scheduling difficulties too, you know, but we can come and bear witness as well when staff can't because staff can't be everywhere. So that's another component, you know, to consider the role of council in all this. And I might piggyback on, I think, a little bit of all of that. I think that we've become more proactive in asking the development community to get out and do neighborhood meetings. And I think that council has been more active in participating. I think this has helped the process. And I want to be cautious and careful that we're trying to develop a more flexible code and then we start getting into maybe making it very rigid where I think if we go on the premise that we've worked very hard to get a good document together, we have an opportunity to try this, you know, and we haven't gotten to the closure of this yet, but if I were to take some of the closing lines, when we get done with these work sessions, I really would like to have a document that if, for example, we were looking to adopt it today, that it have a six-month window for people to have an opportunity to prepare for it. But I'd also like to come back in a year with how is it functioning? How does this work? And our opportunity really to make changes to the document to say, okay, so this notification piece that we crafted today that we didn't change today, that we said how did that work? Is it making the development community better? Are we better at P&Z? Are we better at council? Because staff's able to say, hey, we heard from the community they don't like it. Well, sometimes they may not like it and there's really not much we can do about it. And I want to make sure that we're just cognizant of the work that we've done today. We're trying to make a flexible document that it's improving responsible development in Denton. I think we're there. And as long as we don't get too detailed, I think it'll be beneficial. But again, to be able to come back to council in a year to say, what have we done and how is it working? >> Councilmember Armitage? >> Yeah, so just something to follow up on that. And thank you. I agree. And this is not something that would be written into the code. But I agree it's a good idea to come back after a year. One thing that might be a good idea to consider would be when these neighborhood meetings occurred to have some sort of a comment card like you did at those comment cards at the zoning meeting last night. That would address not this particular development, but just kind of give us some comments on this process. Did you feel heard? Was it at a good time? Those kind of questions so that when we come back in a year, a long time has passed since individual meetings. In that way, we're getting, not everybody's going to fill out a card, but you'll get them, be able to then put them in a box somewhere, then look at them after a year, and that will be part of that annual input process. >> Great. Thank you. >> Let's move on from this. >> Just wanted to touch on two more items. One is the plan development. While this will be a new zoning category, there is also a process that's associated or procedure associated with the enactment of a plan development on the property. This was something that previously was in the code, taken out and replaced with MPCs. We're kind of rolling that back and going back to plan developments. As part of DCRC, we had a pretty, I guess, multiple conversations on should there be a minimum size project or development size for a PD, initially, in terms you usually think of a PD as these large plan unit developments or PUDs, major subdivisions, but as we talked about it and really looking at challenges associated with infill and redevelopment, we didn't want to limit it to just green-fill development where you probably are more likely to meet the standard where it becomes much more difficult is trying to redevelop within the built environment. For that reason, what's being proposed is that there be no minimum development project size or area or lot size for a PD. Again, this follows the rezoning procedure. It gets vetted. There's meetings. It goes through P&Z and it's ultimately up to City Council for approval. Lastly, what I wanted to touch on is under the flexibility and relief procedures is that minor modification and I talked about it briefly as part of one of the questions Councilmember Meltzer had, but one thing I wanted to note, which is a little bit different than what's in the current code today, under the current code, there's the ability to do a buffer modification that staff can approve. It's never certain when this buffer modification can come into play. We've always struggled with it because, really, when Council approves that SUP or whatever is being approved, that modification should be incorporated into that document, into that approval. That's what's being proposed here. If there's a minor modification needed that's associated with an SUP, in addition to that SUP, you will also be approving or making a decision on that minor modification. So if there's a public hearing that's associated with that project, it just kicks it up to that level. So you don't have these, I'm going to bring this forward, get my SUP, and then go back to staff and get a change. We want to avoid that and just make sure everything's out in the open. With that, I'll have Ron come up for, unless there's questions. Yes, Councilmember Meltzer? Just while we're still on SUP Chapter 2, this is just another item I wanted to bring up. On Page 23, 2.3.11, it talks about the Development Advisory Committee and that this is a modification from what's presently the Development Review Committee, and I just could be totally wrong. I just want to share an observation that there's a lot that I think, for efficiency's sake, there's this authority on the director throughout this, which I get that it makes for faster decisions. But when we read this, we think of nice Scott McDonald. We don't know who it will be down the road, and I just wonder if there's maybe an escalation or some situations where there's a check and a balance or there is a Development Review Committee. I just put an awful lot of power in one individual. Like I said, could be totally wrong, but it's just something that I observe. It's like we're really kind of taking away checks and balances in the correct direction of efficiency, but are there cases where there ought to be a review? That's a question. And it is. This does not bypass any departmental review. They're still required to do that. I think there's been this sort of falsehood, I guess you could say, with respect to what the Development Review Committee is and how it functions. It's not a body that sits around and everybody votes on whether or not they approve it. It's essentially part of that review process, so whether it's water, wastewater, transportation, all of the various departments have their review. So you can't really approve the project until all those reviewers have acted or approved that item. And there are approval criteria associated with that. And I guess just one other piece to that, and just to try to keep in mind that ultimately there are layers. So within any of the departments, but in this department in particular, that you're talking about planning director and then development services and then ultimately have the executive staff of city manager's office. So there are some checks and balances that do exist. Legal typically is monitoring most all of the actions that occur as well. Oh, Councilmember Montero. So anyway, I appreciate that question from Councilmember Melter. I appreciate the answer and I'd be curious to know, not now, but as a future, as a staff report request, are there any measures that other cities put in place to have some sort of civilian oversight or involvement at that level of the process? I'm genuinely wondering, are there other cities that do that and how does it work? Do they have, I don't know, a member of planning and zoning be a non-participatory witness, something like that. So I'd just be curious to see what, if anything, other cities do to address that question. Arguably planning and zone, but when it gets to planning and zoning, that is a civilians committee. That's when the civilian checks and balances happen, but of course, not all decisions end up coming to planning and zoning. And I might just add that kind of part of this process was looking at other municipalities and how they do business, hiring a consultant to look at best practices and what we should be doing. And I think first and foremost, or most important in that is, is our legal department has contracted with an expert in municipal law when it relates to land development and through that process, that's what they were guiding where it is we should and shouldn't be. So it was multifaceted as we reviewed where these criteria and approvals should lie and how that works. So just, it was part of the process to look at our concurrent code and look at what best practices is to make sure we're consistent with state law, if that helps. A number of our, and I'm going to use the SEPs as an example, now have expiration dates involved with them. That's, if I understand it correctly, that's only if the use hasn't started or construction is not substantially complete that that expiration date hits, that it's not, and I think of in particular an SEP that was asked for a while back from a business that had been a drive-through prior to the requirement of SEP, and had they had that SEP, they could have just rebuilt as they were, but so if someone gets an SEP for a drive-through, they build it and they need to rebuild in 10 years, they don't have to come back and get another SEP, is that correct? Correct. It would be if they got that approval for the drive-through and then sat on it for two years, that's when that expiration would kick in. Okay, thank you. One other item I wanted to touch on before I get into the special exception and subdivision variance, this is something that is probably desperately needed in how we handle change of uses and the way we operate with certificates of use currently. Currently we treat them really as a certificate of zoning compliance, and so what we've done within the code is create just that. And I can let Scott sort of explain the reason behind a certificate of occupancy from a building code perspective, but for compliance with the land development regulations, while that's just a small component of a certificate of occupancy, it's something that's sort of a different animal than what really a certificate of zoning compliance is. And maybe there are a couple other pieces that go along with that. I think Denton's municipal code today, we have a certificate of occupancy that we issue with a new business, and we have a certificate of occupancy that we issue with a new building. And sometimes that gets convoluted, so what we've done is we've made certain that if someone chooses to occupy land that there is no structure on, we can't issue a certificate of occupancy to a non-building. So we have a certificate of zoning compliance, so someone may need that for banking or they may be able to use that to utilize the land, so it would comply with the land use. Number two, then we would, if they constructed a building based on the land use, then we would issue a certificate of occupancy to safely occupy the building, which is very different than that of perhaps a business license for the type of business within the building. So if I were to give you an example of we have an existing building that a chiropractor is operating out of today, and the chiropractor built the building, he obtained a certificate of occupancy, and we call that AB use, or business use. Well tomorrow a bank decides to move into that. That bank goes in, we issue a new certificate of occupancy, which really isn't accurate, and it would change on the version of the code that it's under. Really it's not a certificate of occupancy that should be changing, it's the business license. So we've just tried to set this up so that we have three different and distinct pieces. One which is the zoning compliance, the zoning verification, so the zoning on that property, whether there's a building or not, the building itself, so can you occupy that building or structure for its intended use, and then the third piece would be a business license for the business that's operating in there. It's not any different, it's not creating any extra layers to what we're doing today, it just provides a more flexible set of tools for our business owners and occupants of buildings today. So it doesn't create another process. So question, let's use your example. Building has a chiropractor in it, that's the use, ABC chiropractor. ABC chiropractor decides that they don't want to be in the chiropractic business anymore, so they sell their business to XYZ chiropractor, and I've heard some examples of where this happens that somehow it triggers a totally new CO inspection of the building criteria and all those kinds of things when the use has not changed. So there's an administrative CO, and then there's other types of CO. So you don't have to answer it now, but I think it would be good in maybe an informal staff report to really lay out those differences as per the new code when someone is able to get an administrative CO, which just means they come fill out the paperwork, change utilities, and they're able to go. Because it's virtually the same use, and they're not changing anything, and just when all those different things get triggered. I think it would be helpful to have, not just for us, quite frankly, but even somewhere maybe on the website that would really delineate those and sort of frequently ask questions, because that's the questions I get the most frequent when it comes to COs. But we don't have to go into that detail today, but it'd be helpful to have some additional information on that. >> Absolutely can do that. The only piece I want to refer back to the development code is what we have in the code today and that's the purpose in updating the code is to be more contemporary or more current. The way that we do that, we've not made that change yet because we're waiting on things to happen. So we'll provide an informal staff report to really illustrate what it is the model is that we'd like going forward. It wouldn't be included in the development code. So the development code is really adding the letter of zoning compliance or certificate. So you could use a vacant piece of ground if it were able to be used in such a way and then truly clearly delineating a certificate of occupancy and the purpose in a certificate of occupancy. And then the third part is the other, but we'll get that to you. >> Okay. I appreciate that. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Councilmember Hussbett and then Councilmember Meltzer. >> Hey, Scott. I have a question. So in your example, what I envision is the community market? >> Yes. >> Okay. Does that kind of touch? >> Precisely. >> Perfect. I like that a lot. >> Precisely. >> Thank you. >> Councilmember Meltzer. >> Yes. Just to go through 107 pages. I thought you really want us to go through 107 pages. >> We do. >> We do. >> Line by line. I've been trying to cherry pick just a couple more items on subchapter two that are, you know, I think worth at least asking about. On page 69, 5B, which is about changing the comprehensive plan, you know, there's a lot of places in the code where it specifies simple majority vote or three quarters for an exception where you've got to maybe overcome PNZ disapproval or something like that. The comprehensive plan is a long-term document and I think should really reflect a very broad consensus. So I think that, you know, to approve a new comprehensive plan, my opinion is simple majority vote isn't a broad enough consensus. So I would just suggest a three quarter vote on that one and, you know, to Councilmember Huntsman's point, at some point we have to say whether we agree with these suggestions or not. But I would tee that one up. And just last one and then I'll kind of stop slowing you down, on page 71, which is, let's see, we're talking about rezoning and there's a question in the footnote about should city initiated applications, this is footnote 211, should city initiated applications be exempt from the preapplication activities, preapplication conference, neighborhood meeting? My answer to that would be absolutely not. We want to have that input, so I'll sort of sit quiet for a while. Those are two of my notes. >> Councilmember Armitage. >> Yeah, and thank you for mentioning that. I agree on that point. I think that does a lot to establish trust for the public. I know a recent PNZ meeting I attended, there was kind of something that came forward from the city that initially hadn't gone through or wasn't going to go through this, the prescribed process, and then we saw that happen in the PNZ meeting and it was really, it was a great thing to watch. I think the public really appreciates that to see that we hold ourself to the same standard and process and protocol. >> And I might, Councilman Meltzer, just along with that is that I don't think that we have an expectation of exempting ourselves other than not necessarily maybe referencing. I absolutely expect that we would hold ourselves to an equal or a greater standard. So I think as we talk through the draft zoning map which we might touch a little bit on today, there may be an opportunity for us to be bringing forward city initiated rezonings. So separate and apart from this process to say that there are areas of the city that we probably need to think about differently and it wouldn't necessarily follow this pattern because we would probably approach it in a very different way. So to say that we want to follow these steps or how is it that we should present that. But we would be doing it in a very forthright way where we would be contacting individual property owners to say this is what we're considering, what are your thoughts before we ever brought it forward. And I think thinking in terms of that and maybe we can craft some language that might satisfy that where we wouldn't be doing anything less than might be more appropriate. Just again, lastly, we did not carry forward the special exception provisions. These were something in the current code very specific to Denton. While I think the Texas local government code has a section on special exceptions that's sort of more akin I think with our SUPs. This was something that was put in my understanding as part of the last draft or I'm sorry the last DDC that was adopted in 2002 that really talked about more kind of granted this special exception for uses that were previously approved. And we think we've covered that within our transitional language within chapter one. So that's why we did not bring that forward. And the other item that we did not bring forward is a subdivision variance. We have never used these. I can't find any time where the city actually approved one. And so we just it just we haven't used it. It was something that that went through P&Z. And so we just we just eliminated it as a as a as an option. Okay we're going to introduce subchapter three which is the zoning districts. This list here is the contents of what is included in the subchapter. I won't go through all of it. Just note that there are grouped zoning districts, residential, mixed use, corridor and other non-residential zoning districts. Some of the significant changes that we discuss topics that we discuss with the DCRC relate to the new lineup of zoning districts. We spent a lot of time with that. We obviously what we're doing here is consolidating some zoning districts that are either not used or not as reference as much. We are combining and consolidating those. But primarily we're also creating new zoning district names and transitioning them to what is being proposed. So what I have it's a it's a slide but I wanted to make sure that you were able to see this slide. So I've put together some copies one copy for each one of y'all. And it's really that transitional chart that we have used or are using in our zoning map update so that you see that that bullet number two there is one of those examples. Real quick question. On when I'm looking at the back up on the presentation it goes up through subchapter two but not subchapter three. Did I miss something? I mean the slides that you have here. Yes I apologize. Did y'all add some slides? We added this slide. Okay just want to make sure I didn't miss something. Okay. Right. We were going to discuss one and two but if we had an opportunity we'd introduce subchapter three. Alright. Fantastic. Thank you. So again I want the sheet that you have in front of you is really just to highlight that bullet two where it shows where the existing zoning districts are consolidated to a proposed zoning district. Not all of them but there are a few. The larger one is the DR1, DR2, RCR1 and RCR2 are being combined into the R7. You have other examples like the NRMU12 and NRMU will be now MN in the new zoning district map. So does everybody understand generally the concept with that transitional chart as we go from existing current code to proposed draft zoning map. Councilmember Meltzer. I apologize. I really try not to scrub your flow here. I would just like to suggest that since I didn't realize this was also subchapter two we all received some very thoughtful citizen comments regarding historic preservation. I would just like to suggest that without having to go through them all necessarily in this work session that they be forwarded to development to comment due to considering comment. And just for maybe a point of clarity really we're just trying to introduce subchapter three. So the zoning districts in the draft zoning map we don't intend on covering all of this material today. It just gives you an opportunity and to your point on absolutely all of the public comments we've received we're consolidating into a list and happy to discuss those if we need to bring back whatever that might be. But we're taking everything into consideration trying to listen. Councilmember Armitage. Yeah. I was planning on mentioning at the end but now since you brought it up again apologies and we're moving on to subsection three because the HLC all of that was part of the subsection two I would request that if at all possible that these historic issues kind of be bracketed much like how the dormitory and these other kind of hot button issues that are important to the public be treated separately but also within this discussion I know we have a limited amount of time but we could dedicate a whole work session for that. I could tell clearly you know there wasn't time to get real nitpicky but again it seems worth going into at some point before the code is decided as a council in a work session. We're happy to get into all of the detail that you'd like. That's absolutely why we've scheduled the city manager has asked us to be here every single week and anticipate that we're to spend a couple of hours. But keep in mind some sections of the code we have not altered and this is one of those the historic preservation ordinance was updated in 2017. Correct. So in 2017 we have made no changes all we've done is taken the historic preservation code and rolled it into the code so that's why we weren't talking about it today. Happy to open that up we've not visited on that topic with the development review committee either just for what that's worth. Well obviously somebody can forward you the comments that were made I think there's an email sent to all of us so we'll get those comments and please take care of them. No I was just going to say while I do have a lot of little nitpicky ones I'm saving those for Friday's