Apr 16, 2019 City Council on 2019-04-16 1:00 PM

Welcome everybody to this meeting of the Denton City Council on Tuesday, April 16, 2019. We do have a quorum. Let the record reflect that Councilmember Armator isn't present at this time, but expect her here shortly. I now call this meeting to order. We'll go through our work session agenda items. First one is citizen comments on consent agenda items. We have two cards. The first one being Mr. Robert Donnelly. If you'll come forward and state your name and address, your time will begin. My name is Robert Donnelly. I live at 3900 Quail Creek Road, Denton, Texas. I'm here to provide you with some information on item 4N. I just wanted to inform you that this fifth amendment appears to take money from the Mayhill Road project to fund work on a regional drainage project that is not related to the Mayhill Road project in an amount of approximately, as best I can guess, of $1 million. This will bring the freeze nickels cost to more than 50% above its original contract. This fifth amendment to that contract is $827,000 increase over the fifth amendment that was presented in a work session, but it was pulled back in December of 2018, so three or four months ago. That fifth amendment to the funding agreement did not have these outside drainage issues. Basically, I just want to make you aware of what this is. The bullet points in the agenda information sheet show that most of this money seems to be going for a detention pond that is not connected to the Mayhill Road project to the best of my knowledge. In fact, in the recommendation, it states for services related to the DCTA bridge, which I understand Mayhill Road widening and improvement project. It's my understanding and nothing I've heard that this detention pond is related except through money to the Mayhill Road project. As far as the bullet points go, they all seem to have that in there. I noticed one of them is for the detention pond for a PEC 5 stream. I'm assuming no Mayhill Road money was seen. I know you're doing a project on a PEC 4 stream, and I'm not even sure where that is, and I don't know that you're funding that out of it, so I don't know why the PEC 5, but anyway, I just wanted to make you aware that there seems to be, shall we say, a leakage of some of the funds that I assumed were dedicated for the Mayhill Road project, so anyway, just wanted to make you aware of it, and it's all public information, so there doesn't need to be any questions or anything. You can look it up, but a lot of times, y'all are very busy and things get pushed through that you're not aware of, so I just wanted to make sure you were aware of this. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Donnelly, and I'll probably ask for clarification on that when we go to clarification of agenda items for the Council. Next speaker is Ken Gold. If you'll come down, state your name and address. Your time will begin. Mayor, members of the Council, my name is Ken Gold. I live at 2512 Natchez Trace here in town. I'm here just to talk about the consent agenda item 4A, the approval of the actuarial study for the fire pension, and I support that 100%. The only reason I'm here is because on the agenda information sheet, the last two paragraphs are talking about possible arrangement to take dispatchers out of the fire pension. That would be 20, 25 contributing members that would leave the fire pension, and that's a controversial proposal because for a number of reasons, but one of the main reasons is there's 87 retirees that are supported by the fund, and the number of contributing members would drop from about 189 to 169, maybe lower. Proposal ratio for the number of contributing members to the retirees would go down. That's a big deal, and it's one of the reasons that the proposal is that part of the agenda information sheet is controversial, and an arrangement was attempted, it was negotiated, and sent to the pension to the union members through the meet and confer contract to be voted on, and it was so unpopular that the city asked that proposal to be pulled in the middle of the election. So just a heads up that if that doesn't work out, I hope it doesn't poison the rest of the meet and confer contract. Thank you. >> Okay. Thank you. Appreciate that. All right. I have no more cards for requests to speak on consent agenda items. We will now go to requests for clarification on agenda items listed on the agenda, and I'll just state one out that I just did is, yeah, if once we go through what other council members have, if we could just have some comments on agenda item 4N that the speaker had mentioned. Councilmember Briggs? >> Well, it was on my list to pull any N, item N, for a full presentation and now for an explanation of the funding for a session out in the meeting tonight. >> Okay. So you want to pull it? >> Yes, sir. >> Okay. All right. We'll withdraw my request and we'll just hear it out there. >> I would also like to pull S, item S, just for a quick presentation. And then on I, I have some questions. It's the tree services and tree trimming. And I'd just like to know if they have, I know that we've seen some issues with trimming trees improperly or at the wrong time or, you know, request for different timing. And I'm wondering if we have tree trimming guide or requirements that we pass off to the contractors. >> So you want to pull that one as well? >> No. I'm just curious right now. >> Oh, yeah. So, okay. All right. Come on down. >> Verne Heath, Executive Manager for Energy Delivery. Yes, we have tree trimming. This is our annual contract. We usually spend between $500,000 to $600,000 per year. This would be a three-year contract. We've used a third-party contractor that has worked around in electric utilities. We do notify the customers prior to trimming through telephone calls, IVR system on large areas, one to two weeks prior to that. We also place door hangers. We give courtesy knocks on the doors before we trim. And we acknowledge that cutting trees is a very important issue that people really take to heart. And we love trees. They're a living infrastructure. We just want the right tree in the right place. And we want to make sure the electric system can remain viable and reliable. >> So I guess did the contractor that we have, do they have a forester on site to know the correct and proper way to cut a tree? >> Yes, ma'am. They have a certified utility arborist. And they actually they take into account all the ANSI standards for the health of the tree. And they make the best cuts that would be for the health of the tree that can accomplish the desired rather than just cutting a limb and stub cutting it. We do lateral cuts. >> Thank you. >> Any other questions for the speaker? >> Thank you. >> Thank you, Brent. >> Clarifications? Yes, Councilmember Melcher? >> I'd just like to pull item E for a separate vote. >> Item E? Are you wanting a presentation on that or just a separate vote? All right. So what I have so far is -- well, item E is pulled just for a separate vote, no presentation. Item I has been taken care of in the work session. N will be pulled for a presentation. And S will be pulled for a short presentation. Is that right? Okay. Yes, I'm sorry. Councilmember Husband? >> Thank you. I would ask for a brief presentation on R, the software, just kind of want to understand that better. >> You want that now or you wanted it in the meeting? >> Yeah, just now. >> Okay. So if we could have staff who can answer some questions to give a brief presentation about agenda item R. Anybody here that can do that? Yeah, all right. While they're gathering the correct staff personnel, any other clarifications on agenda items? All right. Then we'll give them a couple minutes or we'll just -- yeah, we'll just give them a couple minutes and then -- what -- Councilmember Husband, on which one was it? R? >> R, yes. It's the new software. >> All right. Any particular questions or I guess are you just trying to understand a bit more clearly? >> Yes, sir. >> Okay. >> Go ahead. >> Yep. All right. Thank you. Good morning or good afternoon. Good noon. Yeah, we're on agenda item R. Councilmember Husband is looking for just a brief presentation on consent agenda R, which is the consulting services for land management system software for the city. >> Scott McDonald, director of development services. Thank you, Mayor, Council. This is for a consultant to help us through the selection process as we look at and evaluate land management or permitting software solutions. So this consultant is here in Texas and ultimately is familiar with doing that. So they're going to help us through the process. So is it something -- so not familiar with track it. So can you I guess highlight some of the shortcomings I guess of that what's currently in place and then just trying to understand so the consultant is going to create from -- help create from scratch or just present based on a knowledge base of these are the softwares that are available and kind of just bird dog one. I just want to understand that function. >> Let me start with kind of where we're at today. So the current reality of what we have is track it. Track it is a software solution that we do our permitting through and then we have project docs which is the software solution that provides for uploading of construction documents, plans. We also have another module to track it, which is e-track it and that's what the inspectors and those use out in the field. So we have several different platforms in which we're utilizing today. That software solution is out of date. So we had looked at updating that software which really is essentially a new software platform. We put an RFP out and we have several individuals that have responded to that RFP. So as we go through this process and we evaluate whether we switch to a different platform, our goal is to have a single platform so both staff and our constituents have ease of access so all of our documentation is in one place. It's a little bit more flexible and versatile for us to use and to be able to provide that information out to the public more clearly. The software consultant is familiar with local government and land development and so those software solutions are slightly different than some others in that functionality. So they'll help us through that evaluation process. Does that answer what you're asking? Yes, but I guess the follow-up would be is it going to be a turnkey solution, something existing that someone licenses, or do you envision creating from scratch? We have every intention that we're going to buy something off the shelf so it really is ready to be used short of that it'll be customized to Denton. So we don't look at creating our own platform. Melissa, I don't know if you have anything you want to add to that. Good afternoon, council, mayor, city manager. Yes, our intention is for it to be off the shelf but also provide those enhancements and integration between systems. Currently, right now, that's not the case. Even with using the same vendor with two different platforms with eTracket and Tracket, even getting information from each is not as seamless as it could be. Okay. All right. Thank you. And so just, city manager, maybe you could send an email to me just I'd like to understand the shortcomings better currently so that I can evaluate the fixes and so I'm sure John and Chris could give me a list but yeah, so if you could just help me understand that, that'd be great. Thank you. Well, and I think that's good to send to everybody because that's a very good observation and your docs and all these things certainly have their shortcomings and people can be very frustrated sometimes with how they get used and the lack of integration and interfacing so I think this is a great opportunity for us to really make some strides in how we deal with our constituents when doing permitting projects of any kind that they're dealing with land use and so I really appreciate staff bringing this forward. I look forward to see how it goes because this is a very important, important decision as we had when we made the decision to purchase those many years back and had an opportunity to see that they didn't exactly do exactly or they couldn't keep up with what we were really requiring in our development process review and so forth so very good observation and look forward to that sort of comparison and sharing of what staff believes are the pitfalls or the things that we really need to fix with our current software so thanks. Thank you. Any other questions for staff on this? Comments? All right. Thank you all very much. Appreciate it. Thank you. Okay, any other clarifications of the agenda items? Okay, seeing none then we'll move on down through our work session reports. First work session report is receive a report, hold discussion to give staff direction on proposed changes to West Hickory Street between Avenue B and Welch to safely accommodate bicycle, pedestrian and parking needs in the area and this is agenda item 3A. Good afternoon, Mayor, City Council members. My name is Mark Oliphant. I'm the bicycle and pedestrian coordinator for the city. Preetam, one of our city engineers is bringing around a handout that's a blow up of slides 15 and 16 just for your information. Today I'm going to be speaking to you about a proposal for bicycle lanes on two blocks of West Hickory Street from Avenue B to Welch Street. I did see this morning a headline that we're at an impasse and my goal today is to convince you that we may have some good options. We may not be at an impasse on this. So first off I want to tell you about the bike plan that we're using. This is governing our construction and design of bicycle lanes throughout the city. This is called the pedestrian and bicycle linkage component of the city of Denton mobility plan. It's been in place since 2012. It was very well vetted at that time and it has proposals and suggestions for building bike lanes and other bike infrastructure within the city. If you look at the bottom here, we have four lines that affect Hickory Street. They're not exactly in order but I'll tell you, this calls for bicycle lanes all the way from I-35 on the west side of town to Carroll Street on the east, so a dedicated bicycle lane on Hickory Street and this is under the current accepted city plan. Now this is particularly timely right now because we're in the midst of a reconstruction of Hickory Street. It's being repaved. They've done the work all the way up to Avenue B at the beginning of the summer, I believe on or about June 3rd. The next phase of that construction is scheduled to start. We believe it will be about two months for each block. So Avenue B over there on the left to Avenue A and Fry will be two months and then another two thereabouts to get to Welch Street. So far, this project has installed bike lanes on the south side of Hickory Street for the length from Carroll Street to this area. However, once we get here, we have a slightly different character. Those preceding blocks are all lined by residential uses, some university uses but very little commercial. You get here to Avenue B and you have restaurants, bars, coffee shops, retail establishments. And so we think it needs to be treated a little differently than the other parts and of course once you get east of Welch Street, again, you return to a very residential character and we can go back to sort of the original plan which was keeping the bike lane on the south side. So as part of this, just under two years ago this came to the City Council but it was decided to table it and research this further to get some better options because business owners weren't happy with what was being proposed at that time. And we would very much like to build these bicycle lanes in conjunction with this construction that's going on this summer, the rebuilding of the road. So our consultants, there's a great team nationally recognized in bike and pedestrian planning. They came up with five options for us to consider to put bike lanes through this area and I'm going to go through each. So our first option here, I'll just orient you up in the top left is Avenue B where it crosses Hickory. So you have your CVS there, the burger restaurant here and we continue down and then here is Avenue A and fry and they'll all be set up this way just for your orientation. So this first one we're calling our parking protected bike lane option or option one. This removes parking in the first block on the north side of Hickory Street but it retains parking on the south side and this is called a parking protected bike lane. You can see we have the two vehicle lanes, then we have parallel parking spaces, a buffer, a painted buffer and then next to that is a bicycle lane and this is an advantageous thing for cyclists especially. It can be safer because you have a row of vehicles between you and the moving vehicles which can serve to make you safer and then once we get to that second block, we convert, the parking is retained on the north side and the bike lane is kept on the south side like we've had in other areas. So that's a parking protected bike lane and then when it comes to Welch Street, it comes to this intersection which has a light. I want to draw your attention to the right side here. These are called, what are they called, cross sections, street cross sections and that just shows this is the north side, this is the south side and that shows what it would look like. The vehicle is moving, the vehicle parked, then you have this buffer. I also brought a visual aid. This is what those would look like. It's called a flexible delineator post. They're usually with an adhesive stuck to the ground and these can be used between bicycle lanes and other lanes to help delineate them and show that it's a separate use. Option two, buffered bike lane. We like this option very much, it's quite similar. Now this one keeps the parking on the north side up against the businesses there and on the south side we keep the bike lane all along the curb. It's continuous right against the curb where it was against the curb before it got to this area and it will continue there. So as far as continuity, we like this option the best. It keeps that continuity. Here we are approaching Welch Street and then over here on the right again, this is a cross section. So we have the parking on the north side. We have two vehicle lanes. We have the buffer and then we have the bike lane. Option three, this is similar to option one as well. One major advantage of this is that there is no parking loss. What this proposes to do is to keep parking on the north and south sides. We'll have two through vehicle lanes in the middle, but what we'll do is create what's called a cycle track which is a bicycle lane that is separated somehow from the roadway, usually a little above it, six inch curb or something and then you have the cycle track. So we would convert the current sidewalk which is about eight or nine feet wide into a cycle track and bicycles could travel there and then we would need to work with UNT to expand southward so that we could build a second or a new pedestrian-dedicated sidewalk adjacent to it. A major advantage here is that we keep the parking in this area. Disadvantages are we're going to have to work with UNT on this. They have expressed a willingness to discuss it, but I think we would need to go through some of their high-level... Real quick question, refresh my memory on currently, there's parking on both sides of Hickory with a bike lane. There's no bike lane. Got you. And then it picks up at Welch and then goes on out to Carroll Boulevard. Yes, Mayor. I just want to make sure I get that. So UNT has said they'd be willing to consider it. We did have to send some of our higher representatives there to talk to them about it and they do want it to go through their Board of Regents, but it's possible. And then that would rejoin the roadway near Avenue A and Frye. I will point out here this is something that is of a bit of concern to cyclists is that as they rejoin the roadway, moving vehicles won't see them or vehicles traveling eastbound and turning right could potentially turn into them. There's one of the most common accidents called a right hook where a bicycle is on the right and a vehicle is traveling straight but then turns either into them or in front of them. And so that is a concern from the cycling community with this design. They've also mentioned that if cars open their doors on that south side, they could potentially be within that door zone. If we had a little more width, it would be better, but that would of course have to come out of UNT. I think this design asks for five feet. Now another consideration too is that there are light posts and trees. So it may be a possibility too that the pedestrian path actually meanders a little bit to avoid trees or something if we went with this option. So here we are coming up onto Welch. It's also possible we could have a very mini cycle track here of about 120 feet, but it would bias by parking spaces there. Again, you have the issue with cyclists leaving the roadway, being off of the road and then returning to the roadway and potential crashes or collisions there. Over on the right, we have some more of these cross sections of the roadway. You'll see in some sections, we will be able to have these delineator posts and others not. Number four, single through lane. Well, this option attempts to make everyone happy, except it does not make traffic engineering staff happy and I'll tell you about that. So here we keep parking on the north, we keep parking on the south, we have a parking protected bike lane, we have a buffer between those parked cars and the bike lane, lots of safety, the bikes are not exiting the roadway and reentering it, but the problem is we go down to one through lane on this road. This is a secondary arterial road. It's very important that we have throughput of vehicles. If you can just imagine a car needs to stop to back into a parking space or a car is pulling out or a delivery or someone wants to run in quick and get coffee, I mean, you cannot double park here, it would be chaos. So this is a possibility, we wanted to illustrate it, but engineering staff doesn't like this one. Option -- oh, and here's the continuation of it, very, very simple. It does -- it's only a block and a half that we would have the one lane. You can see here on the bottom right, it -- that single lane ends and we go to two just after I think it's like the lucky lose area there. >> So this basically would be a permanent representation of the temporary situation we have on I-35, where you got three lanes coming out into two and then it busts back up. So here you have two lanes coming into one on the west side and then coming out on the other side two lanes for a distance of how much? >> Maybe 1,000 feet or so. >> And where's the stop sign? There's -- at Avenue B, is that where the -- is that where the jack-in-the-box is? >> Here's the jack-in-the-box. >> Yes. >> Yep, so you have a signal intersection, CVS, signal intersection, and then we continue this way, it continues over here. >> But you have a stop sign that's further west on -- what is that, Avenue C, Jayco, four-way stop, I think? So potentially that could really back up. >> Yes. >> Okay. All right. All right. Yes. But it gives you all the parking and all the -- >> Well, that's why we have it as an option. I mean, I appreciate that. I appreciate that. >> So now option five. This one came out a little bit later than the others. We did some brainstorming in conjunction with the Oak Gateway area plan and the people who were working on that. Essentially what we were looking for here is we were -- we were thinking about the nature of the area, that once you get to Avenue B, it changes dramatically. No longer apartments or houses along the roadway. We have, as I mentioned, these businesses and so forth. And it's a very busy pedestrian node as well. You got lots of jaywalking, cyclists. I know from last fall's traffic plan that UNT did, this intersection of Avenue A and Frye and Hickory was the busiest cycling intersection on the entire campus. So you've just got a tremendous amount of things going on here. And what our thought was -- it was a brainstorm -- what our thought was was, well, could we slow down vehicular traffic enough that we could safely integrate bicycle traffic into the two general purpose lanes currently from Avenue B to Avenue A. It's a 20 mile an hour speed limit from Avenue A to Welch, it's 30. We would try to get both down to 20. And we would also use physical infrastructure to try to -- well, to physically enforce the speed limit. If you look here, this is what's called a speed table, which also doubles as a crosswalk. And so it's a raised surface, so as vehicles approach it, they slow down. We would have some bulb outs and improvements here, trying to make it a very friendly livable area that slows down vehicles. Over here on the right, if I could draw your attention there, these are examples. And if this were to be selected, we recommend starting out with nonpermanent infrastructure like speed tables, speed cushions, and things like that, so that we could test it out. We can give it a year, give it two years, see what we think. I will say -- down here is another option, a bolt down curb, essentially, that has these same delineators, or even potentially street art planters or something like that, that could be incorporated into this design. I will say that our consultants, in their professional opinions, did -- they were not willing to put their endorsement behind it that they thought it would really work. But if we wanted to try it, they wouldn't stop us. So those are our five options. So the first four are consultant recommended or consultant identified, and the last one is not. Is that correct? I would say the last two are not recommended by consultants, but we wanted to flesh them out and show them to you as possible. And elements from some could be adopted into others. Okay. Yeah. So here -- and this is the handout you got. This is a comparison of those five options. One thing I will add is that under option two description, it should also mention that the -- these flex posts are a possibility. I just are neglected to add that in there. But you can see, so there's a parking impact to each, some, none, cost estimates. I will say that some of these cost estimates, if the improvements are not extensive, can actually be wrapped into that rebuilding budget, what we've already budgeted to rebuild the roadway, some of the striping and things like that. So it doesn't have to be -- we estimated these as if they had been done standalone. But it really -- it can be wrapped into the -- that roadway project. And -- oh, yeah. So I will say from my perspective, none of these standalone satisfies all of the requirements that the stakeholders are looking for. We talked to a lot of people, cyclists, cycling advocates, business owners. There is something missing with each, but we have continued to work on this. We've met a number of times with traffic safety, mobility, to talk this through. And we've come up with two preferred options that involve both preservation of parking and a through bike lane that satisfies the safety requirements that we're looking for. So first, I'll draw your attention to the left column. We're calling this -- this is option two. Along with a change on Avenue A and Mulberry of the traffic circulation pattern. So I'm going to tell you about that. So what this proposal is -- this came about through conversations with the mobility committee -- oh, yes, sir. >> Real quick, just for clarification. So when you say option two, that means if I'm looking at option two, which is buffered bike lane -- >> Yes, sir. >> -- that this is sort of the modifications to that. >> Yes, sir. >> Councilmember Brink. >> Yeah, I just want to add to that because part of our main concern were for me by speaking to the business owners as a member of mobility committee was that number two removes that parking. And so this kind of fulfills that aspect of where the parking would go if removed for option two. >> Okay. So that's what you're going to discuss right now. >> Yes, correct. >> Okay. >> So if we go back one, you'll see option two removes the most spaces. So the bicyclists love it, but the business owners obviously had some hesitation about that. They didn't want that. So we developed an alternative here. I'm going to move ahead. So what this proposes is currently Avenue A at the Fry-Hickory intersection is both north-south bound, and it only exists south of Hickory, and then it connects into Mulberry, which is east-west two-way. And we are considering a change to that, to one-way. So here's a bubble diagram, real high level, something, so if you can see, if you'll follow me or the mouse, now traffic will travel westbound to here and then northbound there, and we're proposing adding parking, additional parking in these purple rectangles. This would narrow the street a little bit, instead of having two-way vehicular traffic, you'd have one-way. I'm going to go to the next slide, which is a little more detailed. It is a little harder to see, but you can see exactly where these would fall. We have the little red hash marks along Mulberry Street showing where these parallel parking spaces could be located. And then up here, we're proposing to mirror the diagonal parking alignment that's on the east side of Avenue A. Some other improvements, we would bulb out the curb here so that southbound Fry Street traffic has a visual reminder not to go forward there. We would probably also change the signal heads, left turn only, because of the one-way streets. And what this does is it essentially allows us to remove all of that parking on the south side of Hickory Street and not lose any spaces. I have a question. Yes. Currently, the spaces that are proposed to be removed on the south side, are those metered spaces? They are not. It's two-hour. It's two-hour. And who monitors that? UNT does most of the monitoring. I believe our police department is enabled to, but it's really UNT. So that's their jurisdiction? If somebody gets a parking ticket, does it come to the city? Does it come to the UNT? We have an interlocal agreement. Somebody could just brief me a little bit on just how that works. Yes. For this particular street, Hickory Street, is on their plan. We have a list of streets that are permitted by an ordinance that UNT actually monitors and enforces. And do they receive the revenue from the tickets, or does the city? I think, according to the agreement, there's a portion that comes back to the city. And then a portion that goes to UNT? Portion to UNT. Would this be the same set up on Avenue A and Mulberry, or are those streets included in that street list for UNT? We have not discussed this yet. We're still so much in the preliminary stages, but we'll definitely seek any direction from the council if we want to keep it as our city parking open for everyone. We can leave it that way, or we can talk to UNT. The reason we have UNT enforce most of these spaces is they're better equipped, personnel wise, as well as actually receiving the citations, or actually receiving the money for the violations at the end of the year from students. Whereas us, we cannot really recuperate some of these costs. So have we tried to determine, I mean, because if that's not permitted parking with the city, I mean, with this university, if it's not metered parking, I mean, how many, I would presume probably 80 to 90% of those spaces are going to students. I mean, when I hear of business parking, I mean, I want businesses to have places to park too, but that's assuming in this conversation that most of those spaces are parked by people who will be visiting those businesses, and we really don't have any data on that. Is that? Correct. There is an assumption on these new spaces, but we do have some data on the existing spaces on the south side of Hickory. We had set up cameras for about seven days. We collected data. Essentially, what the data pointed out, during the daytime, when the school is up, almost 80 to 90% of the users are UNT students. As it shifts to a after school, nighttime, evening hours, after 5 PM, then a lot of students or the users are business folks that cross the street. Okay. Council Member Briggs. Yeah. On the enforcement, do we have any data that shows how many tickets that they've issued on Hickory since we've taken the meters away? It was my understanding when we did that, it was going to be just a pilot, and they weren't really, kind of who enforced it wasn't really discussed at that meeting, just that the meters would go away, and it would go to two hour parking, and then, you know, it would be enforced somehow or another, but I have been told that they're not really enforcing it because there's not, like you said, it doesn't work for them, like they can't really make the money situation work, I guess, as far as that, so I would recommend that if we did this, some sort of meter would go back into place, but not the issue back, I think, when we discussed it was that it was going to be $4.00 an hour or something, which was the issue, the cost was the issue, not that there was a meter there. So we did talk to UNT, and we are asking them to bring an item forward to discuss specifically this parking scenario, who's charging, how are these meters enforced. They do have some data that they've collected over the few months, and they will be able to present that, it will go to mobility pretty soon. Okay. So what I'm understanding from what you just said is this entire issue, these five options, that UNT has, I don't know if right or first refusal is what I want to say, but they have the jurisdiction, at least we know for sure, on the parking spaces or what revenue or they have some kind of say in the parking spaces on Hickory between Avenue B and Fry Street or all the way to Welch, or is it all the way to Welch? What's the extent of that? It's about this point, which is the street comes in and there's no parking on this side. Okay. All right. There are a few spaces here. But we don't know if that same paradigm applies to Mulberry and Avenue A, but that's something that obviously we're going to have to find out before we really -- Correct. So yes, on Hickory Street, they do have the jurisdiction. They don't have jurisdiction on Avenue A and Mulberry, but we at this point have an option if the council decides we can keep it city enforced or then we can talk to UNT to have that folded into their existing agreement. Because right now, there's no parking on Avenue -- on Mulberry or Avenue A, is that correct? There is some here on the east side. There is a loading zone. Yeah. And on the east side, where those restaurants are, there. But on Mulberry, I don't believe there's any parking. No. Okay. All right. Just curious, what's the rationale or the interest in deciding that the one way should go from Welch north on Avenue A instead of coming down Avenue A south east on Mulberry? Just -- do y'all put out some counters or something, or is it just sort of somebody -- I think the biggest benefit was the right hook. If we continued going southbound, there was a chance that people would make that right turn while these bicycles -- Okay. All right. There is a method to the madness. Yes. Somewhat. All right. Fantastic. That's a good rationale. And I can add to that too because it was brought up during mobility that it would seem that that would be the natural way of progression for, you know, someone trying to get from over here to cut through to Welch, but I believe at that time, a business owner weighed in and said, honestly, this makes more sense. Right. And it does also because if you're going north on Welch across Hickory to get to Oak Street, you've got to make an unprotected or un-signaled left turn, which is very difficult sometimes with people. And so coming down Avenue A to Fry Street, you've got a signal light at Fry and Oak. So you have a much more controlled intersection. Okay. All right. And it's easier to get to by going here than going up, back, down, and then all the way around. Okay. All right. Okay. So that is the proposal. I'll continue on. How many parking spaces does that replace? How many do we get in this configuration? About 29. Okay. I think. And up here, you can see there's a couple that are parallel parking. We do want to preserve some loading zone space and later when we flush it out, we'll get that. There's both deliveries too and prepared meals leaving. So there's loading going on there. So that is one proposal that we go with. Option two for the bike lane on the south side and we replace that parking in kind on Avenue A in Mulberry. So I think we all received an email this afternoon or this morning from Ms. McKibbin about she's out of state and I can't remember which option she thought, but I thought it was this option with modification. But have the business owners been presented with this and what was the response there? Yes. I will get to that. May I speak to the other parking? Absolutely. I will address that. So the other alternative that both preserves parking and keeps a bike lane was option three. And I'm going to discuss a little bit about what this one entails. So that nine foot sidewalk would be converted to the cycle track. A pedestrian only sidewalk will be built somewhere to the south, separate maybe or adjacent. This would preserve that on street parking for Hickory, which the businesses on the north side of Hickory between B and Frye are very interested in retaining. This will require, though, close permission and coordination with UNT. So this is the