Aug 01, 2019 City Council on 2019-08-01 12:00 PM

Welcome, everybody, to this meeting of the Dent City Council on August 1st, 2019. It is 12.02 p.m. We're in our work session room. We do have a quorum, so I'll call this meeting to order. I'm going to keep talking, sort of introductory comments, just drag this -- I'm just kidding. We're going to move through our work session reports. This is -- we've got a couple work session items, but primarily this is the budget presentation, initial long-term budget presentation. But we'll go through a work session on item 1A, which is receive a report and hold a discussion to give staff direction regarding project recommendations from the Citizens Bond Advisory Committee for the November 2019 bond election. Great. David Gaines, director of finance. I will turn it over to the chairman of the committee in just a moment, but just want to extend from the entire staff our thanks to the committee for all of their work, their great questions, and really deliberate conversation that they had throughout the process to get to a point where last week they are -- have this recommendation that's before you today. So with that, I will introduce Pat Smith, who is the chairman of the Special Citizens Bond Advisory Committee. Thank you, David. On behalf of the citizens of Denton, as chair of the Special Bond Advisory Committee, I'm very happy to present or have David present the results of two months' hard work. The discussion was very spirited, and just what we want to see as citizens to have people bring their respective ideas to a very important process is you'll see in the vote tallies at times where there was considerable difference of opinion. But I want to say that the entire package that is going to be presented to you today was voted unanimously in support by everyone on the bond committee. And I want to thank my fellow bond committee members for their efforts, their passion, and their willingness to advocate for things that they believe are important to our community. Everything in this package is important. No one got everything that they wanted. And based on my experience in Washington, that's when we have good policy, is when no one gets everything that they want. But it is a very solid package, and we look forward to getting your feedback on it. Any questions for me? Any questions for the chair? All right. Thank you, Pat. Thank you. Appreciate it. Okay, with that, I will begin the presentation of the recommendation from the committee. There are a few objectives of this presentation. First have an overview of the process that the committee went through, and then to move straight into what the recommendation is from the committee. And with that, we'll talk about how the votes came out with each of the individual projects. Then we'll move to the financial assumptions and the impacts, which are obviously important considerations with the bond program. The committee spent a lot of time going through those financial impacts, and you'll see the result of that in that section of the presentation. We'll also talk through a high level of each of the projects at a summary level. We've talked with council about many of the projects before. There have been obviously some changes since the last time we formally brought these to council in April. We'll talk about some of those changes and definitely have staff here to answer any of the specific questions as we go through the projects. And then we'll talk about the next steps for a potential bond program in November, a bond election in November. So to rehash how we got to where we are with the establishment of the committee, this really all began as a result of the August 2018 council workshop where one of the goals set out was to consider a potential bond program, and from there really worked forward to some meetings in February where the council went out and toured the police station and saw the conditions at the police station, and then in April really had some presentations where we considered the streets programs and the other items that ultimately were given to the bond committee to consider. On April 23rd is when the bond committee was officially established with a resolution, and then on May 30th we had our first bond committee meeting. So the committee's charge initially to the bond committee was to consider projects in these categories below, the public safety facilities and those major roadway projects, local streets improvements, or our street rehab program. Sidewalks were included in that initial recommendation, and the council also asked the committee to consider adding a street lights program or an open space program to the bond program. Initially, the bond program had a max, the charge to the committee was a max of $210 million, and to also see an option of $100 million, and those were derived from a $210 million program being estimated to keep our total tax rate the same, not go above our total tax rate throughout the life of the program, and the $100 million program would be one to stay at the effective tax rate. The committee came back and asked the council to increase that threshold up to $235 million, which the council approved via the resolution before you, to say not to exceed $235 million. A piece of how we're able to do that is with our increased assessed values. This year we can go up to $235 and still stay below the total tax rate that council initially said is one of those benchmarks. We'll talk about the debt service side of the tax rate as we go through the presentation, but that was one of the considerations from city council. We also included in the charge was public art funding. The charge officially to the committee was to consider from 0 to 2% of public art funding, so we'll talk about that a little bit later and how that charge relates to our current public art policy. So here's a breakdown of each of the meetings that we had with the bond committee. You can see it was definitely a big time commitment from the committee itself and really commend all those committee members for taking such an active part in the process. We met every Thursday from May 30th to July 25th with the exception of July 4th, so it was really just every week coming in, having good questions, and having that conversation. So you can see the conversations that we had at each of those meetings, and I will note the final three meetings, we did have an opportunity for public comment, so we started each of those meetings, opening the floor up for anyone from the public who wanted to come and give their opinions or any thoughts on the bond program itself. Really spent the last couple meetings having some of that follow-up, really digging into what the financial analysis is and working through project prioritization so that on July 25th the committee felt comfortable giving that ultimate recommendation to city council that you'll see before you. So here is the recommendation from the committee. The recommendation, the result of the recommendation is three separate propositions. When we initially were discussing this with council in April, we were looking at two propositions, one for public safety facilities and another one for street improvements. By adding open space, which was recommended by the committee, we do add a third proposition, which is park system improvement. So the recommendation is three propositions for a total of $221.5 million. You can see on the public safety facilities, we'll get into a little bit more. As you know, those prices did increase from our original assumptions in April and we'll kind of go back and talk through exactly how those increases happened with a similar conversation that we had a few meetings ago with city council. I will note some of the other changes from the last time council saw this in total in April, our street rehab program is now up to $70 million. Initially that total was $35 million when we originally gave the charge to the committee. That was a result of working with the committee and coming up with a kind of hybrid approach for the street rehab program of having a few targeted neighborhoods, but also saying we want to fix every road that's currently 20 OCI or below in the entire city. So getting those efficiencies from looking at a neighborhood perspective, but also saying we know we have streets that are really in poor condition and we want to make sure we get all of those under 20 OCI streets up to par moving forward. So that was that increase and that increase is one of the reasons we could get to that increase. >> Councilmember Armbruster has a question. I'm going to let her ask a question and then I want to ask you what's the best way to go through this maybe just proposition at a time and then let you make a presentation and then ask questions, but I want her to go ahead and ask the question and then we'll figure that out. >> So I just wanted to say, so first of all, I'm very supportive of the street rehab program as it's laid out, so this question is not, it's just kind of a, going back, as I recall in looking at this slide, so when this first came to council, it was 10 million, is that correct? But then when it came to the bond committee? >> Right, it was 10, yeah, we kind of started at 10 and then with the 35 and now we're at 70. >> Okay, yes. >> That's right. >> I'm not going to complain at all because I like that we're emphasizing more those local streets, just to clarify that for the record. Thank you. >> So David, what's the best way, are you going to take these proposition at a time, like you're going to talk about proposition one in detail, two and three? >> We have a slide for each project, so I think we can probably answer questions on each project. >> Okay, just as we go on each project, let's get through the presentation for that specific project and then just questions go on. >> Absolutely. We'll have staff obviously to help answer any of those questions. And as we move on, I'll only point out again, we will talk about Ryan Road later, one of the reasons we were able to make that increase in the street rehab program is an analysis of what the impact of doing the improvements to Hickory Creek was that we did not need the large project done on Ryan Road because the traffic impact would be lessened by having Hickory Creek expanded. So we'll talk about that a little bit later, but just in context of the total program, that's one of the reasons we were able to increase the street rehab portion of the recommendation. So you can see the open space there for $5 million is now included and public art was recommended by the committee at 1% of vertical construction and once that sets the total, once the total is set, that amount can be included in any proposition, can be split between propositions or included in whichever proposition is desired. It does not have to stay in public safety facilities just because the amount is derived from public safety facilities. The committee's recommendation is for that amount entirely to be in the park system improvements. So the committee voted on each of the projects separately and then after voting on each project separately, there was a unanimous vote from all attendees at the July 25th meeting, 18 in favor. There was one person, one member not at the meeting last Thursday to ultimately approve the entire recommendation. The committee did ask that we share the vote tallies with the council. You can see a lot of these roadway projects and public safety facility projects had pretty strong support. Actually, at the July 18th meeting, the committee said, "We know these top five programs, we all feel comfortable with it." They wanted to vote on those top five at July 18th just to say, "We're comfortable with these moving forward so we could have a discussion on July 25th." That really zeroed in on some of the other items, so those top five had obviously very strong support to move forward and you can see the vote tallies on the remainder. I will point out a few votes. Obviously, the police firing range is not recommended. That was a 9-9 vote and because it didn't have a majority of the committee members present at the time, it did not pass. But obviously, it was a 50-50 vote on the police firing range and then on the public art, you can see the initial vote first to say that the committee desired 1% of vertical construction to go to public art at a 10-8 vote and then 100% of the amount to go to the park system improvement proposition also passed on a 10-8 vote. >> A quick question, if the police firing range of $5 million was then excluded out of the total project cost, what was either substituted or how was that cost spread out or was there a project added that took its place? >> So the way the committee worked through the process is they had their prioritization and they went through each item one by one, so it wasn't really a replacement, although open space was discussed after the police firing range. So they already made the decision on the firing range when they got to the open space decision. So it wasn't really a take this out for something else, they just looked at each project individually. >> Okay. Thank you. >> So I want to move on to a few slides on the financial assumptions and ultimately what we anticipate to be the financial impact of the bond program as recommended by the committee. So to start off with a few of the assumptions that are really baked into all of the numbers that we look at for what the ultimate impact of the bond program will be is that next year we will issue, and you'll obviously see this in our later budget presentation as well, we will issue the remaining $14.6 million of our 2014 bond program. We also anticipate to issue for budgeting purposes $5 million in COs each year through the life of the bond program for vehicle replacements and facility maintenance, which has been a practice for the past number of years in the city. We have included now in the forecast potential debt issuance for development services relocation. You can see the breakdown there for the 5 million of COs for vehicles and facility improvements that are included. We have a piece that has helped us to reduce the debt service tax rate next year and helps offset some of the impact of the program is we currently have a significant fund balance in our debt service fund, which really is a result of having property taxes come in higher than we anticipate because as assessed values increase throughout the year, we end up with more revenue than we budgeted. So we built up this fund balance and it's been a goal of the past few years to draw down that fund balance to really what is an acceptable level of a million or so dollars. Right now it's closer to $4 or $4.5 million. So we've built into the program to use $3.6 million of fund balance from FY20 next year through 2023, which helps mitigate some of the impact of the debt of the bond program. We have updated now with the 11.3% in the freeze-adjusted assessed value that we derive from the certified values for next year. And then in future years, we're anticipating 5% AV increase, assessed value increase. This was a conversation that we really got into a lot of detail, had good conversations with the committee on what number that should be. We started off at 4%, looked at many options from 4, 5, all the way up to 8% on AV growth, and the committee was comfortable with us moving forward, and staff is comfortable as well, projecting a 5% AV growth in future years. Yes. I'm just not sure I understood that $3.6 million, that's kind of unexpected overage. When you say we use it, do you mean that gets used for capital projects, or do you mean that kind of goes into the general fund and can be used toward debt service? So it's all within the debt service fund, so essentially it just goes to help pay the debt service in each year. Okay. I understand. Thank you. And we'll talk a little bit more about the AV growth and what the impacts of being over that 5% will be in future slides. Councilmember Briggs. On the top, the remaining 14.6 for 2014 bond program, because I've heard a lot of people asking about, well, have we even completed the old bond programs, and so is this all that's left from the previous years, and have the projects been identified, if you can just say that, and is that 14.6 enough to cover the projects slated for that money? Yes, it is enough to cover. So this will be the last issuance, $1 million in parks for land acquisition and the remainder in the streets, on the street side, $12.2 million for the remainder of the street rehab program and then a few other street projects that are included in that, but this would be the last issuance and it would completely fund the remainder of what is necessary. We do have slides on a separate presentation I can pull up that show where we are right now with each of those programs, and it's something that when we started with the committee, we made sure we showed them the progress that has been made over the past couple of years, and it's something we've emphasized on the website as well to show that we've really been completing these projects to gain that assurance from the community that we're able to get these projects done. Okay. Thank you. I just wanted to ask you real quick, the 11.3% increase, is that 95% of certified value? Is that what they have to do, is that based on the 95% certified value, or is that? It's 100% certified value, but they take on certain properties that are in ARB review, they take the lower of the ARB review, so that's where that kind of -- Okay. So it's included in that, but if somehow those come out more in our favor, then that's just something that comes to us later on in the budget cycle. Right, and that's where we get -- if you -- we talked a little bit about -- we get those supplements -- Right. -- throughout the year. We're at supplement 35 this year, and that's where you can see that increase. Okay. All right. All right. Thank you. So here is a chart of that assessed value increase. The line graph here just shows our total assessed value as it's increased up over that $12 billion, and then you can see the annual increases each year. We show 11.52 here. That's our total assessed value increase, which it makes more sense for a chart like this, where you see the totals increasing, but as we've noted, 11.3 of that are those non-frozen values, which is really the biggest variable that we have to look at in our forecasting. So ultimately, here's a high-level summary of what we anticipate as the potential impact of the bond program. With the $221.5 million program and all the financial assumptions that we just went through, we anticipate the program will have a maximum impact of a three-and-a-half cent increase on the debt service tax rate. That does not mean that we'll have a three-and-a-half cent increase every year of the six-year program on the debt service side, but at least in one of those years, we could get up to a three-and-a-half cents over our current debt service tax rate. That, again, is with 5% assessed value assumptions. If we get, obviously, next year if it comes in at 8%, the following year at 9%, and then we get to 5%, we have that extra room to work with where the debt service tax rate wouldn't be impacted as much, and it also means we could issue more debt sooner and stay under that three-and-a-half cent threshold. All of our assumptions are based on a six-year program and six-year issuance based on when the project needs arise, and those obviously would be coming to council each year for our planned debt issuance. I think this is an important context for the discussion we've been having now, a history of what we've anticipated as being our cents increase on the debt service tax rate and what's actually transpired in 2005. We anticipated a four-cent debt service tax rate increase, and you can see here that the top dotted blue line being what we anticipated as the increase, and the black and blue line being the actual debt service tax rate that we stayed significantly under that four-cent expected increase throughout the life of the 2005 program, the same with the 2014 program where we also anticipated a four-cent tax rate increase, stayed significantly below that total. And in 2012, the program we anticipated a nose debt service tax rate increase, so we saw that with the debt service tax rate not increasing. Councilmember Meltzer? That's just difference in market rate interest rates than what we forecast? Primarily assessed value. Since assessed value came in higher back then, I think in both of those programs we anticipated a four-percent assessed value each year where we obviously far exceeded that assessed value, so that's how we weren't able -- we didn't have to go up to that higher tax rate. So I think that's important context for -- we are anticipating the five-percent AV growth this year. If we come in higher than that just for a couple years, we won't be looking at that three-and-a-half-cent increase. But as far as actual dollars paid, I mean, that three-and-a-half percent maximum is if we don't have the assessed value to support the debt service moving forward without a tax rate increase, if the assessed value continues to go up, as you said, past the five percent or whatever level for a few years, it's been absorbed in those higher assessed values which translate into even if we keep the tax rate the same, a higher collection rate of actual tax dollars. Correct. Yep. Right. Okay. So I wanted to show what our debt service -- a forecast of what our debt service would look like in future years with the bond program. I know there's a lot of lines here, so I'll try to make this as simple as possible. The red line is our existing general government debt service. So you can see, obviously, over the next 20 years, that continues to fall. And at the end of the 20 years, we would have paid off all of the current debt that we have. Over the next six years, looking at paying off about $120 million of that debt service, which then gives us some of that capacity for the future debt service that we'll have to pay. The blue line is showing that 2019 issuance, adding that on top of it, the issuance that we just made that the council just approved a few weeks ago. So you can see that layered on top of what our issuance was at the beginning of the fiscal year. Green line showing that final issuance of the 2014 bond program. And then the yellow line showing us what the -- of the COs that we're anticipating over the life of the program, where we would be. So the way to look at that is the yellow lines essentially are baseline of where if we didn't do any bond program over the next six years, didn't have any of those significant improvements, where we would be for debt service. And then the purple line shows the impact over where we would be with no bond program versus with the bond program over those -- over those years. >> I noted this, you know, in preparation, I don't know exactly how I'm supposed to feel about this slide. I mean, I see it, I understand what the data points mean, but what are you trying to tell us? It looks like, you know, I might see a slide like this as a picture of a problem, right? Like we've been -- you know, everything's in sort of a narrow range, except this thing is very far outside that range, right? So how would you like me to feel about this slide? >> This slide is really just to be transparent about what we anticipate the debt service to be. Like the committee was really interested in seeing what the debt service would look like. I would say while the hump looks big, that's really -- even with a 5% assessed value, what's making up that difference is new assessed value coming into the city or increase in the assessed value that allows us to pay that same -- the same debt service with a tax rate that would increase up to three and a half cents. >> So it looks like a lot -- isn't it amazing that it's a lot -- that we can still handle within a fairly narrow range of tax rate. >> Right. >> That's your point. >> Yeah. >> Okay. Thank you. >> So now we'll transition and go through each of the projects. We'll start with a proposition overview as we talk through each of the -- each of the projects that were recommended by the committee. So you see again there the police center, the police station renovation project, the Fire Station 8, and the substation project were all recommended by the committee at those revised funding levels and the firing range was not ultimately recommended. So a highlight of -- and we've obviously talked with council about this quite a bit. Sure. Yeah. [ Inaudible ] >> That's -- CEOs that we've already issued for those projects. For Fire Station 8 we already -- we've already got our design done, right. So obviously we've discussed the needs for these projects with council quite a bit, especially the three recommended projects. The headquarters will really serve to improve a lot of those things council saw when you took a tour of the police center -- of the police department, those undersized work areas, inefficient space configurations. The substation will of course provide additional space for the police department outside of the headquarters but also increase those response times by not having to come all the way back and forth through the current police station and having a wider range that the police department can get to. Fire Station 8 again also improves those response times, ultimately the ISO rating, and it's been something that's been in the plans for the city for quite a while to build Fire Station 8. We do want to bring -- use this opportunity to talk through the firing range options and open that discussion up for city council. One of the options that we would say could be possible if the council would like to is we could go forward as we get to a point of specs and get to a point of more formal design for the substation to have kind of an adult inclusion for the firing range, say we're not going to put additional dollars right now in the bond program for it, but at least have that as an option to see are we able to gain some efficiencies with the substation itself and fund some type of firing range. >> Council Member Armitage. >> So I'll say in responding to that, so first I'll say, you know, I was -- had many questions from the very beginning about the firing range, and it went -- and I was trying to remember if it started -- did it start at 15 million with 15 lanes, yeah, and then it was 10 million, 10 million, 5 million, 5 million, and I got some of my questions answered, you know, for me right now, I would need to know, before considering options, I would need to know data about what are the specific needs for the firing range, such as, you know, how many times a year do -- you know, does this need to be used or -- and a week and a month, you know, do we need -- how many times do we need X number of people, you know, say five people, so if it was going to be five lanes, my assumption is that it would be okay to have just five people, you know, being able to be there at the same -- at least to be firing, to be at the same time. So if that is the maximum -- you know, but my guess that that is -- I'm sorry, if that's the bare minimum number of people at the same time, that's just my own guess based on how I've seen it, you know, the number of costs of dollars in lanes go down, so, yeah, for me, I would just need to know a lot more about what specifically the needs are, and I don't necessarily need to know that today, but to even have that discussion, but, I mean, one thing I'm convinced of is that the status quo will not do, that that's unsafe, and I don't know if there's anybody who thinks it's okay to have it where it is now, but so that's just where I stand on the issue, that I would need to see that additional data. >> We have a few slides that we could present, obviously not in the formal presentation, but behind the questions, I could pull up a few slides that we could talk through our most recent proposal for the firing range, which is a little bit different with more lanes than just the five lanes, and some more detail on what the proposal would be for the firing range that we presented to the committee at their last meeting, so I'll leave that open to counsel if you'd like to go through that now or just focus on the recommendation. >> Well, I guess for me, at some point, we can also discuss, and for me it would be, I don't know what open space means, so I would need some explanation of that, and is that something that I think is, because the counsel ultimately has the decision on what goes on the ballot, so for me, it's getting information to say, well, which one is more important at this stage of the game, is it open space, which I have no idea what that means, I don't think it means parks, or a police firing range, so those are just my thoughts based upon at least what you showed in the schedule of projects, especially given the votes on the police firing range and also on the open space, so I don't know if you want to have that discussion now, or we can have that discussion at the end, but probably get through all the projects first so we'll know that. So let's do this. Let's save the slides for the firing range until you get through your presentation and as we begin to talk about the projects and if there is some appetite for looking at how do we get the firing range into the bond proposal, then these facts would be necessary to bring forward to take a look at that. >> Sounds great. >> That's okay. >> Perfect. >> Okay. All right. This is a slide that council has seen previously and one that we went over with the committee, but just wanted to, again, be transparent about the change that we saw in the police station, the facility dollars estimates for those projects, for the renovation projects and the substation projects, obviously, we did end up increasing those cost estimates by $21.4 million, that was after engaging with PPB, the estimating firm, which they are here today, if there's any specific questions on their revised estimate. And you can see the 5 million of that increase was related to construction cost, but really the largest portion of the increase was from these other factors, the largest being an increased contingency, increased cost inflation, knowing the amount of time that we plan to construct and design the projects, having better estimates on those numbers, also better estimates on our IT, our security, AV systems, and those design engineering costs, along with some of these other factors that weren't really involved in the initial estimate that we had going to council. >> Councilmember Hussbett and then councilmember Arbiter. >> Dave, can you help me better understand more accurate cost assessment? What is that? The first one was within plus or minus what to now, what is the kind of accountability to say that they're not over-inflating, they're, you know, they evaluated based on this and their estimation is they're going to be plus or minus what at the end of the day? I mean, how do you truly point to, if someone asks me, hey, how do you know this is better versus them just inflating the price, how do you evaluate that? >> It's a great question. I think ultimately, if you ask them, they would say they feel like they're going to be right on, essentially right on target with their cost estimates and I think the staff gained that belief in them in their estimate based on the previous experience that they've worked on. They've worked very closely. I have one example with Lewisville of doing a large project with Lewisville that came in right at their budget. I think obviously each firm that would come in and estimate would have a different philosophy on some of these pieces, I think ultimately we just gained trust in the way that they estimated. >> And I would add, I believe there was a project they recently worked on, it was the city of Richardson, which was like an $80 million public safety facility. They were able to update the bids from the subs, that sort of thing. So we had much more up-to-date information the last couple of weeks. >> If I could, so the original estimate, then let's look at that, so that you're, do we know how far, I know the total number they were off, but let's say if we're talking just a segment of it, did we dig down and say okay, well this initial estimate is off this percentage or based on the experience, hands-on experience in Lewisville and Richardson to say hey, this is how much that initial look at it was off. I get it, the total number I understand, but just kind of those segments, the key segments you identified. >> Part of the reason that we brought peak performance value in is that we've had experiences the last several years of architects bringing us point in time estimates on the buildings and not necessarily accounting for inflation, the building trades, which is really the moving target right now. There's so many of these construction companies, both in the road and the vertical construction, are really hurting for employees. Some of these firms are able to just come in and just drive up the market in some of these areas. So the architects haven't necessarily gotten that right and we're experiencing that in a couple of projects right now, which is why we have switched to going through this third-party review, making sure that we hired somebody in here that is working with subs, actively managing projects and can give us up-to-date bids or bidding information before we bring up a budget in the council, but I think that was the biggest issue and it was that simply assuming that two, three, four-year build out and what the time value of money is in a labor market that experiencing shortage in several of the trade areas. >> Thank you. >> Councilmember Arnett and then Councilmember Briggs. >> I'll defer mine. >> Okay. >> Well, thank you because that answers some of my questions I had the same because that's a pretty big difference, 21 million, so where we just kind of make it, I guess our staff was just kind of making an estimate or did that original estimation come from another design? >> It came from the 30%, the initial budget came from the 30% design concepts that the initial architectural team had done to try to give us some idea on what kind of space planning we needed and what dollars we might need to set aside and ask for. As we started putting that up against a little bit more refined version of what we would need, what trades would be involved and how long, that's the most important thing. You can see just the cost of inflation is half of that 20 million, so it was how long these folks would need to be on site and how long the project would move forward. Those variables were not included in that initial high-level estimate and we needed to refine it. The last thing we wanted was to bring you a surprise down the road. >> May I? Because it says there are three-year timeline in your conversation just a minute ago, you said three, four years, so that's already adding a possible extra year and so does that increase account for more than three years or are we going to have a conversation later on if it takes longer than that? >> We have been working on the financing plan for the last couple of months, so the police and fire department projects would be the first ones out of the gate and so the initial documents, I'm sorry, issues that we would do would fund these projects to try to control that cost and then we would start layering in the road projects following that. >> So from approval to completion? >> If this were approved, right now the fire station is almost at 100% design and should this get approved in November, we'll be off and running on the design for both of these trying to make sure that we hit that three-year timeframe. >> So thank you and I wanted to defer my question because I sense that these questions were going to be on the same thing, mine is related on this slide but on a different note, so I was wondering and I forget the name of the firm, apologies, but who's here, but I would love to ask a question of them and that is that and I don't know, I'm not quite sure who to make the icon deck with, so I'm not sure if you're familiar with the recent legislation statewide that has eliminated, it's not effective just now yet, but the ways in which it's basically eliminated city's ability to regulate building materials beyond what is already required by federal law, so I was wondering based on that, and you might not have an answer at this time, are there any, given this law, can you see any room for cost savings based on the removal of this constraint, or to put the question another way, as you were planning and thinking of materials, were there even any local rules about materials that limited your choices, knowing that now that's not an issue or that you're only limited by federal law, does that open up new possibilities for potential cost savings? So I think I'm supposed to introduce myself, right? Chris Squadrow with Peak Program Value, that's a great question, predicting the future in any aspect of our lives is not a certainty, right? So the most, to answer your question directly, we did not factor in any pending legislation that isn't enacted now, there are numerous pieces, most notably the tariffs that we've all read about, some of which have been enacted, some of which have been threatened, the 25% increase on China, those are the things that really hammer the estimating community. The other thing to remember is that we, as I was here last, we had undergone 120 months of expansion, which was the longest expansion in US history, now it's 122 months in August. So one of the difficulties of predicting these future projects that, as the city manager pointed out, we'll start design, if the voters are supportive of the bond issue, we'll start design in November, we'll be done with design the following August. And then David has told me that we would not be able to issue a notice to proceed until December 15th, so to your question about what's the duration of the project, we would start on December 15th of 2021, and then we would do the substation, we would move people out of the substation and then start renovating the police department headquarters. So it's going to be about three and a half years from now when the project's completed. The escalation piece that's in this budget is designed using historic data saying that the trend is going to continue, but as I've told you when we talked about escalation, if it did not, if we did see a recession, working with the architect, we have put together some possible alternatives that we could fund with that money that are police department related, and that recession, if it hit, we would have the opportunity to use that mechanism. Go ahead, but one comment on that, because the legislation applied to people who are coming to the city to ask for regulation, to build something, but if the city chooses to build something that, and they decide what they want to put as the materials, the external materials, which this body would vote on, it really makes the legislation moot, so yeah. Does that answer your question? Yeah, well, and yes, I see your point. It does answer the question. Oh, no, so I just want to add something, so I see your point, Mayor, no, my question, I wasn't saying that we're, that we are bound by, I mean, it's hard to be bound by a removal of any kind of constraints, and we can, because we're the city, we could do this anyway. I was just wondering, I mean, I could have asked the question without referring to the legislation even, just saying that, you know, are there any ways where materials could be changed in a way that doesn't compromise safety or usability, you know, that could cut costs. We have, on the continuum from good, better, best, we're in the better classification of material usage, we're certainly not designing a best-in-class or pricing a best-in-class police department facility or fire station, we're in the middle range right now, and that range is driven more by durability and 50-year life and making sure that we are using sustainable design guidelines and having a reasonable approach to sustainable design. There's always ways to make a building less expensive, but they're usually not the ways that you deliver the best value for the taxpayer. So if you stay focused on a 50-year facility, you stay focused on sustainable design principles without going clear off the graph into zero energy, and you also remember that the ultimate goal is that this building lasts for a long time. Chris, if I could, because we're getting into specifics here, and we don't have any plans drawn up for any of these projects, do we? There's no plans, there's no specifications, this is sort of a general kind of estimate based upon what you've seen or what the city may have used in the past, so you're not quoting specific brick, you're not quoting specific metal, you're not quoting specific. This is more general, so it's going to be hard to say that until we actually get a set of construction plans to determine, like we did it with Fire Station 3 or 4 where we came back and said here's some options, here's what you can do here, here's what you can do here, here's the delta. So that conversation comes later on in the process. Yes, sir. Okay. All right. Thank you. I'll just make one quick note of clarification. Our plan would be to do a reimbursement ordinance in October of the following year once the bond passes, or directly following the bond passage in November, to be precise, and have that reimbursement ordinance right after the bond if it passed, if this proposition passed to get rolling as soon as possible. So here's that conceptual design, as we talked about, for the police station. So you can see how it's laid out there with each of the changes, and again, slated to begin construction in November of 2020 with the project completion in February 2022. Conceptual design for the substation, obviously substation to be completed earlier than the police station, with completion targeted for July 2021, and then to utilize the substation as the police station is under construction. The overall. Do you have a question, Council Member? It's more of a concern, because we've three years of the police station staying the way that it is, and I know that this conceptual design in the substation is going to be built. But we toured the police station, and it is horrible, crowded conditions, and so three and a half years of staying in that police station, it's hard to swallow, and I don't know if there's any way that that could change, or we could do something. Well, I think the point was to try to get as much bang out of the budget as we can. You could certainly expedite it. It's going to add significant costs, because you're going to have to relocate people out of the downtown station, so you're going to have additional costs just with that, so it's going to more than negate any savings that we're going to see by being able to transition it. I think that we'll figure out a way to make it work. It's not ideal, but if you take that approach and move them out and have to rent space, that sort of thing, it's going to significantly increase this budget. Do we have a backup plan if this bond for some reason doesn't pass? One of the original statements I made was that having the substation and with the renovation and the fire station all together was a concern, because if it fails, then what do we do? I'm just really concerned about it. I think if it doesn't pass, we're going to have to be back to you to talk about COs in a different scope. That is the backup plan. I'm just putting my concern out there. The City Attorney can correct me if I'm wrong, but it's my understanding that if you have a bond election for a specific project and that fails, that there's a waiting period, I'm seeing three years before you can come back and issue COs for that same project. And the way the proposition about language would read, it would say public safety facility. So if the bond failed, we could not issue COs for any public safety facility for three years. We can come back the following year for another bond election, but that would be the only avenue to do anything sooner than three years. And that applies to all the propositions, so the same thing with streets and with the park system's improvement. And it's my understanding that was part of the reason in general to have different propositions on a bond so that if it's so large that people are having difficulty with the total amount that you split it up into different segments that people can choose if they want. There's requirements so that you separate them, but I think that was the intent behind the requirements. So we're just looking at the overall site plan there with an area for future training center or some other type of facility. So transition to the Fire Station 8. These designs are further along to the point that the Fire Station 8 would get underway very quickly if the bond election passed and be up and running even sooner than the police station or substation. Here's the overall site plan for Fire Station 8. You can see right there at Colorado and Brinker and what that would look like. Key pieces of the overall, there's a rear elevation and then some of the numbers that go along to 8,500 total square feet for Fire Station 8 and all of the amenities listed. Any questions on Fire Station 8 or any of the other recommended police station or public safety facilities? Any questions? We'll move on to the streets improvements proposition. You can see in total the street improvements proposition is $154 million. The total project costs though for these projects is $377 million. That increase between the recommended funding and total project costs is something we talked with council about are these large projects where we're really able to leverage these dollars through cog money, through state money, through county money to complete some of these major arterial roads that have regional connections specifically, you know, obviously Bonnie Bray and Hickory Creek being those large ones where we're able to leverage a significant amount of dollars to expand those roadways. Councilmember Davis has a question. So as staff was deciding what to put in front of the committee and which of these large projects specifically to have the committee consider, was that ability to leverage additional funding, was that kind of the primary motivation in some of these or is there a direct tie to something we've identified as a priority need for the city, not just that there's going to be cog money, there's going to be text out in the money, but actually tied to a mobility need that we see now. My concern is are these projects tied directly to a mobility plan that we haven't yet approved and needs we haven't yet fully identified for ourselves, not just that there's a good pot of money out there from somebody else? I'll address that at a high level and obviously can hand it over to Todd Estes for some more detail. I think a lot of factors as we were in those initial stages of the recommendation, a lot of factors took place. I think especially Hickory Creek and Bonnie Bray are the two of the roads that staff heard about the most. We knew about the development around those areas and the need for expanded roadways. Definitely the ability to leverage dollars played into that calculus on what we decided to recommend. So I think that all interacted together, but I can hand it over to Todd to answer any more specifics. To specifically answer your question, both those roadways are on the current mobility plan that was adopted in 2015. Now one segment of those alignments are not as cohesive from a safety standpoint as we would like, specifically Hickory Creek on the south side of 1830. It was to wind around, disjointed, but all alignments for both roadways were identified in the mobility plan for 2015 and then subsequently we've done area studies in both areas to make sure that that really is still the best place for those and it does support that would go into the mobility plan update that's coming next year. Some of the more specific concerns I think we heard from citizens during the committee's process had a lot to do with, you know, the eventual design of some of these improvements. And they're big packages, they include a lot of construction and a lot of, I suppose, design options as we get further down the process. At what point do we, and knowing that this is a proposition for street improvement bonds, that we have a lot of flexibility when we actually start issuing the bonds and how we use them, at what point do we start seeing, in our six-year program, at what point do we start seeing Hickory Creek options and Ryan Road options and the kind of things, specifics, that we can take back to citizens to answer some of their concerns? The specific alignment questions will be coming out over the next six months. We've already started down the pathway of what we would call an environmental analysis on both of those projects, but specifically Hickory Creek, and that takes into account a wide variety of things. But it's not just soil, it's not air quality, it's noise pollution and a variety of other things, and how that impacts the people that live along that alignment long-term. So those things are being done now so that we understand those considerations and questions, and then we obviously will work with each individual property owner as we go down this pathway of the subdivisions, neighborhoods, business owners. That is a part of every one of our projects going forward, where we contact them, we work with them on what does this look like, what are your concerns, can't address every concern, and we definitely want to understand that before we actually put that project into the ground. Councilmember Montero? Yeah. So I had a question about Hickory Creek. Because when a lot of people, I know when I think of Hickory Creek and the need to repair it, I think of the tragic deaths that have occurred and just how dangerous that road is. I'm thinking about safety on that road for the way things are right now, and it's a slice in time, the development that's there now along that road. But obviously, the plan, because I've been following this as it's developed, and the plan to update Hickory Creek involves both concerns about addressing current safety issues and then projected future growth. And of course, you want safety for projected future growth. But I was wondering if you could speak to, I don't know if you could give percentages to say that this percentage of the project, or from this point on, on Hickory Creek, on this road, has to do with future growth and only these issues have to do with addressing the current safety issues, or are these two so interwoven, you know, the way that you've addressed them in planning and all of the planning that led to that estimate, that it's really hard to tease out those differences. So if you could speak to that. Well, it addresses both, the way this project's actually come together by going the pathway we are, the alignment of Hickory Creek as proposed. What we're doing with the $34 million, that's construction of building at least, say, there's no additional matching funds tied to this project. If COG, for whatever reason, says, you know what, we might do that down the road, but we're not ready to do it now, that $34 million still takes out all the safety concerns that exist on Hickory Creek Road over to 1830 that gets a full and complete project. Now, it won't be the ultimate wide bridge that you would want to have for capacity improvements, but it would get you three lanes of a bridge, and