Mar 26, 2019 City Council on 2019-03-26 12:00 PM

Welcome, everybody, to this meeting of the Denton City Council on Tuesday, March 26, 2019. It is 12.02 p.m. We're going to get started with our work session. Before we do, I have a couple of housekeeping items. One is I just want to acknowledge that this is Deputy Assistant Manager, City Manager Brian Languiz' last council meeting. He's chosen to sit in his office, but I asked him here because we've got to draw this meeting out as long as we can, but then I realized that he can walk out of this meeting at any time and suffer no real kind of repercussions. So Brian, thank you so much. I wanted to acknowledge that and just wish you the best of luck in your new position. I think they're getting a great City Attorney. You bet. You bet. Thank you. You bet. City Manager. What did I say? City Attorney? I've just promoted you. You said you wanted to go to law school, so I just promoted you. City Manager. So thank you, Brian. I appreciate that. Thank you. I appreciate it. You bet. And the second item is I just want to take a moment of silence to just honor the life and contribution of Caroline Booth in this city. So let's just take a moment of silence, please. Thank you all so much. Thank you, Brian. Thank you so much. We're going to go on to citizen comments on consent agenda items. Before we do that, I just need to -- I'm going to put this out here because I don't want to go into too much detail, but I think -- I really think we need to postpone the discussion of the community market to either a week or two out because I think there's a lot surrounding it. I've seen some chatter on Facebook. We've received emails, and quite frankly, it's all I can do to contain my composure at this moment. But I think that we need to postpone that to give out of respect and honor to Caroline and just her work and to make sure that that item can be heard in the right context. So if there's any objection to that, let's hear it, and if not, we'll put it on in the next couple weeks if that's okay. Yes. I'm just wondering -- and maybe you can't say it publicly, but I'm just curious. I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to, if you could -- Sure. I'm made aware of an email that we've received, and also I'm made aware by a Facebook post that you posted talking about the community market and invoking Caroline's name and talking about how she was the best person to know about this. And quite frankly, Councilmember, I'm furious. I think it's very disrespectful. I think it's dishonoring. And so you asked, and I wasn't going to bring that up. So I think in honor of her, I think it's best that we move that to two weeks. Can I respond to that? It's going to be brief, because we're moving on, because I'm really, really angry, and I want to make sure -- in fact, I'm going to take a five-minute recess right now. Can I respond first? Yes, you can. Everyone can look at my comments, and I honestly -- it didn't occur to me. My comment stated that she worked really hard on this, and she understood that -- she went, she found the data, and understood that community market contributes to the city's economic development. I -- anyway, I -- really, it didn't occur to me that there was anything controversial to that. I mentioned that, more than anything, as just a tribute to her. And I really see it as a statement of fact. I honestly don't understand. I would support you in wanting to move this if there was some, you know, dust-up on social media or, you know, rumors going around, anything negative. I don't see that as anything but positive and factual. She was a friend of mine, and I just mentioned that as somebody who was grieving, and also kind of, you know, feeling that, you know, looking forward to hearing this come before us today, knowing that she had worked on it. And I'll say something else. You know, she -- You've got about 30 seconds, Councilmember. Okay, in my 30 seconds, I will say one of the things that I loved about Caroline was that she never tried to sell us on anything. She always told us the truth about everything she put before us. I actually voted against a number of the proposals she put before us, and she did so much research on all of those items. And when I came to her with questions, she gave me data, she gave me facts, and that is what she did in her preparation for a community market. So unless anybody else on council has, you know, saw my post and agrees that this calls to delay this, then -- Councilmember Armitage, your time is up. My time is up. Any other -- we're not going to get into this discussion. The mere fact that you have to try to defend that is just -- so anybody -- we're going to postpone this, out of respect. Yes. Okay. All right. Mr. City Manager, you okay with that? Sure. Okay. All right. Thank you. Moving on to -- then we will move to -- let me see which one that was on. That was B. So we'll get that on in a couple weeks. Work session 3A, provide a report, hold discussion, give staff direction regarding the credit collection policy of the city utility system. Yes. I encourage the breaking you suggested, just to kind of look at it a little bit here. Sure. Sure. We'll take a five-minute break. Come back at 1215. Welcome everybody back to this meeting of the Dent City Council on Tuesday, March 26, 2019. We are moving through our work session reports. Work session report one is citizen comments on consent agenda items. Do we have any cards? We have no cards. Okay. Good. Request for clarification on agenda items listed on the agenda for April 26, 2019. Any clarifications for agenda items? Seeing none, we'll move on to work session 3A, which is provide a report, hold a discussion and give staff direction regarding the credit and collection policy of the city utility system. Good afternoon, Mayor, City Council, Tiffany Thompson, Director of Customer Service. I do have some guests in the audience I'd like to introduce. First off, we do have a new customer service manager, Krista Foster. She's joined us just a couple months ago, so wanted to let you put a face to her name. You'll be hearing from her in the future regarding customer service items. And also we have Navigant Consulting here today. They're the firm that we secured back in 2008 that did our operational review of customer service specifically tied to credit and collections. We brought them back to review our processes, how we've done, and also compare us currently with performance to public and private sector utilities. So they're going to be giving us a report on that, and then I'll be coming back up to give you the changes that were made about a year ago and the impacts of those changes. So with that, I'd like to invite Christine with Navigant out and she'll go over her presentation. Good afternoon, my name is Christine Kozlowski and thank you for the opportunity today to present the results of our most recent study. We got about 20 minutes of material to cover and then I'll be happy to answer any questions that you might have. So we'll hold our questions till the end. Yes, that'd be great. Thank you. Okay, just a little background about the study itself before we move into the results. It was a focused operational assessment of the City of Denton's utility revenue collection practices with a goal of assessing performance and comparing performance, benchmarking it against other utilities in the state and nationwide, looking for opportunities to improve the process and performance if necessary. The steps we followed are listed here and we're going to take you through some of the benchmarking results in some detail on the following pages. Before we do that, I want to set a little context as to some of the changes that have taken place within the credit and collections group over the past few years and especially since our last study in 2008. What we found when we looked at the organization in 2008 was basically a one size fits all collections approach. The performance wasn't as good as we expected for a utility of this size, so we made a number of recommendations to really focus and to use a risk-based approach to target the accounts that need follow-up and collection activity. So we put in a number of changes which are reflected here in the upper table that went into place in the 2010-2011 timeframe. For instance, we recommended that the city use an external credit scoring service to determine whether or not customers could waive a deposit based on good credit behavior. And there are some changes to the systems to kind of support the internal credit scoring and keeping track of payment behavior of customers in general. There were also some changes put in place in early 2018 and those are shown in the bottom table and notably two of those changes were adjustments to the deposit policy and in effect lessening some of the requirements as to when a deposit is required of a customer. So keep those in mind as we go through the charts. I think you'll see by the end of it that a lot of the changes put in place following our first study have been successful in increasing the performance of this group and we'll take you through that now. We assembled two benchmark panels to compare the city against. The first was about 15 municipal utilities in Texas and then we had a second larger panel of about 59 U.S. utilities which were comprised of cooperatives, investor-owned utilities and again some municipal utilities. And the idea was with credit and collections, it can be very state specific in terms of regulations and the practices that are deployed. So we wanted to make sure we looked at Texas specifically, especially when we're looking at the timeline of collection activity and some of the fees that are associated with that timeline. But we also wanted to look more broadly at overall performance and outcome and so we looked at the bigger panel of U.S. utilities to really understand where Denton fits into that panel and if there's any opportunities to improve practices based on what we see at other utilities. We have a list of those 59 utilities later on in the presentation. So let's look at the Texas panel first. I've got a table that won't fit on one page so this is the first half of it. But it should give you some idea of the characteristics of the utilities that were -- that participated in our panel. And I think you can see they go from fairly small to fairly large. And we also wanted to understand, I guess, what policies they had in place in terms of setting deposits and how did they determine the need for a deposit. So you can see here, I think Denton compares favorably to this group. All the utilities require deposits. Most of them will waive a deposit with a letter of credit. A smaller portion, like Denton, will use credit scoring to determine the need for a deposit. And then there is a smaller portion that doesn't even -- doesn't waive the deposit at all. Also, it's notable that about 40% require a two times the average bill as the amount of the deposit. The second half of our comparison here, and I forgot to mention, Denton is in blue. We also have two averages that we compared Denton against. One is an average of those utilities that have a significant portion of AMI metering in place, of which there are about half. And then just an overall panel average. And this chart shows the timeline of actions. When a payment becomes late, in terms of number of days, the late fee that's assessed when it does become late, moving all the way through the notifications and what point those occur within the collection cycle, and then if there's any fees associated with ReConnect later on. And again, I think Denton's timeline is very comparable to the panel we have assembled here, which is good. And I think if you look at the delinquent ReConnect fees, Denton's fee is significantly lower than the panel average. When you look at the late fees, though, just about all the utilities have a fixed percentage late fee of 5 to 10%, whereas Denton has a fixed flat fee of $20. Both approaches work, and we see it pretty common across the industry. The idea of a late payment fee, obviously, is to encourage customers to pay on time. For our broader panel of U.S. utilities, we wanted to focus on outcomes and performance, so we have calculated four metrics to compare the panel and to compare Denton against. And to be able to do that, we had to collect a good bit of data from each utility so that we knew we were benchmarking the same activities and had the same cost information. I call your attention to the paragraph listed as collection actions include. This was the scope of the benchmark, so we included both active and inactive collections, and it's focusing on the inside collections activity, not the field. This is just a table for your reference as to the four metrics that we calculated and the definition of these metrics. They're fairly common performance metrics within the collections department, and we'll go through the results of each of these on the following pages. The first metric is the percentage of net bad debt, and it's expressed as a percentage of total revenue. If I had one collections metric to look at, to view performance, this would be it. And what we've done on these following four charts is compare the performance that we found in our first study in 2008 against the performance that we find today as a result of our current study. When we were here in 2008, Denton was on the high side of our panel, and this was one of the metrics that recommended that something needed to be done, and recommendations we put in place. And obviously, they've had tremendous success now with today's net bad debt is well below panel average. The second metric I'd like to share with you is what I call end row, which is the equivalent number of days that revenue is outstanding. It's a pretty common metric in all industries. It basically tells you how quickly you get your money. The idea is that you want a lower end row, if possible. And when we looked at Denton in 2008, again, it was on the high side, taking about 30 days to get the money. Today when we look at that and evaluate it, it's down to 22, and Denton leads our panel in 2018. And we think this is partly because of the changes that were put in place, the shortening of the collection timeline, and of course, the increase in the late fees encourages people to pay quicker, so you get your money quicker. The next two metrics are efficiency metrics, so we look at cost, unit cost first. So what we've done here is collect labor costs and overtime costs and non-labor charges and any outside contractor fees from all the utilities, and then we divide that by the actions that the collections group undertakes within a year to get a cost per action. Can I just ask a clarifying question? Sure. To break my own rule and your rule. Does that price include, if it goes out to a collection agency, their fee? Yes. Thank you. Yes. That would be the outside contractor fees portion. And it's pretty typical with the utilities that they do send their inactive accounts to external agencies. So when we looked in 2008, Denton had a pretty good cost per, and has an even better one in 2018. But I don't want to look at cost on its own, because obviously you can not spend money and not collect, but you may not have good performance if you do that. So we also wanted to look at the productivity in combination. Here is the number of actions that are undertaken by the people in the collections group as they treat delinquent accounts. In 2008, Denton was in pretty good position, much improved here in 2018, and I like to think that's because they're targeting the accounts they need to target, and able to work those accounts now that it's more focused. And there is a lot of automation in this type of work. The calls that go out to customers are automated, and some of the letters and so forth that go out are automated too, and that just helps overall efficiency. And here's the list that I mentioned earlier. So I guess in summary on the benchmarks, I think we found that the changes they put in place are good, and they still look comparable to other utilities in Texas. And when you look nationwide, the performance of the collections group is doing very well as compared to other similar utilities. So I'll just kind of summarize the findings of the study here. I wanted to share with you kind of what we walked into in 2008, and that's listed here, and then how things look now. So when we first got here, bad debt was not being written off the books, and there was a fairly sizable bad debt allowance that was growing from year to year. And as I mentioned, there was this one size fits all strategy with really no consideration of the credit risk or collection history of a customer, and Denton wasn't consistently refunding deposits to customers who had good payment behavior. If we look at today, things are quite different. Bad debt is being written off the books, 180 days, and it has the level of bad debt has declined significantly in the 10 years that we looked at them last. And of course, we already mentioned they're using some tools to better target those accounts that are riskier and need the collection treatment and are better at routinely refunding deposits to customers. This to me is a wonderful chart. It really does show a good trend in performance of this collections group. The green bars are the level of bad debt write offs over the last five years. So you can see there was a significant decline in bad debt, which is a good outcome for a collections group. And also on the right, the blue bars indicate the number of delinquent accounts, and we saw a reduction in those as well, notably after the increase in the late payment fee in 2010-2011. Otherwise we found a few things that we wanted to mention that we think are notable. We believe Denton is using technologies to benefit the collections process. The AMI metering is obviously very beneficial to the organization in general, but more specifically to the connect/disconnect activities that are associated with collections. They've also introduced a pay as you go program, which provides some options for customers who may not be able to afford a deposit or want to avoid late fees in the future. And of course, more broadly, there's an Engage Denton app that all customers can use that just brings the city services a little bit closer to them. We think that the customer service reps are having much better conversations with customers now. The guidelines are clear, the reps understand them, they're consistent, and we think customers understand them as well. The website clearly shows the guidelines and steps of the collection process. The customer service organization in general has done a good job at developing and training its people so that they're prepared to have these conversations with customers. And of course, the funding interfaith ministries has been increased, and that too has been a benefit to customers especially, and ultimately to bad debt write-offs as well. And of course, the eight-day shortening of the collection time cycle is very beneficial. I know that the finance department is happier to get the money quicker. And then, of course, the benchmarks have revealed some really solid performance from this group over the last 10 years. I do have, however, a finding here. When looking at the numbers most recently for bad debt write-offs, we do see an increase in the 2018 numbers. Now, we don't have a full year's worth of data yet because the debt is written off 180 days, so there's a bit of a lag in collecting that and processing that. But what we've found so far, we projected out for a full year and basically are seeing about a 14% increase in the bad debt. And we feel it's largely a result of the tweaking of the changes to the deposit requirements that were made in the January/February timeframe of 2018. We also showed the effect in terms of the level of bad debt per delinquent account on the table, and you can see that's rising as well. Otherwise, we believe that Denton has some opportunities to further automate. As a lot of the processes are already automated, there are still a few that would benefit and make that area even more productive. And then finally, there are no self-service options for customers who'd like to get a payment extension or a payment plan. They have to go through a representative. And it's quite common in the industry to have an app or a website that lets you go in and request a payment extension with some anonymity, if you will, when you need to do that. To kind of sum it up in terms of recommendations, this side of the chart basically is to continue doing what they're doing. We think Denton Collections Group has achieved great success with the practices that they put in place, and we think it's appropriate today as well. We think the 90-day shortening of getting the money and referrals to a collection agency is a good change, and that should stay in place as well. And some of the other programs that they're getting into now are very beneficial and we'd like to see continue too, including the Pay As You Go program and any kind of energy audits that are being done for customers. In terms of opportunity on the other side of the chart, I already talked a bit about self-service. We think there's some options to add there so that customers can do that on their own. And of course, automating what can be automated within the group. We also think it's important to monitor the accounts a little more closely now that we're seeing a bit of a change in the VAD debt, a negative trend, if you will. So we're suggesting that the department look closely at what's going on there. And then I think in terms of growth, the department itself can probably explore ways to improve the conversation more of counseling and referring customers who have trouble paying their bill, making sure they get connected with the resources that are available in the community. And that's a slightly different conversation and it's helpful to train that and make sure everybody's prepared and able to do that. And then perhaps the city itself might be interested in pursuing options to help customers who are constantly having trouble paying their bills. Other cities have put in different rate structures or discounts to help customers afford their energy if they're struggling. So that may be something the city might wanna explore. Others in Texas have gone down that path too. And then lastly, just to reiterate, the 14% projected increase in the VAD debt is concerning. So I think it does require some follow up and diligence to make sure those accounts are being monitored, that maybe there's more information about their behavior so that you can closely track that. And then Denton right now uses a process that's done quarterly to assess additional deposits on accounts. And we think that needs to be done more frequently in light of these changes. Also with the addition of auto pay as a way to waive the deposit, I think Tiffany will share with you some results from that, but we think that also needs to monitor in case customers do not sign up for auto pay as they have promised to do. Or if they suddenly drop off the program, you may wanna require a deposit at that time. And then lastly, I think the pay as you go program has a lot of benefits here, helping customers and avoiding bad debt going forward. So we think that's a good thing to emphasize and promote going forward. And that's all I had. >> Questions? Sorry, yes, Council Member Meltzer. >> Thank you for the work that you've done. I was trying to understand what the intended effect was, and if we could see whether that happened in those changes that were made in early 2018. I suspect that it's not a total shock that bad debt would go up if you loosen restrictions, but do you think that the intended effect would also be maybe a reduction in non-paid disconnects, something that would be a negative customer experience, which we didn't see. So I'm kind of puzzled by that. I'm wondering, what do you think the intended effect was, and did we see it or not? Can you do anything with that question? >> Well, I think a lot of the changes were on the deposit requirement. So obviously that's your security against future write-offs. So the less coverage you have, the more exposed you are. In terms of disconnects, I think there were also changes to the point system in terms of how a customer moves through the collection cycle and moves down in risk categories. But I don't have any figures on the disconnects, maybe Tiffany does, who can speak to that? >> Yeah, Steph provided some information on disconnect rate, and it ticked up a bit. And I kind of thought that if you were loosening requirements on one end, you might see a benefit there, but there isn't one. >> The overall disconnects from the changes from 16, 17, to 17, 18, we did have a 10% decrease in the number of disconnects of accounts. That's primarily influenced because of all the changes that we made. We had a lot of customers that got deposit refunds. And so where they probably potentially could have been disconnected, now they've got refunds. They had a greater opportunity to move through the utility system with that, so less customers got disconnected. But now what we're seeing is all those changes have been put into place. Now we're starting to see those disconnects go back up to the normal rate prior to these changes. >> Do you have anything to add, Tiffany, on just what was the intended effect of the changes made in 2018? >> I think the intended effect through the discussions with the public utilities we're in and the council is, how can we assist customers, deposits, we're concerning for customers being able to pay them. And so there was just dialogue on what we can do as policy makers with that. And so some slight changes were made and the direction was given, let's make some changes and then come back and see what the impacts of those changes are. So I think that's where we're at today, is to bring forth what those impacts were of those changes made in 2018. I do have quite a bit of information regarding that, but that's my assessment of why the changes were made. >> Yes, Councilmember Morich. >> I have a question for Navigant, actually a couple of related questions. One, let's see, so in 2010 is when the new credit-based deposit system was introduced based on the data from 08, 09. Is that correct? >> Yes, that is correct. >> So, as I remember, and this is something I've been following closely even before I got on council. The biggest percentage wise, let me put it this way, the most amount of money in bad debt at that time in 08, 09. Was, as I recall, correct me if I'm wrong, was from commercial accounts. And now, at least percentage wise, we've got a situation where even though we have a much smaller amount of overall debt, the greater percentage is from multi-family in residential, is that correct? >> I'm not sure. >> Okay, so that might be so, again. >> I have information in my presentation to go over with that, but you are correct. >> Okay, thanks, so I guess we could, thank you, talk about that later, thanks. So my second question is definitely one for you, because it's something that you mentioned. You mentioned that some other utility companies have, and I'm looking at this paper where I wrote down that different rate structures and discounts, other cities, that is. And so I was wondering, number one, if you could just say a little something about some of those models. Number two, if you happen to know off hand whether the cities that offer those kinds of alternate rate structures in discounts, whether they tend to have credit based deposits in addition to that, or whether it varies. And then number three, I was going to ask whatever, you can't think of now, whatever additional information. I would love to see, either from you, if that fits within your job description, or from a city manager, from staff. I would love to see a staff report on that, what other municipal utilities have done as far as different rate structures and discounts. >> So hopefully I'll cover all three questions here. Yes, there are other utilities. I think City of Austin has some plans that are of interest where they offer lower rates to income based on income. And I think they may even have a senior citizens rate. There's a couple different options there in terms of rates. I think they also have weatherization options where if you meet a certain qualification, you get say a free home energy audit and then there's some level of weatherization that can be done at your house to make your house more efficient. I believe that they've got those programs too. And if we look more broadly across the United States, like I've been working in Maine recently, they do have discounted rates, a lifeline rate, I think they call it, which is based on income. And they've got other types of rates, arrears, forgiveness, et cetera, to help customers in different positions deal with what they're dealing with. And as far as the question about asking for deposits, I'd have to look specifically at those programs. But I know the City of Austin does have a deposit requirement as well. But there may be some waivers or discounts to that as well too. >> Okay, well, thank you so much. And yes, so I would love to see, especially the Austin plan. And I'll just mention, well, actually I have two statements, one a plug is that we actually, just for whatever public is listening, we offer free energy audits for anybody who wants them, so that's just universal and a good thing. And I think the other statement is that it's good to know that there are models for having income-based rate structures and discounts. And in the past, there was some uncertainty about that, but it's good to know that there are other models we can look at. So thank you very much. >> Sure, any other questions? >> I've got one on those points. So as you looked at other municipalities, and you have your matrix up there about average days and all those kind of things, and Austin's one of