same slide we saw earlier of this option three, what it entails, but we keep parking north and south and then we have our bicycles and our pedestrians further south a little bit into the campus zone. What this does require, though, is UNT has asked us to prepare some preliminary engineering documents showing where the sidewalk might go, a tree preservation plan and a few things like that that we would need to prepare. They would then be submitted to the university and I think it's the August meeting of the Board of Regents would consider it for us. So stakeholder groups, we've had a lot of outreach, we've had public meetings, so starting in September we met with business owners on Hickory Street, we met in the Aura Coffee, UNT, we've been in continuous conversations with DCTA. They have an interesting issue because currently they run buses down Avenue A in Mulberry and the corner at Welch and Hickory is difficult for them to make, it's a tight turn, but we've discussed that with them, we actually have plans to update that intersection and it will be easily maneuverable by buses as soon as we make that change. What we're doing is instead of having two lanes northbound on Welch, that left lane will become a center median. Let's see, so the business owners, bicycle activists, they've been great, we've heard from them at a lot of our Traffic Safety Commission and Mobility Committee meetings. The police department, I will say, completely independent of this effort, about a year and a half ago one of the sergeants in the downtown district actually wrote a white paper saying I would really love it if we could do something to reduce the amount of traffic on Mulberry and Avenue A. We talk about parking there and the nature of it, but what I personally forget is that all of that completely changes at about 11 p.m. every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night when I don't get out there. In talking to some of the business owners, they have big concerns about people getting in and out, about the widths of the sidewalks in front of them, it's just the nature of it changes very much. The police like this one way, it reduces the number of lanes the pedestrians have to cross, so if they're coming from campus to that area at the corner of Avenue A and Mulberry instead of crossing two lanes of traffic, potentially inebriated or something, it would just be one and we can update that. So that's something else to keep in mind is how this changes day to night, you know. The fire and EMS, they just want to make sure they can get their fire trucks in and out, which they can, and then just outreach and we've heard from the general public. So overall, the strengths here are under the option of option two and changing the traffic direction on Avenue A and Mulberry is that no one is against it. Everything else we have had people vehemently opposed to some aspect and this one everyone says well, I might have this little issue here or this little issue there, but I think we can make this work and staff is coming to that conclusion too. So this is my final slide, recommendations, this has gone to the mobility committee a couple of times, we've discussed it up and down, you know. They do support option two with that one-way conversion, but also have directed us to continue investigating that option three and working with UNT. The Traffic Safety Commission, they've also received this information and have endorsed option two unanimously and also endorsed that parking alternative A, and so in conclusion, staff's recommendation is that the city proceed with option two for the bike lane, coupling that with alternative A for parking, which is that one-way conversion of Avenue A and Mulberry, it will preserve the continuous bike lane, a very important west to east thoroughfare for cyclists, it will preserve parking for local businesses, we feel it's the safest option for cyclists and pedestrians, and it has the least number of conflict points. You started out this presentation by saying you read a headline or something that said we were at an impasse, so I'm not sure based upon what I'm seeing where the impasse is, I mean, obviously you guys have done a lot of work behind the scenes with the mobility committee and the Traffic Safety Commission to really continue to vet this and be creative and find the best options. I would only say, and I'm okay with staff recommendation, I think when it comes to the number of parking spots on Avenue A, I would rather, if you have a little few to give or take away, that would be the one for the loading and unloading, because that is just, I mean, you're going to really restrict that, and you know how it is, a truck can stop anywhere they want to unload just like we see it up on the square, so that's my only concern is that if they don't have any road to unload, they're going to stop in that one lane, and they have the right to do that from everything that we've talked about on unloading and unloading trucks temporarily, so the more we can get them off of that main lane of traffic because they're going down to one lane, the better off we'll be, but I really appreciate the hard work for everybody involved to find some very creative solutions and listening to everybody, and nobody gets exactly what they want, but I think when you take in all those opinions and considerations, you come up with a solution that gets everybody the most that they could expect all the way around, so I'm okay with staff recommendation. Well, I think the impasse is not really that strong of an impasse, it's more of a which way do we go. Option three really depends on whether or not UNT is willing to get on board with it. If they are, I'd much rather do option three, so we preserve parking by making that a one way, the one issue of them having to get back out in that lane of traffic is taken away because you no longer are going to have a right turn lane there onto Avenue A. I'm not following you. So are you saying option three coupled with the one way? Correct. Okay. Correct. Because the major concern- So here, you would not have the issue cyclists coming out and vehicles behind them turning down because Avenue A would be one way also? Correct. Okay. Correct. Yeah, but then you don't need the parking on Avenue A because you're preserving all the parking on Hickory as it is. Well, you're adding additional parking. Yeah. I don't, yeah. I mean, to me, the parking, if we're just going to give it to UNT and those kind of things, I mean, what I liked about the creative solution for option two was it replaced the parking. I don't think our goal is to necessarily add, that hasn't been the charge to add more parking, but I certainly understand making it one way would be, or if you wanted to do it, what do they call it, a road diet, and you put in more pedestrian walks or whatever, but I wouldn't necessarily want to add another 30 spots over there, quite honestly, but that's just me. Go ahead, Council Member Briggs. So I wanted to weigh in on my wish list. So I do like option two with the one way conversion for the parking, but I would also like to make sure that we change the speed to 20 miles an hour all the way because there's that one block where it goes up to 30, and there's really a need for that, especially since it's so heavily pedestrian oriented. And I would like to continue the discussion on enforcement, and I think that's going to be a big part. Parking or speed? Well, parking, yeah. It's going to be a big part of the solution. I mean, it doesn't really help to make sure the parking is available if we're not allowing it open for our businesses, which is the intention of that. If I could just add, in speaking to the business owners, I have repeatedly heard that they are not satisfied with the current parking arrangement, UNT doesn't have the incentive to enforce it like they would like it to be enforced and so forth, so a change there in conjunction with all of this I think would be most welcome by the business owners. So with both of those, I would like to ask council or staff to explore the option five, not the Sharos, but the calm street aspect of it for that intersection with maybe just a few bump outs because it is very, very heavily used by pedestrians and bicyclists and maybe not to the extent shown, but there may be some benefits for us to slow traffic down at that intersection anyway. Todd Estes, I just wanted to add to one item and I heard you mention the bump outs and I heard council member Ryan mention concerns about people pulling in and out of parallel parking stalls. The illustrations we have today were just to show you how it could be configured as far as striping and around the intersections, what we would propose when you actually went to do construction would be that you would do a bulb out at each of those intersections so that you can make it safer for both cyclists and pedestrians. You give the driver a little bit of a hard barrier so they can't just whip right into where somebody is walking or riding their bicycle. It forced them to move off into traffic, but then it would provide some of that traffic calming as well because it's a hard barrier curb, it's not a big wall, but it is a curb and it does tend to slow people down. So that would be included is what you're saying? That would be our intent, it would be our recommendation to make it the safest possible way. Okay, thank you. So Mayor Pro Tem, on option three with the one way on Avenue A, and let's say if you didn't have additional parking, would that mean that if there were two lanes there, one would just have to make a right turn and the other one would go straight? Is that how that would work on option three? Like if Avenue A was one way going heading north, that means you'd have one lane that's dedicated to turning right and the other one would have to go straight, is that on Avenue on Fry Street, is that right? If it was one way, you can't turn down left on Hickory, I mean, you see what I'm saying? You'd have to go left on Hickory, you couldn't turn right on Hickory if you're on Fry Street. No, no, if the one way was going the same way in option two, I'm saying if you're having from Mulberry to Avenue A going up north, you can only turn right on Hickory. Yeah, or straight, that's what I'm saying, so you have two lanes, would those be dedicated because you certainly couldn't turn right from the far left-hand lane? So I understand what you're saying, these two lanes would be one way going northbound. The way they align, it would be really difficult to align it appropriately with the oncoming lane, so most likely there would be a dead-- So you would need to have it one lane to really make that work? Yeah. All right, Council, what's your pleasure? Council Member Hussbuss, you've been conspicuously quiet and just teasing you, go ahead. Yes, no. I understand the group's work. My concern about the parking remains, but if those that are in the area, parking on Avenue A, I mean, I started to drive it and take a picture because last time we talked about this, everyone looked at me like I'm crazy. I absolutely know those beer trucks parked there. I'm certain, there's no doubt in my mind, there's no doubt in my mind that entire first three, four sections are parking for the sub-sandwich place right now, deliveries, it's a loading zone right now, and so no one's addressed where that's going. I mean, that's actual on-the-ground information that I know happens, I just didn't have the time or energy to go take a picture. So it just, so when life happens, do we just say whoops or do we address it now, is my question. I would love to hear someone address, where's the beer truck going to park? Because he's going to eat up and where are the drivers going to go? So there are some parallel spaces here. I think this area can be assigned as loading zone and some of these initial spaces. So we know, I think there are eight or nine loading zone spaces currently available and we're planning on repurposing them within this first half closer to this business area. So let's assume you push it closer to the intersection of Hickory, then that becomes a blind corner for the cyclists, right? I mean, right, if you get too close, the beer truck is there, you can't see around it, there's a cyclist coming, there's a car coming, you know, you can't see. It would be signalized though, but this is signalized here, you don't have to wait at the signal. Yes. I just assume there's Jay walkers out there, you know, I mean, just, I don't want to push it further. I don't want to, I want that to be clear, right? So I want to be able to see. So I don't have a fix, I don't like it, but I understand the group that looked at it. That's what they want. And so I support the work they did. I'm just saying I want to have a clear record that says, I don't know how those two worlds are going to coexist. You can have what you asked for, but I just don't know how it practically functions. And I, and so for me, I would, I don't think there's traction for it, but I absolutely would like to take Hickory down the one lane because I want to motivate people to go elsewhere. I don't want you to cut through the town and the university as you're cut through. You can, you can call the street, whatever you want. The fact of the matter is it's right through UNT, you can call it a highway. Fact of the matter is it's right through the campus. It's 20 miles per hour. And if you're asking me what I do, I'd make it one lane through there and make it very walkable. And then I'd absolutely ask the city manager to go find the software that puts electronic cameras there that gives everyone a ticket that goes 25 or higher, just everyone and just every, every person that goes through there, if you speed, you get a ticket at your house. And that's sort of like the red light cameras that you're not for. Yes. But it gets everybody and it absolutely motivates people to go, go a different way. And I think that's the goal. Right. So, uh, that's, that's what I'd absolutely do. Yeah. So red light camera, if you want to keep your money, come up with a ticket system and call me. I'll just real briefly, I will echo the concerns on the loading zones on Avenue A. So I think really that's going to be the biggest challenge. So if you're able to, because I don't know why we would put parking all the way down. I don't know how many of these businesses, I think they all probably utilize delivery trucks. So to me, I don't know why they would be on the opposite side of the street of the businesses, whereas some of those loading zones could be actually where some of those current parking places are now on the east side. I guess they're delivering to UNT to some degree, but I bet not. They're all delivering to these businesses. So that, that is a concern I have because they will stop. They're not required by law to stop at the designated loading zones. They can, I mean, from what we've heard about the downtown area, these trucks can stop anywhere they want to temporarily unload. So the, the more convenient we make it for them, as far as the proximity of location to where they're delivering, I think they will utilize those loading zones. So I share that concern. I share that concern. Mayor Pro Tem and then Council Member Briggs. Well, I strongly disagree that Hickory is a cut through. Can you tell me one other road that goes from 35 to Bell Avenue besides University? There's Hickory is the only street that goes all the way across town. And so it's not a cut through street. It is an arterial. It is a thoroughfare and the fact that it runs through campus is just before it happens to say. Okay. So I'm trying to figure out what the direction is. Council Member Briggs has expressed her desire for option two with some modifications with the bump outs and some of those other things. Is that right? Go ahead. Yes. But I would also like to have planter boxes as the separators so that we can make the area really pretty. So people can hit them and then we got to replace them? No, no, no. So people don't hit the bicyclist. Oh, okay. So they hit the planter instead. Well, I mean, so for me, I'm just going to say this. The Fry Street area is another area for economic development. We have shops down there. We have students and we have the downtown here as well. And what do people really enjoy when they go downtown? I get the happiest comments about all the flowers and the planters. And so if we could put a couple of planters there as a barrier and fill it with, you know, really pretty flowers, I don't I don't really see an issue with that. And if not, I'm going to go down to the one lane street with Gerard. I'm sticking with continuing negotiations with UNT for a walk path that gives you a safer bike route, especially if you do the one way on Avenue A, because it is elevated. You're not having where's your little delineator deal. You're not having that piece of plastic, plastic protecting the bike. You've got a curb that protects them. Okay. That's my dog. Yeah, nobody's gonna get what they want here, obviously. I guess that option to with the one way streets is kind of kind of where I'm leaning. But I think I think there's going to be some more tweaking that's going to go on on all of these things, you know, for the loading zones are, and all of that, but I think that's something that can be tweaked. And it's not going to be optimum for everybody. So, Councilmember Hudson, thank you. So yeah, so I, I support with staff recommends, that's my that's my option, whatever, whatever modifications that's that's the overview. And I'll trust staff to work on that types of because what is the help me I want to have other comments. But my question is, what's the timing? How long before we're constructing because that I mean, first, that needs to happen. You can't go five miles per hour on Hickory without losing part of your car. And so that has to be fixed. That is a big item. I mean, if you pick option three, the time to negotiate with UNT and try to get the right away and all that squared away, it's just going to take longer. We are trying to get back to construction as quickly as we can, we would like to be under construction this segment when we're outside the school year so that we can get the work done. So we're looking for a direction quickly, so that we can mobilize as quickly as possible. Otherwise, you're basically putting this off for another school year. Got it. Yeah. So with that in mind, option two is less than great for me, I think, but we can that's paint, we can we can fix that. And so, oh, I'm sorry, I was just trying to understand what Don refresh my memory of what to Okay, I go ahead. Yeah. So so that's where I fall. To answer Mayor Pro Tem's concern. I want to push traffic to scripture. And I don't know why people don't want to drive scripture, because if you have an option of driving 2420 miles per hour at segments and hitting all the stoplights are going from scripture and Bonnie Bray, which will have a brand new roundabout. So I can go from scripture. And the next stop sign I see is Welch it's yeah, I mean, Jago, yes, that's lovely. So that that's my answer is I don't want them traversing that that's and no one does that. I don't think anyone does that. I think I think the university will be just fine. If people don't traverse our entire city through their campus, and we enhance that area, make it walkable, and maybe we can keep some of those restaurants there that don't don't make it, you know, maybe if we slow down traffic and make it walkable and make it friendly and user friendly, some of those, we can cut it back on some of the turnover and support those businesses there. So that's, that's, that absolutely does it go from end to end? Yes. Is that optimal? No, strip scripture, you can go from Bonnie from I 35 to Bonnie, to Carol, and you don't ever hit a signal light except for it. It does stop short. Yeah, you make the little jump and go to make the job, which doesn't help them the progression of traffic. But it's also the our primary concern is when you go down scripture, you're going in through a residential neighborhood, and then the likelihood of children running out and across the street becomes greater than when I'm closer to the university campus where the pedestrians and the drivers are already aware of those. Yeah. And let's let's, I mean, these are good points, but sort of off off where we are sure just sort of aspirational. So if we could, it sounds like for what I'm understanding is we have four council members who are okay with option to given some tweaks, planters, bump outs, loading zones, and leave that sort up to staff to determine that. So option to wait and then work through where the loading zones go. And I think, I think Councilmember Briggs has a good point what, what can we provide between the line of traffic and the bike lane. However, we have many, many bike lanes in town that don't have anything. So and plus I think the flower planters on the square, they're pretty much on those bump outs. They're not necessarily in the lane of traffic that people could, but whatever works, I mean, whatever you guys think is the safest y'all are the experts. So you'll, I do have a question on the construction, you talk about the delay in construction because of just trying to figure out this particular because you're starting from Bonnie Bracey, you're here. If something were to happen, if you started from Welch to Carroll, because I don't think that's, is that affected by this? It's not necessarily affected by this. This is really isolated to this area. Right. We were just trying to get this piece done before we moved on to the next one. So we didn't bookend the project and then come back. No, and I understand that. I guess though, if, if there's more delay than, than what we anticipate, I think that's something worth looking at because when you get from Welch to Carroll, you're absolutely right. It's, I mean, it's, and you're going to have a hard enough time trying to keep all the cars out of there from parking in front of the streets while you get all that done. I mean, you almost just have to close the street through traffic, which would be impossible. But okay, good. Any other questions or comments? All right. Fantastic. We solved that impasse hopefully. Let's just go ahead and take about a five or 10 minute break, give council members a chance to come back and welcome everybody. We're back from our brief recess with the Dent City Council on Tuesday, April the 16th, 2019. It is 2 23. Moving on to our second work session item report, which is agenda item three B receive report, hold a discussion, give staff direction regarding the implementation of one way versus two way streets within the city of Denton. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Council members. Good afternoon. My name is pretend Deshmukh. I'm the city traffic engineer and I'll be talking about a very interesting topic. One way versus two way quick overview. Start with the introductions, definitions of what the streets mean, um, advantage, disadvantages of both, then the context, sensitive nature of both, and then recommendations finally traffic definitions as you can see from the names of the suggest that a street that allows vehicle traffic to move in one direction is one way street and then two way, which is most common around everywhere. It allows vehicles to move in both directions. What are the advantages and disadvantages? Start with one way comparison, the advantages. It does increase parking as you can see in the previous item that we talked about on Mulberry and Avenue A, we did add a bunch of parking as we converted the street to one way. So it does increase parking. It decreases congestion because you're not trying to put too many cars on the same segment of the road. They're only traveling in one direction, they're one after the other, so it does decrease congestion. Fewer conflict points. I do want you to look at some of the numbers down here if you can follow the mouse here. If you look at a regular intersection that's two way traffic versus two way traffic the conflict points are 16. We're talking about conflict between vehicles and vehicles at this point, but if you add pedestrians and bicyclists in this mix, that would go exponentially when you have the bike lanes and the crosswalks in there. So we're talking about safety. So it does increase safety, decrease conflict points. If you go to one way street versus two way street here, this is two way and this is a one way street. It goes down to 11 conflict points and then it's down to less than half or between one way and one way. It's down to six. There are some disadvantages of one way street. There is driver confusion and it relates to wrong way driving if there are signage missing or some signage is not clear. People are new in town. Yes, there is some confusion associated with that. It does increase travel time. If you have to go to a destination, you cannot make a left turn and you have to go around the block. So it does slightly increase the travel time. It may increase speed if you have longer blocks, longer length of one way street without any side friction. Yes, it may increase speed and if the driver loses some focus, he continues to go in one direction. So those are the advantages, disadvantages. Two way comparison. So what are the advantages? It does reduce confusion. It is the most common type of roadway out there. A lot of people are used to driving on two way streets. They're expecting. So it follows the expectation for a driver. Decreased travel time. You can turn at intersections, make a left, quickly get to your destination and using the shortest path. Slower speed. Obviously people coming or cars coming in both directions, a lot of friction between them. So speeds tend to become slower. I do want to point out increased storefront exposure and visibility. Yes, there is some relevance to that. If you have two way traffic, you'll have more vehicles within that stretch. And yes, more vehicles or drivers will look at your store as they're driving. But at the same time, they're looking at other elements, pedestrians, they're looking at other cars, turning. So they're looking at other conflict points as well. So I wanted to point that out. Disadvantages. There is decreased parking, as you can see from the previous item that we talked about. Increased congestion. Because it's a two way street, vehicles are traveling in both directions. And then increased conflict points. I did mention that in the previous one. There is a context sensitive nature of planning some of these streets. You cannot take a one way and a two way street concept and just put it in the middle of anywhere. It is very context sensitive. So if you have a specific environment, then you have to mold your options and you have to look at advantages and disadvantages and put them within that context. So it's not one size fits all. And we definitely have to evaluate when we're doing one way and two way, the number of lanes, the widths of the lanes, what are the uses surrounding it, what type of circulation do we want. And then obviously the most important, pedestrian safety. So talking about our downtown area, I really wanted to point out that what is our vision for this downtown area long term? It comes down to that when we're doing a context sensitive planning. So if you look at, I want to quickly explain what we have today here. We have two one way couplets. A couplet is two streets running in opposite direction that are separated by a block. So we have Elm that is southbound and Locus that is northbound. Then we have Hickory, I'm sorry, Hickory that is eastbound, comes towards the downtown. Oak that is westbound. What happens at these two yellow spots, these are intersections of Locust at Oak and Hickory is there's confusion where a two way street comes in in this direction. And then two one way street come in from the other two segments. So it's confusing for drivers, it is confusing for pedestrians, there's a lot of pedestrian conflict for these left and right turning vehicles that are doing this. Another situation at Oak and Locust, there is, it is a two way street all the way up to the square. And then there are approaches on either direction that are one way. So that confusion, I get multiple calls with, go ahead, go ahead. Please finish your. Okay. I've received multiple calls, we've done several field tours, walking with not only council members but staff and our technical team, making sure that we address every concern, we've received several concerns for pedestrian timings, we've received concerns for confusion amongst vehicles that are trying to make this turn, how do we make it safer? So given this existing context of our downtown, the layout, we have some recommendations and that's coming up in a couple slides, but I want to go to this next one. Go ahead. Yeah, so my question is about that confusion. You know, so you mentioned, so the confusion, you know, I myself have, I think anybody who's walked on the square has experienced pedestrian issues with the, especially with left turns. I never thought about that as related to the confusion over the two-way streets because you've got people kind of turning around instead of figuring out how to go forward. If you could speak to specifically what are the public safety hazards that have been caused by that confusion over the transition from one-way to two-way because I'm not sure exactly if there have been any. There are a couple of things happening here. I'll focus on this particular intersection, Locust at Hickory. There's a one-way street to Hickory coming in here. There's a flashing yellow for folks to make a left onto Locust northbound and there is a similar flashing yellow for folks on Hickory traveling westbound to make a right turn to go north on Locust. Both of them are flashing yellow and there's a confusion. A lot of times, vehicles and motorists are looking at each other who's going to go in first and no one is focused on the pedestrian. There are pedestrians that are walking the crosswalk at the same time. So there's a lot of elements happening at the same time when you get to this particular node and that's the confusion I was talking about. >> Thank you and I-- part of that is also that the yellow flashing light is newer, right, with the system and so it didn't exist before and now it does. So can you explain why? >> So the flashing yellow is something new for the manual on uniform traffic control devices. It is the Texas manual that we typically follow for traffic engineering. It is something new that was added and as we go and upgrade all of our intersections, you'll see more and more flashing yellow lights which is a permitted movement and the reason it is not shown as a green ball that would create-- that would give right of way for both of them to turn at the same time which means no one is going to really yield to the other. So instead of putting green balls on either side, the new guidelines tell us that we need to have a yield for both sides so that at least one of them is yielding to the other. Does that answer your question? Any? >> So-- >> Yes. >> Go ahead. Real quick. On those situations where you're turning left from Hickory onto-- heading north on Locust or right from Hickory turning north-- when those lights are active, which way are the crosswalks saying you're allowed to cross? >> So crosswalk is east to west or west to east. So this crosswalk on the north side is allowed and this crosswalk on the south side, across Locust. >> When those lights are in that configuration. >> Correct. >> Okay. >> Yes, Councilmember, I'll return. >> Do you suspect that some of the confusion might be around what to do at a flashing yellow? I know I've had people ask me what do-- what is a flashing yellow, what do I do? I know what it is, but I know that people don't know and I-- that's understandable. >> I think there is some learning required and as this becomes more and more prevalent with some of these new textile projects, the flashing yellow, it will be pretty obvious that it is a yield phase that you yield to the traffic that's oncoming to make that left. >> Yes, Councilmember Riggs. Can you explain why and when this was done or if it's just always been that way, but from, I guess, the east, it's two way down to Bell or not Bell and then from here, it's just one way going to Carroll. So who made that decision and why, I mean, and why isn't that we're talking about making this side to Carroll two way instead of like-- I mean, you just look at the map and I don't understand why it's like this. >> Yes, I cannot talk to the timing of when it was done and why, but I'm trying to explain what are the effects of having all these one way and two way at the same spot creates confusion. So I'm not sure why it was created. There was a project on Hickory that was done a few years ago, right before I started, but in order to have that two way traffic and the back end parking, there was a recent project that was done. I'm not sure why it was ended at these particular intersections. >> So before that, it was one way? >> No, I think it was two. It was always two way from, what is that, Locust East, Oak and Hickory were always two way. It was just when they did the back end parking, it was with, you know, they stuck it down to one lane each way. Wide street, you only had one lane, but it was very wide. >> It was still both? >> It was both ways, yes. >> One last thing on that particular one. I do want to show what happens when you have a two way. So this is the existing lane configuration. I know this is a busy graphic, I just want you to focus on the number here. We're talking about 104 conflict points with two ways and the existing scenario. We reduce it down, if we go to a one way on Oak and Hickory, especially east of the downtown area, we reduce it down to 58. We're down to half the conflict points, which reduces the amount of conflicts between pedestrians and vehicles as well. So I just wanted to point that one thing out before I get to recommendations. >> Mr. Meltzer, did you have a comment? >> Well, I will learn. >> Okay, yeah. I saw you adjusting your mic, so I thought, yeah, yeah, go ahead. >> All right. So finally, based on what I've presented, given the context of our downtown area, given the long term vision is focusing on pedestrian safety and focusing more on bicycles and pedestrians, making that more area more walkable, as opposed to creating traffic throughput through their area, creating the arterials that go through and push more traffic through that area. Instead of doing that long term vision and given the conflict and the safety aspect of this, staff recommends one way circulation and a grid system around this area, obviously increases pedestrian safety, easier to park, congestion is reduced, consistent speeds. It also supports loading and loading. If you have two lanes, you can bypass one if someone's loading and loading. And then you can ability to maneuver around stopped vehicles. So why are we bringing this, this is the last slide, why are we bringing this forward? It clearly comes down to we need to move forward some of the plans that are in place. We have the city's mobility plan. We're going to kick off the consultant bringing a contract to council May 7th, and we want to make sure that we lay out some of these or these decisions are made before we kick off the consultant. We also want direction on what do we do in the overall downtown traffic circulation plan when we talk about the back streets, the new streets. And then obviously we talked about the Hickory Street back there. So these are all connected items, and that's why we're presenting this item so that we get direction as to what council wants to move forward. >> Yes, Council Member Meltzer. >> Do you think it would be fair to say that if you want the most efficient movement through, you do one way. But if you want the most sort of dwelling and encouraging visibility of businesses, that you go two-way so that that's kind of when you say it really comes down to our vision, that's sort of the key question is do we want those areas to move people through or do we want them to dwell, look around, see business? >> So two-way does create more visibility for storefront just given the amount of traffic that goes through it, but it does not necessarily mean that one way is going to be a through-foot traffic. It is the way we design it, one way is more safer. If you have two-way, you have too many distractions to make decisions at intersection points. >> I take the safety point, which is not small, and I also note, and I agree with your original point that it's very context-sensitive, where people in the room are talking about Mulberry street and Avenue A, one way doesn't -- you've got a sharp turn there and they're bound to be slow anyway. >> Okay. >> Okay. That's right. I'm reasoning this through, so I just wanted to see if you shared that point of view. I won't restate it. >> Councilmember Briggs? >> Yeah. >> But I will say even with the one-way streets, there's still accidents and confusion when you have right turns on red or when you still have the red and pedestrians going at the same time. There's still some confusion that happens. We, if I recall correctly, there was a survey, right, that went out about this? >> Correct. That was for the Mew Street project. >> Okay. Yeah. Which I see here. And then there was a meeting or two, or do we have any data from the surveys or feedback from those meetings? >> That will come back for the Mew Street, but yes, based on the survey, there were businesses that had selected the two-way option just because it's more visibility for store frontage, but they're not looking at the whole picture of the