it would put three lanes in the ground straight over to 1830, and that would take out the immediate concerns of the safety improvements. And thank you. Just to respond to that, just to say where I stand on Hickory Creek, I am 100% behind fixing the current safety issues and addressing those, and doing what it takes because of the lives lost and the necessity for that. What I'm ambivalent about is the kind of expanding from two, not just to four, but to six lanes, and with in mind a growth projection for -- I'm trying to remember what year -- is it 2040 or something, a plan for way down the line of what the development -- of what potential development could come to that area. And I understand the impetus behind it. My concern is that that might be assuming potential growth that's not necessarily going to happen. And, of course, we can't control outside of city of Denton, you know, where the growth goes. But, you know, we do have a 2030 plan that, you know, emphasizes less density in the outer areas and more in the inner parts of town, and I happen to be -- to support that. So I'm concerned that we're almost kind of predetermining, you know, this really dense -- in areas that are now rural, we're almost predetermining this really dense growth by planning for and budgeting for six lanes all the way down. >> Before you address that, I want to make sure I understand her comment based upon what you just shared. What I heard you say was that the $34 million currently under recommended bond funding, let's say cog and text dot don't support or don't have the money to extend it from 1830 over to I-35, which that's really the segment that is that built-in sort of high growth, high density. So that's -- I mean, the 34 million -- I mean, the only thing in the bond package would be to say here's 34 million, it will cover those safety issues up to 1830. The decision on whether we move forward with a text dot and a cog approach really is not ripe. That decision is not ripe because we don't -- we're looking at the environmental, but we don't have any funding necessarily set aside for that text dot nor cog. So we're just saying in anticipation, if we can at least get the public safety portion handled, now, that will only get you two lanes and a center turn lane. Is that right? >> Correct. >> Okay. That's not much capacity at all almost for what's out there already, but it does address the public safety issues. >> Correct. >> But then the decision on whether we build a four lane or a six lane from 1830 to I-35 really is -- it's really not relevant totally to the bond package only in the sense that we need 34 million to cover our immediate need and if by chance they allow that, then we're able to do -- we come back and have this conversation. >> Correct. >> Is that my understanding of that? >> Correct. >> I understand that completely, Mike. It's only because I know that the design plans had been discussed by the bond committee and that even though we're voting -- and again, as I said, I mean, I'm for covering the cost of the safety, Mike. I'm not looking at the cost. I'm just -- because I know that it was part of the discussion and I know how things work such that, you know, years down the line, you know, if people are talking about it and say, well, back then, you know, when we voted on it, there was the assumption that this is going -- is what it was going to be. You know, it seems to me that it's a good time to raise any issues that we have about projected future plans even if they don't change the dollar amounts in this bond package only because these were discussed by the bond committee in detail. >> Okay. All right. Appreciate that. Do you have any -- I mean, other than -- I mean, go ahead. >> You know, the only thing I would just add is that all stretches that we're proposing for Hickory Creek has been on the mobility plan since 1999, '98, so the city has been looking towards that area. The plans that we were authorized by council to look all the way to 35W, as development comes in, the preference would be as we already understand where those connections are, and that's what those plans are for. If the matching dollars are available and council so chooses to go forward, then we are ready to go forward. But it also allows us when we're working with the development community, much like several developments that are coming in currently, we know where the roadway would go to make this work, and it allows us to work with them more seamlessly. >> And thank you for mentioning that. I'll just add to that, you know, I have no problem with, you know, planning ahead in a way that leaves room and possibility for that. Just I just as far as putting my two cents in, you know, underscoring that, you know, my concern that it not be predetermined such that years from now, you know, people aren't looking back and, you know, much in the same way that we're now kind of referring back to, you know, mobility plan saying, well, back then in the '90s, you know, they said that, and I completely understand you're not saying we're obligated to do that. Just pointing out that so I could say for the record, my concerns about that and, you know, in my sense, there's, you know, an incompatibility between, you know, between a plan like that which I guess predated the 2030 plan and the 2030 plan. I was just stating that for the record, but thank you. >> Councilmember Ryan. >> Thank you, Mayor. On the Bonnie Bray, you've got up there for five, six, and seven, which is basically everything north of the roundabout up to 77, but on the Hickory Creek, it just says Hickory Creek. Does that 160 include the two phases that we're currently under construction on and going to go into construction this fall? >> Yes, that's the total project value from $24.99 all the way over to I-35W. >> Okay. All right. Thank you. >> Thank you, Todd. >> I would just pick one comment on Hickory Creek. I think a lot of the discussion, obviously, that the council's having was had by the committee in detail going back and forth on that, but ultimately, the recommendation they made was in consideration of the project in a whole all the way to 35, so they definitely had that conversation back and forth. >> Thank you. >> Councilmember Briggs. >> Council clarification. So the total project is to expand six lanes on Hickory Creek? I'm just trying to figure out, because -- >> Correct. The total project is six lanes out to I-35, I'm sure. >> And that was the project that was voted on and -- >> Correct. >> Okay. >> Ultimately, yes. >> Okay. >> Not right away. Not six lanes right away. >> All right. >> Do you want to speak to that? >> So our current traffic study for this area shows a four-lane divided roadway is all that's needed for the first at least 25 years. We projected all the way out to 2040 based on growth projections from the COG, so the only thing that's being proposed to be built to six lanes, if we go forward with that ultimate configuration, would be the bridge crossings so that you don't have to come back and rebuild one of those very expensive items long term. You build a six-lane bridge, then you don't have to touch it, but you can stripe it such that it works for two lanes. But the roadway projected into 2040, 2045 time frame is no more than four lanes. So that's all we would be proposing to put in today. >> Okay. I will just say that part of this concern comes from people who live out there and who work out there and are a little bit nervous about large expansions of roadways coming through -- >> Understandably. >> -- the area. And it's hard when you're out there now to see, you know, the projection of growth. So I just wanted to bring those concerns to the table. >> Sure. >> Yeah. >> Thank you. >> I'll move on to our street rehab program unless there's any other questions on Bonnie Bray or Hickory Creek. As mentioned, we ultimately increased the total amount for our street rehab program, which are really just the local streets within the city, which have been included in the 2012 and 2014 bond program to have that street rehab piece from 35 for the initial charge to the committee up to 70 million. And really it comes down to this hybrid approach that we're taking that I mentioned earlier where we've identified these neighborhoods, which you'll see a map of, of the individual neighborhoods that we can really go in and target and gain a lot of efficiencies on by saying these neighborhoods are in need of street reconstructions, but also we can go in and do any of the utility work that needs to be done at the same time, have our equipment there and our staff and our contractors there to work on multiple roads at once and really gain a lot of those efficiencies that we don't get when we have streets kind of sporadic throughout the city. And then the hybrid approach would be we know we're going to zone in on these neighborhoods but also use the equivalent amount of dollars to tackle all those low OCI from zero to 20 streets that are out there to get them up to par. Will there be a list of those streets attached with a bond, if not on the bond, but ahead of time so that people can see what they include or? Yeah, just like, just like we have previously in all of our kind of informational documentation, we'll have a list of streets that would be candidates for especially that low OCI amount and for the neighborhoods amount. We would have a list of streets that would be published. And did the bond committee review the list of streets that fall into that zero to 20 OCI? Not, we didn't go through exact street names, but we did show the map where we showed where those streets would be and the neighborhoods really zoned in on the neighborhoods to show what streets, but we have not developed that kind of final list of what streets could be on that publication. I recall in other conversations about road repair that we would have as a long term goal to get to 10% or less of streets with OCI of, I forget if it was 25 or below or 20 or below, but poor and very poor. Where would this get us to? Were it something like 24% now or 25% of lane miles? Correct and Danny was around here somewhere and I think he left, so you're going to get my answer and not his. This does get us below the 20%, but it doesn't get us down to the 10% now, and I believe last year when we talked about this very issue, to get down to the 10% was going to mean about an influx of almost $300 million in a one shot to try to get those roadways all the way to a point where our backlog was no more than 10%. There's a comment that this doesn't minimize construction fatigue and we've learned that the thing people hate almost as much as poor roads is roads being fixed. Is there any kind of strategy for how you'd sequence it that wouldn't absolutely minimize it but would lessen construction fatigue? Is there some learning we've had about how to approach with so much work? That's where you're absolutely seeing more of this hybrid approach come together where instead of taking it, we've affectionately called it the shotgun approach in the past where we just say, hey, where's the lowest streets in the town and we'll just go hit those without really any thought process to what's in between them that may be similar but just didn't fall into an arbitrary category. So now you're coming back within two or three years or four years and you're influencing the exact same people. So if we start looking at neighborhoods as a holistic standpoint, I want to do all the infrastructure in one entire neighborhood and move down that pathway so I shouldn't have to impact the neighborhood for another 30 years. If I do, it's minor maintenance here and there, renting out in a day, maybe two days tops. It's nothing like what you see when we totally do a reconstruct. So this hybrid approach is moving us out of that shotgun approach and moving into the more neighborhood centric approach where we understand it's frustrating, it's frustrating for everybody to try to work around it and we want to do our best to try to, we'll maximize the pain for the shortest amount of possible time. I appreciate that. Get all the root canal. Yes, one time. One time. Yeah, so I wanted to say what I love about this and then just to offer a little suggestion to see what my colleagues might think about this, it doesn't change, the suggestion doesn't change the substance of any of this, but just kind of the naming instead of section 1, 3, and 4, or numbering these sections, naming, when it comes to a vote, naming the neighborhoods. And it'll be a little tricky for some of them that don't necessarily maybe have a name, so Southeast Denton, west of downtown area, for some it might have to be a kind of manufactured name, but something where, because I kept finding that, as I was, I kept forgetting which one was studying this, which one is which neighborhood, and then people really feel like they can really picture which neighborhood they're voting on, so that's just a suggestion. But just saying really quickly, what I like about this, this hybrid method, is because while it is good to be able to say our OCIs have improved by this much, kind of like saying we're 100% renewable and our score has been raised, what I see when people are complaining about their neighborhoods being ignored or their street being ignored, it's either that my whole neighborhood's being ignored, or it is a block away, they're improving the street. Why aren't they improving my street? And what this does is it improves the general neighborhood, and these were chosen, correct me if I'm wrong, but based on OCI clusters, clusters of bad OCI streets, and then kind of zeroing in on the neighborhood as a whole, plus having this approach that includes infrastructure updates, even though, as I understand, the bond money is going to the roads, but when it's implemented, it'll involve other departments doing all kinds of underground infrastructure. So I feel that will do a lot for these neighborhoods that, because they have such high concentration low OCI clusters, saying low, I always forget if it's the lower number you want or the higher number, but the lower number, yeah, the bad OCI, you know, will give a sense of our neighborhood issues are being addressed now. Councilmember Brich, question? Yeah, so on this, I'm assuming if it's very poor, then that means complete reconstruction? Anything under a 40, we would be scheduling for complete reconstruction of the road. And is that like curb and gutter and does that does that include design or any of these for like redesign for, you know, different striping or adding sidewalks where there's not sidewalks or is this just for this is just for the streets. Okay. All right. That would address the stormwater component and the curb and gutter. Yes. Okay. And say if it's if you're going to redo the street, reconstruct the street, and it needs to be less. I mean, would the striping come? Yes. As well? Yes. In that process? It would. So if it needed to add in a bike lane or something? Right. Okay. Thank you. All right. Next couple of slides, just add a little more detail to this approach of the hybrid approach where you can see just a map and obviously we have larger versions of this map, but the blue here is all those zero to 25, which many of those obviously would be would be reconstructed with this approach of getting all the OCI is under 20 and you can see the total segments 102 for 20 and under and total lane miles 32.3 in that program. Neighborhoods, we initially started off with seven sections, that's why you see seven there with the approach that we're taking, saying the $35 million really comes or roughly $35 million really comes from these neighborhoods, neighborhoods one, three, and four, which would be prioritized in the bond program. And you can see there that within those we also have the water and wastewater that would be that we'd gain those efficiencies by just going in once instead of having to go in multiple times on one street to do streets and then come back and tear the road up and get into water, wastewater. And so did the bond committee vote on the sections in the neighbor to be a priority? We didn't have an individual vote on the neighborhoods, but they did recommend the entire package as presented. So by voting on the rehab, they voted on the rehab, the street rehab, $70 million as presented. So by voting on the street rehab program as presented, they essentially voted on the sections that we recommended. Okay. So they were aware of the sections during the vote? Absolutely. Okay. Absolutely. And they saw the maps. Yeah. We went into more detail than this on those. With the committee, we went into kind of zoned in on what the streets would look like in each of those neighborhoods. Next project that's included, that was recommended in the streets section was with sidewalks, $12 million total dollars for sidewalks with total funding of $18.7 million. That additional amount comes from safe routes to school funding that would be leveraged for the $12 million that would go towards sidewalks. All of these sidewalks in conjunction with that safe route to school would be for schools that exist now that do not have a sidewalk to the school. So every sidewalk that we put in with this $12 million would be related to getting a sidewalk to schools. And we would plan on issuing $2 million of the $12 million each year of the six-year program. Councilmember Bouncer. Just want to make sure I'm tracking. Would this cover all of the sidewalks within a quarter mile of all the schools or are you just saying all of this money would go within that category, but does it complete the category? So there's approximately $18.7 million in need to cover that quarter mile for all of the schools listed. Now the only schools that aren't on this list, and that's because they're not safe routes to school eligible, are the high schools. But the middle schools and the elementary schools with preference given to the elementary schools first are. Now as you start branching out, what you see in these other circles here, so this kind of darker yellow circle and the lighter, that's a half mile and one mile radius that roughly dovetails with the two mile radius for the bussing pattern that the schools all have tied to them. So within two miles, they don't bus to the individual schools to make special arrangements otherwise. So this matches kind of what they do per school. The quarter mile is what we're talking about with this $12 million and then we leverage it with safe routes to school funding to address all of those issues within that quarter mile radius. Thanks. Council Member Davis. Does anything in this item help us make up for some of the sidewalks they did not recommend in the Ryan area on the, I guess they chose the Ryan Road package that we'll talk about in a minute, that did not include drainage and sidewalks. My concern there is that we've made the same decision that we made 25 years ago with Ryan High School in building out without adequate sidewalks if we do Ryan Road without adequate sidewalks. So do we make up for any of that in this sidewalks package? Some of that would be taken care of with the Ryan project. So looking at a sidewalk on one side of the roadway with the proposed package where it's bar ditches instead of a bunch of drainage infrastructure and curb and gutter as proposed currently for Ryan, that could be added to the project at a fairly nominal cost. I mean one sidewalk on one side is not that expensive. There is a sidewalk out there that gets from Forest Ridge Drive all the way over to the elementary school, Ryan Elementary School. So going a little further down would not be that cost prohibitive. We do have some sidewalk deficiencies down there in the other direction. There's some sidewalk options for the Forest Ridge kids but not necessarily for all the kids in the new subdivisions coming online and then a little further to the west if I'm correct. Well there are some other alternatives when new developments come online they either escrow or they build the sidewalks themselves. So those components should be coming on either a funding portion where we can add it to the project and that becomes an additional funding source for the sidewalk or the development actually puts it in themselves as they come in. Can we update, I know it didn't come to the committee I'm assuming because it's not there but I would like to add Popo Gonzalez up there and because we're going to be looking at 428 and I think it's just important that we include them and then I think it's also important that that development to the west of that school, the ATC being more high school-ish but you know Popo Gonzalez right next door to the west of that they've installed a lot of houses so I'd like to understand that and start looking at ways to incorporate that at the same time so we're not you know if we have to find the money elsewhere I get it but let's at least know what that is. Okay. Thanks. Let's go ahead and take a five minute break and then we'll come back and pick up the presentation. Welcome back to this meeting of the Dent City Council Thursday August the 1st 2019 it is 1 33 p.m. we're moving through our work session agenda items we are on work session 1A still so we'll continue the presentation. The next item within the streets proposition that was recommended by the bond advisor committee was to dedicate funding for street lighting. If you recall when this originally went to the bond committee this was not in the recommendations that originally went to the bond committee but the council did ask the bond city to consider street lighting looked at a number of options of some major streets that could have street lighting projects devoted to them and the committee ultimately voted on recommending to focus on University Drive and this would be University Drive between I-35 and Old North and that estimated cost to get street lighting in that entire segment would be seven million dollars so the committee really placed a high priority on that and voted on that as a recommendation. Oh Council Member Meltzer. Just as a kind of background actually Mayor remember you're making a comment that you're sort of surprised when the University Drive improvements went through and you noticed like hey what's missing you know was that was that an aberration I guess I'm really asking Todd that you know is there some way that we could like does the state just not in general include lighting or was that is this an odd situation where now we've got to come up with the funds in general they're not a they don't provide that as a utility on their roadways that's something that individual communities assess whether or not they want to maintain it long term and that's really the issue is if if you're willing to maintain it then absolutely they will be glad to install it but it's that maintenance agreement so a lot of communities don't have the wherewithal or the ability or desire to maintain it and that's where it gets left off thanks not an aberration thanks. Council Member Breach had a question. Yes and so will this be LED lighting and will it be all be up to new standards? Yes. The next project that was recommended was Ryan Road and obviously this is a significantly different project than that when it was originally recommended to the committee to consider and as we talked earlier the change in the scope of this project was really directly related to the capacity that is built by expanding Hickory Creek lessening the necessity for a larger road on Ryan Road after after that conversation with the committee we went to them with two options one being a four million dollar city cost and one being a 19 million dollar city cost for Ryan Road the real significant difference between the two the four million dollars and the 19 million dollar programs from a city perspective are the sidewalks and drainage improvements this program would not have the sidewalks and drainage improvements outside of what Todd talked about earlier with the with the one side of the road and what we might be able to do with the sidewalks there and then the additional six million dollars would be funding that we'd be able to leverage for the intersections of Ryan Road. Yeah I just wanted to speak to the sidewalk issue which is right right before we took the break I just want to second what Councilmember Davis was saying about you know the concerns about the sidewalks around the school so I support adding in that or fact factoring in rather that kind of extra amount for that I just wanted to clarify when when you mentioned that putting sidewalk on one side of this one side of the street you mean the side of the street of this that the school is on versus the the other side yes that's where predominantly the there is a sidewalk today so we would do continuation of that sidewalk yeah to have the connective and just you know kind of throwing this out there I know that across the street on the other side of the street is is where the you know and there's not even a timeline on this now they just have the property but where the new grace like rain development is going to be and they're going to be you know single parent families with young young kids there but that's on McKinney. I'm so sorry I just wasted the public's time sorry that I was thinking Ryan sorry thank you very much so what are the rules around how these propositions are packaged I'm asking specifically with reference to this one because it's a little bit of the feeling for me of that cartoon where there's two mice watching TV and one says to the other this is the catnip channel we had to take it to get the cheese channel you know where I think like some people might want to vote for you know say the road reconstruction and the lighting and the sidewalks and some people might want to vote for the widenings you know the the big road projects but not necessarily it might not necessarily be all the same people so you know are there rules about how what has to go together and how many parts pieces it can be in I'll defer to our bond council to kind of talk through what our options may be in splitting up the proposal. Councilman Ryan is up to bat on the question sorry about that Councilman Ryan I apologize. Hi Greg Shecker with McCall Parkerson Horton the bond proposition could be as specific as you would want it to be the general proposition of street improvements would encompass all the things that are are being discussed but you could have a separate proposition for sidewalks a separate proposition for specific streets a separate proposition for only street renovations you know renovations of existing streets. Package in any way one is there as far as actual practice with other municipalities is it kind of all over the map. It's pretty unusual to get that specific is that sidewalks or to that detail or street lighting or you know anything like that the most used proposition is the the general one which you're which you're looking at but but you can slice and dice as specific as you want okay thank you councilmember councilmember Ryan councilmember Ryan thank you. This is going back to Todd I guess most likely on Ryan Road looking at only doing a three lane road yes sir I've got a number of concerns some of which you've heard me voice many times before because when we build the western side of loop 288 it will tie into vintage which is the road that our new police substation is going to be on our and we currently have a fire station there the distance between where vintage is and where Ryan ends is shorter than the distance from River Pass to 1830 so I realize it is also floodplain area so it would have to be bridges but the when you look at the the maps that were at the mobility committee last night 10 minute walk to parks and when you look at the fire department's maps that showed the six minute distance from a fire station along Ryan Road there is all outside of those those numbers and so to me while it might not be right right now the long term should be to connect that in there because you it's that or you're going to have to build another fire station down in that area and I think that that development is better are we looking at gaining enough real estate enough right away that will be set for the four line could we do something that would be more in line of just divided two lanes you know large median kind of like what you have on 2499 to the south where they're planning to go to six at some point but could we do that with a part of what drives that center lane for the three lane configuration here is that there's the planning of subdivisions along Ryan Road over its history is so disjointed you like to get the the roadways lined up on both sides so that you minimize the total number of decisions that a driver a pedestrian a cyclist has to make it any one intersection I'm here I'm not looking right in front of me and then right next to me and then right next to me again you have a lot of disjointed roadways tying into different neighborhoods all along Ryan so that that really puts us into a left turn continuously along the entire area and a median gets very difficult to start parsing out who gets a left turn and who doesn't so what I would see and answer your question is this long term if we if we were ever to need to add to you would just add to the outside so we would anticipate putting the sidewalks far enough back that if we had to add lanes to the outside we would just simply add on to the outside okay but right now you're saying this project is without sidewalks on one side we're considering that would go in there but the ultimate configuration of the roadway would have sidewalks so any at any time when you put sidewalks in for this configuration you would end up putting it far enough back so what you see today is the sidewalks are really set back far off the roadway itself which gives you room for the drainage and then ultimately the extra roadway width well and and again I just don't see where this is going to be that much of an improvement to the road as it sits today and to say that Hickory Creek is going to be the do-all for the area doesn't make sense since there's not a connector between 2181 and 1830 except for cutting through neighborhoods and I know that that's a separate discussion of the possibility of trying to get something through there but and part of that is why we looked at the entire area south of Teasley Lane all the way down to Hickory Creek and beyond all the way to Crawford all the way over DIA 35W and 224.99 so that we could get a sense of what do those scenarios really bring to the table if Hickory Creek was just that predominant a driver then the sixth lane would have been the absolute recommended option right now but what happens is is you put in the roadway connection and then it equalizes the pressure because there's a lot of traffic today that is people trying to get north to be able to go south and that that's just what's happening today you see a lot of traffic on Hobson a lot of traffic on Ryan that are trying to get somewhere to the south because we're missing that connection allows you to get over to 35W quicker so that is where that the Hickory Creek helps is it balances out the overstressed roadways that we currently have in the area today. Yeah I mean I'm glad to see that we were doing something on this project I think that there's probably a little different configuration that would work better sidewalk the whole way connecting on the east side that the two sections that widen out getting those connected up so you've got at least part of the roadway already you know finished out and and then just resurfacing some of the bad areas could possibly still fall within that same dollar amount so he brings up a good point and you may have already discussed this earlier when I was out of the room but with the mobility plan update in the meetings that we're having is it possible that some of these designs or some of these items can change you'll never hear an engine engineer say it absolutely cannot change unless there's a safety reason it can but the area study that we did for this entire area is one of the basis for that upcoming mobility plan update all that information is getting put into that same mobility plan update okay all right thank you I just want to kind of add add my voice to that crowd that we talked about Hickory Creek we're talking now about Ryan we've already had vintage brought up and how that's going to tie in I'd very much like to have that conversation soon that portion of the mobility plan because I'm not satisfied with our options I'd like to see more explanation on how we chose these particular alignments you've given us a good start today but I'm not sure that we've addressed all the the citizen concerns in these areas some of those being the traffic flow that you've already mentioned but also brush Creek is a big concern for me some of the folks we've heard from I think you're aware of those concerns and then future growth patterns I'm just not sure we're on the same page yet with the mobility solutions in this area so the the third the five third and final proposition that would be included based on the recommendations from the committee would be park systems improvements would be the name of the proposition with open space for five million dollars and then public art and I'll touch on both of those and what they mean here in the next two slides so open space ultimately just means land acquisition obviously within the parks proposition would be land acquisition for parkland which is pretty all-encompassing of what that parkland could be but specifically just five million dollars for land acquisition for what would become parkland for the city staff has created a master list of those potential properties when we also have obviously multiple pots of money that we use for land acquisition throughout the city this would this five million dollars would just become another one of those resources for land acquisition how close would this bring us to our ten-minute walk goal I'll bring up Gary to answer that question Gary pack and director parks and recreation so we use the ten-minute walk goal as our foundation to identify our land for this entire process right now we're at 41 percent national average is 55 percent five million can buy approximately sixty sixty two point five acres it would depend on if we add that to existing parks if that's a higher priority or that may be already are achieving the ten-minute walk but the ones with the properties we identify are outside that that would help the ten-minute walk improvement so sixty two point five isn't a huge amount of parkland especially if you buy it in one or two lots so it really depends on how big a parcels you buy and how much that spread out in order to really give a more accurate tracking okay but you know kind of in the range of if you if you if your objective was to maximize your impact on the percent of the population you know is it bias five points ten points I could give you an actual number but we can use the tree fund to augment some of that so we could spread that number out a little bit better I'm just wondering if it's enough it's not enough as our population continues to grow we're constantly chasing that number so if if we do nothing we're probably going backwards it may be a better way to put it what's the ballpark price to install a garden variety playground so we have the land put the whatever you would consider a basic amenities in what's that cost hundred hundred twenty five thousand dollars rough average depending on the size thank you I just wanted to just just say just a few words about what I what I really like about this and I'm excited about this and a couple of the benefits would take too long to list all the benefits you know one tree preservation that when when you know when we purchase land as the city it's you know this is land that it's public property and it can't be bought unless the city makes a decision to sell it to private entity but any tree on that that property is going to be be preserved unless unless the city decides to cut down all the trees and I don't think that would happen because people would be really upset about that so and the second thing at least this is for you know for me I see this as a benefit is that we can can use it if we strategically as mentioned here there are a number of number of possibilities as to that aren't being decided on today but about where we could you know purchase that that open space and but we can use that to help meet our 2030 goal plans to not overdevelop our rural area if we can preserve portions and I'm not saying this is the solution to that but it would help with that be very compatible and so I would recommend again I realize we're not making that decision to today on what plan to purchase but that that you know land be be purchased in a way that's compatible with the 2030 plan and having the lower density in our rural outskirts as opposed to purchasing that land and I don't know how much land is even available towards the you know of course you get less and less availability acreage wise close you get to the center of town you know but I wouldn't want to purchase open spaces closer to the center of town where housing could go for instance so I just wanted to mention those two possibilities that that that the people might might not have thought of but anyway I'm excited about this and clearly the bond committee is either unanimous or almost unanimous on this I think I think you were they 11 that's not unanimous at all no so so so split I guess I was I never think of something else but but I'm glad that is to say that I'm glad that that that they approved this I was watching to see they approved that so thank you yes so Gary in the backup materials for the bond committee you had a fantastic chart that kind of cut off as a screenshot of this matrix y'all have been working on with your priority how you identify these priority properties can you give us a brief sketch for the folks plan along at home what the factors are that went into that prioritization because if you look at that chart y'all have y'all have done a really deep dive into what kind of properties you're looking at so back in March we came to City Council an executive session and provided a a process that we created because we did not have one in place about how we would look and evaluate property for future acquisitions for park space or preservation and we came up with 18 to 20 different considerations they include tree canopy types of tree species geological features topography unique assets on the land if there's lake that type of thing and then also the 10-minute walk we're all factors that we look into that so we created a a survey basically internal survey that we could go through and evaluate each process and put that into a chart that trickled down into an excel spreadsheet and then we could rank those by scoring those and giving each one a point value that really kind of raised it to a certain level so we could focus on those parts you know five five or ten parcels for future property acquisition council member mayor pro tem thank you david i have a question i think what i need help with is what is the what are the i guess the financing costs associated with this five million dollars if you were to put that five million dollars on the vacuum and say we're going to spend five million dollars to buy future property but you're going to draw that at some point and it's going to require interest etc while you're nailing down what you're going to buy then you're going to eventually develop that out or not just let it sit but what is that kind of look at that five million dollars by itself the the debt to carry that versus us just going and buying it you know right it's almost like that look of do we do we debt finance vehicles or just buy them outright so can you help me understand that component sure for the purpose of of of everything we put forward in our assumptions we likely wouldn't issue this in the first year which we've kind of ramped up our interest rate that we're assuming so we're at four and a half percent interest rates where our assumption in the future years so we can definitely run the numbers on on that piece of what the actual interest would be on that debt and how for the for the 20 years that we would amortize it I would say I think a big discussion that the committee had was you know the cost of land and how the cost of land is increasing so that would play against that may be a factor against what the interest rate would be in the the amount of debt that we would pay as far as cash funding it obviously we have a number of of other pots of money that we could use mission that tree mitigation fund and obviously we're taking a look right now at our impact fees essentially and how we can use those for parkland dedication so we do have those other mechanisms for parkland acquisition outside of the general fund or even issuing them okay yes so if I could get either you or Tony's kind of snapshot look at that because really really what it boils down to and I take your point right so let's say four and a half percent over 20 years is a component cost of land increase as as time goes I get it that's that's a point but then also if if the land is selling there's a tax in right that you have to account for right if it if the land sells then that's in theory another number that's going to come back to it so so I just want to I just want to have your analysis so what I want to do is take your understanding and and help me explain to someone that says five million dollars for open land you know that we're going to pay debt on makes sense because or our analysis of that is not even taking a position but our analysis is to consider is this and allow that to be considered on its face but I just want to I need to be able to speak to that sure we definitely do the full analysis I will say the amount of interest would be about three million dollars on that five million dollar thank you councilmember Malzner then councilmember Armitage and then councilmember Briggs I'm still uh you know not not quite resolved I don't really understand where the five million dollar comes from and this is really for for uh director Packard I don't really understand where the five million figure comes from and if we you know if we really wanted to make a dent you know we've already voted on the goal we already share the goal so and and you know this is up to the voters ultimately so if they want to pay the taxes to support it you know that's going to be up to them so but I'd like to be able to put something in front of them that we think is meaningful so you know where does five million come from as the number or what would a number be that would make a serious dent in achieving the goal we've already agreed on if if I my understanding and correct me if I'm wrong but during the bond committee deliberation when they were talking about specific projects the fire station uh not the fire station the police station firing range was voted down which means you still had a five million dollar capacity outside of the public art or more depending on how they were prioritized so I think probably well it was yeah I mean it was whatever money they had left they had to apportion that once they pulled that project out as my understanding but that might be they they did take a vote on nine million dollars which actually had a nine nine split and then they went down to five million dollars and that's how they got to the majority okay that's helpful to understand although my question still stands for dr. pack and just what would a number be that would make a meaningful dent in achieving the goal we've agreed on so so what we looked at was a five ten million dollar option that we presented to the bond committee five million dollars provides roughly sixty two point five acres that was based on eighty thousand dollars an acre fifteen million dollars is a hundred and eighty seven hundred ninety acres uh based off of fifteen million again eighty thousand dollars an acre that that's making an improvement um obviously when the land is purchased and a large chunk of it's gone it's it's developed we can't we can't buy that uh so you know I guess the best time to buy land was twenty years ago uh similar to planting a tree in favor of that yeah let's do that yeah I guess just to add on to david's uh point we we do have a study going on right now with a professor from texas a and m that is updating our parkland uh impact and dedication fees so we have not had that updated I don't believe since it's a 99 1998 so and so that formula right now that the developers pay into is based on land prices in 1998 and you know so it was probably what ten to twenty thousand acre today we're seeing seventy to eighty thousand acres so you're going to be having a policy discussion in the next few months um about where should that uh where should those fees be set in order to acquire property today in today's market rates so that's going to be in addition to whatever you decide to put on the ballot just add to uh city manager the the land acquisition funding right now is really tied to a half mile to a mile radius around that development uh what we're proposing is to go to regions and follow the the street impact uh fees region so any any dot in that area from nine to the nine fifteen money could be used to buy land in any of that area so that will free up money we have a little over three million dollars right now in that fund but it's sprinkled across the entire city yeah okay so this is the whole picture of what could go against land acquisition because you got that too yeah that plus the tree fund and the million dollars in the 2014 bond program yes I mean just just to make you know one other point if if you know since that is our goal the ten minute walk thing you know you really only have two choices either you restrict development to where there's already green space or if you want to be able to to grow you got to set aside some other green space yeah I wanted to make the point um so I learned something new just a moment ago about um when you had mentioned that the idea was that um you wouldn't uh start on this until did you say at least a year out is it and and was that something that the bond committee had decided or or you could explain obviously that decision is not set in stone and that would be a decision we have with council as far as when we would issue dollars I will say uh with this program as it stands right now we have um a lot of commitments for a large amount of dollars in the first couple years with the public safety facilities and with hickory creek and and bonnie bray will will be issuing quite a bit in those first couple of years so if assessed values come in higher and we have more capacity definitely something that could come in sooner so not intended to say we would not issue it it's just understanding that we we might have some limits on what we can issue in those first couple but I think to clarify david's point we did share with with the bond oversight committee or bond advisory committee rather a pro forma of when debt would be issued moving in with the public safety taking first priority and then moving forward so it really does depend any any ea v that comes in above and beyond the five five percent growth factor changes things but it was clearly that those were first in yeah yeah and that and so I will add um just to that that if at all possible within that and you know and I don't want to change that hierarchy because the I mean all these things are important but the importance of the of the public safety part of it um because uh once land is uh developed you know we can't um uh go back and make it open space you know as gary mentioned you know the time for land acquisition was 20 25 years ago uh so if there's an opportunity you know to to purchase uh land sooner even if it's not through the bond money because I understand that the bond uh uh you know because it it's all factored you know all these things are are are holistic and and all add up to the debt and you want to manage and and and weigh that and the interest um but you know if we just accept that assuming that the public votes on this comes forward and the public votes on this that open land acquisition is a top priority uh then I would hope that we would uh move try to move forward quickly in whatever way we can so if we if if if we can't get it through bonds you know some of this land that's that's been selected if we can find other ways of doing it obviously this the street impact the impact fees it has to be as you said right around that area um but anyway that's just I I just wanted to add that uh that as long as we can as we consider that this land that we have mapped out is going to get bit by bit in short time uh taken away and and there's not going to be more land obviously that's going to we've got we've got two or three million dollars set aside that we've gotten to go ahead from council to negotiate this so gary's working his way through that and as soon as we can get a deal in place we'll be we'll be bringing them to you yeah excellent council member rakes so I wanted to go ahead and offer my support of this um proposal here and also as as soon as possible and I guess that'll um was just addressed by the city manager but I wanted to say that you know studies show that connections to nature have a positive impact on mental and physical health and um and increases the quality of life of our residents and so this is a pretty important one it may not sound like it but it it really is and this is the reason why people choose to live in our city well we'll move on to public art unless there's any other comment on open space so the committee was charged as I mentioned earlier with considering up to zero to two percent of public art funding based on vertical construction uh the the policy the art public art policy as it stands right now calls for two to four percent of public art of vertical construction cost be devoted to public art in a bond program with initial initial but the charge obviously gave that committee the the opportunity to consider up to zero to two percent early in the process with the committee before we got the updated costs for the public safety facilities the committee had uh consensus on two percent of public of vertical construction to go toward public art with the revised uh facility costs obviously increasing that that that amount of those amount of dollars that would go to public art the ultimate recommendation from the committee as noted earlier last thursday was to go with one percent to recommend to the council one percent of vertical construction of public art which equals six hundred and nineteen thousand dollars they also voted as mentioned earlier to devote that entire amount to park systems improvements there was some discussion of where the best place for that public art would be uh splitting it between different propositions but the ultimate vote was on uh entirely putting putting the entire one percent to park systems improvements um obviously if if council decide took the recommendation and went with one percent we would bring back on the six or 13th uh a revision to the public art policy to allow that uh one percent to to move forward council member obiter can you um can you explain more what exactly that that wouldn't what exactly that means park systems improvements does that mean public art in parks public art in any park in the city okay so it's still limited to to to public art it's just it doesn't it wouldn't include other kinds of parks