them. So if you send us information on these type of practices requested by Council Member Armitter, you could send also the additional information that was in that matrix, because they may have those programs. But where are they in regards to where we are with number of days, delinquencies, bad debt? Just sort of a comprehensive approach to not just isolate one policy, but see how the whole utility acts as a whole. >> Sure. >> Our rate structure, so forth, yeah. >> Sure. >> Yeah, appreciate that. >> Okay, any other questions? >> Any other questions for the consultant? Thank you very much, appreciate it. >> Very thorough report, I appreciate that, thank you. >> So I'm going to go over the changes that were made in 2018. Again, we implemented the credit and collection policy recommendations in 2010 in response to the high amount of bad debt, and just to further enhance our credit and collection policies. In the fall of 2017, we began conversations with the public utilities board and with city council on what direction you wanted to provide us to make further changes. So the changes that we implemented in February of 2018 was to the plus one program. We added an additional $25,000 in funding for them. We also allowed them to give assistance to citizens at the three times versus the one time, and then they could also get assistance with deposits going forward. And then we also increased the ways to waive a deposit, and so customers now were able to waive a deposit if they enrolled in an automatic bank draft, or if they signed up through our payment portal for reoccurring debit, credit card, or checking as well, so they could get a deposit waived. And then we introduced the homelessness deposit waiver, so those citizens, residents that are working through a rapid rehousing program, could get assistance with their deposit as well. >> Other changes that were made is we removed all points associated with- >> You're a waiter. >> So as we look at the first slide and this slide, these are the two things that will be discussed as the increase of what we saw in the last presentation. >> Yes, correct. So the impacts with the additional funding and enhancements in program requirements for the last one, we're going to talk about what those impacts were a couple slides from now, so yes. >> So additionally, we removed all points associated with the credit event overdue interest. This ended up impacting about 1,500 of our customers. They no longer either required a deposit with this change or their deposit requirement lessened with that change. And then we also changed the scale for our customer ranking points and the deposits that are associated with those. So we removed the F rating completely, and then moved up the scale for our C, D, and E customers. And then they no longer had a two month deposit if they were a D rating and went to a one month deposit versus the two. So previously about 89% of our customer base did not require a deposit. And now currently 93% of our customer base doesn't require a deposit based off of the changes. >> So question, in the Navigant presentation, they talked about how our debt was going up, and that I think, correct me if I'm wrong. But I thought that when compared with other utilities, that most of them had either an average of a month and a half or two months or something like that. Did I hear that correctly? >> Yes sir, that's correct. Based off of their study, most utilities had a two month deposit. >> And is there a slide later on in the presentation, or if you have an opinion about it now. >> Their opinion was they thought that our tweak to the deposit requirements such as this might have been a factor. I don't know whether it's the main factor or what percentage of the factor in our bad debt, increasing 14%? >> Correct, because bad debt is a result of what happens when the account finals. And if there isn't adequate deposit coverage, if the customer ultimately doesn't pay, that deposit covers that. So without that coverage, your bad debt would increase. That's what we're seeing right now. >> Okay, is there a methodology whereby the utility department could go back and look at those accounts that have sort of been delinquent and created this rise in bad debt, and see if a deposit had been levied according to our old system. How that might have, trying to narrow down what really is the reason for that may just be a lot of many different factors. >> We're working through that now, but that's really what it's coming back to, is the deposit coverage in the end. One of the themes throughout this presentation is we don't have a full year's worth of data. So there is still some assumptions here, so I want to be transparent about that with it. But definitely want to just let you know where we're at right now with the changes. >> Councilmember Armitage has a question. >> So just to kind of piggyback additional information I would love to see in that request. If you can find out in this same way that information on income can be gained privately. What the roughly income levels of those accounts that are contributing to, however the mayor worded it, contributing to the bad debt, if that makes sense. >> Let me put it. >> Those delinquent accounts, some sort of assessment on the median income, again, I don't want to know the individual information. But to the extent that income levels can be known, right? >> To clarify, so are you asking that when looking at the accounts that created the bad debt to find out what their income level was? >> Yeah, yes, yeah. >> From the customer, from their respective customer for the debt? >> Yeah, yeah. >> I think that would be challenging to get, because we don't collect that information with it. I don't know if there's other comments on that. >> Yeah, so I guess I'd be curious to know, and I understand that we don't collect that information, how other cities, maybe that could factor also into that same staff report about the differing rate structures based on income levels. How other cities, municipal utilities, collect that information. My interest being, are these, because just based on what I've seen anecdotally, people who can't pay tend to be poor, and people who are poor tend to have bad credit because of the cost of living. So I just want to know, am I operating on assumption, or what? And prejudice, or is there hard data behind that? >> I think we could probably accumulate that if they're asking for help through the grant program or interfaith program. Beyond that, I think it's probably going to be a violation of their privacy, and there's no way for us to validate that. But if they're asking for specific grant help, I think that's a condition that we probably could require. You see what their monthly bills are, income, that sort of thing, and at least gather some data in that vein. But I just don't see a way that we can ask people what they're making right now across the system, unless they're specifically asking for write downs. >> Yeah, well, thank you, and I would love to see that. And again, factored into that, finding out how other cities who are offering income-based rate structures and discounts, how they obtain that information. >> We'll certainly ask that question. >> Awesome, thanks. >> And we do have that data for customer seeking assistance through interfaith, as Mr. Holman said, so we can definitely provide that. >> Excellent, thanks. >> Councilmember Meltzer? >> I tried to take another stab at the thing I was trying to ask before, and I don't know if it's answerable. Just where I'm coming from is, I assume that when council voted to make these changes, their goal wasn't to make bad debt go up. They wanted to improve customer experience, make it a little easier on people. And I guess what I'm asking is, is there any measure that we would have expected the benefits of the change to show up in? I don't know if it's really true that people ever just don't get utilities because they can't make the deposit, right? If that were true, you'd see greater access. Is there any kind of measure where you would see the benefit showing up in? Or it's really just, it's just a policy choice, you know? >> My assessment is a policy choice to see how additional options we could give the customers to assist them through the deposit changes and additional ways to waive a deposit. And then, again, the direction was, let's tweak it a couple of changes in the C with the impacts of R of that before we make any additional ways with that. But I do think it goes back to customer experience, ensuring that they have multiple ways to waive a deposit. And then, by doing that, what does that do? >> I mean, I think that conversation, I wish it was steeped in a little bit more detailed policy discussion than that. But from what I can recall, and some of the council members here were on at that time as well. But it was really just trying, an attempt to try to get relief to people on the amount of deposits because there was a sentiment that the deposits were too high. And that's sort of what I remember, is how do we tweak some of this? And it was to do it and then come back with the data to see how it's impacting the system and the financial aspect of the system. And so I think that's what it was to really be a little bit more forgiving on some of the point ratings and the deposits and the waiver for someone who's homeless. So it would be interesting on the bad debt, how many of those are derived from if we issued a waiver in that regard or didn't require a deposit. So I think that was pretty much it. >> So I think ultimately, you want to be able to judge, is this a tolerable effect for the benefit of getting? >> Yes. >> Hard to do it. >> Yeah. Did you have a comment, Council Member Briggs? >> Well, I could weigh in a little bit on that. So we were, at the time, receiving several complaints or bills from constituents on the impact of the deposits. So if it was a two month average, then that would be the deposit that would be required on adding to the bill itself. And so then the deposit would be taken out first, and so then it would just keep going every month. And so it would be hard to manage each month, it just kept building a bond. >> I think that was on delinquent accounts. I mean, I think they rebuild it on a new account. The deposit was part of, they could split it out into payments, I believe. Is that correct? >> Customers can split it out in both scenarios, but to Council Member Briggs' point, it was the customers that were getting, as they created their pattern in the utility system, those additional deposits, so she's correct. >> And then the interest upon that, and so it was hard for them to catch up, and so we were trying to address that situation. >> I'm not gonna insist on this, but I'm just speculating. I wonder if there's a satisfaction score, something so you can tell, is this a problem or is this a success? It might be a success, you know? >> Yeah, I think that's what we're trying to get to. >> Yeah, well, we do after call surveys and also after our lobby interactions. So the customer is providing an opportunity to rate how their experience was and what they're calling us about with it. So we haven't seen deposits be that concern as of net, that may be a result of these changes that were made, too. So we deployed that about a year ago, kind of the same time as this as well, but we do capture how are we doing, how are you satisfied with your experience with us, so that's a great point. So for our homelessness deposit waivers, we have been able to assist eight families with that for an amount of $1,595 worth of deposits. Also with the implementation of the deposit waivers for our pre-authorized payment and reoccurring payment, we saw an increase in that payment channel adoption by 16%. So customers really did take to that waiver option and increase that payment channel. But what we found during those quarterly assessments as Navigant had pinpointed, 55% of those customers that got that original deposit waiver either didn't sign up for that pre-authorized payment or did not maintain it. And so there's a compliance issue and follow through a concern that we've seen through this trending. One of the challenges with that is the customer needs to go onto the payment portal and sign up for that themselves because they're entering in their sensitive information, credit card, debit card, checking. We don't do that because we don't hold that information in house. It's provided through our payment portal, so we are relying on them to do that. We do have some opportunities on how we're going to further check that and address that later on in the presentation. >> Councilmember Romer. >> So I want to speak to anecdotal experience and ask if there's anything that you can do to assess moving forward what the reasons are. If those reasons can be determined for my people who have been pre-authorized for this. Why they end up not signing up or not continuing. I know that what I hear anecdotally, as Councilmember Briggs mentioned, there have been a number of constituents who will just come to us. And because they're having problems keeping up with their bills. And when I have mentioned this possibility, what I tend to hear is, well, I'm struggling to pay rent and utilities. And so they don't, kind of on a month by month basis, and I don't know if this is true for everybody. But it's certainly something I hear and makes a kind of logical sense to me. You want to keep your power on, but you also want to stay housed. And our utilities late policy is more generous than a number of landlord late policy where they could on just a day. So they, a lot of times, want to just really save it. They really don't know month to month. Anyway, that's just anecdotal evidence. But I'm wondering if anything can be done. And kind of when you call and check in on people to see, to find out what is the reason why you didn't end up signing up for this or continuing? So when we're finding that they're not either signed up or maintained at the primaries and they never signed up in the first place. So they said that they were going to do it and don't follow through with it for various reasons. Why we have not asked specifically what is the reason why you didn't sign up for it because we're trying to determine what type of reporting can we create to be able to check that compliance. So these are early on results. What we're starting to see with the trend was we just needed some time to see what the impact was. So this is kind of where we're at today with that. But that's good feedback is the people that don't sign up for it. Why? But there's also some levers that I think that we can pull, meaning we could say the deposit's going to be charged until you sign up for draft with it versus trusting that they're going to do it and then they don't do it. So I think that's an opportunity for us because if they if they know we're not going to charge the deposit and we were thinking that they're going to do it, what we're seeing is they're not doing it. They're not following through for various reasons. I don't know at this time with it, but we think there's some internal things that we could do to try to help with compliance. Additionally. Councilman in the question, I mean, yeah, I think that's probably a good suggestion to do, but also I'm wondering about navigating our system. Is it is it easy to go in and sign up? And what if someone doesn't have a bank account? Is that a certain requirement to do this? That's correct. They would need a bank account or a credit or debit card to sign up for for reoccurring. We have not gotten feedback that the payment portal is difficult to navigate, but that could be one as we're diving into reasons why they didn't sign up to make sure that that isn't a roadblock for them. So that's that's another takeaway for us. And I know that sometimes it's just someone needs help walking through it. So is that I know that's extra time on staff, but would that be an option if they had that information available for someone to say what may I help you walk through and set that process up now? We do that now. One of the things that we do help them like where to go to sign up for it. And we can walk them through that while they're on the phone with it, as long as they have all the information that they they need to do it. But further on in the presentation, we're going to talk about those customers that may be struggling and having some dedicated resources to them know all the options in the community for assistance, maybe helping them a little bit more hands on with setting up through the payment portal. So that's definitely an opportunity. Thank you. One question on the homelessness deposit waiver, is that is that over a six month time? What's what's that data? Is that over the six months since we made that? Yes, sir. It's since we've gone live with it and we haven't had any accounts, I believe that have closed to know what ultimately ended up happening. I guess the thing that is a sort of a tangential observation is I really just want to say to people who have units. And people are in need of units because I'm disappointed that that's such a low number, which means that either people either people who are homeless that are getting into temporary housing or transitional housing either don't know about this program or we're not finding. People to so it's just an interesting number. I would have thought it would have been a little bit higher than that. So and that has nothing to do with the utility department. It's we've got a better job to do about putting people in housing that will allow them to get a deposit waiver to help them get back on their feet. Councilmember armature. Yeah, kind of following up on that point, it would be, you know, one thing I would like to see anyway would be a reaching out specifically to those local nonprofits, you know, giving hope in particular, which already has a kind of a relationship with this. City, just letting them know what this is and exactly what it means. This is just a guess, but I think there, you know, there might be some confusion maybe in what a homeless deposit means. In other words, if somebody has just has has just kind of gone from homelessness to being rehoused, do they still does that still count? I know what the answers are. But I'm wondering, you know, there might be those questions and people not knowing out there. I know that that I mean, one great thing about the way you operate your department is if people when people come to you for help, they don't need to know all the right terms and everything. You'll figure out, you know, if there's a slot for them. Right. But still, it would be good to do some sort of, you know, communication with our major nonprofits. Also, even some our daily bread, you know, in the shelters, because even though they're not housing providers, you know, they have a caseworker there and they're in touch with people and hear people's problems a lot would be good for them to know. Good feedback. Thank you. So this is a break. Do you have a question? It was just more of a comment that I'm I know that our nonprofits are well aware of this program. I don't think that I think it's finding the homes to put them in. It is more of the issue than than the knowledge of the program. But so I just wanted to just take that out there. And I I'm still a firm believer in this program. And I want to make sure that that we continue it and we can always do a better job of making sure to continue the conversation because it has been very funny team since we implemented it. We've been using the wrapping rehousing forms and working with those agencies. But again, just a reminder. What you know about this resource. So and I know from personal experience, this works. So OK, so this is our deposits by class on file. So this is going back to one of the questions earlier, like what type of deposits do we have on file? And so what we've seen with the changes thus far as our commercial deposits have gone up and our multi and our residential deposits have gone down with it. So right now we have about 33 percent fewer accounts have deposits on the accounts with the changes. That's an overall reduction of eight hundred and twenty two thousand dollars and 13 percent of our accounts have deposits on file. Previously, we had about 20 to 21 percent of our accounts had deposits on file previously. So that definitely is an influencer. Ultimately, what ends up happening once that account finals out, if there's a debt left over and unpaid, what it ends up becoming. We did have an increase of 12 percent of deposit refunds on active accounts last year, and that's directly correlated with the changes in removing the points associated with interest and then also the deposit requirements. So we had quite a few customers that got refunds last year with these changes as well. So it reduced the amount of deposits on file, the amount of deposit funds we had on file as well. Were those credits on their account or were those actually checks written back? They were credits towards their account. Council member Briggs and council member. I did have a comment about that. So on the accounts or on the bills, is it specifically stated what what's going on or does all of a sudden the bill gets reduced one month and it looks like the usage is dropped? Is that for a deposit refund? So you'll have a line item on the bill that says deposit refund and have the credit amount and then it'll tally it at the bottom. So there is language on there about the deposit refunds with that. Okay. All right. Thank you. Just making sure. Council member. So a question. Why do you think or do you have any any guess or indication as to why the amount of commercial in commercial deposits has gone up? That's a good question. I haven't dove into that specifically. So that's something we can look at what it is. It may be a reflection of the number of commercial accounts, if that's increased any slightly. So that's definitely a take away. We can look at what that was. That would be my guess, but I really wouldn't know. So, yeah, generally curious things. I think that's all I had on that. Was there any other questions on this level? So overall, and this is going answering your question previously on the types of debt that we had by class previously. So in 08 and 09, the percentage of our bad debt was 46 percent and that was for our commercial customers. And so now the change is the bad debt has gone from 46 percent in 08 09 to 8 percent in 17 and 18 with that. And so our multifamily and residential debt has definitely changed a little bit, but commercial overall has decreased with the policy changes. So what we're seeing right now and again, we we write off debt at one hundred and eighty days. That's when it's deemed unrecoverable. So we do still have a couple of months that we have not written off and don't have the actual write off amount. But what we're seeing right now is about 10 percent increase, which is about thirty eight thousand dollars increase in bad debt. So it's still early on to determine what the true impacts is of the deposit of the policy changes last year. But this is where kind of the health of what that is currently. Yes, that's the first question. So when you say write off, you mean hand over to a collection agency? Now, that's when we transfer the debt to a collection agency at 90 days. Now, one hundred and eighty days is when we write it off from our utility system so we can track our age debt. OK, OK. And one thing I want to just point out about this slide and to mention about the way that I read this. I'm focusing on this, the number, the amount of debt. So we've got this as far as looking at the 17, 18 data, four hundred nineteen thousand seven hundred twenty two dollars in bad debt. And this increase that we've seen that has come since these changes and tweaks that we've made recently. Totals three hundred eighty six thousand one hundred forty four dollars. So I think, of course, I'm just reading from the slide, but I think it's important for us to remember what amount of money we're talking about. I would venture to say that's a pretty manageable amount. So it not for me anyway, not cause for alarm. It's important to think about what are our options as far as coverage, right? If this is the bad debt that we want to cover, what are the most kind of stable? You know, kinds of accounts who could reliably cover that debt, you know, and I would encourage my colleagues to just kind of consider, you know, do we necessarily want those accounts, the multifamily accounts, the residential accounts who fall lower on the credit rating scale? You know, do we want that coverage to be in their hands or would it be better to and I'm not asking you, I'm kind of proposing this just to my colleagues or something to think about. Would it be more reliable, less risky to have our larger our largest commercial accounts, which are pretty reliable to take on that debt, which divided among them would be very, very small amount. I don't I don't understand. I really don't understand what you're saying. Are you saying that we should raise commercial rates to cover this debt because the residential multifamily customer is more unable to cover that debt? I don't. Is that is that what you're saying? I can get to that later in my closing remarks. But I mean, that would be one possibility. That's not exactly where I was. OK, my solution, but that could be one. OK, go ahead. So we do have the plus one assistance program that's administered through interfaith ministries. Recently, we did do a customer experience survey with interfaith because there is a financial tie with that. We want to make sure customers are getting what they need. And so we did a survey on the customers that got assistance that were denied assistance. And we also did a secret shopper component with that. And what we found is 90 percent of the customers were satisfied with their experience with interfaith and would recommend them to friends and family. But there was some opportunity for improvement. We had a couple of customers that were not responded back to by either calling in or coming into person. We have some conflicting information on the Web site and the information over the phone as well. So we did send a letter to interfaith letting them know about the results of our recent survey and ask for an action plan on how they plan to address that. We've been going discussing with them some follow up questions right now. And as soon as we have all the follow up questions answered to that, we'd definitely be providing that to the Public Utilities Board and City Council regarding that. That's my monitor. So because I'm asking because I'm more interested in actual numbers than that than that, you know, kind of percentages. How many clients received helps imagine 90, 90 percent of 90 percent of what number are reported being satisfied? I think we have many. Let me clarify. How many customers do we survey if we could? I know I have it somewhere, but just for the great things. And we may provide that when we give the final results to the specific data points on with that. I remember it being I was surprised to see was low, but that doesn't say anything. I can go back and see things. So out of the customers that were seeking an appointment, 80 or 81 percent of those customers did end up getting our appointment. The reason why they were not provided appointment, they may have canceled the appointment. There was not a true crisis or they weren't listed on the bill themselves. And so out of the customers that went and got an appointment, 68 percent of them did receive assistance after that appointment. And the reason why they may not have gotten assistance is because 74 percent of them didn't show up to the appointment. They canceled the appointment per their request or they did not provide or complete the necessary documentation. A year ago, the number one reason for denial of assistance is they needed assistance more than once. So now with the changes in the parameters, that isn't even a reason for denial currently right now. So that definitely has been an improvement this year. Councilmember Briggs and Councilmember. So then no show for appointment. That is a pretty high number. So I'm curious, is that do they follow up on that to see if they received assistance somewhere else or if they showed up and it was closed or if they they didn't. Feel like it was even worth it if they went back. You know, those that is pretty 74 percent is a lot, especially for those that are really in need of assistance not to come. So, I mean, is it transportation? You know, I would be really curious to follow up to see what what those reasons were for. So what are the barriers for them not showing up to the appointment? Is that would that clarify that? Yeah, I just want to offer like kind of a summary. If if you do get the appointment and you do show up and you do fill out the forms, it's isn't it just about 100 percent actually. 