Aug 13, 2019 City Council on 2019-08-13 11:00 AM

Welcome everybody to this meeting of the Denton City Council on Tuesday, August the 13th, 2019. It's 1102 p.m. We have a quorum. Therefore, I'll call the meeting to order. We're going through our agenda items, work session agenda items. The first one is work session item one, which is citizen comment on consent agenda items. Any comments on consent agenda items? Seeing no blue cards. Next item on the work session agenda is request for clarification of agenda items listed on the agenda. Yes, Council Member Briggs. Item A, regarding the recycling, is this something we've been contracting out in the past and did the same person win the contract and how did the cost compare to the current one if we do have one? Good morning, Council. Kenny Banks, General Manager of Utilities. This is something that we have contracted out in the past. I can get you the information on the prior bid amount. I believe that it's very comparable, but I don't have the exact number with me, but this is a contract out service. We do that grinding about every other month and there's some seasonality to it, and so we have found that contracting, it makes a lot of sense because we don't have to keep a piece of equipment on site. It don't have to step up, step down, step down for it, and basically, this approach has worked well for the composting operation so far. May I follow up? Yeah, of course. Yes. And so, as you know, recently you've had several storms, which is a lot of trees and debris. Sure. Does this kind of contract, does it allow for that? That extra, does it have a certain amount that they do or is it? We have a to not exceed cost on a yearly basis, and that's kind of the ceiling of what we can accomplish. We do have the ability to store that material in large quantities on site, and so when we have situations like that occur, we'll typically stockpile it and basically have that grinding occur over time. So we're able to accommodate it that way, if that makes sense. And if we had a storm that exceeded the not to exceed amount, I would approve it under the emergency authority and then come back to council and ask for permission. Okay. All right. Thank you. Okay. We're on clarification of agenda items. Anyone else? I've seen none. We'll go on to agenda item three, work session reports. 3A, receive report, hold discussion, give staff direction regarding the Razor Ranch Public Improvement District number one. And if we could, I think, Jessica, you said your presentation was about 20 minutes or so? Yes. Okay. Hopefully. All right. Let's try to hold our questions. I think Jessica's got maybe a break point in there that if you get a -- when you think it's a good time to ask you some questions, I just want to be able to get through it and then we'll save our questions, but if you come to a point, stopping point, you feel comfortable with just entertaining questions, that'd be great. Absolutely. Yep. Thank you. All right. Good morning, everyone. Jessica Rogers, Director of Economic Development. I will be presenting today a status update on the Razor Ranch Public Improvement District. So to start by what we're going to discuss, I'll do a brief overview on the project on the whole and then move into specifically talking about the PID and the steps that we'll need to continue moving forward with that. So the Razor Ranch development, as we were discussing before the meeting, it's been going on for a long time. Many of us are familiar with it, but just to kind of summarize it, it is a 410-acre mixed-use development generally located on both sides of U.S. 380 North and South between I-35 and Bonnie Bray. There is an existing Chapter 380 agreement on the project. I won't go into details on that. We distributed a pretty comprehensive and formal staff report back in July that gave details about that. So for my presentation today, I may make reference to different parts of that, but on the whole, we're just going to stay on the Public Improvement District. So just to give you a visual, this map is provided by the developer of this project. So this is the north side, the marketplace development, and you can see this is Bonnie Bray over here, and this is U.S. 380. Pretty heavy on the development side, there have been some additional pad sites that have been added if you haven't been out there, so that is marketplace. The south side includes the town center development, so this is Heritage Trail. This is I-35. This is U.S. 380. Sorry for the change in orientation, wanted to fit it on the slide, but this is the Embassy Suites. This is Future Development, WENCO, and then the existing development on the frontage of U.S. 380 that's occurring, just so everyone can be familiar with that. There's also an existing multiple overlay, or an overlay on it, so this is the concept schematic plan. This was provided in the ISR that kind of lays out the land uses on the project, so some things that people would be familiar with is this is the park. These are the multifamily units that are going in. The single family and some of the townhomes are going in on this side. This is Heritage Trail that kind of goes down the property, so. And then just so everyone is a reminder of the zoning overlay. And at that point, that's sort of the overview of the development, or as detailed as I'll go into in the overview of the development, unless there are specific questions related to the development. If not, I'm going to jump right into the Public Improvement District. All right, so some quick background on what are public improvement districts. Some of you are probably more familiar than others, so we'll just kind of do a quick recap. It is an economic development tool that's allowed under Chapter 372 of the Local Government Code. A PID allows the city to assess fees to property owners based on benefits they receive. Within the code, there are very specific improvements that are eligible to be reimbursed by a PID. The primary benefits is that they can enhance the quality of the development. They actually allocate the cost of improvements to the defined geographic area, and then it allows developers to have access to tax-exempt debt or be reimbursed through the PID assessments to pay for public infrastructure. So in general, there's a few steps that are required to get to the point that we are with the Razor Ranch Public Improvement District. We had to go through a creation process, there needs to be a service and assessment plan that defines the project costs and the improvements. There needs to be a reimbursement or financing agreement, and then lastly, there needs to be an assessment ordinance where the fees are actually assessed on the properties. We're going to go through each of these kind of in order of how this particular public improvement district was created and these documents, so I'm going to kind of take them one by one. So we're going to go through a little bit of a timeline. So the first step was to create the PID. So the PID was created in May of 2014. The PID includes 230 acres, which is on the south side of the development. Currently today, we're going to be talking about what's referred to as Assessment Area 1. So within the Public Improvement District, it can be divided into sub-areas that can limit the assessment to a particular area. So the entire Public Improvement District is 230. For the majority of the discussion, we'll only be talking about 118 acres, and I'll have a map later on that kind of lays out what those divisions are. The public improvements in the development can be financed or reimbursed by assessments. And just to clarify that no city property gets assessed, so any time that the city takes ownership of the property, it won't be assessed again, so we don't pay assessments to ourselves. And then the public improvements that were eligible under the resolution included streets, sewer, water lines, storm water improvements, general public improvements in that area. So here's the map that our developer so graciously provided to us yesterday, so we got to throw it in. I think a little different than what you had in your backup, a little bit clearer. The red outline is the entirety of the PID. The green outline is Assessment Area 1, so that's the subject of the Conversation Day into Orient. This is University, this is I-35, this is Heritage Trail, and this is Panhandle. So we'll be talking about this particular area today. So that's kind of PID creation, so the next step was the execution of a Memorandum of Understanding, also in May of 2014. So the Memorandum of Understanding basically established the term sheets for the PID, what were the terms and conditions, the financing criteria, and it was to remain in effect until the execution of a financing agreement. So we basically, the city and the developer sat down and said, "Here are the general things that we agree to with this PID," and so the term sheet included the financing criteria for the PID, and so these are the financial conditions. So to keep these kind of limited again, remember that there's the entirety of the PID, so there were terms for the whole PID, but then there were particular criteria for Assessment Area 1. And so the two that will kind of come up today in the discussion is that the equivalent tax rate limitation was for 50 cents per $100 of assessed value, and that the maximum construction costs that could be funded were $8.1 million. So when we get into some details of the assessment, you'll see that that assessment is capped at 8.1. That was the condition of the MOU. So that's it on the MOU. We'll move into the next document unless there are questions on the MOU. >> Councilmember Meltzer? >> Yeah. Can you remind us in a sentence maybe, you know, just where the 8.1 million figure came from or the what, why 8.1? >> As someone who was here when that document was executed may be able to say, but I believe it was based on an estimate of the cost of the public improvements in that, in my, I'm looking at Scott Wagner to see if he knows it, the 8.1 million was based on an estimate of the public infrastructure costs at the time. Is that where that -- could you come to the mic? >> Yeah, if you would, Mr. Wagner. >> Sorry. Scott Wagner with Red Development. He's one of the lead developers on the project. And he was here when the MOU was -- >> Oh, gosh, I've been here for a while. So the 8.1 is a new number. The PID, when the petition was formed, did not include a phase one number. It was a $32 million overall cap. What we've come up with was on the first 130 acres, our assessment value to keep our ratios in check with the MOU terms and conditions, we think an assessment value of 8.1 will meet those terms and conditions. So we kind of self-impose that as a maximum for our assessment area today. So it's 8.1 out of the 32 million for this improvement area number one and assessment number one, based on the budgets and the costs that we have back up for. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, Scott. Any other questions up to this point? Okay. >> Okay. >> Thank you. >> So the next document was the reimbursement agreement. That was agreed to in March of 2016. So the reimbursement agreement is the document that authorizes the city to reimburse the developer with the assessments. So the agreement has to be in place for any developments or any of the improvements prior to formal dedication and acceptance of the improvement. So with that, phase one of the public improvements that were made in the development were eligible under that reimbursement agreement. So those were covered. And those included phase one of Heritage Trail, phase one public utility improvements that included water, sewer, storm sewer, utility mobilization and layout, and transformer pads. In that reimbursement agreement, we took the next step into forming the pit, or was formed, but the next step towards creating and executing the pit, and that was that we required the developer to prepare and submit a service and assessment plan that's also a requirement under Chapter 372. Okay, the rest of the presentation is primarily going to focus on the service and assessment plan. So we're going to go through a lot of kind of detailed concepts that are required under the law in this. So I'll kind of stop in each section if there are particular questions, but we're going to walk through a lot of these in detail. So the draft SAP, the service and assessment plan, was submitted to the city in November of 2018. Under Chapter 372, the service and assessment plan has to include what's called an assessment plan, and we're going to walk through the different requirements that are set in the assessment plan. But essentially, the SAP on the whole establishes the annual assessments to pay for the improvements in the collection costs. So through the SAP, the city council, as required by the law, makes a few findings. First, you'll allocate the actual costs of the public improvements based on the special benefits conferred on the properties. I will explain that, what that is, in the next slide. You'll also select or affirm the special assessment methodology. I will also explain that. And then you will determine that the benefits to the assessed properties are at least equal to the special assessments levied against the property, and I will explain that as well in the next few slides. So to kind of have our vocabulary lesson for the day, when we refer to the benefit allocation, and I'm sorry, if there's an asterisk on the title, that's a slide that I added based on questions that we received, just so if you're not seeing it in your backup, that's why you're not seeing it. So when we refer to benefit allocation, what we're talking about is the actual allocation of the costs, of the actual costs of the public improvements based on the benefits that are accruing to the properties within the PID. So an example of that would be if you made an improvement, you installed a water line, you built a road, and the defined geographic area benefited 100 percent, then 100 percent of that cost would be allocated as an eligible improvement for the PID. And so the PID could levy 100 percent of that cost to recoup that cost through the fees. If it was 50 percent, you would allocate 50 percent of the cost, and that you would levy and collect 50 percent of the cost back. So does that concept everyone good on benefit allocation? The second is the assessment methodology. So you go through the benefit allocation on all of the eligible properties, and you come up with your total assessment. Then you have to decide how does that total assessment get divided among the property owners within the PID. And so you use one of the prescribed methodologies that are allowed under the law. The law calls out three, chapter 372 says you can do this equally per front foot or square foot. You can do it according to the value of the property without or with regard to the improvements on the property, or you could do it in any other manner that would result in an equitable share of benefits distributed among the properties. So we're going to talk about those kind of again as we go through what's in the SAP, but those are prescribed by the law, and so you can choose one of those. I know the third one's kind of a figure it out, but we'll actually be talking about the square foot later. So questions about assessment methodology. So as I mentioned, we're only talking about improvement area one. So it's 118.7 acres. It's bounded by I-35 US-380 Heritage Trail and Panhandle, pretty much. You saw a little bit of outside of that. There are additional improvement areas within the PID that could be levied in the future, but right now we're not going to talk about those. Those would be if the developer chooses to do the public improvements in those and levy on those. So we're going to focus just on improvement area one. And then right now the total cost of improvement area, public improvements is greater than 12 million. And you remember that $8.1 million, so $8.1 million can be funded with a special assessment, and then the greater than $4 million would be considered a developer contribution. So getting into the components of the SAP. So the assessment plan, which is required under the law, does a few things. And we're going to go through each of these kind of bullet points again, break them down a little bit further. But the assessed properties have to receive a direct and special benefit from the public improvements for the improvement to be eligible. The owners are going to acknowledge that the improvements confer a special benefit on their property and they have to consent to pay for the cost. The actual cost of the improvement area number one, public improvements are allocated in proportion to the benefits received. And then the assessments are allocated on a per square foot basis, and properties will be assessed for 30 years. With the caveat that any lot can pay their assessment in full with a crude interest today at any point. So going through each of these. So one of the questions we received is how do we prove that the special benefit is greater than or equal to the benefit received? In the SAP, you will make a finding that it's established that the benefit is greater than, and we do that by verifying the cost of the public improvement. So we verify that the developer has expended $8.1 million of special assessments. There's all sorts of exhibits and attachments that go with the SAP that we use to verify that those costs occurred and in fact will verify whatever the total cost is that was expended. And so staff will make the recommendation to council that we verified that the developer did in fact spend greater than the $8.1 million and that we agree that the benefit received by the property owners is greater than the $8.1 million. This is a summary, a preliminary table that would be included in the SAP document showing that and again there would be exhibits and attachments outlining each of the public improvements behind that. So the next section is the owner acknowledgement. In the SAP, there will be a statement that the owners of the parcels have acknowledged that they have received a special benefit from the public improvements and they've consented to the imposition of the assessments. The way that we do that is through a landowner agreement. It was included as an attachment to the original reimbursement agreement. So the city and the developer have already negotiated and developed this landowner agreement. And in that reimbursement agreement, the city had established that the city won't levy any of the special agreements until the developer has executed all of the landowner agreements with each of the landowners. So that's how we affirm that the landowners have acknowledged and agree. There is an opportunity through a public hearing process that any landowner who disagrees or wants to object to some part of this service and assessment plan is given that opportunity through a public hearing. And the city council can make a determination based on those objections. So allocation of actual costs is again how we divide the or how we come up with the proportion of a public improvement cost that is eligible under the PID. And so the proportion of the costs that confer a special benefit get assigned to the improvement area, for some improvements the allocation is going to be 100, for others it's going to be less. For us we've been reviewing only one improvement in particular that we have said is less than 100%. And so our engineering group has been looking at that, it's a water line and we are working with a developer to come up with what's the reasonable proportion of that water line that benefits their property versus benefiting the system on the whole. So we're very close on that. Any questions about the allocations? The next is a little bit more detailed. Can you flip back to page 24, slide 24? Absolutely. So just in the way that it's phrased I could see where someone following along at home would read the words excess benefit and conclude that means you know extra money going from the city to a developer, but if I'm reading this correctly this means just on that table as an example $4.7 million spent by the developer in excess of what we're talking about the assessment being. Yes it's the opposite, it's the excess benefit to the city for the developer installing public improvements. Thank you. Thank you, same slide, thank you. So help me understand how this is rolled out. So $4 million today is not $4 million three years from now. So is it, do they have to be shovel ready projects to try to let the projects at the same time? How do you account for the difference in just value? So this table is based on actual costs incurred by the developer. So this isn't us trying to estimate what the value will be in the future. It's the value based on the actual expenditure. Correct but if they weighted per se, let's say the $8 million is spent first two years or so and then three years down the road you're going to, from their end of the deal they're going to spend $4 million let's say, round numbers. Well $4 million three years from now buys a lot less than if they spent $4 million year one. So how do you account for the different value? Because it doesn't spend the same over time, it can be less value. Sure and I think the developer has phased in building the public improvement so I'm sure they can tell you that yes improvements that they've done this year probably cost more than improvements that they did a few years ago but the way that the PID statute is written that we only take into account the actual expenditures. So from our perspective getting to that 8.1 it didn't matter whether the expenditure occurred in 2014 or it incurred in 2019, we're looking at the actual cost of that improvement to establish the benefit to get to that 8.1 million dollar number and I'm not sure if I'm answering your question. Yes no I'll wait till we get to the projects and that's good to know and then if I may the other thing I had a question about is you touched on the objections would come to the City Council, is there a process that's already laid out how that appeal process works and then if the council sides with the business owner does that automatically trigger the developer to be responsible or not to be recoup those costs or is there a method by which they then say we think you got it wrong and it's appealed? So under Chapter 372 there is a statement that allows the council to consider any objections that a property owner might have through a public hearing process. What that determination is by the City Council whether you agree or disagree could mean that we need to amend the service and assessment plan if you agree with the property owner's objection if that warranted a change in the service and assessment plan but what that objection might be is really speculation at this point so it would depend on what that objection is what the finding of the City Council is of whether you agree or disagree with that objection. Just a note I'd like not saying that would happen but in case that happens I think it would be good to have very clear or clear as we can criteria that would guide that decision to avoid someone just saying you know it's not purposefully but just I'm empathetic for the owner for whatever reason and that's not steeped in the statutes and so then it becomes Yes the statute is very vague in that regard it's one sentence. We may want to craft something that we can agree on in advance that helps guide that decision if those arise. Okay we can work on that. Okay so the next section is on the special assessment methodology this is back to the requirements like I said that are called out under the law and the developer is proposed using a per square foot of land method of assessing the properties. The reason for that is that a variety of land uses that are being developed at different times make it very difficult for us to evaluate the impact of a property so if you developed early on and we were saying we're going to do it based on the value of the land for someone who developed the property earlier than someone who developed it later would have a greater share of the cost because the development's not fully built out we thought a per square foot basis of land simply the area that the property owner occupies most equitably allocates the cost among the property owners in the development so staff agreed with that assessment and agreed that that is an acceptable methodology and it produces an equitable method for allocating the