improvements it's still limited to public art yes but it has to be there there is an option within our policy to do a separate proposition where public art could be its own proposition voted on separately and then it could have more wide ranging use but the committee did not recommend that that's interesting yeah for me just as far as where i'm uh as far as i'm concerned um i like the idea of limiting it to um public open space uh um you know i i don't quite see and i guess i'd have to go and and look at some of the videos of the i was only able to attend two or three of the bond committee meetings but um you know where that was discussed but uh obviously that eliminates you know having something in the some some other public property that's not a a park in a in a right of way on the street um the uh you know traffic calming art or or whatever um but and i had a question um also to mostly to kind of to shore up um my understanding make sure it's correct about the process so whatever uh amount gets voted on and is it up to the public arts committee ultimately to uh to decide on they to vote on this and then it comes to council is that the process i mean to to vote on what the public art is right after the amount is decided is that goes through the public arts committee then to council once we issue the dollars the public art committee then recommends the projects so they go through their process they'll recommend the projects to council to say these fall in lines with what public art is and they recommend moving forward with the projects i would make one note on what you said uh because it's not in the streets proposition right of way would not be included with public art for this oh okay okay because it's specifically not in the streets part of the bond and then and kind of that leads to my the next question of has this been uh by the uh been run by the public arts committee to see what they thought about that uh the the park system and improvement limitation and the the change in the ordinance i i they're having a meeting i believe in a couple of hours and there's an update on the on the agenda so that to make them aware of what the committee is recommending but they have not been involved in uh yeah so i will you know i would want to withhold my uh opinion on that then until they've had a chance to to weigh in and out but i'm glad to know that that it's coming before them councilmember davis so i'm not too concerned with the amount of money that we're talking about if i had my druthers actually i think i like our current policy which is a two percent and i understand why the committee went with one percent instead but my only concern with this item is every other item that we've talked about thus far even though we have a lot of flexibility in how we ultimately do the projects have a lot of planning and specificity um even when we had uh the open space conversation gary told us about how his department has been uh you know for months now really drilling down into a plan on acquisition and how we're going to spend the money that the voters eventually entrust us to raise my concern with the public art is we've already had some problem we have money sitting in public art funds currently some of that's very siloed you can only use it for public art at a police station you can only use it for public art in such and such a way my only concern with um with the including this in the bond issue would be just the lack of a plan i guess some of my concerns might be able to be allayed if and maybe this is a question for david maybe for bond council but how flexible we can be with this when we talk about parks um you know does that mean any place that parks and rec is in charge of mowing does that mean it has to be within the bounds of a formerly dedicated city park like what does that mean and when we talk about public art can we build a splash pad that is also a sculpture element to it and that's a public art i mean i just worry about putting a big chunk of money as well intentioned and as important as it is into a bucket that has no plan and no no idea of exactly how we're going to spend it well i'll attempt to begin answering the question but can obviously defer to bond council um for the example you raised i mean it would say anything that the park's mode would be too broad it would have to be land that was owned by the city and considered parkland by the city um and then as far as what is considered art i think that um we have the policy that that states that to some degree give some balance for that but that's really where the park the public art committee comes into play of defining what that public art is versus um what it isn't but did the did the bond committee have any examples given them other than you know we have some sculptures in our parks now we have a sculpture a few sculptures in a park you know not far from where we're sitting but did they have any specific examples laid out for them here's how the city is thinking about spending this money here are some things we'd like to do some artists we'd like to engage a park that doesn't have art now that could really use a piece did they have that kind of planning built into it or is it just you know how much money can we put in the bond uh well just the way the process played out up until the up until the last vote we were not considering a third proposition for parks so we did have conversations about with them about what signage would be markers and things like that that would be in roadways um but we had not really anticipate up to that point anticipated this this amount going into park uh the parkland proposition so we didn't have examples to show of what it would be but we obviously have examples previously of some dollars that have been spent within the parks so if you could help me so we had talked about not too long ago gateways to the city and within those gateways we're going to put public art of some sort that's you know hired by artists sculptures welcome to denton or some kind of um eagle or something and so would that qualify under here because it's not necessarily parkland and is that so if this gets passed so i'm assuming because there's a bullet point down here that says we would need to revise the public policy so um currently items like that can be used right and if it's revised then it can't be well the reason those those can be used now is because they were part of a streets proposition these if it went forward as part of a park a parks proposition it could not they cannot be used but that's not guided by the public art policy that's just guided by where the funds are and what proposition they're in um the only change to the policy would be changing the two percent to one percent in the range but so within the parks proposition it would not be used for those examples and so that is just for this amount of money to be spent in this area in the parks in parks the park system throughout the city right okay if this were split out as a separate proposition then you're not limited to parks you could put it in gateways you could put it in libraries you could do all kinds of things with it is that right correct okay councilmember milster did the committee consider and reject the idea of traffic calming art or did they you know or was the thought process just that they didn't want to restrict it to public safety structures they only took one vote um so as far as what the consensus of the committee only took one vote on which proposition and it was the vote to go entirely to park systems um and obviously that passed so there was no second vote they had conversation about where to put it and the benefits of the different uh propositions but the only vote that was recorded was to go entirely to park system okay thank you okay councilmember davis sorry i just want to make sure everybody had their chance to speak i i like the idea of public art as its own proposition simply because i understand why the committee put it with open land open space they want to make sure it passes they want to make sure the voters can get behind it and it goes along with something that may have more support you know parkland acquisition might have a lot of support it may not we'll have to see but if we put it in its own proposition we get so much more flexibility we could use it for the correct traffic commie if we want to put a statue in the middle of mckinna circle or whatever we're going to have over on scripture in the roundabout we can put it there we can use it in the parks i just don't see right now a glaring need for parks or where all the sculptures need to go or that we need to use it all on signing and monuments so i would i would be very supportive of a separate proposition for public art and i could be publicly supportive of that too i can get behind that a whole lot easier than i can public art that's limited just to parks so just throwing it out there yep all right i just wanted to get clarification to make sure i understood um so i thought what i was being told earlier was that uh that this that even without the parks uh system improvements proposition um that uh we wouldn't be able to use it on streets because it's not part of the street uh part of the bond package if we didn't have the third proposition then and we then we had public art it would have to go to one of the other propositions so if if council or the committee had recommended put the entire amount in streets the whole 619 000 it could be spent on streets it's just a matter of where the prop what proposition it's in because ultimately the voters will vote on a proposition that has an amount for public art in it and once they vote on that if they approve it it can only be spent within that proposition yeah and so now um so again i'm just want to make sure that i understand what what was just said so is i so so now you're saying that because it's its own separate um uh part of the bond package not attached to either of those other two or together with open space uh it can or cannot be used on street that's where i'm because on the one hand i was i thought i was being told it couldn't be used on streets but now it can be used i'll try to make it as clear it would be in the park system proposition so it can only be spent on parks i'm sorry but i mean without that right without the parks limitation uh it can be it could be used on as council member davis was saying because if if that's the case then i i agree you know pending hearing from the public arts committee that it could be used on a street a park uh an entrance to a part of town anything what council member davis was record was was mentioning was if it was a fourth so it would be a fourth proposition just for public art and voted on separately exactly yeah without the open space if that's the case then it could be used anywhere yeah okay okay okay excellent thank you so much for clearing that up thanks so just a couple more slides um we've been at this almost two and a half hours so just wanted to show what the potential ballot language would look like in the resolution that would be coming forward to you in a couple weeks unless we have any changes obviously at the direction of council uh the first one just um uh limited saying 154,000 for street improvements second 161 uh 154 million for street improvements the second one 61.9 million for public safety facilities um and then the third for park improvements obviously including public art as well the last last slide we have uh one of the one piece that we mentioned a couple weeks ago as we were talking about the recent legislative changes there will be new legislation that that um that impacts the way that bond elections are held in texas that goes into effect september first because we're calling the bond election prior to september first it does not apply to this bond election uh so we are we are still under the rules of of the prior legislation of what we have to the language we have to have within our ordinances within the bound ballots and within all the other required legislation uh so we'll have to abide by that and those are there are differences in what is actually written in the ordinances one piece of the new legislation is to provide what is called a voter information guide with the information that's laid out in front of you showing the total obligations for the city outstanding currently and then what those uh the debt obligations would be for the new package along with the annual the maximum annual increase for a hundred thousand dollars about valuation and then the assumption assumptions used to come up with those numbers um and this is and you have some leverage to add some additional information this is additional information we're adding the the thought process and staff would be despite not having we're not completely required by the new legislation to do to take all the steps uh included we could produce this document and publish it to be in the spirit of the legislation and show that we're going um to do everything we can to be in compliant with it council mayor melzer uh first thing i just really appreciate the uh transparency of the estimated maximum annual increase you know here's the dollars and i think people can do that much math you know to say what's my value so so thank you for that um i have a little uh uh concern uh that you know i think back on that slide when i asked you how do you want me to feel about it the one that showed the total debt service impact uh and you know i'm happy about the fact that this in this overall process i mean the voters are going to say whether they want to pay for this stuff or not but they're they're they're trusting that what we're putting forward is is responsible and the only question i have in the back of my mind is is uh whether we've gotten opinions on like if if if uh voters vote yes on everything uh what does that do to our bond rating is our overall you know kind of financial uh worthiness still solid and from a professional point of view but do we have anybody here that from our we've got yes yeah yes okay yeah i didn't want to you to have to try to answer that question although i think david would have done fine i'm laura alexander with hilltop securities the city's financial advisor and i'm not at all concerned about the city's bond rating based on this program um there's lots of things that go into our debt rating i mean a credit rating and in fact if you know are neglecting your infrastructure or not investing in your infrastructure that's a credit negative um this is not putting pressure you know on on on the tax rate or anything like that some absurd amount of increase so overall i mean generally i would say i don't have any concerns and certainly the city just got upgraded recently so i mean the trends are good all right i appreciate your comments thank you so um i'm i'm inclined to want to uh to want to say that i i would prefer to be able to say to the voters that uh we stuck to the 210 uh the original you know limit even though i you know i i voted and i meant it for to give the bond committee the ability to discuss you know going up to the possibility of 235 but what i'm wondering is um you know if we were to uh you know lower it to uh to the original cap uh and then to say you know obviously wouldn't be part of the bond uh proposition but to pass a resolution or an ordinance or something binding that we're committed to all of these projects but we're just gonna you know but the rest of it will be um uh paid for you know 11 million that additional paid for through other funds you know what would be the you know uh pros and cons uh of of doing something like that but before you answer that um i want to see if there's a if there's any uh appetite other than council member armature to lower this back down to 210 000 i'm not so if we if if if there's not a consensus to do that i don't know if we need to go into the conversation but i don't i don't necessarily feel a need to do that because part of why where i think we're doing this is the transparency of projects and how much they cost because one thing we've always heard is issuance of co's really has very little public input so i'm not in favor of that so before he answers that i just want to get an appetite from the rest of the council council member i would say i'm less concerned about the the overall number if because uh i think we're going to go in the direction at least i would want to go in the direction of somewhat narrower slices so people are you know are not necessarily reacting to a total but you know they're looking at at the components so you know i don't know that anybody is uh you know necessarily making a decision about about the total dollar amount saying do i want to vote for this public safety component do i want to vote for this public art component you know that's why i'm less concerned about the total council member ryan thank you david i believe you said earlier that with our when the assessed values came in that it there was enough of a difference it came in enough higher that going from 210 to 235 wasn't going to be wasn't going to make any difference in what the tax rate would be correct i believe and we presented these numbers to the committee prior to the increase in avian we're looking at more than seven to eight cents we uh we were at force a four cent increase at the 210 million dollar number on the debt service tax rate and a five cent increase on the debt service tax rate at 235 million so that brought us down on the 210 million dollar program for example from a four cent tax rate increase down to a 3.3 cent tax rate increase so that was the delta so that that room is what got us to standard that total so i mean the projects need to be done in my opinion and and so i you know we approved to go to 235 and i'm wanting to just stay with the number recommended yes council may i pretend yeah yeah no i'm i'm fine with the 230 and i and i i don't think there's any way the dentin record chronicle ever reads that uh the city of dentin council put forward three propositions it's going to start with a number right now the live tweets thus far today have included numbers you know it that that is going to be a proponent of it you're not going to circumvent that with facts data anything like that we're there's going to be a bond package total number put forward and then we'll um justify that with data such as you put forward that would then educate the voters and allow them to make a decision but i i don't think you can do an end around around the whatever the total package is going to be that's going to be the the uh the component that and that's a challenge right i mean if you if you but i do appreciate staff and i appreciate the the data points you've given us to then allow that further analysis but the initial number starts and then you you dig into it from there i don't think it's the reverse so we we do have a um something we need to discuss which may add to part of this discussion um we've discovered that uh with and i guess you can be involved in this discussion i presume um as far as about fire station eight and inclusion or not i don't i don't know i don't know about that that's going to be up to your decision but anyway uh there's a conflict that one of our council members has on fire station eight for various reasons so we've been notified by our city attorney that for that council member to be able to vote on the package as a whole that if fire station eight stays in the package that council member cannot vote on the package as a whole period because it's an embedded conflict so there's a couple of alternatives i think probably the most uh reasonable one is we can as a council decide to pull a fire station out which is what four four million dollars five million dollars five million dollars and i believe uh the city manager can can address this too if you'd like but uh that we can issue co's for that if we need to um because it's it's what two percent of the total uh bond package i mean it's it's it's pretty it's pretty minor um so that if you didn't want to put anything else in that place it does lower that total bond uh cost or if you wanted to if we're doing that if we're looking at the fire uh the firing range if we were trying to figure out how to get that done we're going to have to either put that on a bond program or do co's for that so it's almost as if you could say well we're going to do uh co's for the fire station because it's already in full it's it's almost completely designed is that correct it that's correct it's 95 designed already uh which would provide some expediency in that and then if you wanted to you could you could put uh you could slide the the firing range in there if you wanted to but but also then we have to decide which council member riggs can be involved in do we create a fourth proposition as proposed for public art uh so the fire station issue let's go ahead and take that up um because of just the inherent conflict uh council member melson then we'll go to council member uh on return i'm making a little bit of a prediction here but um just as a practical matter i think the public safety component is the least controversial at least it was on the bond committee i think you know was that something to two was the vote yeah that was on the substation that was the only one that had all those five are voted on together and it was 11 to 2 and i would say i don't want to i would guess the the two was not any against any of those projects it was just thinking maybe more should have been in that package of five that's right and you know and i uh speculate that it's probably the least controversial within this body too so if we think that it's actually better to go before the voters that way i um my opinion is that there wouldn't be much risked uh to you know leave it as is without you know the opportunity to vote on it separately rather than to men rather than to manipulate the package in order to well well i think i think what it is is that if we leave it in which i mean it's going to be this body's decision council member briggs is unable to vote or give direction on uh the bond package as a whole oh anything to do with the bond yes oh not just that yeah right because there's yes do you need to i just wanted to correct i okay sorry i was asked this question earlier and uh i basically can argue both sides of that question and so because i can this is why it should probably go as our ethics ordinance um provides to go to the ethics board to get a definitive opinion on that issue because i it's it can go either way i mean i can make the argument either way and for that with you and in wanting to be certain in that in that specific question i would recommend going and asking for an opinion advisor opinion so you guys saw me take out of here really fast earlier that's what that was for um i had found i found out during the presentation about the architect that was chosen and didn't know until that point and so i just i ran out of the room and so um i i would really like to be able to participate in the discussion and um if if not but i i don't want to take it to the ethics ordinance because it is an innate conflict and that's the way i view it if it's left in and so i would just remove myself yes okay so two things that i'm um concerned concerned about so number one uh i had asked a question about you know what would be the pros and cons of lowering it to 210 uh the original the original amount which is something that you know two members of the public had emailed me about and it was something i was already planning on asking about i think it's a reasonable question and i was surprised that um we were asked for a consensus on you know whether uh anybody else uh wants to hear the answer to that question before that question gets answered i don't think we're talking about a lot of money and i and i don't think it's a good idea for us to take consensus on whether questions should be answered so i would love to have that question answered i was genuinely just wanting to know what are the the pros and cons not just about tax rate but you know but interest any any other anything else that i might not have thought of uh it's for me it's worth the time so that number one i'm number two i was also surprised you know in concern um to uh to hear this kind of this this this latest uh news and i was pleased to hear uh you know from city attorney just now this clarification that well it could kind of go either way i mean for me you know i'm just hearing this now for the first time i and i understand as were you um so i i understand that um you know my question is i mean if you know why couldn't we i i haven't heard a good explanation for why couldn't we just vote on the public safety portion separately if the answer is it could go either way you know to me this and and then the idea and one thing i'm definitely against is you know the idea of using it as an opportunity to put in to include uh a proposition that was a i believe it would a nine nine down the middle split on the bond committee i don't think that looks good uh for the the pub the the public either obviously it's possible i'm not saying it's not possible so anyway those are my um you know two big big concerns that so they would like to see addressed yeah i want to address that you didn't answer that question obviously i'm not trying to avoid the answer but i find it a little inconsistent for you to say that to include or to even ask this body to include the firing range because it was a vote of nine to nine in other words you're taking the vote of the committee as they didn't want it it shouldn't be in there the vote of the committee to go with the current level of spending or the bond program was 11 to 2 so it's almost like you're saying well if you're including the firing range that's going against what the bond committee voted for so therefore we shouldn't do it but yet the bond committee also said almost unanimously from what i understand they wanted more money the two votes were more money so it just seems a little inconsistent to me but you didn't answer the question nobody's trying to keep a question from being answered but i don't want to we've got we've got two and a half hours into this this so councilman so go ahead and answer the question i'll just mention one thing as far as the total package i would say that was unanimous vote because they ultimately voted voted on the whole package unanimously for the total as far as i mean if we were going to do if we were going to do the projects but only do only only say we're going to do 210 million dollars as far as where we would find those other dollars uh it would be project specific on what we what we could use for open space obviously we've already identified we already said here's a couple of the the buckets we could use for those dollars but most of the projects would be debt issued of their large projects that we would end up taking out co's or funding in some other mechanism so ultimately we'd have the same impact from a debt perspective although we would get a lower interest rate with co's than we get with general obligation debt and and thank you and so kind of responding to that you know in that case then i'm fine with uh with the amount recommended by the bond committee because my you know my concern was how would this affect or you know would it impact the cost the interest um i still um and uh am wary about going over that that amount um but you know i'm but i'm glad to know that it doesn't make that much of a difference as as far as interest because of as you said it'll be issued through debt and not other forms of new debt and not it also has has similar levels of interest in a way that it all balances out in the end is what you're saying okay thank you so um i want to address kind of as to the the consistency i mean you know anyway sure i guess that that's inconsistent uh for me it's i'm taking these as two separate issues uh in the bond package and uh it's i there's uh anyway that's that's where i stand sure i guess it's i guess it's inconsistent but i feel very strongly about both of those things um and uh and i'd love to hear you know the city attorney's opinion on and about the um you know what you just to kind of elaborate a little bit more on what you said about it could be you know one way or the other um i'm also concerned too about i don't like the idea of taking that fire station out of it because that's such a because that's such a need uh so again we're still doing that anyway i understand um but so i i would just like to hear you know before we alter the substance of a bond package to accommodate a con a conflict that is definitely i'm not doubting there's a conflict but uh to make it so that somebody can vote on it when that might not even be necessary well so and i want you to answer that so i want to make sure i understood what you said council member briggs that given at least the facts as you know them what the city attorney said was well we have an option to go do but what i heard you say was no for me personally i consider this an inherent conflict so notwithstanding what the city attorney says notwithstanding what anybody at this desk thinks about that that you you don't feel comfortable at least as we know the facts now to vote on this if the fire station is left in is that correct that's correct it's consistent with what i've done for four years since i've been in council no yeah i'm not i'm not objecting to that it's just about how we split up the bond package you know as as far as voting on you know just the you know having in other words uh vote on the public safety aspect and then she could recuse herself versus it's not it's you don't vote on the proposition you vote on a package and that is okay so when you vote on the package okay so thank you for clarifying that so when you were saying that that it's you know one way or the other uh you know you you could look at it either way might have to go to the ethics committee you were not talking about this question but the question of whether she had to recuse this this was a conversation to be and to be fair it's not really fair to put air on the spot i i asked i i've put these um scenarios by him he agreed that you know that it probably that was the safest route but the question is you can't separate a proposition off the package the council puts the whole package out for a vote now the voters will they will vote on the individual components but we are not the ethics board and this isn't the appropriate place to try that question and so and is it is it is it state law that um that a that requires that okay so i would so i would love to not that i'm doubting that but i just i always like to see and learn more if i would love to see a link to you know the part of the the law that says that that councils can't uh you know vote on the separate packages separately thank you okay so um mayor pro tem yeah first uh erin can i get a copy of those two emails that were referenced in for the record uh that and they regarding the bond being lowered to 210 million dollars uh so i'd like to copy those then uh getting back to the question at hand uh yeah i i would be well first i'd like to know and it doesn't have to be in this forum but i'd like to know because this this station and this process has been ongoing so i'd like to know when that was decision was made if it was recent then then that's that's different than it's a different emotion but uh if it wasn't recent then that that begs a question uh but either it doesn't have to be here it doesn't change my answer my answer is uh i think as we pointed out i mean it's it's a tight turn it's a bond committee that's been at it every week um and i just i'm not comfortable reworking that on today's no i'm just i can't can't support i can't i want to leave the fire station in okay out of respect for all the work that's been done all the number all the understanding now i want to i absolutely will once we get to the point where we're talking about what goes in and out absolutely but i'm not willing to wholesale do make that change just based on today okay all right i don't like either option uh that's often the case here but uh the option that i i'm willing to accept an option that i don't like which is to find a way to carve it out because uh i think council member breaks uh it'll be important on you know many aspects of the bond package all right council member ryan yeah i'm comfortable with uh pulling the fire station out we are much further along on that project we've had medic eight for a number of years we've got in the budget to train the additional firefighters for that station this next year if anything happened we're going to have employees with no place to go at that point and i think this has been ongoing with with station eight for so long that it we're beyond the process that uh you know if we're at 95 drawings uh you know we can get going on that sooner on a co it makes everything work out well there's a remedy if the voters are against the co they have that 30 day time period in which they can come back to us and you know it'll go through a public hearing process as well council member davis i want to start by saying i don't generally favor the idea of you know carve outs because one of us finds a conflict i'm somebody that has some conflicts and i wouldn't want the council to to go out of its way to do carve outs but i have a lot of respect for how uh council member briggs has handled this particular conflict it was unexpected the way that it came up was unexpected and unforeseen um and the thing that makes this a little bit different for me is some of the things that council member ryan just mentioned about fire station eight i'm looking down the list of projects including the uh the cip projects and streets and this is the one that if you're going to ask me which one of these doesn't look like the others it is the furthest along it's the one that has the the best chance of standing on its own with uh with other means of financing um i would be in favor of i i think something that council member melzer referenced earlier was true with the bond committee if you watch some of their deliberations i think they were kind of solving for a number i think they decided uh at a certain point we need to start pairing things back so we don't go too far um i think this would be a perfect opportunity to get the the firing range back on the table uh we have almost comparable amounts the firing range is not as far along as the fire station is i think it's a reasonable substitution i think if we were to take that back to the the bond committee it's something they would it'd be a little bit more palatable to palatable to them i think because if they are solving for that number and now a 4.9 million dollar fire station project is off the table a five million dollar firing range project fits perfectly in that proposition and it fits their math whatever math that was they're working on so i'd like to take the opportunity to advocate for the firing range to go back into that proposition for the fire station to come out and stand on its own so just to clarify i want to bifurcate those because i think the first issue is um pulling the fire station out standing alone by itself and then there will be a further discussion about the other one you mentioned so just with pulling the fire station out regardless of what happens with the other you're okay with that sure just getting my licks in for the okay sure no no i understand i just want to make sure so we don't conflate the two um yes council member armatron okay um so as far as my take so i don't want so i don't mind altering the way we vote on things um to allow for a con a you know someone to recuse themselves but i do oppose uh you know changing the subs actual substance of what we're voting on um to accommodate a conflict and i have total respect for that for your you know decision on that that conflict so that's something i i do not object to you um i uh i i still haven't seen i'm opposed to bringing in the um uh firing range you know partly because of my objection to the idea of change of changing the substance of of what we're voting on um uh as far as and i know i had recommended changing the number but i still wanted to keep the substance of what we're voting on again it's consistent or inconsistent however you look at it doesn't matter to me um what you know what uh whether people think it's consistent or inconsistent um uh but i would like to hear from uh from chief hedges who is here um on uh the uh on uh fire station eight and how you feel and i'm not going to ask you about how you feel about any other aspects of the bond you know the bond package and substitutions but just about if you could speak to you know having the um fire station in the bond package and you know what difference that makes to you anything you could share with us uh that could help us make this decision or i guess me make this decision but and better inform the public so so i guess help me understand are you asking him to say whether he wants it pulled out or left in i wouldn't put it like that i think that would be unfair question to ask i was trying to kind of leave it yeah that's why i didn't want to ask that i'm leaving it flexible enough to just kind of just share with us um uh you know yeah your reflections on the on the fire station without addressing the need for the fire station eight and how far along it's going i'm getting i'm getting some i'm getting some looks over on this side so help me understand what what some of the concerns are here mayor pro tem yeah no i i just don't think this is the appropriate time if she wants to book time with him to talk about fire station eight on our own time i i absolutely understand that but we're here talking about this package as everyone is kind of stipulated to the fact that we have to make a package decision and what that encompasses and i don't know that this this unique item is part of that package but it's not to be discussed if it's how far along i mean what what he's going to add to the equation doesn't line up with the decision we have to make we have to make a decision and the facts are before us and and we make that decision and press forward with the rest of the package his his position is is valuable and i absolutely would encourage council member alma char to get some time at the fire station and and understand that tour the construction site look at all the plans and all that great stuff i i absolutely am for that but not here not during this conversation i mean we're going to be here for a significant amount of time and so i think i'd like to see us narrow the scope a bit okay if i may i just want to be clear on even what it is that i you know opined on my understanding was we're going to address fire station eight either way it's just a question of whether it's through the bond or through another financing thing so the the status of it you know how far along it is the merits of it should be uh you know shouldn't weigh on that decision because we would most likely do it either way it's just a question whether you do it through a bond or through co's basically right is that is that am i right in that understanding yeah okay council member so i understand that i understand that this is really just i'm wondering uh i would like to hear you know the chief's reflections on on this and and by the way and council member hudspeth i'm already convinced of the need for fire station it basically i'm what i'm wondering is is there anything i don't know that could help uh you know better inform me or better inform the public and worst case scenario we hear a little more about what we already know and the public learned something new but i i don't you know this is the second time in that that a question of mine has been uh blocked and this is so important or is i should say it's been you know attempted to um not allow me to hear an answer to my question i mean chief hedges is welcome to say oh i'd rather not comment you know or just uh you know maybe you'll tell me something i already know but i just don't i don't feel i i don't like what i've you know seen seen happen now councilmembrometer and when we're kind of taking consensus on the quality of my question and i appreciate that but what we're trying to do is efficient what i'm trying to do is efficiently run this meeting and so if you can ask the chief a specific question that isn't one of hey do you approve it do you want to pull this out or not i didn't say that objection but i'm not i'm just saying but you haven't really asked him a question you said could you give me a reflection could you could you narrow it down a little bit so that he can have an opportunity to answer it efficiently so i'm sorry i can't do that i don't want to put him in that in that box it is it my question is simply would like to hear what you have to share about the fire station anything additional you think that you would like to add even if the answer is no that's helpful to me i just don't like that my question is being blocked nobody's trying to block your question we're trying to get an understanding of what your question actually is mr city manager i think the simple answer is no fire chief is going to say they wouldn't like their station expedited we've hired three as council member ryan say we've already hired three of the firefighters to go into the station last year six more input forward in the budget this year plans are going to be 100 designed by the end of the month so we're ready to go it's purely a policy question and whether you agree from a political perspective you're you're willing to make that recommendation or not i'm just not sure there's much more for us to add well actually actually mr city manager you just um gave me a little something new you mentioned expedited right so would you know including the fire station in this bond package that we're voting on would that effectively uh expedite it would get us two or three months quicker ability to get in and in into the station and anything we can do to provide a higher level of service in that area we will always recommend doing is that if it's removed from the bond packages yeah because we'll be able to we'll be able to put it out for bid immediately i'm pretty sure i thought that was mentioned but um anything else you want to add to that chief just for real briefly yes this project has been in work for over two years so design contract was issued in february we actually had to slow the process down to design because we've it was added to the bond program so we were at accelerate on design hoping for funding before the bond proposal even originated honestly so yes it was on track to move forwards without the bond program okay and and so the uh and so it's so the difference in expediting would just be a matter of what two or three months if anything yeah and it would be an ability to add a pumper over there to you know enhance the level of service which has been the point and um we don't i think the real difference is none of these other projects in the public safety side are even close to this far along and we haven't been hiring the folks to film like we have with the fire station and that and so and all that makes sense to me again my question really is is there anything i don't know that i shouldn't should note and that question has been answered now so anyway thank you thank you head just thank you everybody um for me this was extremely important in getting you know getting the answer to this to this question so anyway as far as my input then um then i'm in that case i'm fine um not including uh the uh fire uh the the fire station as long as it doesn't delay it by you know more than a couple months um but i'm i'm not okay with the including uh the uh the the firing range only because i haven't yet seen proof of the need for it and and i want to be clear i might uh at some future date see the need for it i just i haven't seen exactly uh you know why why we need specifically well i guess what we had there was five lanes now i'm being told it might be more you know so for me there are just too many unanswered questions and i hope people understand that i don't hesitate to say when i object to something so i'm not pretending to be uh undecided i'm genuine genuinely undecided on that but i'm not because five million is a lot of money i'm not going to vote to vote to include that well we haven't had that discussion yet so we appreciate your your position on that uh let's take about a five or 10 minute break we'll come back and then so the direction that i see is that we're going to remove the fire station from the from this particular bond package and then we're going to come back and now begin our discussion on if people want things included not included and things such as that so when we come back from our break we'll take up that discussion and then council member briggs will be able to be involved in that discussion welcome everybody back to this meeting of the denton city council on thursday august the first 2019 it is 302 pm we are still on work session item 1a and so we'll resume our presentation based on the okay uh so i think what he's got council member armature wanted to see this so basically what uh we're staff has got us some presentations on the firing range a little bit more slides on the firing range so um if we could you can go ahead and start yeah okay yeah uh so last week we gave the uh the committee updated uh updated slides on the firing range based on some very like some late changes and some new um numbers that we got for the firing range new new design for the firing range so chief dixon gave a presentation to the committee last week and i can ask chief dixon to come up and and kind of quickly go through those slides for council as well if you all would like to hear that sure good afternoon mayor council um frank dixon chief of police so the same presentation i gave to the bond committee last week when this first came up the issue with the firing range and looking at the businesses starting to encroach on our current facility the restrictions we have out there for a number of reasons we share it with four other agencies you bring in inclement weather lead mitigation all those things combined we started looking at what were our options be so we started looking around the dfw metroplex the first thing we looked at was collin county they partnered with the city of allen mckinney in a collin county community college to build a very robust range out there we also found out during that time when we're doing the study they use g2 solutions so one of the things that we did when we determined one collin county is way too far out for us to be using and they wouldn't have the capacity to do it we got permission and started looking at g2 to provide us some concept plan options and some estimation about mid july what they did for us and i asked for what would a basic design range containing 15 lanes be that would also include up to 100 yards for rifle shooting indoors so a typical lane is about five feet they condensed it to 4.6 so just over four and a half feet which actually would give us up to 20 lanes if we choose to use it like that keeping the 100 yard indoor range for rifles and 15 lanes of pistol 50 yards in out we also looked at what would our construction components be because we want to be fiscally responsible and when you're looking at bullet traps there was either the option of going with steel or rubber rubber is a lot cheaper than steel a little more maintenance that you have to do with it about every three years or so to come in and mitigate the lead you close for about two days it's done your back open the steel much more expensive but it almost auto mitigates the lead they can come in and actually go in the back mine it as the range is still open so we looked at all those different things and the the first floor plan that we got was this this is the concept very basic there's a classroom and armory there's a restroom that you can access from the range itself out here there's a vestibule that provides some safety for people entering the range you have dual doors you open one you have to wait for it to close before you can go through the other there's a control room right here that prevents anyone that's shooting on the rifle range if an officer comes out to shoot on the pistol range this person can stop them inside of the vestibule before they come out they also have full control of the entire range and there's two offices right here for range staff so when we looked at this including the HEPA filters all the mitigation the baffling and everything combined we got this down to about 5.2 million dollars now what we have looked at since then was if we combine this with the south sub project there's probably going to be some opportunity for us to bring that cost down even more but we really went with the best fit for us as an agency right now we're shooting about 120 days a year not counting weather not counting other things that may happen where we have to cancel and as we look at growing as a city i really want to increase what our police officers are capable of doing in the training that they get because right now they're getting two mandatory trainings per year one in the spring one in the fall our student resource officers get some special training because they're in schools we want them to be very proficient but there's so much more we can be doing and we need to be doing not counting that we're also sharing the range with four other agencies which severely limits the amount of time we have out there one question i have chief on the the cost slide that was a couple slides back of the 5.2 million a million of that was general condition slash contingency well that's that's 20 percent of that so those are just things that you're trying to plan for that that would be surprises is that i mean that seems like a lot to me is is 18 to 20 typically what we use as a contingency in in our projects and that may just be something for someone else to answer it just depends on excuse me mario canna's our deputy city manager it just depends on the the time frame in which the a facility would be built the way this was the the layout or or at least the concept plan that was given to us by g2 solutions was as if they were built as a standalone project okay so it wasn't it we did not give them direction that it would be bundled or incorporated with the substation so it would be as if you were starting from scratch right new construction new new contractor standing up a construction shack etc etc so they build in those contingencies along the general conditions i just want to point out that that's 20 of that project so it could very easily be less than that as a standalone and then you couple that with maybe uh some economies of scale that's currently built with another project that's correct it would be less than that that's correct uh council member armature so questions for i think um this question would either be for uh for you mario or someone from from finance because i know chief i know chief dixon you're focused on the needs and not the you know the the cost issue um but kind of my first questions are about the cost i'll have questions later about the needs uh so it uh at the beginning i'm trying to kind of trace through um uh go back and kind of to think about how the cost was explained to us from the beginning um in the beginning when it was originally going to be 15 lanes right and and uh you know and i had asked why is it why is it 15 million dollars and what and