meeting so. Okay thank you all right go ahead. So as Scott indicated earlier this is really an introduction didn't want to go into the detail I wanted to highlight a couple of obviously what's included in the subchapter the zoning districts that you have in front of you is really this slide here you see that there are a new lineup of zoning districts we can get into that today or we can get into those zoning districts at our next work session it's up to you all. Well and I think we mentioned it last time I think it'd be important to mention here because it is specifically talking about zoning that the committee ever since it began back in June I guess it was we've sort of shifted had a philosophical shift on that and that's why we had I mean we had fewer proposed zoning classifications when we first started and part of the challenge was how do we if we're going to change somebody's zoning how do we make it as consistent with what it is at the time which was the shift and that's why we had to add a couple just so that we were able to group them together more for compatibility sake. That's accurate in the list that you see in front of you here we had less residential zoning districts we added back a couple more so that we transition easier with for example the NR1 is now R1 and so on and so forth the harder ones were obviously the non-residential zoning districts which you see are pretty spread out here and we are still trying to consolidate some of those because again some of those were either not used as much or just didn't seem necessary for example the ECI in ICE essentially are the same a little different but they are now being proposed as LI so that's a good example of maybe repetitive or not used as much of zoning district so that's that's where we are and as the mayor mentioned we have a zoning draft map that's associated with these zoning districts which is available online and that will be part of the presentation at our next work session to go over that map but again we're here today if that is something that we want to go over with we can do that as well. All right is this the so have you concluded the subchapter 3 okay yes yeah all right any questions? Yes councilmember I may approach him Ryan and I'm guessing that we'll go over the text of subchapter 3 at a later meeting is that is that correct? We absolutely will be spending a lot of time I think subchapter 3 it was really just to make sure that that Ron was able to provide the conversion table explain a little bit about it we're happy to talk about whatever it is that you'd like to talk about each and every one of these sessions it was just to try to get you on on path with that and then that's what we'll be reviewing primarily next week will be three in sum of four and five okay and you're done with three today correct and the question I have based on the slide that's up there right now is currently we consider NR4 low density as we've had zoning cases come before us and I think that it's more appropriate in the moderate density but was that just was that strictly over of now you can get a little bit more than four on an acre based on are you referring to this councilman Ryan right here where it's talking about low versus moderate yes and then that's the future land use designation you know it says up to four so there's there's that little transition between one and the other it's not a clear line of where it falls it's really just our way of designating areas within the city for example you know low density is up to four dwelling units so you have the ability to look at NR1 through NR4 for that area but while if you also have residential moderate which is from four to twelve so most of the times you're going to get something above four it's more of a designation than a density well I just bring it up because we've had a number of cases that say well this is low density and it was NR4 was what they were requesting or four units per acre and to me that's where the I've kind of felt like as I've seen more of these come forward that that split should be between three and four as you have it up there on that slide and I just want to make sure if that's not the way that it is in the 2030 plan that we look at having an amendment to that 2030 plan so that we understand what is moderate and what is low because four still based on four units per acre still would be you know do we need to say less than four units per acre and this is how it is this is how yeah this is how it is in the comprehensive plan and we can certainly revisit that to stop at three or four less but that's really taken right from the then plan 2030 okay thank you any other questions all right thank you very much all right thank you let's take a quick five or ten minute break five minute break we'll come back and pick up our agenda welcome back everybody to this meeting of the Denton City Council Tuesday February 26 2019 we're back from our break and continuing through our work session report items we're on agenda item 3b which is received report hold a discussion and provide staff a recommendation on the design and construction of the new North Lakes Park Tennis Center good afternoon Mayor City Council Gary Pack and Director Parks and Recreation if you remember back in August we presented a concept to you and kind of provided some direction in which we were going to move forward on this process of getting input from the community and user groups for the proposed tennis center and we wanted to provide some updates to you and kind of the next steps and get some direction so the overall agenda for today is review status of the project provide updated design based on community and focus group meetings discuss the estimated budget review the plan for bidding and receive feedback and direction so project goals this is what we started out this this mission to accomplish is replace the existing tennis center if you recall back in 2005 there was two hundred and fifty thousand dollars that was allocated for repairs to the existing goldfield tennis center during that process it was decided that those weren't worth repairing at that time from an investment standpoint and that we should move forward to building new ones so in 2014 the bond issue was passed so we have a total of three point six nine four million dollars for the project this facility provide programs for various ages and abilities attract sports tourism which we do today and we can continue to do that simulate economic development as well as enhance the city's identity just from a aspect orientation vela athletic complex is under construction right now that's anticipated to be completed by mid-april the proposed dog park that you get we brought to you back in December we're going to be starting construction on here in their in their future here's the animal shelter and then this is where the proposed tennis center is located that's the number breaks okay is that can you show me where the single-family home is is that right there on the corner that there's a single-family home here okay and there's one here and there's one here i think there's one right here okay thank you so just to give you a little more of a zoomed in area this is our existing rugby field this would be moved over to the the soccer complex at north lakes we have a practice ball field right in this area an old restroom concession area that needs renovation which we'll discuss our existing recycling center here and then this is the old ymca building so back in august on august 9th just following the meeting we had with you we had a a public meeting in addition to the focus group meetings we had and from all those meetings we had this is kind of a summary of some of the the core feedback that we received that there is a strong pickleball interest in our city and they would like some dedicated courts for pickleball there was a lot of interest in indoor or covered tennis courts that's a little bit more challenging from a financial standpoint that's probably the one thing that i don't think we accomplish out of all the feedback we received here provide future expansion opportunities wi-fi capabilities for for both participants and family members attending after hours usability championship court practice wall wind screens interested in sponsorship opportunities for courts or the facility concerned about development north lakes park as a whole more trees in the park and then providing programming and tournament opportunities for the community can you elaborate on the issue of concern about development in north lakes park let me jump back to this so we have three construction opportunities going on here right at the same time primarily and we had one couple that attended that was concerned about all these projects going on in the park these were all part of a master plan that was done a few years ago i don't think they were aware of the master plan at that point in time but they expressed some concern especially if anything would inhibit or approach the wildflower trail area and we're staying out of that area that's not that's not touching any of that land they're also the couple that asked for more trees to be planted so between the dog park in the tennis center there and even well there's quite a quite a bit amount of trees that are be planted and we also and i i think they specifically asked if we could put some trees in this area here so that could be identified as a future tree planting area so we can kind of build like an urban forest in there thank you you're welcome councilmember melzer yeah um okay uh with the comments uh sort of one each or was there kind of a mass of a massing of comments around any particular i mean that was those were the the highlights um the indoor covered courts came up a lot i think every group we talked to asked for that just because of the heat um a lot of the play patterns are going to be early in the morning and then evenings so lights will accommodate the cooler times um from a financial standpoint that's a larger commitment in regards to covering the courts it also creates some issues and if we did cover some courts those two wouldn't be used for uh usta tournaments because that creates some differences between courts so that wouldn't be be fair to those participants but it's something we could look long term if if that's a desire um but a lot of these came out you know maybe more than once um overall thanks okay from all that feedback um we took our design that we shared with you originally and created a master plan for the entire site um this includes 18 full-size courts uh the bond package that was passed in 2014 only has 12 so there is no intention of building 18 at this point in time or even eight pickleball courts but it's planning for the future so we we have an idea of where future courts would go if the community need and the growth of our uh debt and demanded more facilities um they may never get all these courts may never get built but at least we have an idea where they could go so we're trying to foresee the future and anticipate that the pickleball courts they we did have quite a bit of people uh we spoke to our pickleball players specifically at our meetings um they wanted some dedicated space so we included that in here these actually could be used for both pickleball and 18 or tenant under courts so it's basically a giant slab that we would put some semi-permanent nets up there that we could adjust because between pickleball and 10u it's different size nets and different size courts uh so we'd have some built-in flexibility there um but this master plan provides for all that court space uh restroom and storage this is this building right here is the existing restroom and storage facility that's on property so we'd be reusing that an event structure down in this area for uh you know teams or minor events going on within the facility uh parking would be located here at rhynie and windsor as well as overflow here at the recycling center we're looking at another location within the park to relocate that if needed um and then also we have the airfield parking lot that could be used for overflow and buses if if needed and then uh open space we wanted to make sure we had open space between some of the courts so if there was a tournament going on people could you know go off to the side and wait for their match and put up a tent that type of thing and then we're putting 70 i'm sorry oh no i'm sorry councilmember briggs had a question i believe yeah just um because we had also said that the um airfield lot would be used for the dog park correct so i'm honestly i'm getting a little concerned about um all the uses and the growth in this area without the um parking consideration um so i'm just curious on that front how many spaces because i see parking here how many spaces are accounted for um the amount of courts because i know when you have tournaments you have a lot of families each family comes in their own car with one player and you have several players so um my concern is overflow into the neighborhood parking lots people crossing windsor or parking along here and so and the the homeowners on this side are going to have to to deal with those issues so i just kind of want to get ahead of it and plan um for that because our solution for the dog park was to park in the airfield and now we're saying well those are going to be used for buses and overflow um so i just kind of want you to talk about that there's approximately 70 spaces here um we are going to lose maybe two or three spaces just because there's some existing trees in those locations we want to preserve those so we'll work around those and then this will provide enough parking for the 12 spaces if we built 18 we're going to need more especially for those saturdays with the tournament weekends uh we would need that overflow parking lot from a bus standpoint buses could park here as well but we probably would direct them back in this parking lot not that we have a ton of buses that would be coming at one time but we would it's a little bit easier for them to maneuver in that open parking lot so from a 12 court standpoint there's enough parking between this lot and the proposed lot under construction to handle tournaments yes okay uh from a pro shop standpoint this picture up in the top right hand corner is our existing ymca building today um what we're looking at a proposal is to put a facade and paint the outside of the building do some minor walls inside renovate the bathrooms and the showers um and this would just kind of dress up that area but using that existing building from an inside standpoint uh this would be the this this is this is the back door basically today it would be the new front door but you'd come in this area in the vest of yule there would be restrooms and showers here uh staff meeting areas over here and a few offices and storage and then a lounge for participants if the parents the kids were out playing the uh parents could come in the lounge and hook up to the wi-fi and get on the laptop but we could have a tv in there whatever we chose choose to do at the final uh decision points uh but this would be a a pro shopper they could buy some minor retail uh tennis balls grips that type of thing but we wouldn't necessarily get into a large retail component for resale so as i mentioned earlier we master planned 18 courts and uh eight pickleball courts the bond program was for 12 so what we're looking at doing is to phase in construction as we grew as i had mentioned the items in yellow is what we would include in a base bid so there's 10 courts uh in yellow that would be our base bid and then we would provide alternates for this additional court here this this two two pit uh two bake of courts the renovation to the restroom building and then the four pickleball courts the reason for that is we could um identify what those expenses are for those two additional courts so if the bids came in low we could decide to accept those that alternate for the two additional courts or if they came in much lower than we anticipated we could build 14 courts if council decided that was a direction uh one of the primary goals is to accommodate tournaments and uh and don't you need 12 for tournaments so 12 yeah i mean that ultimately we're our goal is to uh build what we told the community we're going to do as part of the bond program 12 is is a good number ultimately when we have larger tournaments we can't host everything at this tennis center so we are using the schools and other tennis providers you know sometimes we have tournaments up to 600 participants and they're all over the place we want to try to focus that as much as we can and keep as many people in dentin as possible uh 12 is is a sweet spot in addition once we get to 12 courts usa will provide a hundred thousand dollars in grant funding for a new construction if we did i think it's four to eleven it's fifty thousand dollars in grant funding so we will be eligible for some funding either way whether we did 10 or 12 but ultimately our goal is to to to do 12 uh but from a bid standpoint we wanted to be able to have the flexibility if we only had enough money to do the 10 we could do that we could add the alternate to build the other two courts council member hudson you're you're i'm curious looking at the if using this graphic and focusing in on the the pro shop the looking at the layout you have the lounge would that be to the facing to the um west this is the pro shop the lounge is in this corner like the northwest corner okay and have we looked at a technology component that would allow us to do incorporate some sort of video that so so for example grandma wants to come watch a match but doesn't want to be in the heat is there a way to kind of uh factor in see what that would cost not not to say we do it i'm just curious if that would be an option so they could be in the lounge and maybe like a like a rolling like one camera maybe it phases or or a scoring component maybe it's just a scoreboard that that is updated uh as simple as that so you don't get to see the video but you can kind of see the scores change that sort of thing yeah that's a great question um we do have uh anticipated budget for technology for cameras more based on security but that doesn't mean we couldn't look at that uh infrastructure and see how we could make it public facing as well so that could be where you log in just like you log into a text on camera on the highway and you could see the traffic um that or or eagles nest per se uh maybe we could do the same thing and make it so the public could could zone in uh and then have the website updated to similar to an app or a tournament where you could see scores that are posted and updated on a regular basis on what court they're on and you could select the court so that's definitely something we could pursue okay yeah i'd be just curious to see what that cost is and i think the value add may um increase increase usage or you know that that that sort of thing yeah that would be an interesting thanks i'm sorry councilmember breaks has a question to that point i don't see where are the viewing areas okay so so will they be bleachers or they be covered so um these little triangles here are proposed shade structures that people could send them there'd be bleachers under that as an as an alternate purchase uh pending budget so we'd have bleachers there a lot of places it's byoc kind of bring your own chair and people bring their chairs and sit up a lot of tennis centers are like that um so we could provide a little bit of both yes sure yeah i i have a big issue without providing seating um so that's just for me i mean i've been to plenty of tennis tournaments and you want a place to sit um the ones that are bring your own chairs are smaller ones like in lantana and if we're expecting this to be you know heavily used in tournaments like then we need to provide seating um or it's going to be really uncomfortable for everyone okay we we have it listed as one of our amenities so in summary this is kind of our our procurement step our bid process is that our base and amenities we'd have 12 10 courts with lights pro shop parking lot trees landscaping our soft costs alternate one would be that additional bay of two two courts uh plus the soft costs alternate four would be a pickleball 10 u courts and an alternate three would be uh renovation to the existing exterior restroom facility from a project timeline we're here uh we went to park board on february 4th they provided a recommendation to to come to you today um and then over the course of the next few months through august september we'd be completing our construction drawings in our permitting process and then anticipate anticipation of posting and receiving bids in november december and then city council consideration about this time next year in january with construction in early 2020 so next steps based off of recommendation and feedback we could proceed with the completion of the cds and finish out the design we would bid the project and then prior to any steps we come back to you with the proposed uh funding plan uh and construction plan councilmember husbeth yeah can you roll back to the options there please and thank you okay um and then mr city manager is there something that we can pair with this work you know as before to try to get economy of scale or is this kind of timing not sync up with someone or is it maybe it's just unique work that does not allow to be paired but i'm just curious no um actually it's a really good question we're in the process of bringing on some resources right now to help us uh combine four or five uh building projects to see if by coordinating the trades we can't get a little bit more bang for the buck and uh we hear you on the on the alternates uh one of the issues that we need to be able to do is to try to see where those economies of scale are work with real bids and then have that conversation but this is another case where we've got a project that's you know seven years old and we're we're basically bringing it up in today's construction standards uh and we're trying to figure out exactly how far our dollars will go and whether there's going to be any supplemental funding that would be needed but you're going to see us uh very shortly bring forth some some assets to your point that we're looking at aggregating there's 12 or 15 building projects over the next few years that uh we're still on the books with and seeing how many of those we can um package together uh and you know get as many economies of scale out of concrete drywall those sorts of things and and keep those costs down but um it's a good point yeah of course so i think my preference would be depending on numbers uh but i think uh i'm okay up to alternate to i think if we can capture i think we can by then we'll have a branding opportunity in place hopefully or at least understand more about that so i think that would what wafts offset costs i do absolutely agree the pickleball approaches and just that and bocce ball i mean those things are just through the roof as far as activities and brings a different crowd to to the tennis park so you kind of get some mixed uses and just some diverse experiences so i really like that approach again we'll see what the numbers come to be but that's flying blind here in a perfect world um that would i think those two uses uh pair up well if i could just bring one thing that i didn't mention that i wanted to see if i could get some feedback and direction from from council um our facility does not have fencing around the perimeter of the courts so you can come in at any time when it's not open a lot of tennis centers many tennis centers at least in dfw have fencing around the entire perimeter so it's only used when the facility is open uh we are proposing