costs in the SAP the City Council will make it a finding of that that's also required under the statute it'll say something to the effect of that the City Council is determined that this is the most equitable method of allocating costs and that the special assessments will be allocated on a per square foot basis of land. All right any questions on the methodology? Okay and the SAP will also include terms of the special assessment so what that means is because this isn't a fully developed property that an assessment will be levied based on the parcels as they exist today so if a parcel is divided or if two parcels are consolidated we included formulas of which would establish how that assessment would be divided or combined in the future we do allow for prepayments like I said you could pay in full at any time and otherwise you would be making annual installments in full or in part and that if you if the developer had already received payment in advance from any of the property owners that they would be credited against the special assessments the last bullet point their collection of annual installments the annual installments are collected in a manner similar to property taxes so we will actually be contracting with the county to collect those property to collect the assessments they will come to the city first. The reimbursement agreement then becomes the mechanism in which we agree to distribute those funds back to the developer. Okay so the assessment role so this is very similar to the assessment role as we would know it in terms of property tax it's just a very specific limited geographic area it provides the list of parcels it details the special assessment for each parcel and I'm going to show you an example of one and then it shows the annual installments of each property so if you have your glasses handy because it's very small on my screen this is what the assessment role will look out so it look like it has all of the property owners the tax parcel ID numbers and then it has the total special assessment and you see here the land area so basically if you did the calculation come up with this property right here is about 1.2 percent of the total they're assessed about 1.2 percent of the total assessment that's how that works out on the per square foot of land basis and then you'll see here the average annual installment and there are I'm going to show one quick how this would work for property a so property a would have principal and interest expense per year and administrative expense that's the city's cost for collecting and administering the agreements related to the paid and then that property owner would pay in year one seven thousand six hundred and sixty two dollars the city would keep the proportion that goes to pay for our administrative expenses and then the rest would be remitted back to the developer councilman Bragg she had a question I do and I'm just a little confused and I hope you can help me understand so what on on your list back there I saw O'Reilly's right and so that hotel is a hundred percent like there's already incentives on properties and there's already an incentive on the property itself on the razor ranch and so I'm just confused how how do you apply a pit how does that work on a on a property that already is a hundred percent incentivized and you put a pit on it where does how does that if you can explain so this special this is not an incentive going to the hotel this is a payment that the hotel is making based on improvements that have been made by the developer that they benefit from so they're assisting to pay for those public improvements so okay that's good to know so no matter if there's an incentive on a property in razor ranch that the hotel is not exempt from paying the pit if they are exempt from property taxes no and they're not exempt from property taxes or sales tax or right all of those things yeah they're not exempt from any of those they are paying those we may be granting payments back to them in the agreement but they're paying all of those and they would be paying the pit assessment as well okay but we're not going to be say they pay a hundred percent if we grant them back a hundred percent of the property taxes we don't this isn't included in what we have to pay them back no they will be remitting their annual installment and then we would be remitting that annual installment back to the developer to reimburse their expenses for public improvements okay so I'm just trying to make sure that they're they're not all connected and we're not extra paying no back okay no in fact they will be they'll be paying for the public improvements and then again that money is going back to the developer okay thank you I have a question is this a is this an example or is this the proposed this is the preliminary assessment rule that we received as we were reviewing that the drought was we've been exchanging the drafts service and assessment plans between staff and the developer so I believe and and Scott and I reviewed it today that we think that this is all we have all the correct property embers here so then using this particular one so help me understand I think this is what this is telling me so these special assessment total column which is 8.1 million that's over the life of the pit which I forgot how many years it was 30 how many 30 years 30 years yeah so that's it and this is exclude nevermind that's going down a rabbit hole so then the average annual installment is based upon the current assessment so this is just the land value doesn't matter what you have on it you could have nothing on it you could have something on it it's just as if it were vacant land and so no matter like that our our town center associates LLC that's the current developer I think is it not so they're paying into their own pit but if somebody bought let's say track D and built some really high-end something on it that assessment would not change so that's that so this is fixed throughout the 30 years is that right okay it is and so for each individual property there's a sub amortization table that outlines so this is property a this is the annual installment on that property should that property owner sell that property the assessment stays with the property the new property owner would just picks up in the year that it's sold yes yes the new property owner could pay the remaining balance and that would terminate the assessments on that property but that property owner would carry forward the assessment yeah I'm looking at the bottom here six and a quarter percent yes five the next final and those are that's fixed for five years and it's fixed for the remaining and this and those numbers come came from the re the reimbursement agreement that's where the interest rate was set okay right okay yeah well do you have a question on this yeah just I think you've already said it but I'm just want to make sure I'm tracking that you said they can prepay but I mean they can prepay the the 30 years but like the principal right I think just yes they would only pay if they prepaid in year one they would only pay the interest that had accrued to date they wouldn't pay the 30 years but the interest is sort of an income opportunity for the developer essentially you know a carrying cost for the developer yeah up fronting the cost of the development and the public improvements and then getting paid back over time okay thanks okay did you have a question on this all right yeah so I know that we recently approved single family resident but I don't know that it's in the 108 acres we're talking about okay and so my question would have been how does that apply to the single family homeowners in this but since that's not a part of this then I will hold that question thank you that's in a separate you got a few yeah let's power through the end and then we'll okay so moving on so we received like I said the SAP in November of 2018 staff has formed an internal working group everyone it feels like in the city has reviewed it in some capacity economic development legal engineering finance bond council as well as an external consultant have all reviewed the SAP multiple times we've made significant progress which is why we are in front of you today we are nearing the point where council will need to approve the preliminary SAP and moving towards the final SAP so I'm going to kind of put a pin in that idea for one second because I want to touch on one other piece of the puzzle that we have to talk about before we come back to the next steps on the SAP so and that is the amended and restated reimbursement agreement so during the review of the SAP and we agreed that phase one and some of phase three were eligible under the PID to be reimbursed sorry and I'm referring to the phasing of the public improvements that were made so there were three phases phase one was covered under the existing reimbursement agreement part of phase three is also eligible the city hasn't accepted or and those improvements haven't been dedicated to the city so to ensure that those can be included in the SAP we need to add those into the reimbursement agreement so that's a kind of parallel process that we're going down with the SAP with the developers to get those additional improvements into the reimbursement agreement so that way when the PID levies their assessments that those improvements can that those funds can be given back to the developer for those improvements so and then the other note is that you'll see kind of phase two falls out of this is that phase two improvement improvements we're not simply just taking ownership of those and not reimbursing the developer those would be considered eligible under the chapter 380 agreement so the last kind of block of things kind of happen all at once and so kind of to walk through the next steps and there's a lot of information on the side I'll kind of walk through each of those so depending on the discussion and direction we received today that we're going to continue working with the developer to execute and get to a preliminary SAP that we will bring forward to council we're scheduled to bring it back next week on August 20th that will be the preliminary service assessment plan that's necessary so that they can't the developer can start executing the landowner agreement so the landowner has to be informed what the assessment will be remember they have to consent to the assessment so we need that number the SAP sets that number so we have to do this first after the preliminary SAP is taken care of we can move forward with that kind of parallel process of the amended and restated reimbursement agreement to make sure that that base three infrastructure gets included and then we would move a whole host of things forward on September 17th that would include holding a public hearing that's when you would hear if there are objections to the SAP from any of the landowners we know that we have to notice the landowners council will need to create a special fund we're required under the law to have a special fund so that this money isn't commingled in the budget and then you will need to approve a contract with Denton County for the collection of the assessments and then lastly you will actually levy the assessments through an assessment ordinance and so it's very similar to the assessment ordinance for property tax so pretty straightforward assessment you would adopt the assessment role and move forward and with that if all of that happens by September 17th the assessments would go into effect and collected in the next tax year so that's pretty pretty much it on on all that but there's a lot like I said in those next steps and a lot of things that still have to happen so okay kind of open it up for discussion so just to make sure what you're asking from us today you're saying that if all this comes to fruition September the 17th or whatever that date was there's several things that have to be done but so you're looking for direction today how to proceed forward from here yes okay all right okay questions Councilmember Meltzer yeah just to kind of check in on understanding I think what you know my understanding is that this doesn't really affect the city very materially other than we react as a billing service and we're compensated for providing that service is that very material the amount that we are compensated for providing the billing service the administrative cost so we we base that number off of what we expect those to be the city can contract with a third party administrator and that's where that costs for the administrative expenses come from and so our consultant that conducted the peer review gave us an assessment of in other cities this is typically how much it is fifteen to twenty five thousand dollars per year to complete the reviews review the financials make sure that the pit is being administered correctly and so I'm not sure if I could have to look it up real quick of what the exact number that we ended with but that's what that administrative cost is city doesn't make money on this deal we're just covering our expenses for we're covering the cost to administer the pin and and we've already assumed in the because these are public improvements the the maintenance burden going forward on you know that many linear feet okay and then so I don't really understand what direction is needed from us I think the main point today was to to ensure that you saw how this would be operationalized there will be a point which council needs to be able needs to confirm the the assessment process and essentially ratify the re reimbursement methodology thank you okay so you use the term ratify I mean is this at a point where this was back in 2014 and if it was may of 2014 I was not here it was later I think I remember this was approved before then does that mean that the council this is sort of ministerial or administrative and we're just this presentation is for educational purposes primarily or is it also are we being asked do you still want to proceed down this path I guess is I mean I just want to make sure we all understand here what that is so that if something comes up that there's not a question as to whether this is sort of we're just go ahead I'll kind of answer the first part in that the law is pretty clear that city council is the governing body that has to make findings in the SAP the city council has to concur with the assessment methodology has to concur with the assessments and that's how the law is written and so council makes that determination our direction at this point is to continue moving this forward unless there is some objection or direction from council at this point to stop and which we could review and what that discussion item is but our intent is to continue to moving move this forward okay just wanted to make sure that yeah okay do you have done miss it a project list did you incorporate that in your presentation I don't that we are still in the preliminary and draft stage and so in the I will distribute that as soon as I can like I said we have a number of attachments with SAP that actually outlines each of the public improvements it's probably about 40 pages of the 50 page SAP and so we will share that and I can send you a list of what those public improvements are in details with the cost certainly I did not have time to get that built into the presentation no worries I appreciate it yeah I'd like to see that just so I can kind of conceptualize that and then secondly I think it's important for me to say early and often or let me ask the question and then I'll kind of position where I fall on that is there an opportunity in the SAP in the SAP to stipulate that changes won't be made to the overall design of what's the plot the plans of how it's designed we've heard conversations and I've heard concerns from property owners that the original layout of this phase one may vary based on the new ownership and I have a problem if we don't get the developer to stipulate that they're not going to make wholesale changes to the way the property is laid out I think that materially affects their business so that Grand Avenue is what is one thing that's been pointed out to me the Grand Avenue may change to something else due to the new ownership and that to me is a problem because we're saying we're gonna assess you this value based on your understanding today and then we're gonna change what you understand the property is going to shape up to be down the road but you're still on the hook for for 30 years so I think there has to be a way to say they have to stipulate to the lay of the land before we say we're gonna stipulate to 30 years assessment or at least have some mechanism for the owners to to then say you've materially changed how things are going to shape up that then changes my feeling towards this assessment I'm gonna actually turn it over to the actual attorney instead of playing to probably answer that question mayor and counsel Mac Ryan one with the city attorney's office the way this one is set up right now is it's a purely it's a reimbursement type agreement so all the infrastructure that you would be paying for will already be in the ground it's in place it's already located so you will have a hundred percent idea of where that infrastructure is when it comes to you for final approval you will actually get to see where those improvements are and and sign off on it at that point this is not one where you're going to project out and pay for things in the future this one's a pure reimbursement those things are already in the ground when you decide whether you want to reimburse them understood but if it changes the business model for example if I think less traffic is going to come to my wallet shop because they changed where the road goes then you're saying that in your mind that has no effect on my willingness to pay the assessment well I think what following what you're saying is the that infrastructure is in the ground right now and you're saying in the future if they tear up that infrastructure and put something in that's new is that we're going is or if they change the route so for example when I bought my property the road was going to pass directly in front of my street you know the street is going to pass directly in front of my hypothetically pass right in front of my business I'm good with that I'm good with the $1,000 a month that I have to kind of account for so let me let me just as a question of clarification yes because what I'm hearing what I think I hearing you're asking is you know is this based upon things that are already the infrastructure is in the ground and the roads are already there in other words if the roads are already there that these pits are is it is it retroactive it's ratification of something that's already been done in other words in area one and correct me if I'm wrong this example we're talking about the road is already in and the infrastructure is already in so in that case the only way they're going to change the road is go tear the whole thing up and then reroute it right that's that's what you're contemplating what can we go to the to the map the initial map you had a pit one please and thank you so yes so my understanding is the center portion is going to develop at some point and there's going to be infrastructure at some point and those plans have been provided to the city already if that's subsequently changed so now you know there's there's something out there that says this is what we envision to look like but now there's a new owner right and so if that owner then says this does not work for us then you have a situation we have a business owner coming in saying hey this was on the record and this is at the time that this was assessed because even the empty lots are assessed yes so it's this is what I saw initially and I was okay with but that's subsequently changed but I'm still I have this much square foot that I'm looking at and you know that that's where that's where my concern is I think we have to give the future owners some way to hold the developer accountable to what either they need to announce early and often that what red development proposed they're not going to do so we can have that conversation or if they're not willing to do that then that that's my hang up yeah yeah a lot of components to it but get back to the original point we're talking about heritage trail we're talking about certain infrastructure that will be paid back because it's already in place the second part of that is I think you're talking through kind of internal drives and internal roads that might be going through there that's going to be a planning process the properties plotted if they were going to redesign or realign that would have to go through a separate platting that's a PNC type of a process to do that so that wouldn't be applicable to this this is just focusing on which roads which infrastructure was put in place which ones are we specifically going to pay for and how we're going to pay for it any other roads that are not addressed under the SAP really don't belong under the service and assessment plan that's a separate process okay my answer will probably come when we see the the project list and then I can give you more specific examples of my concern yes ma'am no sir so again just making sure I totally get it there isn't a question before us about whether or not to actually have the developer you know build the property owners that that was settled in 2014 whatever the decision before us is just primarily whether we agree that divvying up the 8 million in receipts based on square footage of property is a reasonable way to do it that's pretty much it is sort of the decision before us yes our goal was to not if we brought the SAP before you for approval that that wouldn't be the first time that you would be seeing statements where the City Council has determined X or Y and so we wanted to introduce those concepts to you the benefit allocation the assessment methodology to get direction on those if it's general we agree with staff or disagree and we want more work at that so that way when we bring that document forward that concept is sort of generally agreed upon by this body well because you have different rates of development I can't think of a better way to do it so a couple of things and my next statement is not one meant to share my own thoughts about this particular process or the PID but again I want to make it clear that based upon your comments Councilmember Meltzer that yes there was an agreement preliminary agreement or an agreement back in March or May of 2014 but if somehow for some reason and I'm not saying I'm one of them but if the Council wanted to say we just don't want to do the PID we just don't want to do the PID that that is an option here I mean as far as I understand so if I'm not correct in that Mr. City Attorney let me know and I'm not saying that I'm putting that on the table and I hesitate to even say that but I don't want to people to walk out of this meeting going that thinking that there were there were not choices here because there are choices we did enter into this five years ago and and I think it's it's helpful I think there's some questions that I have just in some understanding about reimbursement rates and the sales tax grant that I think is going to be helpful for me but just need to make that statement not advocating for it or not trying to detract from it just making it a statement of fact so that we all understand here what's going on. Yes Council Member Armitage. So I appreciate you mentioning that because I actually hadn't realized, realized that I'm curious what can you explain how that's the case and what and why we're not locked into it again I thought that when that decision was made. I'll have to explain that. I mean I could be wrong but that's what we need clarification on. Yes Mayor and Council some of the discussion that may lead into a type of an executive session type of discussion but the short answer is in the reimbursement agreement it clearly says that this is still a discretionary function of the Council to move forward at this point. Wow okay thanks. Let me ask a couple of my questions a couple of my questions so when I see this up here is Heritage which one is Heritage Trace the red one? This is Heritage Trail. Oh okay what the one the green boundary? Yes. Okay so the things that we're seeing up there the green boundary the red is just the outline of the whole PID and then the green is what were the water lines the sewer lines and the roads the perimeter