what i remember was being told well it's you know a million dollars per lane it's 15 lanes and then it went down to 10 million dollars why 10 million dollars because 10 lanes and so you know then when i saw it had gone down to five million dollars i knew it was probably five lanes but now we have so five million dollars and we're back to the 15 lanes so kind of my first question is about how you could explain the cost i can and so we took a lot of it from the model that was used or at collin county theirs is a joint effort between the college because they have a believe a police academy function along with the cities of allen and mckinney so uh as the calling as collin county was building their facility then they were working with the other two cities hey while you're working at it you're close by we already use that same entity they already use that same entity for to to for uh bringing police officers on board to their to their to their police force um could we tack on additional facilities because they had needs as well so because when this information was brought to council none of it had been vetted it was literally it was me doing some research reaching out to some folks over at the college trying to understand a what the cost was what they built over at the college back when they opened last november november of 2018 and trying to extrapolate because they included facilities buildings classrooms quite a large number of facilities in that in that structure and so it was really myself extrapolating based on what we knew it was 15 million dollars it was it was a swag and so once we got the pulse of council that that's an outlier you hadn't heard about that because you'd heard about the police station you toured the police station the only thing you knew about was just that we had the outdoor firing range um so we took we were able to go back do a little bit more research reach out to the folks at collin county understand who did you use as your architect who could we go reach out to get a little bit more information now that we have more time and that's what we were able to guess what chief dixon mentioned that we were able to get that schematic design with g2 solutions we invested 3500 dollars in those to get those schematic designs and that's what we ended up getting with with those the number of ranges based on interviews with staff what the needs were based on growth patterns based on the fact that it was going to be indoor could be used basically 24/7 and so uh it was determined that 15 lanes would be adequate and could be actually be extended to larger more range more lanes depending on the width of the lane itself okay thanks thanks can you go back a slide um this so question about the the last bullet point about staff's opinion the gun range can be bundled with the construction of the police substation to realize economies of scale and minimize uh cost escalation does that does that imply does that mean without affecting the cost of the estimated cost of the substation well what it implies that if if we were to get direction from council to further explore the the gun range uh obviously we would have to get to construction documents what we have so far are literally just just they're just floor plans there's nothing nothing's been designed so um if we were able to work with the architect of record g2 solutions in theory could be a sub a subcontractor to that architect of record work to get to construction design and then we were going to the bidding process we could ask for an adult or give us the price of what it would take to build this extra facility while you're already while you're already giving us the quotes and bids on the substation and so knowing that you're again as the architect that we use or this schematic design we used it as if it was a standalone building project but once you bundle if you bundle it with another construction project you're not having to get an additional construction shack hire another superintendent add additional construction staff you're basically using the staff on hand and then that lowers the overhead cost because it's folded into the project that's already that's already happening so what i'm wondering is and to go back to you know as i understood something council member hudspeth said the people are going to focus on what's the dollar amount of the bond project you know uh the bond proposal um so it is and i know you can't say for for certain but it's that we can talk about what is theoretically impossible and then what's theoretically possible so it sounds like it's it would be theoretically possible um to in to include this uh with uh without adding on an extra five million in other words to include this in redo and while reducing it the total bond package by the you see what i'm going i understand i i wouldn't be able to uh be able to state that in definitive yes we could do so because again all we have is schematic designs uh we would have to go through the design process get full-blown cost estimations on some of these components um and we would have a better picture but even if we were to do that it's still probably a five four and a half to six month design process so it could coincide with the remainder of the design with brands that are carol we would be further along sometime next spring we would have much better cost estimations uh so in essence it would coincide with construction if we were to go down that path but i would dare say that we would have the full five million embedded into the other additional costs of of the of the police substation or even the renovations of the existing police you may have some but we would know i don't think we would come close to having the full hundred percent of it yeah but if but theoretically the rest could be paid with some other kind of debt just like this just decided with the fire station it could yeah theoretically in theory but again what we have so far is information based on mr d2 solutions experience again they just went through that process last November so this this these um these facilities are they had these cost components and so uh based on their experience that's their best estimate that they gave us based on a standalone project okay thank you and then should i ask my questions later of chief dixon now but i have a question of clarification so when you asked if this were embedded in the bond program would that change the the cost of the bond program were you talking about the individual cost of the project or were you talking about the total dollar amount of the bond package well i both i didn't i mean they're both it's hard to change one without changing the other well no because i thought your answer was assuming sort of implied that her question was can you almost within the current project amount of the substation and the police renovation if we're given economies of scale sort of absorb most of this uh and your answer was obviously no you can no whereas my my thought of the question was or that's why i'm asking question clarification is if we've pulled out five million dollars out of the the the uh fire station and let's say it's 5.3 million let's just say it's five million yes well then it's a wash so the actual bond package amount is not different it's just the projects that were within that bond package that's different that's correct yes okay all right i just i just didn't know from which angle you were approaching that uh okay uh well did you want to do you have a question for finance or for the chief because if you got a question for the chief council member armature has a couple questions for the chief as well okay all right go ahead cast my mom thanks so i think you know what my question was gonna it was gonna be um uh that so how many um uh how many police officers need to be using um uh the shooting range at the same time and by using i mean actually you know doing the shooting at the at the same at the same time uh and i don't mean on average like this say what's the kind of the maximum and if you could give an example you know of a scenario so for instance like a class where you've got where it's important to have 15 people lined up uh or see what you see where i'm going so when we have our basic peace officer academy going through like we do right now we have 24 students up to 24 students in there so you would have at least half of them on the line at any one time and they'd be switching out now when we have in-service training we're going to have upwards of 30 police officers out there so they'd be 15 and 15 so we're going to build our training around our capabilities not so much our capabilities around our training okay and so so right now and so right now in the um uh the current firing range which by the way i'm convinced that that's not sufficient i'm just kind of curious about what we're doing now um if you have say 30 people there at the same time in the field you know do you have um uh how many people you know will uh will you have or do you have have you had all you know firing at the same time lined up together so right now we don't do nearly that many when we're training on our existing range primarily because of the safety concerns we have trying to ensure that we don't have any rounds leaving that range going out possibly to winco or any of the other businesses they're starting to encroach upon that land so as we're extremely restricted on what we allow our officers to do out there and the controls that we have in place we almost have one instructor per two shooters right now because we really want to be conscious of every time someone pulls a trigger that we have as many eyes on them as we can got it got it so right now like it would be two maximum right now is that what you're saying at the same time you know we would have i think the class i took out there we had seven or eight people on the line at the same time oh i see so but with with one instructor per for every two about two or three students yeah okay uh okay thank you so and so um in an earlier pretty recent incarnation of this of this planet until um seeing this latest um picture with the 15 15 lanes for five million um you know we had gotten this this this uh you know five million with with five lane proposal and five lane was five lanes were okay um were considered okay so is the allowing more lanes um does that it decreases the the time you know that you spend there so you have fewer people waiting so you can have all 15 at the same time with you know and then how many instructors per person is it would it still be uh you know one instructor per two or three just to keep you know to be sure how everybody's doing and no we could open up the instructor student ratio quite a bit everything will be contained and we're going to be fully tactical out to 25 yards meaning there's ballistic protection from the ceiling to the ground out to 25 yards behind that you're still going to have all the ballistic protection in front of you plus it's enclosed so rounds won't be able to leave the range and encroach upon anything around us so we'll be using best practice okay so as far as like giving feedback um so i understand as far as safety but as far as feedback in other words uh having having instructors watch you know the shooters is that does that matter so much or is it like uh you know those carnival games you know where they can tell it can is it computerized so it can tell how you're doing and then you get a score no you can't tell i mean you can tell by your visually where your rounds are impacting but they go down and inspect the targets after each relay okay yeah and so they're not looking in like commenting on you know form on form or well yes they do if they see something then they're going to point okay okay okay so there could be a scenario in other words where you have 15 people lined up all at the same time correct okay thank you just one question or comment of clarification so um there was a lot of discussion about the old proposals and sort of the iterations of the different things that have come back to us and what i thought i heard was that there was no research on that it was simply staff trying to come together to put something together and if i remember correctly the five lanes at five million there was pretty much it wasn't like everybody was jumping up and down there was some resistance to that because it seemed like that that was a little high and so now to come back with a little bit more accurate information a little bit more information that's based upon you know somebody in the business that that designs these and performs this function it's 15 lanes for that amount of money so it's easy to see how you can go from this particular scenario where there's not really any i mean it's not that there's not any data in the sense of that it was a mistake but that was just a very cursory staff kind of put together policy or proposal whereas now we have much more reliable data to give us a little bit better predictability of what those costs would be correct okay thank you yes yeah hi chief did uh was there any discussion i don't know if there's anything practical in this question about whether you could use whatever the county uses i don't know if the county i don't know what the county uses you know but is it was is that an opportunity or so there was the county actually has an outdoor range and they are also coming up on having to make some decisions because there's actually butts up to i-35 we looked at some of the surrounding agencies lewisville has an indoor range they're much smaller of an agency and they're sharing also with other agencies right now so we wouldn't have the capability to go in there we looked at tarrant county their college down there or the county range down there you're looking at if you're pulling police officers off the street to drive to tarrant county to shoot you're almost burning an entire day fort worth has a beautiful range they can't handle the capacity either would the county conceivably want to get in on this and share cost so we talked about co-partnering with someone to build a bigger range but what you would have to do is double this in size because you have to have a definitive break between the two so if the county's in their shooting and we come in to shoot we may have different courses that we're teaching different standards different things that we're doing and you don't want to encroach upon them while they're shooting everything's about risk mitigation right so in collin county they built a huge robust range but they have definitive breaks in there for each agency to use by themselves thanks so chief just just take a moment if you would what is the importance of a police officer's training when it comes from discharging their firearm in other words how important is that shooting skill accuracy and so forth if you could just take a moment just to tell us i mean we're talking about costs we're talking about you know 15 but just for a police officer to be well trained in how to use their firearm help me understand just give us just a couple of comments on that the single biggest litigator in the police department is going to use a force use a lethal force is definitely going to be the most criticized publicly in the court system the most detrimental to the police officer and whoever he's using force on they have to account for every round that they fire and if you're a great shooter in practice you're going to be probably a moderate shooter under stress in a real situation there are several studies that are out there you're going to shoot probably 20 25 percent of what you do in real life scenario as you would in a training scenario it's a very still environment nothing's shooting back at you no one's moving around you're shooting that plain paper that's stationary shootings are very dynamic and i think we have um we have a responsibility to the public that we serve to make sure that we're putting out there the best capable best equipped best trained police officers that the city of denton expects and that's what we're really moving towards we're raising the bar of our standard from where it is and we're going to start chasing excellence so the better the better skill that can be accomplished in that training scenario it's not going to translate 100 to 100 but you're saying if you're not very well trained in that area if you don't have the facilities to do that if you don't have the time to do that then that's going to create even less of a proficiency in a situation where it's it's actually needed definitely okay council member armature so follow follow up to that so first of all i'll say that i and my guess would be that that nobody else would would question the importance of having that anybody anybody you know who has a a firearm you know because it's a lethal weapon needs to be you know well well trained and how to i can't imagine anybody would would object to that i certainly don't so but have they something you just said kind of raises another question for me and maybe it's something that i don't know if you can answer you know you'd mention the you know talk about talking about the the liability you know when there are accidents do you know due to as i understood it you know to to non-sufficient insufficient training or you know not being good enough or not having good enough aim not being a good enough shooter you know obviously when we or i say obviously but my sense is when we think about like high profile you know national cases you know nationwide the ones that all come to mind not talking about dentin you know have been cases where it wasn't so much that i was shooting at this and accidentally shot a person but you know but that somebody was shot deliberately and the debate was was just about the circumstances surrounding that so but my question is can you shed any insight on you know because these are the the high profile cases right that kind of national cases that make the news so you suggest are you suggesting that either in city of dentin specifically or maybe even nationwide that it's more of an issue more of a concern about you know when there are lethal accident or severe injuries liability that it has to do with bad more about bad aim or bad shooting technique or is it about the instead about the decision making you know that that's being made about you know to shoot or or not to shoot no i'm speaking about when there's litigation around police shootings it encompasses a wide variety of topics bad aim is rarely brought into it we're talking about training our officers in the best environment to offer them and the public that we serve the best chance of surviving a deadly force encounter and when you're looking at the issues that you've talked about across the country there's many times where we're getting even in law enforcement we're not always seeing the entire story and one thing that police chiefs we talk about all the time across the country is how can we better serve the men and women that we're charged with leading and we have a tremendous responsibility to make sure that we're giving them and equipping them the best we can because we're holding them to an incredibly high standard and if we're not training them sufficiently to meet that standard we're setting them up for failure yeah so and thank you so so the training about the so actual you know physical shooting technique is just part of the larger picture of of training and that is so are you're saying that that that that's a small part of the training about shooting that it's more about the decision making process and contextualizing things and all these other factors so shooting is like any other skill that you learn when you're in the academy your new recruit unless you've served time in the military you grew up shooting many times you have to learn technique breathing trigger control you have to learn the basics once you graduate from the academy you've been on the job for a while you've been shooting for a while those things become innate it's muscle memory the more you do something the more instantaneous you can replicate that so it's not so much about teaching officers how to hold their weapons it's about replicating that time and time again it's like a professional athlete like a golfer they have to use that technique has to be perfect every time to get a perfect shot and you can tell when they don't do that i guess that's the simplest way that i could explain it thank you mayor pro tem yeah so i don't know if this is the time but hopefully so i want to look at the other projects and kind of share my insights but on this project to me i would support factoring this project in and i would ask when we get there i'm going to ask that we take a different approach to the open spaces and that to me is the the five million dollar switch for me i can't support a project that says that prioritizes five million dollars for open spaces before it prioritizes five million for a gun range that not only take winco out of the equation there's another development right at the back side of it that that facility now is going to be useless it's it's coming faster than we want it to and i'm not willing to tell a investor in our community hey you can't build yet because we have a gun range issue and i don't know that that's the best use of our property to say we have this airport that we've invested millions in to add a second runway to then say we want to have a gun range right next to it you know i think maybe that that property i'm certain that property leading up to that valuable asset has a better use and so the faster we can do that and so i think i would advocate for this bond package and i hope there's there's three other like-minded that we can then move on to the next topic but on this topic i would advocate to add this to the bond package okay and then if there's no traction to i just i have a and when we get there the open space my my absolute issue is i don't want to we don't have we're not actively using what we're planning and and that's great and i want to use the money we have and i also want to add money to that but i don't know that we need to pay three million dollars debt to so let me so let me try to get a little clarification on this so let's put the the open space discussion aside this standing on its own are you in favor and support of including the gun range in the bond package proposal that would be submitted to the voters yes under public safety yes sir okay all right uh councilmember melzer i don't think this is a question for the chief or a point that you're in an awkward spot for you to answer but uh you know public safety is usually the easiest thing to agree with and you know the fact that we got this group of citizens together and spent two months on it and they came back split on this i'd at least like to understand what their reluctance was you know let's understand what their issue was i mean i'm very open to considering it but let's get the benefit of their deliberation you can share some light on that obviously just my best guess to to what the committee was thinking um you know we had a limited amount of time with the committee and we went through very quickly and we didn't give them this information with really some concrete examples of what the firing range would be until thursday the day they actually voted on their recommendation so i i think the biggest piece of the hesitancy on the firing range was just getting the information right up to when they had to make a decision so my guess would be it was mostly a timing thing of when they when they saw the final information councilmember roberter so i know that so we have a couple a couple members of the bond committee here at least apologies faces i'm not if i'm not recognizing could you know members of the the bond committee uh who are here can speak to that or the oh where did uh the chair yeah yeah okay yeah and see the elder or the younger because yeah because so we heard from the chair before if some somebody else who's not the chair or several my only hesitation for that i don't have necessarily objection but my only hesitation is that would only represent their opinion and if it was split nine to nine but in the end i mean and i appreciate and that's a good question in the end this body will ultimately make that decision so um i council what what do y'all what do y'all think on that i mean uh if if somebody wants to come talk it's going to be briefed on this one specific issue so yeah i obviously would like to yeah yeah so go ahead mayor pro tem no i i think my concern is absolutely yours i mean because if staff doesn't have a dog in the hunt i don't know you know obviously there are nine people voted for and so you'd have to have a representative each way to have it equitable or i just i don't know that they staff was at every meeting so well also council member i'm sorry but these were recorded is that correct were these recorded absolutely every meeting except for the first one so these were recorded so we could go back for the council members that want to go back and see view those recordings on that specific issue they can do that and see the entire presentation with everybody because we're if we give direction today we're not voting on this until when the 13th okay so there's time to go view that full presentation uh when this was presented and then each council member can make their own determination as to what they felt that the the uh the reasons were for in that uh i'm going to go to council member briggs and then council member davis and then council member ryan i'm gonna have to remember this hold on because i forget council member ryan i don't know mine but go ahead yes go ahead so i'm just on that topic wondering if we can send this back to i don't know if the committee is done and over or if because there were some changes unfortunately because of my situation as well what we talk about if they could review it and just kind of like yes that's or or not i didn't know if that if if that would be something if whatever we decide because we've talked about a lot of different things and we value what their input has been um just just to kind of get some feedback that can i respond to that yeah please uh and i understand that i guess we're not sending back the the fire station being removed uh we're going to have some other topics to talk about whether there's other things that changes need to be made so these are recommendations from the bond committee uh we can take those recommendations but we have every opportunity to to modify them as we see fit um i think again to go back and to look at the presentation uh the televised or recorded presentation will certainly give an indication of here's what it is and the comments about well we didn't get this until now we don't have enough information to make a decision on and so forth and so on will help give some some opportunity so i i don't know if we number one have time to do that and and and i think that they've done their job and that they've vetted everything that they've been given to them and and so um at some point we have to make a decision as a body to go okay we we can accept all the recommendations we've already made one change so um i i mean so those are my those are my thoughts and comments council member davis and then council member ryan first briefly my observations on the the topic at hand and then my my feelings and direction for staff on the including the gun range i think i'll know where i'm at on that but i have gone back and watched as many of the bond committee meetings as i can you know you fast forward you rewind and you watch as much as you can i think david's done a good job representing to us what their conversations were and what the deficiencies were in their decision making process also note that this was a nine nine vote that is not a ringing endorsement for or against including it it's simply ambivalent and they had one member absent we can speculate on what that member's vote might have been but at the end of the day this is a recommendation to the council and what i see in front of us is a recognized public safety need that i think we all agree there's a need there we have another public safety project on city owned land that represents some efficiencies in the building process significant you know half a million dollars or more possible efficiencies just on general conditions for a construction site and then on top of that we happen to have a bond program that we're talking about this year to me this is the perfect time to be talking about a gun range for for our police for keeping them the best trained as the excuse me as the chief talked about i think if this if the bond committee had had this information as we have it today in front of them weeks before i think we wouldn't be having this conversation today frankly and i have to again as council member melzer said i think the committee was solving for a number i think they reached a number they decided that's as far as they were willing to go and this one didn't make the cut on a slim vote nine to nine so i don't think we're doing anything we're not doing any violence to the will of the committee or their direction to say well we're going to cast the deciding vote in that tie and put this into the project or into the proposition so for that reason i think it needs to go in all right council member ryan thank you mayor yeah i agree with mayor pertain husspeth and council member davis that i believe this for the reasons that they stated they articulated some of the same things i would like to say something to save us a little time by not repeating them and just keep it i agree that it needs to go in okay council member armature uh yeah so on to you know second uh council member briggs's uh question or you know uh recommendation you know i myself uh you know of course anytime um council is voting on something recommended by a committee you know council is going to and we do and have the right to change things here and there i feel that the changes we've made are um collectively and i understand we're just giving direction about what's going to come forward to us to be voted on but uh significant enough in substance uh and you know including things that haven't been before the bond committee that uh i would like to know you know if we can't hear today from several members uh uh you know it's certainly be preferable for me to be able to hear have everybody uh on that committee since it's not dissolving in until the uh voters now it's planned to dissolve on the the sixth you know that's not set in stone there are certain things that are dates that are set in stone you know but if it's possible for them to have one more meeting and i understand you could go back and forth forever but you know to me these changes are significant enough taking out the fire station um you know which i was wary about and i just i had wanted to hear what are the reasons for or against i want to give you one example um of why it's good to get and it's the most democratic thing to do also for a bond election um to get the input from the committee on this um uh i i found out from someone who is a member of the committee and i'll have to go back and watch the video to confirm this but that uh you know during the break that one of the reasons allegedly why um it was so they thought it was so important to keep the uh fire station in was because that they thought that that would make the um or the consensus that that would make the bond package itself the public safety portion anyway more appealing and i don't know and apologies if i'm misrepresenting the person who who spoke to me um if i am i take that upon myself again i haven't gone back and watch the video i would have to watch the video to to confirm that you know but but when when i heard that i thought wow that's a really good point um and uh you know and i think that's just an example of how important it is to hear from the people who have been really deep in the weeds and discussing this so often you know i will say that i attended for some reason i can't remember if it was two two or three bond committee meetings that i attended but and then one of the the subcommittee the finance subcommittee meetings i watched one one meeting that i missed i watched it on video so you know but there so of course i can always go back and look at um you know discussions that have happened at the path in the past but i would strongly advocate for us having you know whatever gets decided on today to go back to the bond committee if there's any wiggle room and just looking at this i i can see some potential uh room but maybe there's something scheduling challenges you know that i haven't even considered so your so your direction is is to not include it in the the bond package at least today uh is that correct well my suggestion was just for us to continue having this discussion and whatever we have consensus on to have that i mean actually i'd be open to what you know what you just i mean that's what you said but um and i certainly am gonna now having heard that i thought oh man i wish i wish i had thought of and i was literally looking around this room as i told him i was trying to read fate read minds which is why i i always regret that that members of the public at work sessions can't you know uh don't have an opportunity to speak up but anyway hearing that had i heard that during this discussion that would have changed the way that i okay all right thank you gave direction councilmember milsor all right i i'm open to it i'm inclined to it but i i don't think we can i can decide that without knowing why you know even if the situation were they just got the information late i would expect that to be a 17-1 vote you know even on no information just because police need it you know so the fact that it wasn't i really want to just understand that better it doesn't quite you know okay uh answer my curiosity sure so you can go back and figure that out before the vote yeah i'm in favor of including it in the bond package so i think we've got a consensus or direction to to do that and of course this is going to come up for a vote on the city council so each member certainly is going to have an opportunity to vote on on this package as a whole and then as information comes forward then and we can move on that as well so uh at least for that that particular issue i think direction is put it in and if something changes we'll have those discussions um mayor pro tem i think you had some other other questions or yes topics or something yes so i my my issue is going to be the adding in the free space or open space i just i if i'm listening to gary's presentation that they're working through some of that now i think that's in play we let that play out and we we he has a great process in place and i think we can then come back and uh build that fund up i think it's a great opportunity to activate the the tree fund and show develop show continued growth and that spending for for developers etc uh and allow us to address the issue i'm not saying don't address the issue i'm just saying don't pay three million dollars in debt to address the issue make it a priority and a budget to then activate it and not be tied to timing of public safety developments etc etc let's just hey it's it's a key issue that we want to address and we want to attribute money to it regularly to continue to chip away at it and i think that gives us some flexibility and it doesn't put us tied to because looking at it as is if if that if someone takes the issue and or doesn't understand or doesn't avail himself of the knowledge they vote against it then it becomes you know uh kind of difficult even budget wise to to do that because it's like hey it seems like there's a sentiment against that so i don't even want to make it a target i want to make it a a goal a priority and and let's just put the budget to it you know put the budget to work and allow them to work through the funds they have so that's that's my hang up with it i just don't think that a bond package we're saying hey these things are urgent i can look at all these other issues sidewalks street lighting roads and and and absolutely tell the lay person and convince them that that's urgent i i don't know that i can do the same with open spaces you okay you can't i just you can't right short urgency anyone else share the same sentiment councilman melserum okay you might have guessed that uh yeah i think almost anything on here you could you could conceivably not saying you'd want to but you could conceivably go back and do it at a different time not this one it's going to be gone and if you want to if you want dentin to look a certain way if you actually meant it when you voted to have a 10 minute walk to green space you have to take action otherwise that option will go away we have to you'll be moving toward the goals that we set out otherwise you know why set the goals let me let me hear from someone else and then we'll come back let you respond council member brigand and council member ryan i am not in favor of taking it off i feel like um the amount that the committee approved is still the same and um if if the voters want to approve it i would like them to we heard uh mr pack and say that you know five million is still not enough it's a start it helps us um if approved and i really hope that it will be it gives us a um a bit of money to also add the tree fund in the tree fund isn't um growing and growing and growing we started spending it and we're spending it good and there's a future um project list for that fund as well um for trees and so i'm i'm in favor of keeping it on there and letting the voters decide what's important to them okay council member ryan yeah um i can go either way on the open space but i would like the public art to be split out as its own proposition so that the public art can be used in other places and leaving it on the ballot lets the voters decide whether they want want to go with it or not this is my opinion okay council member armature i just want to to reiterate uh that i'm i'm strongly for the open space i think you know council member melzer put it really really well uh that you know this land will not be here we're not just something that it'll be more expensive or whatnot or more time it just you know it because of the rate of growth and i really think that everybody who's concerned uh about uh about the growth everybody who believes that uh that we should do what we can to um to slow down the growth in certain welcome growth in certain areas slow it down in certain areas where we want to preserve more of our rural peripheries that this helps towards that end and the clock is is ticking because all these spaces are up for sale and so when people you know neighborhoods that are worried about you know some development that's that's coming in in this big open field that big open field can be preserved you know there's a force field around it if we decide to you know to fund it through the bond through this bond package and that it expedites it council member davis sorry mayor pro tem one last thing to say i think um i'm in favor of keeping the open space um i think you put parks and rec right up there with some of the other things we discussed today is one of the core functions of a city um one of the things we do and only we can do and uh however i'm a little bit worried about the language of the proposition if we call it park system improvements if staff's intention is that we need to keep some flexibility in what that proposition money can be used for then we need to see that put forth if it's that we want this fund to be simply for land acquisition and prevent some future council for issuing bonds for other park system improvements then we need to have that specifically named in the in the uh proposition language that that's what it's for um i don't think that the watching the bond committee video they had a vote on open space they did not necessarily have a vote on park system improvements generally playgrounds and trails and all this kind of stuff so if we want specificity in how we're going to use this that it's only set aside for land acquisition i think we need to say something that's a little more specific uh if we're not worried about protecting it that way then we can leave it as it is yeah so um i'll be short i can count um so the the just of it is this i think i'll start with with uh where uh councilmember davis left off i think the ambiguity is going to come back and be a problem because it does not it's not a fire station at this succinct location so that's going to trigger emails to say well you have this five million dollars just spend it over here on this or on that we we've not provided a any clear direction on where we're going where and and he's absolutely right i've received communications from parks or is it open space or what are you going to do with it you know those type things so i think there there's a problem uh with with how it's presented and it opens the door for people to say hey i was i feel misled by what what is going to happen the debt issue no one spoke to it and and i think it's important just to have a clear record david so you're saying you're probably just in just function two three years out from activating these funds just because of the other projects you don't i mean well okay yeah he didn't i mean it depended i understand what you're saying yeah the fact of the matter is we've not adopted a budget and we could allocate money this year to address what uh council member melzer says is his issue with timing versus be subject to market and what the evaluations are going to be and how many and dictating how many projects we can go so i don't want to be characterized as someone that's not passionate or active wanting to activate the process i'm saying use something that gives you the flexibility to act now and show your commitment to it in a in a annual budget versus putting it off to say oh well we have a plan in the future and and allow that to come to fruition at some point let's have a conversation here in a couple of weeks and let's see where you were if you're passionate about it and you think that there's three others then let's let's put it forward now and not wait for bond package not wait for it to go to the voters so i'm advocating for us taking control and taking ownership and saying hey we said this is important now let's do something about that versus well the voters didn't pass it so we'll have to go back to to the drawing board and i think that's significant and but i'll tell you that that is my so the funding and the absolute ambiguity is is my chief concerns and no one's spoken here about the budget concerns of five million becomes eight million becomes activated later no one's spoken to that and i think uh councilmember davis spoke exactly to the point that it they voted the the those that vetted this vetted it based on the definition open spaces the conversation today it already drifted to parks and that's just in this small circle of seven imagine what that's going to do across the entire city and and and that's that's my concern i just can i add one in regards to the the park system improvements by including public art that was one of the the reasons to have it be more broad to park system improvements if public art was taken out it would be easier to to do open space i i imagine the stipulations if it was open space specific with public art you would only be able to use that public art in land that you purchased or something to that effect you wouldn't have be able to use it throughout the park system so that the decision to put that in that proposition led to a broader language for that proposition councilmember melzer um i agree with councilmember ryan's uh impulse to separate out public art i agree with councilmember davis's uh suggestion especially with public art separated out to call this something like open space land acquisition uh which is the intention and and would give us that flexibility if we do the art thing uh every uh there's only so much that goes into uh the general fund budget we're going to be talking about that later today assuming we ever get off this item um uh but you know there's a reason we do bond packages because some because only so much fits in general fund so some things you know require debt and and it's true of every single item in here that it will create interest expense uh but it is not uh stated as as a fact or as a requirement that no land acquisition happens immediately that was an opinion that we heard but you know i think that that's probably going to be a function of what becomes available in just the real estate process uh and and uh lastly if i can keep going a little bit um i have a question about about the proposition language uh as i mentioned before i think it's great that you've kind of put a little common sensical price tag on each one yeah this one cost 30 cost you 35 bucks this one cost you 10 bucks this one cost you five uh but i think it's still true that the first hundred million uh doesn't add to the tax levy so i wonder just how do we communicate that when the whole thing is split up into separate propositions you know what i mean well i know and city manager somebody else can answer this but i know in the past uh of course the city puts out a tremendous amount of information factual information about the bond program uh and then sometimes the committee members of that bond committee may be involved in in sort of a public campaign of just sharing the facts uh of what it is so it's not like we're going to pass it and then there's not going to be any information out there we're going to you know make sure that people understand what it is there's going to be probably within that information packet you know you said you had a sort of a list of here's some different sections of those roads and here's a map i mean it's just a matter of how well we publicize that uh as far as the facts surrounding the particular bond bond program so yeah i mean anybody want to add to that i mean from past experience i think all the information that we put out will definitely tie to finances as well and what this what this means to average taxable value and those those kind of pieces so we'll definitely hit that in multiple directions on making sure that it's transparent what what the bond package means and that everyone understands um what the impact is to the tax rate i wonder if there might be a a sentence that would be on all of them that says something like you know oh the first hundred million is not projected to impact a sentence on what a sentence on the proposition each proposition language the actual ballot yeah just uh for consideration saying the first time you know the first hundred million uh approved by the voters is not expected to impact uh tax bills so tony went to chief financial officer um state law certainly prescribes you know um exactly what that language needs to look like and so i think there'll be some limitations on on the kind of language that we can put in that proposition um the other thing too that i'll just make sure that the council understands is that once the council calls for the election um on this program we got to be very careful in the information that we put out there that we're not taking a position for against um that particular bond program so i think be very fact-based and right but this is a factual thing right you know well and we got to be careful with that you know council member so generally speaking the material that we that we put out we run it through our bond council and our legal department to make sure that we kind of stay in line um with that neutral position so um i would just be a little bit concerned of of kind of going maybe that direction but well i made this suggestion i'm sure well in that statement really has a lot of assumptions in it i mean to say that there's a tremendous amount of assumptions that go into a statement like that i mean that's what everybody's anticipating giving a certain level of assumptions but as you know things can really change pretty quickly and we just hate to represent that unequivocally this is what's going to happen when something may change to where it isn't able to meet that particular uh fact i imagine we'll get to discuss this again okay so um let's see if we can't start wrapping this up uh i'm okay with leaving it on the proposition you know as far as we got to do it now because we're running out of land i mean this is for 60 something acres is it going to be more expensive is it going to be less expensive i have no idea you know 10 years ago you didn't have to go back 20 years ago to find land pretty cheap 10 years ago we were basically in the height of the recession so things were were much less so who knows what's going to happen in the economy if things could keep going up things could somehow hit a trough and if you have money available you can take advantage of that and maybe pick up pick up more so i'm okay with leaving it in i'm okay with splitting public art out into a fourth proposition and i'm certainly in agreement with if we split it out we need to be a little bit more specific on the the the language of the third proposition we need to be careful even with open space and land acquisition because if it's for parks we need to say parks because land acquisition can be for a lot of different things within the city so we need to make sure that whatever this discussion has implied or expressly stated for the intention of that proposition based upon the bond committee's recommendation that that proposition accurately reflects that so it's pretty tight uh council member armater so two questions one just reiterate one that hinkan answered before the other a new one um the committee and again i haven't watched the video of the the last meeting but i would like to know now um was there a specific reason for grouping open space and public art together that that had to do in addition to what's already been said having to do with um as i mentioned before somebody had told me that the rationale behind leaving the fire station in there was because because fire projects or fire station projects are very popular are very popular you know and that will help to pass that whole package that was the rationale anyway it was articulated to me so was there a similar rationale like that for grouping those two together in other words was there an expressed concern uh that by separating out public art that would make either the public art or the open space are both less likely to pass so um and i'm not trying to block an answer but we we did this just a second ago on uh the gun range and that is all of these bond committee meetings have been recorded and so there's going to be some time i mean you're going to try to give your impression and you're certainly welcome to do it but if it's going to be i want it to be very brief because we can go look at those at those committee meetings that are on record that are recorded i think for a lot of different reasons and this is one of them so um what you're going to say is just your impression but you can go straight to the video and i definitely plan to okay well then so i guess if you if you're going to do that then because i want i want to know now i don't have time to watch the video now i'd like to know you don't have time to watch the video the video i don't have time to watch it now answer it very briefly because the truth is you're just telling your opinion the video states the specific opinions and their verbiage of the committee members yes