68 percent, you're going to get assistance. Yeah, because a lot of it is just people dropping out of different stages. And really, the only sort of discretion being applied is where someone might for some other non procedural thing, not not get assistance is is that not given an appointment stage. Right. That's where we make a determination that there's no crisis. Yes, correct. But OK, so if there's a determination and you show up and get through the process, you're going to get assisted. That's correct. Go ahead. Is there a requirement on the funding that we require that they use all the funding that they're given or does that funding carry over to the next budget? Like, I'm not. Is there is there an incentive for them to make sure and help those who really need help? There's not a requirement in the in the contract, but if there is funds left over, I think we had like seven hundred dollars roll over to this fiscal year. It does roll over. So we use it. But the point is to to use it and make sure our customers are getting assistance with that. So there's nothing in the contract saying that you have to use it. But if they don't use it, then it definitely will roll over. Thanks. So overall, the impacts that we made or changes that we made last year had an overall positive impact. We've been able to assist seventy one more customers for those customers got assistance with deposit assistance and then thirty five families were able to receive the multi month assistance. So previously, those families wouldn't have been able to get assistance with that. So seven more families are getting assisted a month. And right now, our funds forecast is we're going to meet what the needs are, however, we are getting into the summer months, which is the highest adoption months because the bills tend to be higher with that. So there is an opportunity with us increasing the number of times they get assisted deposit assistance. We're going to have a lot of connects coming up in the summer months and the late fall. So there is an opportunity if Council wanted to provide direction to increase funding for this fiscal year for about five to ten thousand dollars to make sure that we have complete funding and we don't run into a situation where we run out of funding in these heavier months coming up. So pay as you go is our prepaid metering program that was launched publicly in February. We have updated numbers. We have one hundred and four customers on this program now. So customers don't have to pay deposits, no late fees. There isn't any interest charges. And also, if they have a past two balance, they're able to put that into debt recovery and every payment that they make a portion of that goes towards that. So it's very manageable for our customers. And we're seeing the customers that are on it are going to see an annual savings of about one hundred and seventy three dollars on an annual basis. So we're continuing to push this program. It's definitely a great solution for our residents currently. So our continued improvement with our internal analysis and then also working with Navigant, we need to make sure that we have a little bit more time on the true impacts of the changes that were made in twenty eighteen and also improve our tracking capabilities and compliance with those waiver options. And so now that we have a little bit of the trending to know what's going on, how can we create reporting and ensure compliance with those waiver options and monitor accounts for adherence? And then for our plus one, the opportunity to increase this current fiscal year's funds, we are already going to add an additional fifty thousand dollars in our customer service budget for next year, just in anticipation for potential more assistance for our customers. So we're going to be putting that in there. We want to also, to Christine's point with Navigant, is those customers that say those trigger words like a health crisis or financial crisis or working through something difficult, if we can get them to more of a specialized representative that may be able to help them with all the community resources, helping them set up their account through the payment portal. So that was a takeaway that we got from the consultants that we're actively looking into now so we can better have even more robust and meaningful conversations with our customers. And then continue to assess the program with plus one and interfaith ministries for what our current contract is and potential additional options with that. And then increase the adoption for our pay as you go program. We are shifting, the biggest customers that are going over to the pay as you go are existing customers, about 64% of the people who have gone to that program are existing customers shifting over. And the rest, about 34%, are customers new coming into the utility system, picking that program. So we want to continue to make sure that we're educating our customers on that, doing, we're going to be doing some marketing with it, creating videos and what the benefits are of the program. So those are our big takeaways currently. I'm happy to answer any questions. >> Any questions, comments? Questions? Yes, Council Member, that's good. >> Thank you. So I have a list here I tried to hold out. I guess my request would be for future information on the, I'd like to see the connection system wide. So for example, if we see a trend up in bad debt, what does that do to the system to, so each rate payer is affected. And so kind of how that affects the rest of the system, if that makes sense. You know, so if the debt goes up 1%, then that then increases pressure, increases rate. I don't know if there's a one to one correlation. I just kind of want to see it, I just need help quantifying what that bad debt does to the accounting, if you will, system-wide, not, and then I think this is a comment. I think Council Member Armitage, I'll take her at her word that says the stricter policy at apartments motivates people to pay. Not saying that's the path we want to go. I just, I want to just kind of stipulate that I believe that to be the case. And so when we're evaluating and weighing options, I think it's important to note that that is a motivator. Whether we want to go down that road or not, I don't think it's deniable that that is truly, and that's just from someone that is guilty of putting things off in the past. You know, it's one of those things that it just is a motivator, you know, and so I, and then we make a policy decision if we want to go down that road. But I think that example given is exactly what we're challenged with. We're asking you to pay and you're saying no, I'm not because it's not punitive enough, basically, you know, and so that's just a comment. My ask policy-wise is I'd like to see something that going forward captures the proof of law. So you mentioned the buzzwords, which I agree, but I also think there needs to be something in the interfaith process that I just here's what I don't want to do. I don't want to incentivize people that go by and I'll just use a crazy example. You go buy one million dollars worth of lottery tickets and then come and say, hey, I didn't win and I need help with my utility bill. There needs to be some kind of way. And I don't know how you do that without, you know, respecting people's rights. But I just think there are genuine people that need assistance that I want to get to versus someone that mismanaged and we may help them too. I just want to understand those. You know, if we get to a point where we're having to decide who gets help, I want to try to figure out a way to put those top priorities at the top. And then mismanagement, budget mismanagement, it's a real thing. But I would put it behind someone that lost their job, you know. So I don't know how to how to weight those things, but I'd like to see us have a way to to evaluate those. May I comment on that? Interfaith does capture and require documents to prove income, what's going on. So they do capture that specific data to make sure that someone did not was not misusing their funds and now seeking assistance with your with your example. So they do capture that. Excellent. Excellent. And then I'll just say again, with the comment about offsetting cost, I think it's fantastic that this system is based on user. It's based on what you use. You pay for what you use best we can. Right. And so I think to to shift that some some way to where it's not based on that then is would be problematic for me as a policy. I think it is it is if you use this this much power energy, then your bill lines up with that. And so I think that is a good thing about this this process. And it's quantified right versus some other systems where you don't know where the you know, the cost absorbed and enrolled in this one is kind of more detailed out. And I think that's a value add. And then so one other thing or two other things I think that when I look at the slide about the missed appointments, I think exactly that was stated. Those that are need assistance and it is an emergency show up and those that maybe think, hey, this isn't going to be as easy as I thought it would be. Don't show up. I mean, I think if you absolutely having been in those in that situation, if you have to pay your utility bill or if you have to get your lights back on or you have to get in front of that, then I think you do what you have to do to make that happen. And I think that's that 68 percent. And so I'd like to see going forward policy wise, though, I'd like to hear from you on when you come back about some way to trigger the monthly average billing maybe for those for the summer months. Right. So so that we can average that out. So if you go to if you go to interfaith and you make an application, if there's some way to to then tag that account to try to get them into the monthly average billing to offset the summer or maybe the summer months, we trigger that. I know it's once a year you can opt in, so I don't know how to best manage that. But I just think to avoid those spikes, maybe if there's a way to get them into if they go into interfaith, if we can get them into an average billing situation, maybe that helps manage the summer. The average billing starts in October because the bills are less than and so you're building up your credit to get into the summer months. And so signing up for the summer months, your bill could actually be higher than what the actual usage is because you're basing it off of an average for 11 months because we want to try to make sure you don't have a big a big settle up bill with that. But I think there's a great conversation piece to that about the pay as you go program. Let's take the you've got a large balance on the account. We can take that put in debt recovery and everything your pains go into your utility. So we got some good options. Okay, good. Yeah, look forward to seeing that. Thank you. That's my bridge. Oh, and then customer. Sorry, I did. I did receive my little pamphlet in my bill for the pay as you go and I kept it and I read through it and I think it's fantastic. But I do agree with you in that we need to increase public awareness about it because if at this point, if somebody is in an existing user and didn't get it in their bill, I'm not sure that they they they know so much. Or if they just kind of chunk it without without looking and open their bill, then they miss it. So I would like to see it in a resident newsletter. Maybe it's pretty handy little thing that we get and social media. We have a really great social media person now that is on top of everything all the time. Maybe roll that out somehow, because I feel like this this is really going to help. Some of some of those situations that we've talked about in the past and also you mentioned that we were on here, it says you need to call the number to get signed up. Is there not a way online that someone can enroll just currently right now? It is there is a lot of education that needs to go along with pay as you go because you're not going to get a bill any longer. Certain notifications aren't going to be there. We need to sign you up for your text notifications, how you're going to hear from us with that. And we want to make sure they understand that before signing up to it, not saying that we can't get there. But right now, with it being so new, we want to make sure that we really take that individualized approach to make sure that they really know what they're what they're signing up for. Because it is generally pay as you go. You're not going to get a bill once a month. So that's that's why we haven't set that up currently. Is there a place on on our Web site under frequently asked questions where it could be do a brief description of maybe what what that entails? We're currently working on that content right now. We want to do the public launch, get the bill stuffer. So we're taking a very methodical approach to the to the marketing, but that is coming. Thank you. Councilman Meltzer, I want to confess that I conflated pay as you go and auto pay. It sounded like the same thing to me. And I gather they're not correct. Yeah. So, you know, if I couldn't get it, probably other people couldn't either just a little feedback. And when I before session asked what what process changes would improve conversion, I was actually thinking about auto pay because you give the deposit waiver and say, you're going to go do this. Right. And then they don't. So I think your idea that you expressed today that put the deposit on and then, hey, as soon as you finish, it'll come off. I think that'll increase both both increased deposits and it'll increase auto pay participation. So I think that's the right change. That's my monitor. So thank you for the presentation. I just wanted to go down my list of suggestions in responding to these ask for directions. I support the additional the additional 50,000 and I'm not sure if you were at was that what you were asking? That's our next budget year, but I am seeking direction if council supports an additional five to 10,000 for this. Yes. And I said, yeah, so that is what you've already. So I think that's great. And I support the additional. I would support additional ten thousand dollars for for this for this year. And let's see, I would love to see. Well, I had already mentioned kind of looking into what other cities do to adjust rate structures and discounts. But working with what we have now, I would love to see the D and E credit rating category be either go down to one month or even be or even no months. But I realize if you could go back to, so right now it's the E rating is a two month average. I'd like to see the E rating equal the D rating essentially to be one month as well, because I see what that does to people who, yes, they have bad credit. But again, if you have somebody with bad credit and you charge them a huge amount, the likelihood that you'll even get that is pretty slim or at least it's risky. So anyway, I would really like to see that move to one month as well. I would like to see our late fee change from a fixed fee to a percentage, and this was a discussion we had last time. And this is for equity's sake, because that $20 fee can really have a tremendous impact on someone, a low income person and someone who has more, not that much. So for equity's sake, if you make that a percentage, and again, just reminding my colleagues that we're really, and I don't know if you could call us an outlier, I'm looking at the navigate person, but at least in a smaller percentage of utilities who, as you mentioned, who charge a flat fee as opposed to a percentage, a percentage is much more equitable. I'd like to see, now, if you owe a deposit, when you move to a new apartment or a rental home, for instance, or if you own a home, move to another home, you need to pay, as I understand it, a new deposit in that new home. And that's something that people complain about and feels like a burden to a lot of people. Now that said, I know that you've assisted recently, I believe, under the homelessness waiver, someone who is in a situation like that. So there's assistance available for those kinds of situations, but I think it would be nice to see that go away. And then I would, and then finally, I would like staff some sort of report. I don't know if that would be from finance or not, but to see looking at that total $419,722 we have in bad debt, and specifically the $386,000 that comes from multifamily and residential. I'd love to see some sort of kind of risk assessment in terms of how, what are the odds of getting that back from this target group? And if our goal is coverage in general, I would love to see what are some possibilities for allowing our most stable, our largest commercial accounts, which as I recall, those are accounts that have thousands of dollars average utility bills per month. I know that's how it's determined. I think I'm remembering- >> It depends on what rate they are and if they're industrial or- >> Yeah, yeah, this is like the highest class. I forget if they're lettered or numbered, but the highest class of commercial customers has a really high utility bill, right? So that, I just mentioned that because that would not apply to most small businesses. But anyway, but I would like to see that different possibilities explored as to how either assessing, either imposing a deposit for those large commercial accounts might help with to stabilize the debt. And kind of what other possibilities might there be? I'm not asking you that right now, but I'm basically just asking, I guess our finance staff, maybe it might be a question for the city auditor, I don't know, to kind of play around with that. Because we've seen, if you look year to year, you can see that we have this consistent debt from our poorest customers. And it's hard to get that to go away. So I want us to be able to look at, if the goal is to get it to go away, whether we can target another group of customers. >> Okay. That's all. >> The council hasn't given consensus on any of that direction, so we need to bring that back on those requests. I'm not going to go into why I'm either for or against some of those. I will say, assessing commercial customers and additional deposit goes to their account. It doesn't go to someone else's account. If what you're saying, Councilmember Armitage, is that we assess a deposit on our bigger customers for the benefit of other customers, I don't really understand that. So you've had about seven or eight minutes. I just simply put that comment out there. So you can bring those back in our budget review and our fees for utilities when that comes in the normal course of the process. It sounds like the only thing you're needing direction for right now is the additional $5,000 or $10,000. Refresh my memory again, what's the reason for that ask to amend the current budget? >> The reason for the ask is the customer seeking assistance through interfaith ministry can get assistance up to three times. And our quarter that's coming up, the summer months, is when we have the highest increase of adoption. And we want to come to you now saying that there's a potential to increase that to make sure we don't get in the middle of August or July. And we could come to a funding constraint. >> All right, Councilmembers, that really sounds like the specific direction that she's asking for. On that number, you had a range of five to 10,000. Let's just start at the $10,000 mark. Are people okay with that, and if not, state now that you're not? Okay, I see that it sounds like affirmatively the direction is to increase that current year budget to 10,000. And so you'll bring back whatever appropriate budget ordinances, amendments that are necessary, if necessary with that small amount, so. Okay, fantastic. Did you have a comment, Councilmember? Okay. All right, any other questions or comments? Mayor Pro Tem. >> Just real quick. On the pamphlets, we're talking about different ways to get it out there. If we can get them to the apartment complexes that cater to low and moderate income, and they can put them out where when someone's coming to lease an apartment, they can see some of the, and even maybe some of the other options that we have. I think that would be a great place to put them. >> And I want to caution us about making assumptions about the level of incomes of these people who have left and their debt, their bill is delinquent. We've got a large student population that when they move, so I don't know what category those people fit into. And that's, I think, what the question was, which we'd heard from the city manager, that unless we have a program that requires them to give us that data, their income data, we don't really have a way to verify that. So I'm not sure where that comes from. If there's something that you guys can do with the data you have to help us understand that, that's wonderful, but it may be limited. All right, any other comments, questions? >> Let's take about a five minute break, cuz the next agenda item might be a little, we're on the Denton Development Code. >> That's when we can flip Gary up to there since the, I think, the next two. >> Who, who? >> Gary Packin. >> Which one? D in it? >> It would be McKenna Park. >> D, okay. All right. >> Yeah, since you get, you can go to the downtown plan and do it. >> Welcome everybody back to this meeting of the Denton City Council, March 26, 2019. We're going to just have a little slight change in the agenda items. We're going to go ahead and do agenda item D, and then do B and E, I'm sorry, C and E, because they're more, it would be the planning's presentation and your sandwich right in the middle of probably a couple hours or two, three hours of presentation. So let me go ahead and call that item. It is Receive Report, Hold Discussion, and Give Staff Direction on McKenna Park Improvements in Relation to the Bonney Bray Street Project. >> Mayor, City Council, this is Gary Packin, Director of Parks and Recreation. This is a follow up meeting to a presentation that we did back in February, actually February 26th, about Bonnie Bray and McKenna. I'll just briefly go through these first few slides, they're more there just for reference for you. Numerous project goals that we started out from the very beginning of the discussion on this project and improvement to the park. Neighborhood connectivity, strategically locating the parking lot next to the playground, and make sure that they're cohesive with each other, as well as some other considerations. We had a public meeting on March 18th, we had approximately 50 people in attendance. Council member Meltzer was in attendance as well. Some of the highlights of the discussion, they asked for fencing along areas of Bonnie Bray and scripture would be preferred in select locations just to prevent any kids from running out in those areas. We did talk about trees being added along there as well. They preferred the playground on the east side, south of the water tower as a whole, just from a small straw pole. But they did like the shade on the north side. I think overall, the water in the group was no parking on Thomas only. More of a supplement to a parking lot, but making sure the parking lot is closed to the playground. They were concerned about nefarious activity in the park at nighttime, preferably on the east side. We're kind of where the water tower and the trees are right in that area. They did request restrooms in the facility. They like the walking trails and more trees if possible. Our playground that's in that location right now is more for the five 12 year old age children. So they asked if we could add a two to five when we do the renovations there. And we talked about the inclusive play structure that we had talked about last month. And they agreed that another location may be more preferred since the terrain in that park is pretty aggressive. They're concerned about parking along scripture in itself, just with the traffic and people getting out onto the streets. Some grading issues near the pavilion, we just have some water runoff that goes into the pavilion on the north side. And then connectivity to Razor Ranch Park and North Lakes Park if possible down the road. And then a few requests for a spray ground. So Bonnie Bray improvements, eventually this old parking lot would be removed and putting new soil and grass. This goes along with the construction of the roundabouts at the intersection of scripture and Bonnie Bray itself. The parking lot will not be accessible to the majority of park customers. So that's the reason why we're looking at relocating that to the east side of the park. We went through a series of options last meeting. Option one has a parking lot south of the water tower and using the playground in its current location. Option two is a small parking lot using that alleyway for the staff used to get access to the water tower right now and moving the parking lot just south of that. Option number three was putting the playground either all on the east side, but north of the water tower or south of the water tower, but all parking would be off on Thomas, so it's all street parking. And then option four was a northeast parking lot in the park and the playground situated adjacent to that as well. In summary, I tried to capture as much as I could from the feedback from the meeting. So this is option number five, this is the temperature of the room. Parking lot rebuilt off of Thomas south of the water tower. Preferably for 15 to 20 cars, but expandable if need be. And then a playground relocated just south of that, so south of the water tower. Install lighting along the trail to help curtail some of that activity that happens in the nighttime. Install bump outs on Thomas when Thomas is rebuilt, so there's more of a dedicated or identified parking along Thomas and itself. The old playground structure could be used for picnicking and or exercise equipment down the road once funding is identified, the one thing that we did not get costs on yet was the lighting. With some of the trail being heavily treed, we may have to look at some lighting that's not solar. So we'll have to look at some infrastructure improvements there, so we still need a little research on that. But overall, option number five is almost identical to option number four in pricing. The only difference is that tree, or the lighting for the trail itself, and any topography that we're going to have adjustments for ADA requirements for the trail itself once that goes into design. So we're estimating roughly around $736,000 to do everything that's proposed. >> Okay, Council Member Meltzer. >> By the way, I thought that was a really well run meeting and really engaged group of citizens. >> On the parking thing, do we have any way of knowing what the typical number of cars are that park in the existing parking lot? What is the actual parking demand? I don't know if you have any insight into that. >> We haven't done a traffic count in that park specifically. Feedback from staff and from the public, it seems like it's heavier on Saturdays and Sundays as most typical parks are. But the thought process with lowering it, because right now the existing parking lot accommodates about 40 cars. That we would try to do a road diet or a parking lot diet, trim that down a little bit, the 15 to 20, and then kind of lean on Thomas for additional parking. >> I was wondering if the reality is that the demand might be met with the parking that's in option two and you expand from there. But I think it would be good if we did have a way to know how many cars actually show up. >> Yeah, just one more. I know, or I believe, based on previous conversations, that bathrooms are very expensive propositions. But I know that there was, was it in Fred Moore Park where there was like a temporary bathroom that was done for a while, around the splash park. Just people made a pretty compelling case, particularly the crowd that come to do, what was the name of that group that comes every Sunday? >> It's like a medieval arts group that do medieval times. >> Yeah, they stage battles there apparently every Sunday. That's just one of those things that makes that weird. But they talked about how now that they're no longer college students, they're now people in their 40s with kids. That they just don't really have the option to just come and stay for a long time if there's no way to get the kids to a bathroom. So I don't know, if there's some cost effective way to do it, I'd be interested in knowing what it would take. >> So a port-a-john type of facility, it's about $850 per unit for a year with cleaning. So that's not bad. We do have that temporary unit that we could take out there to accommodate maybe busier weekends. But it's not something we typically move around day to day. We have to put it out there and leave it out there for a period of time. But we could get a temporary port-a-john out there to accommodate that request. >> Council member Hussbett. >> Thank you. I think, but for the parking lot, I agree with kind of option five. I just don't think that much parking is needed. And even if it does spike, I think with the trail, it's sufficient parking along Thomas, both sides, because it's a very wide street. You can park on both sides and there's not a lot of traffic there, right? So if you park both sides up and down, and you're able to navigate to the playground via the walking trail, I think it makes it an easier walk. I would like to still use the crush granite type walkway versus sidewalk, but I get the ADA necessities. So I'm willing to, whatever that, wherever everyone falls on that, I absolutely get it. >> Yeah, so just carving in that sidewalk, I mean that parking for me is problematic. On the restroom side of things, I've had that conversation when you're talking neighborhood parks and kind of what those are designed to be. Maybe it's something that I would ask not associated with this decision. But maybe in future decisions, we can look at the property across the street, because that house is city property. And maybe there's some options in the future to come back, future budgets and say, hey, we're going to establish something here, crosswalk back and forth, you know, that type thing. >> This house here? >> No, sir, well, that one too, but this one over here? >> Yeah, one over. >> This, on this side? >> No, no, the other way. >> This one. >> Yes, that one. >> I guess the one thing we could look at with engineering is that when this house is demolished, could we tap into that in the future for whether it's a temporary restroom or a permanent structure that could be placed in that area. It's a little further away from the restrooms, but that's something we could at least mark and identify. >> And I'm assuming that would be problematic because it's so close to Bonnie Bray, but the other one, so you have to cross the street, you have to cross scripture to get to the other residents I mentioned, but I mean, whatever it is, I mean, I trust you. >> And so that would be my thought is the way to kind of meet that need is because we're going