context nature of this. So that's the feedback we received from the business owners. >> Right. Well, I mean, just we're being asked to give direction, and so having some of the feedback and survey data would be helpful. >> Okay. Yes, Councilmember Potsbeth? >> I'd like to -- can we go back to your slide with the conflict points, right? Because the problem is, right -- so if we take the downtown area and close it off to traffic altogether, then that cuts that 58 and a half, right? So even lower. >> Yeah. Oh, no. Completely lower. >> Yeah, because those cars are there. So that's the problem. Right? I mean, because if we're just trying to get that number as low as possible, let's shut it all down. And then pedestrians can walk around, there's no conflicts, right? So I just -- I think that's what I'm saying. When you try to leverage these numbers, it really becomes what do we want the atmosphere to be like? What do we want that -- and that has nothing to do with numbers. It has everything to do with just kind of how we envision our downtown functioning. So that's where we get into trouble where people say we leverage our angle arguments, you know, when we hear it, that's the problem. When you use subjective numbers like this to kind of gear -- drive it one way, well, we can drive it all the way to zero and just lock it all down, but no one wants to do that, right? So that's where these numbers are kind of skewed. So for me, I think -- I absolutely would ask that we -- whatever they study, that they study open it all the way up to two-way, all the way around. Because we're going to have a problem with Bell Avenue, and that conversation's coming. We can kick the can down the road as long as we want, but at some point, we're going to discuss Bell Avenue, and so Locus is going to get turned over to us. And so I think, holistically, I'd like to look at every road being two-way and see what that does. It may not -- we may not get there. But for me, no, I'm -- my -- whatever direction you're looking for for me is I'm more leaning towards two-way. I just don't buy into -- I think the safety issue is significant and it's a fact, but I just don't think you can pin it down to if this, then that, right? So if there's less decisions to make, it's safer. I get it that that's on paper, but it depends if the driver's brand new, if the driver's 80, if the driver's 40. Are they looking at their phone? Are they not? I mean, there's just too many variables there. And so for me, that's my direction is whenever it gets to them, I want them to look at it holistically across the board. And then when you're asking about a vision for downtown for me, I envision it being more pedestrian-friendly, being cranking it down -- and here we go again, one lane or something, you know, or the Mew Street being all -- no traffic and all walkable. So you walk behind and then walk up to the square where the traffic is. So something like that that kind of pairs the two, walkable, bikeable traffic behind the main traffic flow, and then you kind of walk your way back up to the square and kind of interact that way. So that's what I envision for the use of the Mew Streets. Mayor Pro Tem. Thank you. When you say that there's additional parking when you do the one-way streets, are you then assuming that you're going to only allow one lane through? Well, if we want to add additional parking in a diagonal fashion, yes, that would be only one way through. Just based on the advantages of this. Would it only be one lane on the one-way, because you're going to end up with -- No, not on the Mew Street. No, there will be two lanes. -- with delivery trucks. No, there will be -- Yeah, we're trying to push them into the -- There will be two lanes. -- Mew Streets, and then you completely block if you only -- No, there will be two lanes. There's deliveries on the back side, so we make sure that there's some space for that. Delivery trucks will be paused. So yeah, there will be two lanes. Okay. And I guess at Cedar and Austin are the two that go beyond the other Mew Streets, they would be one way for their entire length? Correct. Okay. Yeah, go ahead. So first of all, I'm going to come out against the one-way street, but I want to thank you guys for giving me the opportunity to think through this. I know we met before, and I found it really interesting and exciting to think about traffic in this way, because we do take for granted our current traffic patterns. And I like having the opportunity to think outside the box. I mention this because I know we spent a lot of time about it. I don't want you to feel like, oh, she's changing her mind, it's a process. I don't think it's perfect the way it is. I don't think anybody does. And I'm not going to propose what I think is an alternate solution. I have to say, in addition to hearing from constituents who are concerned about one-way street, again, maybe part of that is just resistance to change. I don't know, but I do take that into account. I feel myself as a driver that, and this actually speaks to one of the points you mentioned earlier, when I'm in a grid-like traffic situation where I can go straight, I know I can go one way this way, for a long time uninterrupted, and then I can go one way this other way. It actually makes me feel less aware as a driver than if I'm encountering these, what do you call them, tension points that cause me to pause and stop and think, okay, what do I do next? What do I do here? I know that's not ideal. So I'm not, I can see the safety issues that would come with people speeding through and also with people trying to negotiate one-way streets and getting frustrated, and we know that when drivers get frustrated, which I guess they already are, as you mentioned, but that also can lead to not paying attention. So those are the reasons why I'm coming out against this radical change. But again, I wanted to thank you for bringing that to us and helping me think outside the box. At the risk of making your head explode, if you buy the premise that I think you at least entertained before with the safety point, that it's a little more pro-business to have two ways in certain areas, what if we were to extend, rather than resolving it this way, extend the two-way to Carroll on Oak and Hickory and to kind of offsettingly make it safer for pedestrians, consider, I'm watching your head now, the kind of all-way stop at the corners, you know, where it clears for a period of time, you know, omnidirectional stop for pedestrians. So you're talking about the pedestrian scramble phase. Okay. Yep. So two-way to Carroll plus pedestrian scramble. It actually does work the opposite way. If you go one-way, I'll have extra green time to give the pedestrian to put in the scramble phase. But if we convert this into two-way through the downtown, the square area, there will be congestion backed up at each of these signalized, because now we're talking not just two-phase signal, we're talking about a four-phase minimum signal, which means you have to give time to each of these directions to function and go. So if we convert it to two ways, it will create congestion and back up on some of these parking cars or parked cars areas where it will be really difficult to access parking. Well, I'll just comment, you know, that's not that backing up is the point, but going more slowly through there is the point, you know, obviously there are tradeoffs. Yes. Councilmember Briggs. Yeah, I was going to kind of ask the same thing, because we want to make sure that it's safe, right, and that there's a lot of pedestrians going through there now. And we've made a lot of changes and adjusted some things, but there's still some issues. We talked about, well, having the item before and this one now, it seems kind of, you know, it doesn't fit well together. They're different areas of town, different situations for me, but we did talk about moving traffic and I remember Councilmember Hussbett and Councilmember Ryan, we talked about, well, do we really want those to be thoroughfares? Do we want those to be pass-throughs? Not really. We don't want that for our downtown, but is there another option? Do we have a way to push the traffic from those speeding through this area to other thoroughfares where they can use that as their main travel? There's always options that we can evaluate and take a look at. I think our primary concern was the minimizing the total number of decisions the driver has to make, and while that may be subjective, some studies have shown that that does have an impact. The total number of distractions a driver has does influence the way you drive. There is validity to two lanes going in the same direction that maybe you get a little bit more focused on just going. That can be a cause. There are other things that we can do with a one-way street that's just more difficult to do with a two-way street, like narrow the lanes. We can significantly narrow the lanes down, even narrower than you can on a two-way street, just simply because we live in Texas, there's larger vehicles, and they tend to -- part of the issues we have on Hickory, those back-end parking spaces, is people are trying to back in, and their front-end of their car swings across the lines. If we're all going in the same direction, it's a little easier for all those parking maneuvers to happen. I can narrow those lanes down because we're all kind of moving in that direction. We see the same things in the same way. Two-way versus one-way. As a staff, we believe that's the safest possible course for us to go, especially if we're really wanting downtown to be a walkable place for business, for consumers, for people to come and be in the downtown area, I can shrink the roadway up a little bit, still provide parking, but give you a little bit wider sidewalks and provide the bicycle lanes. It just gets tougher to fit all that in in a two-way scenario. I guess my question is, what are we trying to achieve with this? I mean, if the question is we can't figure this out -- we can't figure the Muse streets out until we do this, what is the big push to do anything? I mean, I guess it's my question, because as far as pedestrian safety, I mean, I don't know if we want the downtown area -- I mean, a lot of commerce depends on people going there in their vehicles, getting out of their vehicles and moving around. So I mean, I see this, what will the recommendation address? But my question then is, when I look at this, I go, okay, well, what are the problems we're trying to address? Now, I see these are issues or these are concepts, but I don't see that we've had unusually high amount of pedestrian vehicle accidents. We haven't seen traffic that's backed up. So what exactly are we trying to accomplish? The Hickory Street bike lane project, okay, I get that because it's coming from Hickory Street and it crosses that crazy Carroll Boulevard thing where you have that right turn that could run into the bike lane. I get that. But the square proper with the Muse streets and Oak and Hickory coming two way from Carroll -- from Eagle to -- So the short answer is the mobility plan and the master thoroughfare plan that we're working on this year has everything to do with this decision, because those are two roadways that we consider arterial roadways, and if they go to two way, it impacts the overall network as to how do we plan around it now? Do Carroll, Bell, McKinney, Eagle become the final drivers? You're saying if it goes from one way to two way or two way to one way? Well, if we consider it one way, then I consider it as it is today. Elm and Locust and Oak and Hickory carry a lot of traffic, whether we see it or not. At specific points in the day, we do get a lot of traffic through the downtown area and people move back and forth. It plays off in our overall master thoroughfare plan. So that's my question is this is supposed to help with an overall master thoroughfare plan? I have not seen anything on that. That's being vetted in the mobility committee. So in some ways, I have no idea what we're talking about in the thoroughfare plan, but yet we're being asked to make some decisions on the downtown area, and the primary purpose of that decision making is how it impacts how we move through our thoroughfare plan as far as through the update. So am I wrong in that? Am I missing something? No, it does both. It impacts the way we go forward with the master thoroughfare plan, and then it impacts a project that's already underway with the Mews Street so that we have a clear scope for the consultant on what it is we're actually doing. Okay. Well, to me, those are two very different things. The master thoroughfare plan, that's a huge undertaking with a lot of implications. So I'm going to struggle with making a decision for this sort of micro area that has broader implications for a plan that I have no idea where we are in that or the discussion, and it's okay for it to be at the mobility committee. I'm just saying... It's not the same thought. We're not talking about it. We've picked a consultant based on RFQ at this point. The contract has not come to council yet. It will be in the next week or two. So then I need some help understanding what the Mews Street is because I know we've talked about it, and we've talked about a couple of the Mews Streets. What can we do with... Is it Maple that runs back there that seems... And I get that, but it seems now we're talking about a little expanded conversation about, well, before we can decide that, we have to decide this. Well, before we can decide this, we're talking about how it fits into this master thoroughfare plan. I'm sort of lost, and so I'm really hesitant to make any particular decision on whether it's one way or two way from Carroll coming in or Hickory without having a little bit more comprehensive scope or view of the impact of that on a macro level. And that's not a criticism. It's just I was trying to understand, well, why are we really talking about this? And I get the Mews Streets, but even then, I'm not sure what we're trying to accomplish with trying to figure out the Mews Streets other than are some of them really not a street, but they're sort of a loading zone and those kinds of things, but then like Cedar Street, which we spent $3 million on or whatever it was back several years ago. So I'm struggling with putting this in a broader context of what we're trying to do in some of these other areas, if that makes sense. Yeah, I think from our standpoint, we were just trying to get direction so that we knew where to even put our time and energy as we go forward, especially as we get a numerous amount of phone calls about pedestrian confusion and pedestrian times walking across the street in the downtown area. How do we deal with the back end parking on Hickory Street? There's just a variety of items and issues that really centralize around. If I know clearly which way we're going, I can resolve a lot of those issues much quicker or at least have a plan in place so that we can resolve them when it's time. Well, and I understand that and I appreciate that. I guess the two issues that you specifically mentioned, pedestrian confusion, I walk in the downtown area. If you don't cross where you're not supposed to cross, it's pretty easy. You press a button and it tells you when to go and when not to go. Back end parking, we spent $3 million or so on that street with back end parking. So if we need to change that, that's fine. So I get that, but that's very different conversation and factors and implications that I haven't really don't feel like I have enough information on to give direction at this level. So would it be fair to just ask what would help us get there because from our standpoint, these are just the things that we're dealing with on a broad spectrum and a small spectrum on a daily basis and we're happy to provide whatever we can to help make that work. Am I way off base or? No. I think that to your point, we can probably bring back, once we have the mobility, the consultant identified for the mobility thoroughfare plan, we can bring them in here, maybe take the little larger slice of the area from Carroll over to Bell and addressing boundaries university down to Eagle or something like that and have that conversation with you. Their main point when we were discussing this earlier was are we going to change anything or are we going to plan it as is or are we going to change it because there are opinions on both sides of the fence on this one. Some people like the two way and from a business perspective, other people feel that as well as our staff does who are trained in this, the one way is safer. It really depends right now on what we believe is, is there really that big of a difference overall with traffic movements or not? They're trying to get some continuity downtown, making sure that they're minimizing voter or driver confusion to the extent possible so I think we could take a bigger slice, have the discussion about how they're going to plan that particular corridor of the city and it'll naturally lead right into the Mew Street but if we're going to change anything, they want to know it because there is some differences in terms of the width of the street, how they design the Mew Streets, if it's one way versus two way, there's slight differences before we start spending money and heading in that direction but if you're asking for larger context for that and how it ties together, I think we just wait until we have the consultant selected, we'll get the input on the master thoroughfare plan, have this discussion with the consultant, lead it through it, then they can bring the Mew Street to you later and I really think that's the way to handle it but if you think this is too micro of an area, that's fine. No, I'm not saying it's necessarily too micro of an area but what I'm hearing is that whatever decision we make in this micro area will impact a more macro area and I don't understand so ideally what I'm saying is if the traffic consultant or whoever comes in and says, "Okay, here's the master thoroughfare plan. If you keep it as it is, here's the way it is. If you change it to option A, here's how it impacts. If you change it to option B, here's how it impacts." And then any of those impacts the Mew Street development in this fashion so you get a really kind of comprehensive look of the decision you're making is going to be X, X and X. We can certainly combine it that way and build a little bit better context from the broader area. Council Member Hussbuth and then Council Member Meltzer. And I think there's a function component to that and I think that's the key too so these traffic patterns affect this amount of traffic and then what does that do to the activity on the ground and I think if we could, I mean because my understanding just trying to react to the concerns you laid out, one, when you're talking about the crossing, I think it's important to put it in the context. So Mayor Watts, I think from what I've heard, the crossing is if you don't push the button, it doesn't turn white to walk. So you have the right of way but it doesn't give you an indication to walk. So you stand there until you push the button and maybe you've missed a cycle or two because you didn't push the button, you didn't want to walk out even though you had the right of way. So there's a function question. It's not as succinct as, "Hey, it's confusing." It functions differently if you don't push the button and so is it a question of do you automatically turn it white or not and so I think that's where you're missing, it's not put in the context what the concern is and then when you're talking about the back end and not or just kind of that whole experience, well there's a ton of consternation and so that's a difficult one to come back and I mean maybe that's a history lesson for everyone but that one's tough to tackle retroactively, right? That's kind of there and I wouldn't advocate doing that again to those businesses to right any wrongs. So I just don't know what the fix is for that one. So I think that's where maybe once we get the public input, that sort of thing, they can kind of add some details to those concerns that give it a different look and it's not so succinct because it is kind of, that is a legitimate concern. If you think someone already pushed it or I didn't push it, we're both standing there, we're both frustrated, then we walk and we're not supposed to just because we think it's broken. Well, it's not broken, it's how it functions and so how do we educate people or give that messaging out? Yeah. Okay. I will add, I think the conversation's been helpful in terms of sort of building the matrix of issues based on all of your questions and I think we can do a little bit better analysis for you now, a little bit broader analysis in terms of what are the pros and cons of each of these decisions based on the questions you're asking, so I think it's been helpful from that regard. One other thing with this issue, we know this is a highly charged emotional issue and I've heard words thrown around like skewed and radical and when you're talking about traffic engineers all they're concerned about is safety and that doesn't mean that just because something exists and it could be a conflict doesn't mean people are automatically going to hit and I don't want to have the perspective here that they've been trying to steer any of you into a certain particular recommendation. They believe the one way option is the safest but believe me, we've spent a lot of time trying to prepare them for this and they can make many arguments on both sides of the coin. This is going to end up being sort of a council and community preference issue more than anything and I just want to set that table. They're not particularly biased one way or another but I always tell staff if you think something's the safest or the best recommendation, you lay it out there. So we realize we're dealing with some highly charged opinions and emotions. Yes. Council Member Meltzer and then Council Member Briggs and then Mayor Pro Tem. So if we just think in terms of what is the vision that we're trying to achieve and just got multiple factors in it, the thing that I most agree with I've heard was the Mayor's comment that we want people to come in vehicles to the square, get out and walk around and if I look at just as a case study, West Hickory versus East Hickory, right, the place where people come in vehicles, get out and walk around is East Hickory and it's been a tremendous economic success and the businesses that are there thrive. West Hickory, one way and businesses have trouble sticking there, they just rotate through. So that's just a case study but it kind of makes me, if I think about what would most fulfill that concept of downtown, I prefer East Hickory. Council Member Briggs and then Mayor Pro Tem. Right, yeah, to that point I think it would be interesting for us to see what would happen and how that traffic would look if from Elm with Hickory and Oak, just doing the same thing, mirroring the reflection of the East, yeah, the two way. But for me, for vision, right now Elm and Locust are speedways. People come down going so fast and I don't want that to happen because I don't care which way you're going, it's not safe when you're going that fast. And it's been one way for a really long time and I think I've mentioned almost four out of six days I see someone going the wrong way on the street and so I would like to have some traffic data on accidents, one way accidents, if it's like, well, they realize it and then they get off really quickly or if some of these situations turn into accidents, I really would like to have some of that traffic data as well. And when we talk about the new streets and one way, two way, for me I can't really make that decision until we talk about trash cans, like where are they going to go? Like we talked about that conversation and that's a really big weigh in on the amount of space we have, what we're going to do with right of way and so that part has been left out of the conversation and so I really appreciate this coming to us but when we talk about the new streets, there's so much of that conversation that's left out, it's hard to make that decision. And part of the effort with this, there's so many factors to this one topic and one of those efforts was trying to narrow down a scope for the consultant so we don't design ourselves into a lot of different alternatives with nothing fruitful on the end other than I've got about 80 different plans, all different concepts and we were trying to narrow the scope down as part of this conversation both on the mobility plan so I don't have tons of options to evaluate. But we can, absolutely we can. It does generate more money and more time to just try to do those things. Thank you Mayor, first off you don't have to press the button to get the walk light in downtown, they've reset those so that they are now an automatic for the crosswalk. I'd like more data from more public input on the new street design program overall. I'd like to know what the Main Street Association, what their feelings are on it as well. We need buy in from both of those. As I thought through and when I do drive the new streets right now and the traffic pattern of the one way, other than Austin which crosses two two way streets, the others I generally probably 95% of the time I'm going the one way that's on that chart so it may not be that unfeasible to think about going this route but the West Hickory versus East Hickory, Williams Square is one of the major reasons for that is there's parking readily available that you can see all the businesses from and so that's something we might need to I mean Frontier has got, it used to be Verizon, they've got that huge parking lot that that's something maybe the city needs to work out a deal that will send the street sweeper through once a once a week if they'll open some of that up for public parking and that would would help that area much more than I think than the two-way two-way might also help but that's it. I want to add add my voice to that if that's not too off-topic because we're talking about trying this trying to solve these same problems that you know providing you know using existing lots to provide parking so that people can park their cars and then and then walk around. Thank you okay any other questions I think hopefully you've had some feedback to where as you begin to continue to move through this bring back some recommendation it gives you enough direction to know how to approach the consultants contract or the scope of the consultant if not then you know come on back and we'll see if we can't help narrow that down a little bit. Any other questions or comments thank you all so much appreciate it. Who said one-way and two-way streets can't be lively? Okay we're going to go on to agenda item C which is receive a porthole discussion provide staff direction regarding future capital needs within the city and associated bond program and election for November 2019. Good afternoon David Gaines assistant director of finance. So the purpose of this meeting is to follow up on our April 1st meeting where we first discussed a possible November 2019 bond election and the project associated with it at that April 1st meeting we focused on our past bond programs the performance that we've had up to now on those bond programs potential projects that could be included in this bond program and the decision points for council as we move forward. So for this follow-up meeting I'm going to go back and look at the presentation we had last time the proposals we had last time look at a proposal that incorporates the feedback from council on the first and then discuss what decision points we have at this point moving forward. So on the first we presented two propositions at a total of 190 million dollars and looking at a bond program that would execute those those propositions in four years. The first one being focused on public safety and really in response to a meeting we had with City Council in February as we looked at the needs at the police station for the police headquarters needs and a police substation along with the firing range and then also including fire station 8 construction in the bond proposition. Secondarily we looked at another proposition for streets and this was really focused on some narrowly defined streets streets that have risen in concern and that we've we identified going into it saying these are the handful of streets that that we want to work on quickly. So again that total was 190 million and we were looking to execute that over four years. Those streets are driven by these these factors capacity congestion safety and future capacity needs also by what we hear from residents the big the streets that really present the most concern and as we look for long-range planning the streets that have that that connection with that regional connection these these streets are really streets that we see as at some point they're going to need attention and this would be an opportunity to to kick that off sooner than later. The overall anytime we talk about streets an important consideration is that OCI the overall condition index our current number for the overall condition index is 64 and we're estimating as we consider this bond program for every point we would get one extra point for every five million that we would put toward the bond program just obviously that's just an estimate a round number that we can consider as we move forward. So you're saying the streets with a OCI of 64 would be included in this or you would like to be included how many I think the that's just saying or overall in the city 64 is our average OCI or total OCI okay so we're really focused on these narrowly defined streets I think one of the in response to a question we got this week we're going to come back and say okay if we went forward with the streets in this program how would that change our OCI and get that in a couple weeks and David's correct that the 64 just represents where we currently believe our overall OCI is throughout the city just on average which is a decrease of about one point from where it was at the beginning of the 2014 bond program some of that's because we're just still in the process of working those roads and other roads have fallen below their maintainable status or below a 40 or 45 on the OCI spectrum. So what we're proposing is is that streets would come in under this program that fall under the 40 or 45 OCI and that we would not look at this from a we need to do this segment and that segment we would look at it more as a neighborhood centered focus to go and do that neighborhood overall but try to make some appreciable difference and then focus our efforts in that manner. So when we did the last one what were the what conditions were we looking for OCI on the streets that that were chosen anything below 40 and then ranked by the worst to the best okay and it was purely picked hey this segments the worst and they just picked right down that list there wasn't really a context of a continuous roadway you actually had segments that were here and then one way over here and nothing in the middle yet that OCI right there in the middle might have been a 55 or a 60 need something to do we need to do something to it and we just did these two hands from a budgeting standpoint our streets department has tried very hard to come back with O and M money and make sure that that middle piece gets done at one time with the entire road okay okay thank you so a question for finance about the roads and I'm just curious you know it was any thought given into given to kind of breaking up if if council gives an okay to go ahead with this to breaking up the roads bond proposition into two or I guess three sounds too many to me but I'm just curious you know what is the I can I can see I can see the pros and kind of lumping all the other roads in one bond proposition is there any good reason not to any advantages to maybe breaking it up I think I going into it the goal has been just hey we're gonna stick to these propositions have a roadway proposition that's the way we've done in the past obviously that's something we consider as we move forward we wanted to break something out and say specifically we haven't considered that to this point thanks I was just curious thank you well and I think the direction for the last five years since the 2014 bond program has been we need to get caught up on our streets I mean that that's been a message that's been loud and clear both from the public and from the policymakers and I like the approach because I think in some ways the OCI has been like the tail wagging the dog because Hickory Street from Welch to Carol is probably an OCI of zero but we you know we can only get there so I like the idea of let's look at something overall and instead of a segment here I mean when you looked at that map it was all over the place the point being that we are we are fixing our streets we are getting caught up we are trying to get ahead of the curve and it just takes a lot of money to do that I mean so I appreciate you trying to really put a big push you know on this bond program I think in some ways to split them up would hinder that overall policy of how do we get ahead of the game which in the end would maybe cost us more money because we're not trying to really take care of those roads in a timely manner so I certainly understand that and this would be one of the biggest bond programs I think that the city would will have issued as far as GO voter approved debt so so the increase one point for every five million that's just sort of an estimate of okay we're spending this money on these and because like you said some streets are falling there OCI is going down correct and so is that just just curious and if it's too extensive I'll get into the details but we do have an active model that we use that assesses every five years we go and assess every roadway in town get an idea where it's at and then we use this model that takes into account traffic by all this other stuff so we get a projection of where it sits today yeah and then we're looking at them visibly once a year good just to see how they're progressing okay all right great yes council member Melton then council member Duff for me you know I don't know if this is possible to do but my preference would be to see kind of what's inside the package evaluated by those different objectives so some are OCI projects some are future capacity project maybe all overall but I don't know but I suspect that that we can make some kind of give some kind of policy direction where if we've got to make trade-offs maybe we don't some people are happy with you know kind of passing however big a bond package we need but if we have to make trade-offs and I think it's a worthy discussion to say do we want to emphasize fixing broken streets adding capacity where it's not necessarily broken safety issues probably put safety first so you know that I think would be helpful to me not to just say streets monolithically but what objective are we hitting sure and I think the number what we have illustrated here this is different than say the capacity rule as you just mentioned which are broken out individually as individual projects this are more the neighborhood local streets that have been degrading over time and just need the attention quite frankly I guess my point is just let you know if council's pleasure is to do a 200 million dollar package that that's a different story but if if we're at a hundred million or somewhere in between and we have to pick and choose then you know you might want to drill into those issues we can certainly take that approach I think with the exception of the possible extension of bonnie bray right now which will change very fast when the new high schools out there and hickory creek and the reason we're recommending that project is to try to access as much federal funds possible what I've asked staff to do also there's another component called level of operation and these these operational scores on all these major chairs you're seeing not only are we hearing lots of concern and complaints from the the residents in these areas because the the congestion but they're operating at probably dnf levels in addition we've we've layered in and proposed layering in at least five assuming five million dollars a year can be spent over the next two or three years on the road program and then ramping it up to six million the last few years of the bomb program tour also dealing with the you know the oci issue but the congestion and capacity issue and we're trying to balance that along with the the oci issue and the other component on this is how long are we planning to do this I mean do we want you know our intention would be to try and not be back again for another three four years for another bond programs how the frequency is important thing but you know the level at which these these roads are operating right now that we're recommending to you they're all probably failing at rush hour every one of them and so you're we're weighing that versus and every time you get a zoning case in here you're all hearing about it so you know we've got that issue versus you know we've got enough funds to take us through the next couple of years to cleaning out the 2014 bond package and what you're allocating to carry us through but we're still going to need another 25 or 30 million dollars to make sure our local roads are being taken care of as well and I'm not sure there's a there's an easy way to answer your question other than the needs are very different but just as acute on both sides of the letter