roads have been put in Heritage Trace and what is that Panhandle or something down here have been put in and that's the reimbursement. Right so there are a significant number of public improvements it was phased phases one two and three and there's a list of projects in each of those phases of public improvements so phase one public improvements that we talked about was phase one of Heritage Trail and then phase one of some water. No I get that so so there's a difference between phase one phasing and within area one. And then we've got there's another two and three you said we want to one of the questions is do you want to include two and three costs in this? So phase phase one was covered under the reimbursement agreement so it's eligible phase two improvements which was phase two of Heritage Trail I'm going to make sure that's got and then it was and it may have been also some additional water and sewer improvements those improvements were dedicated by the developer and accepted by the city without being covered by a reimbursement agreement therefore it's not eligible to be included. So they're not in the 8.1 million. They're not in the 8.1 million they are considered a developer contribution they're in the 4.4 plus million of the developer contribution of an improvement that they have made that has conferred a benefit to these properties. Phase three was split into two sort of sub phases so phase three east and phase three west phase three west was also accepted by the city prior to a reimbursement agreement being placed so it is not eligible as well. Phase three east has not been dedicated or accepted therefore it is eligible so we can amend the reimbursement agreement to roll that into the eligible costs of the PID. So what I heard you say was the 8.1 million is just simply the phase one costs that were reimbursable according to the original agreement. And so then there's four million dollars of phase two and three costs that you're asking this council do we want to amend the agreement to include those phase two and three of area one in this PID is that is that not right? No they are the public improvements have occurred so the only and the only one that we need to amend the reimbursement agreement to roll into the PID is the phase three east. That's the only one they how they get to that 8.1 million was the MOU and the reimbursement agreement the total cost of all three of those added together is greater than the 8.1 but they can only ask for 8.1 because of the MOU that was the term that was agreed to. So on the 380 agreement on this side the razor ranch town center the whole thing not just area one the eligible reimbursement for public infrastructure the type of infrastructure we're talking about now roads water lines sewer lines those kinds of things that total reimbursement amount can be what I know we split it up into different. So the total reimbursement on the project is about 68 million of that 68 million their particular categories I believe it's about 20 million of that 68 million that set aside for these type of improvements fruit for the razor ranch town center or the whole thing for the whole both both sides of University Drive I believe it's for both sides but the only I mean the these are the public improvements that are still going okay so if somehow phase two and three aren't include there's no amendment to the say it's four million dollars then those could be somehow maybe reapportioned or reimbursed through the other 380 agreement so what whatever is captured here in the pit allows potentially more capacity in the the 380 agreement to absorb things that would normally these these work together you're getting 68 million dollars for reimbursement plus you're getting and they don't overlap so if we are reimbursing the developer for the phase one improvements with the paid that makes it ineligible for the 380 so they're not getting it two ways it's no but it's you know one kind of or the other but it does provide a more reimbursable cost to be included in the 380 agreement because these let's say these were going to go into the 380 agreement the 8 million dollars into the 380 agreement so they're getting reimbursed if we now say no we're going to reimburse these in the pit then it just creates an additional capacity of 8 million dollars for additional reimbursable costs that may not have been able to be reimbursed to be reimbursed through the 380 agreement it's it's a you're turning a reimbursement from about 68 million to whatever it is 74 76 and again that's not me advocating for against it's just trying to understand the facts of what's really taking place here and how those those interplay sure okay um all right council member milsor well now i kind of want to make sure i understand what what you were saying so there's an interaction between the pit and the 380 so well the only interaction is that let's take the pit off the table let's just say we don't have the pit these costs would probably be included in the reimbursement of through the 380 sales tax agreement the reimbursement so you've got eight million dollars let's say there's 40 million dollars on this side of the university drive so eight million of that 40 would be these well now with the pit comes along and if the pit says you know what we're going to assess we can we can move these costs over to the pit yeah we'll get it from the property owners we'll get them from the property owners so now instead of 40 million now you drop back down to 32 million so they're not getting reimbursed for all of their costs throughout this whole development over both sides of you know north and south so now it just opens up that 380 agreement to be able to absorb another eight million dollars of reimbursable expenses that otherwise it wouldn't have been able to do and and uh does the developer care whether they're reimbursed through the pit or through 380 you know would they have a reason to care no i think that i think i think this is at least what i remember back in the past is this is just a way to get reimbursement for some additional get more reimbursement for the infrastructure but not the cost of city taxpayers in other words it's it's they're not asking for us to expand our 380 agreement allocation rate that's that's been discussed and litigated and you know that's staying the way it is so this is just another avenue to say hey this is a way we might can can obtain some additional reimbursement through these assessments on the property owners and my hunch is which i think is going to be important to know is because of mayor pro tem's question is that when these properties are marketed there's obviously or there should be and i'm pretty certain there is given the professionalism of both of these organizations people understand before they buy that there's that there's a potential assessment once it gets in place it's not in place now but uh yes it gets in place that i believe is included in the reimbursement agreement or the landowner agreement that there is a requirement that the landowner agreements get attached i believe with the get filed at the county they're attached to the property and so if a property changes hands that property that the purchaser is fully informed of the assessment that exists on that property and these are sophisticated buyers and yeah it's not commoners so so my original question was uh now that i understand that we have a potentially a decision to make um what would the implications be if we decided we didn't want to do it couldn't they have a private arrangement they just wouldn't have the benefit of the city doing the billing and i guess the um uh sort of police power i guess it goes with that but they but you know the owners are consenting to these fees anyway couldn't they more or less accomplish the same thing with or without the pit um not sure i'm not sure i understand the question can you could they do it yeah i think and we might let maybe the city attorney way in but what you're saying is could there just be a private party agreement most likely that would come in the form of either increase increase increased rents or increased sales price of the property all this is is just for the plain and simple this is just an opportunity for the developer to get more of their development costs reimbursed which goes down to what the rate of return number is at the end of the day i mean and that's that's yeah i will make that the the improvements that are eligible under the pit are city assets so there will be a city road a city waterline that the developer is going to dedicate to the city and the city will have ownership over and so um it's not necessarily a developer cost it is a public improvement that the city will have the asset but that's true whether whether we say yes to the pit or no to the pit right it's still going to be city improvements right that's not material that's to the decision so just the question is which way do they get reimbursed right and i'm not i'm frankly finding it hard to see why we should care that much either way you know it's just a task for us no i just want to make sure that we we understand what the process here is because this is we've been on for a long time and this is a fairly new council so there's a lot of moving parts and a lot of concepts that are just important to flush out so and i understand uh councilmember armature and then councilmember briggs okay so i don't need this information now but just wanted to be sure when this comes back to council next uh you know whenever that is will we or can we have a clear kind of itemized breakdown of of what was decided you know in the improvements uh is it benefits the city versus benefits the businesses in terms of that that percentage breakdown yes and there will only be one particular improvement that there's a proportion that's not 100 percent okay so that really that really is the only there really will only be only one yes but that information will be included in it's in the sap so the next time you see this you'll actually see the full document and that information of the percent allocation for that improvement is included okay okay thank you the only reason i will say that we've been going back and forth and we gave some very late um comments back to the developer or else we would have provided um the sap in your backup so that you could have seen it and fortunately it's still redlined and marked up and so i tried to pull out as much of the concepts that i could but i will say that that you know we've been trying to keep moving forward in our negotiations and so the redline document's not something that uh is pretty so that's fine but we're very we're very close thank you and so just to clarify those who have um purchased property and have already developed they did not have not incurred any infrastructure cost already um as part of their development for for these same things so i will say that um i'm not sure i really understand the question so we were talking about a private agreement already um for you know the the developer of red development and then whomever comes to purchase the land and develops them like a contract or sale or something contractors okay yeah and so um i know that say the city when someone comes to develop we do impact fee we we do a certain um contract so that we get our money back and i'm just making sure that that had has not already occurred and so they're not already getting money that we're assessing the the fee on already so i'm just trying to let scott maybe explain that process um as you know if there's been any preliminary agreements but i will say that if someone has paid there's there is a credit the ability to credit someone i think what she's saying is excuse the seinfeld reference but double dipping i think what i hear you saying is if i'm a property owner and i'm coming in and i'm contracting to buy parcel a and part of the agreement says i as the as the property owner or the new property owner will agree to pay as part of the contract price or separately i'll give you you know five hundred thousand dollars of this is to bring infrastructure to my site that's along public you know either roads or waterways or something like that and then if they're assessed to do that as well then they're paying sort of giving back money twice is that the concept i sort of understand what you're asking i'm just trying to clarify that we're not going to be a be approving an assessment on which a property has already paid into at a certain point before they they were there or developed i'm just want to clarify that that that's not part of a contract in the beginning is there anybody here representing the development that has a clarification to that question it doesn't matter who it's got or the anybody if there's anybody here from the new ownership i just keep thinking like impact yeah if i understand um it's a great question so all of the sales that we do and leases that we do with our end users as we go through a mixed use development like this ground up all have that language in there each rent so each rent they pay or each land sale that they pay either factors in their value of the land and or their contribution to infrastructure to the extent that your protection is by the landowner agreement so if a particular landowner paid fifty thousand dollars for infrastructure they're going to ask for that in the landowner agreement or they're going to object to it so you'll that's why the landowner agreement exists so anything that that particular landowner would feel was double counted if they felt that way they would not sign that landowner agreement or they'd bring it to your attention so i can't say whether or not they factored in pricing so if they pay this twenty dollars a foot they may have said that includes infrastructure may have not but every agreement we've done has a disclosure that the pids there and that they will reasonably cooperate with it so they're all aware of it okay does that answer some yeah kind of yeah so but when you said if they won't sign it in they will bring it back to us what process or what do you mean by that that's the landowner agreement it's a it's a contract it's a it's a legal agreement maybe mac can explain it but each person on that list who owns property in here they will have to formally accept the assessment before you all will approve it so that's part of the the public hearing process that you were saying that will come back to us so they have to so we will hear more of the stories if there are any and we we are pretty confident that there won't be any which is otherwise we wouldn't been doing this so it's been established since 2014 it's been in all the sales contracts we broke around 2015 so it's been in all the sales contracts on all the leases since day one and then this is a reimbursement agreement not a upfront financing in 2014 we thought about trying to use it as upfront financing but that was a lot messier for everybody because you were projecting what we were going to build now that we've built all the roads and a lot of the buildings it's now a reimbursement agreement of costs that are actually expended so there will be no surprises on which roads were covered thank you so i'm a little worried that folks following along at home will have heard the words reimbursements and get that confused with something else we already talked about with the 380 agreement that these are not tax rebates these are not this is not money flowing from city coffers this is money being assessed against the property it's the developer taxing the properties to to fund infrastructure development correct yes and they're actually paying more they're spending more money on the site in this particular round for four plus million dollars more on infrastructure than we're even talking about them getting back to the special assessments correct yes so tell me i'm going to use an analogy and tell me if this is is off base or not and the the purpose of having a pit i think in this situation the city's interest in having a pit it's a lot like an hoa for commercial development if you live out in the country and you have a spec neighborhood or something you could just get together with your neighborhoods and you could decide with your neighbors and you could just decide you're going to all get together and pay for a road but what do you do when someone doesn't pay their share what do you do when the road doesn't get constructed on time you go into private litigation all of these folks could go into a private agreement and uh but when things stall out or when things don't happen they don't have the same mechanism that the pit provides to make sure everybody gets uh gets their their fair payment made so the city's interest i think in a pit is something like this this is an enormous economic development um and and has brought a lot of important revenue i think not just to the city but to um i think it's been an enormous improvement in our in our city so if this thing stalls out or if it slows down or if lots aren't developed if things don't move forward then we're not getting the benefit of the bargain we struck with the 380 agreement we're not getting what we originally went out there for so to me i think um the staff has asked for direction i think we should move forward with the pit i think the staff's methodology is uh as you said as council member melzer said the most equitable given the facts on the ground and the speed at which development's gone forward um so i'd like to see that that sap on the agenda as you've recommended okay so i appreciate those comments i i'm not sure that i would totally agree with all of them uh and the ones that i mean because it made it sound like that without this pit somehow this project would stall or that we're getting more than what we originally were designed to get and this is the reimbursement agreement the 380 reimbursement agreement which is what that is that's not a i mean we're reimbursing them for all of the infrastructure they're putting in here this pit is an additional mechanism to get more of those costs back that they cannot get back through the 380 agreement because we capped it so as far as they're doing something above and beyond than what we thought they were going to do initially that's not correct i mean uh now i will say i i'm with council member or mayor pro tem in that there's a specific overlay on this particular part of this project and it was the town center it was the oval kind of the football shaped looking retail with something you know it just that's what's been here for a long time so um there's nothing i mean to change that and i guess we'll have to get some other feedback from league on that because for me i don't think that can be changed without council approval because i think it's an overlay i think it's a site plan overlay that if they wanted to rearrange that whole boundary inside there where it says razor ranch town center they would have to come back to do that based as an overlay so this whole reimbursement agreement the 68 million dollars and now this pit have all been predicated upon the representation that this is the development that we're striving for so in essence what could happen is the reverse of what you were describing council member davis is that we could issue the pit and would the city continue to get the benefit of the bargain that they that they had negotiated for or that we had talked about over these last 10 years or so decades um and so that's my only concern here is if the property owners want to pay more money to the developer for a reimbursement that they were going to build anyway that's the property developers i mean that's the the buyer's decision they know it when they come in here up front uh personally i struggle with a 50 percent a 50 cent assessment that's almost equal to what the city's assessment is now it's only based on the land i understand that um so i i don't necessarily have a different conclusion than you do about moving forward i just think the rationale for doing that i i i'm not sure that um if we didn't do that this pit only came up in march of 2014 this project has been in the works even with the old developer for five years so it's always been this and then it's like well we'd like to get some additional revenue for reimbursement of our infrastructure we can't get it from the city but we can try this methodology and i mean that's that's yeah i don't think that not doing the pit isn't going to kill the project i mean i'm not saying i'm not going to do the pit but i don't i don't want to leave that out there hanging and not just respond to that with my own comments so yes go ahead so i i apologize i may not have been clear in my comments i i don't mean to uh imply that the project stops what i mean is this is a financing mechanism for the infrastructure the project could conceivably slow down if uh if the financing mechanism changes or is different and the agreement that we struck back in 2014 changes the facts on the ground and the financing structure for the developer so when i say stall out i don't mean the project goes away i think i mean that the financial facts change for the developer and um to your point i think this is an agreement that we entered into uh some time ago we set ourselves on a course we're not stuck on that course but what has materially changed for this council since the time we went on that course now if design facts have changed i think uh as city attorney uh said i think there's a separate mechanism for that if there's an individual lot owner and i think to mayor pro tem's uh concerns about particular property owners not liking the new layout or something that's changed or or whatever that has changed with the development for one most of the largest property owners out there are not a part of the agreement so they're just not a part of the you know the embassy suites andy b's walmart all of those they're just not part of the conversation so if there's something that's changed for them that's a different that's a planning and zoning process not the pid conversation and then also we have the objection process that as we come forward if a land owner whether their assessments not what they think it ought to be whether the methodology not what they think it ought to be or whether you know the the layout of the property has changed they can bring that to us in the form of a of an objection and they cannot agree to what we want to do we can take that up then okay council member armature um if if council is to say no to the pid theoretically to this part uh when is the when would be the the timeline the deadline you know to say no i mean for now we're not locking ourselves into anything corrected just kind of saying keep going ahead in in figure in figuring this out uh as as represented in in the progress slide until which which date is the deadline defer to the city manager we have the we have this item tentatively scheduled to come back i believe in september for formal approval i think one of the things to address um the comments here regarding the overlay we can certainly um you know create some kind of a of an analysis for you that um whether or not this request is consistent with the plan that was initially approved by council there's any changes that have been made and make that part of the discussion um you know it's essentially that they're complying with the uh the initial plan that was the last plan that was approved that uh then enabled this vehicle and i think that that's relatively simple to do um but you know ultimately the the action will be taking is certifying whether or not you agree with the assessments is part of this agreement and it's going to be a i think a yes or no question on this 8.1 million so a couple questions uh councilmember mouser go ahead well you know usually uh staff gives us uh uh considerations you know pros cons and a recommendation do you have a point of view on this i think based i want to go back and confirm the plan that was initially approved i think that we've done that but i want to be 100 sure that it complies with the intent of this uh this initial reimbursement reimbursement request if that's the case we'll recommend that you approve it based upon the deal that was made uh initially um i know where councilmember mayor pro tem's coming from is the the new owner of the center has talked about making some changes out there in future phasing if that if that happens that's why i'm suggesting the compliance uh component uh be brought into this that if there's any changes made you're aware