to be doing a lot of work in that corner, water, hopefully accessibility, or to have someone add on a feature while they're there widening the street, maybe we can get some economies of scale. So that's my thing. I'm great, I think that's a fantastic location for the playground to move it away from scripture some, and I think it adds to give them some more privacy, and I think it can be utilized well there. >> Just a couple quick follow ups on your comments. The parking lot, well, if council decides this is a good master plan in a long term direction, we could, when Thomas has improved, that could be maybe our first phase of parking and then see how it goes. And then we could always fall back on installing this parking lot to see how it works and kind of pilot it out first, so that's an option. Regarding the crushed granite, it's a good surface for trails. The concern that we have the most is it moving when we get heavy rains and it washing out and causing just continuous maintenance challenges in this location just because of its terrain is a concern. >> Thank you. >> As Councilmember Briggs was up and then. >> So I didn't see any kind of data on how many trees are going to be removed, if any? because I do know that around the house where I see the path going right through, there's some beautiful large trees. And then I see, so I don't know if the path is weaving in and out of these trees or all of these trees are going to be removed. Can you talk to that a little bit? >> There is no intention to move any of these, so we are planned on working around them. Depending on how this is removed, I don't know. I didn't get in there and walk around the house and how that's the plan to actually excavate the house itself. This location here is just a placeholder, just to kind of give you an idea that that could go through that area. So that can be adjusted. That's not designed at this point in time. The locations up in here, the idea here was to try to weave them through the trees so you could experience that if it's a concern where we might endanger the tree down the road with the excavation. Then we'll move it. This area over here is the flattest of the park, so we're trying to avoid some of the terrain that's in this area. I think the neighbors said this is kind of their skiing hill when we have snow and their sled riding. But we wanted to try to have the park users enjoy the trees, but we had no intention of removing any trees. >> Yeah, we can follow up. In the last conversation, Mayor Pro Tem Ryan mentioned a fence there along Bonnie Bray. But I don't see that as an option there. But I'm in favor of that because of the safety that expending to a six lane fast roadway. >> So I put it here on the bottom of this slide that we still need to identify those costs. >> Okay. >> You know, depending on exactly how close this is, there may be certain areas that we feel like the fences need. Maybe not. So we're going to explore that once we're getting closer in design. >> Well, if you're looking at the picture, it looks just like it's right there at the. >> Yeah, this is following the existing sidewalk here. So we may want to push that back a little bit. But we could look at the both sides, scripture and Bonnie Bray. >> Council member Melton in the armature. >> Just to follow up a little on a couple of points. Is the expensive part of a bathroom running the utilities or it's the structure? Or is it really, it's both? >> I guess it's both. I mean, the smaller it gets, the more cost per square foot it gets. >> Sure. >> Because everything's so dense in regards to the plumbing infrastructure and the walls itself. It's just, they're just expensive. >> Okay, I get it. I'm sure you'll puzzle it out. It just occurred to me, yes, that's right. There's already plumbing. And then I would just say, if we decide not to do it for whatever reason, that's an option. But I would say, and Gary, back me up if you agree with this. They're pretty unanimous in wanting some off-street parking. Their perception was people zip through Thomas quick. >> Yeah, they did mention that the traffic seemed to maybe tick up a little bit with traffic on Thomas. >> Basically, whether it's a lot or a little, it's that they go faster than people would like. So hopefully, if they did have parking on Thomas, when they redid it, if they put those islands in there, that that might thin the road up a little bit and slow traffic down. >> Did you have a comment? >> Yeah, I was just going to say for council members Hudspeth and Meltzer, in two weeks we will be bringing you some ideas on some lower price bathroom ideas that we've been researching last several months. So it could be some options that we could present for all these, this park and other parks in particular, that won't necessarily seem so outrageous with the cost. So I think Gary's got some good options for you to study here in a couple of weeks. >> Council member Armitage? >> Nevermind. >> Yes, Council Member Hudspeth. >> And if one other option maybe, could we talk to the church about subletting? Or I don't know what the rules are as far as parking rights, but I just, again, I absolutely would yield to the residents. But before we take out a bunch of parkland for parking lot, and I know it's a diet, I know it's bringing it down. But before we did that, there's a giant parking lot right across the street that we could potentially. >> Partner with? >> Yeah, partner with and get a row or two and do the same thing, at least until we can get some counts, get some numbers and get a feel for things and then make a decision based on counts. >> Right, we could absolutely have the discussion with them. I would assume they probably want no parking on Sundays, because that's their peak day. So there would have to be a balance there. Saturdays are probably one of our busiest days and then the evenings, so we could have the discussion with them. >> Sure. >> Okay, any other questions at least up to this point? So you just need direction on an option and- >> Yes, sir. >> Okay, Council members? Yes, five, okay. >> Which was? >> Okay, I'm fine, depending on what the parking needs are. It's something like five, but maybe five is closer to two if the parking needs aren't actually that great once we have some insight and bathroom comments. >> So five was some flexibility on, if we don't need that much parking, then you're okay with that? >> Yeah, we can do something less. I'm very interested in what Council Member Hudson presented as well as at least a temporary or maybe longer term alternative. I know it's tricky on Sunday at noon, because that's when these guys want to come out and have their battles. And that's when church is letting out, or somewhere around there. >> Yeah. >> But I don't know, maybe- >> Okay, all right. >> I don't know if there could be some interesting clash between the battle people and the church people. >> Yes, Mayor Pro Tem. >> I would say option five with further evaluation of the parking, if there are other options out there. And to bring us back some pricing on lighting and fencing. >> Okay, all right. Council Member Briggs, you want to weigh in on this? What is the length of that trail? >> I can find out, I don't have it off the top of my head. >> Okay, yeah, I mean, reduce the amount of the parking if needed, I'm in favor of that. And the playground in that area is good with the fence for protection, especially for adding a younger playground. I think it's gonna definitely be needed, so. >> Yeah, so it sounds like the direction is option five with some discussion about mitigating the offsite parking in the park in conjunction with conversations with the church and just the neighborhood and things such as that, all right, fantastic. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, appreciate it. All right, we'll move now on to probably the shortest presentation we'll have today is receive report. Call the discussion and provide staff direction on the Denton Development Code update and draft zoning map. >> Thank you, Mayor and members of council. Bear with me for a couple seconds while I pull up the presentation. Okay, thank you again for the opportunity. This is the work session number five on the DDC update. Just for a recap of what we discussed at our last work session, which was on the 19th, we talked about specifically subchapters four, five, and introduced a little bit of six. I know there were some questions related to lighting. I've got the technical staff experts here that will help answer those questions. Before we get into six, just again, we discussed the uses. There were some items, specific uses that we discussed. We are going to be taking that forward to the DCRC at our meeting, which is scheduled tomorrow morning. So a couple of items we will continue to discuss with the DCRC. With that, I'm going to introduce and talk a bit about subchapter six. We'll get into subchapter seven and also eight today as part of this presentation. Subchapter six is probably the most longest subchapter in the sense that it has the most information. It is combining all of the standards that we currently have in the DDC into one chapter. And those topics or those sections are listed here. I'm just not going to read it all, but starting with land disturbing activities through ESA drainage, through water, landscaping, parking, site design standards, and also solid waste and electric standards as well. So this was the attempt to make the development code as user-friendly as possible by locating all of the standards in one chapter. So with that, I've got a list of significant changes, but this is the opportunity for the council to ask questions. I understand that there were some questions submitted by Councilman Metzler earlier this week. We're prepared to answer those questions. But again, open it up to the council for questions, comments for the DDC update. >> Go ahead, go ahead and answer questions. >> Sure. >> And that last person. >> Perfect. >> Yeah, most of them, you know, you answer them to my satisfaction. I'm like, yes, it is addressed, but over here, you know. So I want to take our time on those ones, and thank you for helping on those. Maybe you can, just for everyone's benefit, address the 6.4.9 A1 page 285, the cross timbers upland habitat, how the 50% preservation there works with the recently adopted tree and landscape code. Certainly, and this language was currently in the Chapter 17 that was recently adopted. So really the way it works, if by right you're able to remove 50% of, for residential, 50% of the cross land, cross timber habitat. So once you, if someone does remove that 50%, it then falls into the development impact area. And so while the ESA does not count for or against, it's sort of looked at separately. However, once you- >> Let me pause you for a minute, just to make sure I'm tracking. So just because you have treed property doesn't mean it's part of cross timbers habitat ESA. >> Correct, it would have to have that designation. >> Okay, so that's a helpful point right there. So, all right, so you can cut within the ESA, and then the part that you cut becomes part of the development site. >> Development impact area. >> Development impact. >> And so within that development impact area, that's where that 30% preservation comes. >> That helped me, I appreciate the explanation. >> But not with the mic on, that helped me, and I appreciate the explanation. I'll go a little bit out of sequence, just because I think the last one will take a little more time for you to respond to. But in 6.13.7 D2 on page 387, it talks about whether basically DME construction. It's impact on trees, and I know we talked about in the committee on the environment about not excluding the city from mitigation requirements. So can you help me understand how this conforms to that? >> Paul, could you give me that section again? I think the 387 page in the actual hard copy is not, yeah. >> Let's go by the page numbers on the bottom of the document. >> That's fine, what's your- >> So it's 6.13.7 D2. >> Okay, thank you. >> So and just to give a little more background, our input on committee on the environment was if we really have these goals on canopy, then we wouldn't want to exclude our own impact on canopy if there's mitigation requirements. We'd want to help move us closer to those goals. So I'll let that all be the question. >> And short answer should just be eliminated. I think that was one of those, that number two should be removed. >> Okay, I'm glad I asked. So you mentioned in our pre-work session exchange that you would talk about substation screening requirements in the presentation. So maybe that's all I need to say, you kind of know my interest in it. >> We're going to ask Chuck Sears to come up and speak to that specific question. So if we can invite Chuck to the podium. >> Ladies and gentlemen of the council, Mr. Mayor. There's a lot of perception in this, and we have a problem to provide safety and we have to provide a fence. And there's pressure to control cost, and then how do you do that? And let me just give you some relative magnitudes of cost. We have stations out west that are not close to anything that nobody really cares about. And we've got chain link around them. That was the standard way several years ago. Chain link fence around an average substation would cost somewhere in the range of $50,000. Provides the security that we need, and it works for us actually. If you go to our standard now, which has been adopted, the concrete fence, it's ten foot high, it's a rock replica with some paint. That will cost for an average substation somewhere between $400,000 and $500,000, depending on terrain and what else you have to do. There's some variability there, but basically $200 foot, as opposed to maybe 20. If you go to an architectural wall, now we're into the necessity of having an architect design it, plus a structural engineer design something that's supposed to stand up in wind with only the wall to support it. It's not a building. It doesn't have the internal infrastructure in the building to support that. And so the cost of that goes five or six times above the concrete fence into the millions. The only example we have of that is what we've gone so far with the Hickory substation. Cost estimate on that is over $3 million. The architectural design part of that was over $200,000 just for that. So our only concern is we can do it whatever way. We don't particularly like the high wall because the equipment has to be cool and that does cut down on the wind a little bit, but we can design for that. It's a matter of do you want us to spend that kind of money on it from our perspective? And whichever way can we get guidance is the way we would be happy to approach. But that's just a rough estimate of the cost. >> I mean, my opinion is probably a lot of times you don't, maybe sometimes you do. You know, you're looking at it for 50 years. I don't think it adds to property values when you've got those big ugly things. So maybe some areas doesn't make any sense. But for sure on Hickory Street, I think it does. >> Sure. Well, and I guess our only concern is that that be considered because out by the cattle ranch, it doesn't necessarily make sense at this time. That's not our choice. That's how that's put into the code and how that's handled is something DME doesn't take care of. >> So what I had teed up was the idea that just we say based on your comments, I think I would amend what I said, but what I had said was we're feasible. That we ask that some kind of a concept be offered to the community and council with the price tag of the options on them expressed in terms of impact on rates. I think that's totally reasonable. But that's very sobering, and you give me the order of magnitude like that. Maybe it's like within certain kinds of designated areas in the city where kind of the integrity of the look of the areas, related to a historical area or something like that. >> So help me understand, it doesn't sound like to me that you're wanting an absolute shall in the code that says you shall put in architectural type fencing. You're saying you want some language that denotes at least to bring back the options codified even though they'd probably do it anyway. But you're saying you want it codified to instruct them to bring back options in every time? >> Well, I'm instructed by the presentation that maybe it's sort of in areas where there's like historic areas or where there's going to be a design district or something where there's some kind of designation about the appearance of the neighborhood. So that limits the application of the request. >> Okay, so because I know that typically when we do site selection, those questions that you're raising are, I mean, I can't think of when they were not considered. I mean, because the public will bring that up as well. So I guess the question is if you want it in the code, is there consensus for that? And then how do we draft that? And if not, then we just move forward as we always have done with the process and identify those at the specific time that the site selection. >> Yeah, so I've said what I needed to, curious to hear what others think. >> Sure, Council Member Briggs. >> Is a 10 foot wall the standard? I'm thinking of the- >> That's our standard way that we do it now. We do it for every substation now, unless directed differently. >> I'm thinking about the new Kings Row substation where it has the rock wall and then the iron gate fence, is that 10 feet? >> That's 10 feet. >> Okay, and is that, I'm just wondering where 10 feet came from. Because I think that's actually, it's a pretty nice wall. But if it could be extended a little higher, that may take care of some of the issues. >> It can be taller. >> It's like a 30 foot thing we're covering, that's right, typically. >> Right. >> 30, yeah. >> So you're talking about the whole- >> Stuff. >> Okay, so I guess I'm just. >> So to keep us clear on posting, at least for the development code. I mean, this is a discussion we can come back on. What is a standard fence and what it's made of, but the question was raised. Do we want to put something like that in the code? Or do we want to just continue to move forward as we have in the past, with past practices of council can look at that as the site locations come forward? >> Or if you're wondering about codifying it, and my esteemed colleagues right here can correct my engineering approach to their development code, is just say, in any given circumstance, the council may direct. Other actions be investigated. >> Did you have a question or a comment? >> You just, you spotted a nod of. >> Okay. >> That's, I mean, to me that, I like that idea. >> Mayor, if I might, I think that just being one of the capital projects that ultimately, whether it's an administrative manual or it's just a policy of the city that ultimately, it's going to go through the city manager's office and come before council. I don't know that it's something that should be codified. Ultimately, we're addressing some of the standards that would apply to all districts and rather than getting districts specific, I think if it's just the policy of the council to give the direction to city manager. >> Okay, any, go ahead. >> Well, you know, I would just ask this. If we have some broad language that council can do other things, I would just propose, say, such as an architectural facade. You know, here's the reason why. If I hadn't brought that up as even an existing possibility, it wasn't coming up. And this is back, you know, when I was just a, you know, just a citizen going to public meetings. The only way it was presented was this is the standard thing and it was to go into a historic district. And people look at it and they go, well, okay, I guess it's a standard thing. We hate it, but it says right here, the standard thing. You know what I mean? >> Which substation are you referring to? >> The one that is not yet built between Hickory and Oak. >> It's the Hickory substation. >> That's the Hickory substation he's referring to. >> Okay, I think I'm confused because, now I could be wrong, but I thought that we had extensive conversation about that. >> Sure. >> And we decided to build a gas insulated substation there, or that was part of the discussion. >> Yes, sir. >> And the cost and the building look and so I. >> Well, but I'm going back to when it was originally presented to the public. >> Okay. >> You know, the typical kind of public meetings. Here's the drawings and I guarantee you I introduced the idea. Because it isn't common practice here, it is in other places. And I understand why. It's ridiculously expensive, but it might be appropriate at some times. But I think if the idea of architectural facade as a possibility is not sort of even there, I just don't think it'll be raised. Even if it's raised and considered too expensive in a particular application, I'm really done on it now. >> Okay, all right. Council Member Hesbeth. >> Yeah, so my insight, I get it, but there's never a situation where I would be okay with a $2 million. At that point, you just don't put it there, right? If it's going to be that bad that you need to do that to it, you just don't put it there. You put it somewhere else. And I'll point out, in that specific location, there's a monstrosity right across the street that's been there since the beginning of the time, because I grew up on that street. And so, I mean, if you're talking about really enhancing the area, you would have to take out Deliquick, you know? So I just think there's some instances where you just wouldn't. I mean, there's an exact substation right across the street that looks terrible by those standards, you know? But it functions and we're used to it. So I just don't envision a scenario where I'd be okay spending $2 million to obstruct something for aesthetic purposes, regardless of the district it's in. If it's in a district that doesn't, if it doesn't flow with that district, I would advocate finding a place to put it elsewhere. So I don't think it needs to be codified because I just don't know that that situation would ever justify spending that much money on a wall to hide it. >> Sure. >> Are there, and I tend to agree with Scott that the code is trying to be as general and predictable as possible with some clear black letter law and guidelines. Are there capital improvement manuals or best practices policies that we have that what Councilmember Meltzer is saying that might be more appropriate for that to go in as far as if there's engineering guidelines, that criteria manuals or something like that that govern what we're discussing that that might be a more appropriate place? I don't know. >> Well, and so because we've been working on this for quite some time, I didn't specifically recall that we've addressed a portion of this as to where it is that if this is not going before, city council is part of a capital improvement plan or other city council approved master plans. A public hearing didn't occur, then it'll go for an SUP. So we've addressed it in the updated version of the code that you'll be seeing next. >> Okay, what are you referring, what's the- >> It's procedures for review. So I can- >> Is it in this manual? >> It is in the new manual, yes. >> What's the code so I can follow along with you? >> It is 5.3.7, public and semi-public utility uses. >> 5.3.7, okay. Let me get to that, 5.3.7. >> 231 is the page number. >> In the actual manual? >> Yes, and then you're actually gonna go to page 232, which are the procedures for review. >> Okay, all right, okay. Okay, okay, so the standards in section 6.13. It says electric substation and switch station shall comply with the standards in section 6.13, and that is 6.13. >> That's the screening. >> Is that what we're talking about? >> Yes. >> Okay. Okay, and then, okay, so shall be submitted at site plan. I'm gonna go to 6.13 real quick. Because what I do want to understand is I think what Council Member Meltzer is saying is that if we're requiring standards, and that if they meet these standards, that they're not required to do anything else, then is there 6.13, what page is that on? >> Page 435. >> Okay, all right, 435, okay, 613, okay, yeah, I was looking for 6.1, and then it's, all right. It required basic level of architectural variety, okay, so this is the standard. Standards in this subsection require basic level of architectural variety, compatible scale, and mitigation of negative impact, screening wall. So what I'm understanding is if they abide by these standards, there's nothing that comes before the council, or it still does? >> That's correct, and if they abide by these standards and they've met all the other requirements, they don't have to come to council. >> Okay, well, truthfully, I understand what Council Member Meltzer is saying, and that is that there is no really overview or presentation of that, given the actual code, so. >> And the, Mayor, if I may, the intent of when this ordinance was drafted several years ago was that we set those standards. And so we, when I say we, the city, determined that the ten foot wall was the appropriate standard. So if that's the case, and they meet that, then they would not need to come to the Planning, Zoning, Commission, and City Council for anything else. >> Which means that there's really no requirement to provide something. I mean, there's no public input, I mean, other than you might have a public meeting on the site selection. But unless somehow the council gives a sort of courtesy hearing or agenda item, there's not a requirement to give that agenda item. Is that my understanding? >> That's my understanding. >> Okay, all right. So, and I understand why the utility department wants that, because if they meet those standards, they don't have to go through the process that can take six months. So I think the point is a good one that Council Member Meltzer makes is how do we do that in a way that doesn't. >> Doesn't make it too cumbersome. >> Yeah, doesn't make it, yeah, or create sort of a different intention for the code than what we might have. So anybody, I mean, we've got some smart people around this table. Anybody got some suggestions? Council Member Husspeth. >> No, then I would ask Council Member Meltzer, what's the optimal look? And then if they want to change that, then they would have to come to council. So if you lay out the high end and say this is what you have to meet and staff or DME says no, we don't want to do that, then it triggers you to come back or you have what is, if you're okay with the high end and they're like, okay, we'll do that, and then it goes in, no problem. If you want to walk it back, it triggers a process. Just work it backwards. >> Yeah, I'm not sure that's what Council Member Meltzer had in mind. Council Member, Mayor Pro Tem. >> Well, considering it's requiring the public hearing for the site selection and notice is sent out to the 200 and 500 foot. That's on page 232, that's one of the procedures for review. Either you have that public hearing or you're going to go through the SUP process, which will trigger a couple of public hearing at both the P and Z level and the council level. With that being in there, the input that can be given at that public hearing as far as do we want to, is this close to, I'm going to have impacts on a residential area that we may need something different. All that can be heard at that same point. >> So then I'm confused. Well, on 5.3.7, which is the compliance with electric standards, and that's the 6.13. I thought what I heard was if they comply with those standards, then they can move on with their project without any public review, public input, or public hearing. Not public input, but public hearing. >> This is a specific use permit is what I was referring to. They don't need to do a specific use permit. >> Right, but they still are subject to the procedures for. >> For the site selection, yeah. >> But at site selection, we don't have necessarily the fence. >> Right. >> Okay, then I think it'd be very easy. You could just put in at the site selection stage. If it's in here, is site selection stage in here? >> Right. >> It's at that time during that selection process that they identify what the standard fence looks like. And then council can consider if we want, and so it just comes. Doesn't necessarily have to go, because you're coming to city council anyway, it doesn't create a separate process or procedure. >> Right. >> You could just say, okay, when you come, you need to have part of the site selection process identified an option for your, whatever it's called, screening. >> Screening. >> Screening. >> Yes, and I think that's pretty much what we've been doing. >> Okay, yeah, and so we just. >> Because what's the public going to ask? They're going to say, what's it going to look like? >> I think that's what we can codify, and that way it's not creating an additional procedure. And it's sort of codifying what the best practices have been. >> Yes, sir. >> That you guys are doing. And then it just gives us an opportunity to say, hey, this is great, hey, it's not. >> So we will add the screening language as part of this public hearing held at city council. >> Okay, procedures for review under procedures. >> Right. >> But of course, you know, obviously the public hearing, the council's going to make any other recommendations. >> Sure, of course. >> But we'll make sure that screening is identified so that it does bring up that question. >> Yes, okay. >> Right. >> Council Member Armitage. >> So I wanted to ask, so if the process that we're using now, going to be using starting with the new codes that now is optional regarding notification to. >> With new development I think kind of the neighborhood-wide spin program inspired. >> Thank you. >> Sorry, the neighborhood-wide spin program inspired approach. If that could be applied to notifying the public as to public hearings on substations as well? Or does that already kick in beyond the, that does? >> Yes, it's actually, Council Member