so councilmember duff yeah can I assume that you know there's a lot of things that can be done to some of these streets to extend their life yes sir right and so those things are being done anyway right yes this is in addition to the ongoing maintenance program which does have an impact on the oci well I think that I think that's really important that you extend the life of some of these streets in the meantime we can you know we can spend the big bucks to get the ones that are really bad fixed if you look at our current maintenance funding levels right now that where we're level or where our funding level is right now we can maintain our roadways as they are almost steady state with our current funding this gives us the ability to start elevating the oci upward I think I think he just answered it because I was gonna ask what it takes because obviously the oci would drop if we're not spending anything on it what correct so what we've got currently in the budget on an annual basis is maintaining us we would stay at 64 and so if we spent 30 million that's that would raise us to a 70 correct that's the idea yes sir okay oh councilmember and that kind of partly answered my question which is but um you know what would you know maybe it's more of a question for finance I guess maybe you would like to answer it really but um you know my concern as far as kind of if we give the direction to go ahead with this in terms of pushing this forward you know hearing from the public well we're still um uh working on the this this old bond package you know and so I think the key will be this is partly first a statement and then a question to see if you had anything in mind kind of you know what how to educate the public obviously we don't the job is not to push the bond project on the public but to just explain you know what all this oci is and why it matters because we also have the option of course of saying you know no not this year next year which for somebody who's just looking at it in terms of you know why don't you wait till you're done paying out this spending for this bond project to let you start the second one yeah what would be in terms of education your your your answer to that to the for the public and i would you know in the presentation on april 1st i think we went into that presentation knowing that would be a decision point it's something that would come up so we would try to tailor that presentation to that point and start off with here's here's how we wrapped up 2005 here's how we're wrapping up 2012 and 2014 issuing our final monies for for 2014 next year so you know if we were to move forward this year it would definitely be a piece of educating the bond committee on that information so that they can you know get that that message out knowing that it's going to be an issue out there i think the initiatives from from staff over the past two years to make sure we're closing those projects out uh would pay it's going to pay dividends in that in that form yeah councilman briggs did you have a question i don't want to necessarily get bogged down on street because this is i mean it's important to get some of this information but i know you've got other presentations in the other slide just to say this is sort of a general overview to give you some direction generally of where to go with this so these questions have all been ferreted out to try to help us answer that question correct and and the only thing i would i would just add is that we have talked as a group before about designing ahead of construction that's an effort in this and david will get into it as he goes down this road this pathway is we're projecting construction to be complete by the end of 2020 and into 2021 wrapping up the 2014 bond so this would allow us to design in 2020 so that we basically just continue on the construction thanks to move forward so the obviously the second proposition was for the public safety facilities uh again early in february went through the police uh substation discussion and the renovations to the headquarters so those have been included here in that initial presentation from the first we had 15 million dollars for the firing range and as we talk about uh opportunities for for changes based on that feedback we'll discuss that in in future slides uh so in that presentation with a four-year program again just like the streets it was a very condensed time frame to try to get all of these turned around quickly and that definitely does apply to the public safety facilities as well and and again we are including the fire station eight at this time in the bond election uh in 2019 if we move forward council member mr city manager i was thinking about this and and my question would be is it appropriate to address what we're going to do with the current police station at the same time as we're looking at the substation or do you see those two separate components because i have a i have a suggestion for if if they go in conjunction but if they don't then then i don't think it applies i think i understand your question the the idea would be that the substation would be constructed first because it it has a significant it significantly reduces your on-site costs when you're you're able to move the staff over into that particular area that'll be working out of there so um the idea was is part of those costs go away that we would be spending on a monthly basis with immobilized on-site moving staff around the number of the less moves the cheaper the project so they do work in conjunction with one another um we're always open to other ideas but that was kind of the direction that we're heading yes so so my thought just whenever whenever it's applicable whenever we evaluate the space at the existing police station my suggestion would be to look at that storage option near the jail for for that one particular all the all the stuff that we have to the accumulates there that we toured because i think when you're reevaluating the space to have that freed up then kind of we can more holistically look at that space and say okay now we don't have this storage area we can look at and see what we want to do here and and and i just advocate again for that storage to shift closer to the county jail where it you know those people that are homeless that need to pick up their things can then go let's say near the city city facilities building and address that storage issue there versus asking them to make their way all the way across town to to city hall to then reclaim their their their belongings you know and so and then that space is clear so when we're evaluating the current police station we can say okay this area is now in play quote unquote versus we have to figure out so when we have to figure out what to do anyway because it's full so right that's just my thought i don't know how how useful that is but that was just and those are the types of things we'll address as you know there's some shell space still left in that building that needs to be built out and you're going to be getting a presentation here shortly on the the state of our evidence room there and i mean we've just got a lot of issues there where they've outgrown the space there's just simply not enough nearly enough space to even build out to accommodate their needs especially when we look four or five years down the road so a lot of the questions you're asking will come up through the design process of that building so i'm really concerned about the the current situation that our our police department is in the the building the we had a tour of it and it was i mean it's i can't even talk about how much in disrepair it is and with the space and i'm concerned i guess i guess i should just say is this the only way that that's going to get fixed and done is in this bond in this bond election yeah i mean we were we were clearly given direction to prepare something for a bond election and not give you a co option we could we had that direction but in february that was sort of the marching orders from the council but i mean if it failed does that mean they're out of luck that they're stuck in that um you'd be you'd be a declining facility you'd be in a position where you probably have to issue co's to deal with it okay thank you well and it may be i'm not sure but i think the law is such that if you have a go bond election and it fails that you there's so there's about a certain amount of time you cannot issue co's for that same issue is that correct mr city attorney or something along those lines yes it's three years if i'm not mistaken yeah that is correct um and i mean it all it all centers on how that proposition is um is put together so we'd have to make sure that we work with our external bond council to make sure that you know we protected ourselves in the event that were to happen with specifically with fire station eight and i'd remind the council on the substation i mean i'm not giving any secrets away here that the you know the idea was is that we're starting to see significant travel time from those folks servicing the south part of denton getting back to the station the railroad tracks certainly an issue but it's really the congestion that we're experiencing there and making sure those officers can stay in their beats as long as possible it's just it's not going to get any better as we continue to grow so that was a huge issue and the other thing that we looked at was quite potentially acquiring some additional property around there but you would have to take out a number of businesses in order to expand the headquarters and you're not solving the issue with getting to south denton so just to quick quick this was the um discussion we had in the work session so just kind of restating that and uh the question was you know the idea was that you've got a simpler path if that substation is out station near station fire station seven and the ability also to stage staff easier and less costly on the rehab of the current police department so all those factors it's very complicated you're right the station is in terrible shape and we need to make some investment for our folks so this is how we calculate the 190 million in that four-year option uh take into account all existing funding or other funding sources obviously the biggest other piece of the other funding that that bridges that gap and what we're actually going to include in the bond program versus the total project cost comes from the other funding on these roadway projects total project cost for these for these uh projects included here is 413 million where the city funding through the bond program would only be would be 136 million verse that 413 million and so those are funds coming from tech stop from the county um and from cog and other sources along the way and in this floor and we'll show this in the next few slides in this four-year this four-year program option we are projecting based on our assumptions that we could be up to a four cent increase over those four years in our total tax rate and again in the next couple slides we'll show that uh council monitor you know this figure has the old firing range projection i think you're aware of that yeah so the way we kind of set this up is show where we were on the first for these four-year option then we'll transition to a six-year option that would be in response to that the last meeting so during the the the follow-up from the meeting was to uh look at the firing range make some adjustments to that look at what it would look like to go from a four-year bond program to a six-year bond program and keep the tax rate flat the entire time as opposed to that four-year bond program we have the possible four cent increase and then also consider additional projects street lighting open space and the housing and homelessness initiatives and how those could be rolled into a program so that's what we'll look at next so here's here's and as we show these bonds sales schedules i just say these are all preliminary numbers and things are going to shift as we actually go into any program here's what we were looking at in the four-year program you can see that it is obviously aggressive on getting hickory creek bonnie bray and the police in the public safety facilities done uh quickly along with all the other programs those being the biggest ticket items in this uh in it in in our the way that we got to that four cent increase if you look at our total tax rate and throughout this we're looking at our total tax rate not that uh just our r&m or our debt service side you can see we would keep stay at that 60 or 62 cents that we're currently at throughout each of the of the future years and that's what we're going to do in the six-year in the four-year knowing that in the four-year program we'll likely need a four cent increase uh starting in 21 through fy23 that four cents is on the total tax rate what's also happening as we go through this with that with our assessed evaluation growth is we're moving cents from o and m to the debt service as well so it's four cents to the total but also six or seven cents that we've moved up from o and m from our operations to the debt service side and that that happens by staying on the on the operation side in our effective range it would be helpful if if you i mean don't have to do it now but maybe offline send an email about showing that breakdown in those years that showing the transfer from the o and m to the debt service especially um we need to also look at is there any impact if the impact if any on the current proposed legislation within the state legislature about uh you know caps and rollback rates and all those kind of things so is this it sure yeah so we've broken down here where you can see i know this is a busy slide but if you the difference basically shows what's coming from uh operations to the debt service and this is on our this is on our six year program that we're presenting uh this would be the increase this would be this column on the right would be what's coming from our operations in our current plan to the debt service side so over that six years in total seven cents would move from operations to debt service and what what does growth assumption does that uh is that following the five-year forecast growth uh rate assumption is a three percent this is four percent the same assumptions we had earlier in the presentations of four percent um on that we can send this out separately too no no it's fine yep got it yep that's all i need i think it's data to kind of build on the mayor's question with what we're seeing happening and also right now with the negotiations going on you know i guess the caveat is they seem to change by the hour but you know the the last update that we're seeing i think the plan still fits within the framework if we end up on the three and a half percent ability but i mean it's definitely putting you in put the council in a position where more and more it was going to need to go to the voters um if if the you know that imbalance starts happening between the the debt service and the o and m and but right now we're not assuming that we're capturing that three and a half percent every year right right now we're we're saying operations are staying flat right so we're actually able to stay even under that three and this is far more conservative than what's happening in austin right now right and you know these are all based on those assumptions and if if it comes in over four percent it has valuation that changes everything if it comes in under obviously that changes things too yep so to show this impact and as a follow-up to a question which i think just gets back to the same point we've been talking about the past couple slides the way that we're able to make this this work without with only going up four cents on the four year or not having an increase on the sixth year is by assessed values going up so even if we stay at the same tax rate the average for the average taxpayer their property tax bill from the city would increase with that increased assessed valuation just on that chart that that's just i mean because this is a this is a good chart because when you look your the temptation is to look over at the average property tax the actual tax and look at it and look at the increase from 2014 to just even 2017 i mean it really but but you have to look at the average taxable value because the tax rate was going down i mean right whereas the the average taxable value of the home the average value of the home was went from 166 to 214 to 233 i mean you're talking that's 30 to 40 percent almost increase within some of those year ranges right yeah yeah and it's reflected in the average property tax yeah so here are the adjustments we made and to the next next slide we'll show the schedule for the six years here are the adjustments we made to get to a six year program you know obviously and it will go through these but in a big picture you know to get to a six year program we've had to spread some of the projects out and get that condensed timeline a little more spread out so we can maintain the tax rate we've also reduced the budget on the fire range from 15 million dollars to five million dollars i think that's a result of us right now having preliminary discussions on different things that we could do with the firing range and not necessarily going with the the proposal of doing a full 15 million dollars and looking all up at all of our options on that we've increased our local street rehab program so to go in addition to the the streets that we've laid out from 15 million dollars to 35 million dollars again i think that's a follow-up to the oci conversation and then our sidewalks our pedestrian pathways uh increase that from 10 million to 12 million over the six years so some some questions about the firing range um so can can you can you explain how because it's a radical reduction i mean how we go down from 15 million to 5 million um and and then and just to kind of preview in addition to that maybe you want to answer these both in one or separate but you know did staff consider the option of just moving to another field with with a berm and making it even cheaper right mario canas are a city manager what we're looking at doing um is working with a consultant to do a feasibility study for us to understand what our full needs are and the police department one of those options is to renovate the existing facility in which we use the outdoor facility that would be one option the other one that we're looking at too is potentially doing a public or private partnership with a with an entity that's wanting to build and then to add on to their to an existing to their new facility that they would be building so that so the five million does that include the cost for the consultant or is this the consult this is the this is the consultant who are already no the five million would be for construction the uh the consultant the consultants in this area are highly highly specialized um in terms of methods of construction we've had some abilities to part um offers to partner that we want evaluated um we've got significant risk concerns as we shared with you at the current range especially with that range getting more enveloped by new developments um and so we we need somebody that can help us make sure that we would be making it as prudent of an investment and giving you all the options um as possible much rather than us bringing in somebody that's not an expert in this area but you've got environmental issues safety issues uh training issues um that we'd like to make sure that we have somebody that knows this industry better than any of us do and so the cost for the so can you repeat the cost for the consultant it's not in this five million it is it would be out of the average general fund just yes operating budgets yeah um i still so uh congratulations again whoever i have to thank for getting that way down and probably police department too um i totally understand the uh safety and reliability risks when the current the current situation obviously that's unsustainable so i support something new uh i still you know for me this is still the kind of the odd one out in this or the standout in this group of bond proposals as far as being able as far as showing the public um you know that that there's a need for all of this i would worry that for instance that um uh if that if people couldn't be convinced you know that this is necessary they might uh vote no to all of it if they can't quite see why um the uh a you know five million dollars for some form of indoor firing range or arrangement is necessary that however is not my um uh primary objection it's mostly that i i'm not convinced that we need an indoor facility as opposed to another outdoor one all together uh so and and then if the decision ends up to end up being well we we need another you know outdoor one or or if the consultant shows that to us um and and and the police department it's a possibility then i can't imagine that would have a five million dollar price tag on it so then we've you know taken out this the five million dollar bond so that feels i i feel i'm shaky on that uh but i can commend you and and uh police department for bringing that price down council member duff i can tell you i totally disagree and you know i guess what i'm thinking you take it 15 down to five million i i hope we're not undersizing what we're doing you know because i think that i think it's essential that the police department has a safe place to practice well and and i think we're getting ahead of the process here as we're talking about what council's for and what council's against and because it's my understanding that how this has gone in the past is we've sort of given some direction we've created a bond committee the bond committee then looks at our recommended proposals then they may add some they may subtract some and then it's the bond committee's charge to create the information the educational information out there to uh assist with the city um and again it's my understanding that these will be separate ballots uh separate propositions on the ballot they're split out somehow it's not you're voting for 190 million dollars at once or you're not voting for it at all that that there's different different propositions there so i really just want to say that to encourage us to not get out ahead of ourselves on this because if one if they vote one down it doesn't mean they vote all down but i will tell you historically when it comes to public safety um at least the bond programs i've been involved in that are that are necessary and that are reasonable and that certainly show a need for enhanced training or enhanced facilities for our first responders people respond to that but it's it's up to the bond committee to make sure that there's enough educational material out there to ensure that people have an understanding so i i don't know if at the council level we can say you don't want to do it but i don't want to macro manage this particular process if we're okay with this there's still another level of scrutiny that's going to happen with with the bond committee of people that we have supported or nominated to be on that committee yes council member i'm glad you brought that up because that may answer my question because i'm looking at the streets and the sidewalks and so um just and just this is my first one to go through so in the process the staff give the bond committee recommendations and they go through a list of the the the sidewalks you say 41 segments or those already determined um and then they just decide yes to those or no to those i'm going to lean over to tony because he's been through this process here and then that and not uh tony point the chief financial officer uh generally speaking there's a a miscellaneous sidewalk category um and we do share with them kind of a listing of um of what those sidewalks may be but again it's really just a um just a proposed listing depending on kind of what's on the ground and what's happening the timing that may change there might be some other things that uh that we may have to substitute and that's really the value of the of the bond oversight committee that's formed out of that process to be able to kind of vet any changes or you know uh reallocations that may need to occur in that bond program that's generally been our practice but certainly if the council wants to be more specific um in their charge then certainly that's that's your prerogative as well i'm just curious about the process thank you and i would add um for councilmember briggs it's a good question and one of the ways that we came up with the the dollars the recommendation for for you and the bond committee that you on with the 15 to 35 million and the 10 to 12 is just simply what we think we can turn out and on an annual basis i would have liked to see the sidewalk number 20 million but pretem swears up and down he can only get 2 million spent every year so well uh we we will and that and we do have very good data on where the where we need to spend the dollars on the street rehab program and on the sidewalks right now we spend a lot of time putting master plans in place and we're updating the sidewalk and pedestrian plan now so we're going to be able to go into them basically saying this is what we can deliver um and making sure but we know those are areas that our residents want to see improved and i think in the past like on the 2014 bond package staff did provide a list of projects that that were prioritized but the bond the the ballot wasn't necessarily restricted to you can only do these and not not anything else so there's there's flexibility in those projects within those categories but if there's major changes or i don't know what the level of degree of change is required but then it has to go back to the bond oversight committee to ensure that the intention of the voters by approving those bonds are not thwarted by whatever recommended changes that that are being proposed is that is that my understanding yeah it is and trying to build in as much flexibility as possible one of the weaknesses we've seen in the last two bond packages for instance was the lack of connectivity of street segments so you might have one in a block in between it wasn't getting done and so that's part of the thing that we were trying to do is make sure that when we're in there we're only disturbing neighborhoods once and looking at and making those recommendations as concisely as possible so our crews are effective because it's very inefficient it's costing us a lot of money that was part of what we rectified last year when we made the bond program whole was connecting several of those streets so you didn't have to go back into neighborhoods bothering them again in another year or two so there's been a lot of lessons learned but you're right I mean one of the things we fully understand that when when the discussion comes to make a recommendation to council they may feel that look shorten this down to four years and we're willing to prioritize the major you know congested streets in order to get there we get that and there's good reasons and good arguments to do that but we just want you to see what we believe are it's doable it's achievable based on the the processes we've got in place now and understand that there are there are plans that are behind these these first several recommendations so this is here's our schedule for that for it to get to that six-year bond program where we keep the tax rate flat throughout the six years again preliminary this is all preliminary but this is a model that would actually get us to where our total on the for the bond program in each year it can be can be absorbed within our tax rate the way it is so if you look at that bottom line that's what our tax rate can absorb without increasing and so it as it jumps that's really from debt service falling off that current debt service we have falling off that gives us that capacity to get there we have extended some some projects so that we're not all hit in FY 21 for example we're hit so much in that one year that we have to have a tax increase for Ryan road as another example those are now in phases instead of trying to shoot to get that entirely completed in those four years that comes along with that to some degree is as you spread those projects out there are inflationary costs that are going to increase so the total cost of some of these projects are going to be higher in a six-year program than they are in a four-year program but that's the nature of of spreading them out to some degree and even on the public safety really showed what is the cash flow that we're going to need each year for those projects and obviously a consideration with that would be do we get the substation done first before we go into the into the headquarters the renovated headquarters so again all these changes are what gets us to a flat tax rate through the six years. So that's our that's our proposal and that's our staff recommended kind of budget right now for a bond program over six years these next three items are considerations the council brought up as feedback on the first that will present but we'll say anything over that 210 million over six years would require an increase in the tax rate to absorb we've really kind of maxed it out of staying under that tax rate over the six years so the first consideration was for street lighting and we have a big number a big range here because the scope of the street lighting could vary largely depending on what we want to do the number of streets we want to focus on number of areas we want to focus on so we've listed some example priority projects here that some of these have been discussed before with council 24 99 21 81 University Drive we've had presentations on those and those have large ticket prices and obviously all the other ones as well there's those obviously demand first for a lot of these from a street lighting perspective but anything we did with wouldn't change our model obviously it could be an increase in the tax rate but it the other option would be to take back something we have on our proposal right now so about this the street lighting we recently discussed that the move to LED and when when is that the plan for that to be to begin I believe DME is actually working on that right now they've started some of that progression and there is a year-over-year turnover on that one other thing I wanted to bring up was while I'm here is that 15 million will not accomplish this entire list that knocks out about two of the major projects or it could be a major project and a bunch of other streets where there's some weaknesses in the lighting I was just going to mention that you know I'm be curious to see what our needs are you know after we switch to LED across the board and then to see LED as far as what it actually does for us with our current fixtures it will brighten the areas where we have them but a lot of the lighting that we have today are too far spaced amongst each other so there's just a lot of dark spots and even with LED that's not they're not close enough to be able to really put in place what people are asking for and that was gonna that was gonna be my next question and some of these roads that we're sharing with you Councilmember Armitage there's just no street lights you know the council's talked a lot about University Drive and I think just accomplishing that was five to ten million dollars yes and $24.99 as soon as that was opened up we started getting immediate comments because TxDOT's just not putting those in their roadways right now so if the council wants to go back and and install those retrofit and that's fine Todd is including the street lights and many of the arterials that we're building now but these are just areas that don't have them that we're getting complaints not not necessarily changing them out right I know I don't want to get too off topic and too into this but I see that list over there and there's some big concerns and the the bill at Hickory is one of them I know that we've brightened up one of the street lamps a little bit but that's from several different police complaints that that's not bright enough and so I would like for this discussion to come back to us at some point where we could really talk about you know if this doesn't get in this funding what we can do especially you know an intersection like that that's absolutely a different topic of discussion but it plays in with this you're right and it's something that we are working towards right now as an overall master plan for how do we get there citywide focus being arterial and collector streets intersections that have high traffic demands across the spectrum whether it's pedestrian bicyclist vehicles and then we can branch out from there but we are trying to take an assessment of where we are across the board and how do we start taking on this elephant in small chunks and I will say with examples that you just brought up I'm working with DMA staff that when there's areas where there's acute lighting that can be put in and you know maybe a two or three different lights to really make a big difference we've identified several areas where we're just doing that especially where the poles are involved but it's a whole other thing when you don't have the conduit and the infrastructure there but those cases we're able to respond a little bit quicker. So the next consideration that was brought up was open space having some dollars in here for land acquisition related to park and open space needs this is not in our current proposal for the program and again this is one that could very largely in scope depending on where we'd want to go with it if it was included we put total cost here from five to fifteen million dollars and again that could change based on what the priorities would be with that. This would have to be an additional proposition to the two that we have now so it wouldn't be able to be rolled in whereas the street lighting would probably be rolled into the roadway proposition. And the next initiative was for housing and homelessness along with the item this agenda item there was a kind of a supplemental information to go along with this I think big picture right now from a staff perspective is that we don't have a plan to put in to put forward right now to say we want to put this in the program our thought for moving forward is to put that as a hundred thousand dollar assessment for housing initiatives and homelessness in next year's budget and from there that would help us develop a plan but certainly you know the council could it's up to the council and what you want to do at this point. And I'll mention so since I was the one who had requested that obviously you know big need for this I agree that assessment would have to be done before a bond proposal and so if there's not the time to do that assessment not the time in the budget between now and November it's important that we go ahead and have an assessment obviously that's a decision to be made later but I just wanted to say since I was the one who suggested it that I'm okay with waiting until we have an assessment but I would just want to make sure that that assessment move you know expediently and that because people are really really suffering but we want to do it right so thank you so much for to the Sarah and Community Development for preparing those staff reports on that issue. And I would add that we are aware this is a goal important goal of councils and we will be back next month with kind of a plan we are having active discussions with the shelters we're having active discussions on enhancements can be made that sort of thing which we'll review with you on May 21st as well. So I appreciate seeing this and I'm glad that it came in this topic but for the request that was made to get onto the bond was for specific basic you know like a services center somewhere that's open during the day when all the shelters are closed and individuals are on the street and say they need to use the restroom take a shower fill out a job application do some laundry and this came to me because I was reading all the comments under the newspaper article on social media and a lot of it was well this is great we're going to spend all this money on streets and all this but what about this need I see this every day this is something I come in contact with what are we doing and so I wanted to have this conversation for council to show that you know we're at least talking about it and that it's on our minds and hopefully something will come to us that is up for actual discussion that's not just next year oh next year oh next year because we're really as far as I'm concerned running out of time on on how much we can discuss I would just add and we have a slight later we show the timeline you know even though the November is the election we are at a compressed timeline to kind of get some of this going right now so that we can get a committee up and running in May and then get to that August decision point so just add some context to the timeline yeah and I appreciate that councilmember Briggs I guess I get a little frustrated when I when I hear comments that we're really not doing anything or that we're running out of time or things such as that because I think we've we've done a lot in the last four years and I think as we'll see in the presentation coming May 21st because the last thing we want to do is throw a lot of money at a problem without a plan and it doesn't matter what the problem is it doesn't matter whether it's homelessness whether it's streets whether it's police firing range it really doesn't matter and so I have a great deal of confidence that as we move