that this facility would be open more often than our pro shop is today so we'd be expanding hours by about 35 hours a week um so what you see here is if we had headed in this direction fencing so you could only get into these courts technically when the facility was open and staffed um one facility that staff um visited and it was southlake um where they had an after hours access where they put a gate into a bank of courts where the staff would open that gate up in the evening and lock the other gates so you could get in there you could press the button and turn the lights on if you wanted to play you know after between nine and ten let's say if we closed at nine um so we were as a thought process we were looking at having a gate here so the or or even here so the community could come in get to the courts turn the lights on and use those after hours uh that's how they kind of added some flexibility into their facility but wanted to get your temperature on whether the facility should be fenced in from a safety security standpoint um it does provide the opportunity to to monitor the courts a little better because you know who's coming into the facility and not using the court so you have people that are paying for that usage during that time um it's it's just a management tool and wanted to see what you guys thought about that um so as far as this issue that you just raised is concerned you know i support uh the most open access um possible uh which could include a fence that you know fencing then has easy access for after hours you know as long as um the public you know for me the important thing is that the public feel that this is there for them as well because it's a public park it's their bond money um so you know i haven't seen and i think that's neat what you're describing i haven't actually you know experienced a court where you can go in after hours and do something to turn on you know to to turn on the lights um it is nice also uh you know another thing fencing does is it prevent well to a limited extent you know fly balls from you know obviously you can go over the fence but at least it um uh so anyway that i'm i'm i'm flexible um on uh fence or no fence i think you know no fence my my instinct tells me it would be the most attractive and feel the most open um but if there's an argument to be made that um uh it it you know it creates problems uh again i know that a number of our and i'll just just say in closing on this issue that that um that some of our uh tennis courts in here in town that we already have that feel completely open actually do have fences around them right but it's clear that remember the public can just join them and pick up and play whenever they want so for me that's the key factor yeah so i am i'm okay with the fence because i'm really concerned about noise and lighting um we are putting this near residential and our current tennis courts are not so we have to make other considerations that that we didn't before um lighting could be pretty bright and um a nuisance and when people play tennis they it's generally screaming so um i just i want to be considerate of of that and so that we're not allowing people to go in after 10 o'clock at night um to play but i do want it to be open access and or to have um the community feel as if it's their courts and they can go in but um there is a a time when it should be used and a time when it shouldn't so uh to kind of we've we've considered that we have put some trees along here obviously when we plant them they won't be full size uh so we'll have to grow into that we will have wind screens along the perimeter to help with that too uh from both playability as well as visual um and then i well i didn't include this on here we do have a heat map in regards to where the the lights are directed to try to minimize as much overspill and and it's like the light pollution possible so i could definitely share that with you in a follow-up staff staff report i would be handy and i um sure go ahead if you if you have had meetings i don't know if the the homeowners around or not have have approached but something like that probably would be great to share with them too okay councilman rometer so to follow up on that kind of so just to clarify so the fencing uh wouldn't do anything about the lights right because it's just it's the kind of fencing you can see through but the lights would be taken care of more by the the greenery once it grows to full height and also by uh a heat mapping as you say is that correct there's there's there's different heights of lights and there's different styles there's directional that are basically shooting directly down and there's some that are a little bit more ball field that are kind of like angled and we can look at both of those and the heat maps are related to that to try to minimize that and that could be part of our design process well i think too i mean you have you have a configuration here of courts that you have some that are closer to the residential and some that are further away from the residential so i think you could figure out which ones if you're going to have some type of after hours access whatever that means i don't know what time you're talking about up till what time but probably be able to work that in a way that will minimize and mitigate that councilmember armature yeah i would just add i was that's it that's that's where i was going on i would i would strongly support that that if you know there are going to be lights and you know after hours play that it'd be as far away from the residents and get you know input from the from the residents councilmember riggs i'm just curious because during our early conversations and then when we had the um unt presentation here they were talking about the use of their tennis courts um for i mean i'm just wondering if those conversations continued and if there was a larger tournament would that would that still be considered so we have had we've reached out to them uh in the past and had conversations with both them in disd to use facilities for larger tournaments uh our goal is to keep people in denton uh whether they're staying here all weekend or spending money in our uh retail shops or restaurants that would definitely be a goal um obviously they're using courts at different times uh so we need to work around schedules to accommodate that but that's definitely a priority for us is to share facilities whenever possible okay and last last question yes go ahead just on our old on the old courts um are they are they staying good great question i'm glad you said that um so that's been the big question you know what's going to happen to those courts obviously um the city moved in a direction to rebuild the courts for a reason um when we resurface them the cracks are still there it they just they'll resurface so it's not a permanent fix um but the thought process was we would try to keep those up and running as long as we can without significant uh financial investment and um if we did not build the pickleball courts as suggested in here we could use those as our pickleball courts dedicated pickleball courts for our pickleball players and they were happy about that they they and you guys can chime in if i'm incorrect but um they were excited to be able to have dedicated space uh that could be used that could be our pickleball center so staffs already looked at you know going after pickleball tournaments just as we do with tennis tennis tournaments to bring people into town and you know whether we could partnership with other communities um to improve that as well so that as opposed to just completely removing them um if northlake's rec center was ever expanded we would probably expand in the direction where there's a couple courts so those may have to be removed at some point in time depending on the design but we'll try to keep those up and running at least until these pickleball courts would be if they're ever built then we could say okay these have reached their their uh lifespan okay so we do we do have a backup plan for them okay councilmember barmiter do you have questions um this was just are are you in the stage i'm kind of looking looking ahead at the presentation seeing it's near the end is this um is this a good point to make okay our final so i'll say um since my previous comments were addressing the one um new question question that you asked about fencing i'll say you know as i've mentioned in the past um you know to me the uh the full uh you know 18 court plan um was excessive obviously since there was a bond election you know we're committed to doing what was promised in the bond um and so you know i support the bear because we have to you know the the bare minimum of that the the 10 courts um with uh you know echoing councilmember briggs you know the lighting uh be and it seems like you're on your way of you know doing that already um with the uh resident the surrounding residents the the lighting um considering them and their input uh and just trying to you know budget as well as possible um uh you know i think for the the future um you know i for pickle ball courts uh it's you know i don't see the need for separate courts for pickle ball when you can just lower the net and say here's where the line is um i used to play i used to play pick a book pickleball and tennis so um and uh you know you just lower the net and then you say here's where you know here's where the lines are same for kids tennis you know that's why i didn't support the kids um courts uh separate kids courts because i played tennis as a kid and uh you know i think it's actually important for for training that kids you know get the feel of an adult uh court and then you just learn to you know you mark the lines et cetera just like you do for when you're playing doubles and singles you can say you know well these are where the boundaries are um so that's kind of my uh you know nutshell um advice going forward uh you know and we do you know keeping in mind also we do have the unt you know they have the 12 courts where they already have their tournaments they've got i believe six additional courts and in addition to that um uh so you know we we do have that 12 courts the 12 courts already in in denton um but again that's an issue that uh that i was able to weigh in on when i voted you know voting on that bond bond package so anyway thank you thanks for the the time you've taken and for breaking it up into into stages rather than putting out the whole enchilada at once i really appreciate that that's my man so i'm going to go with council member death and then we'll come back to yeah rosen has already had pickleball tournaments and uh we've got quite a few tennis courts and pickleball courts and i i would think you can probably coordinate with them if you if you bring in a big tournament and you need more more courts uh they would probably accommodate you that'd be fantastic yeah council member melzer i'm trying to understand if there's any uh down with these alternates is there any downside to putting them out for bid to see how they come back no um you know they the whole purpose of this is so we could see the cards you know what what the estimates are and have the the contractor show us what they are so if the uh the 10 courts came in at you know 500 000 dollars on their bid whatever the number is and it's another 200 000 for the courts we know how much they cost we could add those in i i we have estimates on the exterior restroom but i'm not sure you know we can weigh that whether we need it or not that's not like bad faith like if you know they know that we might not build a project even though they go through the you know the time and expense of putting on it i mean that's sort of a question like it's fair play if it all came under budget then it could be up for council consideration to do the whole thing yeah that strikes me as sort of uh not the time to make the decision on what not to do why not get the bids see how they look you know that's right i mean i don't see a downside to doing that um i i looked at as giving us a little more flexibility with being able to see and pick and choose as opposed to doing a deduct where you always don't you don't seem to get the the same value out of it as a deduct is how we were approaching it any other questions comments direction council member bragg's yeah so i'm i you know my my goal would hopefully or i hope that the base bid or the bid would come in for the bond funding i don't know that some of it's going to maybe be out of uh um some of the alternates so i'm i'm not going to really say what i'm for and what i'm not i just would hopefully all of this stuff with seating comes in um for the approved bond funding and i like the idea of leaving the old courts open and not tearing those down for um maybe maybe those could be after hours play the courts could be you know used there you could change that and then that could be an option as well so that that way um people aren't disturbed um in their homes i've just okay good idea too comments so oh yes council member i have a question about the old courts didn't you say there are some where concerns like it's cracking in the courts you know so it's it's not preferred from a a competitive standpoint from a recreational standpoint you know you can kind of work around it um the pickleball players they were happy with just having space that was dedicated to them um so that was kind of our our thought and how we could recycle those okay and then so follow up sorry so erin do we need a implement a waiver or so just how does that work how does that work knowing if we have a report that says hey this is happening i'd just be curious maybe you can send an email that says uh what kind is should be the guiding line when is when is the you have to do something your own record is saying you know this may or may not be great i think i could chime in a little bit on that they're not at a point where there's trip hazards you know so that that would be something we would address these are more or less you know cracks that just impact the ball's movement if it hits it anybody else so uh you know i was just gonna say uh this is just one of those steps along the way we proceed and in november december when the bids come back we go from there see what funds are available and what portions we can move forward on sir are we bidding it out with the uh with alternates for the bid like you got a base bid on the rf rfp and then with these alternates one two and three is that is that that would be our game plan unless directed otherwise uh ultimately our goal was to build what we asked for in the bond and that was 12 courts in a pro shop um we do have flexibility with the existing um building there that we're using as a pro shop we could cut back on the improvements there cut back on the facade and just kind of put some pain in it make it look a little better if we needed to save some money so we do have some built-in opportunities if we need to play with the budget a little bit as well all right good he thought he else just uh it's probably wrong to stereotype but just based on your comments it sounds like pickleball players are happy people and i'm glad you have a way to accommodate them okay anything else i know sir all right thank you okay we'll move on to the next agenda item which is receive report hold discussion provide staff a recommendation that for the development of land located at the corner of carnage ridge road and i don't even know what that is regalia regala court currently known as patrick park okay um this is a park uh it off of crofford road um that you could see here in this image in relation to i-35 um our guy was directly across the street um the the box in the area in yellow is the location of the park it's roughly 1.4 acres the reason why it's called patrick park uh there's no official name to it that's just a working name uh the the developers uh which ryan ryan is here and can answer questions specifically to the neighborhood development uh suggested the name after their father who is a local professor and a business owner um and we informed him at the time that there is a process you have to go through naming and it goes through council and park board and we're working on that process at the same time which will be coming back to you in a few few meetings um so that is something that he would anticipate doing in the near future but that was just a working name uh from that point so this is a a site plan of the property here's crofford road on the south side of this or on the bottom of the screen you come in off of crofford and you'll it's it's pretty much street parking on on this a neighborhood park there's no dedicated parking lot it's 1.4 acres uh 1.3 plus acres um there is some topography in this area uh you can see right in here there's a retaining wall here and retaining walls along these properties in here um we propose planting trees all the way around the perimeter at this point in time at some at some day uh some point in time but there's a pretty severe slope here so it would be good for kids with cardboard going out there during the summer or even in the wintertime if we got some snow you'd go out there that could be our dedicated sled riding hill but it is a neighborhood park it's street parking um we're proposing to put in a small playground and a small pavilion of sorts the pad would be 20 by 20 approximately the playground is roughly the size of milam park that we just put in about 3500 square feet that just went in this december in january to give you an idea if you wanted to see what that playground could look like it hasn't been designed yet obviously um but uh that's that would be that the parcel itself was uh dedicated to the city in 2017 during the platting process so it is a city property uh this yellow circle gives you an idea of a half mile radio uh half mile walk or a 10 minute walk which we'll talk about this evening in regards to a new standard that we're trying to implement for accessibility to our parks from a park construction breakdown the developer has proposed expenses a little over 400 000 including land uh retaining wall sidewalk slash trail that goes around the perimeter of the property trees uh infrastructure and design and then we would propose to use uh approximately a little over 200 000 from our 915 16 fund we do have 272 000 in that area from development to put in irrigation we'd place additional four trees as well and then actually pay for the pavilion and the playground to be installed that's a roughly 210 000 from an estimated timeline um from a uh hydro mulch that would be done uh in march if not end of this month just to stabilize the the soil install sidewalks in the pavilion slab sometime in march as well and then we would come in and install the irrigation and trees before it got too hot uh we're working on a draft developer agreement so if council directed us to continue to move forward we'd provide that development agreement to you in the future for consideration that would outline kind of what we're talking about today um and then at that point the developer would submit a public appearance uh a public naming process application and then we would immediately start installing our uh playground and pavilion so we could technically almost be open an early fall for the community to use questions council member do you have a question yes i do have a question can you go back to the the picture the first picture this one yes um i'm not sure what the topography looked like before but it looks like it's pretty much stripped of whatever was was on the land and so i'm curious it's a pretty big chunk for us when it was dedicated um was it kind of clear cut and then dedicated or is there a process where something could be dedicated to us because we're we're paying for more trees to be planted and so if there would have been trees on there i don't i don't know if there would have or not i'm just wondering about the process of of dedication um yeah i i wasn't i wasn't here when that was being done so i don't know i could ask the developer to come up and see if he could chime in on that and provide some information if that's okay that's pretty much after the fact i'm just you know was curious about maybe saving money yeah i mean obviously we need to preserve trees whenever we can i don't know if this was an empty lot if there were trees of substance in that area um but that's our goal is try to preserve trees especially when we're looking to identify land is if there's good groves of trees on it uh within a 10-minute walk you know those could be all criteria that we have when selecting property because when you look at the list you're using less irrigation if they're already established and um saving money right you know in the end the irrigation that we're proposing is just for tree bubblers to keep the trees healthy so we wouldn't be irrigating the entire turf okay the one thing i if i could add on this this uh dark gray kind of pattern here you know once everything gets established we'll redress this and look at it but we talked about maybe even putting some sort of um the ground cover in that area just to avoid any type of erosion so that could be an option down the road if we ever needed to do that and then we also added pads i'm sorry no no go ahead we also added pads in case uh public art committee ever wanted to include a small piece of art cast member armeter do you have a comment or question so first of all i just want to say how excited i am about the um the 10-minute uh park plan i know you're going to be that that item was pulled for further discussions or can have a chance to talk about that um so i'm i'm excited um to see that this meets this this new goal um just uh several several questions um uh is there a plan to have water fountain and bike racks i mean not a decorative you know drinking fountain and a bike rack or bike racks we've talked about the water fountain we definitely could add that that was something that was kind of on the should we do it or not so we could definitely add that uh there would be your basic bike rack type of situation in a garbage can as well um the from a maintenance standpoint the hoa would be maintaining this for two years for us so that would be the mowing in minor maintenance uh but we would come in and do the playground checks and all that so that would save us from two years of of expenses as well excellent and so just to continue i mean i think that um i think what drinking fountain should be uh at at every single park functioning drinking fountain you know healthy for all the obvious reasons right it's a health issue uh um so i i think that's important um to your to your knowledge so the so the curlex and hydra mulch um is that you know to your knowledge a wheelchair and stroller accessible accessible that is just to get the hydra mulch is basically the seed and the material to hold the seed in place oh oh i see okay so that's for the plants that's not about kind of filler that's for the turf the grass okay yeah okay so that's not so where the actual okay got it so it'll just be just grass yes yes ma'am and and the the material that the um the ground cover uh yeah the the ground cover where the where the play structure is that that's uh engineered wood fiber just like we have in our other play structures okay it's like uh it's like a mulch yeah okay yeah so that stuff that stuff because i know that some of that stuff um is is hard to maneuver yeah yeah maneuver um and you know because of again uh in addition to you know kids in in wheelchairs people with strollers just i know you've considered the options i mean i support this but you know if there are other uh other options that could be used not just at this or but at other parks that are more