C on the list of items that's required. >> Great. >> A neighborhood meeting held 15 days prior, so it's already codified. >> Excellent, and that means, great, and so that means that neighborhood meeting, it means it would go through that same notification process that we've talked about in the past, the new one. >> Our notification process which would be to mail social media, signs, whatever we need to do to make sure that people are aware of the neighborhood meeting. >> Great, yeah, beyond that 200, 500. >> Correct. >> Excellent, thanks, that's good. >> City attorney had a question, comment. >> Currently, if I'm correct, the site selection process that DME goes through to select a site is not a DDC process. It's a separate process, is that correct? Is that going to continue in this DDC? Is that, we're talking about site selection and what's being done with the new DDC. I'm not very clear based on the answers provided my staff, if site selection is still going to be an independent process to select the site, or if it's going to be merged with a DDC. >> Yeah, because what 5.3.7 talks about is electric substations and switch stations. And that's the actual structure and that's, how do you develop it? What you're talking about is site selection may not be under the jurisdiction of this code. >> That's correct. >> And I'm not aware of that. We can certainly look and verify, but that's a separate process. It's just, this section is pulling the fact that it's either coming as part of a master plan or through some other process that it's been reviewed by council. >> So then his question is, if we were going to add this requirement at the site selection process for screening, for the options and the proposals for screening, where does that get added? Is there a manual? Is there a, I mean, the site selection process, is that something that's sort of in the air and it's not codified anywhere? Or is there strictly a document that says, here's what you're going to do. >> It was back about 2011 or 12 when we first got into our major push on the CIP that had a lot of improvements in it. I don't know if there was an ordinance or just approval by the council on that. But we brought to you a proposal for an approach for development of transmission lines and substations and how the site selection process would work. So I think there's an ordinance, there may be an ordinance on that that's already got a very defined process on that, which involves city council. >> It sounds like we may need to do a little bit more research on this, so this is still an outstanding question that I think that we have. So maybe we could look at, is there that process that's codified in an ordinance or not? So if there is, then we can come back and amend that ordinance if need be, or we can talk about, do we add that somewhere in here? >> Yeah, absolutely will do. The one thing that I can tell you is each time we have brought this, brought a site to or route to the city council, there has been some sort of a rendition of what the substation would look like and the opportunity has been, it's generally been brought up at that point. For instance, for the Hickory substation that okay, we're going to have a citizen committee make a recommendation here. And it came up very early in the process. >> Okay, all right. >> Yes, Councilmember Meltzer. >> I'll just add about a sentence and a half of historical context, probably make a little more sense to Councilmember Hotzbett. As I recall, there were other site possibilities that would have been like $10 million more, because it would have required removal of apartments and relocating a lot of people. So it's kind of like a community compromise, like okay, you can put it right here in this prime place, but make it look nice. And the overall cost was much less than the others. >> Okay, so does that direction make sense as far as how we sort of bring the conversation back? >> Yes, Mayor, we're going to look into how we can get it in the code. But making sure that we follow exactly how we want it procedurally. >> Okay, all right, great. Okay, thank you, Jeff, appreciate it. Thank you for your insight. >> As far as other items on my list, I had two kind of ones that will probably inspire a lot of discussion. But I think they're really on the map more than on the code, per se. >> Okay. >> So we can talk about that. >> Any more discussion about the code itself before we move possibly to the zoning map? Councilmember Briggs. >> I had a question about the HOAs, because I remember us talking about it in our committee meeting. And then I've thought the consensus or that what we discussed was that there wouldn't be required HOAs for every single development. But then on our backup and our code, it did say that. And there was some concern about having every single new single family subdivision having an HOA, and us forcing that upon them. And so it was my understanding that that conversation more so revolved around streets and having an ability for the HOA to cover the streets when we take over them. But, can you come up? >> Yeah, so I'm not in favor of an HOA for every new single family subdivision. >> Brenda McDonald is going to speak to that issue. >> Okay. >> Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. My name is Brenda McDonald. For those of you who don't know, I'm outside Land Use Council on the Code Project. And as I recall, our conversation on the HOA was that it would be required where there's a common area. And so that we can ensure the common area maintenance. And there are about five provisions that we want to make sure are in their CCNRs. That allow the city to go in and maintain and charge the HOA if that common area is not being maintained. I think what you're talking about is the private streets converting to public streets. And I think that was a whole different kettle of fish. >> Okay, so just to that, can I respond and say, because we did have in our new tree fund, or the conservation easements that the city would take over. And I just want to make sure that there's clarification between those two so that the conservation easement doesn't get called a community space. In which the HOA is going to be required if that's something the tree fund is going to cover. So I just want to make sure that there's separation and clarification on those things. >> We can distinguish between the two for sure. >> Okay. >> Council Member Arvind. >> Yeah, and I'm, so to that point, I too share, Council Member Briggs reservations about that. I'd also like to hear, either now or maybe at a later date, if it's not fully codified, what exactly constitutes counts as a common space. Is there a definition off hand or? >> They are typically platted as separate lots that are maintained and owned by the Homeowners Association, so they are delineated on the plat. >> Okay, so kind of a follow up question, it might sound silly, but so without a, so say a development that wasn't planning on having a homeowners association, right? How would you define that without the word homeowners association in it? Or does it, see what I mean? Because I understand from the perspective of a development that intentionally wants to have a homeowners association. >> Well, the developer establishes the scheme from the very beginning. And if there is common area that all of the residents in the platted subdivision enjoy, then dues are collected for the maintenance of that common area. And so that's one of the things that the homeowner structure does. It doesn't always have to include architectural controls, fence controls, that kind of thing. The city's interest is making sure that common area owned and maintained by the HOA or the community association or the property owners association is adequately maintained. Often times as these HOAs age and the sort of the developer leaves and the neighbors take over. Sometimes the dues structure doesn't cover adequate maintenance of those areas and then you're left with high weeds and grass and code violations. That having these requirements in the documents allows the city to remedy those high weed and grass concerns and levy the homeowners association for that activity. >> Okay, so that makes sense to me. But as I understand it, and this might be more a question for the development staff, because I'm still trying to understand this part of the codes. So this part of the codes regarding HOA that Councilmember Briggs was asking about, it's requiring that if there is a common space in a development, in a common area, that there has to be, in a new development, that there has to be an HOA. They have to have an HOA, is that correct? >> Yes. >> Yeah, okay, so and that requirement is something I'm wary about. I understand that if there already is an HOA that they've already committed to taking care of that. >> I'm not saying that I'm totally opposed to this, but that I would have questions about it. >> So I understand it in being a, so if you live in an apartment complex, there's a community center with a swimming pool, and those are something, it's separate. Which when you pay your rent, that part of that goes to maintaining. So that's kind of like what this HOA is for. It's not just an open space, which I've asked them to separate. And so if that's left to the city as a conservation, an easement or open space as parked, that's not what the HOA is going to be responsible for maintaining. This is just going to be, so the developer, when they are developing their single family development, has the option, if they want to have these amenities, then they would need an HOA to cover them. But if they don't, then it wouldn't be required, is that right? >> That's correct. >> Okay, okay, thank you. So then I'm okay with it, and thank you. I know you've sat through many of these meetings, so you have to clear up a couple of my follow up questions. Thanks. >> So we're clear on that, that it will just be if there's common spaces that HOA is going to be required, common amenities. Yeah, okay, all right. Everybody okay with that? All right, okay. Any other questions or comments from staff before we move on to the zoning map? Because I know Council Member Meltzer has some questions about the zoning map as well. >> Just, I've got some items under the sub-chapter six, but also just state again that there are members of the technical staff here. If you all have any questions specific to sub-chapter six, both DME and I believe Deborah's here as well, and Brad Layhart is here as well. Okay, there was a question before we leave sub-chapter six on lighting. I know that that was a question. I don't know if the council would like to have Jerry Fielder, sorry, to come up and speak related to lighting, if that's the council's direction. >> Sure, Council Member Armitage. >> Yes, I would love to hear about LED lighting. >> Jerry Fielder. >> Well, good afternoon. >> Good afternoon. >> We're going LED. So kind of let me give you a little bit of input about what I know right now about some of the standards that we're establishing. We are doing a retrofit in Denton, which means that we're not going to intentionally re-change any poles or anything like that, we're just going to change the light bulbs out on the existing poles. And so some of the changes that we're making is right now we use what's called a type three lantern, which has a little bit shorter of a longitudinal throw, but a little bit fatter in the back. We're going to go to a type two. And the reason why we're going to a type two is because it gives me a little bit longer throw. It doesn't quite put as much to the back, quite as put as much to the front. So that should help with number one, since we're about 300 foot standard spacing, put more light on the street. But you still get a little bit of light back here for the sidewalk, but not so much that hopefully you're not encroaching on people's houses and everything else. So that's going to be one of the first changes that we're making. We are going to, right now we're using 4,000 Kelvin temperature lights on all thoroughfares and highways. And those, the highways of course is I-35. University and Look 288, we plan on putting 4,000 Kelvin lights up for that. However, for the residential areas, we are going to take that down to a 3,000 Kelvin light. It's a lot more vanilla is the word I was told to use. From that standpoint, it's not quite as bright as the 4,000s. And since we have the thoroughfares and the highways are so much wider, we really need to have a lot more light so they can try to get across the street and try to cover as much as it is. But the 3,000 Kelvins are going to be a little bit more subdued in the neighborhoods that we have like that. So that's the plan right now. We are talking with streets already, not streets, but with Todd Estes to kind of develop new lighting standards. One of the things we're going to have to do is probably come to you guys in the future and try to change this 300 foot rule to something other where we kind of do a design based upon illumination engineering society standards at the time so that we get the proper light on the ground. But I also want to say that, well, I guess one of the biggest concerns is going to be up light or what they call, you know, sky glow. Well, all of our Cobra heads are going to be what we call use zero. That means there's no up light that goes up at all from that standpoint. So the Dark Sky Association approves of that part of it. In fact, some of the luminaries that we've looked at are actually a little bit more than just 90 degrees or, you know, they take it down even further on that part of it. So those are the standards that we're doing. We are actually an RFP right now and the RFPs are due for the luminaries back on April the 2nd. And for the control system is back on 416. And I mentioned the control system because let's say that we put this up there and there's still areas where people think there's too much light or something like that. The control system will allow us to dim it down even more from that standpoint. So that can be a by light or that can be by neighborhood. It also gives us a greater control over, you know, turning things on and off as well as the control system is what can automatically report to us that a street light is out from that standpoint. So that eliminates a lot of the, I guess, worries that people have right now. Everything's an automated system. You have to go online or you have to call in. And that's just probably not really the most convenient way to do street light allergies. So the light control system will be a separate item that we bring to you guys in the future. So that's kind of an ideal of what we're doing with the street lights right now. So, yes, ma'am. So first of all, so thank you for specifying that and clearly you know about the Dark Sky Association in there. Yes, ma'am. Yeah. So that is excellent. You know, and I will say that these numbers meant nothing to me until I started researching them and seeing that really that 3,000K is kind of what is, you know, kind of recommended for residential neighborhoods, you know, ideally, you know, 2,700. I love hearing about the control system, and I just had a question about that because, you know, that applies to how I'm thinking about this and how it goes into the new codes. Would it be able to take down a, you know, a fourth. So, say, there's a 4,000 light in an area that is kind of officially not residential, but, for instance, on University, I know there are some houses that back up like the back of the house, you know, and so people's windows might get some of that light and say there's complaints. Would it be able to take a 4,000 down to a 3,000? Yeah, basically what it is, it's the amount of lumens that's coming out of the top. So lumens is what leaves the light and looks is what's going to hit the ground. So you have amount of lumens coming out of the light. So this basically will control those. So we reduce the amount of lumens that the lights put now. So if somebody thinks it's too bright, then the dimming will help bring that down. One of the caveats I like to add for this is that these are going to be new lights in the city, and they're going to be perceived brighter than what we have right now. So people are going to think, well, it's a lot more light. But in reality, I mean, it's pretty close as far as especially the 3,000 Kelvins to the same amount of light that we have now. I think it's just whiter than what it was before. And how low can it go? We can turn them off. Yeah, okay. Well, I don't care to ask. I wouldn't have known. Just turn off the light. So no, but I mean, as far as like, can you go dim it as little? Could you take it to 2,500? I'm going to say probably. I mean, one of the ideals that we've kind of passed around, let's say that the city of Denton is having a fireworks display and you have all these streetlights going and it's bright and you really don't want those. But we can actually dim those down or turn those off for a short period of time. So you have the fireworks display. And then whenever it's over, they come back up from that standpoint that can all be controlled within our dispatch area. Yeah. Anyway, this is great. And I also applaud the choice of LED lights, even though I'm concerned about the brightness. It's long lasting, energy saving. So anyway, the control is great. So thank you very much. I know that was a lot of time spent on that, but that really helps. And I'm comfortable after that with the way it's integrated into the new codes. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you, Jerry. Any other questions for the code? Comments from staff on the code on Chapter 6? Any questions? Comments? Okay. So we'll move on to the zoning map. That we're doing. Let me go real quick through subchapter 6. Oh, I thought you wanted to cover everything. Got you. Got you. So that we've got your own questions and comments. Just really just a highlight overview of what's covered under subchapter 6. So this slide right here basically discusses there's two slides on it. Very short list. Again, we talked about all the standards are consolidated into one subchapter. We're making sure that it's not a one size fits all. There's actually tailored approaches. Flexibility on options for, you know, certain design standards. We're going to talk a little bit about the landscaping and the buffer and screening requirements. A lot of the technical procedures and technical requirements have moved. The procedures moved to subchapter two and the technical have moved to the criteria manual. So that's a good thing. There's still going to have, we're still going to have the expansion applicability table, but it's been updated. And of course, the conservation landscape or and it's a big part of this subchapter has been adopted by the council a couple of weeks ago. I'm just going to highlight some of these things here. We've added more requirements or new requirements regarding fence and walls, something that the DCRC met on several times. The parking that we approved back in May have been incorporated in this code, May of 2018. Let's see here. All land use will have a parking requirement and then the open space requirements, I think there was a need for that and I believe a question regarding what the percent should be. We've proposed we currently have open space requirements for multifamily. We're introducing a open space requirement for single family subdivisions. And then that's it. More tables and graphics to make it more user friendly. That's all of subchapter six. Any comments, questions on subchapter six? And if I can just continue with seven and eight and then we can get to the zoning map. Oh, sure. I thought we were just doing subchapter six. Today will be seven and eight and eight is the last one. So after today, we're done with the DDC. So subchapter seven is your subdivision and basically discusses platting and other dedication requirements. Similar to the previous subchapters, we're moving most of or all of the procedures into subchapter two. Any technical requirements that are not code related are moved to the criteria manuals. This subchapter has discussion. I think this is where Councilmember Briggs discussed the homeowners association, which is covered under gated communities. There's provisions for cluster development. And as you all saw from a previous illustration from our consultants, Clary on the opportunity to develop cluster development is available through this this code update. So if you have a large area that has a density requirement of so many, you can preserve open space and still keep the density by clustering them in one area where it's not going to impact the open space, either ESA or just tree conservation. And that's that's it on subchapter seven is really a way of cleaning it up and making it more streamlined for subdivision requirements back to the homeowners association. Just can you clarify? Because on the page before it said that we are going to require open space. And I do remember that I heard Mayor Pro Tem say, well, I don't want to force them to require open space if we're going to force them to have an HOA. But that, again, isn't just can you just clarify for me right here? Sure. The difference. So earlier when we had the discussion with relation to homeowners associations, that was under the section of gated communities. So if you are proposing a gated community, the homeowners association requirement is under that. Now, if you are not a gated community, the requirement for HOA is not is not a requirement. However, we when I say we clarity on our consultants and staff, and I know we discussed it with the DCRC, are proposing that there will be a requirement for open space requirements. I believe it's five percent or something to that effect of the total property. So in essence, there should be open space for these subdivisions that were proposed that are being proposed, but an HOA would not be required unless they're part of a gated community. Thank you for the clarification. So when it talks about the required open space, it says open space may be held in common ownership by the owners of the development who will be responsible for managing and maintaining the land. Open space may be conveyed to a property owners or homeowners association. It may be conveyed to a third party beneficiaries, such as an environmental or civic organization, or it may be dedicated to the public and conveyed to the city. So at some point, that common area is going to have a corporate maintenance obligation, and it could be an HOA, it could be a civic organization, it could be the developer, but there are provisions that require an entity of some sort to maintain that common area. But there were several options for that. Yes. So it wouldn't be. Just an HOA. Okay, last chapter, chapter eight, which is your definition section. And I think this is, if not one of the other most important subchapters in my opinion, because what we're proposing is a definition for every use and every term. And so if you know of a definition that's lacking, or if there's a definition that you need clarification on, please let us know, because part of our job as staff is to make sure we interpret the proposals as clear and concise as possible. And in doing so, we need to make sure we have clear definitions. So this is another important subchapter. Does any of the council members have any questions, comments or suggestions? I just have a question on this or a comment. I know that in the past, and I mean it happens, you know, some, where there are items that are capitalized in a document, which typically means there's a definition for that. Okay. So I just want to make sure, and I'm not going to be the one to do it. I'm not going to read through it. There's got to be a way technologically to go through and just ensure that if there's something that's not capitalized that needs to be capitalized as far as a term, that that occurs. And if there's something that's capitalized and there's not a definition, I just want to make sure that we marry those two because it can really create problems when that issue arises and something's capitalized and it shouldn't, or it should be capitalized and it's not if there's no definition. So however we need to ensure that if we're able to do that, just that would be helpful. Yes, ma'am. I think then the point, the overall goal here is to make sure that we have definitions for as many as possible. Yeah. Well, my comment isn't about that. It's about that sometimes you just get a syntactical error when somebody's scribing it and it's, you know, like for, I'll pick one, land disturbing activity. So sometimes that land disturbing activity may not be capitalized. It may be a little L, a little D, and a little A. Okay. But it, so then it's not really a definition or it could be capitalized somewhere in the document, but not have a definition. That's all I'm saying. It's not that I think there's some missing, it's just to make sure that we're intentional on what we want to be defined and what we don't want to be defined. Understood. Yeah. Yeah, well, there's a lot to do. That's a hard, but it really can create some really interesting challenges if it comes up. Okay. Yes, Council Member Armitage. So two things in the definition section. Number one, and I didn't go through and kind of look back for every instance, but for instance, on page 496, the first definition on the page is paranormal consultation, and that was a category, of course, that we chose to strike. So just a kind of reminder in the editing to make sure that where there are, were terms that were used in a draft, yeah, that are not going to be in the final version. Should be removed from the definitions. Yeah. Gotcha. And then, and I wanted to request that there be a definition of open space, was that the term used, open space, because, you know, I mean, that might not seem unnecessary, but I would hate for there to be some, you know, controversy having to do with no actual definition in there about what defines open space. I think, I mean, that's a very important term in, you know, definition. I'm sure it is in there, but we'll double check. Oh, okay. Just to clarify, Council Member Armitage, did we say that we're going to get rid of the paranormal consultation? Maybe we didn't, I- Was that the- Yeah, I, well, that's a reasonable conclusion from my memory. Basically, I thought we said a number of things, paranormal, medical, dental, therapist, would all basically be handled by professional office. Okay. That was my memory, too. Thank you for- And that the rules that need to be expressed would be about parking and signage. Okay. Well, we'll apologize. I didn't catch that, but we'll make sure that that's included. But absolute ban on Lithomancy. I'm not sure what that is, but that's good. That's all the sub-chapters, and we can go into zoning if that's the direction of the council. Anybody have any more questions on the actual code? Yes. Just a reminder that we're growing to a close, so ultimately, we've gone through the material. We're going to have Ron know the date off the top of his head. And when the adoption draft will be available to the public? This Friday, March 29th? No. Excuse me. Comments would be going to the- Actually, comments went to Clarion, and they will be getting comments throughout this week. And the goal is to have it published online March 29th. So it'll be an updated version with the corrections that we've noted. And then we've got the next couple of weeks to really kind of go through that, going to P&Z on the 10th of April. So we've got two more work sessions scheduled, just if we can answer any questions or clarify any information. Councilmember Briggs has a question. In one of those, could we please talk about short-term rentals as a council? Absolutely. What's it called? Thank you. Short-term rentals. Short-term rentals, okay, yes. Any other questions or comments? Okay, all right. So we'll move on now to the zoning map. I believe Councilmember Meltzer had some questions on the zoning map. Yeah, I'm happy to hear, you know, what staff wants to present and maybe we'll get addressed along the way. You got a presentation on the zoning map? We don't have a presentation. We have Cody Yates here if there is a specific question. I know that the question or comment that was presented or provided, that is, by Councilmember Meltzer was related to the zoning of RR and the properties that will not meet the minimum lot area, is my understanding. Yeah, and actually, you know, as I've seen your response, it's kind of led me to maybe want to spell the question out a little more. You've got this RD5X, which is kind of like a placeholder designation today. And so I, you know, but that doesn't exist in the new nomenclature. And so I understand that the idea is to kind of use RR as the placeholder. But, you know, as Ron just mentioned, you've got an issue where 760 of these properties actually don't meet the requirements for RR. So what occurs to me is that there might be two possible better solutions to discuss. One would be, have a placeholder, have an RD5X, you know, you can call it something else, RX, I don't know, like shorter names now. Or, you know, if people are going to have to make a change because we're putting into something, they have to make a change one way or another because they're currently not zoned. But if we're going to put them in something, why don't we put them in something they fit? And these are like innocent questions. There might be very good reasons for what you've proposed. But anyway, I'm happy to hear your response. >> We've had a series of conversations with the review committee on this very topic. I guess I want to draw one line of distinction between the RD5X and what we're doing is reclassifying. So we're not rezoning anything, so it's somewhat of semantics. But it is that we're classifying them as RR, which is the least intensive. Another provision within this is that any existing or the residential won't be non-conforming. A third piece to this