forward that the community together with the nonprofits with the county as a regional effort is working earnestly to resolve this issue and I'm just asking people to look at what's going on look at what the council is doing also look at what the nonprofits are doing because we may not have that specific facility yet but there's certainly been a tremendous amount of improvements over the last three or four years on access to facilities and the number of shelter beds but I think you'll find in our in the presentation coming up that there's a menu of options available to both the council and again the nonprofits and the other regional organizations that can help us solve this because Denton will not be able to solve this on its own it doesn't matter how much money you throw at it I think we've seen in the past how when you have a collaboration of these organizations working together you have much more efficient use of resources and that's really my goal personally but I understand the concern and I understand the comments and really it's indicative of the progress we have made because before nobody was talking about a service center because what we were having to talk about was where do people go when it's storming where do people go when they've run out of shelter beds we are addressing that need so the next next step is well how do we move up that kind of scale of need so I appreciate that we're at least having that conversation because it means we're not having the conversation that's downstream of that because we've been making such good headway in that area so I appreciate you bringing that up. We just wanted to show at you know I have the discussion to this point another summary of what the staff recommended city funding for a six-year program would be so you can see on the right these are all the projects that we discussed and what you just saw on the other slide with a schedule that adds up to that 210 million dollars wanted to point out that these three items that we just discussed the other proposition request are not currently in this 210 million dollars so those being added again would likely require us at least to estimate a tax increase and to the right here we've estimated that about a 12 and a half million dollar increase in the total program would equate to a one cent increase in what we would expect in a tax increase over the six years you know timing is also a factor in all of this if we just moving projects up would require a tax increase as well when that cent would happen so there's a lot that goes into it I think a big picture way to think about it would be 12 and a half million dollars equals about a cent to the tax rate what is the projected interest rate on these bonds issuances we had to factor that in somehow do we have four and a half percent and this is over a six-year period I mean it's say levels at four so if it if it goes up to five five and a half and we've seen how 1% or 2% increase or decrease can affect this so if what has it been historic what is it now right now it's about 3.4% mayor and 20-year bonds I will tell you that that four and a half percent is a is a conservative number that we've got from our financial advisors there's you know five to ten basis point hedge on that number I think I think the reality is the market is currently on a downward slide certainly on the longer end of that interest rate curve I don't anticipate major changes from that so okay so if either way whether it's less than or more than that if it's more than that then we might have to either slow the project down not issue you know maybe delay some projects or increase the tax rate the converse of that is if your rate stays at three and a quarter three and a half three point seven five then you have some additional capacity in there to either do more projects or your your debt your tax rate is lower based upon the transfer is that okay that's exactly correct mayor and I do want to remind the council that both of the 2005 and 2014 bond programs we did assume tax rate increases that never happened and it didn't happen because of some of those exact things value was higher interest rates came in lower just you know just the timing of that and so certainly if if things work in our favor we could potentially advance some of those projects issue the bonds a little bit sooner than that we that we currently anticipate but I'll tell you I think our plan right now is a very conservative plan there's a lot of wiggle room there again but we want to make sure that it's a plan that we can can support at this point so I want to go back and just clarify something you said because you're right in the 2014 bond program the voters approved up to a three cent tax increase whereas when we talk about this program and that it has a built-in three or four cent tax increase the six it doesn't have a tax it doesn't have a tax rate increase but because of the the assessed values that property taxes paid will still go up because the rates staying the same but the valuations are going up and that's sort of the same kind of methodology when we had the four percent or three percent that was available in the 2014 bond program we kept the tax rate the same but because valuations went up we didn't need to raise the tax rate but it wasn't at the effective rate so people were paying more so now we use an operational model of the effective rate and we go from there yeah in 2014 if you recall the texture with 68 cents right and it was going to go three cents above that now we're talking about a 62 cent that would be held steady under a six-year bond program a four-year bond program you could go up to four cents from that so okay good all right yes council member Melcher when when directions given to the bond committee do they get direction about the the total that they're working to yeah I think I think historically one of the tasks that's been provided the bond committee is do you agree with the the total number in the proposition or in the way that the potential tax exposure is there or do you want that lessened and so that that's typically something that the council has asked them to evaluate before making that final recommendation as I understand it okay so we don't that takes another burden off us and is there is there any downside to putting more items on the menu for them to pick from so there's just a couple I can think of I mean I really appreciate the work that's gone into including street lighting open space and so on you know we'll see if they value sort of the last road project on the list or the lighting you know but you know would there be any downside to sizing PEC 4 which I think could substantially increase the economic potential of downtown and then there's also City Hall West I don't think City Hall West is probably the only reason PEC 4 didn't make the list is I think the council needs to have a significant discussion down the road about how much the taxpayers should pick up with that project versus the TERS and you know the taxpayers don't benefit from that as directly as the TERS does and so I just didn't feel comfortable making that recommendation I don't feel like with a tax increment finance district down there that the taxpayers outside of that should be subsidizing it I think it's an interesting policy discussion for you for you all to have because there is additional capacity and you are absolutely right once that project is completed it should open up a significant part of the downtown for redevelopment and help with the EAV. So the next portion is really just try to seek some direction from council get some feedback on where to go from here so the first couple slides are really what do we want to do the 2019 bond program so the direction we're seeking is should we hold November 2019 bond program bond election and if so what menu of projects would you like included at this point obviously preliminarily but to give us some direction moving forward obviously the alternative that would be to not issue to not have the bond election look at CEOs for some of the projects that we need to do immediately and then possibly consider a bond election next year in November 2020 and then obviously with that if yes what what projects should be included in that bond program we could go forward with a recommendation that we put forward for this six-year program right for now or we could at council's discretion look at the menu of items and either change things out add something in take something away so really this opportunity to to hear from council council members council member breaks I would like for the all of it to go to the council even the three options and let them choose which ones that they want to go in to the committee I've heard it bond council by committee thanks can you go back to the list please sir thank you I just need to be educated on the but for Barney Bray I would just need to know more information I'm just I'm familiar with the roads generally but for example Hickory Creek has so many different components you know I'm curious if we would be able to act on it and get all those kind of different parties to line up to where we could be effective and hit our timeline you know because I know there's county roads etc. that our county component text out in there someplace so that's I just need to understand the value add in some of those roads I I don't doubt that it's a priority I just don't I don't know if someone asked me if I could articulate the benefits of those and so that's where I would need some some help Bonnie Bray is is a no-brainer just because the high school component and kind of what we've done already that kind of late predicate so I could I could hazard to to address that but the others I'm kind of fuzzy on and I'm okay with the other components as I mentioned I would prefer to see something here to to make our city council chambers more able to accommodate disabled people but that may be an easier fix right that doesn't doesn't require it so I've said that before but want to just reiterate that but of this list I'm okay with I'm not okay with the additional tax items just you know until we get a better read of what's what's in front of us I don't I don't and and I'll tell you my primary guiding light for that is the habitat homes which are targeted at $100,000 evaluations are coming in at 140 170 and that that's scary to me what it's going to do to to other homes you know once we kind of get a feel for where those are going but anyway so okay with everything need help on the streets understanding those components and I'm not okay with increasing the tax rate to to capture those other and we can certainly provide that additional justification of the bond committee let them but it and back to the council I have no problem doing that I think the one thing I'd point out with Hickory Creek to you it's very similar to Bonnie Bray in the in the sense that there's we've got the ability to connect all the way to I-35 right now we are already seeing subdivisions being planted from I-35 to 377 right in the middle where the roadway would go and we don't know where to tell them to reserve right away so we've got several roads Hickory Creek Robinson Ryan Road 428 they have they've all they're all have the capacity what they should be right now and we're trying to avoid that with Hickory Creek as well as accessing as you can see about 135 million dollars in federal funding for our taxpayers so if I could if you could make a note I'd love to get a some guidance on just tour so if I'm driving it and because I've been in the area it's just an area not long ago but if you could give me some kind of guidance hey look at this you know this is coming you know just some kind of cheat sheet that says that helps me understand because I have the GIS map I've driven area I just need help pairing the two okay so I'm just not in that area a lot that'll be helpful we're happy to put all this together for you and easy one page easy to understand one pagers and what the strategy is okay thank you can I clarify so my direction would be to give them this list but to stay within the proposed the rate not to increase it so that if they wanted to not do the firing range but wanted to do five million and street or just that that was my not not just to have you know you could go and spend however much increase the rate however much you want but just to give the menu of options like maybe they think well you know let's not do this street right now but maybe we want to do this so that that's where I was coming from give them the menu to fit within that recommended rate 210 yes thank you Councilmember Rommersen um yeah and I I do agree that you know they should be encouraged obviously we can't micromanage the bond committee but you know to be uh encouraged to kind of stay within uh this same range I just wanted to be known obviously I'm in the minority on this but just for the record you know while I strongly I strongly support everything in the public safety facilities part of the package Proposition 1 but I myself um you know can't get behind the uh five million dollars for the firing range especially when we don't quite know exactly what that's going to be I do also want to say though for the record just to respond to you know Councilmember Duff I definitely agree that that they need a a place to be able uh to to practice shooting and you can do that outside I'm not convinced that an indoor shooting range is necessary and I think for a bond package it's really important that we do necessary things all these other things uh I happen to see as necessary I just wanted to state that for the record Councilmember Meltzer um I'm fine with the you know direction if we don't want you to go beyond this but I would also like to be very clear to the bond committee that up to a hundred million dollars no tax increase I mean if you know we've got to see if what they come back with is persuasive enough to us to say yeah we want the citizens to consider us raising their taxes for this stuff so up to a hundred million no tax increase and then I I personally would suggest that it's just clear for thinking about it uh instead of talking about pennies on the tax rate which requires you to do a little bit of you know arithmetic we talk about dollars on the average tax bill you know I I think it's very uh tempting to uh sort of paper over the fact that you're raising people's taxes if you hold the rate flat you're going to raise their taxes and it's fine if we want to raise taxes but let's be open about it so I would say up to this level no tax increase and then each ten million dollars is whatever it is you know I haven't done the arithmetic on the average tax bill we're happy to put it out both ways everybody digests this discussion differently so we've gone through this slide 20 times probably so let me go deeper I never looked that direction mayor pro tem thank you mayor yeah I'm good with staff recommendations going forward uh I mean we could easily get up to 600 million if we all put our own little pet projects on this pretty quick whether it be city hall uh west or you know adding street it's these are the most necessary projects right now see what our tax rate does with this like we said with the 2014 we could have gone up to three cents it didn't happen is as that goes on through time in a couple of years we can come back and pick up some other projects yeah I'm good with the staff recommendation uh the only thing I'd I'd kind of like to see the street lighting I would be good for that and uh you know one interesting thing is is I look at that list up there and none of that affects where I live okay but I can tell you we have a lot of good people out there we'll support it council member yeah I'm just I'm just curious about the the substation and where that would be located would that not be located out just for that purpose so that the response time is I mean I'm just for clarification on the location of where that may be here it would certainly benefit that area that would not be yes thank you well I mean it may not put a street light out on ropes and ranch road or the whole development is private anyway but if they come into Denton it's benefiting them as they come into Denton so I really hate to look at it that way and I'm okay with staff's recommendations I will say you're you're right councilmember Meltzer well if the tax rate stays flat your taxes only go up if your assessed value goes up so I think there's many people whose assessed values don't necessarily go up right now I mean I've seen I've heard some I've seen some that go down a little bit I've seen some that stay flat so you know when we usually consider assessed values we usually look at it as an overall average in aggregate but there are different different properties that that doesn't happen so and the converse is true if your values go down and your tax rate is flat obviously your taxes go down so this is going to all be an interesting move forward and we not none of us can predict the future but I do trust that we have the management in place that as things happen that they're nimble enough and they're they're efficient enough to find the best ways to to accomplish the goals that this body has and the citizens have given them to do so I'm okay with what's been recommended okay we have a few more decision points not really yeah yeah yeah so the next item open for discussion is the how many more slides do you have because we've been going for about almost two hours so we need to take a break unless you've got just this is the last slide we're just talking about the bond committee and the public art but we can probably take a break yeah let's take a break let's take about a five or ten minute break welcome back to this meeting of the Denton City Council it is 433 we're going to proceed back with our work session reports we left off before the break at work session item 3c so that's where we'll pick up so the next item we're seeking direction on is the formation of the bond committee so we've listed a couple options options here obviously we could do whatever the whatever the council would like as far as the formation of the committee our proposal would be to utilize one of the proposal would be to utilize this current over bond oversight committee and add one to two residents per council member to that bond oversight committee you know an advantage of that is obviously the bond oversight committee has been involved so we'd have a they wouldn't have as much of a learning curve as getting a whole new committee together and we are on a somewhat compressed schedule to other times we would be going through a bond program to be able to jump right in with a smaller group would assist us to to meet our deadlines with the with the schedule for reference in the past in the 2014 and 2005 bond programs we had about a 50 person committee as opposed to the 2012 bond program there's about 25 members that 2012 bond program is very focused on streets so there was it wasn't as expansive as the other ones I think that was a reason for that difference in the total numbers option two would be to just establish a new bond committee with whatever numbers per council member you all would choose to have a completely new committee as we move forward and then obviously option three would just be any anything any other way you would all like to would like to form the committee yes so just for clarification on option one so it would be some of the existing members and then just some added new members per council the current committee and see see what their appetite for be for serving would be so we would approach them and ask if they would like to serve again but that would be the idea use that that current committee and add one or two or however many you would like to it and you said there was 25 in the 2012 bond program there were 25 in the 2014 and 2005 bond programs there were those committees had 50 members on them the bond oversight committee currently is comprised of how many people five five so it would be five people plus however many we appoint per council member oh okay so it wouldn't be all of those people coming in from the okay right that the entire bond over the bond committee from the 2014 bond program what they all didn't go to the bond oversight committee we ended up with the five that we have now do we have a list of who they are I mean is that public knowledge do they have regular meetings and we do have regular meetings we meet we meet quarterly to go through the progress of the 2020 205 2012 and 2014 bond programs if there's a need to you know redirect funds change those out we had that discussion with them that's been part of charge but the idea here was they've got a it's like a history lesson every time we get together with them in terms of what was meant you know what authority we asked for what they're comfortable with and just felt like it gave the new count the new council appointees on that committee kind of a running start because it gets so much knowledge about how we've handled things that's my monitor so I support option one with one additional appointee per council member I think it's essential you know not only not just in having continuity in general but also that as I understand it that the people who are on this committee have seen you know what goes wrong when a bond when bond money doesn't get utilized in time so they've got that additional experience you know the kind of lessons learned the hard way not that it was anything of their own doing but you know but they've seen that and so I think it'll make a nice mix of them you know those five plus one additional per council member I think two I think that that seems that that would be too many too many cooks in the kitchen I also agree with option one one per person would work well are there any regulations regarding the I mean obviously they have to be a citizen but if they happen to be on a other board even if they're appointed by someone else is there anything that prohibits someone from serving on a bond committee outside of not being a resident of the city not that I'm aware of unless there's a resolution that was passed in the past that actually put some type of eligibility criteria but I doubt that exists but I'm just throwing that out there okay thank you last bond committee I believe in 2014 there was a and I'm just bringing it up for historical context just to because if we're only going to be appointing one per council member you know there's single member districts here and there's also at large seats here that I think there was a rate a rule or something where if you were a single member district your appointee had to be in your district do y'all remember that remember that there's sort of a little bit of controversy around that I'm not advocating for that I'm just saying that you know that's what it was last time it came with you know some discussion about that but I don't care one is fine 12 people you know that's pretty small for a bond committee but I understand the need for it with the time compression and because it's a fairly targeted bond proposal if it was extensive as the last one I think that would be that wouldn't be enough to really gain a clear representation or have the ability to have a strong representation throughout the city I think with with this we could still have that but it's very targeted doesn't sound like there's a whole lot of I don't say latitude but really restricted to we've got some rails on there as far as what what we're trying to accomplish but I mean if I had mods or others I'd just assume a point to which would give a total of 19 members and I typically think that they break up into subcommittees to consider the different type of ballot propositions so you'd have enough people to form these committees and and not very many people they wouldn't have to do double duty on some of those so not necessarily saying more is better but I think in this situation 12 if I had a preference between 12 and 19 or 714 times yeah yeah 19 I would I would assume I prefer the two do we have a list of who the current members are but I tend to agree with the mayor on on that and if I recall the the time that I went through with the single with the district was for the ethics committee I think where where that I would try to review committee I think yeah yeah oh that might have been where that was yeah okay I'm mistaken and any other time it hadn't been included yeah so I don't know if it's for this committee or not but that would be a good question to find out yeah so so council member the committee's made up of five individuals currently bond oversight committee mr. Randy Robinson is our chair he was also the co-chair of the 2014 bond bond a blue ribbon committee of the 50 member committee and mr. Tim crouches is also a member of the bond oversight committee he was also the co-chair of the citizens bond committee Janet Shelton was the the the chair of the subcommittee on parks Brandon McCluskey was the was the the chair of the subcommittee on transportation and then we have one other member I apologize can't remember her last name at this point her name is Sarah and she was also a co-chair of one of the subcommittees I think that was on on the drainage component but but those are the five members and we can certainly get you their information any bios if you'd like to see those as well I think we probably have those somewhere so that's Mary Meltzer oh were you were you on deck okay I'm sorry council member Duff I have a tendency to to have smaller committees but I think in this case we actually need the 19 so I'm in favor of two per council Mary Meltzer I'd like to see the bios just you know for information a couple of those folks I'm acquainted with personally I'm extremely confident in their capabilities and how much help they'll be so my inclination is option one with the two per based on the guidance that they've got a break up in the subcommittees to get work done and I'm fine with two so it sounds like option one with two council members per or two nominees per council member appointees so as far as the timeline moving forward we would try to possibly the next council meeting bring this back up for discussion on on those committee members that you would want on the to nominate for the committee and at that time also we would talk about the charge that we would give the committee so based on the discussion you need to stay within 210 million dollars and anything else we would want to put in that charge as they create the committee so we'll bring that back at the next council meeting possibly okay all right and that's when the 26th was the next yeah next week yeah 23rd I can't add that's memory it just doesn't remind if if we need to nominate or recommend people within our own district or is that a conversation or was that just something that was that yeah I was mistaken on that I think it was the ethics issue that was the ethics either charter review I think it was the charter review committee is when that was so I would retract that comment so yeah that didn't apply thanks yeah but the next decision point is the public art decision that we went over this on April 1st as well but to to rehash the decision points are do we want to include public art do we want public art to just be folded in with the propositions we currently have or do we want to be a separate proposition and then based on our current public art policy council would decide between two and four percent of vertical construction as far as an amount that we would devote to public art within the bond program you can see a history in 2012 public art totaled four hundred thousand dollars that was prior to this updated 2013 policy the 2014 bond program had the new policy where it was two percent of vertical construction not all projects and that was five hundred and thirty five thousand dollars in the 2014 program so you can see for option one for direction would be to fund public art in the upcoming bond program and then between two and four percent you can see that between that two and four percent would be between eight hundred and eighty thousand dollars to one point seven million dollars and these numbers haven't been included thus far and what we've what we've talked about question I have is product last time but do I'd like to get some data on the amounts you've given us the amounts of the last bond programs what that money has been spent on and you know if there's still some outstanding what that is because I know there was some discussion about that and and does the does the project have to be directly related to the particular like if it's a fire station does the does the public art have to be in the fire station so just a little brief refresher on that policy and then how has that played out historically oh based upon the last two bond programs we can bring that back next time okay what we spend it on and okay how would those have been utilized sure yes is there some kind of statutory definition of public art must it always be sculpture or could when we say public art could that conceivably also support performing art arts venue construction for instance I think we'd have to go back and just look at the public art policy and see how it's defined in there I don't have that in front of me but we would definitely if we bring this back we can come back with that and show how it's defined okay and I don't personally see why it should why we need to be expressed in terms of a percentage of everything else versus just being you know another line item on the menu as it were can be considered as part of the part of the ad up the bond committee evaluates in my opinion I think if we did that we may want to look at revising the policy along with any decisions council would make to go because the policy does kind of go with those percentages so it would just be a change to the policy as well okay all right any other questions on this item staff have appropriate direction yes we do okay great fantastic all right thank you thank you we'll move on to our next agenda item receive report hold discussion or provide staff direction on the Denton Development Code update and draft zoning map mayor council thank you very much Scott McDonald director of development services we're here hopefully for our last work session to discuss the development code as well as zoning map we have a couple of items that we just want to follow up and and bring you up to speed as to what's transpired since we met last week to give you an update on kind of where we're at with response forms we've had at our public hearing last Wednesday at PNC we had probably about somewhere around 300 people that showed up we were here early in anticipation of trying to try to deal with some of those most of the people showed up probably about 6 20 625 some people may have left just because they couldn't get into the building we had them wrapped around the building DTV and planning staff did an excellent job of really trying to do a little bit of crisis management we turned this room into a viewing room we turned the downstairs conference room into a viewing room we divided and conquered had staff in both locations so we can kind of talk about what some of those issues were as well as set planners up in some of the conference rooms down the hall to to try to address some of those issues with that being said we had about 170 in opposition and 58 in favor to being neutral with that being said we tried to figure out what the opposition comments were from the comment cards of that you can see where that's broken out largely what we had for the population that was there was ultimately not really understanding the zoning district in which they were in and why they were changing so really it was change and a lot of it once we explained really where that was at that brought a little sense of relief we've received actually even up until today some positive feedback from citizens that you know they feel better about what was occurring especially after having a little bit more information to go with that. Basically the speaker cards if we were to talk about what we had largely we had opposition to the zoning map we had very little opposition or comments related to the development code with the development code we had seven in opposition one in favor of we had I believe four individuals that spoke and really the issues there were also related to the zoning map and or the R3 designation that I'll get to here directly. When we talk about the draft zoning map and the speaker cards we had 14 individuals that spoke we again largely had to do with some of the RD5X which is a holding category going to an RR did not wish to change nor to have any zoning designation so had quite a few of those as well as dealing with some of the changes that we've made since then at least up Friday that I'll speak to somewhat. Our recognition of what had occurred with PNZ we were proactive in getting the city's main web page we put a splash up there to get a direct link to the zoning map we heard individuals say that they could not find the zoning map even when they went to dentoncode2030.com there were too many clicks so we have the main landing page for the city there is just a direct link to the zoning map and we also put another link directly on that main splash of frequently asked questions trying to help address those issues that relates to the transition and primarily those are zoning districts we also released a press release we went on social media and have really aggressively tried to get the information out there from what we heard from the feedback from PNZ. So we have also set up for next Tuesday prior to the council meeting that we'll have city staff available over here beginning at 2 p.m. so we'll have stations set up so that we can ultimately try to vet out what we can and allow the public an opportunity to come in so they're not coming in at again 6/20 if that's what the case is but largely I think we addressed the bulk of the individuals that were at PNZ anticipate maybe a few may still show up we just don't know what the rest of the rest of our citizens citizenry look like. So I mentioned with the R3 in part of what we were doing in the use specific standards and in within the allowed uses R3 we had a piece in there which allowed townhome, duplex, triplex quad or not quadplex and townhomes after meeting with the DCRC on Friday and the feedback that we received from the public we've removed that from the R3 designation so it would take it to R4 and above so R3 would just simply be one and two family dwellings. So I had a question about that and I understand how that came to be. Now I want to preface this by saying that I had previously been under the false impression that actually duplexes were included under the current codes for R3 but they're not. It's because I had been misinterpreting all along that definition of what now we're calling townhomes which is and I like that it's called townhomes in the new codes because that's the colloquial definition. I had been interpreting the current definition under NR3 and all the current codes which is attached single family dwelling. Correct. I had taken that to mean you know well duplex is like two attached triplex is three attached and townhome is as many what is it three or more anyway but now I understand that only applies to townhome so that is all that is to say you know my concern about restricting that zoning further now and I understand there's a lot of public support for it is that the ideas I understood it was that the current zoning being presented was supposed to reflect what was currently what is currently on the books already and then future zoning changes changes to zoning being coming more or less restrictive were to come to us further down the line that was to be another stage so it's not to complicate things and that's of course with the exception of new uses which didn't exist prior so if you could kind of explain why if you understand my objection to doing this now you know why that decision was made for R3 other than the fact that so many people came out against it you know why can't the answer have been well you can bring these objections back to council at this future date when we you know when when the zoning will be reconsidered I'm sorry yeah I will address it quite easily we're trying to figure out and I had to think back and went went back and found a chart that I'd made early on in the process and initially we stopped at R4 was our top zoning and we've since added an R6 and R7 so at the time that we started this process the R3 was going to be a conversion from the current in R4 so somehow or another this the SUP process or the ability to do these with SUPs didn't get taken off when we added those two other zoning districts and then re-evaluated who went to what so in actuality the R3 and this goes back to the 2030 plan as well the the 2030 plan talks about density of four and less is low low residential low low density residential that's what R3 falls under is that low density residential and townhomes duplexes and triplexes are not what people consider low density residential they're they're a moderate density residential yeah okay and and thank you so I I understand from that perspective and appreciate the clarification and also that and so I happen to live for instance I live in an R3 it is going to become R3 but as you're explaining you know it's not quite as simple as that when you look at you know how so anyway thank you for that that's very relevant but I'm curious also kind of from a staff perspective how you and I'm not trying to put you on the spot but I'm just generally curious how you kind of balance that decision you know to make something that that might