wheelchair and stroller friendly so i'd love to know more about that the engineer wood fibers is ada accessible but may not be the best solution there are poured in place materials kind of like a sponge porous rubber that is easier for for uh wheelchair uh maneuverability so this is ada accessible um the downside is it has to be replaced every year i don't know how often we replace our wood chips every five years or so completely every year we completely take it out and start over um the the port in place it's a little more expensive um durability it may last longer it does wear and tear with our heat you know it'll come up and you have to cut it out and replace some areas but that's something we don't have any of those facilities i think we have some spot areas at uh eureka too um to kind of give you an idea what that is uh so that's kind of a combination of the two but there are some play structures that that entire structure is a port in place uh rubber component and thank you i was about to mention that that year we get to i like that stuff uh so anyway hopefully the price will go down or uh we could explore it in a future playground to see what the difference is between the two yeah oh that'd be great that'd be excellent yes councilmember melzer i just wonder from a planning point of view as we approve these you know sort of big capital improvements in parks how do we think about you know budgeting in the increment for maintenance because you know like with these these materials that need to be replaced or i mean everything needs some kind of maintenance right i mean how do we how do we incorporate that in our planning so um what we are doing and and we did it this year as part of our supplemental package is we've looked at projects that haven't been funded over the past years and everything going forward when we open up a new park we're estimating what that cost is and we'll continue to provide that to council for consideration um to give you an idea what packages are going to cost down the road that includes basic amenities such as trash removal park mowing um vandalism repair uh play run inspection staff costs for site inspections and litter pickup that type of thing um and then irrigation repairs water all those components based on the size of the park and the location uh and how much we anticipate that needing um i'm sorry if you just said it and i missed it so so what what do we do how or how does what do you do with those figures once you create them i mean are they are they sort of always being built into our you know our forecast or yeah there would be a budget line budget line item breakdown you know um generalists it's maintenance per square foot or per per acre or whatever into these into these parks and the idea philosophically is it over time as your ea v rises there should be the funds to take care and absorb these types of amenities in uh but yeah each each respective park is is essentially given a budget um uh dollar amount for its basic maintenance and we just track those year over year okay so you know i mean conceptually we're making those decisions at the same time right when we're saying yes we've got the you know the capital funds because of the dedicated park funds if we say it's covered you're also uh you know represent us like we've considered the maintenance too and that's yeah that's covered that's that's part of all maintenance uh are all um park dedication is that the there should be the ea v to support the parks so you should see that that cost payable to be absorbed through the new ea v each year as these develop so we we estimated a rough estimate was about 15 000 15 17 000 dollars in expenses this is kind of far removed park from a time time standpoint that might be a little heavy so as we get into it we can continue to try to mold that number uh we're trying to develop standards so like for instance every park has a water fountain every park has a garbage can so and and how frequently those are needed attention um you know with working with hoa and helping with the maintenance we'll we'll know a little bit more going into it two years from now with them helping us with that process we're trying to fine-tune that so we can get it down to you know a per acre this is what it should cost on an average especially as we go into master planning right you want to know that we're just uh thinking all the way through all right great thank you councilman brix last question about the trees um so you mentioned there would be about 10 trees six and four i think new trees um but they are going to be responsible for two years will they be responsible for all of the trees or just their trees um if the the trees die um will the hoa be replacing them or i mean how does that divide up well um obviously we we're going to be installing irrigation retaining the irrigation so if the irrigation breaks in it and it stops and that's why the tree dies then we'll probably assume some responsibility for that but if it just dies on its own because it wasn't healthy when it came in we we look whenever trees are installed for instance at vela we want to approve the trees before they're put in the ground and if we don't like them we reject them in some instances you can actually go out on property where they're coming from and pick the ones you want and tag them so we know we're getting a better quality from the very beginning so that's kind of the process that we we roll through um trees are a living species a living asset so they can be challenging uh but if the irrigation shuts down on our our dime then we would probably take responsibility for that but if they die for no reason for us we'd reach out to the the hoa and ask them for that to be replaced and so you brought up types of trees so will the developer pick their six trees or will it come from a list of our approved park trees it's going to be recommended from our park trees okay so the staff recommendation okay and that hasn't been finalized all right thank you quick question on this slide i must have missed something so help me understand so this is a city dedicated this is the land's been dedicated to the city yes sir it's going to be a city park yes sir so we have parks proposed development costs that's you yes we've got developer proposed development costs is that the developer paying for these yes sir okay so the land value has already been i mean that's it's already been absorbed yeah so then the actual check somebody's got a right at the end of the day to get it to where we want it to be is how much uh well they're proposing to do the infrastructure on this right um so that's something we have to work out in a developer agreement but ultimately what we're looking to pay for is 210 000 dollars okay uh and if you go to the the site map uh with the overlay of the way the park looks uh i'm sorry not the not the plan but the one before that yeah oh this one that concept so the whole space is about an acre would you say it was it's 1.36 of 1.4 acres so what is the coverage of the area that's actually available i mean if that's all ground cover people aren't going to be i wouldn't think roaming around in the ground cover and you got the trees and all that so what is the space that's sort of outlined with the green area the pavilion and the playground yeah so this this is a high this is more of your high grade right here from this point up the hill here okay um this is kind of the key area that's quote unquote usable for regular play so it's probably less than half it's it's probably a little more than half but you're roughly maybe 0.6 0.8 somewhere in there if you could just do a rough calculation on that i'd like to and if you could go back to the grading sort of the the aerial uh that you had superimposed the square where the park was uh let's see that yeah oh i'm sorry yeah you had it right there this one that one um where is the high area that is it up there in the it's in this this corner up in here and it comes down okay is that a retaining wall right there this is a retaining wall this is uh i don't know six six eight feet okay all right okay and then there's retaining walls around the back over in here all right and then there's houses you know butting up yes okay all right thank you appreciate it thank you councilmember riggs so will the bottom of the hill end in the you talked about you know um kids sliding down the hill is that going to be will they be running into people's fences in the backyards or into the street i'm just i mean if if that ever happened it would be going in this direction so there would be enough space for them they wouldn't be hitting fences so they wouldn't be going backwards towards the they would be going into the park away from the fences yeah okay so this is the perimeter here so there's a retaining wall here and there's fencing and retaining walls along here all the way over to here and then down okay yes councilmember meltham uh at the risk of being really annoying this late in the game it occurs to me if you go back to the plot uh now this is all like being developed it's not all sold and not all built yeah is that kind of picture right if uh and there might be great reasons why quote unquote patrick park is designated where it is but wouldn't you be within a 10 minute walk of a lot more people if it were more you know in the central part i mean maybe there isn't any big area like that that's you know not already committed but right if you know if that's your goal is to have more people walkable to it yeah so i mean this is all obviously just newly developed and i anticipate this would be developed in the future uh that's not within a 10 minute walk obviously you have some houses here in argyle and you have the 35 that's a kind of natural barrier um so this is more or less focused in this this corner of the city uh this evening when i provide you the 10 minute walk uh aerial uh the park serve the trust for public lands website identifies where kind of like a heat map where your red areas your densely populated locations that don't have accessibility uh and then orange and then all the way out as it gets a little bit more accessible to green spaces where they do have parks that are accessible so that's a way that we can look at where parks should be strategically located uh in the future so we're meeting that 10 minute walk goal so yeah the park is roughly in this location so this is roughly a half mile radius around the park space can i can i can i interject here yeah because this is already plotted from what i can tell this has been plotted and it's been dedicated so uh yeah okay okay uh direction on this i guess do you need direction to move forward uh with the expenditures and things such as that yeah so that would be great obviously we'll be coming back to you with a developer agreement for consideration that would outline kind of what we've already presented today um but if you're okay with that direction we could start as soon as you know real soon on a playground any any objections if you do please verbalize instead of a head nod so it doesn't sound like we hear any objections so uh move forward okay oh thank you that's my monitor not an objection i obviously support with my my comments that i mentioned my suggestions i mentioned earlier just curious um since you mentioned um i i think as i understand you to say that um a discussion that parks is is currently having a discussion of kind of best practices uh or or a kind of universal city park standards in general that's correct um uh do you have an idea of a timeline at which you anticipate that coming to council that's uh going to be included in our parks master plan so we're working on that now we're working through the needs assessment will be launched to the community at the end of this month early march uh about 10 000 postcards will be sent out to households in denton as well as the the survey is active on our website so people can go on to dentonparks.com and participate participate in the survey uh we'll take all that information and provide recommendations and that'll go through a master planning or approval process with council probably in november okay november okay thanks great well i look forward to that thank you well thank you ery appreciate it thank you thank you so much we'll move on to agenda item d which is the last work session on our public work session reports receive report hold discussion give staff direction on the mckenna park improvements in relation to the bonnie bray street project oh you've been up here for what three yeah yeah wow i may need an iv here in a little bit so okay um mckenna park and the impacts of mckenna park with uh bonnie bray um construction as well as a house that the city had purchased um i guess back in the fall uh in regards to that that project so i'm going to talk a little bit about bonnie bray engineering engineering is here as well if they have anything specifically i can't answer and i'll talk a little bit about the impacts of mckenna park so some of the goals or items for consideration that we looked at uh during this process was determine the future of the existing house at bonnie bray and scripture uh the roundabout in park and how they function cohesively uh access to the park is not an impediment to vehicular traffic uh with those improvements placement of the parking lot is in the best location for park users uh combining the sidewalk in the trail for dual purposes so we uh planned for a loop trail around the park it didn't make sense to have a sidewalk you know going straight along bonnie bray or scripture that if we could you know kind of combine our resources and put in a trail that would meet both needs of the community uh for both on sides of those streets uh parking is strategically located near the playground since we have families that are coming out with young kids typically for a playground so we want to save that from them have to walk too far uh there has been consideration in the past of an inclusive play structure at mckenna park uh placement of trees to serve as a screening along bonnie bray and even scripture uh to help improve the safety uh and then noise as well uh minimize impact on our existing trees we have some really great trees in that park that we want to preserve uh neighborhood connectivity so if we could put in sidewalks that connect to the neighborhood so they could come out of their uh their homes along the street and get into the park uh easily and then plan now for uh potential improvements in the future so from a bonnie bray uh street improvement so what you're looking at here is the old bonnie bray uh that is being used currently as a parking lot uh in both directions here you got parking on the left side there's roughly 35 40 parking spaces there um according to staff they're not always used some people park over on thomas uh for parking on that side of the park um and then this house located right here is the house that i believe back in the fall you received an isr uh from city staff regarding the condition of that property um and its geographic location in regards to the proposed uh roundabout so here's an existing area with the proposed design you can see the roundabout here at the intersection the house is located right here so that's uh an impediment to the current design now here's the bonnie bray right away this is our playground and our parking lot so our kind of park amenities are located here and then we have a small pavilion here that is going to be on our short list to renovate um and improve and then we have a water tower feature here there's quite a bit of grading here so this rough area here is the highest point of the park and then it slopes down quite a bit down into here and then this is somewhat flat up here although it's a higher plateau so there's some adjustments to this as you can see it's coming into this area this is the parcel that the city had purchased for the purpose of the roundabout with this design it does impact this parking lot so that is kind of the reason why we're here to discuss with you is there's a median running down the center of bonnie bray that would prohibit people from coming south and making a left into the park and then this median here on the roundabout would prohibit people from making a left into the park as well so we looked at some options to potentially relocate that parking lot or work with no parking lot at all so option one um i guess before i get into that so during this planning process and we talked about the sidewalk earlier we wanted to see what it would be like to put a loop trail in that entire park it's a great park it's got some topography obviously we'd have to make sure that it's ada accessible from a user standpoint but what you're going to see in these renderings everything in yellow would be built as part of the bonnie bray project everything in white would be built at a later date whenever funding was identified so i have a question on that um could you go back to the map of the alignment right there so that yellow line that was in the previous slide is that represented by the far your left line of that schematic for the proposed new road if you could is that that yellow line no it's just we just we weren't sure exactly when we were putting that through where that was going to end up so we're proposing it just to kind of not to get too close to the road right but you would come off of this intersection wherever this crosswalk is and then come into the park a little bit and kind of weave through the existing trees whenever possible to create more of an environment and shade for the walkers okay so if you could see here here's where the house is right so that roundabout is kind of roughly roughly in here and that's why i put that arrow just kind of given direction of kind of where that roundabout would be so i have a question on um because the trail the trail uh crosses the ingress ingress to this proposed parking lot here this yellow thing here um so if you go back to the road map alignment um what has been the thought of why why are we not considering a left-hand turn lane like this is just my thought we own the land so if you needed to dedicate land to bonnie bray to sort of create an area where you could put in a left-hand turn light and leave some of that parking there what what's the rationale to not do that i guess is my first question i'm gonna ask traffic engineering to come up and speak to that because it's far enough away from the roundabout and it's far enough away from pan so i'm just curious about what's what's the rationale there pretend they traffic engineer for the city uh the rationale behind this particular um location is more of a side distance issue if we provide an inlet uh there has to be provided an outlet here as well so i think the major concern here especially coming off the roundabout there are two curves and the side distance issues uh exist here especially if we go with a lot of tree coverage and other um obstacles here so this is not the ideal location for getting in and out um or creating an opening for this particular parking lot uh okay when you say side distance it's meaning you can't you're coming around that curve and you can't see somebody pulling out of there over the shoulder so if a park uh if a car pulls in here seeing in this direction for traffic curving around this curve okay uh and and i get that and i'm not trying to say hey let's redo the whole alignment i guess my point being that to put a parking lot in off of thomas street uh when there is no parking lot there it just seems like we're doing a lot to avoid that and and i just don't know if you were to do something different like if that curve there if you created it a little wider i don't know i'm not a traffic engineer but it just doesn't seem we i don't know not having data on what that means it's just hard to to make a decision on on that like if you were to change the the curve a little bit or if you were to move the the entrance down a little bit to the north um uh so that's just my thought when i just looked at this i thought well okay so anyway that's it those are my observations uh council member briggs yeah i'm gonna say the same thing like i i have an issue putting more concrete anywhere where there's grass and taking trees out um in a park because that's what it is and that's not your item i know it's but i would like to see it's like yeah it's like pretend like oh god i dug behind this podium here um but i i also agree with the mayor i mean we could we need to do something with that alignment whether it be take the median out or shorten the median so that somebody could be able to turn i i i don't want to you know sacrifice safety but i think there's already that large amount of area there and we should be able to in the process this far in advance find a way to get people into that parking lot so i think there are a couple uh issues here there are two access to this particular parking lot and uh the other issue with the median is if we create a median opening people are more than likely to start making u-turns there that's another issue with this particular uh median in place the reason we want to channelize them is go to the roundabout to make the u-turns that they ever have to get into that mode that's one thing the other thing is the access here is also in there's a median that channelizes um motors that are coming into the roundabout at the appropriate speeds so the median is taken out and these access points are left open then uh that creates a safety concern um if we if we open this median out people will most likely try and make this left turn into the parking lot and uh there are some challenges that this parking lot is just too close to this particular roundabout and it may impact the overall function of the roundabout access to the parking lot right yeah that's what i'm saying kent that the access to the parking lot move move down a little bit i think there is a steep uh there are alignment issues as far as elevations issues uh there is a steep hill on this way so the more we move away yeah before before so i was just addressing that i understand about in fact my thought was you just does the parking lot have to have two one and two ingress egress or could it be that they can't come out on this side and you just come in and out on that side because i wouldn't be for moving the median on the roundabout for the very reason you're talking about can i suggest we're we're getting a little hung up on the existing parking lot and part of what gary was going to allude to as we get into this discussion is that we're looking at moving the parking where the people would actually want to be in the park as well as providing a trail so that they could walk around the park to different areas so some of the places we could put the parking are not necessarily right here where regardless of what kind of traffic control you put here whether it's roundabout as we have it or something else it's still too close to the intersection so as we put the parking in other places whether it's immediately off street essentially on street parking or some of the other locations that gary was going to present those would take some of these concerns off and allow this to be more green space okay so let's do this uh councilmember armaturas has been waiting let her make her comment or question then we'll go ahead and i started this so i'm going to be able to finish it that we'll go ahead and let gary finish his presentation so we'll have the full scope of it and then if this we want to raise these issues again we can do that so i apologize for that councilmember armatura well yeah so and actually i appreciate you're raising that issue because that was my my question as well i'm glad we have traffic engineering and parks here in the room at the same