i don't i don't recall the exact conversation um some things to that effect i believe were said but i i just off the top of my head you need to recall the exact conversation to that effect okay and i just i just want to clear up something there was never an issue or a discussion with the bond committee about fire station eight making the police department projects more attractive that never happened what so that so that that that whole proposition i mean somebody may have thought that but that was not discussed and that was put in there way back one of the very first initiatives that was put in there because we knew we had that project coming forward so i just want to be real clear about that i think what you'll see with the the discussion on the open space of public art there's definitely a concern that either one of them standing on their own will they pass but that's really no one there was no conclusion to it it's just simply your call what here you want to move it forward so um refresh my memory who's okay with splitting out public art okay it looks like public art will stand on its own proposition um okay to summarize make sure we you know so if i've missed something somebody certainly chime in go ahead counseling something i only alluded to briefly and i don't know if anyone has any interest in it but i think it's somewhat different uh and and potentially worth splitting out in one group uh bonnie bray hickory creek ryan road kind of the expansion kind of projects versus the other items in that in that proposition one i just think it's uh somewhat different interests probably different people support them uh okay that's that's so you're saying bonnie bray hickory creek and ryan road would be in a separate proposition yeah i'm not sure what your street improvements and then the other ones would be so we have a total of five if if if i'm not mistaken dallas recently had an election with nine i mean but that's i mean they're right i'm just saying no no understand yes i would just obviously we can whatever the council decides we can do that we can split them out the benefit of having them together is if we have unused dollars from one of the projects then we're able to do the bond committee and the bond oversight committee and council reallocate those dollars to other projects if we lend them to a certain amount of roads and we have unused dollars we can't then reallocate them to other street rehab programs or something like that that was just that's a consideration for parsing them out that makes sense okay all right that's helpful thank you okay so i understand we're gonna we're gonna pull the fire station eight out for all the reasons stated earlier we're going to have the firing range as part of the bond package under public safety the proposition three will be split into two separate propositions and we'll rename proposition three to more accurately reflect the intent at least of this body and what we believe the intent was based upon the discussions of the bond committee we can always go back and watch those if if we need to do something different and we'll have a separate bond proposition for public art which means that if it passes that can be allocated to anything within the city it's not just parks or streets or it can be used as the public art committee and the council and the public's outfit is that correct yes okay what am i missing council member breaks well i i like the idea of splitting the major construction streets um that council member metzler mentioned i i think that's probably a pretty good idea and i know that money can be used in different ones but um i wouldn't want to take money from sidewalks if we had some left over and put it into you know bonnie bray i would you know it could go either way right so i feel like if the the rehab and the sidewalks and the lighting are in one those are more likely going to get done um with the money instead of saying oh well we're short on hickory creek let's just take money from you know this other thing here which is less important lighting and put it to use because we need this six lane road like so for me it makes me feel so you're okay with splitting those two out i am council member armature and so and i too i think i think that was a very good idea um to split those two out for those reasons um and i still kind of wanted to know the answer to the uh other other question that hadn't quite been answered and that is is there is it possible for the bond committee uh to to meet again uh to to to squeeze in another meeting i'm going to leave that up to staff to contact the bond committee i mean i mean they've got uh they they had their last meeting but i'm gonna i'm gonna leave that up to the discretion that would be great if if they could be asked i guess what would we be asking them just to for for comment on whatever we give you know the total package that there's consensus on today because in my view it has changed enough and new things added in since they discussed it a number of council member davis um on that point and then going back to the the original question which was splitting out i i've already heard from members of the bond committee i've heard from my appointees and others i've gotten page long emails from some members of the committee i would not inflict another meeting on them i think they've done yeoman's work i think they've done the heavy lifting on all of this i wouldn't i would impose that on anyone to say that you've got to get the 18 of you back together and do the work you've already done i think it's time for us to cast our votes isn't it yes it's 19 19 right today the absence so um that's my opinion there nobody really asked for it but there it is um the on the question of of splitting out some of the street projects i think i agree with the spirit of what you're saying you know give the people more choice over specific projects my concern was though let's say it's bonnie bray and let's say that bonnie bray fails well we can't issue co's for that project and then we can't put it back on the we can't we have to wait another year to put it back on a ballot so if it becomes a critical project that's got to get done um we don't have if we if the proposition is bonnie bray improvements and we're limited in that way and that's the one that fails well now we can't go after bonnie bray improvement other funding sources so i would rather we have the flexibility um of having all of our kind of improvement projects streets improvement projects in one package um i i see less of a danger that it goes the way that council member briggs described and more that we're going to want to take the cost savings because we leverage some of that money get some more cog money or some more tech stop money i think we're going to end up wanting to take that those additional bond dollars and bring them down to the street the neighborhood street improvement project or the lightings and all the lighting projects and all the kind of that that kind of thing i think there's more money out there if we do it this way than if we start cutting it up well i'd remind the council that's not what happened with the 12 and 14 packages if you recall i came back to you last year with staff we asked for 35 million dollars to make the local road position whole and we stopped short on bonnie bray so you know that those are the kind of discussions that the council has along with the bond oversight committee if if you start running short on dollars somewhere so no and just briefly the the the expert that does this regularly says no good practice is not to break them out in the smaller segments and so i'm going to defer to to his expertise and in their their practice and follow that advice how's my run i'm in the same grouping yeah i am too and and and the real reason is is because our practice has not been to rob peter to pay paul i mean it's been it's come back to a bond oversight committee which is typically the chairs if there were subcommittees i don't know how that's going to be structured under this particular committee then it comes to council it's not a staff decision that's made outside of council authority so and it you don't want to have bonnie bray or even hickory forget the additional dollars from the state i mean hickory creek is a public safety issue as well right there bonnie bray i believe that's the the phases where the new school is going is that correct yes so that's the that's those are the phases where the new school is going so i mean i'm okay with just keeping it keeping it together because i think we might have some more synergies in that regard and as far as sending it back to the bond committee i have no desire to do that so do you have any desire council member ryan to send this okay mayor pro tem all right so we've got you know sort of a consensus i mean if they all get together and they decide they want to meet and call me i understand that but i don't think formally from this body the direction is to to instruct you to go back and take that to them any other issue that i've missed yes go ahead do you want us to bring the public art policy back to revise it to one percent uh at the next meeting oh i'm okay with the one percent so if we're going to go with the one percent then we need to revise the the policy correct and we can bring that back one percent council member barmiter i mean i i prefer two percent and with but then again so many other things that i prefer that i'm in the minor minority on so okay one percent okay i'm not okay i'm not hearing any other objections so all right okay um any other questions or discussions on this issue all right let's go ahead and take about a five or ten minute break we'll come back to agenda item number b is that the budget we have department budgets okay all right let's take a five or ten minute break all right welcome everybody back to this meeting of the dent city council thursday august 1st 2019 it is about 4 27 p.m we're on agenda item work session 1b so i mentioned it offline but i don't want to be here till nine or ten o'clock tonight so we've had this presentation it was in our backup we've had two or three preliminary presentations on the budget i know the departmental budgets are coming up but when we get to the main budget let's make our questions concise let's not repeat our comments and let's certainly not repeat repeat questions so i would appreciate everybody's cooperation in that regard thank you good afternoon mayor city council members nick vincent city's budget manager just want to do a quick introduction the departments will be presenting to you today their 1920 proposed budget they include parks development services engineering and traffic and with that i'll ask gary to come up and present parks good afternoon mayor city council gary pack and director parks and recreation first of all thank you for the opportunity to speak today but i also want to thank staff for all the work they're doing through the budgetary process as well as throughout the summer it's an extremely busy time for us and we have a lot going on so highlight a few of those great things that we're doing for fiscal year 18 19 we've introduced some new camps at north lakes rec center as well as expanded our camps at mlk and expanded some outdoor programming for our adapted youth as well as a farm to table program so there's some exciting program opportunities we're doing from a construction standpoint we're just going to be opening vela here at the end of the month we're going to have a grand opening you'll be hearing about here real soon we have a number of playgrounds we've replaced and we're going to be replacing in 19 we have a significant amount of planning efforts that are ongoing with the department not just the city strategic plan the department's plan but our master plan our urban tree plan and we're wrapping up a cost coverage study sorry oh sorry it's going to be a quick presentation let's go let's go real quick you said quick yeah i love it i love it and then over the past year we've done a lot in regards to policy development with ipm special events and sponsorships and we have some more that are in the works as well for fiscal year 1920 i mentioned earlier we got a number of projects that are in the works that will be completed north lakes dog park is under construction we have we're going to be starting our park restroom projects here real soon as well as a cooperation with a grant for a green ribbon for improvements to university drive that's currently out to bid with text dot and then we're also sending out rfp for southwest park to get that planning effort started we're using our master plan efforts for the department to integrate in with that with community needs and then our capra certification and our gold medal efforts we plan on presenting hopefully next fall to uh nrpa for our department certification as well as have as we talked about earlier as we're working to acquire land with our current resources some of our emphasis for the budget process we are continue to working on our pilot project of in-house construction the dog park being a major asset that we're developing in-house as well as our park restrooms as in in our median enhancements at eagle and elm and dallas and teasley and then we plan on implementing a number of programs due to our intense planning efforts with our master plan our urban tree plan so we're going to be busy with those efforts next year some cost containment strategies we are bundling some of our construction projects so our tennis center as well as the south lakes tennis courts which are both bond projects those will be bundled as well as alh and the pro shop from the tennis center similar size buildings those will be bundled and those will be going out later this summer and then next year we're going to continue our efforts of internal park design the dog park we had a quote it was originally about 80 000 to to design that we did it in house as well as the construction so that's allowing us to reallocate funding towards bricks and mortar efforts and then process improvements we've worked hard to with our gis team from tech services to lay out our 9 15 16 funding as well as our 10-minute walk uh mapping so we can identify where we need to buy land we've had over 30 public meetings uh this year gathering information and feedback from the community so that's been very important for a lot of our planning efforts and then um in 1920 we'll be rolling out and actually full implementation on a number of the policies that you've recently approved some general fund highlights from a revenue standpoint as you can see the revenues are overall pretty flat between 18 and 19 from an expense standpoint um we have where the the general fund subsidy is up about 1.2 million dollars as a whole uh and i'll explain that in a little more detail here in our future slide in regards to the water park we have made some efforts last year if you recall we reduced our uh our um admission fee by three dollars we've had 13 weather days where last year this time we had 26 overall attendance is up about 6 000 people our revenue and general admission passes are up about 11 000 dollars our pass sales are up about 100 uh but overall we anticipate our revenue to be fairly similar to last year now that would say the weather we think it would be higher but that's still an estimate if we have rain in august that'll sway that number a little bit so that'll impact us from a park supplemental general fund uh the integrated pest management the co-sponsorship are two items that you've recently been presented uh by staff veterans village we presented to you uh a few months ago the signage improvement plan was uh put in in regards to an effort to replace the city hall signage as well as some park signage that includes uh funding to hire a consultant for that as well as some implementation of sign construction our new and existing park maintenance is also a supplemental these are the breakdown of the parks where we previously did not have funding for those those assets and then some new facilities that are coming on board to include uh the dog park and vela uh pond maintenance is a challenge for us right now specific at lake forest we're trying to control the vegetation growth we're doing some mowing whenever we can with with an arm to do that as well as we're looking at some other applications working with texas parks and wildlife to see how we can control that on the can you go back a slide so the beautification areas so i guess those are entrances to the cities um when are those going to be um done or even begun dallas and teesley we already started removing some of the old asphalt city staff has done that concrete's supposed to be formed up here real soon um and then eaglem we're waiting for them to do some sewer line work underneath that property before we come back in and and cap that with the beautification so you should start seeing some things happening real soon so i assume that since it's in the budget for next year to be maintained and it should be complete yes okay thank you from a recreation fund standpoint we have this broken out separately uh revenue some highlights um a general fund transfer uh for supporting overall recreation is about 1.2 million dollars i'll provide some more more information on that in detail and explain how that's that's working if you recall we had some collapsing this was the first year where we transferred uh 31 hbus into 17 moving those over to the rec fund and that's why you see the general fund transfer starting in fiscal year 1819 from an expense standpoint uh again you have that 1.2 million dollar increase in general fund subsidy to support programs that includes all everything that's proposed in the budget for this year for rec fund supplement uh we have approximately 361 000 dollars as of september uh in the rec fund these two projects will be proposed to come out of that leisure services capital provides the opportunity for us to replace um equipment or fitness fitness machines uh in our rec centers and then the self-serve golf ball dispenser what we're looking to do there is put a machine out the driving range so we can actually add hours to our service and reduce costs for staffing so we can people can come out you know at dawn to come and play where we may not be there on time so we're actually expanding our services yes councilmember about that because in our next presentation in the backup for um supplementals it says that that part wasn't funded is that just that you're going to fund it from a different area and not the correct that that's currently not funded in the proposed budget what we've done we've called out those two items and then when we talk through development services their primary item um which is maintenance for their software we've called those out separately and said those are in a group of supplementals that we're considering with our fee study that that's going on so we'll be doing a fee study for both recreation and for planning and for development services and the idea that would would be that any increase in revenue would cover those supplementals moving forward okay so it is funded or is it not i'm just because i in the in the current proposed budget is not funded but we know that we'll be doing these fee studies which could result in more revenue and with if we increase revenue through the through those fee studies we would add those to the budget to correspond the the recreation budget development services budget and general fund are all contingent really upon they won't be there won't be a final recommendation on those until we get some feedback from council on the fee studies that are going on with development services in in rack and there's a potential there's subsidy roughly around three and a half to four million dollars in those two funds currently by the general fund and we need council's direction on what what you want to do with those fees which will have a direct impact on funding these supplementals as well as potentially even altering the tax levy recommendations so you'll have that discussion in three weeks okay three weeks before you have to make a decision on the tax levy itself oh mayor pro tem carry what is the what is the uh in preparation not getting ahead but just what is the fee for do you know off top your head for for the gym usage at the rec center for for a pass yes sir it is 150 dollars okay for a pass and we just started that this year where you used to have to get a gym pass at each facility uh now it's 150 dollars and go to any gym for the year for the year it's 20 a month okay okay thank you right it was 120 dollars at one or two of our rec centers and then it was 150 for north lakes now it's 150 for the entire year at all the facilities uh position summary uh we are proposing an increase uh 2.7 um fte's for this year and that is primarily focused on park maintenance park fee adjustments very minimal changes as proposed as of right now we are as mentioned earlier going through a cost recovery study so we may have some more adjustments for you in the future industrial park does not have a rental fee we do have some groups that that have used that in the past so we're just putting a small rental fee associated with that north lakes dog park if somebody wants to come and use the smaller section for a birthday party for their dogs or their family uh that would be available our park contractor fees are being switched from a lump sum to an hourly rate which we don't anticipate any uh impact there and then special event deposit is a refundable deposit as part of our special events uh process special revenue funds um just we talked a little about the tree mitigation fund we have 2.2.4 million dollars in that account some of that is for keep that beautiful primarily the large sump of two million dollars is for land acquisition we're working through through some process on buying some land that would be coming to you in the future and then a couple hundred thousand dollars for tree planting uh we haven't planted any trees since last november we provided we're provided direction from council to conduct an urban tree plan and we're in the process of doing that right now yes yes excuse me uh gary if you could go back uh on the gas well fund the revenue is 30 the expenses are 70 so uh we have 30 we have um estimated balance as of november is september as of september 30 is 76 000 and then we're going to spend 50 um so there's a typo there it should be let's see what am i seeing here just drawing on fund balance right yeah yes i don't need to spend a lot of time on it but but just you know does it cost us more to operate than it generates well i guess it depends on on how much it's producing at the time that it's that's that's those are i don't know royalties is the right word but revenues in from the gas well uh gas wells that are on on or near park sites that can only be spent on park sites so it's it's just basically a fund balance holding account and so the expenses don't actually have to do with getting the revenue that's right it's just use of that money that's correct okay i understand thank you yes a question question about the impact fees and you don't have to switch this slide um but uh could could uh impact fees once they get adjusted be potentially used to um bring help bring down the cost of admission the uh sorry uh membership for for the athletics at the rec facilities the uh 9 15 16 can either be used for land acquisition or park development it can't be used for operations got it okay so physical improvements itself uh so we mentioned earlier that we're working through a cost recovery study right now this is just to give you a an example of each hbu or each facility civic center dean urec center in regards to its revenue and expense comparison as i mentioned earlier um this slide gives you a three-year history two years back and one year forward in regards to all the revenue and expenses that are generated in the general fund side of the budget as well as the recreation fund and it gives you a total of that general fund subsidy so for instance uh the overall subsidy provided by the general fund for the department in 17 18 was 11 million dollars uh and that was breaking even um for the the rec fund specifically in 18 19 it was similar a little over 11 million dollars and then this year it's jumped to 14 million dollars that includes uh some items which i'll provide here on the next slide our supplements that are in the budget at 1.3 million dollars our seasonal rate of pay of a little over 300 000 last year we had a hard time hiring part-time staff at our pools uh to conduct programs as well as um operation with our lifeguards so we we worked with hr and they were very helpful and we did an analysis across dfw in regards to staff costs and we increased some of our employees up to two dollars per hour and we had no problem hiring staff so we hadn't had to cancel programs and we're you know we feel really good about the staff we have this summer so we have been able to operate at full capacity so that's been a good investment the three percent increase overall for staff salaries a cost of service increase of 424 000 those are internal transfers and then we had some budget allocations that we missed last year at 55 000 so that makes up roughly that 2.4 million dollars real quick question um if you could go back to the previous slide um i'm trying to understand what this is telling me when you say the general fund are you talking about for parks so parks brought in revenue of 2.2 million the expenses for parks was 13 million and that's that's the subsidy there i mean for 17 18 i'm sorry yeah is that is that how i'm reading that right these are these are the parks department revenues and park department expenses so we have two budgets we have our general fund side of the department and our recreation fund side okay general fund is primarily park maintenance and some other some other business units and then the recreation fund of all our rec centers our programs so that's the one where you have this sort of the graph parks and recs program analysis yes um in that in that graph i think that was your previous slide there within the expense bar is debt service part of that no this is this is just operations okay so debt service like on the natatorium and or water park is an debt service on any of these facilities it is not included in the graph that's correct okay all right thank you yes councillor milsor yeah just to just make a quick comment i don't think there's any department where we provide service uh you know where the expectation is it's a it's going to be like a business and make a profit or something it's you know it's a set of services the city provides so really the revenue is the subsidy to the general fund right i mean it costs money to provide these services and you know hey great it's offset at least place of revenue so that's the subsidy to the general fund in my view just well and and yeah you say potato i say potato which is fine but i think the question is going to be in three weeks is is that acceptable to have that kind of disparity in other words to use your your position do we want to have a little bit more subsidy to the general fund to allow us to do some other things uh as as compared to do we want to you know reduce our expenses by charging more or something so no i i i totally get what you're saying i don't disagree with that yeah council member griggs yeah yeah so i i look at parks um budget a lot differently than developmental services like so um here you're gonna have some of that supplemental and you're not going to cost recover everything because you know it's parks and people they pay taxes for um to be able to use this and so but i'm looking at this chart and you know there's some things that i know we don't really have the time yet but we should really individually talk about you know some of these things because some of them you know like the natatorium we've had many conversations about that so that's not really surprised and that has to do with the daisd partnership and that's just something we're stuck with and so um i think that adds to a lot of that negative number as well but then when you look at public relations i mean how are you gonna cost recover that really um you know i'm saying and so i don't know leisure service administration i'm not really sure but there's you know there's some things we can have more detailed conversations about when we i guess are you're coming back to us yes and i'd like to have those and because that your face value and you see that negative with the big red you know it's it's like oh my goodness but then when you start looking at each one and the services we're providing to our residents and um so i mean i i think we're still doing pretty pretty good and i i understand that you know we're gonna have to have a pretty difficult conversation but you just i'm not in the frame of mind that we have to completely cost recover you know parks so tim tim smith was going to be here to talk a little bit about the denton parks foundation but he had to leave for other commitments so we're going to delay this to a another meeting okay uh further questions yes that's my monitor well yeah so i was going to wait to come till the the end of the the parks um presentation uh to address the the white paper about the pest management ipm yeah yeah the ipm yeah and i don't know if you have that you're able to put that up for the i i don't have it so i can put up on the slide it's kind of it's small small uh print for a slide just anyway but i had a number of questions because that was um yeah they're 460 61 000 yeah so since it was is such a big expense uh you know i wanted i wanted to ask um and these will all these will be mostly kind of questions that i've been asking a lot uh along um a couple of some of them are are new though so i what i'm wondering is kind of my overall question is um you mentioned there that um that that we that we want to go organic or organic is is a priority uh for i guess for the for the department for for council um certainly it's a priority for me um so uh and then and i understand that right now we've got the one you know project the denia that's by the project yeah the organic which i had had and don't worry i'm gonna ask ask now i'm just mentioning this you know some questions about why is the cost you know so much uh because i was always under the impression not uh that organic involved less cost yes more you know more weeds but but less cost and you're balancing the health benefit with the more weeds you know as we had discussed um you know i'm wondering um if that uh prioritization of organic methods could be used to shave some of the cost off of this for instance um you know when it comes to uh the uh the use of uh of dyno dirt the what do you call the the topping top dressing yeah the top dressing you know what is like what it what part of the cost is that and is that you know i'm concerned that since we're using uh fertilizer chemical fertilizer you know if the chemical fertilizer will you know essentially kind of kill the you know what i mean the um uh uh top dressing and will they kind of uh defeat each each other you know i would you know to be uh maximum organic as i understand it would just involve taking away um the the fertilizer and the uh it's called uh finale finale is the yeah the um yeah you know i i had kind of done some research on that subsequent to our our conversation when we voted on going off glyphosate i don't think it was known what the substitute was going to be which is fine but you know but then i found out finale i looked up about it um you know and there are some some concerns about um the the chemicals in that so anyway i was wondering kind of leave it broadly for now you know are there any areas there where you could see shaving off some of this big cost uh in a way that also helps with the goal of being organic and again given that you know a number of us here when we last discussed it we're okay with uh the you know we're okay with some more weeds and i think you know council member ryan had had brought up the possibility of it you know organic uh substitute i remember asked for a staff report on it and i was trying to find i'm sure it's there but i couldn't find where the in preparation for this meeting where that staff report was if you know if you could speak to them so just to recap a little bit we just went through a year-long process with the focus group to update the park's um ipm program the integrated pest management program and just to give a little bit of background on that the integrated pest management program is not an organic program what that does is it takes a combination of cultural mechanical and chemical methods by specifically identifying what pest whether it's a weed pest or an insect pest determining what pest you're dealing with the level of infestation taking in all of your environmental factors into place you know what is on site and then determining what the best approaches to combat that specific pest and then it's a continual learning experience so that's the ipm specifically for the denia project we we are working we continue to work also with a consultant who is specifically into organic maintenance and that's howard garrett he's known as the dirt doctor and he was recommended by the focus group so that's how we got in in contact with them and we've been working very closely with him on an organic maintenance program for denia in that staff report that was provided to council i believe we gave some detail from his program maintenance options and it did show that the organic maintenance program was substantially more costly than a regular or our current maintenance program and in the conversation that we had even with the group that you recommended i believe it's the non-toxic neighborhoods we asked that specific question if it was their experience whether or not organic maintenance was costlier than your kind of normal maintenance practices and they also said that it would be for the first 18 to 3 years it was after that that once you begin to prepare your soil and get it in good health that you begin to see those decrease in maintenance costs whether that's in product use or whether it's in things like watering and so forth so we do expect at some point to see a reduction in our maintenance cost but it's not immediate we've got to get our soil in good condition before we get to a point where we see those reductions in maintenance cost and it was for the first 18 months to they said 18 months to three years yes yeah and so about the question of the um the uh the fertilizer the chemical fertilizer underneath in the um uh you know organic matter on top correct is that you know because that's so much of the cost no and i'm glad you brought that out because that's something else that we provided clarification on so when we say fertilizer we're talking about adding an amendment to the soil that makes it healthy so it could be chemical based it could be synthetic based or it could be organic based it all depends on what that particular site needs and each site is different so what we might find is an issue at north lakes park maybe a different soil amendment issue at denia park and we don't know that until we test each each site and then know what that site needs are we using synthetic fertilizer products at this time yes can we cut back on that and then use something like top dressing dino dirt to supplement instead of yes and that's what we're trying to work out now um in the um supplemental request i believe there's eighty thousand dollars for top top dressing so what we would do is try to identify where the best location is to use that top dressing what location needs it we can back off on synthetic fertilization and then this would substitute as our fertilization and that was yeah and that kind of you know because the 80 000 is such a large percentage you know about a quarter of the cost um you know i i i would i would i'm not quite sure why that is why it's necessary you know to have all that to just be spending you know 80 000 on our own on our own dino dirt and i know you know it's something that that we discussed when talking with um you know non-toxic neighborhoods but so i i'm i i'm having a real hard time understanding where you're going with all this so i'm trying to reduce that so i i read the white paper i appreciated that it was written um i'm trying to reduce the cost it's a significant cost but i think well first of all we had a work session on this in may that we went over a lot of this but so what you're saying is that you think that the 80 000 which is supplemental is high but yet what i'm so correct me if i'm wrong what i'm hearing is that 80 000 is to use dino dirt to act as some kind of more organic kind of improve the soil so i'm really confused by your line of of dialogue and your questioning because i hear you want to cut costs but also here you want to try to improve the organic process of how we're approaching our park's maintenance and i think what they're saying to you is yes we want to do that as well the way we're proposing to do it now is a supplemental of 80 000 so if we don't do the 80 000 of dino dirt what are we going to do in this place it could be synthetic fertilizer or some or something else but again and this would be across the entire park system so we're you know we're looking at multiple sites that we would test to see if this is the appropriate method to amend the soil to get it healthy and get it you know to that place where we could at some point have that reduction in maintenance but it's a bit as you mentioned earlier that the synthetic is just one of fertilizers just one of the options right correct it could be synthetic it could be organic it can yeah we're gonna i mean okay okay okay what's your what's your point and what is your what is your request or your proposal to reduce the cost in a number of ways that i am not allowed to go into can y'all bring us back some of that because we are not going to spend another eight hours on the budget presentations i'm sorry if we can get these concise it's a lot of money okay it's 80 000 we had a work session on this back in may and i believe this has been the number that has been in this council's budget and council direction for the last three months so i'm running the meeting we're going to get through this if you guys could provide her with some alternatives maybe to the council of okay if you don't do the 80 000 you're going to do synthetic fertilizer what's the cost difference what's the organic nature difference but we've got to get through these presentations we've got another two months that we can talk about budget uh issues so um if we could move forward on the presentation is this this is the breakdown the actual the majority of the cost is in mowing so it's the um and i believe this my i yeah the majority of the cost is is in mowing and i was also going to suggest i don't think we need that much mowing and i don't think we need that much water we're going to do rainwater collection but anyway apparently i don't know when is the time you know to have the discussion we pay these people as professional staff members and if you want to say i don't agree with that kind of mowing i totally respect that totally get it you can say that and we've got it on record and if this council believes it's too much mowing the council can make that determination but if you're going to say if you're going to micromanage a mowing of parks projects that's fine we're not going to do it at the dais during a budget presentation so that's up to you any other questions thanks for the white paper i appreciated it any other question on parks all right thank you very much i appreciate it and we'll be looking for those alternatives thank you so you're up thank you mayor council scott mcdonald director of development services delighted to be here to talk to you about the development services department really what we are is is just a great partner in the community trying to help with sustainable responsible development in denton really with our culture focused on you know just being there for solutions transparency customer service and continuous improvement i'm delighted to share some of our performance metrics over the past year what we've witnessed is is that we've seen a total of 852 more permits issued from 17 to 18 in doing that we've also reduced the days to issuance from 14 to 11 our multi-family projects have have gone up dramatically we've had eight major projects which accounted for roughly about 92 million dollars worth of construction value as well as on our single-family permits we've issued an additional 131 single-family homes with a value of over 32 million dollars if we talk about some of what of our performance metrics is really of what we're doing and how we're doing it and you can see in the chart that indicates the the number of widgets if you will the type of meetings what type of processes that we're going through in the in the overall numbers that correspond to that with that being said our average numbers have gone up as far as what our review is but we've taken the days of review time down so we've we've reduced that number and the days to approval have went down significantly and we're tracking on you know really what we're looking at from last year as we reduced it by over a month and we're on track this year to be over two and a half months less so our average review times our goals and accomplishments we've put on board development project facilitators so we have an individual or individuals that will help shepherd a project through so if we're going to truly be a one-stop shop that we have a one point of contact that communicates with the development community again shepherding that project from from cradle to grave so they introduced herself in the beginning of the project and and there there is that point of contact for all of our other departments throughout the city we also do a customer satisfaction survey on anyone that we get coming through the building or anyone that is conducting service with us with really 91 of that population telling us that they're very satisfied with the service that's being performed we've worked through and completed the wayfinding project so we started that in the previous budget year we've completed steps two and three this year and we continue to expand our our staff training and progression you know hoping to have more technically competent staff that can be more effective and efficient our goals for 1920 are going to really really focused on our development development code to complete the implementation of that we've got more work to do as a result of the the legislation and our historic preservation plan and then we're in the middle of the process for an rfp on software our cost containment strategies are that of that we've been hosting on-site trainings so rather than sending staff throughout the state we bring the state to us and we help to host for other communities but we're able to afford more training opportunities to a greater volume of our staff as well as reducing our travel we analyze what we're using for cellular data on wi-fi devices and so instead of using cellular data we're using wi-fi more and we've reduced cost by 7200 with that and then we really have focused on our customers and reducing where it is that they have to travel and try to use again the one-stop shop and helping them be more effective and efficient our budget highlights are relatively simple we're we're in the process of evaluating cost of service study as the city manager indicated that's an important part of what we're doing we've been working on that for well over a year staff have been evaluating their time we've got a third party in to evaluate that we'll bring that report back in in several um in several weeks yes councilmember briggs and so for us to um so will we need to approve a i guess a new pricing plan after that service study comes in or yes we'll be recommending fee changes okay we just don't know exactly what that might look like we know that our building inspection fees are relatively close to where we need to be we've got some changes that we're going to bring forward but significant there's a significant difference in our planning fees i think often we follow consistently with our other texas communities and so everybody just says well this is what they're charging that's what we'll charge our communities are now taking a greater look at really what that cost of service is so we're charging um 700 for a zoning and and we'll have um you know thousands of dollars invested in staff time to to bring that to light um so it's going to be a dramatic change from where we're at today but truly from the cost of delivering that service rather than um it's born by the development community and and so we just want to make sure that it's um relative to what we're doing right now i definitely agree with with that um we want to make sure that it's cost recovered and that the taxpayers we're not supplementing this department through our general fund it's a lot different for me when we talk about parks as you heard earlier yes yes and we've got some public good and the city manager has been very diligent in making sure that we evaluate how much of that is isn't it and that's what i say about the time studies is that how much of it is that we're providing that that public good or that public service um versus the time spent with the development community so we're we're going to break all of that out and and uh present that to you so you've got a clear direction on on where we're at thank you yeah just uh hope you might take a moment to explain if you go back one slide i'm sorry yeah the first uh uh footnote any particular you know change in how you're operating that that would be interesting about yes i'm sorry and i didn't mean to skip past that slide off the revenue um yes as far as on expenses we we've added uh three project facilitators um additionally during the year we added a building inspector and a permit technician so we've added staff into the department um to augment the difference in the service delivery part of why it is that we're you know even more closely evaluating that cost of service delivery um in order to get that where it's where it's appropriate is it just a kind of a budget thing to say that they're allocated to capital projects or is it literally like a skill set transfer oh sorry it was a it was a completely different uh business model that was created with uh scott todd and myself to try to respond to the development community and some of the critiques that we were hearing about not having one certain person to to deal with um and you know and so we ended up moving those fte's from capital projects over adding some additional staff mid-year because the building inspectors were getting overloaded but this this but this this staffing model is very different from what you've seen in the past in in addition one of the other cost drivers is we're continuing to evaluate development review engineering which is going to be it's also part of this issue as well that's the other hang up right now we're still working through is how quickly we're able to evaluate site plans uh that sort of thing and get back to the development community so as we're putting in uh folks that can be more responsive and get the get our development community through the process quicker we're taking on costs that we need to be recouping from them as well and so that's the ongoing discussion that scott and i are having with the development community is we're willing to continue putting different ways of doing business in different skill sets different business models but you need to make us whole for that and from their perspective time is money and it's been a fairly solid trade-off right now yeah the numbers are reflecting that and then really it's from engineering not necessarily capital so we we refer to it as capital is just being that department that's what i understood and thanks for explaining that council member davis so we're on the subject of footnotes can you or david one of y'all help me better understand footnote two in the interplay with the unfunded supplemental um because that was one of my kind of red flag items in the proposed budget too is we've got some money sunk into the software um how do we how do we keep getting return on that investment can y'all help me understand the interplay there yes it was it was budgeted a couple of years ago it was it was it was uh allocated for something else it was brought back in development services budget and the 500 000 is it is a one-time expense so that might be for for hardware or implementation and then what you'll see in the supplemental will be the ongoing or where it is that it would be if it's a hosted solution what that annual cost would be so with the the fee studies that we're doing do we expect then that the ongoing is going to be covered or we expect that it's not going to be covered i wasn't clear on that we we anticipate that we would cover any and all costs or or we're going to at least propose that that where it is that it's cost for for service so if you're utilizing the system that cost of service then would be recouped okay very good thank you okay so we spoke briefly about um adding adding employees and and what we've done over the the course of the department for the year we don't intend on adding any employees um in the upcoming year and i think it's also important to note that from a turnover standpoint the 16 17 year we had 41 turnover we reduced that number in 17 18 and we're down to six six percent in in 18 19 so we're holding on to our staff which is better for our community and at least our relationships out there in the community um spoke briefly about the permitting software maintenance um typically what happens with uh software or hosted solutions is it's really an evergreen product so rather than paying for a product and and then you have to pay for upgrades this is a is a continuum so it's hosted off-site um those solutions will provide for um upgrades when they make improvements as well as that support um we are in the rfp process so uh currently we started with some demos today so we haven't landed on a solution we don't know exactly where that is going to be but we're evaluating what that might look like additionally we've asked for a walkability study so what we want to do is evaluate how it is that we tie into the park's master plans attempt to get connectivity between unt and the square twu in the square and how it is that we ensure that our subdivisions and community is connected more so than looking at projects in individual light and then as well the comprehensive plan that's coming up on five years old we know that the city has grown significantly that the growth patterns have changed so it's time for us to evaluate uh the comprehensive plan this is not going to be as significant as it was five years ago this is really just an update to that plan to make sure where it is that council direction is going forward council member briggs and so so far is just number one is the only one that's been funded in our uh no we'll be we'll be uh all of those will be coming forward but again we're waiting until we get i'm sorry oh the cost of service davis got another piece of that okay so numbers two and three currently are in tier four and so as we talk to the proposed budget those are not currently funded within the proposed budget and then that first