is that we're going to bring forward city-initiated rezoning. So as we look at groups of these, that we say we have a category of properties. And we've gone through and done the work as far as looking at RR is a minimum of five acres. So we recognize how many of those we have as five acres, and some as two acres, and some of them as small as just a lot. But we can't take a wholesale change as we update the zoning map because that's exactly what we're doing is just making a straight conversion. So what we're proposing to do is to come back and go through a process of identifying those highest priorities and taking those RRs that maybe are not five acres. Someone can still address it in a number of ways on their own, but the city's going to come forward in blocks or groups of those to try to address some of this. >> Okay, so the intention isn't to leave them in a seemingly non-conforming state? >> Seemingly, but they're not. >> Won't be declared non-conforming. >> Correct, so I think we have the solution for it. It's a very complicated legal matter, and so we've had safe to say probably hours of discussion on the very topic and think that we have a resolution for it. >> But I spent a minute and a half on it, so I think I'm equally qualified. >> I understand. >> Well, it sounds like you've thought it through. >> City attorney has a question. >> I saw that answer, and I knew that property when it's annexed into the city comes in on zone because we don't have our zoning jurisdiction over them until they're actually part of the city, so that's why they've been given designation of RD5X, but they're unzoned. However, with the RR as being the base, the presidential rural, on the zoning map, and you are actually zoning it or initial zoning those properties, and then you want to come back later and rezone it later. So there will be two zoning actions that will occur for these properties, am I correct with that? >> She's right here. >> I'm here. >> And I will say that certainly on the word city initiated is that we want to look at really the environment on the ground. So what actually exists around it and provide the notification to the adjacent properties. And we'll be doing that with a series of property types, not just the RR. But the RR is the least intensive zoning classification that we have. So whether it's a conversion or a classification, it isn't necessarily a rezoning. >> No, no, it's an initial zoning is what you're going to do. >> Correct. >> And so I'm just, is there a need for that step if you're going to analyze these properties, where they're located in connection with other properties that are zoned to see what the perfect fit is. So do you need this extra step is what I was asking. >> So let me- >> Yeah, behind the mic, please. >> Yes, so let me understand your question. Is, Aaron, is it to leave the RD5X and then go evaluate them and change them to one of the new districts? >> That's more or less the question. Do we need that interim step of- >> Of reclassification. >> Initially zoning them for the first time and this step. I didn't know if it was something necessary because it seems like you're duplicating staff efforts here. You have the initial finding all of them, zoning them, and then coming back later and doing rezonings. >> So there's not going to be individual notice for the map adoption because it's not a rezoning, it's a reclassification. So there are a number of existing zoning districts that are going to go away. And the zoning map is going to reflect the new districts as close as they are, as they can be. So that's a text amendment, not a rezoning. One of the concerns that I had about the zoning map, as it existed several months ago, is that there were some rezonings on there and we want to provide proper notice. And so that's why it changed back to a pure reflection of what's on the ground, what the zoning is today based on the new categories and the new ordinance. >> I understand- >> And we can talk offline if there's a process that you prefer. And I'm not sure why the RD5X went away, except just a desire to reduce the number of districts. >> To answer that question, the reason why the RD5X is going to go away is really, we were introducing some new zoning districts, new line of zoning districts. And that was not an option, obviously we're going to RR. And when we initially started on the zoning map, we tried to zone the properties as to the best that we could. Obviously then we had direction that we want to match it as close to the zoning districts that we have today, and that's why we're back to them being RR. So the point is, I think that we can consider an RRX, right? Because it's not initial zoned, it's still a placeholder. And when we go through the city initiated rezoning, then we can change those to whatever zoning district, and we'll skip that one stage. Does that make sense? So we are- >> No, I understand completely what you're proposing. I was just curious as to why we were giving them zoning and then coming back later and doing another zoning to make them conform with surrounding uses. Something like an extra step that may not be necessary. >> And the only reason, the extra step is that when we were doing this, we identified a number of split zonings. And then some that ultimately, if the individual owners were its tracks of land, that maybe we could simplify the process for our citizens as well as for both our commission and council, that was the motivation. >> So does that help you- >> Yeah, I mean, however you all decide to do it, I think the problem's been clearly identified. I see it's obviously thornier than it looks on the surface. I'll go on to the second question. >> Sure. >> If you would, that's all right. And I think I'll just put it this way. Can you say a little more about how you intend to deal with the numerous split zone properties as you make this change? >> Part of the map's exercise is that, again, we want to match the existing zoning as much as possible, and so we have certain parcels that have multiple zoning districts on them. And what we're going to do is we're going to replicate that as close as we can. So identifying what the zoning district, those areas should be and we're going to match again exactly what we have today as far as zoning districts. It's a mapping exercise, it's not going to change anything. And the intent is to get as close to the zoning districts that we have today. >> So you're not going to leave them as split? >> No, that's not the intent. We discussed during the DCRC that we were going to match the map and reflect that in the new zoning map. >> Okay, thank you. >> Also, I guess I'm confused. I thought the council discussed that. Was that just the DRDC that discussed that? >> That was- >> The council discussed zoning and I thought we did and I thought we had three options and it was option one, two, and three. That was the DCRC when it presented. >> Okay, so we haven't discussed it here. >> No. >> Haven't we discussed it here? >> Okay. >> You don't think so? Okay. >> I don't know. >> Okay, cuz I thought the, yeah, so that- >> It's worthy of your discussion. >> We've spent a few hours on this particular- >> No, that's why I was hearing the same information because we're keeping what you're saying is on the split zoning. We're just going to take what the split is and we're going to apply the zoning that most represents each one of those specific splits. >> Correct. >> Is that right? >> That is correct. >> So in some sense, we still will have split zoning on a property. It's just it will be, like this property here, you're going to have three different zoning classifications. So there'll still be split zoning. It's just, it'll be closely related to what it is on the ground, what it is right now. >> What is on the current map, yes. >> Okay, I'm sorry, I got confused. I knew I'd heard this discussion, I was having deja vu. All right, fair enough. >> There's so many meanings on this, yes. >> Yes, sorry about that. I apologize. >> Yes, Councilmember Hussbeck. >> I thought I heard it both ways. I thought I heard someone say there's no more split zoning and then my understanding was, yes. >> Yeah, there will be split zoning. >> Just going to mirror what they have with the new labels. >> If I may, just to clarify that. Initially on the draft zoning map, we had this one, it's like a green area that we call split zoning. We're not going to carry that, that's going to go away and we're going to actually zone it the way we have it currently in the zoning map. >> But technically, it's still a split zoning on one piece of property, yes. >> And is there a way we could have those conversations or open the door for those property owners to have that conversation. Will we notice them and say, here's where you are. If you want to raise concerns, questions, unify, apply, or how do? I'd like to see a path forward to- >> Sure. >> To unify those. >> Staff has actually discussed that and we've got a plan and prioritizing areas that we want to address. And part of that effort will be to talk to property owners to make sure when we take this forward as city initially zonings that they'd be part of all that process. >> Yeah, I think we discussed that in the meeting as well. The phantom meeting that I talked about, go ahead, council member. >> Thank you, and if I may, and just want to make sure, because I think it is, on your list from our last conversation that the last property we looked at last, I guess that was Tuesday, next to, I guess it's at Bailey Street. Near loop 288, there's a mix of NRMU and NMRU, MRU-12. >> I think that was, I think it was the one you had up there, Cody. >> Yeah, but this one? >> Is that the one you're referring to? >> No, sir, no, loop 288 and Audra is the general area. But the just of it is, I just want to make sure it's on the list to be evaluated. >> Yeah, you're talking about the one we looked at last time? >> Yeah, yeah, I just want to make sure it's on the list. >> Yes, any of the 100 or so parcels that have multiple zoning districts will be part of the list. >> Okay, thank you. >> Council member Briggs. >> Yeah, and it also has been brought up in the community, though, regarding the split zoning, that this would be an opportunity for us to avoid any kind of issues that happen like with the park seven where something at one point was overlooked when that one section was left and it didn't really comply with anything else around the area. So if you can speak to that, so when you say we are going to match the zoning closely to what it is already, is there opportunity there for us to find, I don't think there's anything left in the city that quite looks like that. But are we addressing any of those issues? >> So to Ron's point, we have a desire to look at our properties as well as all of the split zonings. Then we'll just prioritize what those split zonings look like so we can clean them up. They will reflect what zoning they have today. So we're just going to trace those lines, convert what that nomenclature is, and then staff will be bringing that back as the city initiated rezoning. So we'll look at each of those parcels, contact the property owners, and do notices for the neighbors. So hopefully, with any luck, clean all of those properties up. >> I will say that lots of people are getting the notices now because I'm getting lots of questions and emails and social media posts. We shut down Ron's voicemail box yesterday, so I don't have voicemail right now. >> Can I just follow up one more question? >> Yes. >> What is conditioned zoning? >> So conditioned zonings are those zoning change requests that went through city council and have a approval with conditions. So for example, if there was a zoning that went from NR2 to NR4 with a limitation that it'd only be single family, then that is a property that has a conditioned zoning. >> Because I did receive a message, someone received a letter that said your area will be rezoned to a conditioned zoning. And I just wanted to clarify what that meant. >> Yes, that's technically what it is. Zonings that were approved with conditions. We're going to wait from calling them overlays, we're just going to say conditions. Because it gets complicated when you have special purpose overlay districts. We're trying to separate the two. This is specifically properties that have been approved with zoning with conditions. >> Okay, thank you. >> So before I, Council Member Armitage and Mayor Pro Tem. If y'all could email, if you get questions that specific. Because I think instead of having to answer them, if there was a central location where there's the question and there's staff response, I think it would really help if people knew that there was a place that they could go first and see is the question there? Is it going to be answered there? So I don't know if that may be too cumbersome, it may be too big. But if people are having questions, if we can find a way to get them answered instead of waiting between each council meeting. So just as a sort of a process that would help, I think, help communicate to the public. Because there are going to be a lot of questions. Yeah, does that make sense? >> Right, and this just happened within the last day. >> No, no, I understand that, and so it's not a criticism, it's just more of a hey, let's try to get ahead of the process and figure out a way that we can get that information out there a little bit quicker, so Council Member Armitage. >> So I was just going to comment that I appreciate what the attorney had said about the wisdom. Of course, you were speaking from a legal perspective, but also from a practical perspective about having the zoning map as it is now. At this first stage, kind of reflect the current zoning, but with the new terminology because of the response that some people are having. And again, this will go away, it's just people, it's just a teaching learning moment for everybody. I would guess most of the general public really doesn't quite understand even really exactly what zoning is. You don't so much think about or encounter it until there's a problem. Why is that allowed here, or something like that? So these letters can look intimidating to people even though the content is not. So I like being able to tell people, look, these are new terms. And at least for the people who have come to me so far, these are cases where it's essentially the same zoning with a new term, and so I can tell them that. There are all kinds of fears, which will probably come to you, including I'll mention somebody was afraid that this was some sort of big land taking, well, I still get to keep my property. And of course, the answer is yes, but it comes from the not knowing. So it's good that that rezoning will be coming in a later stage. And we'll be able to say when that happens, there will be public input. That's a separate stage. I greatly appreciate that. >> Thank you, Mary. Can you zoom in on Audra and Audra, where it makes the turn there, Nottingham Audra? Because I know we did, okay, and those are condition zonings in there? Is that, I thought we were going to put those as a PD, since basically that's what a condition zoning is. >> There's a difference though, Councilman Ryan, when we discuss this with our consultants, PDs are more intense as far as different zoning districts and different design standards. For example, the ropes and wrench, the village of Carmel, those are PDs that have a longer list of standards, longer list of zoning requirements, while a condition zoning has maybe a few conditions. And so there is a difference between PDs and condition zoning. >> Okay, because it goes back to, since we're getting rid of density on these, and quite often these condition zonings were something that they went to an NR6 with 4.2 units per acre. And if we don't have the density on there. >> And that's the reason why we're keeping them, and so what will happen is on the future, whatever map we have after it's adopted, it will have this layer, this pink or this purple. And it will be where the person that's looking at this will have to be able to pull up an ordinance. So you're going to go back to the ordinance. It's not going to be the zoning that we're looking at because it's got specific conditions related to that property. >> Okay, I guess I'm still a little bit weary, this is something we can discuss more tomorrow. >> Sure. >> But it concerns me, the PD made sense, even though it's not a full documented PD, it's still something that we're doing that's unique from any of our other zoning districts. So basically, we've created another zoning district that is a condition zoning. >> I think part of it, councilman, is just the nomenclature, is it a PD or is it a condition zoning? I think all in all, you're still going to have to refer to a document that has those conditions or those specific standards. >> If I may, if you look at our current zoning map that I have pulled up now, that's how we've been doing it with our overlay districts that just references the ordinance. And yet, we still have the PDs on it. >> Everybody good? >> Yep. >> Okay. >> And I think, and I don't know if it's there or not, but I think Councilmember Armitage brings up a good point. And that is if we have a website or if we have a place on our website where people can get questions answered. If somebody just, if we have just a draft of, just a narrative of, here's what we've done. Here's what the process has been where we're trying to reflect the zoning on the ground to this. Just maybe a page description of this process that might help answer those questions I think would be helpful. A page or two that really just outlines the basic process and our intent in what we're doing. >> And I was going to respond with Councilmember Briggs' comments on, so we've got staff returning Ron's calls because he needs to be here today. And so we've created really kind of almost like a mini FAQ. So why are you receiving this notice, some responses to that. >> We intend to expand upon that and we'll get that information out on debt and code 2030. Additionally, I think we'll try to get something out in the Friday report that will provide some linkages as to where that's at and how we're communicating some of that information. So absolutely, I think great idea to put a little bit more narrative into it than that too. >> Councilmember Armitage. >> And I would recommend, it's probably, it was probably just implied in the request. Just to add that that narrative being the plainest English, in just simple, simple colloquial terms, that'd be great. >> Yeah, absolutely, it's what we learned to do from our legal staff, is what not to say. So we'll put it in the simple terms, so absolutely. >> All right, anything else for me to get from you? >> No, just one slide before we end this, and it's a fairly quick slide, and it's the last slide. Just to recap real quick, on March 29th, we will have a final adoption draft, that's this Friday. It will be located on dencode2030.com for everyone to look at. We are planning on two additional work sessions, the second and the ninth. So any questions, any topics you want to discuss, short term rentals for sure will bring that up. And there will be other discussions that we'll be having with the DCRC that we will bring back to the full council as, again, part of this process. So again, two work sessions scheduled on April 2nd and the 9th. We are hoping to get to the Planning and Zoning Commission public hearing on April 10th for a public hearing and recommendation. Part of the letters going out this past week was to prepare for those public hearings, both the Planning and Zoning Commission and ultimately City Council on the 23rd. So just want to give you all that recap so that everyone knows where we're going with the dates. So. >> Any questions? >> Okay, welcome everybody back to this meeting of the Denton City Council on March 26th, 2009, and we will now begin the public hearing of the City Council on March 20th. So, I'm going to give you a little bit of an overview of what's going on in the City Council. And I'm going to give you a little bit of an overview of what's going on in the City Council on March 20th, and I'm going to give you a little bit of an overview of what's going on in the City Council on March 20th. Okay, welcome everybody back to this meeting of the Denton City Council on March 26, 2019. And before we get started on our last agenda item, need to address at least some comment that I heard just before we came back from break that a public hearing, our public hearing was posted for 630, posted, because the agenda that I have, says it just comes immediately after, that public hearing items will begin immediately following the closed meeting in the work session report. >> I think what happened when the newspaper ad went out, it had set a public hearing time of 630 in the newspaper ad. >> Okay, so that's what governs, is that correct? Okay, all right. Okay, well then, so I guess, do we, we'll just go ahead and run through, well. After our closed session, should we just wait to do the entire council meeting at that time? Or do we go into special session and then adjourn and come back for the public hearing? I guess we'll just do that. Yep, okay, all right. Fair enough, fantastic. >> Did you, did you do something? >> Mayor, I think Scott was going to get clarification from legal, the public hearing item, while it is a public hearing item, it's not, there's no prescribed. >> Is your mic on? >> Ron, turn it on. >> Yeah, there you go. >> I think Scott was going to clarify with legal whether or not it is required to be at 630. >> Okay. >> It is. >> Go ahead. >> You've noticed it out at 630, so the 630 is the time that the public has gotten notice to come and actually attend that public hearing. >> All right, so what we'll do is we'll go through this agenda item, we'll go into our closed session. We'll go into, we'll start our regular, or the special called council meeting right after closed session, but we'll adjourn it. And then we'll pick up our public hearing at 630. >> Right. >> I mean, we still may even be here at 630, so yeah. Okay, fantastic, thank you so much for that clarification. Yeah, in the future, if somebody could just let me know that ahead of time before I get into the meeting at 4 o'clock, that'd be great, I'd appreciate that. Thank you, because I would have just kept going and without anybody telling me. >> And I'll take full responsibility for that. >> No, no, it's not about beating on anybody, it's just, yeah, just heads up, that's all, it's not a big deal. We'll get through it. Okay, our last meeting, our last agenda item for the work sessions is agenda item E. 3E, which is receive report, hold discussion, and give staff direction on the downtown design standards. >> Thank you, Mayor, Council. I'll certainly try to go as slow as I can. >> Nobody gave that instruction. >> I have two slides. Really, so we've talked about the design standards several times. Really just kind of bringing this back on some of the items that needed a little bit further clarification and discussion. But the city's been discussing how to protect the Denton Square for years and really for decades. And it's historic character and it's historic relevance. In particular, the contributing buildings in the National Historic District. So I just want to make sure that we're focused on that and what we're doing and what we're attempting to do. We've had great success with our public input. We've really not received any opposition to what we're proposing to do. We've got a flexible set of standards that really are just trying to protect what we have and make sure that we're managing our historic significance of the square. The first bullet that I'd like to speak to you about is we, as we went through the process, we had a number of options that were presented for appeals to what the decisions that wouldn't be made at staff level. Or when someone didn't comply or the project was in such a scope or magnitude that required action by a board. What we've done in the ordinance is removed that board. And so ultimately, it would be either a staff approval or denial. And that, or the process would take it before this body. So it would come directly to council. There wouldn't be a board and council would be that ultimate decision. >> Is everybody okay with that? >> Yes, I'm okay with that. I'm just curious and apologies that I couldn't make the meeting last night. I had wanted to. Was that run by the public and did they weigh in on that? >> Yes, and I can speak to that a little bit. We had quite a turnout. We had about 35 members of the public that showed up. It was a number that were just the citizens at large. We had some of the business owners, some of the property owners. It was overall, it was successful and they were positive. They provided us with several pages of comments. We've distilled those down and have those available. We were able to ask some of the questions that we're really here to talk to you today about and get a handle on that. >> And did they address that issue of not having a board, having it go to staff and then council? >> No, I didn't bring that topic up. I thought what I understood from council is really it was council's directions, policy maker's decision. And so I just excluded that and we went into the other topics and they really just got their feedback overall on the standards as a whole. >> Thanks. >> Okay, so again, consensus or direction on that? Council member Briggs. >> So I'm okay with that. So when you say staff, is it just any staff? Is it qualified staff? Is a preservation officer included? I mean, I just want to be a little bit more, I'm comfortable with it. Just want to make sure that whomever is the staff that they're qualified to look at the, is it the contributing buildings, the overall historic? Or is it just anyone, or will there be one designated person? >> Much like many of our ordinances and what we're trying to do, whether it's the right of way ordinance or the development code, we have assigned a level. And so in this ordinance, it is the director or designee. Ultimately, it's the department, and within the department is the historic preservation officer. So dependent upon the building and what's occurring, there may even be components of this that would go to HLC. So it's the director's ultimately responsible for the process and who is overseeing that process. >> And that would be you? >> That would be me. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay, all right, you have your direction on that one? >> Very good, thank you. Another point of discussion was Stucco. Received some feedback on the provisions of Stucco and concern with Stucco, I think that ultimately, and I have some notes, my apologies. We have roughly 20 buildings with Stucco, I believe is the number currently. And with that being said, excuse me, it's ten buildings with Stucco on them. Ultimately, it was overall is that we, what we heard from the public last night and staff's opinion is that we want to just minimize, not to say that Stucco isn't allowed. It's just that it isn't the predominant architectural feature. If it exists on the buildings today, they would continue to maintain and be able to have that just as we go forward. >> I'm okay with that. And also, after I made my comment about the Aubur House, I drove by and noticed that some of the Stucco had been broken off and it's brick underneath. So, my bad. >> I don't remember what your comment was, but about Stuccoing over brick? >> No, it was about the Stucco buildings that were already down there. I didn't realize that some had Stuccoed over the original brick. I think you'll find a lot of those buildings were originally brick that were covered over. The Texas building was totally covered over with some kind of concrete panel and they took them off. Okay, good. So, staff okay, council okay with this direction on Stucco? Yes, Councilmember Melton? >> Yeah, just to highlight the significant example would be fine arts, right? That's Stucco, if they want to keep it Stucco, you wouldn't be surprised. >> Okay, all right. Okay. >> Window glass. >> Window, so window glass and that was really about whether it was tinted, reflective or opaque. And ultimately, we came out with some greater options. So, ultimately, the businesses need to have visibility, low visibility is acceptable just as long as it's clear or it's lightly tinted. Just, again, looking at the distinctive character of the square that we want to try to maintain that. We do not desire to have mirrored, reflective or opaque, but wouldn't be opposed to tinting. Of course, when we talk about a low E argon or an energy efficient window it may have some reflective capabilities to it. We're not certainly wanting to prevent that or even if someone chose to tint. It was just defining that so it wasn't that it was reflective or opaque. >> I'm not sure our current energy code will allow us to prevent it, to prohibit it. >> Great point. >> So, okay, all right. Okay, murals? >> Okay, so murals, largely last night, what we heard from the public was that they were opposed to. Just an informal doodle poll of the people that were in attendance asked a series of questions, whether it was painting brick, whether it was painting, excuse me, painting existing brick, painting repainting, or murals, and then the distinction between murals and signs. So, ultimately, what we're presenting is that the desire is to minimize or eliminate any murals on the forward facing buildings within the square. And then any signage that may be considered a mural, or something that someone would want to propose, that would ultimately come to council, would be 25% of the building frontage or less. >> Okay. >> Councilmember Husspeth. >> Clears his throat. >> Again, I mean, so applying that standard, just looking forward. They'd paint over the fence, or no? Minimal, because it's going to be there. So we can't feign as though there's a building going to be there because there's zero plans for anything to go there. So for the foreseeable future, that fence facing inward has a mural on it. Do they have to paint it in the scenario you laid out? And I would say, no, it is not the building or the facade of a building. >> Then I can't support that. >> Okay. >> Because you're, so the fact of the matter is, it's there in lieu of a building. It's filling a space because there's no building there, and so it fills that role. And you're almost, to their benefit, given the, I mean, I just, you're drawing attention to an open spot, and it's allowed to be there. Because I just, it's not even handed, so for me, I can't support. I understand where they're, I don't, let me fix that, I don't understand where they're coming from. But at the same time, when you're talking about enforceability, and you're talking about inconsistencies, and you're talking about people challenging our approach, it has to be even handed. And so if we're not going to paint over that fence, and we're not going to remove, because some of those signs, although not murals, it really is consistent with that look. And so if we're looking for a particular look, then we need to address every sign inward facing. If we're not, then let's pick up where we are in any new building. Then let's take a look at that when it comes. But I would be for leaving what is there, there, and picking up should the need arise. >> Do you want to respond to that, and then Councilmember Omitra's got a question. >> If I understood you correctly, it would be anything that's in place today. And then moving forward, which I think as far as from legal standpoint, and certainly Aaron can chime in, that this would be in effect, nothing would be retroactive. So anything that's in place today would legally exist today. It would just be going forward. Number two is that if we need to define construction barricades, or those standards differently, we don't necessarily allow for. That's a temporary barrier for safety, and again, we wanted it so it wasn't something just delaminating plywood. We certainly can propose standards for those, or how to address it. >> So thank you. And my thought is, I know specifically we have an item coming for, it was Andy's. I mean, I think it's all tied to this, so that's why I look at it synonymous. But the latter part, I think you're absolutely right. Yes, there should be something that addresses temporary or permanent barriers, right? So heaven forbid something happens to another building. I think there needs to be a standards about what can fill that gap and what that looks like. And in a perfect world, how long it could be there, I don't know how legally you can do that, but. >> And I can address a portion of that. So within the standards, we have temporary construction standards. Temporary construction barricades and fences are permitted as necessary during the construction of a permanent building. Temporary screening materials and designs along French construction areas are to be permitted to minimize the visual impact of constructed areas and fencing. Temporary screening may not be used to advertise any offsite or non-property related entity. All temporary construction barricades, fences, screening materials, and screening designs must be submitted to and improved or denied by the director or is designated through the administrative review process in section 210, blah, blah, blah. >> [INAUDIBLE] >> Could I sell you on a materials list to that? >> Absolutely. >> Yeah, I don't know what everyone else thinks, but I would like to see a materials list, because that fence, just go look at it. Go get up close to it. I mean, it's weather has beaten it up pretty good, and it won't be long before it looks pretty bad. And so there needs to be maybe some materials list that we, because I think the key is, we have to look at it as though it's going to be there in perpetuity. Because unless we can force someone's hand, they have a right to leave that there. So thinking worst case scenario, what are we okay with? Being on the square till the end of time, and that fence isn't it. >> Councilmember Armitage. >> I was wondering if you could just explain a little more about the 25% rule with the sign-like mural that you were explaining about the 25%. If you could kind of just state that again. And so I could think about how that, and ask a follow-up question if need be, about how that would apply in a real life scenario. >> It really is just, so trying to find that balance between where someone may wish to express some artistic ability or whether it's in their signage is just minimizing the impact on the square. So saying 25% of the building's facade, no more than 25% of the building's facade may contain a mural. So does the facade, does that just mean the entire front from the ground up, including the doors, the windows? >> That would be correct. >> No more than 25%. >> That's a lot. >> Okay, so thank you. Thanks. >> Thank you. >> Councilmember Briggs. >> So Andy's aside, like that's a different topic. That's not what we're talking about here for me. I'm okay with the recommendation. I think allowing some of it is good, because I don't think at first at all it was allowed. But when you think about historic buildings, things were painted on, because they didn't have neon signs. So to advertise their name, they would paint it on. I think that that should be allowed. >> Thank you. >> Yes, Councilmember Nelson. >> Can you give some insight into what the actual rules are related to the fence that we were just talking about? Is it in fact, by right, able to be there in perpetuity instead of a building? I perceive it as a temporary thing, but I have no idea whether that's true or not. >> As did we, and as do we. We intend on that space being occupied. I think the real estate's very valuable in the square, and we don't anticipate anything like that. >> Yeah, it's a practical matter, probably wouldn't be, but could it be? Do we know? >> Well, our design standards would say that you have to have a structure. You couldn't have a parking lot. But when you get into a situation that we have today, I don't know that I can answer that. And I don't know if Aaron can provide any input that would assist in that matter, which is how long a temporary wall. >> Define temporary. >> Temporary is the question. It's going to really depend on the facts on what's presented before the building administrator to determine. I'm assuming this isn't even a defined at all. Temporary not to, some ordinances will say not to exceed a certain amount of time, 90 days, 120 days. So that is going to be the open question to determine. >> Let's take the easier end of it, instead of saying what's temporary. Would that be, by right, allowed to be permanent? >> No. >> Okay, so I feel very differently about it to say, no, it's not permanent. I don't know what temporary is. It's not permanent. >> And I think to Aaron's point that a number of our codes address temporary and the intent of temporary. And I don't know that we'd want to be as defined to say that it can only be there 180 days because if you're building a complicated building, it may take a year. So the intent of that is really to shield whether it's visibility of what's occurring for safety and the like. So it is not the intent for that to be a permanent structure. It is not a permitted, it is not a permitted component within the standards that we would have. >> Thanks. >> So, but let's, two different things. Is there anything on the books that says that fence can't be there until the end of time? >> Well, I'm just saying, the answer, I can tell you the answer. The answer is no, but I'll let them tell you. >> And I would say no. And I would say that there are, well, there are several ways that one could say it is to be temporary. It is not allowed. It is the use of that ground and what is allowed there and whether that's an accessory structure and accessory structures are not allowed. You have to have a primary structure. >> Go ahead. >> To summarize, I just receive questions regularly about can we activate that piece of property? And I think we do ourselves a disservice by not plainly saying, no, we cannot do anything to activate that property. So it clearly communicates to the public that we can't activate that. We can't force a piece, we can't force a building. We can't force them to fill that space. There is nothing on the books at the time of the fire that allows us after the fire to make that happen. And I just think that's important to clearly communicate regularly versus continuing to maybe say it different than then perpetuates the question, well, when is something going to happen? Something will happen when the owner of the land wants something to happen. Or the new person that bought the land wants something to happen. Absent that, there'll be a white fence with a fading mural on it. >> Councilmember Amater. >> So I just wanted to, just to, since we're still on murals, so since you had a chance to clarify about the 25%. Anyway, I just went and was looking at the facades of the different buildings and kind of measuring out what was 25% because I'm concerned about, I want the business owners to have the opportunity to paint something, to paint an attractive sign. And I'm okay with that because I think that the 25%, given what we've got there, I realize this is about going forward, but I'm talking, but those are the best examples I have. I think that that provides a really nice balance, a way to solve as best as we can this mural problem. Because there are people out there who don't like murals, and then people say you should be able to have a mural anywhere. So to me, this sounds like a good solution. >> Thank you. >> The question I have on the fence, whether it's temporary, permanent, or whatever we want to call it. That was erected when? About a year and a half ago, a year ago, less than that, when it was the father? >> Yeah, it probably would have been February. >> Of last year. >> Yeah, somewhere in their box. >> Okay, there had to have been a process, I hope, that if you put up a fence, typically if it's a repair beyond a certain extent, you're supposed to pull a permit. So there was a lot of conversation at that time about we can't leave this open, we can't leave this. We've got to put some kind of something up there, and then once they put it up there, we can't leave it like this. We want to paint it, and these kinds of things. So there had to have been a process at the very beginning, I would think, where someone had to come in and file for something to put up that structure, regardless of the mural, regardless of what it's painted. >> That would be correct. >> And so I think the answers to our questions lie in what it is or was that they were required to get. If it was a fence permit, okay, fair enough. And I don't know what the question, I don't know what was proposed on a permit to say this is what we're going to build, and this is why we're allowed to do it based upon the permit application. So I think it would be helpful if we just maybe had just a little one page summary of the historical context of not of the fire and people's comments and all that, but what was the process and procedure whereby this structure got put there, and what were the approving documents that were submitted in order to get that? And then we can talk about the mural and the painting and all that, but I think from what I hear you say, Councilmember Huss, but I mean, it is the mural or the painting, but it's also that fence there, and what's the nature of that, and how long can that be there, and how did it get there, and those kinds of things. Does that make sense? Yes, that's correct, and your point is fantastic. I think that will be very insightful. And I think I can answer that for you now. The mere fact that we requested that they put up safeguards, ultimately had safeguards during construction, then there was a concern as to how that property would lie and the fall hazards that would exist or potentially exist. So we asked the owners if they would build that fence/wall, something to prevent people from going in there not being attractive nuisance. No, no, I understand that. So we permitted as a building permit to construct a wooden wall, and the intent of that was to be temporary. Okay, I understand the word intent, but if there's a building permit with a specific kind of approved construction component, then there are rules and regulations that regulate that as well. Like if it's a wall, then there's rules that regulate what kind of wall it's supposed to be, what kind of material it's supposed to be, and those kinds of things. So I understand what you're saying as far as just the environment and the context of that request, because staff was getting pressure. Council was getting pressure. Do something, do something, do something. And so I think it's just going to be helpful to understand what exactly -- I mean, if we requested it, that doesn't mean that we said we want you to do this. You don't need to get any approvals. Okay, what approvals did they get and what regulations apply to the approval that's obtained? And you don't have to answer that now. Sure. Because it may have some bearing on what is there. I mean, if it's a wall and if it's a mural and if it gets faded, if we pass this and we say murals can't -- then it can't be a painted mural because it's going to be more than 25%. It's no sign. When it weathers and it begins to deteriorate, then there's going to be certain rules and regulations that apply to what can be put back there. So it's really -- to me, it's just also just looking at the rule of law of how did it get there and what regulates it being there. I mean, that helps, I think, answer some of these at least factual questions. And I'll be happy to provide that. I will tell you that the mural wasn't necessarily a part of the permitting process and nor do we have those in place. And I think that's the catalyst of why it is that we're here today. Right. As so that we can define this so we don't continue to end up in these quagmars. Sure, okay. I think so -- and I don't know that I can short of this particular one where we talk about a temporary, whether it's temporary or not temporary, to address the mural component if we think going forward, because again, I don't think we have retroactively. No, and I get that. And so anything that exists out there today, I believe exists today. And Aaron can correct me if I'm wrong. Sure. I think the reality in this is then going forward that we're suggesting that it's a 25% maximum for a mural on wherever it may be. But the new regulations will govern if something has to be done with that barricade or that barrier or that wall. In other words, if somehow the wind blows it down. If somebody drives their car through it. I mean, there's rules and regulations that govern how you repair something that was once there but now may be subject to different codes. Just like we have all over the place. I mean, you know, you're -- so that's -- I think it's just to get an understanding of that would be helpful. Councilmember Armitage? So just to clarify, so that 25% only applies to the front facade, right? That is correct. Yeah, on the sides, whatever. Yeah, it was never -- the issue. And all we were looking to regulate was that of in the square proper, which is that inner -- the inner facing facades. And I'm okay with that because I know that it is that people who have current -- you know, like I think it was Cartwrights that you showed a sign that if it's 27%, he's still governed under the old code. We can't make him go -- or him or her go do something with it. And you also made a very clear distinction on those signs that are legally there or those things that are legally there. And that was the only caveat with the Andes mural is that, you know, that was the whole discussion of was it a process whereby they received approval from a different body. And then we said, why don't we wait and see how this outcome is before we readdress that just because it would have been silly to try to make a decision when we were looking at addressing this issue to begin with. So did you have a -- yes? >> Yeah, I just want to ask if you had any thoughts about whether this standard would apply or whether a different standard would apply to the Muse streets as far as the mural issue. >> No, we did not. >> I don't know if I have an opinion about it. It just seems like we probably have to think about it at some point. >> Sure. And I think if I can, this again is that one step, a step trying to take a proactive step where it is that form-based code, any number of things have occurred for decades that we haven't been able to get over the finish line. So just truly trying to get a document that we have something to begin with and then we can work through that with the community. >> Okay. So what I hear is a consensus with some questions and some additional facts addressing particular situations and then we'll move forward and as those get flushed out we'll make any changes if we need to, if they're warranted. All right. Great. >> Very good. Next topic was historic preservation and again certainly conscious of those that are contributing buildings and limiting the demolition. Those items would come before the council, so instead of it going before the board, with the exception of where it's required to go to HLC, they would continue to go to HLC and then council, but any of those would come before council that we can, you know, certainly minimize the impact. >> Councilmember Briggs. >> Was the mini mall a contributing building? >> It was. >> Yes. >> Okay. >> All right. >> Thank you. >> Okay. Stakeholder input, public forum, feedback. >> And I spoke briefly about that, had a very nice turnout for a couple hours and a lot of positive feedback and we have that available, we can provide that. That's really where that was and the overarching response was, really was overwhelming support. They want us to move forward, they want this to happen in the community and that they want us to preserve the historic character of the square. >> Did you happen to take note or, I mean, were the people that were in attendance, were they either people who had a direct interest in square, either by owning property or having businesses there or was it a fairly, I mean, 35 people out of 130,000, I mean, was it a good cross-section of the ideas for the square in the community? Did you get any sense of that? >> I did, I think I spoke with most everyone and I would say it was probably less than 10% being business owners, had some people from UNT, students and the director of the urban planning school or it will be the MPA program. We had some, just some citizens at large, we had people that are interested in historic preservation. It truly was, it was a cross-section of our community, it really was, I was surprised and some of the people I expected to be there were not there, which was surprising to me. >> Fantastic. All right. So bottom line is I'm looking forward to trying to bring an ordinance before council and I think I've got two items to bring back which is really talking about what we have for a temporary wall fence, how it is that the one came into place. Otherwise, I think I have a very good understanding, these were the last outstanding issues and if I understand differently, I'm just going to take this as council has a desire to move this forward in ordinance form. >> Okay, any comments or questions? Yes, council member Hesbeth. >> And I guess it would be, I think yes, your summary is right. I think yes, I look forward to getting this kind of chapter closed. But then I'd like to get started on a something more whatever teeth are allowed to bring buildings back, right? So a similar situation, unfortunately, there's a fire, what ordinances, what rules can we apply to then mandate when something goes back or action takes place, even if it's a shell structure. But I'd like to kind of look at, that's a bigger, broader issue, so I don't think it needs to bog this down, but it's something I'd like to take a look at, plan B. >> Absolutely. >> Okay, anybody else? >> All right. >> I'll be back. >> All right. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. Okay, I believe that concludes our open work session items. So we will now, following those items, I will convene the closed session at 425. We will consider the following items. Consultation with attorneys under Texas Government Code section 551.071. Deliberations regarding real property under Texas Government Code section 551.072. And deliberations regarding certain public power utilities competitive matters under Texas Government Code section 551.086. Welcome everybody back to this meeting of the Denton City Council. We are in a special call meeting. We're going to open that meeting at 5.56 PM. As a note, our public hearing agenda item 3A will be heard at 6.30 PM this evening. Pursuant to the posting of the public hearing notification in the Denton Record Chronicle, published in the Denton Record Chronicle. So our first item on the agenda is consent agenda. Council Member Meltzer? >> I move approval of the consent agenda. >> Mayor Pro Tem? >> I'll second. >> We have a motion and a second for the consent agenda item. All in favor, please signify by raising your right hand. Opposed by like sign, carries unanimously 7-0. Moving on to items for individual consideration. 2A, consider approval of a resolution of the City Council of the City of Denton, Texas, approving an application for a historically significant site tax exemption for the property. 2400 North Bell Avenue. Yes, Council Member Briggs. >> I move approval. >> Are we going to have a presentation? >> We can, I'm not sure. >> Okay, well. >> All right. >> I still move approval. >> All right. >> I'll second. >> Okay, we have a motion and a second. All in favor, please signify by raising your right hand. All opposed by like sign. Motion carries 7-0. I should have asked for a presentation on that. >> We'll commend him on a job well done. >> Yeah. >> So we will now, we will once again adjourn the open meeting at 557 to reconvene again in City Council chambers. It's, oh, yes, huh? >> In chambers? >> Yes, are we going to be in chambers for the public hearing? It'll be in here, yeah. Yes, Council Member Hutzpah. >> It's when we knock out the moving items. I mean, I don't have any, but I'm saying- >> Okay, yeah, we can do that. We can knock out concluding items. That's a good suggestion. Thank you so much. So we're going to move down to concluding items. So all we'll have to do is wrap up the public hearing when we come back, when we reconvene. Any concluding items? Council Member Briggs. >> Just a couple of notes. So during the Navigate presentation with the energy audits, they mentioned that some cities do weatherization programs. And I know that we've been discussing that in our committee on environment. So just if we could have an update for full council on that program. I think we were talking about grants. And also a write-up report from Mr. Fielder on the LEDs in our Friday report. So that that information can be presented to the public. I know that some have been reaching out to us and concerns on health impacts of LEDs, of the blue light, and of the dark skies. And I think he addressed quite a bit of those questions today. But a little write-up that we could share would be great. Thank you. >> Yes, Council Member Armitage. >> And I would like to see a staff report on HOAs and what other Texas cities have done to try to rein in HOAs. Make sure that they don't raise the costs too much, whatever too much is. I'm just curious to know what has been done and kind of what the legal restrictions are on that. >> Yes, Council Member Meltzer. >> I'd like a just very short staff report on whether there are plastic to fuel technologies that are presently available as an alternative to our current plastic recycling. And an opinion on whether they're attractive economically and environmentally. And then secondly, I think this may have existed in the past. But I'd like to ask staff to consider whether it be desirable to have some kind of a public suggestion box, if you will, for ways to save money or find efficiencies. And with some form of public recognition for those we choose to act on. And I would submit that we consider the first entry in the suggestion box, the suggestion to have a suggestion box, and that came from French and Rialt. >> Okay, fantastic. Anything else? Yes, Council Member Hussbett. >> One other thing to add on to Keely's request regarding LEDs. When they first did propose the idea, I ask the, because my understanding is that it takes longer to break down in the once disposed. And so I just want an analysis in their reporting of what it is. Does the length in life and less in the trash offset the fact that they're going to be in the trash longer? Just whatever that evaluation is. >> Okay, all right, anybody else? >> Okay, well we will stand adjourned at 6.02 PM and reconvene at 6.30 here in the council work chambers. >> Welcome everybody back to this meeting of the Denton City Council on March the 26th, 2019. We are picking up in our regular council agenda item 3A, which are public hearings. We've already concluded all the other items for the special call meeting. This is the last one we have. I'll call the item hold a public hearing and consider adoption of an ordinance of the City of Denton, Texas, partially amending ordinance 2016-215. To approve an amended alternative environmentally sensitive area plan with conditions on two portions thereof. I will go ahead and open the public hearing, so I won't forget to do that. >> Good evening, I'm Julie Wyatt, senior planner with the City of Denton. I'm going to present a small portion of this environmentally sensitive area plan. But I'm actually going to then, after I've done the little bit at the beginning, I'm going to call up Christy Upton. She's really the technical expert on these matters, and so she'll be able to talk more in detail about the plan. So this is AESA 18-2, Villages of Carmel. So the request before you is an alternative environmentally sensitive area plan. And it affects two pieces of property. First, it affects this little area right here. This is the larger ESA or the previously approved alternative ESA. We're actually only talking about this little small portion in yellow. And the request for that area is to restore across Tempers upland habitat on approximately two tenths of an acre. The other part of the request is this little area right here. That was previously a riparian buffer, and part of this request is to restore that area as well. So just a little bit of historical context. This is part of the Villages of Carmel, that's a neighborhood within the City of Denton that's developed over the past 15 years or so. And a preliminary plat was approved for this section in February of 2016. At that time, the applicant knew that an alternative ESA would be that they were going to pursue that as part of the development of this section. And they were going to pursue that in order to remove a riparian buffer in this location. And you could see there was a note on that preliminary plat that indicated that they were going to be pursuing that alternative ESA plan. And this preliminary plat showed the maximum number of lots that could be approved or built without the approval of that plan. And with that, I'm going to have Christy come up and talk about the timeline of that and also the technical aspects. >> Christy Afton, Environmental Compliance Coordinator. >> And I will be presenting some of the technical information about this project. So this was a really complex one to understand. I'm being new to this project myself. It took me a long time to wrap my head around all the different aspects of what was going on. So I hope that maybe this timeline might be able to give you a sense of how this proceeded and how we got to this point. We started off with this ESA 8.3, which was a ESA assessment to determine the cross timbers upland habitat designation. And then we moved on to ESA 15.3, which was another ESA assessment that was done in 2015. And that assessment was a confirmation of the riparian buffer that we'll be discussing in more detail. And then in 2016, there was an alternative development plan, which if you may note that in 2016 we had not started to use the acronym alternative ESA plans, AESAs. To present these, we were using alternative development plan projects. And this was an approval to remove that riparian buffer, which I'll be referring to as the original ESA, in exchange for preservation of two acres of that cross timbers upland habitat, which I'll be referring to as the all ESA throughout this presentation. And that was adopted under the previous sub-chapter 17 code, which is previous to what you just reviewed as an update. So this was previous to what was updated on March of 2018. And then there was an original ESA, that original ESA was filled. And that fill was part of a Corps of Engineers project, and I'll go into that more detail later. It was filled beyond what was allowed by the Corps of Engineers. And that occurred somewhere after that ADP was approved in 2016. And then after that, a portion of the ESA, the all ESA that was approved to be preserved was removed. A portion of it was removed, that 0.23 acres was removed, and that's that cross timbers upland habitat. And then there was a little bit of earthwork also on a sidewalk construction that impacted that cross timbers habitat as well. And today we're here to discuss the restoration of all those projects. So with that, I'll go into more detail about each one of those parts of the timeline. So the ESA 8-3 done in 2008 was to assess that cross timbers upland habitat. The designation was removed because it was an isolated tree canopy, and it did not meet the designation or requirement of 10 acres or more. It was 5.8 acres total, so it was removed. Also, you might note in that plan that there was two other sections of cross timbers upland