time can you explain just what you just said about you know the more green space you mean if the the if that parking lot's eliminated it would be replaced by green space but then there would be but then if there's a parking lot somewhere else so the parking can come in various different kinds of configurations and that's part of what gary was going to allude to you could have some smaller lots in different areas they could even be just right off the street especially as you move over to thomas street which is a little flatter on the hill side uphill side of the park you could even put some progressively down scripture on the park side so whether they're parallel parking or they're head-in parking there are options that don't necessarily mean you have to put in a parking lot inside the park okay yeah let's uh we'll hear some of those options i'll just i'll add to that you know having heard from some oh and you can sit down it's just a kind of a general he can finish if he likes i've been up here or you can stand up um uh but uh you know having heard from some you know members of the community people are wary about more concrete in in general um and they're also uh uh wary about um about parking additional parking being located closer to their residences uh you know uh kind of going to go back to um i mean i'm i um i was not alone on council and you know being wary you know as you know about the just the using that side of the street for the roundabout i do support the roundabout and the bonnie bray you know the improvements on bonnie bray but that we had um uh that had the roundabout gone over to the other side you know then we wouldn't have all of these these issues but but we are tackling them now but i think i think with that the reason i raised that issue is with that in mind you know the residential neighborhoods have already been felt kind of you know hit by the things the um changes coming to bonnie bray so it'd be so great to see these mackenna park improvements which had the potential to really improve a park uh really you know get them excited and to see it as an improvement all around so just to kind of tie together what todd was talking about is this once construction was all completely done and everything was was out of the way that we would remove all of this asphalt uh remove the house obviously and then this would all be encompassed into the park whatever whatever is left over and this would be added green space it's it's fairly flat right here there's 40 spaces coming down this side we're looking at a parking lot diet so we're thinking somewhere around 20 parking spaces and then you could use thomas as well if you wanted to parallel park on thomas so that the overall asphalt concrete or even an eco-friendly parking lot that we talked about for the dog park or the tennis center could be included in that so hopefully we're reducing the footprint of of uh parking park on both sides of thomas and scripture yeah so you can park on both sides of these streets or at least on on scripture you can park on both sides of thomas it's wide enough for parking so the thought process is to make a smaller parking lot for about 20 spaces okay so um option one has a parking lot coming off of thomas this is somewhat flat area there's there's one or two small trees here that we could propose to relocate but that would have some grading in there but not as much and then the sidewalk slash trail would be this this trail in yellow it's 10 foot wide it would connect up to the parking lot so people could come down through here and get to the existing playground there is quite a bit of topography from this point to this point so we'd have to either come around here or even put some switchbacks in here to get people down here from from that location option two um is using the existing little alley that goes into the parking it's a little gravel parking lot up in here for staff to get to the water tower this is what it looks like from thomas you can see there's a little gate right there but improve that asset it's not the best looking condition so we could improve that and then put a parking lot similar to what we proposed at south lakes park a little circle type of environment there and then relocate the the playground up onto the hill so it's adjacent to the the parking lot itself the playground does need to be replaced it's part of our 2014 bond program it's the last playground to be replaced so we got to need we need to see exactly what we're trying to fit all that budget together so we so we nailed the 2014 bond program in regards to playground replacement and then here you have the trail again in yellow option three you could put the playground here you could put it over here as well if you wanted to this has a longer trail on it's basically on three sides of the park all of this parking is located on thomas street itself there's no dedicated parking here this all down here on the old bonnie bray would be removed and that'd be added green space and then option four it's probably our our least desirable one because it does get close to these these homes up here we tried working a parking lot in amongst these trees move the playground away from bonnie bray away from scripture whether it's in this proposed location or it's moved over a little bit closer to thomas in this grove of trees we would try to design that to fit it in there along with the parking okay so from us and come back to the question so for a financial summary on the options and a breakdown for the amenities as well as the funding mechanism option three doesn't have a parking lot so you're safe on proposed parking there the sidewalk gets a little more expensive in options three and four because it's a longer longer trail the playground when we're relocating the existing playground to another space within the park we we add a little bit of extra in there just because we have to put the new concrete ribbon around it and all the infrastructure where the playground's at so that increases that cost a little bit the trees and irrigation is pretty much the same regardless and that's proposed coming from the tree mitigation fund and then we included some contingency in there as well uh staff is proposing the parking lot could could start as early as may 2019 if provided direction and then we would work uh the playground probably start a fall construction uh for that once we go through the bid process any questions so several questions um first off have there been any neighborhood meetings on this we haven't we certainly could have one uh to follow this up and get some feedback in regards to you know this is some of the thoughts that came from council and this is you know looking for some feedback i i actually i don't feel ready i mean if everybody else feels ready then i'll put in a recommendation just based on you know what i've studied and the feedback i've gotten the emails that i've gotten from residents um i would ideally like to you know for there to be you know at least one neighborhood meeting and then to hear what was said at the at the neighborhood meeting and to use use that again it's not that i'm working with nothing i have the uh you know the backup plus i have gotten some feedback in writing from from the neighborhood um let's see i so uh and i'll just sum up i took some notes that were just summing up the feedback that has come to me um uh from what i've heard um that uh you know people tend to prefer from people living in the area um people like the grassier option uh with minimum concrete um uh people like the idea of having a neighborhood meeting or somebody had mentioned that i can't imagine anyone to be opposed to that would certainly help me make a decision um pedestrian and bike access was a concern obviously you know concerns that you're taking into account as well um uh you know wheel wheelchair uh stroller access um and uh and two other things um the that uh the playground there were at least two recommendations that the playground that's put in in contrast to the playground that exists now that it be more appropriate for small children for younger children not at least i assume not to the exclusion of older children but that uh parents of younger children were saying that the current playground is not as appropriate so um uh and and then another thing which i don't see um uh you know budgeted in but it might be within these costs is lighting that that was that was another concern um so that's a kind of summary of the feedback that i've gotten from from residents um you know nobody has said or that has been forwarded to me because there's something that was forwarded i think they came to all of council that was from some facebook group that i'm not on of property owners in the neighborhood um but uh i you know haven't heard anybody say that they want an additional parking lot so i would be inclined um for uh that to go with um option with with the option without the parking lot but like i said i would strongly prefer waiting to even decide until hearing from the neighborhood because again this is just i think i got i got an email and then some screenshots from a facebook page that were forwarded to me that's is that's what i'm going on councilmember melson and then councilmember huskell yeah i think we all saw the same i think the idea of a neighborhood meeting makes makes lots of sense uh my my sort of uh hypothesis from what i've read but you know great to kind of check in with the folks in person was that two is maybe closer to where you might land because uh people want to park along thomas anyway that seems to be the part of the park they want to go to uh so it takes some of the pressure off the parking on the street if you have you know whatever off-street parking there is there uh and i think two is a kind of a low impact approach to that um and it you know and then it puts the the playground up near where they want to park so uh that that's that's that's my hypothesis but i do like the idea of hearing uh what the neighbors have to say in person councilmember huskett and mayor pro tem thank you can we go to option option three please sir thank you yeah so for me i'm gonna one rely on the fact that i grew up less than a block from here when kids actually went outside and played uh for at least 15 years of experience so i'm going to lean on that heavily but this option is absolutely best one because pre-tem said that bonnie bray is going to be 80 miles per hour he guaranteed me that and so uh taking out parking here or anything around bonnie bray when when our citizens are doing 80 up and down there won't work uh i just and you get an opportunity to grow the park i mean that's that's a rare thing and so i i absolutely support that you get more more walking trail and and i don't know if we could do can we do crushed granite instead of true sidewalk i mean i don't know how that works but that's just my preference i like that look and that feel uh better uh and then but the park location you can't beat it there's a gazebo here there's one down here there's one over here you know you just can't beat that location plus this thing is on like a 90 degree tilt where it is now and so you have to run off and all that other stuff that that just beats it up and so thomas street is is wider than two of our new new streets i mean it is significant so there's plenty of parking there it gets you off of scripture which is a another raceway pre-tem said i could go 50 there and so um it takes away the the the speed hazards of getting your kids in and out of the car you can open a door don't have to worry about you know someone buzzing by i mean it is absolutely the safest it's closest to all the gazebos and then the bigger bigger kids are going to play basketball they'll park on scripture and and they're safe they're good and there's a gazebo here for them and whatever we put uh where the existing um playground is they can use that for shade structures hang out whatever that is so it really is and it's on top of the hill so you know you you don't have you can drive right to it you don't have to navigate the ups and downs that sort of thing it and so uh that this option is absolutely a no-brainer to me i hope everyone else can see it or i hope people get the requisite confirmation via emails and and out too but i i think this is outstanding approach so thank you i do like the idea of the neighborhood meeting on this i think option three would be my first choice option two would be my second especially with the the previous parking like we're talking about using in southlake that would be much better uh environmentally uh in you know you know how we we we add zero to most every project you have that you bring to us if it's 500 000 we'll make it five million um one thing i would like i would like to know is uh the feasibility or what the neighborhood would think about some type of it doesn't have to be tall but a fence a long bonny bray because of the amount of traffic on there because you're on a downhill slope a kid getting away from you quick can end up out in that street that i think that's something that we need to consider along that route okay anybody else that's member so i am in favor of saving seven hundred thousand dollars and not doing anything um preferably but um because i'm not in favor of adding concrete you know um taking up grass and green space and uh i wasn't in favor of the the bonny bray thing as well so i mean i'm just kind of all out on this project but for for what i can say about it if we're going to move the playground i would prefer i would like it to stay on this side um and not put it closer to the gas wells um just just for preference i don't know if that's going to make a difference or not but in my mind it feels like it's the further away the better um especially if they put more on there i don't know um so that's my um suggestion for the i guess which would be option two um for the moving the playground structure there and it would be flatter and so it would be more accessible for strollers and um and that's not an um this was the park that was planned for um ada um disability inclusive structure place structure and i think with the topography and with the speed that it's not going to be the best park um and we need to get on um and find a backup plan for that um and so um i don't i don't see the need for putting in the the concrete um path i'd like councilmember hudspeth's suggestion on um granted if possible but then again i don't know if that's ada compliant for wheelchairs i don't know how you know that would that would work as well so um that that's just where i am on this i would really like to see the the current parking lot instead of you know paying to make a new one um somehow workable but it sounds like it's not going to be so that's i'm not going to get my way on any of these things i don't think councilmember duff yeah of all these three all four options option three makes more sense to me you know it cost wise it's it's towards the low end and i think we can do without a parking you know building more parking out there so option three is my preference i did forget to say that i am in favor of a neighborhood meeting i think that would be very helpful um to hear what the people around have to say and because they're going to live with it day in and day out so that would be something i would like to see happen and and i don't know how you do the communication but if you just do the if you go out on this side you're not going to get very many people because it's razor ranch so i would prefer it to go maybe 500 feet into the neighborhood instead of um circumference yeah it'll it'll be 500 feet i think from the boundary of the park so it'll it's not from the center it'll go out from it's my understanding is that not correct that goes 500 feet from the boundary of the park if you do a neighborhood meeting i think the neighborhood meetings uh you know that's prudent prudent exercise um but i i i just want to make sure that i understand excluding the excluding the walking trail all right because if that's going to be concrete and you know you can always not have a walking trail i mean there hasn't been one there for many many years but just on the parking you're not increasing the concrete in the park if you take out that parking lot and you cut in half the number of spots that you're adding back so if you don't want the parking lots i get that but to say that we're adding concrete except if you include the the walking trail that probably will i don't know what the calculations are on that but from the parking opportunities you're taking out more than you're putting back in okay if if it goes if it's that option it may be no parking lot all right i just want to make sure so it sounds like that the direction is uh sort of all over the place on the options um but it sounds like the direction is to have a neighborhood meeting and to bring that feedback back to the council and to uh and then we can sort of work through the details of the different options uh councilmember armature i thought maybe i might but i i felt like there was if there was you know consensus i mean they seem like a lot of number threes option number threes that and a neighborhood meeting but well i i think that's counterintuitive i mean if you're going to give direction to do option number three then why aren't you having a neighborhood meeting no no no no i'm just i was just correcting i was just well correcting and also asking just to make sure i heard correctly just because you mentioned that the options were all over the place i just wanted to make sure that i heard correctly that the impression i got was that it was that that there was a strong consensus for option i don't know if there there was three three what were you i said i said two i don't i don't think i heard any ones or fours yeah so the two came back and i don't and i was yeah so yeah so you were so i'm saying you might have three threes councilmember briggs is out altogether except maybe option two john uh council mayor pro tem i don't know what you were i was i was basically option three option two the difference is that you're you're adding that that previous parking so so that that can actually come at a later date as well that previous parking if we find that we've got parking issues on the streets councilmember armater if we're going to give direction for option three because there's a consensus there's no need for a neighborhood meeting i've heard no no i i agree completely i agree completely i'm simply saying the direction is for a neighborhood meeting bring it back and then we'll have we'll probably have a whole another discussion about this so any other questions or comments councilmember hudspeth yeah when you send out that notice skip 316 north bonnie bray just skip that one well get it to the renter not to the not to the homeowner please i'm making out okay you've got your direction yes thank you thank you you bet okay we will now convene uh in closed session oh let me get my i will now convene the closed session at 307 we will consider the following items consultation with attorneys under texas government code section 551.071 if we could prepare the room and all who are not necessary for this meeting if you could uh we do have a quorum present so i'm going to call this regular meeting of the denton city council to order at 6 31 um in the council chambers a couple of matters of housekeeping before we get started uh item 5a has been pulled by staff uh and so that will not that will be heard next week on march the 5th that's in regards to polling locations um i am recovering from a uh respiratory ailment and so i can't talk for long periods of time so councilmember briggs is going to be doing the proclamation tonight and also if i have to step out she will uh take over as presiding and so she's going to go down now and welcome our guests of honor to uh lead us in the pledges to the u.s and texas flags so if you will stand with me if you're able hi i'm excited to welcome the girl scout troops tonight come on down here and lead us in our um pledge allegiance okay whenever y'all are ready you ready we'll start on three one two three pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic of which it stands all right so what yes we're going to say your names okay so take the microphone and tell everybody who you are my name is lily my name is molly my name is sinny my name is elaine my name is betty my name is gwen my name is marian my name is aria my name is ellie my name is mia my name is lily my name is maddie my name is nixie i'm elise hi welcome everybody welcome thank you so much for that thank you so much and i do have a proclamation here and i think elisa are are you coming down or if there's somebody that wants to come down and um talk about the truth you want to say your name and so i'm elise clements and i started bulla harris day six years ago as a part of my silver award so girl scouts will always remember din's first girl scout leader and so her legacy will live on so all right so i will be reading the proclamation tonight and i'm gonna have to work last it okay all right to all whom these presents shall come greetings whereas bulla harris was hired in 1914 by president william h bruce to be the first women's physical education teacher at the north texas state normal school which is now the university of north texas she retired in 1960 after teaching for 46 years and whereas in 1917 she started the first local the first girl scout troop in denton texas in 1922 and became the commissioner of denton girl scout council in 1967 she was awarded her 50-year pin and was made a lifetime member and whereas in 1925 bulla harris started the green jackets organization which is still in existence at the university of north texas and whereas in 1936 miss harris along with 12 other professors started the denton county teachers federal credit union which is currently dacu and whereas she helped organize the north texas chapter of delta psi kappa the women's professional education fraternity and whereas after retiring from the university of north texas she was a charter member of the flow memorial hospital auxiliary where she volunteered over 6 500 hours as a pink lady and whereas on october 25th 2015 miss harris received a texas historical commission under told story marker that is located in the city of denton quaker town park where the girl scout little house once stood now therefore i chris watts mayor of the city of denton texas do hereby declare and proclaim february 27th 2019 as the sixth annual bulla harris day in the city of denton and urge all citizens to recognize and honor the many contributions of bulla harrison thank you for bringing this to us it's wonderful achievements that she did i appreciate that thank you council member amator i had a question i had a question for the girl scouts and you can just answer from your seats are cookies still for sale no oh so i it's okay i went through a box of samoas a box of savannah smiles and thin mints so i have to wait till next year okay they're so good anyway you guys are wonderful and what what a great uh honor and great uh woman to celebrate thank you all right we'll move on to presentations from members of the public if we can roll the tape please the denton city council has adopted rules of procedure including a code of conduct that applies to citizens as well as council members these rules were enacted to promote an orderly process and to preserve decorum here is a brief review of the rules that apply to citizen reports citizens will have four minutes to give a scheduled citizen report and four minutes to give an open mic report there will be an electronic bell when time has expired if the remarks are not concluded by that time the citizen will be asked to stop speaking