one uh i think we envisioned it being funded after we once we get through that cost of service uh study piece okay we did not want to make any presumptions on what you were going to do with fees so we wanted you had the fee study first and then if you agree with where they need to be then we'll add some of these back in but i want we did not want you to feel like your back was up the wall may approach oh you had follow-up yeah yeah go ahead so on those fees the the cost of service if they're they're increased you're you believe that with that increase these can be funded without a tax oh yes okay yes in fact in fact depending on where you land on the development service development fees as a whole not only could these be funded but we may be able to walk down the levy a little bit thank you because your cost recovering into i mean you're not cost recovering from any other department other than planning and development services yeah you get if you get uh 750 000 more dollars you got you'll cover this and then 300 something thousand within the uh budget yeah reducing the general fund subsidy exactly any other yeah may pretend i'm sorry no no problem the city manager i would like to get a copy of the rfp just a link something just so i can read it in advance and kind of understand what we what our target is okay for that software and in that way it will help me evaluate what we get back so please and thank you any other questions questions comments thank you very much yep let's take a five minute i know we just took one but the pizza's here so we'll grab us something to eat and come back and welcome everybody back to this meeting of the dent city council at 5 23 p.m on thursday august the first 2019 we're on our agenda item 1b which is our department budget presentations yes evening mayor and council taught us to city engineer we're going to run briefly through this if you need to ask questions please feel free to do so so some of the accomplishments from this last year one of my favorite things to report on is we have 19 of our capital projects in the either in construction or completed another 10 that will be coming out later this calendar year but that accounts for those 19 that accounts for about 240 million dollars in project value that is out on the streets right now then just too many things to accomplish this last year there's a lot of things on this slide and you add to that just the growing number of private development projects that last year alone we were looking at 35 projects at a given time and now we're pushing 70 plus just a brief highlight of some of the projects and the progress we've made so bonnie bray phase one sorry that we lost the temp the video temporarily apparently that's not working but it's a cool drone shot that our tech services and our dtv folks put together that flies down the length of these two new bridges on phase one phase one is nearing completion it'll be complete this year should be towards the end of november by the time it's open and ready to go and then vintage boulevard which is this phase two is actively bidding right now so we anticipate that going to construction late this year mayhill road we've had traffic moved over onto two brand new lanes so nobody's driving on the old pothole road that road has now been completely taken off and we're working on putting in those new lanes as well so that project itself should be ready to go and turn loose to all lanes by the end of this year as well councilmember briggs public service announcement do not speed on mayhill there are motorcycles police on there all the time yes and and the progress is really good to watch so following that were several rounds of small transportation projects that we had visited with council about over the last two years and i do have a correction on this slide here so the hickory creek road turn lane and the bell and mckinney turn lane evidently i got the turn lanes confused they should be flip-flop this should be complete down here at bella mckinney and then up here at hickory creek road we are about to go into construction on that one we're waiting on field crew availability to go to complete that one the remainder of these projects that you'll see here they're going through a permitting process they're either nearing completion on design or they're complete and design and we're just waiting on those text dot they all are associated with a tech stop permit in some form of fashion so those roads will be going to are those intersections and small transportation projects be going to construction here soon mayor pro tem has a comment or question so i'd like to see mr city manager or uh some some way to um capture the success stories i mean this intersection we come in 52 000 under what we what we projected and i'd like to try to begin to memorialize those and some sort of update notice that sort of thing but that that's going to be key uh that that hey my ability to communicate that back that says yes everything's torn up at once but we're going to hit our deadlines and we're going to come in at or under budget hopefully all things being equal especially this one where you had to danny had to rework it because of the rain delays etc etc so it's hey it's out further but to still come in 52 000 to the good so i'd like to kind of get a kind of an update periodically of projects that are completed and then the savings attributed to those i think we have our public affairs staff work with todd staff they work very closely together and just uh you know that that slide that he started off with it sort of shows the uh the last year it's it's pretty impressive and i would venture to say it's probably more than he just four or five years combined so um you know he just kind of glossed over it so what we'll try to do is something you know there to really talk about the process because he's put it in place and what we're getting turned out the door i think it's you councilman breaks so are these all the um the projects that we approved because i don't see the noddingham 381 on there unless i'm just missing it for the small transportation project that was included it is yes it is included it's currently under design we're actually working with the real estate to take a corner piece of the church property or some uh one of the parcels on the north side so it is in there okay it's just not listed it's not in the list so there's a lot more thank you all right well i'm glad pretend was here to correct that so appreciate that so some of the goals we have for 19 and 20 and of course there's more that's not even on this page but the prime focus will be clearing out the last the 2012-2014 bond projects all of those will be going to construction in the 2019-2020 fiscal year and then gearing up for that 2019 bond program taking that to the next moment and achieve that process in a much quicker fashion more process oriented fashion than what we have done in the past of course going back to the budget emphasis 2014-2019 bond programs 2012 bond programs and then continuing to refine the development review process scott just talked about that a minute ago we've made significant strides in working with the development community and how we best proceed through making sure the city's interests are kept at heart while making sure that we don't make that as painful a process as possible in the development community to do that but there's still more work to be done so some of those cost containment strategies and then also go in line with what we're just mentioning on improvement practices just implement some technology and software practices that help to streamline that work staff investing a lot more time in training building that culture of let's can do solutions oriented that has been there but really bringing that to the forefront and then making sure that qaqc doesn't get sacrificed as we start going into a new territory if we got to get this done faster as the state legislature continues to squeeze down the time frame with which we have to review we are still not going to have the ability or excuse to say we missed that because there just wasn't enough time we still got to be able to catch it so some process improvements we had gone through last year really worked on that front end loading of projects making sure that we understood total project cost going forward overall completely that development review process and as we go forward we're really looking to define those kpi as a key performance indicator indicators for those capital projects so you really do understand how they're performing we understand as quickly as possible when those issues may come up and go awry we can address those issues as quickly as possible and then continue that just continuously working on that process improvement on both the private side and the public side of projects some things that have changed in our revenues and expenditure from last year to this year we had a hbu 840300 that was the development review hbu so we took those engineers and we incorporated them into the overall engineering staff so there's one less hbu within that engineering grouping than there was a year before we're also gearing up to really work on this expanded capital improvement process and program adding the 19 2019 bond into it as well as our just continuing maintenance projects that require some kind of engineering help requires that we take a look at this holistically and how do we get more people in place better talent that's the additional staff standpoint the market is tough to bring this type of talent here anywhere the private sector and the public sector is having the same issues that we are bringing the right people in that can get the job done quickly and efficiently one of those process improvements that we embarked on last year was bringing in a consultant hr green help us with the development review process they are helping us by making sure that we collect accurate information on processes as we go through they help streamline the technical review of the projects from a private side so one of the things they do is they take the lion's share of that just what takes hours upon hours of an engineer or staff time to get into the weeds on a project and make sure that it does meet our specifications and our requirements they make sure that we get that done because they can ramp up to the the ebb and flow of the private development community unlike we can so they can right now they're throwing 12 to 15 engineers at the development review process just in reviewing the plans so when you get into the technical work it just requires that kind of workload with the sheer amount of projects and number of work that are the amount of money and projects that are coming through the city right now they have definitely decreased our backlog and their turnaround time is better on the technical side but there is still a lot of room for improvement as we're still working with each other on the best way to make this happen so some budget highlights from the revenue side we're projecting basically a flat line from last year's revenues to this year's it's a little bit of a decrease some of that has been some adjustments in what workload we anticipate and where those revenues will come from and on the expenditure side there's a bit of an adjustment the salary and personal expenses side does go up but again that reflects what we're talking about bringing additional talent to the table to be able to do this work more effectively in the end the net result is roughly about the same budget as we had presented last year and just another view of those overall expenditures per department or per division as we do go through our business one big change you'll see is the difference between development review this is that 840300 that was eliminated out of the budget as we consolidated the engineers into the overall engineering group last year so the increase there was both due to bringing those personal salaries into that department into that hbu versus where they were selectively set out apart from everybody else and then also the hr green contract in and of itself um i think you just mentioned hr green contract that was the um outside consultants that we um outside consultants that we hired as extra staff yes right okay correct i was just wondering where that was thanks i just as a quick review of our departmental staffing so one of the things that we are asking for this year are a few extra staff so you'll see some changes in the staffing numbers last year we had projected at this time 10 people in the development review side and that was before we had gone down the pathway of bringing hr green on board to help bolster that total technical staff and do the review piece so these five folks that we had originally that's this number here they were moved into the engineering staff and then we have added a couple of new positions they all see the public works inspectors we had one very talented individual that a lot of experience and we brought them in as a project manager so that's another way area where this had offset itself so one of the additions we'll be asking for this year is an additional inspector to round that back out then we're looking at an additional person on the traffic side that one requires just a little bit explaining there's an asterisk on there we had another talented individual in our operations staff that really we could use to put to work as a technician on the traffic engineering side it helped give us better breadth and flexibility as we're reviewing traffic control plans from the private development side and on the internal side so we've brought that person on board there and on the technical side so we show them here currently in the traffic engineering group but we'll need to replace that position in traffic operations which you'll see here on when pre-tam comes so our net supplemental package summary for engineering we're looking for one more engineering position for traffic that's the person that was currently housed in traffic operations but he's doing work for traffic engineering this just gives that position back to traffic operations and allows traffic engineering to have the person that is currently doing the job but have that fte in place the additional inspector that offsets pulling one inspector out as a project manager then you've got one additional project manager we are managing somewhere between 46 and 47 projects right now from a capital project side we're about to add more with the 2019 bond program so a good work healthy workload for a project manager is going to be somewhere around four or five projects at most seven where our project managers currently are is between 10 and 11 so this would at least give us the ability to ensure that quality is put in place in the right place the right time for those projects we can manage things like preventing scope creep increase cost of the budget by having somebody fresh and who has a healthy workload and not somebody who's overworked managing these large projects and then the last position is an admin admin three that really would help our real estate staff as we're going into the 2019 bond program we are still working our way through all of the real estate acquisitions that all departments throughout the city utilize our services for and then we're going to add this component of the 19 bond program into it they just need purely the office help to get this work generated and out the door not right now good evening mr hair members of the council my name is free tam deshmukh i'm the deputy city engineer and i'll be talking about traffic i have the shortest one here it's seven slides only so let me know if you have any questions and i can try and answer them focus and vision for the department our main goal here and vision is to manage traffic create a state-of-the-art traffic management center and also create a network of signal that are connected through fiber so once we do that once that's achieved we will be able to considerably improve safety within the city improve efficiency and the overall mobility through the through the net transportation network here so how are we going to do that the emphasis here is twofold address maintenance requirements and needs for aging traffic signals as well as signs and markings and then the second is reduce congestion by improving the efficiency by modernizing every signal we have the equipment that we use to operate them well cost containment strategies here primary focus is using in-house staff we get gain a lot of savings if we use in-house staff that we've employed the signal technicians and the technicians for signs and markings they if we use them in-house as opposed to a consultant there's a saving of over 70 percent also increase a the communication with between the signals put in a robust communication signal plan in there so that that would increase our efficiency reduce our response times what we can do is not only assess the situation or concerns that we get but for most part address them remotely and not have to leave the traffic management center and go to these intersections to fix them also one thing you're doing is selecting the right equipment we want to make sure that the equipment we select for our signals is tried and tested we are not implementing something that's going to fail we're getting the top of the line the best so that it lasts us for a long time process improvements what we've done is we have upgraded our network we've added a fiber network that currently covers about 35 percent of our signals so we can actually actively talk to them we can see how their operation is going we have cameras on some of these intersections so we can actually review any concerns that come up for example dallas teesley we have a camera and we could monitor construction while it was going and address any concerns that were happening traffic control going wrong or any any concerns that would come up so yes we are working towards upgrading that network and adding more intersections we're also conducting semi-annual reviews for our traffic signals signs and markings while we are out there so if there is a concern at a signalized intersections then our staff will go out there and conduct the semi-annual review and save time save the extra trip to go back and schedule it the other thing we've added a state-of-the-art printer that prints signs and that is very effective efficient it it has increased our capability the durability of our signs and it does create quality products that will last for a long time and then we're continually upgrading our signal system by synchronizing them so that way we reduce delay reduce congestion i understand there are a lot of construction going on but we're trying to keep up with the synchronization program as i mentioned ongoing we're going to continue adding more signals to our network so our fiber network is continuing continually expanding and also we are reallocating our resources from addressing concerns or spending more time addressing concerns to better managing and maintaining our existing infrastructure quick budget highlights expenses i think bottom line if you look at it the numbers are not changing their minor increases for operation cost as we continue adding more signalized intersections within the city some of the equipment some of the maintenance operation costs keep on going up and of course the salary increases for the for staff position summary we currently have 12 folks within the operations and there is there is one signal technician there is less for the signals but we used to have four and i'll talk a little bit in the supplemental but we currently have 12 folks in the supplemental we're requesting sign or two positions for signs and markings and one for signal technician the primary reason here is we are trying to play catch up on a lot of our pavement markings we we are in a we are in a location in the state or in an area where the sun the the heat and the winter time damages the pavement markings pretty quickly every four years is typically when we need to go back and replace them because they fall apart every four years we do not have enough technicians to actually take care of that and that's why we're not able to go complete the every go complete our maintenance program every four years so we are about 25 there so if we add more technicians it'll definitely help us improve our program and follow up on that program currently we only have an annual program for the crosswalks we do not have an annual program for anything else and we really want to get there so that's why this we're requesting two signal technicians signs and marking technician and one signal technician and that those crosswalks are for school zones right not just all the crosswalks no right because there's some that need to be redone and so are we responsible for marking text dot streets as well we are as far as crosswalks are concerned yes we are okay and is there a different product on the market that lasts longer that may be may be a little bit more upfront cost but you know we are continually trying new products so every time there's a new product in town in town or every time there is a new thing that we have we definitely go and try it out but we haven't uh we we're not getting anything that lasts more than four years typically any other questions any other questions for traffic oh yes go ahead just a comment thank you for being so responsive i know that a lot of our complaints and things that we hear have to do with traffic and um lights and so i just want to say thank you for your quick responses to um all of those thank you thank you appreciate it thank you councilman breaks is there any more uh budget presentation departmental budget presentations i don't think so we've we've made it through all right so we're going to move on to agenda item 1c receive a report hold discussion give staff direction regarding the fy 219 20 city managers proposed budget capital improvement program and five-year financial forecast i think this was about 100 slides right 62 but we'll be fast we'll get through them i like to start off by thanking the budget staff and the entire city staff for uh getting us to this point obviously it's been a long process to get here with the proposed budget so thanks to everyone involved and i know we have plenty of staff available for questions as we go along is it is it um broken down in a way that we can hold our questions through a certain segment of the presentation or you just want as questions come up to to just go ahead and fire them you can ask questions as we go through okay fantastic all right thank you yeah here's the key budget dates up to this point obviously we just got our certified values uh last week in advance of the proposed budget that you received this week um where we got our final avs and we'll see the impact of those and then we'll have we'll have items on the agenda every meeting moving forward um for to follow up questions in advance of those public hearings on the tax rate and and budget and then ultimately council adoption of the budget on september 17th we wanted to start off this presentation really tying the budget back to the 2018 council retreat and show how those priorities set during the retreat have been reflected in the budget the first first priority being the new bond program obviously have had discussions on that today and the result really how that ties directly back to that retreat last year the second uh the another priority from city council during that uh during the retreat was a master plan for homelessness and you can see here in the middle section i won't read every bullet point um you can see all of the initiatives that have been taken that have been underway this fiscal year as a response to the council retreat and then on the right here and as we go through each of these you'll you'll see these these are how really the the proposed budget is tied directly to those priorities set during the council retreat a number of our tier one supplementals that are included in the budget are directly related to homelessness and they're items that have been discussed with council multiple times but you can see each of those listed there from the united from the barrier funds expansions to the nkoc shelter expansion street outreach team the tier five the veterans village park is not currently in the proposed budget but is on the supplemental list for consideration by council and then you can see below the 75,000 for the housing grant fee grant and homeless in the 107,000 through the highway for the homelessness assistance program are in the current year's budget we also have 145,000 for additional grants and then the 125,000 for utility assistance that council's seen before another priority from city council is the mobility plan and you can see an emphasis over here on the right in the in the proposed budget you have before you on on mobility a lot of that is coming directly from the traffic safety fund as as we know where we won't be receiving revenues to the traffic safety any fund anymore with the changes in legislation for red light cameras our plan is and you'll see this as we go through is to exhaust the fund balance of that fund and use all those funds next year if possible so we have 1.6 million for traffic signal design and construction 150,000 for a new striping truck that will that will be of a lot of use 200,000 for traffic calming in addition we have 200,000 for bike lane improvements that have been a priority for the city over the past few years we have a tier four supplemental for a walkability study which you saw earlier that's not currently included in the proposed budget but is up for council consideration and then we're making our final debt issuance from the 2014 bond program of that 12.2 million dollars for street reconstruction another priority was open space planning obviously we've had that discussion earlier with the bond program for the five million dollars for open space land acquisition that is planned to be included in the bond program included in open space we've included the the large supplemental request that was also discussed earlier for the integrated pest management system we've added five hundred and eight thousand dollars that greg that gary that gary pointed out earlier to up that park's maintenance amount to cover a lot of our new park land we have a tier four supplemental for park signage improvements that's not currently in the budget and you can see down the list a lot of our special revenue funds how we've allocated allocated dollars to open space planning tree canopy we have uh another priority from city council we have three hundred and sixty thousand dollars these all being from the tree mitigation fund three hundred sixty thousand dollars for public tree planting two million now for potential land acquisition related to trees and then 16 thousand five hundred for our tree initiative program city facility planning obviously the sixty sixty six point four million we have for public safety facilities sure point of clear so two million in that account now we have two million budgeted just for land acquisition okay thank you we have uh first city facility planning each year we budget the one point one point five million dollars for facility improvements we have that included and we talked about that earlier in our ceo issuance uh plan in relation to the bond program finally our downtown master plan we currently have one hundred and twenty two thousand budgeted for downtown grants this exhausts the remaining amount in the reinvestment downtown reinvestment fund which will no longer be active after this year as we as we spend the entirety of those reserves and then also includes additional dollars from the tours fund downtown tours fund which will now will be where the housing grants are the downtown grants are housed we also as an 1819 supplemental from excess dollars we expect at the end of this fiscal year we have a hundred thousand dollars for an economic development strategic plan the development code and an additional priority we've already talked about the planning software three hundred thousand dollars we are recommending revised development services fee structure that we've talked about and then the opportunity for a comprehensive plan update so now that we've set the stage with talking through how how the budget ties to the 20 uh 2018 council retreat really get into the meat of the budget and talk about what our priorities are we're going into the budget process really as as always focus on cost containment organizational efficiencies which each of the department presentations have focused on that you've seen up to this point we have a general fund budget that's really based around the effective rate as we go into the budget process we start off with what is the effective rate what can we fund under the effective rate and this year really base those those tiered structures of the supplementals on the effective rate and ultimately we're able to fit three tiers of those supplementals under a 1.5 cent increase over the effective rate so that's currently what's in the proposed budget david on the effective rate calculation refresh my memory because new construction that's not in that calculation is that correct correct all right um so do we know have we put a sort of a tax levy quotient to our new construction i think i think new construction further on i'll just address it then i'm sorry okay i have a slide that breaks down the new construction here are some of those assumptions for the general fund and some of these we talked about obviously during the bond presentation 11.5 percent total increase in assessed value as we've talked through the budget process the last time last time we had a preliminary budget update to council we were around the eight eight percent range in assessed value really just trying to guess with those preliminary values where we're going to end up we didn't have as large of a drop as we had last year between our final preliminary versus our assessed value um and that's why last year it was about a six percent drop from that last assessed value or preliminary value to our certifies this year that drop is only around two percent so it's it's been a strange year with assessed values with all the protests so um not something that we've seen before but that's the numbers came in a little bit differently than we were anticipating on the debt service side we were able to drop the debt service rate by a by a cent that's a combination of factors one being our increased assessed values but also our drawdown of the reserves that we talked about earlier as well well about between five and six hundred thousand will end up drawing down on reserves next year from our debt service fund which allows us to drop that debt service tax rate about a cent our total tax rate on the mno side with the proposed tax rate while it's a one and a half cents over the effective tax rate it is still a decrease of one and a half cents from our current tax rate uh so that's what our our total tax rate coming in at uh 60.5 cents so so last year uh our our current assessed value for well the 60.60 is both both of them but it was what 61 it's almost 62 cents was our was our because our current rate yeah 62 62047 yeah sales tax we're still budgeting at three and a half we're budgeting three and a half next year over our revised estimate this year which we've had previous conversations with council concerning and then yeah if you look at the five-year plan we've kept that three and a half percent estimate moving forward franchise fees obviously something that we've discussed with council multiple times over the past few months we're anticipating that 650,000 draw down from the new legislation so a couple highlights i won't hit all these bullet points but i do want to point out a couple things obviously a lot of this is our our measures that we go through every year one i do want to point out is is the return of unnecessary fund balance from internal service funds you'll see later we'll go through each of our internal service funds on one on one slide and you'll see that we we have been carrying a million or two million dollars and a lot of these internal service funds that wasn't really necessary because those internal service funds are funded through cost of service transfers that we can anticipate for the most part each year so there's not a need to really carry a fund balance there so we've drawn down the fund balance in those internal service funds which has relieved some of the transfer needs from the other funds this fiscal year so we feel comfortable in doing that moving forward and just dollars that don't need to be sitting around essentially we talked a lot throughout the year about our reassigned unutilized vehicles really decrease the amount that we have going in CEOs for vehicle replacements and also don't need the six hundred thousand dollars in cash for vehicle revenue vehicle replacements that we had last fiscal year compensation and benefits currently the civil service pay adjustments to maintain our meeting confer agreements which is really about the five and a half percent above the survey city's average is included in the proposed budget along with all the increases that go along with those meeting confer agreements all other positions in the city currently have we have a three percent average merit increase so we have a three percent and a bucket that we use for our increases for all other employees throughout the city future years we have that same same increase on health insurance i think obviously we had the health insurance presentation health fund presentation to council previously we are able to go into the fiscal year not anticipating any increase to the city portion of health insurance which obviously is a is a big deal as we compare to other entities to other private sector companies who are seeing those large increases really with with our the way that we've managed that health insurance fund have been able to go into next year without any increase for our city portion of the health insurance our tmrs rate our retirement system for employees that are on the fire pension throughout the city has increased slightly 17.46 so not not a large impact on the city that that increase in the fire pension rate is still at 18.5 cents five percent we do have a two million dollars of budgeted salary savings within the general fund budget this is something that we anticipate each year knowing that we're going to have turnover and we're going to have vacancies throughout the year it's it's about our average and what we have each year in savings in the general fund is that a is that uh recorded as a revenue expense where does that show up in the show just when we get to the report if you could just point out sure yeah so we did uh want to bring with this slide just bring this up for council's discussion uh if if you all wanted to have any of the council stipends current the current council stipend is seven hundred and fifty dollars per month for city council one thousand dollars per month for the mayor uh we put options if if council wanted to consider any changes we put a three percent option would just to be in line with what city staff staff gets right now any other changes that that you would all would like to consider or no changes at all and also so this is not a change but just kind of for the record and also to make sure that this was budgeted in there that i uh you know because i'm employed at unt okay yeah so that that includes for for six of the uh or rather five of the k-5 council members got right thank you okay may pretend i i would um throw out there for consideration from the council to take a different approach i'd like to take that three percent increase annually and apply it to the contingency funds uh if if they're i don't know if that's doable i don't know what that does to the math but instead of putting it on the stipends i could see that because it allows uh the council to give more and and uh so just that that's my analysis of that option i'd like to see that as an annual thing to the contingency fund so that we can uh apply that uh to the community yeah yeah um sounds it sounds like a fine idea to me unless um there's some other reason not to i'm curious to know how much of that uh actually gets you know when you budget did we budget for that last year and how much of that gets gets used like the council can uh we can we can follow up with that okay doesn't this require does this require a vote um from about the charter amendment yeah it does require uh it's an ordinance yeah an ordinance it's an ordinance yes oh okay so it doesn't it's not like the charter specifies exactly how increases are supposed to go if three percent is simple ordinance and if it's above three percent there's a special process and this was included in your friday report i think two weeks ago okay thank you that's my browser this is one one uh charter amendment that i i voted against people wanted us to have it but but uh you know my feeling would be either it should be like 2500 a month or something that would allow someone who doesn't have you know a lot of flexibility in their schedule to be able to serve uh or nothing because i don't think it probably would have affected like anybody's decision to be on here who's on here now uh but uh guessing that we're not going to have a wholesale revision of it i don't think we have a need for an increase all right we'll address it as it comes up so i want to uh call go through our property tax rates obviously we've discussed our effective tax rates um up to this point but really show what our effective tax rates are our rollback rate and then talk a little bit about the future legislation so you can see our total proposed tax rate there at 68.54 cents our effective tax rate is one and a half cents under that 59.04 cents and then our current rollback rate under current legislation is that eight percent rollback rate which is eight percent over our maintenance operation rate plus the our effective maintenance operation rate plus the debt service tax rate that's at 63 cents 63.3 cents obvious the three and a half percent rollback rate does not apply to us this year but just for uh for reference purposes here's what we anticipate our rollback rate would be with the three and a half percent which is just about two cents over our effective uh effective rate so with our current budget we're still slightly under that but obviously it does uh have that that ceiling is just uh lower is going to be lower moving forward that three and a half percent but your property tax rate the first chart or first numbers that's the effective rate or is that including the supplemental we recommended that 0.605454 this is with this is our one and a half cents over the effective rate this is with our proposed rate with the supplementals that we discussed you can see there again just the total values um of our of our uh frozen and unfrozen certified values about a half a cent yes and so if we went with the effective rate none of the tiers would be funded or only tier one if we went with the effective rate we'd have one and a half tiers so as we go when we look at the tiers in a moment you'll see uh that cutoff point is really in the middle of tier two as we talked previously we had those tiers directly tied to one cent over the effective rate as numbers actually came in our supplements were a little higher we were able to use a little more debt service that freed up that other half cent under the effective rate okay here's a uh just a comparison of our assessed of our appraised values in the next slide you'll see this that same chart that we saw in with the bond program 1.3 billion dollars of total increase in in value 386 million dollars of that coming from new construction and the remainder coming remainder coming from increases in existing property values and here in just another slide as well break out that 386 million dollar increase to show commercial versus residential we are excluding those frozen values of 1.4 million dollars which equates to about 1.1 million dollars in in lost revenue that we discussed previously as well our average taxable value has increased from 233 thousand dollars in the city up to 248 almost 249 thousand dollars so we have seen that steady increase and we have that on that on a slide following as well where you've seen that average value continuing to increase question councilmember well i'm just curious because i've got 1.4 1.1 loss in revenue from the tax freeze and our original is your mic on yeah okay sorry and so in our original discussions before it happened where we was that kind of the right estimate or was or was is that more than we thought because at some point i remember somebody saying oh it's only going to be maybe four hundred thousand dollars or something we went went back and looked at what was presented at that time and i think the difference is it just happened faster back then if you looked at what was proposed it was a gradual it said we're going to get there year over year really it was we had a seven hundred thousand dollar for lack of a better word just loss in revenue um and then went up to 1.1 where i think the previous expectations was that would be in year four or five that we would get to that point right okay thank you so here again we don't have to spend too much time on this slide since we saw it during the bond presentation but you can see that significant increase in the assessed value really since 2013 2014 here's a breakout i know i know this is always of interest so here's a breakdown of of the new value growth uh about 61 percent of that new value growth in the non-ter's values is uh residential 39 percent is is commercial that compares for our total value we're at about 66 percent residential 33 commercial for our total certified value so you can see um how that compares slightly less on residential more on commercial coming in compared to our current breakdown of certified values cell stacks you can see down obviously our increases over the past few years leading up to this year which we've always discussed multiple times with council where we're coming in really right at what we are total sales tax that we brought in last year and we feel comfortable estimating that 3.5 increase over our revised estimate next year general fund revenue you can see our breakdown of general fund revenue obviously the largest portions being property tax and sales tax i will say one one difference in this pie chart than what we've seen over the past couple years is that sales tax is is slightly less and property tax is greater where those percentages were starting to get pretty close around 33 percent 34 percent now there's a bigger disparity which um which obviously property tax is a more stable revenue source compared to sales tax so uh not a bad thing to see percentages like that you see our our transfers being our our third largest uh source of revenue and then return on investment and all the others following which we'll get into more detail on those as we go through the presentation expenditures by category personnel services as always and as you see with just about every city 70 percent of our of our expenses through our general fund are related to personnel services question on the personnel services because i know we have a meet and confer with the fire association and that's that 18 point something 18 percent are police officers under civil service as far as the retirement are they under tmrs are they under a different methodology under tmrs okay so of that 70 percent um part of that 70 percent is i want to say 18 percent because i think tmrs was 17 point something and uh 18.5 so about 17 and a half 18 percent of that if i'm correct correct me if i'm wrong is money that's it's retirement for our uh civil service personnel in the fire department and also for just our uh employees is that correct right yeah based on based on their salaries that 17 council member mel sir nothing matters much it's just for a couple of pie charts but isn't there something a little fallacious about including transfers that's non-cash expense right it's just accounting adjustments as you move between departments why would you put it it's not a real revenue it's not real expense in governmental accounting though you've got it you've got to show you'd be able to track the money between funds so it's you're you're right i mean it just kind of it it increases your expenditures but it just you should be able to take this pie chart and track every transfer between funds in the city and i okay and because we use utilize internal because we utilize internal service funds some of those transfers are directly related to it expenses and other expenses that really are realized by the general funds that's what it is so here's our general fund forecast over five our five-year general fund forecast you can see our if you just if we just jump to the bottom our our target fund balance is between 20 and 25 so you can see over the five years big picture we are anticipating to to stay stay within our our our goal fund balance each of those years in 2018 2019 obviously we had significant changes during mid-year that we've talked to a council council about multiple times through march and april of changes we made on the expense side to account for changes on the revenue side to a point where we got not only to a balanced budget well we had some excess reserves that we've been able to fund some of the supplemental requests that were coming up through the 1920 budget in the 1819 budget and those are all one-time reserves not ones that have ongoing costs and we'll detail detail those out here in a couple slides for 1920 see our base our base expenditures essentially just everything moving forward status quo with with our salary and merit increases plus our new we have our new recurring expenses and new one-time expenses called out you'll see these detailed on the supplemental slides the only difference between what you see here and the supplemental slides is we've had we don't show the fire the three new firefighters related to fire station eight on the supplemental list because that's been a decision from council in prior years and really has been baked into our decision process moving forward it is a new recurring expense but not something that that we were going to deviate from in 2021 we do have eight hundred thousand dollars again related to fire station eight that's adding the final three positions also a lot of the operations costs we anticipate with the fire station and increasing those positions up to captains that will be housed at the fire station so as mentioned here's the 451 thousand dollars in expenses that we that we're funding from the 1819 budget and excess reserves that we that we anticipate at the at the end of the year some of these we touched on earlier as well with a five-year strategic plan a number of of really necessary one-time expenses out of animal services i think over the past year or two as over the past year especially council's been well aware of all the changes that we've done at the animal services and those really are in line with a lot of those changes grant management software for community development a number of fire increases and then you can see for hr municipal judge on public affairs this construction guide we did do that for the first time this fiscal year and then included in the budget through our supplemental packages is a plan to utilize those construction guides each year moving forward so that becomes a recurring expense mayor pro tem do we know how many devices cpr devices that buys us is that do you know if that that covers the entire system or is that kind of a start i will defer to it's the best trainer ever good evening i'm david beckard assistant i mean fire marshal and assistant chief and to answer your question because uh the goal is is to place at all aid stations we're currently waiting on an afg grant to see if they'll help cover some of those costs but on the supplemental side as well we were prepared it was it'd be a hard decision where to put you know devices in and bring them in over a period of years so we felt the the best way to do that was to implement them all at one time yeah no i agree i just wanted to make sure and is that the automated um yes sir chest compressions yes sir outstanding great yes sir thank you thank you appreciate it any other questions on this list are these outside of the tiers correct okay these were one-time funded through 1819 already included okay so now we'll start talking through the tier structure and what supplemental additional items have been added to our proposed budget moving forward so we we funded the top three tiers here in blue in total of uh 3.8 uh 88 million dollars and then our additional tiers if council so decided to include these into the budget would require that cent over the uh effective tax rate or two cents over the effective tax rate so over the next few slides i'll go through these uh pretty quickly i won't go into each one of them in too much detail but definitely available to answer any questions and obviously we have plenty of staffer to answer those questions as well the first tier and this is all things that we talked to council about before the first tier throughout the process has really been focused on council initiatives uh discussed the pest management uh the integrated pest management with 461 thousand dollars of some of these parks uh pieces with the street closures and the co sponsorships of special event funds that council considered a few meetings ago and then the remainder here really focused on those homeless initiatives that council gave as a priority from the barrier funds to the mk oc shelter regarding um and mr city manager i don't know who can speak to it here's my question uh regarding the monsignor king extending the hours yes what does that do process wise to uh how we handle uh for lack of a better word someone's downtown during hours where they could be at the shelter or sleeping on a bench or how do we do we change our process at all because those hours are available so let's say it's it's during the hours now they're open they were closed don't have anywhere to go i get it but now it's open in the heart of my question is this if i'm investing we are investing 400 000 dollars to say hey we want you to be comfortable we want you to be taken care of how do we how do we affect that how do you manage that or do you i mean i could be absolutely wrong in my my understanding so are you asking is this providing funds for kind of a day center right i'm saying it used to be closed so whatever hours let's say it's eight at night and monsignor king is closed and you have to be you know you you're sleeping on the bench you're sleeping on the bench but if now you have 400 000 dollars that are going to say that you have a bed to sleep in do you have do we as a city take take the policy stance to say hey we're going to move toward making sure you're utilizing that 400 dollars or are we just going to say the 400 dollars expense is there if you want to avail yourself of it but you don't have to yeah i'm going to ask uh sarah keichler to come up and kind of address the plan and and the policy issues she's been working with with mkc's uh management over there uh sarah keichler director of public affairs um so the proposed model would open it up for seven nights per week and would offer the opportunity for individuals to go to mkc and become part of a program where