habitat that were removed at that time. And then in 2015, that ESA assessment of the riparian buffer, they confirmed that that riparian buffer did exist. There was a 50-foot riparian buffer, according to our code, depending on this drainage basin. And it was found to be an ephemeral stream, and it was rated in fair condition using our R-SAT tool. And going back to this previous slide, I want to emphasize that cross timbers will be referring to as the A ESA and this riparian buffer will be referring to as the original ESA. So in 2016, the ADP 16-1, the applicant requested and received approval on August 1st to remove that riparian buffer in exchange for preservation of the two of the 5.8 acres of the cross timbers upland habitat. Again, the riparian buffer being the original and the cross timbers being the A ESA. And then the upland habitat encroachment, what happened was there was an inconsistency between the grading plan and the final plot. And that inconsistency, as you can see, I've pointed out, was these two lots here, which the final plot did not include. The grading plan had included those two lots. So inadvertently, those two lots worth of the cross timbers upland habitat were removed. The tree survey prior to the removal showed 195 caliper inches in that graded area, and the survey did not record trees greater than six inches and did not document that understory. This is some photos of the upland habitat encroachment. And in addition to that, during the construction of the sidewalk along Mist Harbor, there were some understory impacts. The earthwork included moving some soil around, and they had pushed it up into the forested area. And then in addition to that, in March of 2017, the Army Corps of Engineers verified that the applicant had a nationwide permit coverage to fill 300 linear feet of that ephemeral stream. Ineverently, 702 linear feet of that stream was filled, and thus they were now out of compliance with that part of the Army Corps of Engineers nationwide permit. And my understanding is that their plan out of compliance with that Army Corps of Engineers was to mitigate the ephemeral stream and to restore it back to its original conditions. So this plan today is to address the Alt ESA, the cross timbers upland habitat, the .23 acres that was inadvertently removed. The criteria for approval of alternative ESA plans is to create or expand or improve preserved areas, to improve encroached habitat or environment, to maintain the habitat continuity, to maximize public access and utilization, and to preserve the protected area in perpetuity and create a high quality development. Staff feels that they have met this criteria for approval except for the second bullet point, which is not applicable to this project. So in that, I'm going to explain to you the restoration strategies that the applicant has proposed. In the original ESA, the stream section that was removed per the approval of the ADP, they will be restoring 402 linear feet of the original ESA riparian buffer. As I mentioned before, the center portion of this riparian buffer will be restored per the Army Corps of Engineers mitigation. The part of this that they're adding on for the City of Denton's mitigation plan is the area outside of this line here. And they will be planting 177 of the 195 tree caliper inches that were removed from the .23 acres of the Alt ESA. Is the 177 caliper inches, is that what they will have to replace? In other words, let's say you had three inch trees, that would be over probably what 50 or 60, close to 55 trees. So that's not what it will grow out to be at a certain time frame. That's what's actually going to be planted on the ground. Is that right? We're correct. Okay, thank you. Thank you. And then in addition to the trees that they'll be planting in this area, they'll also be adding an understory to promote the growth of this forest. And they'll be adding American Beautyberry shrubs, post oak seedlings, and Blackland Prairie Seed Mix. Yes, Council Member Nelson. I'm not sure if this applies given that you're trying to create an ESA, but is there any kind of irrigation requirement what will ensure the survival of these trees that are being planted? Yes, sir. They have included in the alternative ESA plan that we're proposing today. They have included an irrigation plan both for this area that I'm showing you right now and for the area that I have in the next slide. Thank you. For the restoration of the 0.23 acres of upland habitat, we felt that it was best to plant the additional 18 tree caliper inches along the frontage of Harbor Mist to create a harnessing of that area. And then the rest of it to add in this, they'll be adding in a Blackland Prairie Seed Mix to kind of create a savanna within that forest. Just an example of what the Blackland Prairie Mix will look like. In addition to that, topsoil will be restored to promote the planting viability. And there will be landscape irrigation, as we just discussed, at both sites. There will be infrequent to no mowing schedule will be implemented to promote a natural habitat progression. And there will be educational signs which will be placed along the pedestrian sidewalks at both locations. This being this sign just being an example of what that educational sign would be. There was a long term maintenance and monitoring proposed. There will be a three year monitoring period where the applicant will replace any dead material, repair any eroded land and remove any trash, and will produce an annual report to environmental services, which will show what work was done in the previous year. And there will be a final acceptance of this project after three years, which environmental services will be conducting an inspection and issuing that final acceptance based upon the conditions being met. And I'm going to turn it back over to Julie and she'll present the rest of this information to you. All right, so in accordance with the development code requirements for the alternative ESA plans, notification was sent out. We received three letters in opposition. The primary opposition was due to they felt concerns about drainage and particularly if any additional impervious surface was going in behind their houses. It's actually these three lots right here. So they were concerned about any additional impervious surface. We did talk with them and let them know that the intent isn't to add additional houses or to put any paving, but to actually restore that ESA area. So based upon the criteria for approval, the Planning and Zoning Commission recommended approval of the request with conditions that staff recommended. There are seven conditions. Primarily, they outline what stated in that alternative ESA plan that Christy just went over. Also talk about the annual reporting and that they have to be maintained for three years. And that part of this was also coming up with a way to monitor this because we've had some alternative ESAs come in and we really haven't come up until now with maybe a plan on how to monitor these. So for this one, we have added in some sort of financial surety to ensure that the trees that are planted do live and will be thriving at the end of that three years. And at that point, then it'll be released and we'll feel like that will be an established area. Quick question, on the $125 per tree caliper inches, how is that number derived? Is that a policy or is that, where did we get that? That's what we use typically when it comes to mitigation for trees that are cut down and that was under the old code. I know there have been some changes to the tree plan recently, but the previous, this was based upon the previous tree code and that the 125 per caliper inch. Yeah, that's, I've got a question about that because I think we approved the tree code and it was sort of, I thought I remember saying it was 200, but also that it was approved, but that it was sort of in conjunction with or ran parallel with the old code. And so I'd like to eventually have a discussion on that number and I might discuss that with the applicant because I know that's not what it costs. I mean, if we had to go in and plant all those trees, we're, we're going to only get half of what we could. So I just wanted to know where that came from. So I appreciate that answer. Thank you. Is it also that the H.O.A. for the villages of Carmel would take over maintenance and ownership of the lots? And they do, they are H.O.A. lots so that they would be maintained going forward. So that was the recommendation and of course staff recommended approval of those conditions as well. So I'll stand for any questions. And if they're technical, I may have to call Christy back up, but. Any, yes. Councilmember Meltzer. Yes. Is there any learning that we can have here? Because this is the first kind of case like this that I've seen. I'm here about 10 months. Do we have a clear perception of why the damage, the destruction of the repairing buffer was so much greater than what was permitted and why the destruction of the upland habitat occurred? And is there any change in our processes that are indicated by that to prevent something like that happening in the future? That's a good question. And I think that's where that bond or that letter of credit comes in for that maintenance period. Because it then allows the city to continue to monitor that alternative ESA area and to make sure that it remains in the state that it was approved to remain in. So going forward, might we do that with sort of the first round on an alt ESA? I think that that would be the direction I would like to see it go. Because I just don't think in the past we've kind of embedded that in with those projects, so. Thanks. Yes. >> Councilmember Archer. >> So I really like this idea and I support this proposal as a way to make up for this damage that was done. I was going to ask very much the same question that Councilmember Meltzer asked. So I'll kind of just follow up on what he was asking about. I agree that having money put down to invest in anything like this potentially happening. I think that's a great idea for an alternative ESA going forward. My question is, and you might not have an answer to this, or staff might not. But what can be done to prevent, going forward, to prevent so many trees from being accidentally cleared? Obviously, we can't be everywhere all the time, so maybe the answer is just there's really nothing that can be done. Or I don't know if you have anything to say to that. Doesn't affect my support of this proposal, because I support it. I just want to while we're here. >> I don't, I'm going to call Deborah Vera up, she might have some more information on that. >> Good evening, Council, Deborah Vera, Environmental Services. It had been a learning experience. A few things that we can take from this case is the chronology of events, how applications are approved is important. So having that disconnect between the alternative ESA plan and the approval of the final plan opened the door for information that was not accurate to actually get approved. So that was lesson number one. Lesson number two is we are working on the ESA criterion manual. We have never had a criterion manual for managing ESAs or protecting ESAs. One of the things that we are bringing is actually signage as a part of the construction site. Now, construction site, there are a lot of moving parts, heavy equipment moving. So I think that if we not only put the fence out, the protective fence along the ESA, but actually put signage on it, alerting the operator that this area is protected and meant to be preserved. That would be a visual clue for those operating heavy equipment. So those are the few things that we would be bringing on in the near future as a part of the ESA criterion manual. >> Thank you so much. Those are excellent ideas. That's really reassuring. Thanks. >> Okay, any other questions for Stan? Yes, Mayor Pro Tem. >> Yes. On the notifications, you said that there were three that came back in opposition. And yet when you talked to them, they didn't realize what was going on. They thought there was more homes being built. Do we have a process where when somebody misunderstands and sends in in opposition or in favor that they have the ability to correct that status? >> They could always remove that status as, okay. And it does happen from time to time. But I would say there's not a well-defined process in that. It really is more of just talking with them. And we do tend to talk to residents that we get letters from. So sometimes we do get that letter back saying, okay, we remove our opposition. Sometimes it's really just not a clear process. >> Question on the 177 inches compared to the 195. Instead of having the full replacement of the 195, what was the rationale behind that? >> I'm going to have Christy come up for that. >> They're actually replacing the full 195. I'll point back again to- >> Oh, did I miss that? Okay. >> Yes. >> All right, fair enough. >> So I see 177 plus the 18. >> Yes. >> Okay, got you. Thank you. Sorry about that. Okay, any other questions for staff? Nope, thank you. This is a public hearing. We do have a card. Justin Bono, if you'll come up, state your name and address. Your time will begin. Thank you. And you are the applicant, I believe? Okay. >> Hi, Justin Bono, 9219 Arbor Trail, Dallas, Texas. I am the applicant. Own the remaining property there, was the developer of this property for the last several years. Don't have a presentation of my own. Do appreciate Ms. Upton and Ms. Wyatt. I think they did a great job of presenting a very complex subject and a long chronology of this. Happy to stand for questions. Would offer a couple of explanations. One is it relates to the timeline. I think Ms. Fiera did a great job of kind of explaining how some of these approvals of the ESA and the grading plan and the plat were, you know, overlapping as we were pursuing approvals back in, I guess it was 2016. So I would hope, certainly something I've never seen before, but, you know, we ended up kind of working all the way through the process and having a set of construction plans that showed our grading contractor that two more lots needed to be cleared than really needed to be cleared. So naturally they received a grading plan and went and cleared what was on the grading plan. So I think I would tell you, at least in my experience, that's a rare case. And, you know, I think the Ms. Fiera's point with some better chronology for when permits come across, I think there's some improvements that could come across there. As it relates to your question, Mayor, on the cost, you know, naturally what we're doing, we're planting inch for inch what was inadvertently cut and then putting an additional reserve in place to the extent to give that we have a contractual requirement in the plan to make sure that there's 90% of what we plant that continues to last for those three years, but then putting an additional financial security on top of that. I'll tell you, I just happened to pull it up on my phone because we're starting to get bids for this work and our initial bid range to anywhere from, depending on the species, anywhere from $105 an inch to $180 an inch. So while every one of them's not $125, at least it's in the ballpark of what is coming back there. And so I guess the question would be, you know, I don't know that it would make sense to provide 100% financial security for every single inch we're providing, but hopefully that additional security that we're agreeing to gives you all security for standing behind the project. Well, and I appreciate that. And so my question isn't to be either punitive or anything like that. It's just what we we just passed a tree code that and we've realized that when we're buying trees and we're planting them, that it's costing us at least $200 a tree to plant them. Now, that doesn't mean that you can't get them less expensive, but we still have to pay our cost. So I guess my thought on that is I know you're calling it additional financial security, but it's really that if somehow you don't, not you, but if there's not a performance of that requirement and we the city have has to go out and either replace the trees or plant the trees. The only thing that we have that allows us to do that is that escrow bond or reserve. So I figured it up if we did the $200 and I'm not stuck on 200, but I'd like to get something closer to that. That's an additional basically $24,000. I don't know what bond costs are. I don't know if you're planning on putting it up in an escrow account. So I just I don't think that's a I don't think that's an unreasonable ask because it's not like it's it's it's trying to be punitive. It's really just reflecting more what our costs are to do that. So I get your point, totally understand it. And again, it's isn't about trying to to to be punitive in that respect. It's just trying to make sure that we cover our costs if we have to rely upon that. As you said, we may not have to. But if we do, I would hate to think that we're already, you know, 40 or 50% in the hole or something like that. Right. And I certainly don't understand don't pretend to understand kind of the workings of your internal purchasing processes. So we met there may be some semantics here. I was presenting a cost per inch number, which is what the escrow was calculated on. It sounded like you were talking about cost per tree, which may be multiple inches. So, you know, that's a good point. I'm sensitive if it's $200 a tree, and I'm talking about $125 an inch for a two to three inch tree. I'm not sure we're not talking about the same the same numbers at the end of the day. Well, I think ours is 200. I think I misspoke. I think well, I don't know if I said per tree, but ours is $200 per cow or per inch is what the cost is for us. Yeah. When we're buying trees and we're planning, from what I remember the last report we had, is that is that correct? And that's what our new code it says is it's $200 per inch on mitigation cost. Is that is that correct? So yeah, it is an inch per inch comparison. So I apologize for that if I misspoke. Yeah, would you have an opposition? Yeah, I mean, I would hope to find some common ground in the middle again, you know, to plant the trees and then provide a 100% escrow for what I just planted. You know, so a 2x cost on done from my things is what you're talking about. You're talking about 100% of your your cost to plant. In other words, you're I'm not sure I'm understanding that because you're saying at $125 an inch. So you're saying it's costing you 24,000 to plant these 177 inches. Is that what you're saying? Because you're saying I thought I heard you say we're providing we're planting it and we're providing 100% reserve. And I'm trying to understand 100% reserve. I'm saying if we went to if we went to what I was asking went to what you're asking, you know, we would essentially be okay doing the work and then and then writing that same check again to put it in escrow for for three years. So I certainly understand the need for the escrow and understand the experience that you all have had with some other developers that haven't owned up to their obligation over that over the course of those course those three years would just hope to recognize the reality that the likelihood of having to replace every single tree over the course of those three years is probably an, you know, an unlikely occurrence and find some, you know, reasonable middle ground. Well, and maybe I'm not communicating very well because I'm just simply saying that the $125 figure that you're using that in our current code, we're using 200. So it's not about we're trying to get more than than what it is. We're saying that the amount of trees that you can replace at $125 an inch it costs us from what we've seen and calculated about $200 an inch. So it's it's not trying to say we want to plant more trees with that money. It's saying it cost us that amount to plant that same amount of trees or that same amount of caliper inches. And so so I guess am I hearing you say that you obviously would prefer not to do that but whatever the council decides you're gonna it's I'm not trying to put you on the spot. I just need to have I'm bringing it for you. You all have the vote tonight. So I don't Okay, fair enough. I don't know that it's you know, I would, I would think that I mean, to your point, if it's $200, $200 an inch, I'm not arguing your costs. I'm just saying to apply $200 an inch to every single inch and have a 100% reserve on that at your cost seems like a significant reserve for something like this where you know, it's not I'm physically doing the work and then providing that reserve on top of that. Okay. All right. Again, I can I understand them. I'm submitting this for your approval. And you know, you have a you have a vote on this and sure not. And as I said, it's impunitive. It's not it's not it's not punitive. Any other happy day. I'm happy to answer any other councilmember Meltzer. We'll have to deliberate on your point. I think I understand what you're what you're trying to say. I just had the risk of making this continuing to be uncomfortable. I would just like for understanding, you know, to just get what happened I got I understood the first part that the you know, that the that the plan told the basically told the contractor go clear, go clear two more sites. So I understand that one. And what was the story with the Yeah, so I can't certainly put those two lots from the grading plan in their lab, I can 100% put the filling of the stream in in their lab, we had our grading contractor was working out there over a weekend, our engineer shows up on Monday morning and found that more was cleared than should have been cleared. So technically, it was strictly a an issue of our grading contractor, not following what was on the grading plan. And we not only are we filling that stream, and you know, there were some additional trees that cut that were cut down that we have already paid the per caliber inch fee for those into the tree mitigation bank and held the held the grading contractor fully responsible for those costs. Appreciate the clarity. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. So maybe a question for staff first. So maybe that'll that'll so Julie, can you tell me kind of centering around the conversation the mayor had? How many trees are we accounting to replace and there was a percentage of trees, it wasn't it wasn't a tree for tree, it was a what percentage did we apply to the to the escrow? Oh, to the escrow. It was $125 per inch that they are proposing to plant. So it was the 100 195. You applied that $125 per inch, right? Yes. Okay, got it. Okay, got it. That answers that question. And then this city manager, if you could come back with a give me an idea if if going forward, there's an option to do like a geo fencing, because my understanding graders use GPS, you know, kind of to to orient where to go. And so if there's a way to somehow implant something in a mapping system or something like that, that creates some kind of fancy not like to know about that for future uses, that may be something because I know they're not, you know, I know that that technology is what they're using to grade and level, etc. So I'm curious if there's a way to kind of embed those coordinates that would then kind of red flag that work. And then what just just so help me make a decision, what happened to the two lots that were the additional two lots that were clear, they put a house on them? Nope, that's what that's where they're gonna replant. Correct. Okay, got it. Okay. Thank you. Any other questions for staff? And we this is still a public hearing. So is your question for the first time? Let me do we have any more questions for the applicant? All right. Thank you, sir. Appreciate it. And I want to see if this is I want to see if there's any more people willing to speak at the public hearing. So this is a public hearing. Does anybody else wish to speak on this agenda item? Just come on down and state your name and address your time will begin. Anybody wishing to speak? Seeing no movement, we will now close the public hearing. Okay, Mayor Pro Tem. The the amount that's going to be put in to escrow that 24,000. Is that intended in case they don't follow through on this plan? Or is that intended in case they do the plantings, but they have trees that die and stuff dies, and we've got to come back in and replace certain trees. It would be be trees that trees that die. Okay. And one other thing I wanted to point out on that that maybe can help get to the middle. If you recall that $200 figure, at one point, it was like three, maybe it was 315. And that included meter costs. We took that out. And so it was the the actual tree planting and irrigation. So one thing to note here, they are that irrigation is included for that first, essentially those first three years. If it has to be replaced, obviously, irrigation would be continued. But if it is already installed, that would be the responsibility, I guess, of the HOA since it is an HOA lock. So the irrigation can fail after three years and whose responsibility is it to repair it, get it working? That would be the HOA if it's on there. And so if the trees die after three years, is there any responsibility to have to replant them? We would have to, we would be, we have that that money to replant it. After three years or before that, during this three year period? Before the end of the three year period. Okay, I'm talking about after the three years. Let's say after the three years. After the three years. It doesn't matter. They can just all die. And that's just the way it is. Hopefully not. But okay. All right. Any more questions? No, I think that was my point was that there's some irrigation expenses included that 200. Remember, we used to have the meter included. That's more at the 315 back in the meter app. Leaving the cost of the actual drip irrigation going around the tree, we were at the 200 an inch. Okay, well, I'm going to say this. I'm in this kind of mood. We're talking about $24,000. And I know we could say it from the city side. But we're talking about $24,000 additional money to help us understand that we can plant a tree, whether it's irrigation or not, out of a multi probably either hundreds of thousands of dollar project or a million dollar plus project. Okay. Fair enough. Councilmember Hudson. No, I just want to I want to double check to make sure I'm tracking with you on the map. So point valid. I think though, for me, if we're at one we're staff one. Well, the proposal is 125. Yeah. So I add 75 to that times 195 to get the two per tree if they've already accounted for every tree. But I think you went the whole to 195 again at 200. You totally lost me on that. Okay. So the goal is to get the 200 per tree. Staff. No, no, not per tree per inch. Which is per inch. So staffs per inch was 125. That's correct. The total we're trying to achieve is 200. The difference is 75, not 200. So I think you account you calculated 200 times 195 to get the you're right. Yeah. Yeah. So it wouldn't be. Yeah. So organically, if we get the 200 per inch, I think it's an additional $14,625. Yes. Which to me is it's not the middle because it's fully where we want to be. But it sounds like the middle if 24 sounded bad. Right. Okay. Yeah. I understand. Yes. Good point. Okay. Anybody else? Any questions for staff? Councilmember Meltzer? Not questions for staff. Just kind of write it down. Oh, yeah. Talk about it a little bit. Sure. So I think I understand the applicant's point. He's going to put the money in, right? You're really being hedged against it failing. So like, in other words, once the initial planting is done, your risk is less than or maybe I'm wrong with this, but this maybe this is a question. Once you've done the original planting, set up the irrigation, you're no longer $40,000 at risk. You know, it's somewhat less over time. It's just really like what dies out of the $40,000 you put into it, right? No, I mean, well, if in let's look, the reserve is in case it's not just about dying. It's if something happens and the development may be sold. I mean, three years, the development may be sold and it may be HOA. I don't it's just saying, Hey, we just want to make sure we're made whole. We want to make sure we're made whole. And if the irrigation system fails, and somebody doesn't fix it, if half the trees die in the irrigation, it's not a matter of trying to predict what's going to happen. It's saying is and to use Councilmember Hutzpah's math, which is more accurate, $38,000 or something like that for 177 cal per inches, which is their two inch trees or the three inch trees you're looking at anywhere from 65 or 70 trees to down to 55 trees, depending on how big they are. I'm not quite sure I understand your answer. It's not that much money is what you're saying? What I'm saying is, I don't think that we're asking too much to say, Hey, can we be made a little bit closer to hole in case something fails? And if it were something much larger, I understand it. But you're talking an additional $14,000. And we're going to ask people in the future to pay $200 an inch, which may include irrigation. But again, this is I mean, we're gonna all get to decide what we want to do on that issue. So I just want to understand your position. Yeah, I understand. Yeah. Yeah. Councilmember Hutzpah. So I'm going to move approval of this restoration plan with staff's recommendations and recalculate the their math on the the escrow to $200 per inch. And then whatever that math comes to be 195 times 200. $39,000. Okay. All right. Councilmember on return. I'm about to second it. But first I want to ask just to make sure so and that's with the staff recommendations. That's correct. Yeah, I second that. Any further discussion? All in favor, please signify by raising your right hand. All opposed by like sign motion carries 60. We have this completes our agenda. We've already done concluding items. So we will stand adjourned at 715.