of it if it affected the assessments any way you'd be have to be brought back in to amend the plan because the um you know potentially the the routing would be a little bit different or the or the lot would be different so we're happy to make sure that it complies and as long as it does and these are eligible expenses we're going to recommend approval if you know if if it gives us hooks into you know into the development process that we wouldn't otherwise have that would be a reason to to go forward yeah and remember there's two other phases um that that also needed to come back before council so you'll be getting periodic updates on this but it's perfectly reasonable for the council to ask the question did they do what they said they were going to do is it in compliance with the initial plan that we that the council at the time approved and if so if those two are affirmative that our our response will be yet to go ahead and move forward with approving this if there's any changes and that are being requested or made i believe that you are entitled to the answer as well that changes your thinking so we're happy to to do that level of assessment for you before we recommend approval if council were to say no to uh reimbursements for this phase what would be the uh cost savings or you know to can we could even put it that way to the city i mean what is that the answer is zero the answer is zero this is simply a mechanism as uh council member davis suggested for the uh developer to reimburse themselves and it's a mechanism which essentially eases collection yeah yeah but there's no cost to the city yep okay yeah thank you i wanted to to confirm that thanks but i and i sound like i'm opposed to this and i'm not but sometimes i just can't let statements that i i have a concern with the point about saying that they've complied with the agreements that were in place at the time i totally get that the concern i think that the mayor pro tem and quite frankly i have is that this whole thing all of the reimbursement the 380 everything that we've done up to this point with this project has been based upon a schematic that has been presented to the council and to the public over the last decade and up to this point they have we've got a hotel out there we've got you know the the retail on the the fringes of along the university drive and now popping up along 35 it's that inner core which is really the heart of this development that's the thing that is to make it stand out among developments just throughout our city and quite frankly throughout the region as far as how it looks what the stores are uh and and things such as that um what is this so that's the existing so this is what you can see that that this is already developed and this is already developed so really it's just sort of this kind of core that you're talking about well so so now this is my question all right because that's sort of the site plan but that's not the concept plan or the plan that shows the oval retail development with think you know the the pedestrian walkway in the middle so that's been my question all along is is that schematic a part of the ordinance or was it conceptual only and that right here what i'm looking at if this is the site plan that is that is on that is approved then those two green areas with the road running through it right in the middle right there i think is where the town center was going to be is that is that correct um if that's the only representation of that that the developer has to abide by does that mean that we i'll just say me i've been under the wrong impression that that schematic was one that was part of and approved as this is what's going to be there and in the overlay uh or is this just the site plan as it is on the ground today we will we will research that question so we give you up and and the reason the reason i say that is i think there's been 40 or 41 ordinances associated with this project jessica and her staff have spent all summer trying to mouse track that back so um we can't speak to the documents right now sure that we're showing back in 2014 but it's a question we will answer for you yeah and if this just changed we'll show you those iterations yeah because that that that answer that question is very important for me i mean i have no problem moving forward with the pit i would like to keep it at the 8.1 million i don't the phase two and three um i certainly i want to keep it at that until i hear the answer to the question of how is this going to develop um in that regard so uh understanding this isn't going to cost the city of penny this pit it's not going to cost the taxpayers i mean they're not there's not these assessments are not to the taxpayers it is a a mechanism to reimburse them uh the developer more than what they were able to achieve through the 380 agreement with the city uh and that's not a bad thing it's just i want to make sure that we understand and understand those facts council member breaks so speaking of that i i think that we actually approved the change of this um maybe a year or two ago um what you're talking about from what was this the original plan to what it is now that came through council um yeah i don't some former phase but i'm just but that's not my question or comment um we're talking about well you're so this isn't going to cost the city anything well the pit might not but what i would like to ask for at some point if we could get um what the maintenance cost of these improvements um to the city would be um for the infrastructure all the roads and the the water infrastructure that's going in um i know because once it's built i guess it's already handed over to us it's different um you know than a regular street or um somebody who a bunch of homeowners who want to get a street and then hand it over they have to make those improvements um so it's it's a little bit different but i would like to know just for my own sake what what those are going to cost the city um on a regular maintenance okay we can certainly work that out i do have one question for the developer or or probably you scott you're yeah the old developer sorry i like to refer to as the the middle developer because there was an old middle developer i'll take that then a middle developer so a new developer before before the pit we talked about it back in 2014 or 15 y'all the the middle developer had estimated that the total infrastructure cost for all the roads both north and south interior the infant the water wastewater side all of that was well over the 68 million dollars that okay all right and i remember seeing a chart like that i just wanted to put that in context of of what we're what we're talking about okay yeah thank you appreciate it oh yes i'm sorry council member and then we'll go to mayor yeah i'm a little uh a little puzzled by councilmember brick's comment which you know just leads to the question is that is there a possibility that these streets would not be public streets you know right because you because if it's a question of just how they get reimbursed for something they were already going to spend either way and they're already going to be public streets that we would already have to maintain either way that's different or is that is that a discussable option whether these are public streets that we need to maintain or our pub or our private streets let mac answer these are public improvement districts which requires and the ag has given opinions on this it requires that they be public improvements they have to belong to the city and be dedicated to the city they can't be private no i understand that they have to be in order for the pit to yes come into effect my question is whether they have to be public at all let's say there were no pit would they still have to be public streets most likely i mean if we're talking about if we're talking about the improvement specifically here we're talking about heritage trail which is a key component of the city that that would be a public in all due respect i think my question would be best answered by city manager rather than you know sure representative well i think that it i think it depends on how much we've locked ourselves into the creation of the pit to begin with and if if they're you know this is a small component of reimburse themselves for very specific infrastructure programs but if the creation of the pit required that it be public infrastructure i mean the answer yes if there's still an ability to not honor or to not approve the pit then that would be a point of negotiation where you could require that this be private infrastructure it's highly unlikely this ever would have moved forward if that were if the requirement that it was been private infrastructure though so i think that i think that decision is passed you yeah go ahead let me clarify all the improvements are already public they're already dedicated they're already being maintained by the city this is part of your mobility plan this has been public improvements from day one so there's no option to make these private even if we wanted to we couldn't make them private even if you wanted to they're already public streets they're dedicated on maps and plats back years ago and they're on your mobility plan so heritage trails a public street panhandles public street obviously the water lines a public water line so there's no option to make these private and the cost of maintaining public roads are covered under your normal city operating budgets just like any other public road this is not a private road in any form or fashion we're not making a choice here we're building public roads that were always intended to be public roads right i understand the point of view sounds like you want to confirm that not that i've an axe to grind either way i mean i'm really just trying to understand what the levers are what's before us you know well he is correct i mean once once the city accepts the streets water lines sewer lines they become public improvements so that has happened so it is too late for this to okay to not be all right so then whatever the maintenance costs are that's what they're going to be and it's not material to our decisions yeah it's really not it's just more interesting i think and we can we can certainly put together a cost based upon our total system and you know when we will start incurring maintenance costs on this yeah but but but it doesn't weigh on any decision that we have to make that's correct it's really no different than somebody puts in a subdivision residential subdivision they build the roads council mayor pro tem thank you just to be just be clear i look forward to the feedback i'm okay moving forward and i want to be very clear uh i've been working in in partnership with um or just visiting and learning and from red development since being on planning and zoning and and and kind of work with them every phase of the way and so i don't want it to sound like i mean they've done everything that that i've anticipated them to do and i think that's very clear should be very clear and i mean and we've seen i've seen two projects that one in andy b's and two in the villages of razor ranch where i'm at the ground opening and then seeing them kind of come forward and and so from concept to actually being open have fulfilled every expectation so i just want to be clear about that but the the the the shift is that the property has been sold and that kind of me to me is important to give peace of mind to those that are invested in that area that they either one understand what's coming so that they can voice those concerns early and often or that they have some peace and that's that's really the key component for me so i'm happy to move forward and i'll just look at the projects and and and kind of understand what and for it sounds like it'll be good to formalize what is expected uh because there seems to be some different uh understandings yeah thank you and we'll i'll talk to the city attorney about you know if council would like us to bring the the new owner in to if there's any difference in his overall vision here and how that might affect anything um you know exactly what levers that gives us we'll also let the new owner know that that's a concern of council i know i know that several of you have brought that up to me independently he's aware um mr ricco is with fedella's uh he's here and it was efficient then yes yeah we're happy to continue discussions with him um about what his vision is yeah and i i i want to echo mayor proten's sentiments i mean i've i've worked and been associated with this project for the last 10 years and and i've been very pleased with red's persistence patience perseverance in uh the economy and changes of staff just the whole thing so i i i have utmost confidence in in what they've done out there so my comments are not to to try to provide some cold water on this it's just i just want to make sure this is a very important discussion because this will be the first one that we have in this community uh or the only one depending on what happens in the future but it's it's just good to understand the concepts the process and the implications so that we make the best decision we can so i'm i'm perfectly supportive of moving it forward uh to uh the september agenda based upon the information that we'll get on the site plan the concept plan you'll see it a little bit before then yes so you'll need to approve the like i said the preliminary sap by resolution that doesn't tie anyone down to making the necessary changes for the final sap but that does allow the developer to begin executing the the landowner agreement so that the landowners know what to expect from the assessment so it will come back either on the 20th if for some reason we can't get to a preliminary than the 27th but we have to bring that forward and call the public hearing and all those so the majority of everything will be finalized on the 17th so curious on what was the price per foot that was placed on the land assessment was it just the dcad value or what i mean you got a price per foot on the assessment but you how was the value i mean in the table when you go back to your table um yeah you've got um uh let's take one i actually did a calculation last night to check my math by pencil old school but essentially it's not a this isn't the value this is the so 1.5 acres is about 1.27 percent of the total land area in the assessment area and so if you actually multiply 1.27 percent times 8.1 million you get 102 000 okay that's how you did it you just took it a proportional you put it took it on a proportional basis okay all right any other questions my understanding is we're moving forward with this we're going to have other information coming forward but um okay all right thank you very much appreciate it thank you very good job thank you scott for being here to give us some some background and some assistance thank you all right i think lunch is ready let's take a break for about five or ten minutes grab our lunch and we'll get back to work welcome everybody back to this meeting of the denton city council on august the 13th 2019 it is 12 57 p.m we're back to our work session reports on work session agenda item 3b receive report hold discussion give staff direction regarding internal audit of the procurement card program in the procurement department and an audit of the procurement programs and controls good afternoon um is the city auditor purchasing is one of the very significant control for local governments local governments typically spend if you could maybe put the yeah i can i can barely hear you now yeah there you go there you go okay you're good thank you very much appreciate it let me start again uh purchasing is one of the very significant control for local governments and because local governments spend millions after millions of dollars through this function on a city i mean on a nationwide basis this function has had significant amount of frauds and abuses and uh again i mean that rose in our risk assessment as a very high risk item in texas non-compliance with the procurement statutes can be charged with financial penalties and confinement or both basically i'm going to be representing two audits uh today and basically they have the common subject matter i mean this compliance with procurement statute were studied at two different levels into different audits on a bright side purchasing division has good policies and procedures and uh city is very effectively using the cooperative purchases cooperative purchases are cheaper to enter into and they are quicker so they are beneficial uh division appropriately processes emergency purchases we did find several opportunities for improvement the state local government code requires that the city must seek sealed bids or proposals for expenditures over 50,000 with some exceptions and city is required to obtain two quotes for from historically underutilized business for expenditures between 3,000 and 50,000 also the city policy requires solicitation of three quotes for purchases between 3,000 and 50,000 we observed that the city did not obtain sealed bids for 7.4 million dollars of purchases each exceeding 50,000 from 71 vendors without procuring sealed bids this purchases did not fall within exceptions and were made during f y 17 and f y 18 in addition the city employees use p cards to make purchases for more than 50,000 from seven vendors and spent 674,000 without complying with the statutes the city also made food purchases for 268,000 without compliance the city made purchases ranging between 3,000 and 50,000 from 867 vendors and we selected a sample of 50 vendors and we found 80% noncompliance with the statute and 54% noncompliance with the city policy and we found similar discrepancies in p card audit now why did this happen the root cause is that there was a interpretation of the statute that purchasing department had which turned out to be not very accurate and if law is applied accurately these are the results so what is the statute according to the procurement statute if separate purchases of items that in normal purchasing practices can be purchased as one purchase and they are cumulatively exceed 50,000 then compliance with the sealed bids and proposal is required the value that is the major value that this audit contributed that we with the assistance of city attorney's office we have an agreement with the administration we all agree what is the right process to go forward and they have agreed to that and we're going to go forward with that and we were informed that they have made progress so member breaks has a question and so on on that because the audit I think was just a July 2017 through 2018 which isn't a very I mean it's a long period but not and so did is it likely that the same interpretation has been consistently done in the city since before that year period as well or is it just no it is possible okay it is possible that we didn't look at the previous period right actually the period that you are referring to is just for peak audit okay and period for purchasing audit was f5 17 and f5 18 okay but it is conceivable that same interpretation existed before of course I've not audited right okay thank you the second issue is a previous council resolution authorized city to receive bids electronically and this particular resolution require identification security and confidentiality of electronically transmitted bids and proposals the e-bit process we found that there were several weaknesses that would allow premature opening and manipulation of bids now this process this discrepancy has been fixed or they are in the it is in the process of being fixed by implementation of a software and this software will restrict opening of the bed until the date of the opening and it will also keep pretty good tab on who is accessing the bed yes council member so so before that that software so anyone could open the bed before and look at it and is that is that what you're saying was was been had been done well I'm not saying it has been somebody did it possible but it was possible okay because bids were submitted in excel spreadsheet and we all know that Excel spreadsheet is very easy to manipulate but administration have fixed it is that software how does it already been purchased or is it within the supplemental my dad can answer that has it already been implemented good afternoon I'm cassie-ogden director purchasing yes the software has already been purchased we purchased it out of last year's budget and it's fully implemented as of June 1st okay thank you we looked at the bid evaluation process and we didn't find proper documentation of independent unbiased determination the available documentation sometimes did not identify the evaluation team who participated on evaluation team there was no documentation supporting the reasoning for assigning scores or independence of the evaluation team I was told that the administration is working on this issue and and it's going to be taken care of and they are going to keep detailed documentation of who participated and what was the reason that's correct in fact staff about a year ago has implemented a process that anyone saying I evaluation teams as well have to fill out a form disclosing any relationships anything like that so just continuing to formalize all these processes that it's exactly why we set that function up 12 to 18 months ago as we were running across several of these issues we also looked at the sole source purchases now also purchases are important because this purchases basically does not follow the sealed bidding so basically circumvent the whole procurement law and this is provided in the law that in certain cases we can purchase sole source where there is only one vendor exists for certain product that city may have useful so we looked at that issue and the evaluation the controls over evaluation of sole source purchases needed improvement for 87 percent of sample 47 purchase purchases sole source purchases there was no evidence that the item offered are the only products that products or services that can meet city's operational needs many of these purchases were supported by the letters of vendors promoting their own product my understanding is city has implemented a new process that is going to fix this issue. The P card purchases are basically credit card purchases which are conducted by employee making their own decision and purchasing it but that needs to be approved by the by management and management meaning their supervisors that is the only control over this purchases however we found that for many transaction like 800 some transactions well I'm ahead of myself I'm sorry P card purchases were not monitored for management and compliance with law the issue is that city may be missing opportunities for consolidating some of the purchases and getting a contract for getting better price we were also informed that subsequent to the audit purchasing division has implemented monitoring of the monitoring procedures okay as I said we found that for 862 transactions totaling $238,000 the supervisors did not approve the transaction and basically I mean this discrepancy can lead to abuse because supervisor control is the only control on these transactions subsequent to audit the supervisors are required to approve the transactions failing to do so would lead to suspension of P card privileges so this is a good solution for that. During the audit period the city spent about $412,000 in travel costs and since this travel costs were booked by employees individually they paid retail prices however the state of Texas has a travel management program which is available to us and using this program could result in cost savings purchasing division has concurred to research options available through states travel program so if we identify savings then that will be benefit to the benefit of the city so I want to ask you something about that because I know we went over this in the audit finance committee so if I remember correctly based upon and in the report based upon at least the draft report your determination will result in recognized cost savings at least at the time of the audit finance committee it was based upon a telephone call of somebody giving some hypothetical situation somebody saying we haven't implemented the program yet but this is what we think in other words that's a pretty definitive statement you have up there and at least when we reviewed the report in the audit finance committee meeting I had a concern about that because