if the citizen does not cease and a second request is made the mayor will request to have the citizen removed from the council chamber citizens are asked not to approach the dais if a citizen has papers or other materials to hand out to the council please let the city secretary know in advance for scheduled citizen reports the council may initiate discussion or questions following each citizen report for non-scheduled open mic citizen reports the council may listen to citizen speak however because no notice of the subject of the open mic report has been provided to the public in advance the texas open meetings act limits any deliberation or decision by the council to a proposal to place the item on a future agenda a statement of factual policy or a recitation of existing policy citizens are asked to direct all remarks and questions to the council as a whole and not to any individual member please refrain from making abusive personal impertinent profane or slanderous remarks anyone who violates this council rule of procedure may be immediately removed from the council chamber thank you in advance copies of the rules of procedure are available from the city secretary all right and we do have two who have signed up in advance and i have two blue cards for open mics so we'll start out with uh reena hartman is she here okay uh on regarding the proposed coal hunter ranch mmd if you'll state your name and address your time will begin honorable mayor pro tem and council members um thank you for this opportunity to speak and to present this evening my name is reena hartman and i know that my time is short so i'll get right to it i am a seventh generation texan fifth generation in this area i was born and raised in the justin northlake area and have been a lifelong resident of denton county the city of denton is near and dear to me because i attended the selwyn school as a kindergartner danced at liz giego dance school and was on the denton swim team for years with my sisters my own four daughters danced at denton ballet academy for over 15 years so we also had a business in denton for several years i received both of my degrees at unt so denton has been our second home in the interest of full disclosure i am also a member of the town of northlake city council but i address you tonight not as a council member but as a resident of denton county i would like to note a trend in the surrounding communities of citizens voting out councils who approve megadensity developments justin voted out their megadensity council argyle voted out their megadensity council and my own election was the direct result of the former council approving a zoning change for hillwood's development known as pecan square against the wishes of 96 percent of citizen respondents to this development i ran with two gentlemen one of whom was a write-in candidate and we won many considered it a mandate by the people and just last friday our current high density mayor withdrew from the race and we have a new mayor elect in northlake these are if you drive along 407 the images that i've taken here this one was from argyle and it talks about stopping megadensity development this is from a property owner in northlake on about a 15 foot sign to stop high density development in our rural northlake and justin communities talked to councilman let me move on i would like to address the municipal management district proposed by the developers for hunter ranch hillwood and coal ranch stan stratford as you all know by now an mmd gives the taxing authority of the city to a private developer this them this allows them to mitigate the risk associated with their multi-billion dollar development yet they are the ones who benefit financially from their development in the last council meeting which was i believe a special meeting that you all called hillwood representative brian carlock noted that there are 1500 of these mmds alive and well in texas however i would challenge the perspective from which that statement is coming from the developer perspective i am sure that that that it's nice to have reimburse a reimbursement mechanism that exploits the taxing authority of a city against its citizens from a citizen perspective i would challenge you to talk to the people who live in a development that has an mmd i spoke with over 300 residents of canyon falls which has an mmd during my election many people questioned what it was many told me they had no idea that they would have to have an additional tax that their neighbors and other parts of the town don't have and several told me that the extra tax had caused them to make plans to move please remember that the proposed term for this particular mmd for hunter coal ranch is 25 years but it's renewable in perpetuity and this council or a future council will not have much if any control over that renewal if i may how many minutes do i have i'm sorry i don't see a counter 34 seconds okay i just want to run you through this real quickly this is our own development this is where pecan square is located hillwood came in and they wanted to maintain the old kentucky style barn this is what they actually did to it this is a the arena riding arena this is what they proposed then this is what they came back and proposed this is the high density development in their area some of which is up to 12.1 homes per acre this is going to quadruple the number of residents of our town and i would love to entertain any questions that you might have council member armator thank you so you mentioned well first of all i'll say i've made no secret of the fact that i completely agree with you i share your skepticism about these mmds you mentioned you you talk with residents of canyon falls how long did you get a sense for how long it it takes for somebody to live in one of these mmds to start objecting to it and to realize that they've been taxed higher is it with the first you know the first uh tax season that comes upon them does it take a while does it vary person to person it varies person to person and the people that i spoke with many of them in fact i would have to say most of them did not know about the the additional tax they realized it when they got their first tax bill some of them did know about it but very few in the 200 or so odd pages of documentation that you sign whenever you you know buy your house this is in there somewhere but yes they most of the people i spoke with were i would dare say outraged by the fact that they had this extra tax and no one else in their town had it or a few other people well thank you thank you for coming to speak to us sure council member priggs you may or may not be able to to address this question but did your um did the previous council have an agreement with with them because you mentioned you showed a picture of what was proposed what they said they were going to do and then what they actually did um so i'm just curious um was there a an agreement to keep that and then they just didn't there is a developer agreement that's signed um but there is a an enormous amount of latitude within that unless you specifically state and your your legal could probably address this better there's some latitude within that and within a zoning type where they can change things so they did that there was no agreement in place that i knew of that said that they had to keep the barn and in fact the barn as i understand when you buy a piece of property you have it inspected they apparently did or did not have it inspected before they purchased it but after they purchased it they determined that it had um that it couldn't be salvaged the old barn couldn't be salvaged and so as a consequence they tore it down which i understand um but okay they had proposed something different than what we are ultimately getting okay thank you thank you very much thank you appreciate your time our next speaker is mark brady it's mark here regarding unfair billing practices by the city of dent utilities not seeing any response so we'll move on to our open mic uh and our first speaker will be shane warner horn good evening my name is shane warren my address is 1716 equal drive unit 325a so i got my toenail pulled out today and it's about four on the one to ten pain scale as i speak so let it never be said that unt students don't care about municipal government i would like to address council members about the proposed poll application on campus because i had planned to come to this meeting to talk about it on that agenda item and then it was postponed but i felt compelled to come and speak i understand that two council members can't vote because of a rule which i believe is the equivalent of representative stuckey not being able to vote on any college bills because unt exists in his district but regardless i must address the council members who are able to vote on this legislation so like i said bicto hurts really bad i don't have a car so i would not be able to have walked here to present today if professor lane had not driven me here if i had not had a friend with a car or a car of my own many students on campus especially students who live on campus and thus live in dent in nine months of the year also are in this situation as somebody who is an sga senator who has registered hundreds of voters in previous elections i can tell you that it is really hard to get students to vote in a specific election when you first have to overcome the logistical hurdle of convincing them to take however long it may take to walk to a polling location when they don't have a car to have to go through the indignity of asking somebody who wasn't going to vote anyway to drive them all the way over there it just makes everything a lot more difficult and i think as somebody who wants unt students to become more invested in dentin in the long term it's a lot harder to do that when there are institutional barriers to voting and when i was thinking about how to put it in a way that might be more relatable i think about the state policy concerning systematically under funding municipal governments now i'm just talking about a hypothetical state but let's call it texas so like you systematically under fund and don't provide the necessary resources to get a task done and then when people complain about it you either hear hey there's a conflict of interest because you were elected to represent a municipality or you hear well if you really wanted to get this done that bad you would just figure out a way to do it unfortunately that it feels more like a petty comeback than a realistic policy proposal to figure out how to get more people to vote or how to get municipal governments funded adequately if we're going to stick with that analogy and i think it would be a lot easier for me sga senators various non-partisan activists on campus to get students to come to vote in elections and since they're non-partisan elections there's not really a way to game it for a certain agenda if they had a polling location on campus which unt is enthusiastically offered to provide for both early voting and election day voting thank you thank you do you have any questions sorry uh no okay thank you very much our next speaker will be jennifer lane i think shane did a beautiful job my name is jennifer lane i live at 1526 willowwood street denton and i think shane did a really very good job of demonstrating the quality of student and the thinking of the students and why they want to vote and how they need to vote and how attentive they are i think that perhaps if there is if there remains the likelihood that some of you may not be able to vote that perhaps first and foremost look at the possibilities of the locations that are very near campus as opposed to the locations on campus but if it's possible to accept the enthusiastic offer that unt has made it would benefit far more than the many many students on the campus it would also benefit the people who are living and working there particularly during early voting who might be voting you know find it convenient to vote in the elections in other parts of the county but at that location or at the location that's nearby during early voting on election day obviously it's going to be district three and it would be many people who would be walking as like shane and he really makes it very vivid that he actually has an injury today so this you know i didn't even know that i didn't even know if he needed a ride and he did and so it just sort of really brings the point home that even walking which is perhaps you know more time than the average student has it's made worse if there's any any other impediment or other obstacle going on i i think that i also think that a non-partisan election is where students should begin you know if they can obviously the attention and the media and so forth brings them out and register they register and they participate when there's you know attention being paid on these national elections but i think they will be so contributive to a non-partisan election because it's issues based and they have no reason to turn it into a partisan election they have just only want to know about who's running and what's going on and and whether or not they care in the last round of voter registrations which were thousands students were happy to learn that they would be eligible to vote in the districts where they live because they were not going to be moving between last summer this fall and now so they are you know those who are registered in the fall are ready to go for the municipal elections some who registered a little too late were excited to think that their first election would be something a little less overwhelming any case there's a lot of reason to encourage the campus community and the surrounding community to vote in this election thank you the more votes the more people vote the more votes for everyone thanks thank you we'll move on to the consent agenda councilmember priggs i move to approve every item except b k and m which we will be pulling councilmember armator i second all right we have a motion and a second for the consent agenda except for items bk and m let's vote on the board and the motion carries six to zero we will now take up items bk and m individually let's start with item b consider approval of resolution of the city of denton in support of house bill 749 and senate bill 338 which deal with raising the minimum age to 21 for the purchase of cigarettes and e-cigarettes good evening sara kichler director of public affairs this is a resolution of support for house bill 749 and senate bill 338 which would raise the minimum age for the sale and use of tobacco and e-cigarettes to 21 so just my quick way of background why this item is before council tonight we had a work session on january 15th where staff presented information regarding the sale and use of tobacco including age restrictions at the conclusion of that work session council directed staff to do two items one was to work on an educational campaign regarding e-cigarettes in partnership with the denton county public health department and with denton isd staff has already met with the denton county public health department once and are meeting with them again later this week with the denton county healthy healthy communities coalition tobacco work group so we're continuing work on that item and we'll provide updates the second was that for staff to monitor state legislation as well as prepare a resolution of support for council consideration for two proposed bills that would raise the minimum age to 21 years old statewide it's a little bit about that proposed legislation these were identical bills that were filed on january 11th house bill 749 has been referred to the public health committee on february 21st and senate bill 338 has not been referred to a committee yet these bills would raise the minimum age to 21 for the distribution possession purchase consumption and receipt of cigarettes e-cigarettes and tobacco products so in other words this the proposed bills would apply to retailers they cannot sell or anyone give away to anyone under the age of 21 it would also apply to individuals an individual cannot possess or use tobacco or e-cigarettes if they are under the age of 21 so the action item before council is if you'd like to approve a resolution of support for these proposed bills if you would do so staff would communicate council's position to our legislators as well as the legislators that serve on the committees where the bills are assigned to read register support on the on the bills we continue to monitor them keep council updated and we'd also send a copy of the resolution to texas 21 they're a group of organizations who have come together to advocate for this from governments to health care to other advocacy groups so that is the item before you and happy to answer any questions you might have councilmember melter uh not a question i just you know wanted to share a couple of comments from the excellent staff report that was provided for us uh tobacco still the leading cause of preventable death in the united states it's a free country but we're talking about what constitutes underage use uh 95 and this is all quoting from you know your work 95 of adult smokers begin smoking before they turn 21 and studies show that the ages of 18 to 21 are a critical period when many smokers move from experimental smoking to regular daily use and then regarding e-cigs i note that uh it was provided to us that in the 2016 report of the surgeon general e-cigarette use among u.s youth and young adults is now a major public health concern it increased 78 among high school students from 2017 to 2018 but where i really want to go with this is that um uh it's already illegal to uh for say high school senior to distribute uh the these products to someone younger but we hear anecdotally it happens the issue is brought to my attention actually by commissioner hugh colman uh the issue seniors do have access it's not allowed for them to distribute it but this legislation moves the locus of control to include our responsible local merchants i hope that the disd board will follow suit i hope that the county commissioners will follow suit and i hope we have a unanimous resolution today councilmember brink on the sorry i'm looking at my um information because i i thought the current legislation proposed it may have been one or the bills but it um concerning the legal age of sale and puts the burden on the merchant and not the um the user it doesn't penalize the user um is that the one that didn't make it yet or um was it in both pieces of legislation the bills are identical so it is in both pieces of legislation um so the city of san antonio ordinance is only on the retailers um where this would be statewide for both retailers and individuals okay so that's the difference yeah it's basically taking what's existing in the health and safety code today and raising it from the age of 18 to the age of 21 so the age is the only thing changing the majority yes the majority of legislation is raising the age from 18 to 21 okay thank you any other questions or discussions not i would entertain a motion councilmember melter i move approval councilmember armator i second all right we have a motion and a second for agenda item 4b let's vote on the board and the motion carries six to zero we'll move on to agenda item k which is consider approval of resolution the city of denton uh authorizing the mayor to commit to a campaign goal to improve a 10-minute walk to parks campaign good afternoon council gary packen director of parks and recreation wanted to spend a few minutes of your time tonight and talk to you about a 10-minute walk campaign that is being held by a texas or i'm sorry the trust for public lands international parks recreation association as well as urban land institute this started a little over a year ago there's currently 229 cities have joined on to this campaign and this urges cities to actively pursue a 10-minute walk or approximately half half mile distance to each park within the city for each to each resident this ensures that a 10-minute walk is accessible to everybody in the community their goal is to have it nationwide obviously that's an extreme challenge but we have an opportunity to consider some improvements to our community as well so it the the benefits of a 10-minute walk include access to nature preservation of park space space health and wellness opportunities accessibility to the community and underserved populations economic investment as well as building community in general the trust for public land put together a website is called park serve.com and this took data from every city and it calculated they have an algorithm that identifies the density of communities where populations are and where parks are and it automatically generates a half mile distance from every park space according to their data we're at about 40 percent of our population which is a little over 50 000 people have access to it from a 10-minute walk to our parks so that means there's about 75 000 people that don't the national average is 54 percent across the us and it's about 55 percent in texas so you can see here these are other cities in texas have pledged to the campaign we're at 40 percent and the average again is at 55 percent the one thing that we would be working with tpl is they have us down for 43 parks and that's not accurate we're at 33 so that number 40 percent could could actually go down so we have to go in and figure out how they've calculated that and basically help them clean up the database to make sure it's it's more accurate what this what this property does not include is golf courses cemeteries hoa's in private parks that are not publicly accessible to give you an idea what the website looks like and it's it's free and open to the public and go in and put denton texas in there we'll show you all this information but they put in some some priority points of just based on density and access to parks so the red area is where we have dense population that do not have a 10-minute walk accessibility in the community the green spaces are parks and you can see that gray area is where that coverage is being optimized this is missing some text on my slide there i don't know what happened to that some of the goals that we would set out is provide connection to quality parks to meet the needs denton as a whole develop a five and 10-year action plan five years tpl's action plan 10 years would be fitting into our parks master plan so we would make sure that's seamless between both approaches we would our goal would be to at least meet or exceed the national average and maintain that as we grow and then obviously would implement this as a measurement tool during our master plan process and what this can do is it allows us to identify or a criteria that allows us to identify where we need to buy parkland or if someone suggests hey we should look at this parkland if we have already two properties within a 10-minute walk then that may not be a high priority for us but we can use that and say okay this is an it's this is an area that's solid red within our community we need that space to make sure we have two to three thousand people that could possibly have access to that space so an action plan strategy that we've provided to you and your ais is uh select an attainable walk goal which would be that 54 to get to the national average if we could identify eight to ten new parks that's approximately 16 to 20 000 people so we could make that improvement uh significant significant improvement right away um a measurement strategy would be to approve accessibility with a minimum financial resources so what we want to do is maximize our opportunities but try not to spend our way out of that paper bag per se so we would look at ways