they would be working with a case manager for housing solutions and other supportive services if they are part of that program they wait they will be able to stay seven nights per week until they find housing as long as they're actively involved with that case management another piece of that model also still have a number of beds that will be available for inclement weather so those individuals that are not part of the program will still be able to come in on nights of inclement weather what it does is it does offer another opportunity for individuals to seek assistance to seek help so that when our public safety officers are out in the field they also can offer rides or transportation or at least connect them with the services that are available and so what would you um how do you so let's say we're a year year and a half down the road how do you evaluate measureables for lack of a better word as to if if the if people are taking advantage of the opportunity or it's the opportunity's gone unrealized that's a great question um there will be metrics as part of the agreement with mkc to measure a number of different things including number of individuals that are entering their length of stay during the shelter there is best practices the target would be less than 120 days that depends on having enough housing resources again to place individuals as far as you know housing placement housing outcomes and then we also measure a number of different metrics through the denton county homeless leadership team where we'll be able to see our numbers lowering in terms of individuals that are experiencing homelessness number of individuals that are living unsheltered so it will take a number of metrics from different places to allow us to assess how is our housing crisis response system doing overall excellent great great to hear thank you councilmember melser yeah not really a question just a comment as i recall most of the money in that line item is in is in case management so you know it's not even primarily uh as far as measuring the effectiveness of the you know the funds about the additional shelter it's about providing exposure to the case management which hopefully is moving people into permanent permanent housing those who can be moved and i suspect that the metrics will will be focused on that to some extent correct so can you explain the difference um because i'm the diversion money for barriers funds because the barriers fund for housing is really important and so um i haven't seen a um i guess a division of how those funds are currently divided up and so i'm curious um is i the only one i'm having issues with here is the actually 64 000 on the street outreach team okay um personally i'd rather see those go into either diversion or housing because we know that actually is working um so and so can you give me um some ideas on like 40 000 for diversion what what would some of those funds be used for in in that category sure um so it can be used for a number of different things and i'll try to give an explanation to some and invite danny show up if i'm not if i'm missing something important um but it's to help those prevent individuals from becoming homeless so for existence or for example um if someone's car broke down and they just need an assistance with a car payment in order to have the necessary income to pay their rent and their utilities and to continue on and that's one example other examples would be just temporary assistance with a rental payment a number of you know transportation to get reconnected with other families or individuals so they can remain housed a number of different ways to keep individuals housed which is the most cost effective solution in most cases and so then and so the the housing um one would be to get people that are not in housing into housing correct it's really the for the housing it's in order to provide to kind of encourage landlords to open up housing to individuals that may have higher barriers um so someone that may have a criminal background or a history um can we provide a down payment of sort um or that that security um you know five thousand dollars per household that if something were to happen in the unit that landlord knows there is some security there that his unit will be taken care of and so as we heard when uh cortney was here i think the part of those funds were tied up in that kind of insurance and so um which is good to have so that people can have housing but a lot of what i see um are requests for funds for the diversion to keep the families who are struggling you know in their home um and so i would much rather see more money into those or you know um from the outreach team expansion and i don't i can't recall actually what that 60 almost 65 000 is for that if it if it's putting a counselor or somebody on the team because from what i understand from what i know when i went out um there were a couple of officers and they were mostly volunteers so um so i can i'll address it in two parts so the for the barriers fund and we had recommended kind of just the diversion of those two or the separation of those two categories when we put together an agreement if it is funded by council we could have that be the initial starting place and then do monitoring and reporting of how those funds are being spent and adjust come back to council and adjust let's say we need more and diversion less in the housing assistance maybe that's something that could be um redone through through an agreement um to transfer those funds um as far as the street outreach team expansion one of the needs identified was to have a dedicated case manager or social worker in the field right now giving hope provides that individual however they're only going out every two weeks to connect with individuals in the field what we're trying to do is have more of a presence doing the street outreach team and really trying to connect with those individuals that are living living literally homeless they have facing chronic homelessness which may include substance abuse mental health and so we're looking for a full-time social worker or case manager that can be out there in the field providing that service that has a background in mental health and can provide that which is kind of a gap right now in our street outreach team and i know our police and fire departments as well want to be doing additional outreach this would provide some of that social service aspect to partner with our public safety teams just a follow-up and so would that um would they house in our um police department and work with that team or would they be hired through united way again like all the others because yeah we have not determined that yet actually what we were um kind of kicking around with staff is doing a request for information i'm just saying these funds are available here is the goal and then seeing which organization could potentially best meet that goal and how they propose to to work with our street outreach team councilman barometer yes so i would encourage uh your staff to at least consider looking into a partnership with mhmr for that role because i know they do a lot of work with people experiencing homelessness and indent in any way so that would be and that could possibly lower the cost if it wouldn't be an entirely new full timeline but just adding more to what somebody else is already doing and having them change their methods a bit to be more in the field i wanted to address three issues on this on this the slide i'm number one i want to ask the mr city manager or maybe be a better question for for sarah to answer but um so you had mentioned earlier that uh in in an email that uh that uh today we might be talking about possible pos possibly expediting those uh or maybe you didn't mean today just kind of in the future expediting uh the funding for men senior king yeah we have already started a conversation with uh mr metzler uh to uh let's try not to give you too much credit yeah um to you know to see you know how how quickly we might be able to move up the uh and expedite this um in what his time would be should the council decide that you know they're ready to fund this in in august but really trying to get some idea what his ramp up time is and how we can decrease that so sarah's actively working with him on that and trying to get us some some better information okay okay so that's that's still those talks are ongoing and with that being the goal okay uh in august uh making the funds active in in august it depends it depends entirely when how quickly he thinks he can get up and running so we're kind of we're going to take that date and kind of work backwards and get something to council okay well well wonderful i'm i'm excited about that and i hope hoping pray that goes goes well i i strongly support that um about the and i already met at least began to mention kind of my concerns about the cost for our pest management um top dressing expenditures you know i think that the cost is is too high so um i i would like to at least ask for a staff report on uh what the how the costs would be different if we used only organic fertilizer if we didn't use top dressing at all obviously that would just be 80 000 less and my you know my other recommendations that i made i can email some if if staff wants but but i would like to see a staff report uh on that a kind of itemized breakdown uh i'm not i'm not sure we could if you have some specific questions you'd like us look at we're happy to do that each one of these recommendations was taken straight out of the workshops with the exact numbers that we had given you oh yeah yeah so if if there's areas that you you or someone um that group that you were working with no i can't remember what the group was called if you've got some other ideas we're happy to look at them oh yeah um and so that yeah that that group i mean i i was just asking them for questions they don't have a specific you know i they would have to come on site and whatnot they're called non-toxic neighborhoods this is more of a so i knew the figure um uh but i didn't know for instance i didn't know uh that you know the particular kind of uh of uh uh pesticide substitute we'd be using and it's and and then it came out that that was finale you know and i looked that up i had some concerns about that and was i went back and with some so there was additional information that i looked up and anyway if there's don't want to spend if there's some specific questions you want us to answer just let us know and we'll answer them excellent well thank you there absolutely are so i will send that uh and request a staff report on that okay um so and then the third thing i want to ask the street outreach team so i i fully support uh funding of a uh uh mental health uh professional to um to go in the field and talk to you know our uh people experiencing homelessness and i i would also support that for all other forms of health you know i know that in many ways our our phone when it comes to emergency medicine our fire department you know does you know does that it does that anyway because for a lot of people um that's their only you know emergency medicine is the only time they can get it uh so but you know i i do have a problem with that being part with that hire or you know expenditure being a part of the street outreach team and you know i can go into that at a later point but i i have some issues with the the protocol for the for the street outreach team uh and i just wanted to just read if i may um that uh when they go to uh to an encampment if there's a complaint about an encampment or an existing encampment that they know about it says as long as there's no public health or safety concern or urgent resident complaints complaints and the site appears active the team will continue to monitor without any additional action other than ongoing outreach it might be more of a sarah question i could see you look at you looking uh and uh but um so that i love that part but then it goes on to say if the site is inactive or active and public health and safety concern is present such as in the examples given people are living without access to running water bathrooms trash disposal or safe cooking or heating facilities or it's unsanitary due to the accumulation of garbage human feces hypodermic needles etc etc then there's a site assessment and then it's the city manager gets to decide what to do and then the memos provided to council you know my issue with that is that i can't think of a single uh encampment that has running water bathrooms trash disposal or safe you know any of those those things listed um so i would need and i know we're not voting on the policy today i'm just saying that explaining that because i don't support the policy as it currently is now um that i couldn't support uh you know that expenditure being a part of the street outreach team i realize it's a time for a later discussion to discuss changing the policy i'll just address that really briefly the street outreach team is separate from that process the street our team is really there to connect with individuals and connect them to services they are part of our effort that's an internal homeless team made up of city staff where when we get um complaints or concerns regarding different encampment sites there's a number of factors that we look at and evaluate over time to know is there a significant public health and safety concern where we may have to take some action we work very collaboratively and we have kind of a process set up and guidelines so i'd be happy to do an informal staff report um i think we may have done one previously for council to share that again just to remind you of our process okay yeah that would be excellent because when i was when i kind of received this information because i had asked about it before and um you know i i was told that or at least the impression that i got is that this is part of the street outreach program um but but there's probably some misinterpretation in my part i'm looking at the email right now uh that because there's i guess some overlap between these two that wasn't clear to me um so if that can be made clear to me and i can be okay with that then um you know then the point is moot but i i would like to show that to get you some more information thank you thank you very much question for you sarah real quick if you could um in in subsequent budget presentations on the barriers fund housing because i know that we've sort of said that it's five thousand dollars maximum per quote unquote reimbursement kind of that so we have to hold that back so looking at that it's 10 people you might be able to get 10 people that seems seems high to me i mean yes anything can happen and but i'd like to maybe have a little bit further discussion on that and then on the street outreach team expansion if it is the funding of a mental health professional what i mean number one would they be going out i guess don't have to answer it now but maybe some more explanation of what they would be doing and you know the time frame that they're going to be out and so they talk with people then what i mean are they trying to connect them with services and follow through just sort of an understanding of what the job description and the goals would be for something like that yeah we can put that together okay thank you any more questions on tier one we will go to tier two tier two is again uh included in the proposed in the proposed budget uh really focused largely on on public safety all the items in tier two some police positions included i will use this opportunity to also say within the 18-19 fiscal year we have done five fte transfers from other funds and other departments to police to increase uh over five fts this fiscal year in addition to the fts that you'll see for police in a supplemental package so four fts for sworn officers additional for police and two for civilian jailers in tier two included and we also have some additional police positions in tier three we have 450 000 for our public safety meet confer agreements we're currently going through those conversations with both police and fire so we wanted to put an amount in here in the supplemental that we would have to work with for those those discussions what does that represent what is that i mean is that is that salary increases is it it's a number of policy uh issues that uh they would like address such as you know compression issues that sort of thing so once we get the formal list there we will sit down and talk to you about that but they're they're having some concerns about how long it's taking them to top out they don't feel like it's competitive with other departments and that's just one of several examples okay all right sure when that agreement comes forward we'll bring it forward but now you said police and fire but is is police also under meet and confer yes yes oh that's what i'm talking about it's the place to go okay all right i misunderstood i'm sorry we're negotiating with both right now but they're under tmrs but they're under meet and confer the police that's where i got confused okay all right thank you yep you can see the construction guide now included uh to add to the budget this fiscal year and be an ongoing cost in future years as i said we did the first one this year as a one-time cost but then have those uh twice twice a year moving forward animal services adding a couple of part-time positions for kennel kennel technicians and then for fire having a operations a develop professional development program um that would be pretty important for them included tier three again these are included in the proposed budget at this time significant uh adding three fte's for dispatch for public safety communications this is a real need out there they need some additional staffing and uh these three fte's would help them quite a bit the dispatcher overtime included as well this is really more indicative of the amount of overtime that we're seeing out there and the amount of demand that they have with those dispatching positions we can obviously answer more detailed questions if you have any on that we've added three so the additional three police uh positions which brings us to a total of nine for 1920 increase in police are these public safety officers that are now included in the budget we've talked we talked obviously previously about the the additional parks maintenance which is really related to a lot of the new parks that we brought on board over the past few years and plan to bring on board next year at five hundred and eight thousand dollars we do have included in the budget as as directed by council previously to eliminate those overdue fines but do want to show that as a change to obviously our net net position and then we've included an accounts payable automation software in the finance department this is uh really to help us modernize our accounts payable system it's very paper-based right now we're going through an audit with the internal audit and this is one of our responses to the recommendations that you'll see soon is that this will help us quite a bit to to improve our processes mayor pro tem david not directly related to this but it's it's relational can you follow up with me and give me your look into your math on the parks maintenance because if we're going to go purchase 62 acres at some point that's going to cost something to maintain so i want to factor that in thank you tier four these are items that are not included in the in the proposed budget at this time but would an additional cent would fund these these items including the one-time costs see a council initiative a couple of counseling initiatives up front with signage improvements at the parks uh improving a lot of the old signs that we have out of each of those parks modernizing those a special council for the internal audit we have listed here six hundred and seventy thousand dollars for internal service fund requests we'll have that in detail later on in the presentations we'll really call out each what what that what makes up that six hundred and seventy thousand dollar increase to the general fund from those internal service funds you saw you heard earlier about the comprehensive plan updates and the walkability study those are currently not funded in the budget but that we do show them here in tier four you can see the additional items from animal animal services for a volunteer coordinator public affairs a public participation platform again another a couple of animal service officers and then the traffic uh fte's that you that you heard earlier as well yes so if i recall i that improvement program or the cash that may have come from when i requested a new sign just for city hall i don't know if that is and then it developed into this or if this was something parks wanted but i i only requested that we get a new sign for out front of city hall because it's like termite eaten and you can barely see it and then they're turned into like a consultant with 150 000 for all parks so i don't know if that's related but if so that's not what my intention was yeah one one spurred the other the idea was if we're going to start replacing signs in the city should there be a brand that we use that sort of thing so we can certainly segregate and if we haven't already the the city hall sign from the park signage but yeah one one did morph into the other in terms of a branding exercise i know tier five or some more council really a set of council initiatives that have been and i can go back to tier four if they're anymore well just you said that this would be an additional penny correct so you're saying that an additional penny equals about 1.5 million dollars well it equals about 1.2 million dollars but knowing that we'll have a lot of one-time cost usually and we have one time cost okay previous supplemental and tiers normally we feel comfortable dipping into our reserves if it's for one time cost so it makes us feel comfortable make up the difference yep okay so this this is the one i know it's a little confusing and i wish we had the the two uh you know cost of service studies done we will bring those back to i think it's on the 20th of august um but once we get the feedback there this could change some of these could get funded and we could still end up moving that levy down so but this is what we've got for now so we're just kind of showing you what the next ones up would be so just for clarification so let's just take this tier for instance tier four we've already got tiers one and three within the proposed budget of effective rate plus one and a half cent right addition to the effective rate what i'm hearing you say is between the uh planning department and the recreation fund if you find savings of let's say or if you generate a delta however you do it of a million dollars let's say you can either come in here and say well we're going to fund up to a million dollars of tier four or you could go and if we use a penny as 1.2 million you say instead of applying it to either tier four or five you reduce that one and a half cent down to whatever that would equate is that that's exactly what i'm saying and in in those cases you've got somewhere in three to four million dollars of under recovery there so it's really going to be a council's call and maybe you decide you're going to recover two million of that four that directly changes how we approach the budget and the levy okay and you're saying those conversations will be in about three weeks yeah three weeks so that's enough time to process it with council and get a budget uh because i know we're hitting a timeline so we've got enough time to make some decisions on that yeah we will likely try to fund several of these uh especially the first half of them and you know at a minimum and then move on and give you some options on hey do you want to reduce the levy amount as well and it gives it leaves us i think about two weeks okay is that right yeah it's a tight time frame but we do yeah i was gonna say you grimaced when i asked that question i was just smiling i'm kidding i'm kidding the smiley emoji right yeah yeah are there any more questions on tier four supplementals and i again we'll touch more on these internal service ones later on in the presentation tier five is is again focused just like tier one on on council initiatives or at least or items that were initiated from council discussion um additional closed closed captioning uh which would be an ongoing cost for that would come out of the general fund uh we do have some other items in the peg fund that relate to recording of meetings but this is uh somewhat separate from that community market funding which we'll talk about more later as well hundred and ten thousand dollars uh air quality sensors has been something that we've had on the list as we've had been having the conversation about those that we do right now that the scope on that is can is pretty wide and a lot of different ways to go so we don't have an exact dollar amount for that initiative right now but definitely can can talk to that we've obviously had uh some questions that's why i always go out on the on paid paternal leave and the uh living wage impact up to the fifteen dollars an hour i will say on the living wage impact i think it was noted in the isr as we made those changes that gary mentioned earlier to our our salaries for a lot of those parks positions we've gotten to a point where most of our staff are at that eleven dollar an hour range now so it kind of it got us up to that point but you see the impact of that fifteen dollars an hour and then a couple of the other items that are not in the budget currently the the fee grant non-profit fee grant program and then the veterans village park site councilmember armature yeah so this is my favorite uh slide that's going to say tier it's not my favorite tier but anyway uh so i've got you know kind of some some questions and just a couple comments um i want to say um that i i think all of the uh items on this slide are really important i hope they end up making it in there um although the the the community market funding that would be uh that's assuming that they um uh don't get the hot funds or has that been we so we'll talk we'll talk about the hot fund later and the items from the hot committee that we said we have three items from the hot committee that that were um directed to bring to council that that's one of them so this would be if it was okay i see if got it okay there was a conversation general fund so we just put it on there for consideration okay so we'll so yeah so we'll get back to that later so i think so the most important for me on this list um are uh the paid parental leave and living wage impact and i just want to make quickly a case for that and to say i was sad to see that um that these two things ended up on on this tier uh i know that that doesn't mean they're not going to get funded and i know that i know that the tiers can change um but because uh staff is uh such an important part i mean staff helps to everybody knows how important staff is you know we can't run the city without without staff um and that that three percent uh raise all around which applies to everybody um you know including those on the bottom right but it's the of the pay of the pay scale um and now we no longer as you mentioned have people making just uh what what's what's the official low on paper where we you know we don't have anybody in that category 10 uh something like that i can i know that we don't have very many people at all we had yeah none in fact yeah so um at least as i understand that there are none now so we could just get rid of that tier altogether um uh but you know moving up to 15 dollars is would be bigger than uh a bigger increase than three percent for the you know for those who are are getting there um and so what i was wondering uh was as far as the living wage goes what is you know comparing it to the three percent uh merit increase all around uh what's the total amount of the uh three percent increases uh all around citywide for all staff if if i could have a number for the for the for the total on that i'd be interested to compare that you know to the number to the number for the the living wage impact uh and you know what i and what i'd be interested to see was um and i don't know if they have that or are working on that and i can get that later in the presentation yeah if we could get because i know there was a whole council work session on the living wage impact and my hunch that it's on tier five because i don't if i recall the meeting i wasn't there but i watched it that there wasn't a strong consensus to do that so there were questions there were questions about about and that's coming back to us if i'm not mistaken that that whole discussion policy issue was going to come back because i don't think it was is settled but what i don't want to do is recreate that whole work session and yeah on this one item so and i'm not and i'm not i'm asking i'm asking a new question this is a question i hadn't asked before because now we're talking about it in terms of the general big budget picture right back then had i asked about the three percent merit increases that would not have been uh part of the i part of the posted agenda item uh but so anyway so while they're considering it i if i had to choose i would prefer lifting up people at the bottom to a three uh and in other words living wage impact to a three percent merit i'm sorry three percent increase across the board uh you know if if i have to choose i go with lifting up okay you have an answer for that question to the general fund the total uh impact of three percent is 1.4 million in total but for this fiscal year because of the way we do um our increases it'd be about a seven it's a seven hundred fifty thousand dollar or seven hundred thousand dollar increase this fiscal year okay seven hundred thousand dollars in increase yeah so okay so it's so it's it's i was about to say a little more it's not little but it's it's you know so seventy thousand more to give everybody a three percent increase um which is very little for the people at the bottom and versus it's lower cost 632 210 to lift up people at the bottom i would i would much rather uh do that so i'm mentioning that just to say that's that's that's where i stand i that's why i am you know this year you know we'll say that i'm i'm opposed to the that three percent across the board and i prefer instead the the living wage impact for the paid parental leave i'll say um uh you know i was pleased uh to see that the figure is relatively low and relatively doable and i think that that's one of the uh uh factors that can really help to not only to better uh the the quality of life for for our staff uh who are going to be become parents but also can help us attract new staff i that's a major factor uh and i think for something that would have such a big impact 284 000 to 200 280 i mean that is low cost for a huge impact so i really really want to strongly make the case for that um and then finally also again as i mentioned i'm for all of these i'll just wanted to say quickly about closed captioning that this has a benefit not only more uh ada accessibility uh for people with um with uh hearing impairments but it it also comes with a uh a transcription service or at least that's what i call not it it it produces transcripts rather uh that anybody uh can use to see to read exactly what was said uh at at meetings and an actual transcript of the meetings covered by that closed captioning uh so that's that's why i i support that um and of course i'd be curious just to know you know what uh when we get an estimate for air quality sensors if we could be notified you know what what that would be because i consider that important as well so i did want to point out and these were discussed earlier today as well um especially this planning planning software is one that as we go through the cost of service study with um with the consultant we built that into the cost of service study to say let's let's allocate that 300 000 out and so it's it's really tied directly to the cost of service service study you'll see from um on on the planning side and then these other items the two rec fund items just wanted to call those out so that we could consider them in relation to the uh rec fund study that's my race and so on the um driving range the ball machine when uh mr packing was up there he said that would actually save money in uh staff time and um some other things and so it's a fifteen thousand dollar one-time cost i wonder i mean have we looked at the amount of money and how long it would take us to save that i mean it seems strange that we're putting it off when it's just fifteen thousand and it can immediately start saving money in time i think i think we can there's definitely you know considerations we can have for a dollar amount like that and find ways to fund it if that's direction the thought process was knowing that the rec fund is in the situation it's in right now just making sure that we before we did that we had that discussion with council of what is the appropriate level of subsidy from either direction we want to frame it um before we did that so i think that was the intent of calling it out so that study will look specifically at this machine and say this machine will save us this much money we should buy it the this is the study is really the study is really going to be a highlight when we go through the recreation cost of service study for council it's going to be we're going to be putting different programs into tiers and asking council how should each of these tiers be subsidized with really how much should general fund pay how much should taxpayers pay versus how much should fees cover knowing that recreation does not cover itself entirely but having that high that high level council priority level discussion of these set of programs what should that level be so we won't be getting specific so it's just interesting you see 300 000 and 150 000 then in a one-time 15 it's just just a question i think i think to be honest i don't think the council has ever seen a cost of service study on the rec fund with the exception of an auditorium until gary and laura got there last year it had all been just sort of combined with the subsidy hidden so if there's projects that and so one of the things we've done is just kind of pulled it apart say was it really cost us operate these programs what's the usage on them if we're having to pay people a lot more money to provide the program should the taxpayers just eat that or should we increase fees so you're going to see that across the board with several of these programs so it's not easy we can't sit here and just kind of cherry pick an issue or two we want to make sure that you may there may be just certain issues or certain areas programs the council says these are off limits we're okay with that and there's others we think you should stand on their own we want to have that conversation because i don't believe this council's ever had that conversation so once once that's been done we'll have our marching orders we move on we may ultimately make no changes to the rec fund that's fine but we at least owe you the respect of having you weigh in on it and so will that also look at future projects like the tennis center coming up to see how much that it's going to make or is it just going to look at things that are currently i think it's going to happen currently uh gary's got gary will be able to put together some pro forma's based on you know you know they're kind of aspirational and then and that as that always happens with a new uh a new investment then you kind of hone it over the next two or three years to see how it's actually being used so we'll take our best efforts once that's built to see what kind of usage is out there and and just start honing it for the next two or three years there's really no other way to do it with the rec program well and and let's keep in mind that this is the city manager's recommended budget given the assumptions and the criteria and the parameters that they've stated one parameter being hey we're going to do these cost of service studies so any of these things we've seen on tier four tier five i mean even if we did nothing with the with the cost of service studies and they they brought us no additional this council can still decide out of all these what they want to do that could do them all they could add more i mean so it's within our discretion so i don't think we need to lose a lot of when we see these numbers just because it's in tier four tier five doesn't mean that it's an automatic exclusion it means that let's get gather up as much information as we can and then we'll have that discussion so yeah based on what we're hearing today i appreciate that mayor based on what we're hearing today and what we hear on the 20th we will be back to you the next week with some recommendations on the tax levy and what's in tier four five so it'll get cleaned up very quickly after you we get your feedback the next couple meetings yep good thank you oh and we are halfway through the presentation wasn't it 66 yeah okay just wanted to ring the bell flying now yes wanted to ring the bell and we're done with the general fund so that's great exciting so the the next section we'll talk through a lot of our special revenue funds and internal service funds uh the first two that we want to touch on are our tours funds our tax increment uh reinvestment zones obviously uh first being our downtown tours we have seen uh a large increase in our in the assessed value of the downtown tours and we'll see you'll see that really noted with historical numbers in the next slide uh currently uh you get the base of above the 95 percent value which comes out to about 124 um million dollars in in assessed value which then equates to the estimated revenue of seven hundred and fifty thousand um dollars to the tours next year we have our in in budgeted in the turn the downtown tourist fund is 76 thousand dollars which is year five of five for the for the stoke contract uh it'll be our last year that contract next year and then as mentioned earlier we have uh the future grants budgeted at 74 thousand dollars this is in addition to uh the fund that's closing out with about 46 thousand dollars for grants without we shifting over to the tourist fund so we've budgeted 74 thousand dollars for those downtown grants out of the downtown tourist fund we'll break down as we did earlier we'll break down how that what that the increases look like between residential and commercial here in a couple slides but you can see the numbers there on the residential value versus commercial value in that in that fund our west park west park tourist fund uh base value of 119 uh thousand dollars and now we're on 2019 up to 110 million dollars in that in that tourist fund for that tourist area and the estimated revenue from the city of 266 thousand dollars we also include about a hundred thousand dollars from the county that goes into that fund we have a incentive paid payments to winco funds of about two hundred and five thousand dollars six thousand dollars that's included as well all the increase in that fund was from commercial value there's no residential and the west park tours here you can see that that increase on the downtown tours appraise value over each year since 2010 obviously has had steady growth throughout the process with this year being the largest growth that we've seen in the downtown tours from an assessed value perspective up to 210 million so just a couple of observations about this slide because i've been involved in deter since it was created if you look at the slide especially i popped down to new value in millions so this is what has been the new construction values over the years from what is that 12 to 2019 which what does that add up to total do we seven six 13 22 about 25 million dollars over the last eight years 20 25 million dollars when you look at the the value changes well from 79 to 210 what is that 140 million correct yeah 140 so of the 140 total 25 has been new construction either residential or commercial over the seven years i said it back then i'm glad i see this because when you look at the project plan now i'm know you're grimacing now you're not smiling yeah you're not you're not you're not smiling trust me you're not smiling so we really need to have a discussion i'm not going to bring it up now we need to have a discussion about really what the function of the tours is because most of that increase 80 percent of that increase almost has been just in increased values of existing properties now some of that's remodel there's no question some of that's remodel but i mean when you look at i mean look from 2015 to 17 it jumped or 16 17 million dollars and just in the value change just in an assessed increase now the thing that i noticed which is very odd to me so you can tell me if i'm reading this wrong so in 2017 we had a value change of six million is that just is that total value change or just is that the total value change the total value change right so then that means that the total amount of change in the turrs property was solely based upon new construction that seems very very odd to me that that there was no increase in the existing assessed value so that's why i'm saying i don't know what that line value changes in millions if that's the total increase which it looks like it it looks like it is six let's see 142 24 yeah so well you have any thoughts on that we'll follow up and okay yeah because that just seems when you look and the same in 2015 so i just don't know if that value change in millions is if that's the total then you look at the new value subtracted and that's and it just seems a little odd to me but it seems it does seem okay all right because my point being and i'll close with this i think we need to have another conversation about what the turrs is for are we going to be able to use it for maybe some drainage projects because i don't know what the balance is in it um what's the balance in the turrs fund do we know is it in another don't worry about if it's in a slide yeah do uh what is it it's a little over a million okay yeah okay all right so so we got about 200 000 and then add the 700 000 to the plus okay all right okay yeah so i'm just looking forward to that conversation but i did want to understand the numbers on the chart and what seemed to be sort of a and we will probably be back to you in the next quarter so we've got a couple ideas on projects we've been approached by some developers with some drainage projects downtown that may help us expedite peck three and four so we need to get your feedback on whether you think this would be a good fun to tap to help do some matching appreciate it okay thank you yeah thank you as we did previously wanted to show in graphical form that the separation between residential and commercial and the new value on each of those so it's residential mainly in the increase right traffic safety fund so we're going to start going through a lot of the of the special revenue funds but wanted to call out a few of them particularly the traffic safety fund obviously the discussion we've had about the red light cameras and we're anticipating to have a fund balance at the end of the year of about 2.2 million dollars i think that could end up being more than 2.2 million dollars but just with we just want to see how things work out but our goal would be to spend the entirety of that fund next year so while we have two million dollars budgeted currently we would come back after we exhaust those funds to council with a budget amendment so that we can try to spend all those dollars as quick as possible on one-time expenses the plan right now in the fund would be to focus on travel signal signal construction design so funding three traffic signals for both construction and design a striping truck for traffic and then traffic calming measures of two hundred thousand dollars next we want to get into the the tourist and convention uh fun discussion this was as mentioned earlier was a a piece of this on the next slide were three items that the hot committee asked come asked come to the full council for consideration and discussion so i will just touch on this high level summary quickly before we get into that that discussion if as if as council has your has your discussion if you want to see more detailed analysis of each of the recommendations and how we ended up at our total expenditures i have that available as well i can pull up a a sheet that we can look at all of those recommendations but in total right now the recommendation is to spend 3.4 million dollars and out of the fund and leaving our fund balance at at two million dollars or 15 percent of recurring expenses which uh could could help with the discussion on the fund is five hundred and twelve thousand dollars that really that's of expenditures and that sets our limit that we can spend out of this fund on historical items historical expenses or public art or art expenses yeah just kind of for clearing up the definition of terms so tourist and convention fund is that's just another term for the hot hot funds revenue for distribution correct it's just the name of the fund that we have okay okay so when when will we be discussing in particular uh the recommendations from the hot funds committee for expenditures or or grants as it pertains to the budget is that today is it next time when do y'all anticipate when did y'all anticipate that well i think i think davis point was if uh if the council is okay with the hot fund committee recommendations they're included uh can be to be funded there was still a couple policy issues out here uh request that i think that the hot funds committee i wasn't there but i believe they asked for the council input on these three items so we need to get those cleared up so we can finish this off so you're saying go ahead and discuss these now if you wouldn't mind sure okay yep all right councilmember armature yes i had a question um uh for uh for staff i forget if you were included in that i know i sent to randy and um but it was kind of shortly after uh the agenda came out uh for today so i you know and it uh and i understand you know if there wasn't enough time to come up with this but um i wanted to know about the county you know this the county request because it is side it's so big oh and i don't know um uh yeah uh councilmember davis since you had had to you'd recuse yourself from the hot the uh the county part of the hot funds discussion would it would it be better for me to wait to ask about the county issue to the end i would ask just if it's dealt with kind of in a piece if it's not you know ducking and diving between county and um we will do that whether it's now or later doesn't make a difference to me just if we can deal with it all at once okay now it doesn't matter to me so i don't know if there's consensus wouldn't be a good time at the beginning of this or i'm fine talking about it now they keep talking about the county issue let's talk about it the denton county one-time request now so you'll have an opportunity to recuse yourself and then we won't be jumping back and forth so we're going to limit our discussion to the denton county one-time request i'll wait till sure yeah yeah so you know one thing i so it's it felt and i was glad that um you know we decided to bring this forward to council um because it it seems to me an unusual or it seemed to me unusual you know but then i found out that this has been kind of a standard dent in practice for at least as i understand it for the the county to get hot funds money from the city and so what i was asking was uh you know how do other counties in texas get hot funds revenue from cities and and i understand if you don't if you don't have that answer and i understand if randy didn't have the time because that's a little research project but it came out because as soon as i saw that that was on the agenda for today that was when that that question came out and i tried looking that up on my own but i didn't know sure we don't have that available okay yeah so for me you know i would be really interested to know that uh it it it feels unusual to to me i'm inclined kind of against it but but it would influence my decision somewhat to know is this just what what counties in texas do get hot fund revenue from cities you know considering that the county is a taxing entity itself you know which separates it from any of these other um you know applicants for hot funds you know they like they actually tax themselves so that i'm inclined against it for that nothing about the the actual substance of what it's funding but kind of the principle of the the thing but i'm wondering is it just me you know or is who has a problem with this or is this really something that's unusual and and also i'd like to know uh and this is just reiterating what i've already asked of randy you know what more about the history of of um city hot funds city hotel tax revenue funding county expenditures how far back does it go and how much have we spent just out of out of curiosity and if there are other cities that do it you know do they um yes uh tend to spend as much as as as we do response and we can definitely follow up with that information thank you so am i reading this correctly that the amount there for the request is for the fence and restrooms total correct and so for me that fence and restrooms for the park was really for the community market as a you know lift up like this is what we need it's going to be here but if we're not funding the community market to what they need they could likely go away and then in that case i'm not really as you know gung-ho on restrooms there with hot funds from the city um if that market isn't going to be there i would prefer the county to pay for itself um for those things so and i know we're talking specifically about the county but for me it depends on that funding um so that's where i stand okay yes mayor pro tem yeah can you help me um is that the that's just a portion of the cost i'm assuming the the 150 the 151 is a portion that is at half or so 151 is just what was spent last year so that's just showing the prior year so that was um uh for different for different pieces for something different so the 343 680 noted here is specifically for a fence and restrooms at the historical park so that's the entirety of that amount okay so that sorry wrong number right question so that's the entire cost or the cost we believe is more than that and that's a portion of i believe that's the entire cost for those pieces and i just one thing i i gotta rebuff every time it's said the community market is made up of vendors that aren't going away right management may change but the community market in and of itself is made up of individuals that have an opportunity yeah let's try to because you can he's allowed to sit in on that conversation so got it um i'll repeat it yeah yeah thank you but no so on this on this that that's i'll take that in i don't know that i'm comfortable paying for the whole thing right you know okay anybody else comment yes so since there's a dash there does that mean that the committee decided not to fund any of it at this point to bring it to council we just yeah okay well it's so the recommendations have you used in your recommendations without this everything allowed i think yeah okay i've slept since then but i think so okay yeah all right