seem to at least for someone living in R3 like a change I have a question of clarification I thought what I heard you say Councilmember Amateur that your understanding of this process was that the zoning the new classification of zoning should reflect as close as possible to what's the current zoning on the ground and uses is that my understanding yes and that had been that had been my impression that that was for this go around that was the goal okay so a couple questions currently in R3 are duplexes, triplexes and townhomes allowed in current current in R3 no I'm asking staff no to townhomes with an SUP townhomes with an SUP so before the zoning planning zoning meeting the code even now before you start making any change R3 in the new classification includes townhomes, duplexes and triplexes with an SUP is that correct what does the current R3 say before you before you take these out yes correct that would be that would be correct as as the draft was out there for the yes correct so what you're doing the decision you're making is making the current or the proposed R3 look more closely like what the current R3 is because absolutely if you had duplexes and triplexes and all that those aren't in the current ones except for townhomes with an SUP correct and so you're trying to restore that because of the methodology that Mayor Pro Tem had just enumerated that because we've shifted some around this was just I don't want to say it was an oversight but because we we did some moving around this residents brought it to our attention the staff's attention that you've got things in here that are allowed now that were not allowed in the current in R3 zoning and you're just trying to restore that sort of consistency is that correct absolutely accurate okay so Councilmember Armitage what when you're saying so I'm still are you saying that you're opposed to moving these out of the current proposed R3 zoning so this is my question just to rearticulate so I understand why duplex and triplex are being taken out because currently duplex and triplex are not allowed even with an SUP they're just not allowed in R3 they're not permitted in R3 but townhomes are currently allowed with an SUP in R3 so I'm just I'm just wondering this is a question I just wanted to hear from staff perspective exactly and let me let me provide a couple more pieces to that so so keep in mind that we've made we've made the transition and we're taking a code that's 17 years old and trying to make it current and some of these things we've added in but we dealt with density to the past now we have now we're dealing with the lot size so we're using setbacks and realistically in an R3 someone couldn't put a townhome in so you wouldn't be able to do it because of the standards that we're putting in place so anyone with R3 property that wishes to do something other than a single-family is is able to single-family detached is able to do that by coming in and just requesting a zoning change so they can go through the process of a zoning change and go to the appropriate zoning for what it is they're they're proposing to do can ask a follow-up question to help me understand so it is the same true for tiny homes which is the new use so right now under the current draft tiny homes are not permitted even within SUP in R3 is that I'll have Richard look because we made a couple of changes on that and that's what yes PD PD only so so it's a plan development so you're gonna have because a tiny home isn't going to be a single-family detached on a lot it's going to be really consolidated with other so so it's a plan development tiny homes so a plan development of tiny homes is permissible in the new codes under R3 within SUP is that what you're saying are you looking at the zoning districts not within it plan development is a zoning district of itself so you'd have to come in and get zoning for that plan development oh of course okay and thank you code committee who has spent a lot more time I appreciate appreciate your I'm sorry did you answer that I was just verifying what we had in the book they did and you're right now I understand thank you so she brings up I mean and and as she asked her question then if right now R3 current in R3 allows townhomes with an SUP what's the objection to in the proposed R3 allowing townhomes with an SUP which is basically identical to what it is currently I understand about removing duplex and triplex the lot size so that that lot size that because they're planted as individual lots for each of the townhomes okay it wouldn't meet the standards the current standards but they correct it would have met the standards in the current zoning the NR3 zoning correct okay it's just it's different it's different now okay okay so I assuming we're done with the R3 what what that recommendation is and we're we're moving forward again we heard a lot from the public on on that very issue and I think that addresses the concerns from our citizenry the other was gas wells so our city attorney Aaron Lial met with Clarion on Tuesday following the council meeting I guess it was or Wednesday early regardless last week and with that being said we needed to change the organization of gas wells so the way that the structure of gas wells is in the code we're just going to modify the way that that's set up just to make sure that we're consistent with what we have it has been our intent and continues to be the intent that we are not making any changes to gas wells I've said that countless times I continue to say that and Mr. Lial is ensuring that that we're not doing that by virtue of how it is that we're putting it into the code so we're going to have a little bit of an organizational change within the code but no no change to the the context when discussing with Clarion basically what we were proposing to do is to put the gas well ordinance the 2015 version in its own separate appendix so what we'd be doing is to renumber re-letter to be consistent with the rest of the proposed DDC with that numbering scheme as well as making sure that it's very clear the differences between those regulations that are zoning and those that are development site development regulations and as you all know under House Bill 40 once a ordinance reaches five years then it's presumed to be commercially reasonable for purposes of HB 40 so we're approaching on the four-year mark we've got another year to go and so that's one of the reasons why I didn't propose that we open this up at this point along with the DDC because it would have sidetracked everything as you some of you who were here in the 2010 2012 and 2015 gas well ordinance amendments it was a very comprehensive time-consuming process for council members council members and staff so the recommendation that I had proposed was not to make any significant changes to it any substantive changes I think having the appendix is good in that way and I didn't know that about the the five-year so I guess my question is if it's an appendix and we decide to have that discussion and make minor modifications or slight changes then the appendix would be the only thing that we vote instead of the whole DDC each time correct it would follow the DDC amendment process but that is correct yes yeah I just missed a little bit of what you said I'm really interested so I understand that if something is commercially reasonable then it's sort of protected or it gives the city additional defense against a challenge that our ordinance is not commercially reasonable under House Bill 40 that was the Fort Worth provision because theirs had been five years so all the rest of us since we modified in 2015 we had to start that clock again so for the last five years apparently it was commercially reasonable in the last five years but I just didn't catch what exactly about ours is you know is is it that will be coming up on the yes the whole thing you're saying the whole thing yes the whole thing is okay the clock is ticking we're just under four years okay thank you and I believe Clarion's looking to see and and you can correct me if I'm wrong Aaron whether or not that that retaining it in chapter six as it was stated and renumbering that is the similar same option as being an appendix I think I think that's correct they were going to look into that a little bit further and then come and get back to us okay okay and then another component to that would be that I think Aaron maybe you'd like to speak to the vested rights portion of this as well and most of the council members are probably familiar with the vested rights statute in this basically the it's also known as the freezing statute anytime a developer brings in an application for development not zoning but for development once that permit is filed even if it's the first permit in a series of permits the regulations that were in effect on the day of the filing remain frozen so if we make other changes three months after that the developer doesn't have to comply with those with those regulations because they're vested in the ones that were in effect of the date of the filing and and that's all is driven by state law chapter 245 of the local government code what the council adopted back in 2013 was a procedure as to how do you determine how does a developer determine that they have rights that are vested and so that that's currently in thirty five point three point eight and spells out the actual process what a developer has to do file a petition and gets reviewed by the city manager and a determination is made that's not in state law so many cities including our own have that type of process built into it so that was inadvertently left out we are bringing it back in I guess clearly I didn't understand exactly the difference between the statute and the process so that's coming back in so that we do have a large-scale developer that's proposing to file something under our procedure so we're trying to ensure that it's still there thank you additionally Friday we had some conversation with the development review committee on the NM zoning district and the use of administration professional and government offices so there were a caveat within the MN that would cap the administrative professional government offices at 10,000 square feet and then page 208 has the section that references where this is at and so we're proposing that it go to 25,000 and 25,000 require anything over 25,000 would require an SUP additionally we had an issue with musician studios we had received some feedback we worked through the language with our legal staff and outside council the definition of a musician studio so again allowing a musician studio in accordance with actions that were taken by this council some time ago will be a facility and in green is the change the primary use is the production so we are defining a musician studio and then ultimately excluding that of a one and two family dwelling so if the primary purpose is someone's residential dwelling they wouldn't be considered a musician studio so as a home occupation they would be able to do that if that makes sense so it was our definition that we changed and again working with our legal staff and the outside council ultimately ended up with adding the primary use is just seeing now seems to miss the main thing that happens in musician studios which is practice like playing of musical instruments other than you know not necessarily in a private instruction setting. I wouldn't disagree I mean ultimately we can add that we can edit I don't know that anyone here would have any issue with that and we can visit with a development review committee but I think if you mean practices in band practicing I remember the legal saying that anyone has the right to practice in their garage or have a garage band or practice in their home that that isn't what this was trying to capture unless that's what you're saying? Well there are limitations you know to playing in your home or in a garage in terms of meeting a noise ordinance if you can be heard in the next dwelling you know that violates the ordinance and you're just having one next to a music house which I enjoyed I'm not saying everyone in my house enjoyed it you know the thing you can say to someone who's violating the ordinance is what about working in a studio that's where music could be played in its own so that you know that that's taken into account. Well yeah for us we talked about this on council and I guess a year or so ago and for being in a music town there's several individuals who have recording equipment and maybe it's not you know that's where the primary use came from because there's several people bands musicians that have individuals come over they do you know little recording tracks and we didn't want to make that use non-conforming so. I get the primary use thing totally fine with that it's just when I think about what happens in a musician studio playing music seems to be one of the main things I know I'm going way out in the limb here but. Well I don't think that's I don't think because it's not in there that means you can't do it. I agree and I don't know that it's a problem to add or or not to have it but happy to happy to add it if so directed I just we can do that. Yeah I guess I just want to make sure that it it's worded in such a way that it doesn't preclude people from practicing at home and catch the primary use that's where really correct this this is this is truly looking for that commercial operation we have two different components that will address the home based occupations meaning number of persons as well as they have to comply with the nose or noise ordinances so. So are you saying is this an urban farm or a community garden. Thank you. Moving right along. So you can add wordsmith that in. Absolutely will. Yeah. Richard you got that. Okay so where where we're at is last Wednesday we had our our public hearing with PNC PNC recommended both the code and the zoning map. We recognize next week we'll come to counsel for the code and the draft zoning map. Our intent is is that we are going to open the public hearing and continue to a date indefinitely. So we anticipate that we are going to have more public feedback and comments we're going to work through those those issues prior to adopting the zoning map. What we will have within that that indefinite period is is that we're going to take consideration of individual zoning changes those that that may be inconsistent with a map transition will batch those will organize those for consideration. So we may do a district type or we may do it geographically so we may have a quadrant of the city or some area that just makes sense to kind of evaluate that entire area so we can provide a presentation on numerous parcels whether it's parcel type or or just the geography of where it is so that we can give you at least that presentation and then we can certainly get public feedback feedback and input as we put out notices as we'd be required with any other zoning change. Yeah quick question is there anything that took place during the PNC kind of meeting preparation leading up to that you would like to have in place. So I wish we had more computers more maps more whatever to accommodate people or to pull up you know interactive maps is there anything we're missing in preparation for the council meeting that soon I think you're right probably most of it was addressed but on the off chance that we do have another phase two type crowd what what do you is there anything we're missing to help you and your staff illustrate the people changes help them see the changes or anything like that. I sure hope not so I thought we were prepared last Wednesday we will be more prepared this this next week we were going to be here at two o'clock we have all the staff that all of our planning staff is going to be available IT is providing us with you know additional laptop computers so we're going to make certain that we're set up and that we're going to be available to the public as well the only the only question or challenge may be depending on how work session goes and how long that may go and whether or not there's a closed session where that might take place or if we might have some alternatives but we haven't gotten to that point to have that conversation with the city manager okay thank you thank you so as we as we go through the process of looking at these individual considerations and those individual zonings or group zonings prior to the effective date it'll come back to City Council we'll hear the consideration of the April 23rd hearing and we'll have the any of the zoning changes that are being proposed prior to that date they will be heard they will be ultimately heard whether it's in a group or individually and they'll be called by individual ordinance but then we'll have the consideration and approval of a new zoning map which will be as amended to include those individual hearings just maybe a reminder is is that the zoning map is nothing more than a graphic interpretation of the zoning so it's the action that council takes to approve a zoning change and then we color the map so that you can then see it so we're not changing the zoning map we're changing zoning on a parcel so we're going to reflect that on a map so really the actions that you're going to take prior to the adoption of the map will be the map with with those changes as amended we're just not going to change that draft zoning map because we've published that out there and so people have an understanding of what they're looking at and I guess I also want to say that that last bullet is is that we're going to continue to work through any city initiated rezonings that we feel are necessary so as we make these changes as council goes through these hearings and we look at this holistically we may have other items that we may want to bring forward but of course we'll do that at the direction of the city manager and council but we just know that we're going to continue to do this on an ongoing basis is review the code and the zoning as we move along so one other change that occurred and Richard's going to pass out the transitional chart as we as we heard from citizens last Wednesday and as we work through the development code review committee on Friday it came abundantly clear that we needed to to look at the transitional chart this transitional chart will become a part of the code this will be one of the appendices and it will be included within the within the language of the ordinance when adopted so what we've done is we've we've moved some of the zoning districts from our where the current zoning districts are to more closely align with some of the challenges that you've heard from folks with the are seven where it is they were claiming an up zoning or a down zoning some of that occurred with the transitional chart so we're modifying the transitional chart to make this more consistent with where we're at today this is that update and like I say this will be adopted as a part of the code and as well as in the ordinance that is adopting the code and I don't know if Mr. Chair if you have any comments that you'd like to make with that or yeah we had quite a bit of discussion on this and it's it's something that's been discussed off and on throughout the course of our meetings and I think as we got down to the wire we started seeing the writing on the wall when as issues came forward so we will have a few people who a few citizens who will be re-noticed because we're now what the intention originally was was if you are in this zone you go to this one but when the map came out there were some that didn't do the proper crossover or for whatever reason and so those will be re-noticed to let them know what they actually are going to if I'm not mistaken prior to the change yeah those that that have been noticed that they're going to an R7 may not be going to an R7 may be going to an MN which may be more appropriate and conversely those that would be going to an MN might be going to an R7 and and we had a number of examples of that this this fixes that actually helps to rectify and will reduce the number of notices that will be sending to property owners because it's a more appropriate zoning classification so we'll have less hearings as a result of doing this when we come through to that next phase after we have next week's meeting and then we start the city initiated re-zonings this will reduce that number with that being said if I you know I'm just certainly looking for any last wisdom that I need to to take forward and any items that you know we need to address prior to next Wednesday's meeting or next Tuesday's meeting excuse me just be well hydrated next Tuesday and eat nutritious it might be a long meeting we never know any questions for this councilmember armature just a small request that if we could have a copy of this PowerPoint sent it wasn't in the backup so just to have that for my members thanks absolutely mayor pro tem the minor changes that we've made like for example the musician studio and that you're gonna have a list of all those that will be presented to us next week and is the yes thank you there's amendments to we will have a in a rata we will have a complete list of all of the changes from what the draft is that you see today prior to publishing that will be a part of what we're doing when we pass the development code so or hope to pass the development code with that being said that way that all of those changes are outlined and where we're at currently any other questions comments all right thank you very much for the update well that leads us to the end of our open work session we will now convene the closed session at 525 we will consider the following items consultation with attorneys under Texas government code section five five one point oh seven one deliberations regarding real property under Texas government code section five five one point oh seven two so we're going to move into closed session and dinner is ready so y'all ready down there at the end y'all ready I'm just giving you guys a hard time well welcome everyone to this meeting of the Denton City Council it is about 630 p.m. on April the 16th 2019 I'll call this meeting to order our first item on the agenda is the pledge to the U.S. and Texas flag and please stand with me if you're able I have a couple proclamations the first one is a proclamation for the national day of prayer who is here to come on up receive this good evening how are you wait on old castor in here need some help yeah no you're good oh wow okay well if you would introduce yourselves and just tell us a little bit about the proclamation the national day of prayer coming up I'm Dorothy Smith and I'm the dent coordinator and we are going to have a really full agenda this this year we have the McNeil family that's going to start a concert at 11 and our prayer and program is starting at noon to one o'clock and we're just looking for a wonderful time we have shuttle service because of the parking problem around the square and so it's going to be at the corner of Northam and Parkway and and we will have a shuttle service from there to the square and then back after the program and we just got a lot of neat things planned this year so and if if it rains which it doesn't usually but you know how that is yeah so if it rains we will be at the cross timbers the Denton campus on West McKinney Street next to the independent bank I think is what it changed to so I'm John Smith and I guess I'm there and boy but I think that was been a long time ago so I guess I'm an out and I'm working with well thank you all so much for being here as a mayor of the proclamation proclamation by the mayor of the city of Denton Texas well my ear just started ringing as I was saying that and you know when your starts ringing sort of messes you up but anyway whereas the National Day of Prayer was first declared in 1775 when the Continental Congress appealed to the colonies to pray for wisdom in forming this nation whereas on May the 5th 1988 President Ronald Reagan set forth the first Thursday of May of each year as a National Day of Prayer and whereas throughout the history of this great nation many citizens and leaders have and do rely on the power of prayer and their faith in God and whereas there will be a citywide gathering on May 2nd at the courthouse on the square at noon at which time people come together to pray for the seven centers of influence government leaders on all levels our military the media the business community education churches and families now therefore I Chris Watts mayor of the city of Denton Texas do hereby declare and proclaim May the 2nd 2019 as National Day of Prayer in the city of Denton and encourage all citizens to gather on May the 2nd 2019 to pray for our nation and thank you so much for doing this year in and year out thank you so much for what you do for our community. This is a proclamation for the University of North Texas the football team and University of North Texas and just come on down everybody. I think Gerard this is this is a sort of your initiative is that is that correct okay you know when you you make national TV and have a great great year they did you know and plus I'm biased I'm a season ticket holder so okay wow all right does that get him any extra kudos since he said that on on local television well I want you guys to introduce yourself and just tell us a little bit what you do and about North Texas football. Gerard Moseley chief operating officer and associate vice president and we're honored for this proclamation and Councilman Hudson said be sure to let everybody know we still have season tickets available for this next year shameless plug it is is a request but what we do want to say is we really do appreciate our success is a big part in a big part due to the support we get not only from the community but from businesses and people throughout didn't didn't County and so we're very honored to be here today. I would echo what Gerard said Hank Dickinson longtime member of the athletic department and plenty of years were proclamations weren't forthcoming but since we got to South Luttrell role in this football program we've had some great success happy to keep him in one of the big reasons is one of us top assistant coaches Tommy Maynard so turned over one of the guys that really makes it happen so y'all stole my thunder and you get to say my name for me huh. Tommy Maynard associate head football coach and I've been here all three years with with coach the trail came in at the same time we just been so blessed and so lucky and fortunate to be part of not only a great university but a great community and we've just really enjoyed and embraced didn't and and we couldn't be happier. We did. That's my son Davis he's he's the number one fan right there so yeah he's great. Well someone who's been here my whole life and got two degrees from North Texas I've seen a lot of change and I will tell you the excitement over the last three years that's been generated in this community on the university is is actually unparalleled so thank you so much for for bringing that here and look forward to the continued success and it's my honor to read the proclamation and thank you Councilmember Hussbuss for for bringing this to our attention. So this is a proclamation by the mayor of the city didn't whereas an honor of the University of North Texas football team upon the conclusion of their 2018 2019 football season and whereas the members of the University of North Texas football team work diligently to create and sustain a winning culture as well as represent the University of North Texas positively on the national stage and whereas the hard work put in by the football players coaches and staff has accumulated into two consecutive winning records of nine and four and nine and five respectfully whereas play playing in bowl games two years in a row ensures that the University of North Texas remains recognized throughout the country for its accomplished football program which increases the standing of the university and the city of Denton and whereas these players have succeeded in providing sustained excellence for the football program and the university while engaging in their studies and managing the rigors of the student athlete life and where Seth Littrell Ren Baker and the other coaches and directors have elevated the main green to a powerhouse in the conference USA with an increased reputation nationwide and now there and now therefore may be proclaimed that the mayor the city of Denton here by recognizes the University of North Texas football team for its achievements and urge all citizens of the city of Denton to continue to share in recognition of their accomplishments thank you thank you guys for being here. Thank you all gentlemen for being here thank you so much our next item on the agenda is presentation from the members of the public if we could review the procedures for addressing the City Council. The Denton City Council has adopted rules of procedure including a code of conduct that applies to citizens as well as council members these rules were enacted to promote an orderly process and to preserve decorum here is a brief review of the rules that apply to citizen reports citizens will have four minutes to give a scheduled citizen report and four minutes to give an open mic report there will be an electronic bell when time has expired if the remarks are not concluded by that time the citizen will be asked to stop speaking if the citizen does not cease and a second request is made the mayor will request to have the citizen removed from the council chamber citizens are asked not to approach the dais if a citizen has papers or other materials to hand out to the council please let the city secretary know in advance for scheduled citizen reports the council may initiate discussion or questions following each citizen report for non scheduled open mic citizen reports the council may listen to citizens speak however because no notice of the subject of the open mic report has been provided to the public in advance the Texas open meetings act limits any deliberation or decision by the council to a proposal to place the item on a future agenda a statement of factual policy or a recitation of existing policy citizens are asked to direct all remarks and questions to the council as a whole and not to any individual member please refrain from making abusive personal impertinent profane or slanderous remarks anyone who violates this council rule of procedure may be immediately removed from the council chamber thank you in advance copies of the rules of procedure are available from the city secretary we'll move on to 3b which is received scheduled citizen reports from members of the public our first speaker will be dr Stephanie Renke regarding Children's Advocacy Center for Denton County if you'll come down and state your name and address your time will begin hi my name is Stephanie Renke I reside at 3621 Bentley Court here in Denton 76210 mayor city council members city staff and guests good evening I'm a resident of Denton I consider myself to be a true Dentonite having lived here since I was six years old and it's my privilege to serve on the board of directors for the Children's Advocacy Center for Denton County and my purpose this evening is to thank you for your ongoing support and to share with you some updated information about the Children's Advocacy Center it's difficult to talk about the subject of child abuse statistically one in six boys and one in four girls will be sexually abused before their 13th I'm sorry their 18th birthday and sadly Denton County is no exception 1096 children came to the Advocacy Center in 2018 to tell their story of abuse to a professional interviewer to begin their journey to justice and healing putting that number into perspective that number of children would fill every seat in every classroom at Newton Razor Elementary School the school that I once attended the mission of the Children's Advocacy Center of Denton County is to empower child abuse victims their families and our community through education healing and justice we work closely with law enforcement we have worked with Chief Frank Dixon and the Denton Police Department and I'd like to thank each of them for their efforts to protect the children of Denton along with the Denton PD we bring together child protective services the district attorney's office sexual assault nurse examiners juvenile probation and our own staff this multidisciplinary team approach under one roof is one of the reasons our communities are safer before the opening of the Children's Advocacy Center in 1997 the conviction rate for abusers was eight percent last year one hundred percent of indicted cases resulted in a conviction last year we provided over 13,000 therapy sessions to child victims of abuse services are offered to the child and non-offending family members because the child benefits most when the entire family system is healed all of these services we provide are offered to families in both English and Spanish and they are all provided free of charge the city of Denton has always been a supporter of the Children's Advocacy Center and we appreciate your past and your ongoing support unfortunately our need continues to be great Denton County is one of the fastest growing counties in the nation and we continue to see an increase in the number of child abuse cases we saw a 35 percent increase in the number of interviews last year and over the last two years the numbers have grown by 70 percent we helped 457 clients who reside in Denton in 2018 providing 5,869 separate services to those clients including forensic interviews case reviews medical exams therapy sessions crisis intervention family advocacy and court preparation so I'd like to again thank Chief Dixon the entire police department the mayor the city council and city staff for your time your attention and support that you give to the Children's Advocacy Center for Denton County and in closing I'd like to invite you to attend a sneak peek of our new space for lunch and lunch for elected officials on Monday May 6th at Serve Denton now you know they're in the midst of construction there or you could come Tuesday May 7th at our Lewisville Center we would love for you to meet our staff and see how we provide justice and healing to the bravest children in our community thank you so much thank you councilmember Armitage I have a question oh yeah well first I wanted to just thank you so much for the invaluable public service you provide and I wanted to ask two things one if you could just speak to you let the public know including those watching at home how how they can help help out by volunteering where to look you know what the web address is and second I wanted to request if you could no timeline on this whenever whenever you feel you feel ready to it ready for it I would love to see you know submitted to council just kind of a list of what any remaining you know needs needs that you have in terms of volunteers support whatever so we can have a sense you know not only what needs have been met but also what needs from remain unmet absolutely thank you so much for your kind words and thank you for allowing me to give you a little bit more information about how the public can get involved we you can go to our website the Children's Advocacy Center for Denton County there's a link there where you can pull down a drop-down menu to volunteer opportunities we have things going on year-round where people can get involved we have school supply drives we have a drive at Thanksgiving time to help provide food to families Christmas because these families they get disrupted a lot of times they lose their source of funding because the maybe the offending parent was the breadwinner of the family and so now they find themselves in dire financial situations so we try and fill in the gaps where we can there so we often ask the community to help with those types of things that we do there so visit our website we're in our offices in Louisville but as I mentioned a minute ago we're building and served it and we're looking forward to expanding our footprint and being having more of a presence right here in the city and do you know I find that what is the website WWW it's okay if you don't yeah I always just Google Children's Advocacy Center for Denton County thank you thank you no more questions it's my understanding that the next presenter Mr. Lester Hudson has rescheduled for the next council or sometime in May so we'll go on to our next scheduled speaker Mr. Walter Dobson regarding biodiesel plant exit extension is Mr. Walter Dobson here all right seeing none we'll move on to the next one next speaker is Tammy Whippleman is that correct yes thank you regarding the Denton County MHMR Center crisis residential unit you'll state your name and address your time will begin hello I'm Tammy Whippleman with Denton County MHMR I'm the administrator of special projects there my address is 2509 scripture street suite 100 oh thank you on behalf of myself and our executive director Pamela Gutierrez we are really appreciate your time hearing us tonight we're here to speak about our crisis residential unit the crisis residential unit is an alternative treatment program which serves as an alternative to inpatient psychiatric treatment we're a 12 bed facility located in crumb and we serve individuals for an average of 10 days but up to 14 days as an alternative to inpatient psychiatric treatment the goals of our program for individuals on the individual level are to help individuals get out of a continuous crisis state and to discontinue that cycle of crisis in their lives so they learn how to better manage their lives