it didn't seem like that was based upon data that was too easily a substantiated or specific kind of proposal because that means if you travel at a certain time you've got to take a certain so the use of the program may result in recognized cost savings but to say will at least unless you have some different information than what was at the audit finance report I'm struggling with that no I take it back I mean it should not be definitive statement because the purchasing division has to do their own analysis to come up with that okay all right yeah technicality but this is something we discussed back then so I wanted to make sure we had some clarification I understand yeah all right thank you that's all I had for this any questions on the p-card and okay we'll go down to councilmember armature and then councilmember Briggs so first I want to say thank you for this audit this is something that was very important to me and I don't know if this was a result of my asking you know you to do a p-card audit or if I when I mentioned it you were already planning on doing it either one it doesn't matter but it's what has been a concern of mine since long before I got on City Council I'm mentioning this because there had been you know going years back number of public information requests for p-card audits and there were purchases that stood out to you know members of the public as just possible red flags you know of course the average member of the public can't do an audit but you know I remember when one one year it was I think maybe well I won't say the number but thousands of dollars in dip and dots you know for parks you know maybe that is the sole vendor I don't know you know a lot of those you know the red wing shoes maybe that is the sole vendor but I know that those were listed the shoes were listed as one of the kind of incorrectly purchased items you know $54,431 in these these these red wing red wing shoes and you know when members of the public raise these kind of issues sometimes the response that that that that you get is a kind of defensive well gosh people need to wear shoes you know people need these things and so I'm pointing this out just to say when you when we look at how things that just struck members of the public is unusual now that we have an internal auditor thank goodness and these these kinds of issues get just get looked at by the auditor and then we find out there is actually lots of money that has been been wasted because of lack of oversight so it doesn't really it doesn't help I'm just making this as a general statement general observation that when we hear these kind of concerns from member of the members of the public instead of being defensive we should we should we should say well maybe that's a source of concern you know please forward that to the auditor so anyway I just wanted to point that out and to say indeed there were legitimate concerns it's very troubling I'm happy that these are being cleared up but and I encourage people to to read the report because it's in these small expenditures that add up that you know taxpayers money can can trickle out so anyway think I just wanted to thank you and and to to mention that not so much a question but as an important statement I felt needed to be said you're welcome and maybe I missed it I know you represented some facts about transactions that might not have subscribed to particular state compliance or but I don't think I heard you say that a lot of money was wasted you gave facts about whether there was you know review supervisory pre cards or something so I mean I just I didn't hear that statement in your in your presentation or read it in the audit so I just want to make that clear thank you yes councilmember Briggs so I have a few things and what just on that what what I read and what I inferred was that if certain processes were to be changed we could have some you know we could save money not that it was a waste just that there's potential to save money if certain other processes were possibly were implement possibly yeah if we were to do it a big process so I did read both individual reports and there were several recommendations and I and in favor of all those recommendations and just wanted to I know that I was going through and saw that some had been implemented somewhere and just wanted to give you a moment to say you know on those recommendations if if you're in agreement with all of those I think largely I think you mesh is work here it's it's not real surprising I mean one of the one of the things we've been dealing with especially in the purchasing room is just a lack of informality and practice and so it's helpful to get another eye on it and a set of eyes on it and to say you know what are the concerns Cassie and her staff of you know that's the reason her position was set up was to start attacking some of these issues because we continued we saw a lot of the same things that mesh was saying he's brought some other ideas to the table as well and I think at the end of the day it just makes us stronger but yeah we are in the process of implementing suggestions there's really no huge disagreements with him at the with the final report I mean we we sit down with his office and kind of hash out any concerns or differences of opinion or or ideas at the end of the day I think there's still some you know there's always going to be that that discussion at the end of the day but he's there really just to challenge practices do you have the right documentation that sort of thing so that's what we've been doing not only in the purchasing area but really all over the city the last couple of years and I don't I there's nothing I really take exception to it all I think a lot of what he's talking about just basic management controls that we're having to break some old habits so I just have a couple more okay and so I don't know if this was covered I didn't really read it but do any of the things that you found as far as the the bid processes because when we get bids in we send out 400 and like three come back and that's always been a question for us you know why aren't more people responding did you find anything in this audit that would give clue or reason to that to that or are not really is that something beyond well I did see that many of the emails that went out were returned like they were not correct email address so that is one of the factor but why somebody will not bid is beyond is that not okay yeah and then the last thing because both of them we have local government codes that are in place and so you know why does it matter well that's a big one and so who would bring that up to us would it be that a another bidder or a retailer would approach us and say that you know we're not doing this properly is that who we should look out for or well what the risk is that suppose if he awarded bed and the person that did not get the bid can dispute because of the discrepancies that we have and in that case I mean it will be difficult for us to check I mean defend defend that so that is a risk okay thank you well I would just say that there are bid processes that go out where we do have vendors challenge the processes and you'll see us routinely bringing in let's reject the bids learn from this what wasn't clear not I don't think the I don't think the number of busy receiving is all that concerning quite frankly a lot of times are just blast emails out the vendors that sign up and they may or may not be interested in the work they may or may not be the local company that's eligible to service the parts you just don't know I know I know the numbers look weird you know but you can't force people to bid and there's sometimes market constraint reasons why they don't do it but the one concern that he's brought up that I definitely agree with it's the sole sourcing and that's been something that we've had to put some processes in place we're continuing to work with the departments and there had been a you know a comfort level here that we like working with you know company acts and we're just going to therefore we're going to craft a good reason that we should work for company acts and Cassie and her staff have been given full authority and autonomy to challenge every one of those decisions request proof that sort of thing so it's how these audits work and it's helpful to us to say look you know it's coming from different places and it helps also structure her workload as well where she's spending her time so it's very helpful overall but a lot of what he's identified is definitely doesn't need to be improved just to follow up just I just want to say thank you to the city auditor and thank you to the city manager for working together this is how the process is supposed to work and I appreciate it. Councilmember Meltzer then Councilmember Armitage. Yeah I'll just add a comment that you know when I initially saw this on Audit and Finance was a little alarmed by the sort of impression you get that like somebody was going out and making $50,000 purchases and ignoring the process but when we dig a little deeper and see that you know what a mesh has really turned up is was a recognition of some of our purchasing power that by making many little purchases actually do have $50,000 plus leverage with variety of different retailers and I think it's led to some efficiencies so you know just good management practice to catch it. Councilmember Armitage. And just to clarify what I meant by waste you know it's a personal definition what one considers waste versus not. As I see it it's not so much that these purchases weren't weren't needed it's not up to me to judge that that would be a whole other kind of audit but it's just a matter of as far as I'm concerned if purchases were made you know illegitimately or illegally or not following at least the protocol then that's a betrayal of the taxpayers trust in my view and I feel that any money purchased that way is wasteful so anyway that I wanted to clarify and I wanted to ask you know if you were to single out you know so looking at the list of departments you know kind of parks comes out at the top of you know make in terms of just expenditures of these P card purchases made in violations and if you could you know say a little bit more about that does it tend to be you know because departments cover a lot of each department covers a lot of territory you know in a department like parks is so big I mean where they kind of spread out all over the department or in certain certain areas. We did not look at that granular detail okay we will look that kind of detail when we audit the parks department got it okay okay let's say in that case you've got there is no department in the city that comes close to the number of programs they put on exactly so you know rather than throw a department out like that I think each each department's got its own unique set of circumstances some departments are solely going out procuring tools that sort of thing which he's helped us as well get standard agreements that you've approved recently with Lowe's and Sam's at Home Depot and those sort of those sorts of things and but the lot of the programming of these departments is where you're going to see it I mean one of the outcomes of Umesh's work is my hand gets to sign a lot more things and but it's helpful seeing that you know having us kind of rethink some processes and who most probably who we're giving P cards to it is changing behaviors in terms of the the travel the meals more due diligence on that sort of thing so you're not going to get a simple answer on any one of these with the with the P cards and I think the I think the other thing we're going through is just sort of discussing who really needs them how many do how many do we need out there and should we start you know using POS instead of P cards but I think the other thing that's important to realize in this whole thing is you know he's come in kind of giving us some best practices in a few areas but Cassie and Jamie have been kind of rebuilding our processes and purchasing for 18 months that I don't think the manual had been touched in 30 years and the informality in this area was something that definitely needed to be improved so when we see audits like this it's just sort of integrating what are we doing we should is there an area that we should be focusing more on as we're continuing to you know revise and modernize the business practices so that is how it's supposed to work and it's helpful from that regard thank you and that reminds me you know thanks not just to our auditors but to Cassie and staff for really revise revising this this process so in need of revision any other questions on this agenda item okay and you're up for the next one is that correct she's going to be present oh okay medicine all right agenda item 3c which is received report hold discussion to give staff direction regarding an internal audit of the city utilities cuts process um hello i'm madison russia i'm a staff auditor for the city i'm here to present our audit of utility street cuts as the mayor just said um so i'll start with kind of why we did this audit um so this audit evaluated the city's ability to safeguard it's one of its largest assets um streets from the effects of utility street cuts um so you know not only are streets a huge investment but the city also spends millions of dollars annually to maintain and improve this asset um and a street cut so essentially utility lines are often placed under or around streets to more efficiently provide services to residents as i'm sure you guys know um but in order to main these utilities um you have to cut into the street which weakens the integrity of the street structure so the city mitigates the effects of some of these cuts on streets through the right-of-way permitting process which has three key components one is the design standards for the restoration of utility cuts which are developed by engineering services um two is the work conducted by the utility crews and their associated contractors which they're expected to meet those standards and then three um review and inspections completed by public works inspections right-of-way inspectors um to ensure that the crews comply with the standards um so we found that this process is well designed however we identified three key areas for improvement so the first is the city standards so this is an illustration of the cross section of a roadway um and best practices suggest that a utility street cut once it's restored look like this um specifically the underlying cut should be t-shaped the backfill which is this section right here should be compacted to a certain level and that the joints of the pavement should be sealed which is this black line basically however we found that the city standards actually look like this um basically the joints aren't they don't require the joints to be sealed and this allows water dirt weeds and other materials to enter into the joints which can cause faster deterioration of not only the patch backfill but also the original street underlying layers of the road um so this can cause cracking of the surface um sinking of the patch and ultimately a pothole um and we recommended that the standards be changed to address this issue issue and um staff has concurred any questions on this area is it typically the um a developer and a private development who would do this the right of way workers it's the city that does the work it's tipped it's most likely the city um but also like at most the gas company does that and some other like um uh cable companies do some work under the city they have infrastructure there and they do this kind of work that we're talking about and regardless of whoever it is they follow the city standards so it's they are expected to correct um so actually that's the next part i'm going to talk about so second we found that external utilities and internal utilities are being held to different standards um specifically the external utilities such as at most and co-serve and other entities like that are required to use um a concrete flowable backfill on the top 18 inches of their trench so that's this area right here um and the internal utilities um have been and had more flexibility in their backfill material so they're not required to use this specific backfill um in part this is because internal utilities um are being inspected by the city's field services supervisors while external utilities are being inspected by public works inspection um so we recommended that public works inspection do the inspections for all the utilities including the city's utilities to ensure that they comply with the standard um and staff is generally uh concurred with these recommendations um but water and utilities and engineering services are working together um to look take a look at these design standards to make sure that they can comply basically so any questions on this did did you did you consider as part of the as part of this uh the size of easements for utilities or sit for internal utilities or is this just about is that is that another discussion is that i think that's another discussion okay okay because yeah that that is something that has has been called to my attention that i would like to to see i like this idea of having public works inspections of having an external external supervision on on that on this um and i think when it comes to easements too because it's been pointed out to me you know that there's some areas all over the the city where there are kind of questions about you know is this utility pole too close to this you know residential development and as far as i understand we were the ones yeah we did not take a look at easements yeah so that would be great thing to to look at also thanks okay so then the last um area for improvement um we found that part of the reason you the city utilities were not receiving inspections from the public works inspections was because of their workload um we estimated that the inspections took up um 93 percent of dedicated right away inspector time during 2018 which does not include any administrative work at all um so the division has recently hired two new inspectors so we did not recommend a staffing increase um to facilitate these workload increases um but we have recommended implementation of a permit management solution which we believe should increase the administrative efficiency um once it's in place um so any questions on this any questions okay so um in addition to those findings we issued a few uh other recommendations to increase the effectiveness of public works inspections mainly we recommended some changes to the right of way permitting fee structure improvements to inspection documentation and clarification of internal utility policy um management has fully concurred with all but one of our 13 recommendations um and the remaining recommendation was partially concurred with and we believe that they have a sufficient plan in place to address that finding um so now i'm i'm done unless you have more questions any further questions thank you very much appreciate it all right thank you great presentation all right we'll move on to agenda item three d receive report hold discussion give staff direction regarding public meeting video recording prioritization mayor council ryan adams public affairs um just to uh bring this topic back up to council uh we are seeking your direction on the streaming recording of additional board of commission meetings as you recall back in april we presented options to supplement our dtv staff as they record public meetings this would be twofold one would be able to potentially record additional public meetings and we'd also free up dtv staff time to be able to focus on other responsibilities that they have including video production at that time council recommended outsourcing uh 50 meetings per year with the city's current uh recorded meeting host uh swagger productions and i'm happy to report that we have executed a contract with them and we're right now in the uh deployment and implementation they should be doing some uh equipment installation in this room here in the next few weeks so these are the meetings that we actually record right now uh when we met back in april we presented a similar slide that had uh the uh number of meetings and the average views up to that time we've updated that slide to include everything from the last six months uh from january to june and as you can probably guess city council has the most meetings the longest meetings and the most views on the other end of the spectrum your traffic safety committee our commission is the lowest amount of meetings uh the and the lowest amount of of live and on-demand views so what you're going to discuss today and and hopefully provide direction on is uh the potential to add up to two meetings additional boards commission meetings that are recorded uh staff recommends that council consider the board of ethics or the zoning board of adjustment of course the board of ethics has had some interest in having those uh proceedings recorded for uh for the future the the board itself has has made that request in addition to that the zba zoning board of adjustment is a quasi-judicial board which has a unique level of authority and sets it apart from other types of boards and commissions council can also consider uh replacing one or more of the less reviewed meetings that we currently record and and putting something in its place or giving staff direction to procure additional meeting recording services uh we currently are going to have 50 uh remote recordings uh they do sell them in bundles of 50 so if council so chose to give staff that direction we could procure another 50 meetings to be outsourced so as an example of what that might look like uh if we were going to add in an additional board of commission meeting uh we could have our dtv staff record themselves the city council p and z and pub meetings and then outsource to swag it the economic development partnership board mobility committee traffic safety and then add on the board of ethics with an estimate of about 20 meetings per year for that board that would be 100 meetings on average uh recorded by our own internal staff 50 by swag it but we would save a healthy amount of hours for our dtv staff that they could put towards video production and other activities that of course is not the only option uh we can take out the lowest if you're looking at option b you can take out the lowest viewed least number of meetings commission which is traffic safety and bring on board zba as a substitute addition option c would be to potentially take option b and add more meetings onto it and kind of open the doors to a number of different uh combinations of of boards of commissions that could be recorded and this is where i step back and and ask council to provide direction and on what they would like staff to do as far as recordings thank you i prefer option b well i think when you brought just the first go around i don't know that i said it exactly as option b is stated but uh it makes a lot more sense that boards with decision making power be recorded as opposed to those that are advisory only so option b is to me the best option out there i also prefer option b could you flip back to slide three real quickly just want to take a quick moment to point out that um it's important for us all to remember that meetings consume resources um it's not just time we spend in a room talking about things they take staff time we pay the staff to be here it takes uh real monetized resources to have meetings that last uh several hours uh yes so i am wondering uh and i'm not sure what the results will be of uh zba how many you know views we'll get of course there's you know no way we can tell except to try it uh i i do you know consider it a priority and i this might mean that that i'm suggesting options c uh definitely either b or c uh but our committee on persons with disabilities uh is you know because they're highlighting uh it issues pertaining to people with disabilities many many of whom can't even can't make the meetings because of their because of their their disabilities and the additional time it takes um so you know that that is one citizens committee that yes it's just an an advisor an advisory committee to council uh but because of the subject matter you know that would be one that i would advocate for uh for having their meetings recorded i think especially when when or if i should say we we decide to do the closed captioning which