through cooperative agreements and those cooperative agreements can be with educational providers whether it's disd unt twu private schools where we can have cooperative agreements with them for access to their green space or their playgrounds during non-school hours uh homeowners associations that's willing to allow the general public to come in and use their space railroad and utility land owners and easements uh if dme has a corridor running through the city that we might be able to put a trail on that would improve that as well uh private developer developers as our community grows and new developments are proposed that we make sure that we get adequate property to meet those needs within those communities and then some other action plan strategies is to locate underutilized city property that we can improve enhance and develop as well as identify potential land for parks we talked about this earlier whether it's preservation of of groves of trees preservation of open space or a combination thereof that that fit into those red and orange areas on the map that you'd seen that's a way that we can improve our uh our 10-minute walk goal so our next steps is if city council adopts a resolution this evening under consideration the mayor could sign the campaign commitment we'd work with tpl to update their database to make sure our numbers are accurate we would continue to evaluate our inventory make sure that's accurate as well and give that to them and then we would start looking at cooperative agreement opportunities with a number of those uh community partners that we had mentioned and then integrate all that into our parks master plan that we're working on right now that we'll be bringing to you uh in november of this year councilmember armatoria's question so um i'm almost at a loss for words to explain how articulate how excited i am about this and how much this will do for city of dentin from a quality of life perspective from an environmental perspective we're talking about preserving green space for the public use uh that will not be developed for any other use except to have parks and i just wanted to thank the parks department for for putting this together and i can't wait till the kids find out and the parent parents of of of kids who live so far from a park that on the weekends their kids say can you drive us can you drive us over to eureka i mean it's great that we can drive to eureka anyone can um and and also i know that you are well aware that how important it is that there be walkable uh and and ada and stroller accessible sidewalks going to those parks you know and how this factors into the plan so thank you and i'm just so thrilled and when the public uh finds out about this again especially the children there's going to be a lot of public support so thank you thank you all right uh council member breaks yeah so um i want to echo those sentiments as well and um i'm just really excited that the 74 000 um city of dentin residents that live that don't live within a 10 minute um walk within a park hopefully um we can get that taken care of soon and this just means more open space you know for a city and when you hear residents talk that's a big concern of theirs um the loss of of habitat and open space and and trees so um not only is it going to be good for our residents our you know our children our air quality um but it's just good all around so i appreciate that and with that i make a motion to approve council member melter it's great stride forward for a livable den walkable den i second all right we have a motion a second for for item four k uh any further discussion let's vote on the board and the motion carries six to zero thank you gary all right we'll move on to item 4m uh consider adoption of an ordinance city of dentin regarding speed limits in several areas good evening council members my name is pretend they smoke traffic engineer for the city and my presentation is going to be pretty short it's a hard act to follow for uh after gary um quickly uh this is speed limits there are three segments we're talking about this evening and the first one is a brand new facility from tech stock fm 2499 between i-35e and fm 2181 uh that segment was uh recently built um and tech stock conducted a speed study uh there was no speed limit on the books for the city at this point because it's a new facility so we want to put it in our ordinance that's the first segment second segment is us three eight uh 377 between i-35 actually it's south of i-35 starting um right after the railroad track the segment between i-35 and railroad track is 40 miles an hour already between that and fm 1830 and then the last segment is cowling road this uh is on the northern side of the city and uh there's another visual on the next slide currently it doesn't have a posted speed limit so it's defaulted to a 30 mile an hour private face ship speed limit what we're proposing is 2499 tech stock conducted the study their speed studies came out and they're recommending a speed limit of 45 miles an hour between i-35e and fm 2181 um staff has reviewed it and feels comfortable that the study um follows all the state and federal requirements and this is this is the segment we're talking about um so that will be 45 miles an hour uh staff recommends that the second segment is us 377 uh this stretch and we're focused on the stretch between the railroad and 1830 uh it's recommended at 45 miles an hour it's currently 50 miles an hour they are um tech start is constructing it's under construction right now it's widening the the segment this particular segment uh from two lane to a six lane divided facility and they would like to for us to enforce a lower speed limit given that it's a construction zone there are barriers that are low profile barriers that tech start is using so that that was a recommendation for coming from tech start during the construction after the construction is done typically when a facility is widened from a two lane to a six lane similar to us 380 tech start we'll go back and redo a study and after that we'll bring again an item to update the speed limit on this segment the last segment if you can bear with me this this was the only map i could find this is the city limits along i-35 this is the northern edge of the city i think sanger begins right about here it's cowling road coming in this is rector road 156 joins in here at the bottom sangers right here there's a small sliver of the road that is currently within the city this is county portion currently posted at 40 miles an hour this portion that's going north is also county posted at 40 miles an hour so this currently is a speed trap considered to be a speed trap because there's nothing posted as far as the city goes we're just um working with the police department trying to clean up our books and make sure that this has a posted speed limit and we can um enforce it the way we want it so i think that's it i'm done with okay council member riggs on the on the changes i know that 2499 did not have a speed limit and so people have just been going really as fast as they can on that one so there's not um going to be i guess when they see a sign then they'll know that there is one um my other question on fort worth drive because that is a change and then cowling i guess is just making it consistent with the opposite end so that's going to clean that up but as far as 2499 and 377 especially since it's going to be lowered will there be um are enough clearly posted signs and how will that work with the police and the violations will they give warnings for a certain amount of time for people to get used to that change because that's pretty significant yeah i think typically there are a few weeks of time period that pd works with us right after posting it speed limit signs will be posted after major intersections so if someone enters at robinson anything north of that in either direction will be posted so there will be clear signs and pd will issue warnings in the initial phase of it as as we open this up is it possible on 2499 to get um one of those electronic signs so that it says speed limit now posted at um for the first week or so so people can see it in a larger you know area yeah we we can absolutely do that okay thank you council member armator yeah and now i'm not i'm not sure that this is part of those signs that you're talking about but i was actually gonna gonna ask about those um those electronic signs that have the speed that say the speed that you're going those are really effective i don't know how many of those actually the city owns i know that there was one on oak street so those are radar feedback signs that's how we in certain instances collect data as far as how how fast people are moving so those act primarily as a traffic calming device to let people know but that won't be deployed on this particular section that's something that we use as a traffic calming plus data collection equipment and we have currently a traffic department has to we have two did you say correct okay so that's a limited that's a limited number because i was going to suggest and i and i make sense that that's the purpose but it does additionally have the effect of especially for drivers who are frequently drive that area and are just on autopilot they see something new they might not pay attention to you and a non-electronic sign anyway the kind of sign that councilwoman briggs is talking about would serve the purpose as well thank you councilmember haspeth i move approval councilmember briggs second all right we have a motion and a second on item four m uh there's no further discussion let's vote on the board and the motion carries six to zero we'll now move on to our items for individual consideration as mentioned earlier item 5a has been withdrawn item 5b we will take out which is considered option of an ordinance authorizing the eighth amendment for professional services between the city of denton and freese nickels union council uh todd estes city engineer is definitely a little scary we say the eighth amendment but there are reasons behind that peck four just as a quick overview peck four is actually a conglomeration of multiple projects it's in blue you see listed above those are the water wastewater and components of elmond locusts and a couple of side streets in there at prairie as well as at mulberry where we're doing relocation of facilities and upsizing of certain facilities as well as what you see in red which is the first two phases of the peck four stormwater project that project is the first two phases of four that remain that remove about 61 acres of floodplain out of the downtown area so the current contract had seven previous amendments amendments one through five were from 2009 2015 for various additions to water uh what specifically wastewater and stormwater components of the project and then element amendments six and seven or with regard to certain utility plans need to go into the elmond locust areas we started adding on the streets component for a reminder tex dot is going to come back and repave both elmond locust from eagles university when we get done with these utility improvements that project is still slated to go forward this year these improvements just recently let for construction amendment seven was because the drainage criteria manual had changed in the interim so we made some revisions minor revisions to the plans themselves a very large box culvert essentially 11 million dollars worth of construction in this total package when we go out to build this project so a number amendment number eight was a direct result of when we bid peck four phases one two last fall those two phases came in higher than we had anticipated and we only had one bidder significantly higher we went back to the drawing board reached out to the contracting community to figure out what had gone on that we were so far off in the bid amounts and the engineers approved estimate when we first bid this project made some changes to the plans themselves so that that project would go forward with a better bid we did attract multiple bidders this time around this also includes some of the construction phase services when we do go into construction where the consultant we retain on board as a project team member to make sure that the project is delivered as efficiently and correctly as possible so we are recommending that council approves this amendment for this design contract an amount of 182,315 which would be amendment number eight and i'll be here for any questions council member breaks what were some of the changes that you made so the original plan was a what we call cast in place in other words we're going to go out and just build one massive box with concrete when you're building it in place it means i got to put molds essentially in the in the way of wood forms and a lot of concrete and because the boxes were very large i think they were 13 to 14 foot wide maybe closer to 17 come to think of it and the ultimate configuration through certain segments that is a very long span without anything in the middle to support it so the concrete itself is thicker there's a lot more steel in it it just gets a lot more expensive all the way around so one of the revisions we made is we went back to the drawing board and said okay well if we couldn't do this one massive box what would two or three boxes look like so that they're smaller what we would call precast or they're built in a factory and then a crane lifts them in and drops them in place so that was another option an alternative we even came up with a third alternative that was two smaller poured in place boxes as well the current bids that we did receive here recently those bids came back with each of the three bidders choosing one of those options as their preferred option so it was an interesting mix but we did get better pricing the second time around okay and they all all the options do the same thing the intention of the original goal yes absolutely without extra harm yes okay okay council member breaks i move to approve council member husbeth second all right we have a motion and a second on agenda item 5b there's no further discussion let's vote on the board and the motion carries six to zero moving on to item 5c consider adoption of an ordinance the city of denton to declare the intent to reimburse capital expenditures of general government with certificates of obligation uh in principal amount not to exceed 4.6 million dollars sorry about that okay good evening members of council david gains assistant director of finance i have a brief presentation on this item this item is required by federal law for us to document our intent to reimburse ourselves for tax-exempt bonds this is not approving the bond sale but is approving us the ability to move forward with these projects so we have the the projects listed here the first is our police facilities project these are the costs related to design land acquisition of the police facility study in total that project is four million dollars this 1.45 million dollars is a portion of that the remainder comes from previously identified capital police projects that we're delaying and uh we as this is the priority at this time the next section of one portion of 1.5 million dollars is related to streets improvements a portion that has hickory creek realignment which is an a we had an hdr contract at a previous council meeting to kick off that process of design and feasibility 400 000 of that 1.5 million is dedicated to the hickory creek realignment the remainder is coming from uh previous uh previously approved projects with geo and co funding that we had an impact fee budget amendment to free up some of those funds the remaining 1.1 million dollars were are intended to identify small transportation projects that were funded from the general fund over the past two years that will allocate this money too which will free up resources in the general fund the final project is uh our server refresh and from our uh technology for technology equipment this was in our fy 1819 cip and it's a replacement and upgrades to our servers and other it equipment we have staff available to answer any questions on any of those items moving forward here are some of the dates that we have for our next steps with this particular co issuance we'll have a notice of intent in april and may will be our uh our projected bond sale date with funds becoming available in june of 2019 at that time likely we'll i've already spent the money so really that money would come in and we would just reimburse ourselves for the funds that we've already spent i am available for any questions on any in the process or any of the projects that we've listed council member melton so just to reiterate it's not changing any amount that we've agreed to spend it's it's a way to deal with a timing issue of financing sure i will point out point out one thing this the three million dollars from those first two projects those were made available from our fy 1819 original cip we had a reduction in our vehicle replacement amounts freeing up that money allowed us to go forward with those first two projects the server refresh was already in our cip those two are taking the place of those vehicle replacements council member husbeth i move approval council member melton second all right we have a motion and a second on agenda item 5c uh there's no further discussion let's vote on the board and the motion carries six to zero and then i move on to agenda item 5d consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of denton uh for professional services with o'brien engineering uh for the lake forest park pond in the amount of 347 000 good evening council member my name is drew up and i'm the superintendent of parks and recreation i'm bringing forth to you today for their contract for the engineering of the construction documents dredging of the pond and the dam repair replacement so this is lake forest retention pond and dam uh we'll go through the pond history just so just the overview photos of what the pond looked like from 2001 and 2018 a depth survey we took back in sept September and a summary of the analysis that we've gone through for the past few years this is what they the lake looked initially in february 2001 the city bought the lake and the property of lake forest that now like forest park sits on in september of 2002 that's what it looked like in 2005 2008 2014 september of 17 and march of 18 as you can tell throughout the throughout the years the siltation has moved into the pond and caused the the vegetation to continue to grow and over and overtake sections of the pond these were this the depths that we took back in september and speaking with staff that was back here that was working for the city of denton parks and recreation department back in 2001 2002 the original depths near the dam which is in this area here instead of the 12 feet 12 to 17 feet that we have now was around 20 to 21 feet at that time to go through a little bit of the history of what we have in 2009 tcq did an inspection the dam is a low risk dam and so therefore the inspections happen about every 10 years and so tcq came out and inspected the dam found the dam in the poor condition and made the the following requirements 2011 parks and recreation went out with cpny and they looked at the structure and of course the the probable maximum flood that it did not meet their 25 percent and then of course that the dam likely needed to be raised or reconstructed in 2014 parks and recreation hired kimberly horn to do a floodplain study just to do the hydraulic modeling and see what the surface level was for the hundred year event for that flood it went to bond in 2014 for a little over a million dollars was which was not granted in 2017 after our record-breaking rains in 2015 the dam did fail in areas the parks and recreation department worked with the drainage department to repair those areas and rebuild the spillway at that time and the outflow in 2017 back in october of 17 we hired tnp and they conducted the following and made recommendations that the dam needed to be repaired and it did not meet the hydraulic capacity and tonight we bring you o'brien o'brien's engineering plan and with that plan they're going to provide construction construction documents all the cost estimates for construction so we can go out to bid after the documents are complete project scheduling and they will do the water rights with tcq the dam breach and mapping in emergency action plan the rehabilitation design and the dredging plan of the pond and the clue to include other things they will also be there whenever this project goes out for construction they'll be the engineer on record and with that do we have any questions customer breaks so the lake looked significantly different from before but it looked it just looked a lot different um like it's not really alive and i i see their shirts over here it says save our lake and and it looks like there's there's not a lot of um it's not healthy so i'm curious if there's other issues besides the silt um that might be chemical runoff from the water or if there's quality water quality testing that we do on it and there's no other issues i mean i just want to make sure that if we do the engineering part of it that it's not going to do more damage um that it's you know there's not other things that we're that we could be looking at but we're not uh yes ma'am we have looked on look with that we've also met with many different departments including environmental services and with that um you know they they go out and periodically test the waters and we haven't had anything come back on on the lake forest pond that anything's contaminated uh with that we are working with them also and we will be installing in-house we will be we will be installing check dams further up the creek that supplies the water for for this lake to be able to control the silt in the future okay all right thank you we do have a number of cards here from individuals requesting to speak on this item so we'll go through those uh i believe they get three minutes is that correct yes okay so uh i'll call your name when you come up to the podium uh when you state your name and address your time i'll begin the first speaker will be paul jenkins good evening my name is paul jenkins i'm a resident lake forest my neighbors are standing and sitting behind me here give me a little support uh i walk by the lake every day sometimes twice a day uh the colors around the lake in the morning at sunrise or at sunset can be spectacular it's a wonderful place uh the lake supports a large number of wildlife and we're concerned about losing these folks uh some of these wildlife are owls woodpeckers falcons red-winged blackbirds doves crows we also have raccoons coyotes gucks there's a bobcat around we used to have a couple of turkeys but i haven't seen them lately uh on the lake itself with the mallard ducks a lot of other species of ducks that i'm not able to identify we uh we have the geese we have egrets blue heron occasionally a beaver sometimes snakes we also have frogs turtles snails uh recently uh we've had some visitors i don't know that'll show or not uh pelican oh there you go i took a picture of him about 10 days ago they uh they stayed with us a couple of evenings got their strength back and took off from wherever they were going uh another thing that most people are not aware of is the lake also supports fresh weather clams here's a shell i picked up by the dam several years ago i have other memories of the lake also uh my wife was an invalid she was confined to a wheelchair spent a lot of time in our health care facility i would roll her out there in a very short period of time uh her attitude changed she started feeling a little