in the future as well as to increase their quality of life and try to help them restore a pre crisis level of functioning we also help them with basic living needs like employment and housing so when they discharge from our program they are in a more stable place when we do all of this through group counseling and group skills training we average between six and eight groups every day and all of our groups are different and they range from suicide prevention to crisis management depression anxiety management stress management communication skills relationship building pretty much anything you can think of we probably have a group on it we spend all like I said about eight hours a day in group and then we also provide auxiliary services we provide medical services we have a psychiatrist and a nurse that work on stabling the individual's mental health needs they see those individuals the nurse every day and the psychiatrist at least once per week during their stay additionally we have a case manager that works with them multiple times during the day to work on basic needs what are the things that the individual is going to need when they discharge from our program to ensure that they'll be stable and we have a lot of outcomes that we've been measuring we've been open for four point five years and we've served fourteen hundred clients during that time so far this fiscal year ninety percent of the people that we've served have not returned to an inpatient psychiatric hospital or jail upon their discharge so our recidivism rate is ten percent which is a fairly good recidivism rate in addition to that ninety five percent of our individuals have reported a positive change in their quality of life so we give a pretest and a post test to quality of life surveys and ninety five percent have improved their quality of life regardless of their length of stay so the individuals with three days or fourteen days are both reporting increase in quality of life so the needs that we're currently seeing are obviously funding this program is grant funded currently but the grant that we have is only partially funding the cost of the program and this program is providing stellar services for a fraction of what it cost to provide services in a psychiatric inpatient facility or in a jail setting so we are coming to the city council requesting additional funding for a program such as this that is providing stellar services to citizens of the city of Denton we've got a couple of questions or comments councilmember Briggs thank you for coming and presenting and I'm looking over the presentation and I'm I may have seen it but if you could just tell us how these clients are chosen twelve people because I do know there's a great need in our community and there's probably you know a hundred or so so how are the twelve individuals chosen for this type of program so the individuals have to be referred to us either through our mobile crisis outreach team so individuals go out to the community and see individuals that are in crisis and they are referred from them or they can be referred from inpatient facilities that feel like the individuals need a step down into the community or from a physician any physician can refer to that program as well so would this be considered sort of a transitional type of housing it it is a it's a it can be used as a step down from an inpatient facility it's not really transitional housing his transitional housing is usually a little bit longer than two weeks but typically what we do is we provide opportunities for people to find transitional housing if they have or if they're homeless and they're they need additional treatment while they're looking for housing okay well thank you for coming this is really great to learn about thank you appreciate it councilmember Archer so first I want to thank you for what you do and encourage my colleagues to go and visit the crisis residential unit it's one thing to read about another thing to visit and I will never forget my experience having visited to see the effect it has on the people who live there and how much they love it how peaceful and beautiful the setting is but my question is I was wondering if you could elaborate more on so we have these those of you watching me we've got these these handouts that have kind of PowerPoint slides on them and this slide for needs talks about your grant running out there was I had put forward a work session request about this issue of funding and the subject came up well you know doesn't you know the county provide for MHMR so if you could explain you know the role that cities within the county can take and what if there have been other cities as my understanding you know at least one other city has contributed what a difference that would make and also what the timeline is exactly when your grant funding is running out what we specifically city of Denton can do to sustain this program absolutely so we do get state funding and we do get funding from city and county but they're all for other programs so this specific program was started through a different grant and so when we don't have when we can't take other state funding or county funding and just put it towards whatever program we want it has to go towards the programs that they fund we have received funding before from city of Denton but it was for a different program and it's through a grant from the city of Denton and we have also received funding before from city of Louisville as well thank you customer Meltzer I saw your name up or you did you withdraw your name I would do because councilmember Armentor okay I was going to ask okay all right seeing no more questions thank you very much appreciate it thank you for your time I appreciate very much you bet that concludes our presentation from members of the public we'll move on to the consent agenda chair would entertain motion or entertain action on the mayor pro tem move approval of the consent agenda pulling items E N and S did you repeat that please mayor pro tem I'm sorry consent agenda with the exceptions of items E N and S E N and S okay councilmember Briggs I second all right we have a motion and a second to approve the consent agenda except for agenda consent agenda items for E for N and for S which will be taken up as items for individual consideration does that accurately reflect the motion on the tape yes all right thank you all right let's vote on the board please consent agenda passes say for agenda items E N and S we will now take those up in order the first item to come up will be agenda item for E we've got a couple of recusals councilmember Armentor and councilmember Meltzer agenda item for E is considered option of an ordinance of the city of Denton approving a city co-sponsorship and amount not to exceed three hundred fifty five dollars of in-kind services for the University of North Texas Department of Media Arts movie I don't believe a presentation was requested so no presentation councilmember Husbeth right that's that's my recollection as well outstanding program and outstanding teacher and so look forward to it and I move approval all right mayor pro tem second we have a motion and a second for agenda item for E let's vote on the board please motion carries five zero give councilmember Armitage and councilmember Meltzer a chance to rejoin us for the next agenda item which will be agenda item for N I believe okay so we're gonna move in yeah the the presentation on agenda item for N we're gonna put that at the end just because the they're they had to take some time they'll be back they're going out of town this evening so they want to leave right after the council meeting so we'll consider them once they get here we'll go ahead and work them in yeah thank you and that's agenda item for N so we will we'll bring that forth later on in the agenda so agenda item for I believe it was s is consider approval of a resolution of the city of Denton opposing both Senate bill 1152 and House bill 3535 which were recently introduced in the 86th Texas Legislature good evening mayor city council Sarah Hickler director of public affairs the item before you is a resolution to oppose Senate bill 1152 and House bill 3535 so cities collect reasonable rental fees for the use of their public right away so this includes for companies that have infrastructure in our right of way we will charge reasonable rental fees on behalf of our taxpayers that own that public land what Senate bill 1152 and House bill 3535 are proposing to do is to allow any company that provides telephone and video services which have infrastructure in our public right of ways to stop paying the lesser of two fees which they pay now they'll have the option to either pay the telephone access line fees or the state cable franchise fees although they benefit financially and profit from both by using public land for private purposes so essentially these bills could force the city to subsidize the cost of doing business for the companies by giving away taxpayer owned property for less than the fair market value of rent which should be charged under calculation of this bill the city of Denton would have lost revenue on behalf of the taxpayers in the amount of 709,000 in 2017 and 669,000 in 2018 Senate bill 1152 has passed out of the Senate on April 4th and that bill has been received by the House for consideration although it has not been scheduled in the House yet I would expect in the next week or two it will be scheduled for a House vote should council want to express opposition a resolution has been prepared for your consideration. All right Councilmember Meltzer. Yeah I move approval of the resolution expressing opposition. Councilmember Briggs. And I'll second and I appreciate the presentation I just wanted to let the public know what is happening not only you know with the the tax caps and everything there's also other ways that the legislature is reducing ways that the city can collect from larger businesses as well so I just wanted to put that out there and with that I'll I'll second for the opposition. Okay all right we have a motion and a second for agenda item 4s. Let's vote on the board please. Motion carries 7-0. We'll go ahead and move on back to agenda item 4n which is considered option of an ordinance of the City of Dent Texas Home Rule Municipal Corporation authorizing the approval of a fifth amendment to professional services agreement between the City of Denton and Fries and Nichols. Good evening Mayor, Council we're here to talk just briefly about amendment 5 to the Mayhill contract. This amendment if you recall Mayhill it actually extends from University Drive all the way down to almost I-35 Colorado Boulevard. The original phase stopped just short of going over the DCTA railroad tracks to provide a safe crossing. About a year and a half ago we decided to attempt to move forward with the bridge and funding options for the bridge the North Central Texas Council of Governments came back as a partner of that project funds have been committed for construction of that we were also in the process of acquiring the last pieces of right away so that we could continue that project forward and that would be this little piece here in red while it looks little in conjunction with the overall project it is one of the most challenging areas that we have on the project. The original contract for this project design contract for this project was four and a half million dollars it was back in 2010 we had several subsequent amendments for a variety of issues some that had to do with just the structures that were being and properties and structures that are acquired around the original phase of the project and then progressing all the way through until the amendment 3 amendment 4 where we had fairly significant changes based on some additional scope to the project adding Spencer Road and rehabilitation of that road some additional work that needed to be done to determine what else needed to go in conjunction with that bridge especially as we went back and looked at the overall project and some of the items that were not as thoroughly looked into specifically storm water flood control runoff scenarios especially at the connection where the bridge would be going in place. Amendment 5 is a fairly inclusive all-inclusive adjustment to this project when the original bridge piece of the Mayhill project was stopped short and they went to the alternative alignment project was led under the bridge was fairly well already complete and ready to go to construction it was about 90 percent complete may have actually been just a little bit further so part of what you have in this construction amount down here or this excuse me the design amount this 1.3 are a multitude of different things one it's the addition of reconstruction of portions of Mayhill Road as you go a little bit further south of the bridge I'm going to go back it may actually be this is the alignment of the bridge there are there's the intersection that needs to be taken care of right down in this vicinity there are some additional easements and things that need to be acquired to make this piece work it's specifically in this area and just around this area as we start getting into grading some of this roadway needs to be re-analyzed just over time the original design contract had been done back in 2014 so here we are now 2019 some of the standards have changed some of the details need to be updated portions of the bridge were actually analyzed where we might instead of going with a retaining wall go with an embankment which would be a little bit more stable provide a safer course if somebody were to lose traction on the roadway and move off side you also have construction administration some additional inspections help there is a piece that is the drainage portion the final grading plan and design of the flood control pond that goes just to the east of the bridge and that is to prevent flooding of the homes downstream that are currently in the floodplain when the project was originally designed there was additional culverts put under Stewart Road when the alignment was shifted back over to where Mayhill sits today there was no flood study tied to that there was no looking at the downstream flood conditions they would just put in some extra culverts because that's what it's appeared to call for as far as drainage when city staff turned over about a year and a half ago we got a chance to look at this project again we came back and looked at this potentially dangerous scenario and came up with an option that allowed us to then take some of this flood floodplain area offline control it on the upstream side of Mayhill especially with the bridge coming in on the west side so what you have today is an amendment to complete the design to move forward with landscaping construction plans get this project moving with the cog dollars that have been tied to it to get the bridge over the railroad tracks we're recommending approval of this amendment for 1.3 million dollars mayor pro tem move approval of item 4 in we have a council member Briggs do you have a discussion okay we don't have a second yet so I'll allow that go ahead yeah yeah well yeah I just I thank you for doing the presentation that's it's a large contract and so when you look at the consent agenda and you see seven million dollars and it's there I figured it needed its own discussion and then there's all the different moving parts five amendments so there's there's a lot of information so I just wanted to put it all out there and make sure that we all had everything we needed thank you second councilmember Hudson second all right we have a motion and a second let's vote on the board please for agenda item for in motion carries five to two thank you thank you Todd that concludes our consent agenda items that were pulled for individual consideration I believe we'll move on now to agenda item five items for individual consideration will be agenda item 5a consider adoption of the ordinance of the city of Denton Texas approving a joint election agreement and contract with Denton County for election services for the general election being held Saturday May 4th and runoff election for June 8th 2019 if necessary good evening mayor and council I'm here to present the general election contract the contract is with Denton County for administration of our general election and if a runoff election should be needed then the terms of the contract will apply although the anticipated costs for any runoff would be dependent would not be provided until later the services for the general election are for city council districts one two three and four the locations we do have 26 countywide polling locations and there are only ten locations for the city of Denton total participants are twenty eight entities the grand total cost for the general election is three hundred eighty seven thousand thirty four dollars and one cents of course the Denton cost itself again it is only estimated is at seventy seven thousand four hundred ninety three dollars and twelve cents we will receive the final cost after the general election has been finalized and all costs have been determined the there are actually twelve polling locations but we are only billed for ten since two of the precincts are being shared with a couple of other entities the next few slides present the cost breakdown I won't really go into detail unless you have some specific questions relating to the detail that is provided in that cost estimate and again we get back to the estimated cost any questions any questions seeing none councilmember Armitage I move to adopt this ordinance councilmember Briggs second we have a motion and a second to adopt agenda item five a let's vote on the board please motion carries seven zero agenda item five be considered nominations appointments to the city boards commissions and committees committee on persons with disabilities health and building standards commission and public art committee councilmember Armitage I have a question do we have a rule about how long a specific appointment can go unfilled before something you know before it falls to somebody else or whatever it's my understanding that we don't and I think maybe we should you're correct we don't have that and whether or not the council should or the city should that's a decision for you all to make yeah like I mean I don't have a specific solution in mind you know but I think after a certain period of time you know something should be done so that position gets gets filled if a person can't fill that slot okay all right any other questions don't believe we have any nominations at that time is that correct all right we'll move on then to public hearings 6a continue to hold a public hearing and reconsider the February 5th 2019 denial of an ordinance for a specific use permit to allow for multifamily residential use as part of a mixed use development on approximately 31 acre site I will now open the public hearing and we'll hear comments from staff and presentation and then we'll move into public comment after questions development services so just a brief background on this case if you'll remember earlier this year staff recommended approval of an SUP on this site the planning and zoning commission prior to that had also recommended approval four to three on February 5th council did vote to deny the requested SUP and then on February 12th there was a vote taken to reconsider this so that's what's led us here tonight since that February 12th vote staff has met with the applicant multiple times to review some revisions they wanted to make to the plans so in your backup you'll notice there were two ordinances provided one of those was the original ordinance based on the original site plan which was denied and is up for reconsideration and the second is an ordinance based upon the revised site plan which we'll look at tonight and for tonight's presentation staff's recommendation is based on that revised site plan again just a brief background the site that we're looking at is zone neighborhood residential mixed use which does require an SUP for multifamily I have the criteria for approval of an SUP here in case we need to refer to them but I'm sure you're all familiar it's in general a compatibility analysis and making sure there's no negative impact on adjoining properties just a brief reminder the criteria that staff looked at in our findings regarding this did not change based on that revised request the proposal is still consistent with the future land use designation of business innovation we again didn't see any likely nuisance potential for this use the scale of development is still consistent with what we would like to see in the NRMU district and particularly in a highway location such as this it seemed compatible with the area and again there is adequate infrastructure in place to serve the site so just a reminder of what the original site plan looked like it was broken down into two phases with about 17 acres of multifamily 14 acres of commercial that's not being considered at this time that will be developed in the future this particular plan included 336 dwelling units a mixture of one two and three bedroom units with a density of right at 2.48 units per acre so this is the revised site plan that was included in your backup again a few things have shifted on the site there are less buildings overall the number of units actually dropped from 336 to 330 the density dropped slightly to closer to 20 units per acre and this plan only includes one and two bedroom units again you'll see the 14 acres of commercial is left there for future use this table was provided in your backup I included it here for reference but this breaks down the the original plan and the numbers that were included in its data table the revised plan and then a comparison of that difference hey could you go back to the last slide I couldn't read it on those setback this is the revised plan correct yes on those setbacks I was trying to read it in the backup but also on the screen here let me get behind the mic on the little well that's right near the residential NR fours what is that is that 300 yes sir it's 300 okay and then the three lines from the red starting from the left of the screen what what are those numbers let me print a copy of that glasses won't help me yeah the the the bottom line would be a 466 463 in the middle and then 470 is the northernmost line okay all right thank you so again won't go through this in great detail but some of the key changes between the two plans again was the the decrease in the number of buildings the actual building footprint increase you'll notice the buildings were a little bit larger in scale than the original the total building area did increase the again the density is fairly comparable just about a half a unit per acre decrease lot coverage and landscape area did each of just by about a half a percent and the tree canopy adjusted upward ever so slightly the parking count is a substantial decrease due to that again it's now one and two bedroom units only and there are less units than the original plan and the the setbacks that were proposed between the gas wells did change slightly the setback to that northern pad site increased about 33 feet more and the southern site remained at 300 as it was originally shown the building elevations didn't change you'll notice for the the revised plan there were less elevation options because the units that included garages previously wouldn't be included and in the revised option there's no garages intended a notification was sent for this new public hearing we did receive two responses in opposition that are shown on the map staff's four recommendations did not change between the two versions of the ordinance as those remain the same and then the requirements that are listed in the ordinance that that tie the ordinance itself to the site plan that you're considering did change to account for those new numbers so I've highlighted in bold all of the elements that changed within those six conditions but the context of them remained largely the same and happy to answer any questions I've got some questions but it's more along the oh Councilmember Briggs go ahead I didn't I just flipped my screen over I didn't see you and I'm curious you may not really know because it has to do with the gas well pad sites the one that is 250 I don't know if that well could be if more wells could be drilled on that site but the one the other one what is the potential for for the amount of wells that could go on that site do we know that or is that you're referring to the northern wall site so that particular site on the gas well plat only had one well intended on that site so that well is in place if the the gas well operator sought to add additional wells to that site it would require them to go through the processes in our current code I do have some slides prepared if you all want to walk through that process it's a little bit convoluted with a few different steps but I'm happy to go through that if that would be helpful and Councilmember Briggs when you talk could you maybe get a little bit closer to the mic I sometimes have a hard to well I just have a hard time hearing you know when I saw someone my hearing's going I don't know what to do okay yeah sorry yeah so here's the just a look at the two well sites of the northern well is the one that you're referring to there and then the southern site is the one that had the 300 foot separation on their site plan so again just the gas well plat to reiterate that northern site had one well indicated on the gas well plat the southern site did have two wells only one of them is drilled so the expansion process for that northern site so if you'll notice on this map there is a blue shading here and that is actually floodplain that's recognized by FEMA so under the current gas well ordinance if a site is located within the floodplain fringe there is a lengthy process that has to go through to expand so the first would be a setback reduction that this particular well would need because the site doesn't meet the current setback that's required for existing well sites from protected uses which is 500 feet because it doesn't meet that for any change to the site to occur it would have to get a reduction in setbacks through one of three options that we can look at briefly and then their second step would be what's called a watershed protection permit so this is required for any gas well that's within either a floodplain fringe and ESA or within 1200 feet of the flood pool elevation of one of their two nearby lakes and then additionally for sites that require a watershed protection permit within the city limits of Denton they also have to obtain an SUP as part of that process so expansion on that site would go through the same SUP process that goes to public hearing before P&Z and city council before staff could then approve that watershed protection permit if they meet all the technical requirements and then finally they would go through the gas well site plan process which is the standard process outlined in the 2015 ordinance in lieu of the gas well plats it focuses in more narrowly on just the acreage that they're using adequate landscape buffering access to the site that sort of thing that is an administrative approval once they've gotten through these other hurdles at that location and then from there they could allocate on that site the area where they intend to drill wells and they would be able to fit as many wells as they could based on their geology and the constraints of the site within their designated wellhead area. So I don't know if that addresses the concern but it is a lengthy process but ultimately it would depend on the geology and how the site works but they could obtain multiple wells on that site if they went through all of these steps. Any more questions? Real quick I've got a couple but I just want to get you said that on the setback reduction yes that you had some slides on those three options yes sir and then I want to make sure that I understand that on number two if you're inside the city limits SUP is required and would that come before council I guess an SUP comes before council. Yes sir it would follow the normal SUP process yeah if we could just see those three setback options and then we'll go down with the request to speak okay so there are three options provided in the gas well ordinance the first is a property owner waiver so if the operator can obtain written notarized waivers from 100 percent of the owners of protected uses and lots within residential subdivisions that fall within that 500 foot setback the setback could be reduced from their standard 500 feet to the minimum of 250 the second option is a variance through ZBA so ZBA could approve a variance if it finds that it meets the criteria for approval which is typically a hardship test and wouldn't wouldn't cause any adverse impact on surrounding properties again in that instance it could go from 500 feet to as low as 250 which is the absolute minimum and then the third option is the administrative variance option where a gas well the gas well administrator could approve a reduction in setbacks if the operator has at least one existing site within the same mineral lease that's located closer to protected uses or residential subdivisions than the site that they're proposing to expand and the operator agrees and in writing to limit development on that site that's closer in that instance the setback can only be cut into half the difference between the required and the minimum so in this case it would go from 500 only to 375 I don't think the 375 would benefit the operator in this case because the site is I believe closer than that so they would need to pursue in that case one of those top two options either ZBA or property owner waivers okay I'm going to run down the questions but I'll probably come back to this councilmember Meltzer thank you mayor there were objections from two neighboring property owners what was the nature of the objection in general it seemed like traffic on Windsor Drive was the primary concern and having what looks like a single point of access they will ultimately also have access on I-35 but I believe the concern was just increased traffic on Windsor Drive thank you councilmember Hudson thank you two quick questions so one two different owners right the property owner that's developing and the gas well owners two different people is that right yes I believe the gas operator doesn't actually own any of the surface land just the mineral rights okay got it and and then the second question is the per the city's current current ordinance distance requirements they meet or exceed those existing requirements that we have on the books right now correct the reverse setback is two hundred and fifty feet which they exceed from both wells okay thank you councilmember Briggs on these top two if I recall trying to think back to the original meeting was it mentioned that the the waiver has already been given so one a has already been given to the so that that's already just for this particular property as part of the agreement that this developers entered into with the gas well operator they agreed that in the future they wouldn't oppose if the operator sought this reduction that they would would sign such a waiver it would also be required of all the other owners within that radius okay so could you pull them the site map or something that shows the lots and yeah well do we know how many of those residential lots are within the 500 feet of the pain number one well in other words how many waivers would they need to obtain and I'm assuming the pain number two well do they have to get so that pain number one has a site plan with it right it doesn't yet they would have to produce one if they sought to amend that site from what was okay and that wouldn't but that would include where they're thinking they're going to put any of the wells that they plan to develop and then those wells no matter how many they would have to meet whatever setback distance is required based upon all of these procedures that eventually if they panned out I mean so on the 500 feet from the pain number one well do we know how far that extends down into the northern or the you know the northern part of that subdivision where the pain two well is located do we know that do we know how many I don't have it with me up here but I could I could find a document that has that yeah that would be important and then on when you talked about if you go back to your conditions about the conditions for reducing the oh the setback yes that one I believe okay so the administrative variance is pretty much out because it's not none of them would meet that I think is what you're saying yeah and again I don't know the exact distance but I believe they're already within that 375 as well so okay now if if they're not if they're unable to obtain a property waiver or a variance and or and or is part of my question if if the SUP is denied are those ands you got to have all you got to have this setback requirements and then you've got those other requirements if it's located in a current watershed so you've got two different tests that you've got to meet both of those tests yes that's correct okay okay and if you could go back to the map with the wells located so when you say that part of the flood part of the site is within the floodplain which is that's what it's showing that's because that whole entire what is that a gray area is the is the gas well plat is that correct yeah the the grayish purple color here that outline that includes the subdivision the subject property and this parcel is all within the boundaries of this gas well plat right now do we know if that southern well is still operating i believe both of them are not not to a great extent but they are both producing according to the railroad commission at a slight amount okay all right i'm trying to think of having more questions uh okay thank you appreciate it yep any other questions before we take public comment thank you appreciate hailey all right we'll go with um the applicant first we got a couple of cards we'll go with the applicant and then mr ed soph will be on deck after the applicant so michael nary and orly allison good evening good evening council so working i guess uh michael nary four three two one glenn air drive in dallas i want to thank you guys for taking time to hear us again um we left the last meeting feeling that there was a sense of confusion about the process that hailey just went over in great detail and i think what's important to remember is the main takeaway is that all pathways towards an expansion of the gas well lead back to you uh the the watershed protection permit given that the gas well site plans in the floodplain and in the city limits of denton requires a specific use permit to be granted so they cannot expand the site without your approval as well as pnc we have hailey mentioned we've worked on a revised site plan we've been working on this uh for your consideration tonight approval of this revised site plan is certainly our preference the original one would be acceptable i'm going to go over some of the changes and just call out the differences for your consideration here is the two side by side so what you can see is there are fewer buildings as you mentioned we've pushed the buildings inward from the eastern boundary nearest to the northern well and you'll notice that we've removed the building that was closest to the southern well and relocated the amenity center down there to increase the distance for more units i've kind of redone the comparison chart that was provided to you so i showed the original plan the revised plan the difference just like you saw it and then i put a column in to address whether or not this revised plan in each cup in each row is compatible with the original ordinance and the allowable plus or minus five percent difference that staff was granted excuse me you'll notice that the majority of the items on the revised plan are consistent with the original plan the number of buildings and the parking count those were two proposed changes i made at the last hearing in february and obviously with the denial they weren't considered but parking we're not asking for a variance we absolutely want the code to apply just as a formulaic method to determine based on the actual unit mix developed how many spots are required and we're happy to meet that on the number of buildings you know plus or minus five percent on 16 is less than a building so we figured we'd ask for that to be a maximum the only thing inconsistent is the building footprint and therefore the building total building area which actually was not part of the ordinance i don't believe but building footprint we're asking to increase by about 17 000 feet and i want to talk a little bit about why so the original plan had some e-shaped buildings that you can see on the images in kind of the crevice of the e would would have been stairwells that go up to a landing and then there'd be you know four units around that at levels one two and three the revised plan includes those stairwells as part of the calculation and also includes interior corridors so it's redesigned the stairwells aren't in the same place but we've put in an interior corridor which will improve resident safety in the event of an emergency apologize for the bad images i was on my laptop but you can kind of see what i was talking about on the left is the original building and on the right is the roof line of the new buildings so we believe that this is a conservative plan from day one when you look at some of denton's development code