we're not deciding on today but that's a a possible budget item uh which i i support that would really help um with with that committee with with all committees for for people with disabilities so uh you know i i guess i'm fine going with the with zba and seeing how how many views it gets because you never know uh until you try it um so why don't i say i prefer you know even though in in the minority uh prefer option c with consideration for the committee uh persons with disabilities and also the council committee on the environment again i don't know what the results would be it might turn out that a few number of a small number of people uh watching that but i know that i've had uh at least one person ask me you know why aren't they the environment committee meetings recorded and then i've explained this whole this whole whole process uh so i know that there's an interest in that you know i hope at some point uh it becomes efficient and economical enough to get pretty much all of them i mean i can make a case why people might want to hear just about any of them in public art is you know uh makes decisions and hlc you know it's kind of quasi-judicial in that way too um but uh in the current world you know i came in with a different uh point of view but i'm actually persuaded uh that i'd go for board of ethics and disability i think that's a persuasive argument that the people are interested you know many of the people are interested in that subject have mobility issues and uh would you know benefit from from it being videotaped anybody else mayor pro tem did you be yes sir i option b okay all right um so as far as on this what i thought i heard was that zba see how the viewing goes and then we can come back and revisit it and add a potential change it out absolutely with the committee on disability because right now we either change it out we substitute them or we spend an additional fifty thousand dollars to buy additional views which i mean that would be i guess a budget discussion uh later on uh so i'm okay with option b with the caveat that let's try it for some predetermined amount of time because they don't even meet regularly i don't do they meet regularly which which board zba they meet the schedule the last last one of the month but only as needed so yeah so it'd be interesting to get and and then the committee on disabilities meets is that once a month or what's that's once a month once a month yes sir so yeah i i think get some idea of what i'd like to have some historical context for zba how many times they might they might have met in the last six months or a year but i'm okay with option b with the caveat that let's do it for sort of a short amount of time and see what we get and then we can look at substitute committee on disabilities and we can do the same thing there see if people are tuning in and if this sort of hypothesis or this perspective uh bears itself out that will give us some data one thing that that we should note also is that board of ethics also meets as needed right so if if there is an opportunity there if the number of meetings trends down uh we can always reassess and look what we can do as staff uh given a period once we ramp up and we have a few months of data we can include uh what our statistics look like in terms of viewing in terms of number of meetings and a friday report and give that give that information to council so i do have the net that that's a very good observation so let me ask you this the board of ethics only meets i guess as needed now that they're going they're charged with some revisions to the ethics code they may meet more regularly so what would be interesting is if there's a way to do a hybrid and that is that and so i don't know how swag it works i don't know how this works so it may be impossible to do but if you have a month where the board of ethics or the zba is not meeting at this you know that month if we know that is there a way to substitute in the disabilities or would you want that on just a regular basis in other words sort of do a as if it if it's available we can do it and if not then we can or we just go with this and i i think to your point we we would want to make sure it's a regular basis because when we record one meeting you set that expectation that you're going to agree as i was saying that that's what i that's that's what came to mind so you're right sometimes i learn these things as i'm saying them council member briggs so i must have missed it but my my understanding was that swag it was going to be in addition to what we already recorded so i was thinking we could do i think in the the previous conversations it was two or three more boards but then when i look at this swag it has been used instead of dtb for for these and so and was my understanding that we were approving this in addition to so that we could get more boards and commissions but it looks like swag it just absorbed some of those other ones and then there's just room for one more so i may have missed that it's actually both they're going to be able to take some of the uh the boards that have a lesser number of meetings uh off our hands as far as staff goes but with since they do sell their services and bundles of 50 meetings there's still opportunity to add another one or two boards in in addition to what they're taking off our hands so we have the the benefit of more boards being recorded potentially but also saving staff time to devote to other other resources for our dtb staff and other activities so question then uh what i think i heard you say so if let's say hypothetically speaking let's say for instance on um edp me edp meets every month they meet roughly sometimes a little less i think 10 times a year mobility committee meets every month is that right yeah pretty much okay um so my thought is and i appreciate council member briggs what your observation so what you're saying is you just took since we're buying groups of 50 meetings is what i'm understanding you to say okay we want to feel swag it up and then whatever is not i mean we want to do council pnz and pub and then take the next 50 so if we took let's say mobility and we did still did dt dtv i don't know why i can make something that's hard to say dtv really shaking his head i don't know if he's shaking his head at my comment or he's shaking his head at me i can't tell um so if we substituted one in um for mobility or edp then we might could get the disability committee in so you're you're saying to not record mobility and bring in i'm saying if dtv is dtv recording mobility now they are recording mobility now okay um and are they recording the edp board they are uh are they recording traffic safety they are all right um so in essence if we said if we still had dtv record mobility but not edp or traffic safety so we're we're taking but edp is picked up by swag it mobility would be dtv board of ethics would be swag it zba would be swag it but it seems like we might have some room for the committee on disabilities if we if we take out the mobility and just put that at dtv ask that yeah so anyway did you want to mr matthews yes i see the billy thank you mayor council um on april 23rd when i was here what we proposed was offloading edp mobility and traffic safety to create some bandwidth for dtv okay our request load is you know we just can't meet all the requests we have for videos and so that's what i left and i left i mentioned at the end of that meeting 20 or so meetings would be available at the 50 and that typically would be two boards or commissions okay but because the board of ethics is meeting so regularly the approximate 20 count made it one so gotcha okay this is not only about doing more meetings this is about creating capacity for dtv and some bandwidth for our production otherwise we won't be able to meet the demands that we have yeah those demands being requests from just different departments or or uh you know some of our most successful and and not to besmirch some of our our our committee and commission meetings but some of our most successful most viewed communications in terms of video are like our original denton district video or an auditorium video they get thousands of views and the more time our staff stays dedicated to some of these meetings the less they have the ability to produce those meetings that are pushing out those communications to the public if i can make a recommendation it sounds like particularly with zba and board of ethics the the number of meetings is one question mark that is still out there would council be supportive if we it sounds like option b may have the most favor if we went forward with option b reported back on the number of meetings and if those come in low or if council wants to you know look at some of these other different options whether it's uh having staff drop mobility committee meeting or adding on another pack of 50 we can report back how we're doing and this question can come back up and we can we can take take another look to see if we had the right mix of commissions and committees yes council member can you tell me how many meetings you're assuming in this recommendation for zba for zba we're assuming 12 okay because i think it's actually like two a year seriously i'm not making that up i mean i i recall having to look through it when making an appointment because there's someone who's you know not sure how many meetings they could make and i think it's literally been two a year so if that's the case it's not on there what else could you do yeah yes uh council member briggs and council member robinson so i'm just going to say because you mentioned mobility um we had a meeting this morning and i think it's going to be extremely important that that be recorded with all the construction coming up and especially that's the one on systems text dot report that we get and so i have referred many people back to that when they have questions about construction and what's going on in the community and i would not like to see that one um go away i think it's it's really important right now with everything that's going on i don't think that's recommended to go well he mentioned something about mobility so i'm just going to put that out there i don't know okay yeah mayor pro tem oh i'm sorry council member i'll return the mayor protein um so can you can you explain uh the 10k to 47k you know the that range because i know they come in packages of 50 so how much that all depends and it's such a wide range depending on if if council was going to maybe recommend and come to consensus on a committee that for instance does not meet and perhaps for scheduling reasons cannot meet in the work session room but council felt strongly about recording that those meetings we would be uh we would need to actually rewire up a different room whether it's in city hall and that comes with a one-time equipment cost the 50 meeting package is about ten thousand seven hundred dollars uh and that's on an annual basis but if we had to wire up a new room that's where you had that variable that that wide ballpark range and that would be a one-time cost that would be a one-time but the recurring cost is consistent unless they rise the price on us in the future yeah okay yeah so i think um i mean that was bless you that was a good point about uh you know the the infrequency of the zba meeting so i'm hopeful obviously we'll know when we know uh but that disability committee or some other committee again that would disability committee would be my preference um we'd be able to have room for that once we see how often zba meets may put him no in in your tracking i'd like to maybe uh separate the board of ethics meetings to hearings right i think there's to me and and and i think there's a distinct difference in them kind of discussing verbiage versus hey there's a there's a hearing to be had and i think uh i'd like to just see how many of those just like vibrate those numbers because i think there's uh for me i think i would advocate for one over the other i got you so we report back in a few months make that distinction yes sir please and thank you so mr city attorney um question on zba because i understand that that board the decisions excuse me the decisions from that board would not be appealed to the city council they would need to be appealed directly to the district court is that correct first date statue that is correct and is that review to use the legal term of art de novo in other words whatever record is developed at zba um testimony comments i guess it could come in but yet there it's it's like starting all over just in in a different forum is am i i don't know is that is that how that works it's not a de novo review okay the standard would be basically reviewing all the evidence from the lower board and of course attorneys making their legal arguments and i think the standard is clear and convincing evidence okay there's a difference in texas depending where you're at as to what that burden of proof is yes councilmember davis i was going to ask you if you so um i think the mayor's question hits on um can you go back to slide three again i think we think about this first in terms of live streaming for people to be able to watch at home as we're doing things i think the more important thing we're doing with these recordings is preserving them for posterity like councilmember briggs mentioned referring someone back to the mobility committee um you see it all the time on facebook so it refers back to a city council meeting that's really the most important thing we're doing i think if we go down this list we kind of have diminishing returns um you know we have fewer and fewer reasons as we go down the number of views it's because people are referring back to them less so that i think a great reason for keeping the zba in the mix especially if it's only a few meetings a year if we're kind of flexing somewhere else but including zba um because i think that's one that someone someplace maybe even a district court may want to go back to um i did like their suggestion though on the ethics board when they're doing kind of work session stuff when they're kind of reviewing verbiage and thinking things through those are all changes to the ordinance that would have to come back to us anyway and be preserved for posterity that way however the hearings the things that they do they're just they're the only ones who can do it um i think that makes the most sense you know panel reviews hearings um advisory opinions even but the uh their meetings where they're kind of spitballing ideas and thinking up language i don't know that we necessarily need to record those forever and ever so there's been a little consultation between the city manager and mr matthews i believe and so we might have found us a solution that's what's so great about these discussions and deliberations and brainstorm because i think we can we can find a way to really meet as many interests as we can so i'm not going to take credit for it you can sort of talk about it it's all billy's idea you know the uh the zba uh councilmember melter's right i was just looking at the last three years i think they've averaged a couple meetings a year an hour and a half or less so the dtv could likely take that over and if you wanted to add the citizens with disabilities committee under the swagging account i think that's the solution and there's no i don't i don't see a need to choose between them when your average zba meetings less than an hour and a half you know that's not it's not going to stress them too much if that changes we start seeing an influx of new cases we'll talk to you but i think right now that's probably the way forward if that's if that's your goal is to get them both in so uh i'm going to call you mr matthews it's hard to do that but is it it would you like to come in or that that's okay with you okay that's all right okay so he's he's good with that so it's uh it's offloading a lot of what they requested maybe just an additional two meetings maybe less than two or three hours a year uh and of course if that begins to change we can come back and and make some additional decisions are people okay with that kind of uh compromise uh councilmember ryan well um i'm gonna go back to my previous statement that i feel like what needs to be recorded are those that have final decision making power those that could end up going before the board of ethics so i would think that hlc uh health and building go before the board of ethics yeah on our on our ethics ordinance we have we have these boards are covered by the ethics ordinance we have some that are not you know traffic safety is not but hlc is right so those are the ones that i feel like because they do have that final decision making power should be the most critical okay or the first on the role to yeah okay councilmember melzer i understand that rationality do you think ultimately we should get there but weighing a lot of concerns i like the recommendation they just teed up and i would also um just to save videoing hours i would uh i would also weigh in favor of the suggestion of board of ethics to limit it to kind of hearings versus you know just work sessions anybody else okay is everybody okay with sort of the proposition city manager enumerated yes councilmember barbara so yeah i love that idea i i just want to make sure um as far as the the discussion about the ethics board and whether or not to film just uh hearings versus all meetings is that is that something we're taking consent getting consensus on now or is is this are we kind of tape you know putting a pin in that for later yeah that's a good point i'm i'm okay with moving forward with doing all the meetings with that information coming back about how many meetings those are between bifurcating between sort of the meeting of the board for administrative purposes and the meeting of the board for hearings because if we've got the if we've got the capacity right then we've got the capacity for swag it's not going to cost us a whole lot more money if any i mean if you're buying a package of meetings so exactly if it's if it's doesn't affect our cost and i get that and then as we get more information on the number of meetings so forth we may want to move this around a little bit absolutely i think we have our direction just give you guys a quick couple of next steps we should be fully deployed by october 1 we're going to be testing out the equipment on different meetings we'll be here on staff just to make sure that everything goes right but it'll be very automatic once it gets rolling and we're hopeful it'll be very successful so from the public's perspective it'll be totally uh i don't want to say transparent it'll be seamless when they go to look at a an archived video it'll just be just the same as if dtv did it it'll stream in real time like it normally would and it will come right up on the website in the same time frame like it normally would okay and so the the end user shouldn't really notice a difference at all great okay fantastic all right thank you appreciate it when did we take a break was it yeah let's go ahead and take a little five-minute break before we get into budgets and rates welcome back to this meeting of the denton city council on tuesday august the 13th 2019 it is 141 59 we're back to our agenda items our work session reports 3e receive report and hold discussion give staff direction on the proposed water wastewater and electric rates for fy 2019 2020 good afternoon mayor city council members nick vinson the city's budget manager i'll be presenting to you today the fy 1920 water and wastewater rates after these presentations tony will come up and present dme's rates so for the upcoming fiscal year we're proposing no residential or commercial water rate changes in this proposed budget this slide summarizes the wholesale water rates in the city of denton i do want to point out that we are proposing to increase the wholesale raw water pass-through rate on lake chapman it is increasing from 0.0266 to 0.0270 this is based on the cpi adjuster for the month of june what's the residential rate comparison at 9200 gallons you can see the city that in the middle of 52 18 just in about in the middle of the neighboring communities so commercial rate comparison at 50 000 gallons using a two inch meter it's 274 is the current rate commercial water rate comparison at 200 000 gallons using a two inch meter is 940 150 we're currently in the middle also with that that concludes the water presentation so as i said we're proposing for residential commercial rates to stay the same this fiscal year wow that's a i think that's almost a record council member melzer um i recall a year ago there was a view that uh 10 years out there could be a hundred million dollar expense and this is the same same kind of dynamic with wastewater and the point of view at the time was you can't really store up funds and anticipation of that people don't really like that so much and also technology can change or outlook can change i just wonder if there's any kind of update on you know those prospects uh we've updated the uh 10-year forecast for both water and wastewater i think we had shared with you last year there was a uh potential solution on the uh the wastewater side to buy us a little bit more time and capacity and so that was actually one of the proposals on tonight's agenda one of the change orders for that project so we feel good about that the update to the city's impact fees has also been helpful and one of the things that we've changed this year i think trying to meet you midway and the councilman midway is starting to escrow up the new impact fees to help pay for the design and the initial design of the next expansion of both the water and wastewater treatment plants that is an eligible expense and it does it does help us start building those those dollars to have to mute the effect on our existing rate payers who don't necessarily need that extra capacity today so that's how we move forward we're going to continue to evaluate on an annual basis as we always do you know what the growth looks like and how that's driving our planning time frames for both those utilities i think it's the most responsible way of moving forward you just never really know if you're going to hit a low on the growth and then you've started over billing people so i i like the middle ground we've reached on this over those discussions thank you yes and does this rate ordinance include the higher rates for the summer months if you use a certain um more water is that still the same there is a billing based on um summer months that is correct yeah absolutely so the winter month and summer months there's two different volume charges for those okay those are staying consistent they are staying consistent absolutely yes mayor pro tem did under do i read it right that the difference between um commercial and residential is just usage as far as how which how it's categorized reason i ask is someone asked me uh they have a hanger at the airport and they're they fall into commercial and so i just needed to answer how that determination is made um so let me ask uh dr banks come up here and i guess you're wanting to know when someone calls in for service how we determine if it's a residential service or a commercial service more of a billing okay from the buildings okay good afternoon i'm ken banks i'm general manager of utilities um this is uh typically determined when a customer calls in for service uh through customer service um it's going to it depends on on whether it's an upgrade to an existing service or whether it is a new service so if it's a new service we'll typically end up having a information to take a look at to determine what the what the usage is so uh it a commercial is just simply something that is in a commercial zoning district it's not zoned residential uh there there are other factors that go into that consideration but that's an easy way to to think about how we make that distinction and so um again if it's if it's a changing use it's a little bit different but um a new use is is often based on zoning and just an understanding of what's being proposed okay thank you sure council member brief yeah and i think we saw the comparison chart and i think it's probably going to be in the other presentations too and we'll be in the wastewater presentation yeah yeah from other cities and um do we take into account the size of those cities or is it just that they're full service or i mean what well when we pick the cities that