better uh she could watch the action on the lake in the summertime the fish are jumping out of the lake the dragonflies are flying around and after we spent some time out there she was more relaxed she felt a little bit better and was sort of energized uh by the time i took her back she had a little spark in her eye a little color in her cheeks that's one of my memories so i appreciate you listening to me and help us save our lake thank you i want to thank you for um for sharing sharing that um and uh coming out with your the with the photo and your your memories um you know i i realized as soon as you started speaking that uh you know when i was speak when i was speaking earlier about our our new parks plan um and having parks 10 minutes away i i kept thinking and talking about how much the kids are going to love it you know this is exactly parks are for everybody everybody and the story about your wife i i will never forget that thank you so much for sharing next speaker will be eda smith thank you for allowing us to visit with you tonight and to tell you some of our concerns about our lake if you state your name and address to to begin your name and address to start out my name is eda smith and i live at lake forest i have lived there for seven years and when i came to look at a cottage i chose one that backed up to what we call the creek and that's because the water was there and i love the water and so for the time i have been there i have enjoyed very much being near the lake seeing the animals and the fowl that come into the lake and visiting with people who live not at lake forest but in the general denton community when i first moved there there were people who had grown up there their parents had lived there and they were showing their grandchildren the lake and so this has been a great thing for denton for for many years but the growth to the east of us which of course gave us a lot of new homes and walmart has really created a problem for the the running water there and the reeds and the grasses then cut that off from from running into the lake because we because of where i live um i have noted some dangerous kinds of things there have been two nights in this last month that i got up at night set the alarm to get up at night and went out to check the water of the level in the creek because it can't run into the lake now so it's backing up and there's a roadway between my cottage and the creek and it has backed up across the roadway and just up to the grass toward my cottage so that's a real concern to me and of course our assisted living center is very close by and it has had water in it a couple of times and that's that's a concern so thank you very much for planning to begin a study that would provide safety for all of us and for all persons who want to enjoy that beautiful lake thank you thank you next up will be paula blind my name is paula jocelyn blind and i will preface this before i start is that i live at 3900 monaceto but i've been in dentons in 1960 so i'm sort of like old old dirt here i would like to give a brief history as i know it about the lake we know as lake forest i've lived in that area for over 30 20 23 years and my dad lived at lake forest village for five beginning in 2004 at that time you could stand in the window on the fourth floor and look at the lake extended all the way up and even with those windows it was beautiful to see and many people from surrounding neighborhood enjoyed the lake and so did the wildlife over the years much construction occurred on the north and east of lake forest village and the city of denton allowed the contractors to move dirt build subdivisions wal-mart the l.a nelson elementary school and they were they were probably required but they did not put up the barriers and so consequently that did not protect the streams and the creeks that run into lake forest at this moment the city of denton is allowing the contractors on the widening of teasley in that area their work and they have no barriers now you've fired them recently and so now that dirt is just lying exposed and the last rain there's there's no there's no barrier anything to protect that so the lake is filled with dirt that washed downstream and vegetation and sedimentation have taken over the lake today if you stand on the fourth floor and look out the window you will not see any lake below but you can see that much of the lake has disappeared and you can see that by the pictures earlier this lake is not only important to those that use the park for recreation and exercise but also in controlling the water flow during heavy rains to low-lying downstream neighborhoods i'm asking the council to please step up and correct what has happened to lake forest this lake is important and should not continue to be unprotected and neglected thank you thank you and our final speaker is levana durie good evening my name is levona durie and i live at 3900 montecito drive in lake forest village a few years ago lake forest was a beautiful serene crystal clear lake and that was the reason that originally it was called crystal lake it was because of the of the clearness of the water residents could look right out the windows of the mid-rise and cottages and see the beautiful stream the lake and the wildlife now all that is visible is a stagnant murky odor-filled shallow bed of water full of trashy dead vegetation that blocks the view of the lake and keeps the stream from running properly into the lake as edda just explained a moment ago due to the city of denton's inability to enforce the regulations of contractors who were building developments upstream and control the sedimentation runoff into the lake the growth of vegetation is smothering the lake's life away its depth now ranges as low as two feet deep many of the fish species are gone and much wildlife has vanished we do have some coming back as paul explained the serenity of the once beautiful lake is fading the lack of water surface no longer allows the amazing sunrise and sunset and beautiful glow across the lake surface that we used to see the dam is currently closed due to safety reasons residents from lake forest and other surrounding communities both north and south have lost the walkability around the lake access to the trails around the lake and to and from the dog park and people can no longer fish off the dam families take many assisted living residents and health care residents for walks or rides around the lake or sometimes just to sit and enjoy the sunshine and water my question is how and why has the city allowed this beautiful lake and its environs to totally deteriorate so quickly over the past few years the most important question now is what is the city going to do to reverse this tragedy and how fast the lake is quickly declining and so time is of the essence as a time is of the essence as a resident of lake forest village who walks along the lake every day enjoys the wildlife finds serenity in the picturesque views i personally plead with each of you the council to pass the request today in the amount of three hundred and forty seven or eighty thousand dollars for an engineering evaluation of the dam and the lake and then to do whatever is necessary to fund the amount required to return this lake to the beauty it once held i thank you for allowing me to speak and i would personally like to invite any of you to come out and we would give you a lovely tour of our lake and council member melzer has a question for you not specifically for you ma'am actually uh kind of for anybody in a blue shirt blue t-shirt not you man i hear everyone tonight as as i heard you you know when visiting uh out at lake forest you know that we're concerned about the loss of the lake and and the sort of apparent near death of the pond but is there anybody here who's looking for something other than the action that's being requested of us tonight that's the part that i'm unclear in other words if we vote i'm looking for some indication in body language if we vote for this study which includes uh you know studying replacing the dam dredging and preventing silt from coming in in the future is that what you're looking for i would say yes and drew huffman could probably answer that better than i but yes we want we want whatever is necessary to restore that lake to what it once was and uh not only for the enjoyment of it but i think it also from what i understand has an important uh duty in regulating the the rainfall and streams and the rain and the flooding that goes down to the oaks amato cito and some of the other residential areas maybe even thistle hill i'm not really sure i don't know all the land layout but but i think it's an important lake and we need it in denton for sure thank you thank you all right any further discussion on the item if not i'll entertain councilmember armator so um i just wanted to say um well first of all thanks again for for coming out to speak um shortly after i was elected i received an invitation uh from the from the good samaritan right by the lake to come and speak uh and i had actually um had never uh seen the lake before and that was the key concern of the residents there uh and they showed me the lake uh and told me the story of the lake and um i i was blown away um and you know that that uh was when you were concerned became um my concern uh so thank you so much for your your activism and your voices uh and i i think that this is a great lesson in how we need to be um continue to be proactive and in uh in the future to to preserve um so that we're not reactively you know looking back and you know trying trying to undo uh undo past past damage um you know it's also a lesson in uh that as as great as it is to to grow as a city and have new development that there's a price to pay for that and we can have natural habitat and uh development existing in harmony but we need to be sure that we that people clean up after their messes we protect areas that need to be protected um and uh you know uh so anyway i i just i thank you so much and i'm i'm sorry that uh it has has taken so long but please this day is has finally come so thank you council member breaks i have a few questions for staff anybody anybody that wants to try to answer my questions okay so um it's a very lovely lake and you heard um the individuals here want it to be restored so is this our solution for that restoration or um is that is that going to accomplish that my other question is this contract is it just for um is it is it for the work or is it just to tell us what we need to do and then we'll have another item which will individually kind of go through and tell us what we have to do and the repercussions of it so this contract excuse me this contract specifically would be for the engineering analysis and design of the dam itself the design would not be just for what that dam is today and restoring to its current condition it's planning for tomorrow the dam does not convey the amount of water that we would consider needed which is why it has gotten poor inspection reports from the tcq in the past but dams are always cost prohibitive to try to renovate or restore to what they should be so we we do have to make a better spillway the dam needs to be a little bit more substantial than what it is currently and then there will be an ongoing maintenance after the fact so this contract gets the design and construction documents complete then we would have to bid the work out following that so we would come back to you with that contract okay so this isn't actually for the dredging of the lake and and restoration of the lake okay this is for not only the construction documents for the dam but also the construction documents of what the dredging will take place how much each part of the lake it's 10 the lake is 10 acres so they'll fully look at exactly what the they'll go out there and take more comprehensive depths of the lake and then tell us based upon all the analysis of how deep the lake has to be and what it has to be also we've met several times with texas parks and wildlife we also have a meeting march 9th coming up with texas parks and wildlife and they wanted to wait until march april time frame to do a comprehensive analysis on the wildlife that especially the fish that are in the pond during this time of the year you know the water's colder so the fish are closer to the bottom so they're going to do an analysis on what the wildlife is in the lake now so once the dam is repaired completely and the pond is dredged then we can return the wildlife to what it was what it is and better than what it is right now that includes habitat for them you know egg laying areas for them and they'll look at the analysis and they helped us back in january we had a contractor come out and clear the cattails in the area as you saw in the pictures most of the lilies were already dead because of you know that time of year but we had a contractor come out and they cleared the cattails in specific areas mainly up near the good samaritan village all of that area we left certain pockets of cattails because the fish and other wildlife have to have that aquatic vegetation in the lake to be able to survive it's a natural ecosystem that survives there so that it's good to have those pockets of areas and if we concentrate those areas and keep those areas live and well and keep the other areas that that's not needed in the lake you know out then we're better off we also have a supplemental package that'll come to you you know in the budget in the budget cycle to for a contract for a contract to be able to manage that lake in an aquatic vegetation state so but we are looking at all different areas we talk texas parks and wildlife that doesn't just include the fish it also includes the waterfowl you know anything from microorganisms to you know the pelican that you saw okay well that's really great to know um i know it's um it's a precious thing to have and i want to make sure that any kind of vote that we take isn't going to um destroy what we have and i know it means a lot to the individuals sitting here in the audience as well so um okay and everything will come back to us individually the reports from the texas park and wildlife and some one of the ladies mentioned that there was a section in the stream that was blocked um and so the water was building back up is that something that we can look into ahead of this to make sure that that water can drain um down yes we'll have i already made a note we're going to have drainage crews go take a look at what's actually out there impacting water water flows we'll also be looking at any potential erosion control issues that may be coming from the cessation of activities of the 2181 project okay because that was on my closing remarks too so all right thank you council member amator can either of you speak to the rough timeline of these these next steps coming up whenever we went out to o'briens to get this contract we uh i gave them 90 days we wanted this we wanted full documents the studies everything done that they can do the only thing that may take longer than 90 days is of course working with other governmental agencies like tcq in the state of texas for the water rights uh that doesn't have to be done to you know to mitigate what we need to do for the for the lake and the dam but everything dealing with the lake and the dam will be done in 90 days from signature of this contract excellent thank you council member melter yeah i just want to note for the record that our city engineer got spontaneous crowd applause just doesn't happen that often council member hussman thank you i'm gonna move approval and i'm gonna thank the neighborhood for coming out and and making your your concerns known consistently today and before uh thanks to staff i for uh taking a vested interest and and and i think that is that's key it's not a mandate it's a hey we're passionate about getting this done as well and so i appreciate that and i see that in your work and so that gives uh peace that it'll get done and that the work will get scrutinized properly before it comes back to us uh so that we can then uh take next next steps so uh with that again i move approval council member melter all right happily second all right before we vote on this i just want to make a comment for the record that i've been out to good sams a couple of times and and taking tours of the lake and i have made several requests and everything takes time uh but requests through both our parks department and our engineering department to get this moving forward i'm very happy to see it moving forward uh seeing no other request to speak let's vote on the board and the motion carries six to zero that brings us to concluding items council member briggs i have just a few things just while we're on that topic just to make sure that the teasley um dirt is mitigated from going back into the and i know that i heard our engineer mention it but i just wanted to make sure and double mention it yeah we'll ask um stress just to look at that tomorrow he's in daily contact with the state that's actually a state project not a city project so he's in uh daily contact with them about cleaning it up and providing access to our residents as well um also um i'd like to see if council can discuss cold weather policies regarding our municipal facilities um for for use from organizations and i would like to request a work session i know we had a staff report on it but i would like for the work session for allowing carriage rides horse and drawn carriages um in our city to come to a work session so we can actually discuss it because we have a an ordinance that prohibits it i think currently um and then last there's been a lot of um issues with um pipelines leaking in our city i know the atmosphere is out doing a lot of replacing um but we we do see a lot of rezoning and new builds and we have in our backup we talk about water infrastructure and roads as infrastructure but we're not ever really versed on if the pipelines are old or if they've been updated and so i'm just curious if we could get that added to our ais just to to know ahead of time because there's a lot of old um gas pipes in our city so if they're going to need to replace them if they can do that ahead of any kind of a building that would be be really great that's it council member melzer with respect to the peck four project uh this is something i brought up i think uh about 10 months ago um i mean i remain interested in whether property owners who have ceded drainage right of ways to present you know for the cult for the creeks that are there i remain interested in whether they would be open to providing bike and pedestrian right of way which we don't currently have the rights to especially with the knowledge of the property value increases that have occurred in other texas cities to be verified where this has been done where creeks have been put in box culverts and covered over been turned into bike and pedestrian paths providing off-road trail access connecting neighborhoods with them with downtown so i would like an isr that informal staff report on what the requirements would be to survey those property owners to see if that's an option for us to consider council member armator okay so one um a sad note and a positive note i saw that there was a um a pedestrian accident uh on on mckinney earlier this afternoon while we were having our meeting i just want to say uh you know thoughts and and uh and in prayers to the the victim in there as they they heal um i really really sad to hear about that um on a on a bright note um i wanted uh to to mention that um today was the uh celebration for the hundredth habitat for humanity house in city of denton council couldn't attend because doing this it was at six o'clock but i wanted to uh to thank uh habitat for for all they do uh for uh to make um uh you know low income families into proud homeowners and you're in city of denton and i want to thank or to congratulate the uh mahiya barahas uh family who are are now homeowners and they have a beautiful beautiful new home and thanks so much for autel habitat for all they do council member husbeth thank you um mr city manager i would like us to take a look as i continue to study opportunities for um internships etc and just i'm passionate about helping uh kids i heard a talk about the discrepancies between paid unpaid uh internships and how that affects who can apply to those and then a spinoff from that conversation to my point here is uh i would ask that there's a process by which we look at jobs the city post and uh i guess give them a second pass to see if if a four-year degree is mandatory if it's requesting a four-year degree if we could vet that or double check that to make sure that is a true requirement or if that's just uh something that is standard language type thing i don't know what that process would be and i don't know how how often that would be but i just think that could potentially be a barrier where we could have someone in the entry-level position they may excel but just can't clear that that barrier so maybe there's a way to uh look at those positions or also uh highlight those positions that are entry-level but have room to grow as people fill those and and proceed i don't know how best to do that but that that's my heart and then um interesting enough my mother comment is about atmos and so i'll give uh my comment and then maybe some uh direction in in that uh staff follow-up atmos had to run new lines in my neighborhood so i talked to staff and talked to the developer and pardon me the the contractors and i'll tell you that atmos left my home my front yard uh better than when they arrived and that's not but for the large equipment lots of digging lots of hole lots of noise but all said and done they came back put new grass down that sort of thing and so i want to give credit where credit's due and then also i think to you to the point earlier uh what you'll find mr city manager is in speaking with atmos they have a new uh new equipment that allows them to sense gas leaks faster because it picks up at a higher rate and i'm sure there's some more technical knowledge to go with that but that's what's happening so we're being better served by atmos because they're picking up leaks faster with the new equipment and so i appreciate them and and and and for someone that is quick to say how frustrated i am with their rate increase process at al uh i want to give credit where credit's due they did a great job in our neighborhood and i credit them for unsolicited getting the new equipment putting it in place and that's what happened on elm street uh just the other day that new equipment worked and did its job and they detected it early and that is to be commended and so i that's just kind of direction as you're looking into those other questions so and then i i'll end with um just looking forward to the proclamation i guess next meeting for betty meyers but what i had an opportunity to serve mentor denton at the school named after her and and see her in just different capacities and she served on the school board same time my dad did so just outstanding uh person in our community and and she'll be missed but uh i do appreciate the opportunity to recognize her when that comes around so thank you all right and and i too want to just uh say a couple words of dr betty meyers who's been a huge mentor of mine uh in in many different fields i've served on she's on the she was on the surf denton board with me fellow kawanian and we're different clubs but the clubs all interact uh and uh as well as politically she's just been someone who's meant a lot to me and uh for those who are unaware the funeral service is tomorrow at three o'clock at a bank the conception there's no further business uh we will adjourn