requirements on density you allow 30 units to the acre we've proposed 20.5 20.05 lot coverage and landscape area the maximum is and minimum are 80 20 we've proposed 49 and a half lot coverage and 50.5 percent which is two and a half times what's the minimum required for that on the gas well setbacks as you all well know it's 250 feet uh to a protected use we've pushed these buildings back on the north and you'll see that on the slide and like i said removed one on the southern website so this is the original reverse setback map that we presented last time this is the new one and i've put those numbers up there for you uh to see and you'll notice we pointed out that we removed the building down there so we're at 463 is the closest one on the northern site we've we spend a lot of time working with the gas well operator um you know probably over the course of a year prior to submitting this sup and the the gas well plot what i'd like you to know is that they have a gas well plot that encumbers this entire property uh the entire pain property to the east and and the you know the resident i'm thinking it carves out the residences there but um that allows them total control over what gets developed on the surface of this land so we spend a lot of time negotiating with them working with them talking about their plans and i would just like to convey that everything that they've indicated to us is that their ultimate plan and i think this is reflected in the agreement we reached is to ultimately operate the northern well in a more significant fashion than they are now and abandon the southern wall that being said right now i think the southern well is producing a little bit of gas and the northern well a pretty limited amount if any so just want to conclude by saying you know the reason we've worked on a revised site plan is because we've heard concerns from the commission from the council and we really tried to address some of those concerns by pushing back further from the gas well you know the interior corridor i believe it's a nicer product but when you think about resident safety if you go up a stairwell there's a landing four units go up a stairwell same thing if you're on the third floor there's an emergency beneath you you really have one exit out of the building the interior corridor provides every unit dual path access to two exits this project has received little negative feedback i think hayley just mentioned there were two received i it's my understanding those were in response to a site plan that was shown that didn't show the commercial area so it looked like the whole project was ultimately all going to dump onto winsor road we are as part of this project we're also going to be expanding winsor road right there trying to work with the city on the next little piece um at the south of the flagpole on the pain site and then i think there's a piece a little bit further east that needs to be addressed i'd like to say that denying this sup does not achieve the goal of increasing reverse setbacks nor does it limit the development of many other protected uses that don't require an sup those can be built you know at 250 feet and so i don't believe that denying the multifamily project will achieve the stated goal of you know increasing reverse setbacks this project is intended to anchor a mixed use development that will ultimately contribute over a million dollars of incremental property tax revenue to the city each year that commercial piece you know the timing is in question there's expansion of i-35 going on that will affect the demand for that property but that ultimately will be developed i know the city's in talks on potentially having winsor cross 35 they're relocating the exit to dump in to exit northbound just prior to winsor which will help this property and i learned this morning that the texas department of transportation is expecting to get environmental approval or their environmental report back within 30 days so that's a couple years sooner than we had originally thought but anyhow we appreciate your consideration tonight if you have any questions we're here and lee allison the project engineer is with me as well councilmember briggs just a few questions sure um so you mentioned um evacuation and safety can you just because that was one of my questions and you you mentioned it briefly about the levels and that can you can you go over that again sure so let me put up an image for you so i apologize for the bad image on the left is the original building format she had where those two green spots are in the e those would have been stairwells so on each side of the building you would have a single stairwell up and a landing that landing would have had called four units in it and then go up again same thing so you have stacked three levels of four or five units there if you live up there your only path to exit is to exit and go down that stairwell so imagine just for you to say if there's a fire emergency below you that's difficult now now with the interior corridor you walk out of your door fires below you to the left or right you can go the opposite direction it's just a it's a little more expensive but it helps achieve a better outcome and the event of an emergency well yeah i'm glad that you thought about it and mentioned it because that was a concern you know for being close we've tried to be thoughtful about concerns we've heard and trying to address them and i have just another one clarification you did say that there will be the two exits so there will be one on winzer and one on frontage road right or 35 so on the new plan on the right you can see and the the road and the exact pathways we have to get textile approval on 35 there is intended to be the exit to the south to winzer there's one in the middle that'll access that road with the path out to 35 and then on the very north side it'll the multi-family property will not exit directly on the 35 but it'll have access to that road to then exit out to the access road okay and last last thing on the original when you look at the the satellite image there's a large pond on the property is that used for drainage or is that just can you i don't see it in the design so i'm just curious if oh i'm going to refer to our engineer if that has to be diverted somewhere else or if it's just for man-made or good evening lee allison with allison engineering group the pond that is on there today is a stock pond that is not used for drainage purposes and we do not anticipate keeping it for drainage purposes okay thank you question on the uh the exterior it doesn't look like there's any brick or stone on the exterior of the apartments it looks like stucco hardy plank i believe that the elevations reflect stucco hardy plank hardy board right um any um i mean if you were to have a stone or brick requirement is there any objection to that what we would like to do potentially would be to put that requirement on the buildings uh closest to 35 and closest to winter on the south so that the you get the most bang for your buck on outward appearance uh for your residence does that make sense it does but i would also uh and i understand that but when you have also your your residential that's there and they're looking at those buildings um i think i mean they they're going to be there all the time you know it's it's basically not quite in their backyard but pretty much so i think it's just as important as your sort of frontage on the highly trafficked areas that if uh for for those uh as well so uh i just wanted to sort of get your thoughts on that sure i think that uh so we're not the multi-family developer we have a partner that's working on the project and i think that they are trying to deliver a product that is workforce housing you know young professional price sensitive folks and trying to deliver at a couple hundred bucks a month less than kind of market value so it's a trade-off right everything every cost that goes into the development has to come back on the rent side so i think that i understand that having built sure with stucco and stone brick there's not a huge difference i know there's a cost savings um but as far as what they're rented for what demographic they're trying to target we have no information on that i mean if we did we might put some of that in the sup so um i would just those are my comments on that any other questions for the applicant okay thank you very much we may have other questions as we go through the public comment portion uh next speaker is mr ed soph if you'll come down state your name and address your time will begin good evening pardon me ed soph 1620 victoria drive in denton under the criteria for approval the sup criteria one of them was when evaluating the effect of the proposed use of the surrounding area the following factor shall be considered in relation to the target use of the zone letter d on that is air quality including the generation of dust odors and other environmental pollutants and it was mentioned in the presentation that there were no negatives in this but i would contend that there are definitely are negatives and that could affect people very drastically on july 20th of last year gas wells pain one and two which are close to the proposed development were inspected by modern geosciences the outfit that the city has contracted with to monitor the wells this is on the city's website gas well website pain number one had total fence fence line particulate matter emissions that's including pm 2.5 and pm 10 up here of 60 69.33 micrograms of per cubic meter of air pain number two had total pm emissions again including pm 2.5 fine particulate and pm 10 gross particulate it's called had a total of 87.22 micrograms per cubic meter of air the world health organization's air quality guideline values for 24 hour exposure mean to particulate matter 2.5 is 25 micrograms per cubic meter and those figures you see there under the who 24 hour and their guideline for particulate matter 10 is 50 micrograms of per cubic meter of air pardon me together on that hot july day pain wells one and two filled the air with 157.05 micrograms of particulate matter per cubic meter of air i don't have to tell you you know already that fine particulate matter such as 2.5 are known to trigger or worsen childhood asthma and we already have tremendous rates of asthma in our area there's also been an association made between mothers exposure to fine particulate matter and birth defects these are only two wells out of the 315 located within the city limits what are the cumulative effects of the particulate matter emissions of all those other wells on our air and our health how will the particulate matter emissions from pain wells one and two affect the health of the residents living in the proposed departments this sup again must be denied and again the need for our outdated gas well ordinance to be strengthened to protect the health and safety of future residents in future developments cannot be ignored procrastination is not good policy proactive precaution is thank you very much thank you all right okay this uh we've got one card wishing not to speak was ronda love in opposition 1921 holly hill lane this is a public hearing anybody else wishing to speak please come down state your name and address your time will begin anybody wishing to speak okay we will now close the public hearing discussion action councilmember armature okay um i just wanted to explain uh how i'm gonna vote um i'm gonna vote uh no on this and i want to explain why um why i'm voting no because it's important um that um the public understands why we vote the way we do um i'm voting no uh because of the proximity to gas wells because of putting residents so close to gas wells i understand however uh that this is uh what within our current reverse setbacks i also understand as the applicant said very well uh you know voting against this is not going to change our um our gas well ordinance i thought that was a that was a legitimate point to make and uh it's also true that there are permitted uses uh that could end up putting residents close to gas wells that would not go forward to council however uh because uh i i ran on a platform that included uh my my uh opposition to our our current uh narrow reverse setbacks and setbacks and my need to expand them uh i feel that whenever an issue like this comes before me i feel like it's my responsibility um to do what i can when there's a decision before me um to put people out out of harm's way of gas wells that said i want to just take a moment just to say what i like about this project uh even though i'm voting no um i like apartments i know apartments get a bad rap um i like i know there's no guarantee it would would be workforce housing i think we have a need for workforce housing um so i like that idea don't have a problem with the facade with the density as it's set up and uh so i i just want it to be clear uh that this is not me voting against more apartments and in denton it's about the uh proximity to to gas wells okay uh council member brian thank you mayor um i also have concerns about not having any brick or stone on the on the uh the buildings and uh would like to have a anyone else's input as to if that was required what percentage they might be interested in requiring on the building especially considering it's on 35 uh it's you know part of the the entrance to the city so to speak i know we'll build further up but right now that's on you know kind of one of the more northern developments and it kind of lets people know what denton's about when they see that and so that that becomes even more concerning than what it would anywhere else in town council member briggs so i i wanted to thank you for um working and listening to concerns and changing some things on the um on the project i have noticed um so it's geared towards young professionals which is not marketing towards families and children which was mentioned but there's no guarantee as well um work for there's workforce housing there is a um an evacuation plan that you thought about for safety you've increased the the setbacks more gone over and above and all of that is not unnoticed um up here i still stand where i stood before but i wanted to thank you um for working and going above and beyond what what you could for this project if it does pass it's going to be a better project and it's going to be safer for the people living in it any other discussion comments council member husbeth yeah question is there someone from staff that can speak to the numbers presented or do we not have anyone here the the scientific number yes sir would you not have anyone here tonight okay um and continues yeah that this is where um i fall and this is i'm on record as saying this earlier so i want to repeat it in this form to advocate for change i'm absolutely for it that change starts with us i believe um upholding our end of the equation um and so we have an ordinance in place i think it's our duty to honor that we we also talk about um applications that come in and changes uh to the right now we're talking about the development code and those changes and and uh legally explained if an application is submitted during that time those changes do not affect an existing application and so i think that's where i struggle is if we don't hold ourselves account i get it hey let's change it by all means but if we don't change it how do we how do i reconcile against a moving target no there's no static number i hear there's consistent science but there's never a static number when we have these these discussions the number always moves it's 1000 it's 500 it's 400 it's 300 it's 800 and so that's that's where i should i can't um line up with the moving target and i don't think it's fair uh for those that would come before us and i don't think it's fair for the city to um not put forth a a clear barrier for people to hurdle and so if we wherever we put the burden the the barrier mall forward but it needs to be static and so that's where i fall on this issue and and i appreciate the applicant making the changes that they did and i appreciate the concerns that uh mr soph laid out that's absolutely um significant and i i wish that we would have someone to speak to that uh but that being said um i wish um this this body would would um at some point uh lock in on a number so that we can communicate that early and often and and raise the standard of our expectations or at least stand behind those standards thank you council member melzer i completely concur uh with the remarks we just heard that we need to revisit the matter of gas well setbacks and find our way to uh to a standard that we can that we can agree on that we can communicate clearly that's based on current science uh and that's not internally contradictory with uh other ordinances um that having been said i i don't find that that uh there's anything unlawful about what's being proposed but my obligation first is health and safety that's why we have cities that our power is why we have city councils our power is first to protect health safety and general welfare and knowing that there are no studies that uh show that it's healthy or safe to live within 500 feet of gas wells uh i'll be voting as i did uh the previous time and i i i do recognize you know the very serious efforts that have been made to kind of move further you know in the direction it's uh but it's not where i can move approval got a couple questions for staff um the questions i had before about who was within the 500 feet uh of the the pain i guess is that the number one which is the north well the short number is there'd be 17 lots that would require um the waiver to be signed not including this property not including this property so 18 total okay and um what was i going to ask you oh the setback that the pain too well is from that neighborhood do you know what that is um currently i know it's less than 100 feet i'm not sure the exact number okay all right okay yeah um i appreciate thank you very much i appreciate that i appreciate the applicant's uh efforts in redesigning the site plan i appreciate mr soph your comments here which applied to this project as well as just overall to the city overall and and i i do appreciate that some of the questions i have in using that as a factor in my decision is you know what's the average i mean if we're going to use that data i'd like to have a little bit more idea of what what the data is overall but the truth is council member husbands we have locked in on a number we've got locked in because we have a we have an ordinance that that defines those setbacks now with an sup process each one of these council members is is uh has the right to vote however they see fit and i respect that and and appreciate that process what i've recognized too and that's why i asked for this presentation of what if which is a big what if the gas well developer comes back to try to what is it called get a modified site plan or what's it called hayley the fancy full name for it is a gas well development site plan gas well development site plan and so what i'm hearing is that according to our ordinances which i was here when these ordinances got passed and and discussed and one of the reasons we have this gas well development site plan amendment was for this very situation and that is it increased the setback if they wanted to develop it they had to increase the setback from protected uses and they had to go through a couple of uh approval processes in order to do that one is you've got to get the the waiver from all the property owners you know how difficult is that i don't know i don't know if that would be that difficult quite honestly but then you have to come because it's in the floodplain you have to come before the city and get an sup you have to get the same kind of variance or amendment or regulatory approval that we're voting on here today which means at the time if there is a time where that gas well development operator comes for a gas well development site plan that whoever's sitting up here is going to be in the same situation we are in today to say hey um we've got an sup here that we can deny for you know various reasons uh as expounded by legal on on various occasions and according to our ordinance so they would be in the same position to make the same vote to deny it in order to not increase those setbacks currently the setback is 300 feet on the well that's 80 feet from residential homes and currently they moved the buildings back to where you've got 466 feet to 473 feet away from protected uses which is almost double what we require currently and i appreciate the effort to do that so if nothing changes if they don't come through with this or if it gets denied and it's the status quo this multifamily project will be 400 something feet away from from those gas well sites so i do have a question hayley on and if you can answer this so if they come back then basically the question becomes on the receiving variances from the property owners that just allows them to reduce it from 500 feet to 250 feet is that correct correct now is that is that automatic is that sort of strict liability in the sense if you get that nobody else can take that away barring the other scp process for the floodplain in other words if the floodplain wasn't there if you get that waiver there's no process through city council there's no process through administration it's it's it's a done deal correct as long as it's 100 of the property owners now in this case you have that other sort of mechanism which is the flood plain issue correct so that means that if they want to put new gas well sites in or pad gas wells in they're going to give you a site plan gas pad development site plan and show where all these things go and on that depending on whether it's 500 feet or 250 then they they would have to place those wells accordingly to whatever that distance is based upon correct the setback is actually measured from the boundary of their pad site so the wells would typically be well within that pad site to allow maneuvering of vehicles and things like that around it so so i'm just going to be honest i'm going to vote for this because i believe that right now we have an applicant who is exceeded our code and i've i've watched the setback a discussion that was back in december or november last year when i was not present and you know the fire department stated that the explosion explosion site was 300 feet from the patch i watched that and i watched council members struggle with do we increase the reverse setback and we will have another conversation about that because i wasn't present so we will have that but right now this is what what we have on the books this is what we have and and if it were 250 feet as it sits or 300 i i would be in a very different position but you moved it back 50 feet it's 400 something so i'm going to quit repeating myself my concern is the the facades honestly i would like to see some brick and or stone simply because i think it uh number one it maintains better number two i think it provides greater strength and rigidity to the to the properties and if from the residences in the back i think it's just more aesthetically pleasing depending on how it goes how it's set up so that that's something am i going to deny it for that i don't know i'll just have to hear the discussion on that um but i appreciate your hard work and i appreciate the council members who are voting no that really commend you for the work that you've done uh and i understand why they're voting no and and i respect that so we've got a council member ryan and then we've got council member huthis who's who's uh up for a motion so council member ryan mayor did you have a percentage that you wanted to see in brick and stone or just i think i don't know if it's a percentage i think either the first floor you know up to the the bottom plate line sort of like a because these are three stories is that correct these are three stories so no i mean so one third of the uh trying to think what the the word that we use for the masonry material to be brick or stone let me does that sound right i mean if it's a three story building and you want to go first floor yeah and they can figure out how to put it on either in accent walls or something like that is is that something that would make sense to staff or correct the the current i believe proposal in the new ddc is 40 percent minimum brick or stone so if it's a percentage or up to a floor plate however you'd prefer to word that oh the current code is 40 percent um the current code is not specific on how masonry is defined in the past this project's been going on for a couple of years stucco and hardy board is considered correct the new ddc specifies brick and stone is the primary masonry materials and that will be a 40 minimum yeah okay councilman mayor pro tem any comment on that uh now i'll wait to hear the motion and see if i want to add a friendly amendment that's fair enough all right council member hudson so so first i'm going to move approval but in that i have a comment i i during this discussion if we get a second um i invite those that um have a different setback number in mind to come on record and say what that is if you then we have a clear record for the discussion that's forthcoming where you think in this particular project where you think it should be that way we have a clear record and and those watching understand the challenges that come with finding consensus on this topic so hopefully they'll they'll take me up on that i i open that up and i kind of set that expectation or make that ask that we have a clear record of where everyone stands on this desk today on this particular project how far the setback should be that could be done during the conversation during the uh discussion before we vote so i hope someone will take me up on that or everyone will take me up on that that is adverse to this to the work done here uh that'll be good to know uh and so with that i'm going to move approval and with staff's recommendations and with an open mind to um a friendly amendment council member duff a second all right we have a motion second mayor pro tem uh i'd like to make a friendly amendment that they'd be required to have 35 percent in brick or stone would the applicant like to i mean just before we have further discussion could i ask council cv staff a couple questions sure you mean offline over here yes that's fine any other discussion on this um i tell you what let's take about a uh let's take about a five minute break and we'll come back give them a chance to convene welcome back everybody to this meeting of the denton city council on tuesday april 16 2019 it's about 8 12 in the evening we're back on agenda item six a and before we proceed uh had a little conference during the break with the city attorney so if you wouldn't mind repeating your comments or your concerns uh it's just concerned i know there's been some discussion here about uh looking more at the gas at the gas well reverse setbacks or setbacks in general and i think that's a separate discussion that's not posted for tonight so i would recommend not getting into that discussion stick to the item that's posted i will say that if i remember correctly on your survey there is that item on gas well setbacks if if this council individual individual council members want to have that discussion you can always provide that input via the survey to have that thank you all right um we we've got a motion in a second we've got council member melzer you would you were drawing your request to speak yes because i was going to got you respond to the yes sir thank you yes thank you uh mayor pro tem ryan yeah mayor i think right before the break we were uh waiting for the applicant to kind of reply to his thoughts on the 35 percent brick or stone well before before he does that i'm just wanting to clear the clear the deck as far as questions and things so council member griggs right well yeah i also wanted to speak to that and i didn't think right now was the time of the place for the the setback requirements and just wanted to confirm confirm that i am willing to discuss it just not here right now at this moment and part of my decision has to do with the sup and the compatibility with and not injurious to the use of enjoyment rather than the actual setback itself and so that's on this item i just wanted to go ahead and put that out there thank you appreciate that all right if you michael if you come forward and sort of address it uh sure i wanted a conference with staff about what would happen if we asked to table the item like i said we're the land developer we're not the multi-family project developer i can't speak for them i've tried to reach two partners at the firm multiple times and i'm not sure that a 35 requirement would be acceptable good all right council member ryan any questions on council member melzer well i was just gonna ask how much time the applicant would need in other words when would you be ready to come back well we were trying to i was trying to establish what that timeline would look like with staff because i well i i say that just because i'm willing to move for postponement yeah and and i will objectively oppose that and i hope the council votes it down because it's it's i mean you're voting against the project and you're wanting to postpone it to probably have the same vote so i'm ready to we we need to do this and if we have the percentage on there your your your partners get to decide what they want to do uh so we've been at this two or three times and it's time that we we take a vote on this matter as far as i'm concerned yes um we were having a discussion too is this a percentage of the total project a percentage of each building may pro temi i think that question is directed to you since you made it yeah i would say it would be a percentage of the total project so if you had some interiors that you wanted to do a different surface on and do more on on those that are on the perimeter and and seen from the right away or seen from other property locations i'm fine with that would you be willing to consider a situation that requires more specifically and a higher percentage on the buildings fronting the right away to the south and the 35 access right i think that's what he i think that's what he just said i mean basically you've got 35 percent of the total project if you want to move that around and i just don't know in my head the math how how that works michael i appreciate it um if mayor pro tem wants to respond to that but i think it's time for us to time for us to go welcome everybody back to this meeting of the dent city council coming back from our break uh it's august the 16th 2019 it is 8 30 we are resuming with public hearing 6a we've closed the public hearing now we're taking staff comment uh council comment and then the applicant responding i think where we were was the applicant was at the podium council member ryan of course had made a proposal of council member ryan could you present your friendly amendment 35 percent of the exterior to be brickerstone okay and michael if you'd like to respond to that or we were in the process of discussing that yeah just clarify again it's 35 percent of the total not each building right right so if you want to put 100 on one building and him thank you unless on others that's fine okay would you accept that friendly amendment council member that's good yes sir council member duff would you accept that friendly amendment as a second yes all right we have a motion on the board for agenda item 6a to approve with staff recommendations in addition to add a condition that 35 percent of the total exterior area has to be in either brick or stone is that is that a correct a statement of the motion mayor pro tem yes as far as your amendment all right okay we have a motion and that added condition let's vote on the board please motion carries four three we move our second public hearing i believe has been postponed has it not yes yes okay yes has been postponed till may the seventh so now we are at concluding items council uh council member melzer um well first to follow on to comments on the previous item i urge my colleagues to express strong interest in revisiting the matter of gas well setbacks precisely because we did not reach consensus last time not talking about it is getting us no closer uh to getting us to a policy that is up to date with the science and and is not internally contradictory we have another uh little item maybe not so little i understand there used to be a rebate uh for electric lawn care equipment including trimmers uh and i guess first i'm asking if that's true not to be answered now but uh and if so in the interest of promoting better local air quality uh i would be interested in an isr on the feasibility and desirability of reinstating that for both uh residence owners and for commercial lawn care services all right council member briggs yeah i had my name up there sure you want to do sure i do i do some people may have been wondering what's going on today i've i've had my um friend here with me today and i just wanted to to say a few words you know our community has um experienced a lot of loss lately individually and um just at the city level as well and i wanted to bring miles to council tonight to show how art can be found in the most mundane objects and can inspire a whole community um to do good and also to have a little fun and if this isn't denton i don't know what is um i do look forward to proclamation by the mayor for miles one day but i'm going to go ahead and read you um what he is really quickly and then i'll be done i have no other are you going to read that whole no no just the beginning i i'm okay i know it's time to go home but uh this is miles logan and he's a 170 year old post oak log from texas cross timbers that escaped a fiery death by rolling off a trailer load of firewood at the dallas bell eagle drive interchange thankfully without incident thereafter he was rescued from the medians by my friend and then brought to life by the artist at art lab 3000 so miles purpose with your help is to support both local businesses and denton non-profits and anytime anyone takes him they have to donate money to a non-profit as they pass him on so my money is going to go to uh kuzu a local radio station here but uh so that that's what's going on i'm not completely lost it not yet okay all right anyone else on concluding items council member hospice thank you mr city city manager i'll send a link uh to a it's a program that i was made aware of i think in iowa it's a leaf vacuum so instead of using bags they have a collection that way and so i'd like to try to price that out and get your your thoughts on that then um on i'll email you this as well but just as a placeholder the service road teasley as you exit out 35 in front of brookshares there's a left turn only and then there's a u-turn lane i'd like to see if we could work with test tech stop to get that left left turn only lane to be straight or left turn it backs up quite a bit up and to the exit ramp because there's only a single lane that allows you to go straight and with all the construction i'm hoping maybe we can create a second lane that allows people to go straight or turn left yes sir yes and uh so i'll send you a map or something like that then i want to thank everybody that helped make the red bud fest uh the success it was and and i was able to judge the the trash and fashion so so that was fun uh community market outstanding had a good time there and then spent some time with mayor watts friday uh with the i think it's minster dhs competition and so that was a lot of fun and and congratulations to andy scott who won a lot of great talent there is a guy that painted live it is really fantastic a lot of fun to see and then um lastly i i um i just want to respond by saying i think it's important to show a willingness to um honor the ordinances now to then before you seek changes and so that to me is is important to show a level of ability to better said to to show our ability to commit to what we've committed to or what we communicate and then you go back and and you make those changes in in earnest and not almost hold someone ransom to say i'm not going to change it unless you meet me in the middle and so i think that to me is is is significant that we as this body communicates clearly and early as a consultant said and i'll leave it at this he said it's important to be clearly wrong early it's important for us to communicate early to those that come before us what the standards are uh and then we can go back and change those but while the these ordinances are on the books it's important to stand by those and and that guides my vote on what i uh weight highly i don't want to weight something highly that that i don't believe has traction or support so that's key to me thank you i have one um i want to congratulate north central texas college for their partnership with the uh u.s small business administration because they received an award small business development center of the year for the north central texas small business development you know they're in partnership with the chamber and the city uh certainly has worked in supporting that effort so i think those efforts are paying off and i certainly am excited about nctc coming and joining us in our downtown family and look forward to their contribution i think this is just one other example of how our partnerships with our our institutions of higher learning really just benefit all the community so again congratulations to them and dr wallace for their achievement any others okay we will stand adjourned at about 8 40