we pick are they just um what are these cities we've historically used um in the past so to answer your question there are some cities on this chart that are smaller than the city of denton and some that are larger but we've historically compared ourselves to these cities um so historically i mean if we if we were to narrow some cities down and put the ones that were comparable to us in full certainly that would be a better idea for me about how our rates are um just for future we can definitely do that thank you okay all right great okay i'll pull up wastewater now i'll walk through it if you have any questions feel free to stop me so similar to water we're not proposing any rate adjustments to residential commercial rates this fiscal year in 1920 i have summarized the residential wastewater rates for you here there are two components that make up a customer's monthly bill on the wastewater service side one being the facility charge you can see that i'm here of eleven dollars and one being the volume charge of 380 per thousand gallons this is the residential monthly bill comparison at 5400 gallons i do want to point out last year we did a five percent rate reduction for wastewater customers we also reduced the minimum volume charge from 6000 to 5400 gallons so this chart is represented in the new 5400 gallon minimum which the rate would be 3152 this is the residential wastewater comparison of 5400 gallons you can see the city of denton towards the bottom end of the chart at 3152 um in this breaks coming forward we can come back with some different cities to show commercial rate comparison similar to residential there are two components that make up a commercial rate a facility charge and a volume charge so you can see the inside city denton commercial customers 2650 for the facility charge the volume charge is 485 this is the commercial monthly bill comparison at 50 000 gallons and at 200 000 gallons and so you can see the rates are staying the same at 269 and 996 50 it's the commercial wastewater comparison at 50 000 gallons and you can see the city of denton right here in the middle in the yellow at 269 so the commercial wastewater comparison at 200 000 gallons you can see the 996 currently in the middle so we are proposing to change a few compost fees this fiscal year and the first one we are looking to introduce a bag dino dirt rate of four dollars per bag and this is something we want to continue you know begin offering to the community for sale they come into the facility and currently it's sold in bulk so this will be easier for people to transport that want to take it home and dino dirt overs and this product is used in erosion control around the community we are looking to increase that rate from two dollars three dollars a cubic yard based on cost of service dino landscape mulch is currently 2750 a cubic yard and there are other types of mulch that are offered this particular one does not have a high demand so we are looking to discontinue this rate yeah no so on the on the bag dino dirt i know that there was a pilot or that it had been implemented for a little while and it was very successful for those who don't have a large truck but and have smaller yards to to be able to do that and so i'm very in favor of continuing that so on the dino landscape mulch how many mulches do you have and how do you determine what is high demand and what's not i'll ask dr banks to come back up the podium he can speak to how many mulches there are and and is this um made from and we're going to we just on our consent agenda there's going to be a an item tonight for for mulching right for for grinding wood wood material if it's a consent agenda item a uh that's for the grinding purposes and so that really applies to any type of compost that we're going to be making because we're taking the raw wood waste and grinding it up um with regards to the uh to the bag dino dirt just real quickly to run through this list you're correct it was a pilot uh four dollars a bag is based on cost of uh of service calculation and that has been very successful we've uh we basically uh didn't advertise that and we started that program up this february and we've already had about 2300 bags go out the door so i'm pretty pretty good and um especially considering it wasn't advertised so this is just to memorialize the rate and the rate structure uh the dino dirt others is a waste product uh that we uh store it's they're basically uh at least at the time we're thought to be too large to actually uh go into the compost and be used as a compost feedstock however we've been experimenting with some different ways to use those materials uh we we proposed the two dollar rate just simply to allow it to uh be used there were other composters that came in and and took some of the material off site so we gained some storage space uh but now that we are uh finding that we can use it as a good feedstock for our operations we're actually proposing to start using more of that in-house and so we're raising the rate a little bit to um make sure that we're recovering full cost on it and then also in recognition of the fact that it's becoming a usable product for us um i don't have the fee schedule with regards to the different types of landscape vultures we have a number of different products this particular one requires a a multiple grinding passes and it simply is not one that we've seen much sales on what we have found is that the first grind pass on that is actually producing a product that we've been experimenting with for erosion and sediment control and being able to apply that material to a site so that when you have a stormwater event it will actually retain the sediments on site and it's a usable product at the end of the day because it doesn't have to be removed like a landscape fence or something like that so what we're doing or what we're proposing to do on this is the dino landscape mulch which has never been a very big seller to actually eliminate that and focus on using the feedstock for the landscape dino landscape mulch for the purposes of creating this erosion and sediment control product there are other types of of uh of landscape mulches out there uh this particular one just not it has not been a big seller for us just a follow-up sure yeah and so um if i if you could get that to me i'm curious just to know how much um how many different kinds i haven't and i've heard that some of them use dye or there's a colored product yeah and so i'm and is this one that didn't use the dye that's correct yeah it's not a colored product right and so there's some concerns of people that buy the mulch that have the dye in it versus this natural one so correct and and there are other natural mulch options still available with this one off of the line okay if i could just get a sure yeah a list of those thank you yeah council member roberter so so just to clarify so of the um the dino dirt that has been sold so far how much of it has been this year this fiscal year how much has been purchased by the city versus purchased by uh individuals i i don't have those numbers with me we'd be glad to follow up with a uh informal staff report to put those together for the council yeah i would i would love to see that and so that but now the the 23 what is that 2300 bags did you say uh yeah it was is that just individually is that just individual that's the that's the individual single cubic foot bags so i mean and those are just going to individuals or those are also purchased i would have to look back at the numbers to see if we distinguish those my my guess would be they're predominantly going to individuals because they're relatively small product they're really made for someone that wants to put a couple of bags in a trunk of a car or or in the back of a pickup truck versus getting a full scale unbagged load in a larger you know truck or a trailer okay thanks so would it be acceptable to go ahead and put the mulch types in the isr as well so that we could just kind of have that all together okay all right any other questions thank you thank you thanks actually concludes this presentation too okay thank you very much all right well uh let's see i guess the next one is uh agenda oh i thought we had dme on here three three uh oh there it is oh okay yeah go ahead mayor city council tony puente chief financial officer just kind of run through this uh presentation again based on the direction that we receive from the council at your budget workshop um the staff had proposed a one and a half percent increase to the eca rate council directed us to have no rate increases and so this rate ordinance that we're proposing uh reflects that direction from the council so there will be no no base rated uh changes uh no changes to the eca or the renewable cost adjustment uh we continue to have a suspension of the transmission cost recovery factor uh there are a couple of other items on here that i did want to to kind of go through certainly if you have any questions i have some backup here on residential rates but just quickly so again the residential rates all stay the same there are no changes uh being proposed based on the direction from council same thing with uh general um or commercial uh rates as well all remain um unchanged um i do have a just a little bit of information for you we have added a a new rate to the rate ordinance that's being proposed in recognition of the upcoming changes to the led system um across across the city for both street lights and also security lights and so we've provided just some basic information for you on some of the changes obviously with the led lights there is a reduced wattage that goes into into those lights that will certainly result in a little bit of savings and so we wanted to recognize that within our uh proposed rate ordinance um again the eca rate uh one of things that we are proposing this year is to actually add the actual eca rate uh to the rate ordinance it was previously just in there by reference and so we've specifically added that in there and going forward any changes we'll have to amend uh this particular rate ordinance um with that uh that really all i have for you let's have any questions yes ma'am yeah could you go back to the i think the first slide that actually not the first that that one right there so the prepaid service i see is a little bit more expensive and i think i read it's because of the um the the facility charge yes that's the the cost to the to the particular vendor who's who's worked who's facilitating that process for us okay and so the prepaid service is something that we offer to help with monthly bills is that i mean if you could just go over that and um the is that the facility charge is that a third party vendor that that we pay that or is it just our in-house staff that works on it more it's it's actually it's actually both but yes the the the reason for the increases because of the contract that we have with acceleron or not acceleron acceleron and so one of the one of the benefits and some of the benefits that we've talked to you before is that if a customer is on this prepaid service then there is no deposit that's required and so that is waived and also any of the reconnect fees are also waived and so that customer gets that advantage by being on this prepaid service is no need for there to be deposits and is this the one where if they it's a prepaid service but they're short twenty dollars their utilities get cut off is that still this one the one where they have we're having some issues with i mean and and people really not understanding when they sign up what what it's about i mean i just see that their rate is a little bit more and i understand the benefit of the no deposit and um but there's been some issues if say a normal um residential service um is not is has a 20 balance um what's the time difference that their utilities get cut off versus someone with a prepaid service is it the same or is it is it different let me ask tiffany she'll kind of walk you through that okay good afternoon tiffany thompson director customer service so for the prepaid utilities the customer does have a difference in when they would be just subject for disconnection it is truly based off if they are prepaying for their services so all of our all of our other accounts are post-paid so they bill after they use the usage with prepaid once they're being billed daily so they're making sure that they're prepaying for the utilities once they hit negative a penny on that then they're no longer prepaying their utilities so they begin getting notifications and the customers actually go in and set up what type of notifications they want to get how often what's their threshold that they're comfortable with getting notifications so they're notified and it takes about two days before the actual disconnection happens but they're getting notified along the way so yes it is accurate if they go into that deficit where they now are owing for utilities versus being prepaid that they would be subject for disconnection once they disconnect and they they pay they're reconnected within 15 minutes for that there's no associated fees with that in addition to no deposits there's no late fees there's no interest on these accounts so this additional facility charge or higher facility charge does cover the acceleron cost which is a software provider for that and we have a dedicated staff member that works all these accounts to ensure that we do the reconciliation process daily and any support for these customers as well so that's a little bit more information and so sure so when someone signs up for this are they because there's a lot of confusion about it and i've sent you know some some emails back and forth and so is it fully described to the people when they sign up or is there some more education to it that we could do just to help people understand so that when they owe 20 dollars and their electricity's cut off they're not saying my electricity was cut off and i only owe 20 dollars yeah that's a very valid point what we've learned once we implemented everything going live is making sure that we spend more time with these customers on the onset to educate them that if you are go underneath that penny and you know that then you're subject for disconnection with that so we highlight the additional facility charge so they're very aware of that and also how the program works with it we have about 470 customers on it right now so those are the lessons that we've learned but we haven't we have worked through that but we still have a lot of positive feedback regarding the program and just one more follow-up and is that facility charge is that 16 dollars charged every month yes just like the normal facility charge that they would be it'd be 867 for residential and then prepaid at 1602 council member ryan thank you mayor uh on the led security lights um can you go to slide five because i'm wondering if my backup's reading strangely okay yeah our backup has the same line on on both of them yeah correct we had we had sodium vapor on here twice but yeah i fixed that for customers that do pay for these security lights is it when the city decides to or when they get around to going out and changing them or can they call in and request that their light be changed out to the led i think so currently we have not made any changes to any of the security lights and so we are bringing forward a contract to the council on the 10th of september along with the control system that that will handle our our street lights and so so once we have that equipment in place then we will start going out there and replacing those lights or if something happens in between now we'll be changing those lights but i'm not aware of any customers calling in and asking for those changes at this point okay thank you so i have questions about um slide three and four so i guess three for uh tiffany following on um or maybe tony could answer this you can decide uh you know following up on councilmember briggs's comments um so so 16 dollars and that's 16 dollars and two cents that's every month for the prepaid and our late fees our late fee is still is it still 20 dollars all around yes so we didn't have consensus i guess for to change it to a percentage um i know that's not on the table for today i still advocate is for the record i still advocate a percentage then we'd be getting more from our bigger users uh who pay 23 23 thousand dollars or more uh per month um and it would be a lot less proportionately for most of our residential users um you know for me that's it's so close it's almost like uh i mean it was a four dollar difference but almost like being charged you know and an additional late fee every month can you explain why why that is the facility charge is that a cost of service but before the 1602 there's already an 867 facility charge for all residential so it's that delta it's that difference so it's not a it's not 20 it's not 16 dollars it's an additional seven and a half dollars or something like that okay so thank you that's a good point and and and um to respond to you as far as the miscellaneous rate ordinance that miscellaneous rate ordinance will be coming to the council in the next couple of uh meetings as well so there'll be an opportunity to provide some direction on on those items at that time so that actually so then i and thanks thank you for pointing that out yes so be more accurate to say you know that's about an extra seven dollars so that's a cost of cost of service for the prepaid yes correct for the prepaid um and uh what's the reason for the for the 20 dollars being the cut off for uh being the point at which you get a shut off oh i see i see okay okay that was confusing okay okay got it got it got it and for those customers that are on prepaid i believe once they get to 14 dollars is that is that correct tiffany they start receiving a notice um that hey you may want to take a look at this again yeah and and does that notice come it comes in the mail so one of the benefits to the prepaid services is they set the threshold the customer does so if they want to get a notice that they're coming upon five dollars left on their account they can set it for a text message or a phone call however they want to receive that message so they have that threshold set up excellent and so thank you so apologies for my misunderstanding that's that's how i had thought it was and then the 20 dollars confused me but i understand now it's just an example um so my next question have to do with slide number four uh and now will will this will this be coming to us in a couple date discussion of commercial rates a couple meetings from now you mentioned that well we've we've provided to you already the red line version of the of the rate ordinance to the council as part of this discussion for today the council will not adopt that rate ordinance until the 17th of september along with all the other rate ordinances okay right but again just like with the residential rates there are no changes being proposed to any of the commercial rates based on the council's direction on august 1st yeah well and i know that i mean when we um discussed this in earlier this month we were focused mostly on the the base rate i guess as it's called and you know looking at res examples of residential rates um you know my concern about this and and i appreciate this slide you know you can see the um uh the the big difference between as a small business account and a large business account in terms of the footprint uh you know both in terms of environmental impact you know and then the amount that they spend um it's it's it's my understanding that the larger commercial accounts with the bills of monthly bills of 23 uh and more per month and end up paying less per um per kilowatt hour uh once you factor once you factor everything in uh and and if that's the case um you know have what if we were to uh give some sort of incentive uh to get people to to get those larger accounts i'm talking specifically about the general the general service large account which is so many more times the just the the medium account um if we were to kind of charge more for to use more uh could that have the if wouldn't that have the effect of either one or the other uh bringing lowering uh our lowering usage and i know we're 100 renewable and all that but it's it all comes in through the grid and everything's all all mixed up um so it's not not technically 100 percent or um raising the amount of revenue we bring in which we could use to help pay off our debt and uh to keep rates low so i'm wondering if there have been any consideration of of that of playing around with those with this general general service large uh account and raising the rate on that i don't think i mean we had a work session on this i guess earlier this month and so let's not say we can't have the discussion but that direction would come from council that's not necessarily a staff recommendation and so um that wasn't mentioned back then because i know we were focusing primarily on the e.s.a. rate so you're mentioning it now um and so it's just a matter of if that's the direction that council wants to pursue council member go ahead so just a couple things mayor so first of all just to be clear we we've not made any uh recommendations to increase the base rate for any of our customers the the increase that was being proposed was on the e.s.a. rate only um the direction the council gave us was let's leave things the way they are come back before the end of the calendar year and give us an update on where we are and let's have that conversation so so that was a direction that we got from the council correct yeah so i i remember that at the time as i recall and again i might be remembering this incorrectly but i remember you know i had asked about you know the difference between the commercial and residential accounts and was told well you know we're talking about the base rate now and the cost and and uh this will this can come to a later discussion so that's why i kind of feel like this is the time if we're going to talk about this that this would be the time and to me it seems uh an opportunity especially especially given what we what we saw last time about how yes rates are staying the same for now and and i support that uh but um you know because of the uh uh performance of the deck and a number of other factors you know there's concern about about about rates going up in the future so what i'm wondering is you know if this is our opportunity for this year i just want to make sure that to have the discussion before we lose it of well that's that's what we're yeah of raising uh of raising those um large commercial costs i won't even use the term rate because i don't know you know i know that there could be a number of different ways of going about it you know if you spend um if your bill goes over a certain amount or if your usage is over a certain amount of kilowatt hours uh you get charged an extra you know something that would again either make more money for the more use or give some incentive to lower the use council member briggs so i i wouldn't be in favor of just an an overall but something similar to the water structure that we talked about earlier um within certain few you know within a certain i guess couple of months if you go past a certain amount of usage then it increases slightly to cover that that cost since water is also a precious resource and um generally during the on peak time when the hottest part of the day if that if a certain usage for you know someone who has gone beyond what they normally do um i would i would be inclined to discuss that at a future in the future um when we talk about rates or if rates have to increase um that would be one of my first types of discussions that i would i'd like to have but um so i mean yeah that's that's more similar to to what we do with the water since it already is something that we have and i'm not necessarily saying to do that right now but i'd like to see what that would look like in the future and i also have a question about the led lights um i'm looking at jerry over there he's like yeah um so is that we you mentioned street lights but we also have we have a lot of other lights like we have all the lights within our park systems are those going to be updated and we also have um like a lot of hoa you know a lot of um homeowners there's also street lights there within the hoa's and i don't know that that necessarily counts as a street light or does it yeah i think i