let me go get yeah okay all right okay so we'll move on with the other two issues dent square maintenance and then the dentin community market so you can see the total request from the community market which hasn't been discussed before and the current recommendation from the committee was fifty thousand dollars and then the the square maintenance at thirty five thousand dollars also up for consideration for council yes council member bricks isn't there didn't we approve recently like it feels like we're constantly approving some sort of contract for cleanup downtown um at least two lately i mean are these separate from that or are they paid with hot funds or am i just like dreaming of it it feels like we're um yeah recently discussed this so this gary pack and director parks and recreation this um square maintenance is for parks and recreation where we have uh power washing and additional litter cleanup we have someone go around the square a couple times a week um the concept i think that you might be talking about is where brian burner came and talked about some additional um valet service downtown well we're talking about power washing because our member specifically asking if we address the homeowner's concerns um where we're power washing at a certain time downtown yes so this is the power washing and the litter cleanup around the square that's done a couple times a week the power washing is done periodically throughout the year and we were power washing i think it was like a sunday morning and we adjusted that and last time we power washed was i think was maybe labor day we did it when uh when we weren't disturbing people and it worked out good so the conversation in my mind went similar but it was where this time the um trash cans would be moved and power washing would happen underneath or around the trash cans is that the same discussion i don't recall that okay so then there are two different contracts for power washing downtown no i think the one where you're thinking about is the moving of the um the the dumpsters was in relation to something else either a reconfiguration of the dumpsters or some other that to clean up around the dumpster specifically this was big bellies the big bellies we were talking about cleaning up around the big bellies power washing the big what big bellies the trash cans and recycling big bellies i mean good i thought you were saying something to me so anyway i just was trying to figure out if this amount was for that contract well that we approved the power washing is for the sidewalk but i can make sure and talk to drew if that if they're getting underneath the garbage cans yeah i can talk to him about that and circle back around with council councilman roberter could this possibly come out of the turfs the downtown i think that's what we discussed yeah when we acted when we were something like power washing could definitely come out of yeah yeah i would you know my uh view is you know i feel um a little ambivalent not as much as my ambivalence about the for the county sorry request the last request we discussed um but uh you know kind of ambivalent about you know funding our own departments through the you know the hotel tax revenue so i i would but you know it it sounds like this is an important expense um and i do see how you know i'll just put this in as just a comment on each kind of general budget um i'm concerned about and i understand the impetus for it but concerned about how i see the you know parks budget and and i know it's going to be coming before us with the impact fees i hope we can solve you know a lot of these problems both by the impact fees but i see how parks is kind of being spread out and um uh so uh anyway i just wanted to recognize that um uh that you know i worry about that you know that department and you know want to support uh what they do but yeah if that could come out of the tears i would much prefer that okay all right councilmember davis that was a big part of our conversation on the hot funds committee our concerns we were looking at a big long list of community groups and outside entities and non-profits that make use of those funds and every dollar we spend uh on the city side uh with hot funds is a dollar that's not going out to community market or historical park or any of those kind of things so um our thinking was if at the expense of the request is only 35 000 if there's not someplace in the city budget or with the tours where that could be found uh because those non-profits and those other entities don't have the opportunity to come into those other parts of the city budget the same way that uh say the parks department could they don't have access to the tours the same way that we do so that was the thinking on the committee yes councilmember so i i see that but i also can see where it's extremely important to have the the square clean um what i this contract has been going on and there's still complaints and issues about trash and um like liquid people send me videos of people taking out trash and dragging it down and then there's this this goo all over the sidewalks and so um i it needs to be hosed off and so if they're not doing it who is is my question so right and i think that's that i don't think there's any disagreement that is there does the square need these kinds of services the question is where where will they be funded from and that was the primary uh discussion on on the committee was that this is specifically for downtown and this is specifically for downtown so uh go ahead ethan yeah so i think gary mentioned this a second ago that we we are running that pilot project for solid waste um and i think that's one of the things that we're going to be talking to the city manager about as a matter of fact tomorrow is the pilot's been very successful so far so i think now we're into the discussion of what does funding look like and i think that's a discussion we can bring back to you all is that the receptacle uh refresh my memory just real quickly so so what we're doing right now is replacing the dumpsters yes with the carts and providing like backdoor service right um so in addition to that that's not a full-time job even once we integrate the entire square so there are some things that we can pick up as staff to kind of unify and clean up the area i think that's where i was getting the power washing you know we're moving the dumpsters out basically that's correct so you're opening up parking spaces and you do have some ability to do some of that cleaning so yeah that the question becomes do we want to leave this funding for this particular uh job in in the hot funds tourist and convention fund or do we want to look somewhere else councilmember melser uh a very uh open to the idea of having that discussed by the tourist board incidentally you know we've got a lot of boards and commissions that serve in an advisory capacity and we generally give them the respect to do some deliberation you know on their volunteer time we all appointed them and we listen to them sometimes it influences them so i don't think we should be you know so cavalierly disrespectful of the tourist board you know i think that let's get let's get that that input but but i would favor uh you know including that on an agenda for that group well i don't know if anybody was disrespecting that i mean they were just simply saying can the tours pay for it which we know that it has to go through the tourist board to get a recommendation so i don't i don't think that anybody was trying to disrespect the board yeah yeah i mean i know we can't make unilateral decisions for the tours it has to go through the the process of the board's recommendations and so forth yeah okay uh so as far as this one are y'all okay with sending it at least through the the tours board to get a recommendation then come to council and if we want to do something different we can if we accept the recommendation we can is that right okay all right fair enough thank you okay yeah community market council member breaks so i'm going to say i would like to see that i'm glad to see that it's 50 but um that doesn't include from what i understand they're losing the 25,000 grant um from the usda so that actually is not going to be as much as it looks like because that's going to be um going into what's lost so it won't be 50 over what they are are getting um and then if we're not going to do the last one that we talked about that we're not going to talk about then um i would i would prefer to increase that a little bit to continue to pay for the porta potties that would be my recommendation i think it's nine thousand dollars or something at least just to keep that um going a little bit so if i could just get some understanding of what you just said so uh and i was approached by the director after the hot funds meeting and we scheduled a meeting but somehow it got cancelled or something but uh so what i'm hearing you say is that right now there's 25,000 dollar funding from some outside grant outside the city or anything that they're getting currently all right and um you're reporting that they're losing that or they're not being reallocated that grant is that correct it was in their presentation to us okay all right so then the additional 25,000 uh from the estimate of 25 you're saying they're about 5,000 in the whole is that right because they were they were at 15 so if they were at 16 plus in 2018 actuals they were at 16 plus the 25 which is 41,000 right um and so if we go with the 25 estimate of 25,000 but then we added another 25 to make it 50 so the 50 is and i'm not disagreeing i mean i would probably go with the recommendation you just made but so they're getting a total of 50 whereas in 2018 they were getting a total of uh 41 with the grant but now that the grant's going away then yeah okay all right appreciate that i wasn't totally sure of all those numbers okay and so you're saying uh what as far as we've got 50 under the recommendation from the committee and you're saying add to that how much yeah well part of that 8,000 i think of the request was um something that i recommended for the porta potties to help pay for if we're not going to pay for fencing in a restroom which was part of their master plan to keep them there then i would like to at least contribute money to help them pay for the porta potties because we prompt you know what the fence and the restrooms is what maybe that's what that cost at least based upon their presentation is that right right i mean if we're not doing the other which would be you know the restroom because that has been the plan from whenever we started this conversation when we decided not to move them down by the police station so help i might need some help from the city attorney and also some help from you in regards to because based upon prior discussion there is some either linkage or not linkage so i just want to be respectful of of council member davis and so if you'll help me and if you'll just pay special attention to try to make sure and we wouldn't do it intentionally it would be something that we sort of get weave it in just in the course of the discussion so just want to be mindful of that i don't know if i know where that line is so i'm going to have to just rely upon just your sensibilities and what you feel is the is the line so yeah okay yeah all right council member armature okay yeah so um another kind of wrench to throw in there about funding uh for the community market is that after also after that discussion or partly during um at the last hot funds committee meeting there was somebody uh the director of community market and somebody who i think was the the treasurer on their board who um had mentioned something during the meeting and then kind of explained up was explaining afterwards that it this figure didn't include their most recent budget request adjusted for uh to meet their staffing needs that by which i mean the figure that was um uh that we were deliberating on at the last hot funds meeting because they had they they had one staff member who is no longer uh with them and so there was some adjustment and there was discussion does that ring does that ring a bell and maybe we would need randy here no no that discussion wasn't in the in the meeting itself exactly exactly but there were but it was you know it was raised and so i just wanted to make sure that um you know because i'm looking at the same number you know did that when you got those figures because they were going to give you all the figures you know did you did that adjust did that change the the amount or just the distribution no i whatever figures the community market might have provided to staff they're simply presenting what the actuals were for the tourist convention fund their request uh of the 108 000 the 219 estimate and what we recommended any other kind of data well like i mean what so as i understood it they were saying that the request that we deliberated on wasn't the latest request i don't i don't know the details on that either i'm just i'm just mentioning apparently they they sent something so and randy can follow up on that we don't need to discuss that now especially since i don't know the details since i never received uh to my knowledge received it but um uh but i wanted to add one other one other factor to that and that is that um uh that that uh last year in 2019 as i understand it yes they got 25 000 from hot funds but they also they had divided their request between hot funds and sponsorships and so they were they were and i forget the exact amount but they received a certain amount last year in sponsorship so the total amount together um that was given to them by the city through different um you know pots of money the sponsorship pot and the the hotel revenue pot and it's it's it's uh closer to the 50 000 than i and i'm i'm just mentioning that for those you know it doesn't change the 50 that that 50 000 and uh or or anything else except except it just changes that second category when we're looking at how much more this year versus the previous year if that difference matters to people so council member and council so there was about 3500 in the general fund that went towards um the port of potties and and that sort of of activity but then there was additional seven thousand dollars in our sponsorship fund that was for a one-time event that they had out at the community market and so so it's about a little bit about ten thousand dollars of additional funds outside of what they received from the hot funds that they were also getting and so and and so again for the port of potties it was it was about 3500 that that we had budgeted in the general fund and that's now gone away yeah okay and you know and i'm not saying that this is inaccurate because that's how much they got from hot funds that um it and i wanted to add uh you know that we don't so i support if um the uh if i'm trying to think how to say this without talking about um that other taxing entity uh but uh i would hope that if they wanted uh really wanted a fence in restrooms at historical park and if they didn't get it from hot funds and i'm not asking anyone to to to answer this but but i'm just okay okay well i won't i want to say that i'll just say that i think we shouldn't assume that so i don't want to assume that they're not going to end up getting it anyway through some other means however if they don't get it if the community market doesn't get restrooms and fencing through some other means then i would want to uh do you know whatever we can to pay for that through the you know pay for the fencing and the porta potty through the general fund okay so we've got uh and i'm gonna recognize the mayor pro tem and then council member davis but what i've heard so far is in as far as proposals which that's what we're aiming for here is to get it we're gonna we're gonna start getting some direction on on this particular issue i've seen i've heard council member uh briggs say that she wants to see that 50 000 i'm just going to say increase ten thousand dollars that's what was said was what they were receiving from the city and porta potties and a one-time sponsorship for an event not something that was ongoing so uh so that's what i'm hearing so we'll we'll take it up from there and go with mayor pro tem and then council member davis thank you and then council member david do you know what we pay pay for the uh restroom at the splash pad there the kind of portable thing that we set up i don't thank you yeah but we have to buy i believe the cost for that portable restroom was about 35 000 dollars and that was purchased that's owned by the city okay yeah so if we're doing something like that i can get behind that if we're going to buy it that we can use it elsewhere it doesn't have to you know so it's there on the weekends that they're active but we can use it elsewhere and we're not buying something for that organization i can i can get there but i'm not there's too much patchwork and i agree and i do have a problem if you don't have an event and we're just giving you a blank check for seven thousand dollars and saying hey you know i'm sure you can use it well yeah they'll use it and so i i just i'm not comfortable just giving with no kind of dedicated use uh so so where are you on the recommendation so committee recommendation i'm okay with as is but if there's a consensus if there's i mean i get it that there's a restroom issue and but i'd like to see a i think that just because i'm a big fan of what we have there at the splash pad it's it's super nice it's it's it's uh ada accessible and and we can use it for other things when it's so it's not just sitting there you know so um i would just point out to use hot funds to purchase a port of potty that we would use kind of for other means or i don't think he's saying to do that you're saying well are you saying to purchase it out of hot funds i'm saying well fair point yes i was but yes if we can't then then we that's when i that's the what's the move when you're when you're the manager and you go to the bullpen and tell them to bring the couch with the i look over tony i tell them bring in the couch with the 35 000 dollars yeah dump it out all right okay council member david so uh we've covered i think most of the hot fund committee's discussion about 50 000 how we got to that recommendation you have to remember too that we're looking at the entire spectrum of groups that are asking for money from that fund the way that we got to this recommendation as opposed to the the pretty large request from this group was trying to be equitable with all of these different groups that need money for all of their good causes and we also took a real hard look at what are the what are the groups that are putting heads on hotel pillows where this money comes from and kind of the intention of it going forward and we decided amongst ourselves i don't want to speak for anyone else but i think we decided as a committee that the community market does contribute to the overall tourism picture in denton but we also had some things that we funded instead of their 108 total total request we thought that 50 000 was a substantial increase over their hot funds allocation last time and still represents a substantial increase over their total funds from the city from hot funds or any other source it's still a substantial increase any way you slice it there's more money going from the city to the community market um with the committee's recommendation um i really like this new idea from mayor pro tim hutzpeth about a an asset that we can use again and again as opposed to you know lining the pockets of a porta potty company that sounds that sounds like a phenomenal idea to me i i think our recommendation is fair i think it's equitable to the group and i think it's important to keep in mind that the community market is an asset to our community it's an enormous value add to our downtown area but it is not a city program it is a group of private vendors who have formed a group for their benefit to be able to sell their products to the community if we were operating it as a parks and rec program or as a city program i think my my my thoughts on their funding picture would be different but as it stands now it's a community group that provides a service but at the same time supports a number of private vendors so i think our our recommendation is appropriate for a group like that it's not the city's job to make sure the community market is solvent it's our job to do what we can to help the tourism picture in the city with these funds that's what they're there for so i like the recommendation and i like uh mayor pro tim uh hutzpeth's recommendation for uh either an additional bathroom unit or the one from the splash pad when it's when we build something else out there however that works out okay councilmember nelson yeah like the bathroom idea too uh on community market uh i think it unquestionably contributes you know to the tourism picture and which is incidentally not only heads on beds it's people coming and going to restaurants and just enjoying what they're asked to offer i think it's unquestionably a draw and i'm but i'm willing and i'm willing to spend more to get more and my my proposal would be that we put together a package that includes use of perhaps the civic center during the months that they don't operate now last i heard december was a good time to do retail maybe that's just me i can't believe they don't have any kind of a holiday market so uh you know i think if something that includes use of that facility and that you know and if they're having problems trouble with solvency they ought to be able to figure out how you know that you can charge vendors more if you've got more months of availability so that's a revenue generator for them and that's a an asset to dent then year round so that's where i'm at okay so as far as though this recommendation i mean because we're going to give staff direction help me understand that in terms of the recommendation well it's you know it's got to be another conversation with them but it's just it's you know it's to see if you can get maybe it's this number maybe it's a different number uh they've got to be willing to operate year round it sounds to me like they're working year round kind of anyway uh but that our contribution would include in kind okay but it's conditioned on them contributing more than they already do by being open year-round okay all right uh councilmember armater and then we're going to try to get some direction yeah so just you know just uh responding to a few things number one uh so i'd like to see a staff report uh on as as soon as we can it um what the latest uh you know community market uh hot funds request was because there was some uh you know concerned that what we had deliberated on and what apparently what we're deliberating on now was not the most recent thing that they submitted uh and so i would like to you know uh us to be clear about that um uh and and then uh i would also like to uh fund their full request uh because of their because of their value to denton and for tourism in denton uh not necessarily through the hot funds but you know through uh the uh trying to remember which tier it was in the supplementary budget funding five yeah through tier of course yeah through tier five um and speaking of tier five i forgot to say how much i like the veterans park too that uh so i'm working for veterans park in tier five uh you know whatever is not i i would support whatever is not covered uh in you know by the uh hot funds request be included in that that tier five the difference um but again the key for me is just making sure that that we've got their latest request because they did signal that we weren't working with their latest request um i i i do agree that it's better i like the um uh porta potty or the portable bathroom whatever at the splash pad and i would rather have you know an asset than something that we have to to keep renting too so uh you know and and that could come out of the i support that uh coming out of the general fund as well um since it would be be used for other uses and i don't think we could argue that uh a bathroom on its own would be a tourist attraction you know for dent for for dentin although connected exclusively to the community market sure but on its own no so that's why i'm recommending that would in terms in terms of a staff report thought staff is telling me the last official request we got from doing writing from the uh i think rachel was the one that was working with vicki to get her request prepared for the was the 108191 so if there's something that's been said verbally it's not been put in writing to us and if it if it has i i'm not going to have them snap put a isr together to for their request i think that if she wants to update her request and explain things that's fine we can certainly put the additional uh if the council it sounds like there's at least four or five of you that are interested in mayor pratt's idea with the the poor potty's uh we can certainly put that in as in is a one of our recommended uh supplementals but we don't have anything officially on file that's different from that 108191 number so i just want to avoid a report on that yeah thank you and again so you know just to be clear i wasn't sure from what was said whether it was a change in number or the distribution but it but but anyway but if that if that could just be be looked into and to make sure that we have their latest requests i don't need a staff report on just making sure with them i wanted to respond to kind of two things that have been said and then i'm done number uh first response to councilmember melts are about raising the fees um you know the problem is that because they're you know the vendors that they have there um are for the most part can't afford higher fees they're already they've had to raise their uh their fees their total fees as the farmer fees have been raised um and they had to raise them a little bit and they lost vendors through that so that's why uh you know they feel that if they you know raise the fees they would they would lose the vendors uh and then finally you know in response to uh you know councilmember dave is concerned about you know being a non-profit entity that um uh that uh is kind of an umbrella for these you know for for-profit vendors uh i don't have a problem with that because what we're funding is the not you know the non-profit just like with in a funding of of chamber of commerce or cvb you know they're non-profits they're they are genuine non-profits and i don't see a conflict between them you know the fact that they they deal with um you know for-profit entities that help in the case of cvb you know for tourism in in denton uh so when you're talking about just the whole category of tourism and convention fund is it does involve uh commerce and and profit it's just that we're not funding those for-profit entities but then in those two cases anyway the non-profits that support them okay no council member ryan and then if yours is very brief but council member ryan because we're gonna we're gonna get direction on this we're not gonna spend an hour on this discussion yeah go ahead well i like the idea of the portable restrooms but what i would like to know before i would want to move forward with that is what's the ongoing cost on those because there's obviously some service cost involved how does that compare what's what's the number of years for payback and what's the life life expectancy of those portable restrooms it may be that it's just as cheap to use a port-a-potty is what it is to to buy that and then with the annual service okay that's that's a set of numbers i'd like to see uh and i'm good with the the current recommendations up there i think there's a lot of other places i think the most bang for the buck that we get is through cvb because that's their main thing is bringing people to town they're not concentrating on the local market as well as the outside market as far as getting people to town thank you yeah just on the narrow point of uh community market raising fees raising fees for no more sales i can see that could be a problem raising fees when you get 50 more selling opportunity including the holidays that's a different proposition did you have something real quick mayor pro tem yes sir just to to um highlight for um because thank you for for the insight and i think that one of the cool things is is i from memory it's it's cooled like it's air-conditioned and is but that to your point that's valid to look into those costs and see what it looks like but i think there's some nuanced differences there and then you know just succinctly thank you for the for the insight into the deliberation and i think that that to me is at the core if we're giving money to the vendors right if the vendors want to but but i think there's an innate conflict that we've not touched on and the conflict is the community market as an entity is asking from for donations and money and that sort of thing and so when each buyer that goes to the community market has a decision to make you can donate to the community market or you can buy from its vendors but one takes away from the other right management takes donations and takes money and they don't necessarily pass that down to the vendors and then if so if you go there and you say i want to commit donate to the community market but you don't spend any money with the vendors are you helping you know so there is a conflict there and so i think if there's a proposal for the vendors because that none of this per se goes to the vendors so if the vendors come forward some kind of organized way that's a different thing but for the leadership management that's what we're talking about so as far as the $50,000 request and this is outside of because we don't know as far as the decision on the the portable restroom which is a good idea and my hunch is i don't think that's going to be an issue but for the purpose of giving staff direction the recommendation of $50,000 i mean i'm okay with that uh who else is uh are you okay you're okay with that okay um so not so you had mentioned before about kind of raising about raising it by the amount that was not limited to the one-time expense well that was that was when it was a an expense for additional porta potties but if we're going to look at this and so we can always come back and amend this if we need to uh based upon that so uh okay go ahead yeah i'm okay i just want to make sure that there's restrooms out there that's extremely important there's people out there all day um when sure when our people come to our town to visit they want to make sure and have a restroom and if it's something that we purchase that's great we have plenty of festivals where if the community market is not in session that that restroom can be somewhere else we have you know a homeless population who constantly needs a restroom who you know if it's not being in use there maybe can be in use somewhere else so all right so it sounds like the direction is the recommendations from the committee for now that may change yeah yeah um okay i'll point out all other requests from the committee are in our recommendations are in your budget okay yes so for uh for the rest of a lot of these special revenue funds won't have a slide to go into each of them but do want to point out uh to you the appropriate fund balance for each of these special revenue funds the revenues that we have budgeted in 1920 and the expenditures that we're expecting in 1920 uh that we have budgeted and then where we anticipate them to end in the year and their fund balance you have details on each of these within the budget obviously the street improvement fund being the largest of this group and uh we've had a previous presentation on the street improvement funds we've seen the detail to that budget tree mitigation fund uh including two million dollars for land acquisition that we mentioned earlier in addition to tree planning and some other expenses have had the conversation on the recreation fund and the traffic safety fund and so you can see the rest of those funds there if you have any questions any questions a few more of those special revenue funds some of the smaller ones outside of the parkland dedication and development funds but you can see the amounts there that we have budgeted and the the fund balance for each of those and then our grant our grants as well isn't a fund but you can see the unspent amount of our grants uh noted there and we have the detail on each of those in your budget as well so david the parkland dedication fund parkland development fund that's those are the funds that we that there's conversation about changing some policy or some ordinances where it can only within a half mile which then it may and i guess we'll have to get a legal opinion on people who've paid into that under that paradigm if we change it is it still restricted to that paradigm or can it be expanded so we'll have a conversation on i just want to make sure those are those two correct yep absolutely can you say a little bit more about the non-capital grants category and the the balance in that sure a lot of a big piece of that is community development for cb gd dollars that we still have unspent we also have rtr funds and some transportation dollars and many a number of projects that that have unspent dollars yeah thanks and that's that's what i thought it was and and i was um i appreciated you know seeing the full budget the way it was late laid out um and i had never realized before how much percentage wise of our cdbg grants go uh you know don't get fully spent you know there's a lot for obviously there's that's a big um percentage of the total grant amount but in terms of each individual grant you know there's a breakdown in the backup for the presentation today and it's a significant chunk of as i remember just about each individual grant as opposed to you know clustered in just a couple big ones or something so what i would love uh love to learn more about either in a staff report or in an email or a meeting in any form um uh i want to know uh why uh you know what why we tend to you know not um spend the full amount if it has to do with the you know the red tape in these in these grants and then you know what happens to the unspent amount i would just like to learn more about process the process so that might be best answered uh in a meeting with the community development i'll leave it to them but as long as it could be communicated to them that at least i i wanted to learn more about that i was very interested to hear that absolutely yeah go ahead so here are our internal service funds which again you've seen the detail on on these budgets and we'll talk a little bit about their supplemental request in the following slides uh one thing i want to point out just at a high level and it was something that we showed as an emphasis earlier that we're really focused on drawing down these fund balances and using the fund balances that we have not only in this year's budget but even in fleet as an example drawing down the fund balance to get to this 975,000 that we're heading into the fiscal year with so it's just been an emphasis um for us this fiscal year and also you can see that uh facilities management this is the first year that it's becoming an internal service fund it has been previously as a part of the general funds this is the first year that we're separating it out so supplemental requests for those internal service funds here are the the items that we have budgeted um in in the 1920 budget funded in the 1920 budget from the internal service funds you can see quite uh the first four there for our procurement and compliance fund uh from contract management software uh there are a couple of softwares there and certification programs customer service a number of um items that we've discussed before i know we've had the credit card fees discussion already with council previously and you can see a couple of those positions in customer service that are needed an increase to fuel with fleet and then an overhaul of a new replacement of our firewall with tech services that's a large amount that then you can see how these internal service funds get distributed out to general fund utility and then the other internal service funds based on their function and who uses the service so that's what's being charged back to those particular funds correct utility fund service absolutely for yeah broken out by those yes items we have a number of unfunded requests from the internal service funds when we when we went through the tiers earlier tier four had a total 670,000 for transfers from the general fund to the internal service fund supplemental requests so we've broken those out so that we can fit that into the tiered structure you can see a number of those from engineering that you just heard you know in the prior presentation to our fleet uh positions and and equipment with the portable lifts a number of tech services requests for public safety that we can definitely speak to if you have any questions and then some other some other more citywide or specific programs like the smart cities program that was include that's unfunded request in the tech services fund so let's take a real quick five-minute break just real quick welcome everybody back to this meeting of the dent city council on thursday august the first 2019 it is 7 56 we're resuming our work session reports of agenda items 1c just to remind everybody we will go into us after we completed the work session we got an item for individual consideration and we do have a closed session as a placeholder only we'll discuss that as we move forward on probably dme it's a placeholder for dme so agenda item one is it c c yes c yes sorry going backwards so we're going to we're going to go through our utility funds our enterprise funds over the next few slides obviously these are big budgets that we've had significant conversations with council already so i'm just going to touch on these at a high level at our performer lever our five-year forecast for each of these funds but definitely we have staff and we can reference the previous presentations if there's any questions you can see our water fund where we have no rate changes anticipated anticipated next year just a couple of things to point out on this five-year forecast you can see our operating reserves stay stay in line and increase over the over the course of the five years also would point out that we have begun with this upcoming fiscal year to move nine million dollars from our impact fees to an impact fee reserve in anticipation of a large lake the large lake lewisville project that's going to be coming up in years following this five-year pro forma so a couple of the changes that we made we also obviously last year had our change to our impact fees change the structure of our impact fees and are now collecting more in those impact fee dollars those impact fee dollars wastewater a similar story to water where we have no rate changes and obviously have had this detailed conversation with council as well have maintained a healthy fund balance throughout the life of the of the five years and and and feel comfortable with the fund with no rate increases what's the policy for because you've got a fund balance working capital plus operational reserve what what is the i mean is there an operating reserve policy of so much percentage of the the budget amount what are we looking at yeah if you look down here at the bottom kind of where my cursor is that's the that's the the threshold that we want to be at the 100 days target at 10.7 million dollars up to the 140 days target of 14.9 so our balance is staying between those two so all right great thanks drainage drainage obviously is not a separate fund drainage is within the wastewater fund so these numbers were included in the numbers you just you just saw but you can see how what the what the drainage drainage fund looks like one piece that you'll see on the supplemental slides is we are adding a crew to the drainage to the drainage the department in upcoming years so you can see that when a jump in their o and m expenses and that's not that's really coming from the revenue funding capital which we put into an amount to go out and do projects in drainage so we're devoting those resources next year to funding this this crew and then as in future years we're building that revenue funding capital back up the electric fund we just had this discussion at the last council meeting a pretty detailed discussion on the electric fund ultimately after the conversations with council to have no rate increase going into the fiscal year but obviously we've had the significant conversations about what the eca balance looks like and our plan to to use reserves and some of the additional base rate revenues we will receive to offset the eca balance but our plan is to come back to council at the end of the calendar year beginning of the next fiscal year give an update of where we are that eca and possibly at that time if necessary bring rate options to council to consider to make mid-year adjustments to that eca rate solid waste fund again no no rate increases and i will note on both the electric fund and the solid waste fund will be bringing rate ordinances for you to see for all the funds but it's particularly the solid waste and electric funds that haven't gone to pub yet for consideration as well so a little more detail on what those rates will look like one of the considerations obviously in the solid waste fund will be the valet service that will have that conversation with council but you can see we do maintain very healthy fund balance and solid waste in the future years that gives us some of those options on the rates that we'll discuss with council overall the chart that we like to look at each year because we have no rate changes in any of those any of our major utility funds we anticipate no change to the monthly impact on rates for customers airport fund airport fund is an enterprise fund so it's just treated a little separately but we want to make sure we called out what what the airport fund looks like heading in the next year again you saw more detail on this previously but we do only real one-time costs that we have included in the airport fund is 250 000 for air air field pavement next year debt service is not out of here debt services in the general fund i just i mean i just want to make sure that i mean we because it's real easy to forget that so your debt service on the airport is what is it about 400 okay all right so just yes keeping it real sorry i've been i've been in budget hearings with dcta starting at 11 8 30 in the morning so i've been going along here for three and a half hours before we have started here here are some of those uh the the supplemental requests that are all funded within the utility fund so you can see those water uh water functions that were added to their budget next year from metering production administration adding an administrative assistant an intern and then water distribution adding a position and a cruise truck to go along with that and these are in there and they didn't require a rate increase because of probably the growth of just meters and things such as that increase and just having the fund balance and increased revenue and got you okay that's right and that's what that's the case with each of these utilities we have no unfunded supplementals thank you wastewater a similar story adding uh three positions in wastewater collections itself and then also as i mentioned in drainage we are adding an additional crew for with four ft's with the goal for them to really get out there and um get a lot get a lot more work done solid waste we're adding um the the supplementals before you one fte um included and then some radios and some um drop off at a number of other items including some additional engineering services so that's it for the utility funds uh our our capital plan for the for next year uh new funding including utilities is 118 million uh point two five dollars obviously the the top top note here being the 14.7 million in general obligation bonds that will be closing out the 2014 program that we've talked about a few times today already uh general fund co's for vehicle replacements and facility improvements along with our plan over the past few years and moving forward and then you can see the utility co's make up 72 uh with seven million dollars but we're also uh in within the utilities putting 25 million of revenue funded capital that we won't be issuing um debt for so here's here's uh the total picture of citywide uh will be increasing 36. uh about 37 positions next fiscal year in total uh obviously that's all funds together uh what the what the picture looks like okay here's our total budget 1.2 million uh 1.2 billion dollars uh with our available capital budget these are kind of unspent funds that we have for for the next year and then new funding for capital programs making up a large portion of our total budget and then electric fund and followed by general fund is our largest uh largest funds within the city so the general fund is about 120 million 125 million somewhere around there so the next steps we today and the item for individual consideration is the vote on our maximum tax rate required for notices so uh we always like to make it clear as we vote on on the notice that's before you for individual consideration that's that's just to set a ceiling for the discussions we have with council so we always set that uh higher than what we our proposed tax radius just so that the council can have discussions that we don't limit any of your decisions moving forward but we would obviously as we got to a point to actually adopt tax rate we would lower that to whatever amount we end up with obviously we have a few variables that are in play over the next few weeks as we talk through the cost of service studies uh which our next item we plan is to have uh hopefully both of those on the august 20th uh council meeting where we go through those cost of service studies and we'll have public hearings for the tax rate on august 20th and september 10th uh and the budget public hearing on september 10th and we'll continue to bring have an item on future agendas to try to come back and answer any questions that you all that you all may have about the budget and that's it 61 slides okay um refresh my memory on our next agenda item just what is that what is the tax rates you're proposing and and i know it'll be in the presentation but the the maximum tax rate 62.8 okay sounds okay any questions on this uh work session item item 1c any other questions of course we're going to have this we're going to have the ability to ask questions and get some of these questions resolved or or some information back that we've that we've talked about we'll continue to come back and we also have the utility order uh rate ordinances um and then we have our rest of our fee schedule coming back in addition to the cost of service studies anything else on this agenda item all right then that will conclude our work session reports we'll now i guess do we have we're not convening into a special public meeting are we we're just moving on to into agenda item two which is items for individual consideration to a i guess consider uh yeah to a consider approval of a resolution of the city council the city of denton texas placing a proposal on the september 17th 2019 city council public meeting agenda to adopt a 2019 tax rate that will exceed the lower of the rollback rate or the effective tax rate do we have do we have a presentation on that i don't have a presentation um this essentially has the public notices that will have you you can see those in your backup public notices that would go out for the uh tax rate and the uh public the public hearing for the budget and shows a rollback rate effective rate and then the max tax rate that we're putting forward right now councilmember breaks so this is an approval of the max of a possible max tax rate essentially all it is it's putting the it's what the notice goes out as so we have that heightened rate just on the on the notices that go out because if we put any rate lower than that it becomes our ceiling essentially once we say our rate's going to be 62 cents we can't then go over it so we could put out our proposed tax rate as we have it in the budget the 60.5 cents but at that point it limits council and you can't go over that amount in in future discussions over the next few weeks for me that would be my cap anyway my highest if not lower on working through some of these issues so um okay councilmember robert yeah so just to ask for for for clarification can you can you explain exactly what flexibility there is in this um uh ordinance that we're voting on right now i just just want to just want to make sure that i understand it so this this could this is this isn't going to change the uh or rather this this allows us to would allow a change in the total amount uh for the it essentially sets the highest the highest tax uh the highest tax rate that you could set going into 19 okay that's that's how i thought i understood it our proposed tax rate is the 60.5 cents we've added a little over two and a half cents to that just to give some room for any considerations it's been our practice over the past few years to set that max tax rate when we act when you actually vote on the tax rate we obviously bring it down to what the proposed is um but if council doesn't want to go that direction we could we feel we could change that to the proposed tax rate thank you yeah mayor pro tem yeah i move approval of item a as as uh presented by staff councilmember robert second i we we need one amendment to the motion okay on the last date september 17th for public hearing that should be september 10th for public hearing for the budget all right uh mayor pro tem would you like to restate your motion with that it should be i'm trying to track with you i'm just pulling it back up it should be september 10th the final date there that it says the city of dinton to be held on september 10th requiring public notice for your public hearings right instead of 17 correct okay got it so i move approval approval of item a uh with the amendment to be held on september 10th 2019 okay councilmember armatran i second that all right any discussion councilmember elsa yeah i'm uh not in favor of a tax increase at this time uh but i'd be willing to have a discussion up to the inflation rate which is one and a half percent uh i'd offer a friendly amendment to 0.5993108 that's adding the inflation rate to the effective rate i'm confused this is just a notice yeah so you're saying that would be the that'd be the max that's that's that's my opinion okay i was making sure i understood no i'm not okay with that okay uh okay so uh we don't have the friendly amendment the motion has stated and has been seconded all in favor of the motion as stated please signify by raising your right hand all opposed by raising your right hand uh motion carries five to two all right uh that uh concludes our open session agenda items are there any questions for staff on is this dme yeah competitive matters that we need to go into closed session about does anybody have any questions that that would be more appropriate for closed session okay okay all right okay seeing none then that means that we will seeing no concluding items will stand adjourned at eight twelve