think some of those do count that um count within that number it's about 7800 street lights across the entire city and depending on what the arrangement is with each individual neighborhood and hoa some of those could be our responsibility and some of them may be the responsibility of that particular hoa and so will they be notified that this is that we're making the conversion and they have the option to do it or are no squeeze in here um jerry filer division engineering manager for distribution um as tony mentioned we are going to be coming to you next month with the um contracts for both the led lights as well as the contract for the control system um what we're going to be presenting at that meeting is our plan for deployment along with that and right now that plan starts in the core of the city and then we're going to kind of go out in a kind of an organized fashion to make sure that the cruise time and cruise resources are managed correctly um there's a couple of lighting corridors that we have um carol boulevard as well as i-35 that will be kind of split out and these guys will have to do those one thing but um you know as as those lights come up that's when we plan on getting those lights changed out um i'm not sure that at this point we we're going to be telling anybody that we're going to change them out i mean i think that we're just going to be changing the lights out they'll just start at one point and just start going around the city and getting them all changed out is the plan currently right now and does that include parks um if the parks is included in my numbers then it will but there are some that are not included in my numbers now one of the other things that we're also going to be telling you at this thing is that we anticipate like traffic department and some of those other departments will be using those same lights that we're going to be buying so they will have access to those lights to be able to change them out if they wanted to from that perspective okay thank you mic's on mic's off uh yes councillor melton this one won't be uh resolvable today but yeah i'm interested in the general concept of whether there are incentives that uh you know might encourage more you know more efficiency but i don't necessarily assume just because an organization is large that they're inefficient and you know i wouldn't i wouldn't uh just sort of want to do something that would create unintended consequences of just discouraging employers from being that sort of thing but but if there are ways of uh and this is sort of a seeking future staff direction you know if there are guidance if there are ways of determining for you what might the opportunities be for you to economize in your energy usage you know and they're kind of different almost for every outfit uh and there's a way to incentivize that beyond just the savings you get by by having a lower electric bill um you know i'd be interested in hearing about that okay all right yes council member armature oh just just to respond to that you know and that's an interesting idea i would just say just to clarify uh i don't mean to imply necessarily that it's inefficient you know if you're using that much um but that you know to go back to what council member briggs was saying our water department has you know at their rate structure they've got i forget exactly what the numbers are but we were just uh looking at that you know they've they've just got a kind of objective number that just says you know if that uh at this level you know you pay more and after this level you pay more uh it's not a you know not a moral judgment i'm not taking offense to that that kind comment but just to say you know it's not a moral judgment or anything it's just um that's the way it is in our water rates and people pay that and they don't complain about it uh so again i'm just i'm very interested and i have for a long time been interested in kind of playing around with just this one category the general service large and seeing what we can do with this category to help keep our rates low and and pay off the debt but i understand from all this discussion is move forward with the current rate structure if it comes before a vote people who disagree with that can vote against it there seems to be some desire to have some further discussion on that issue of and i wouldn't apply it just to general services i'd apply it to all if we're going to look at you know i mean water usage is not just restricted to large water use it's anybody whether it's residential commercial so if we're going to do it we need to do it for all all the particular sections instead of just one so if we're going to have that discussion we need to have a comprehensive discussion about that so any other further questions on you got any more presentation slides no sir all right i appreciate that okay we'll move on to agenda item three g which oh do it f oh oh man i'm trying to get us get us through the end of the agenda let's let's get let's get rolling here i mean receive report and hold discussions this is f receive report and hold discussion give staff direction regarding the fy 2019 20 city city manager's proposed budget capital improvement program and five-year financial forecast good afternoon mayor members of council david gains director of finance uh this item is really just intended to be a follow-up to our budget discussion on august 1st and answer any questions that you all may have on the on the budget process and where we are right now mayor pro tem did you have slides i do have slides we also had a budget memo uh that was attached to this item as well that we could i could address go ahead yeah well i just want to get your um paying threshold for i mentioned before increasing the contingency funds three percent when when staff looked at our uh kind of the stipend amount was 70ish dollars so i just took liberties with that and so i'd ask that the council consider maybe 100 even uh to the contingency funds in in the budget i think that those numbers kind of become comparable but i'm not sure if there's any traction for that but i wanted to revisit that we'll we'll let's get through the slides and then we'll we'll take that up i really don't have too many slides nothing nothing new just kind of rehashing and to set the stage for the conversation today just the dates of where we are so far obviously august 1st we had our budget workshop and we'll have these meetings continue on the next few work sessions just to have the opportunity to answer any further questions and then we'll have our public hearings starting on the 20th with september 17th as the the goal date to adopt the budget and the rate ordinances here's the general fund forecast that we showed on august 1st as well no changes um to the total numbers here on the general fund you can see that we maintain a healthy fund balance throughout the the five-year forecast and have a balanced budget in 1920 we do have the supplemental request attached to the summary of the supplemental request attached to this item and at the previous on the previous agenda you saw the white papers the detail and all the supplemental so we can definitely answer any questions on those again that tiered structure that we that we took the tiered approach this year tiers one through three are currently in the proposed budget tier four associated with a one cent increase over the proposed tax rate and tier five a two cent increase but we will know we all we still have that development services fee study coming back to you on august 20th we a new development as of yesterday we've decided to push the recreation cost of service study back until later in the calendar year or possibly early next next calendar year just to have more time to really get into to the numbers and understand the methodology as we gone through the process there's a lot that goes that goes into the recreation study and we want to make sure that we have a fully baked presentation for you at that point we're going to wait until the end of the presentation for questions thank you so next steps obviously public hearings as i had mentioned and then the development services cost of service will be on august 20th and that obviously could have an impact on the discussions for the supplemental request okay council member we're going to go council member husbeth council member briggs council member armature then council member melzer mayor pro tem i'm sorry no i i that was my my one component was the okay was that a hundred dollars per council member yes sir 1700 1700 yes sir well yes increase of 700 yes up up to yes 100 increase across the board yes all right uh council member breaks and so just to address that i would i would be okay okay with that 700 dollars um i do know that um in years years past i don't know if it was last year or the year before we decreased those contingency funds to um kind of fit into the budget so they were at one point a little bit more and then they were decreased as we were trying to meet the effective rate i think at one time we were all willing to to decrease that at one point yeah it was so significantly higher so i'm okay i'm okay increasing that a hundred dollars more it could help um someone so just for clarification so um when we say here tier one two and three um increase zero increase above proposed rate and is that proposed rate the effective rate the proposed rate is one and a half cents over the effective rate so the one and a half cent over the effective rate essentially um had us fund these first three tears so if we were for the effective rate tier one two and three would not be funded we would get we would get about three quarters of tier one half three quarters of tier one would be funded yeah tier tier each tier is about 1.1 1.2 million dollars so um we wouldn't get all the way into three and i just want to clarify because i think there was some confusion last week when we were voting to publish the the property tax rate itself which is an unfortunate exercise but um once once the development services rates are rate discussions had this week my intention is to to take a look at tier four again and then probably reduce the property tax uh burden on everyone right now the development services department and what in the services we're having to put in place to uh support the development community is under collecting around three million dollars maybe more than that so if we decide to adjust the fees next week to make sure that the cost of service is standing on its own my intention is to go back in and reduce the proposed tax levy to this budget this is normally not how we would like to do it but we wanted to be sure especially with the new legislation that just came into effect putting us on the shot clock that we had the right tools in place to address the developer's needs and that we were collecting the appropriate amount so that discussion next week is very important if we decide we're going to for instance uh recapture two of the three million dollars we're going to go right back in and recommend lowering that property tax levy so that's how it's going to work operationally the what what david had to publish is just a academic exercise it in no way is going to reflect what we actually recommend to you at the end of the day right well i just wanted to clarify because for me i was thinking that it was um and this was just my misunderstanding that we were starting our budget from the effective rate and that's where that's where we were um so for me i need to get back up i guess to just a tier one um because i'm not necessarily in in favor of going over that much well we we we will we'll finalize remember this is the manager's recommended budget so you know once once this is done once we have that that revenue finalized next week we'll go back in and recalculate this we'll show you exactly where the effective rate is on the tiers and then if you wanted to go above that you know what it would what it would cost but we wanted to give you some idea and be as transparent as possible that today my recommendation is all those items up through tier three are so important this is what i would recommend new revenue comes in and we have the ability to reduce the levy that is the next step in this process and it's it's our goal as the executive team okay thank you council member armature yeah so see so a couple questions um uh can you can you remind me to mr city manager so which tier are the um uh paid parental leave and the 15 minimum in trying to remember that was four or five those are in tier five and the reason they're there is i did not have consensus from the council that that was a priority of a majority of you okay because it was my understanding and maybe it was a misinterpretation on my part that for the 15 minimum that we had kind of my memory is we had given direction to get more information and to kind of come back with us and have a discussion that that's different than giving direction that that's a policy that councilor adopted yes so but i i i had thought that the discussion was gonna gonna happen before the budget was finalized well and at the last meeting i believe you requested a 20 dollar analysis 20 living wage analysis as well so we're developing that that should be ready for this friday's isr to go out for that analysis once the once the recommended budget i just want to be clear on process once the recommended budget is put in place and we have a final property tax limit we may be able to make that adjustment before the regular council meeting next tuesday night we'll see david's look at me very nervously now but once that's done the council always have the ability to say we disagree with x number of expenses we want to substitute this initiative for one of your recommended initiatives or they can raise the property tax level either way is is a way to get there but i i did not recommend anything on tier five that did not have at least four of your support okay and so that that i i understand and respect i just again i've been hoping that that we're going to get to have that that discussion um where we could give give direction yay or nay besides just uh you know getting more information uh before before we finalize the budget but anyway but i look forward to seeing you know what the comparison is at the 20 the impacts of the 20 dollars uh again you know i i do think that especially the the paper and to leave i you know look look at and i'd like everyone to just see how how relatively um little that is to to be able to offer a policy that helps our um staff who uh who who want to have children both current current staff and future staff that's i was pretty pleased that at at the number we got and uh again and then for the living wage impact as i understand it i guess carla's not here but um which is fine but but there's uh that some of that has to do with kind of leveling up other other um people who make other kinds of amounts within that same tier i forget the exact hr terminology for it so and anyway that's kind of what some of that expense is um but can make a make a big difference and i think send a really good message to all all our staff uh but again direction is direction so if we haven't had direction on that but uh i i kind of feel like we haven't really had a full discussion on on either of those two yet i'm hoping that we might be able to do that well i mean i wasn't here for the living wage discussion but i watched it and it was pretty comprehensive discussion i mean and so the direction wasn't as the city manager said but uh we're going to have an opportunity to talk about these things the two things you're talking about are about a million dollars which is about a penny on the tax levy so that'll just be a policy decision that this council will make based upon other priorities so um yeah all right sorry then there was another another question if you could go back um let's see to the slide we were at with the uh the yeah so the i just wanted to make sure i understand um so were you saying that uh the developmental serve the development service fee study is going to go ahead but with recreation it's going to uh going to be delayed is that no we will we will present the development services fee schedule next week uh it's particularly uh important that we get that done given the fact that we're going to have to adjust staffing and turn around times quickly recreation we did a dry run of that yesterday and we're not ready and that's so i want to be sure that when we come to you that uh we've got our all of our direct indirect costs broken down appropriately to facilitate that discussion i just felt like it was it's not a lot of money but it's but it it wasn't as clear as we needed it for your feedback and so roughly when i know can't say at this point necessarily but roughly when do you think the recreation quarter four fourth quarter probably november early december no okay okay so it's going to be off budget and we'll be talking which is just fine because most of those programs start um in the spring and summer anyway and we can always go in and do a make some adjustments where we need to but there was just some concern about whether our costs were as accurate as they needed to be okay okay yeah i'm fine with that i just wanted to just wanted to see exactly when it was going to be coming in council member melzer okay so i get it this this could all change based on that conversation uh just for accuracy sake for today though you know at the effective rate the average annual tax increase should be zero right so so tier one i'm looking at the you know third column tier one zero cents increase above proposed rate then average annual tax increase right so so tier one that's within the effective rate so that should be zero but once you're going above the effective rate those the second two numbers probably aren't zero correct absolutely miss we were doing this over the proposed rate now there's tier three it's whatever it is you know but it's not zero on on august 1st we sent out a chart that was on the effective rate i could i could pull that up so i mean it's going to all change anyway but just just so that what we ultimately look at you know that we kind of are shooting for the same outcome and if you look at that i think there's about a proposed rate not not not the other way so that was what's this is part of your proposal oh okay so it's not compared to effective rates compared to proposed rate the one and a half over effective your points so now you know what i'm asking for your point's a good one and we will make that adjustment okay i appreciate that that'll help us and and i'm hoping that when we you know have the the different view after we discuss development fees you know we get into the tiers that we'll be able to have a conversation where we can propose moving things between tiers if you know is that reasonable yeah yeah we'll have we'll have all of the supplementals out there just showing you how we've how we've tiered them as an executive team and if you want to say hey let's i'd like to propose supplementing this or changing this around that is certainly your prerogative yeah subject to you know getting through the others to agree obviously right all right um i'll just add just one more point if i may on on living wage i don't remember if this was part of the discussion which i also watched on the video uh that week uh but if there was a breakdown i seem to remember that maybe this was part of the ask for more information uh breakdown for how much is affecting part-time versus seasonal versus real year-round you know positions or is this all uh you know for that line item in tier five is that all associated with year-round uh full-time positions i think there was all full and part-time positions full and full and permanent part-time positions i mean i'd be when we get to that discussion i'd be interested in seeing that broken out okay sure yeah thanks great all right any other questions on this agenda item yes mayor pro tem so um mr city attorney could you be prepared for my question when that wage or the the number attorney to leave discussion i want to understand the state's position they the state just sued san antonio with their leave of absence time is some restriction regarding time off they just entered a lawsuit so i want to i just can you be prepared to kind of compare and contrast those two and i just really want to understand the elements to see if that is applicable if it's way off that's fine i just i can answer right now okay those lawsuits are challenging city past ordinances that impose that obligation on private businesses this this here what they're discussing is a actually a city providing it for their own employees and not on private businesses so they're they're not the same okay very good thank you fantastic anybody else all right all right thank you david appreciate it yeah all right now we'll move on to g which is received report hold discussion give staff to oh go ahead mayor pro tem do we have consensus on the uh going up on the um contingency funds oh uh i mean anybody have an objection to that okay yes all right thanks thank you appreciate that oh i'm sorry councilmember armater i'd rather just stay the same before looking at kind of other impacts but if i'm in the minority okay all right yeah i mean we can always you can always change your mind later on this this is a fluid motion so for today yes tomorrow maybe you don't know all right thank you appreciate you bringing that to my attention agenda item 3g received report hold discussion give staff direction regarding the 2019 bond program all right good afternoon uh obviously today on the on it for individual consideration is the election ordinance for the 2019 bond program it's been a long process to get here and so um excited for this opportunity so we'll go through uh i'll hit the bond program on a high level to show you where we are and touch on a few of the remaining outstanding items and some information request um again showing how that bond program fit into the council retreat from last year and now you can see the total funding um for the bond program at 221.5 million dollars uh ordered a little differently to match our bond language our actual the actual election ordinance with proposition a for street improvements at 154 million dollars and we've discussed all those projects in detail and i'll touch a little more on the street rehab program in just a moment the public safety facilities for 61.9 million dollars parts land acquisition which um we'll talk about the language in a moment which was a follow-up discussion that we have from the last meeting and made some changes uh based on council's direction so parkland acquisition will be um the title for for a lack of a better word for this proposition and then public art as that standalone proposition uh total in the 221.5 million dollars here are a few of those follow-up items that we wanted to discuss start with an estimated bond issuance schedule and what a um what a project schedule would look like off of that uh bond issuance schedule and then discuss proposed ballot language and just today we updated the presentation with uh with those streets identified for the street rehab program which we'll use moving forward so here's a uh a potential bond issuance schedule i will you know provide the caveat with this that this will will definitely change this will not be exactly how everything um is issued moving forward and how the projects are designed but this is uh at least for planning purposes and as we looked at the impact on the debt on the tax rate with our other assumptions the numbers that we use to come up with that three and a half cent uh possible debt service tax rate increase so in this in this scenario like the one laid out here the first year would be obviously uh getting ready for the public safety facilities police station uh the police facilities and in anticipation of having those project complete in fy21 and then starting the design for bonnie bray uh for phases five and six hickory street rehab program uh beginning the design for that um and then the sidewalks you can see there starting that started starting the sidewalks program as we move forward yes real quick i'm bonnie bray you've got it going out into 23 and 24 and in mobility today we've discussed the fact that we would have bonnie bray completed by the end of 22 that was a uh late breaking change as of uh last night this morning with a mobility plan so the way that the bonnie bray was laid out here was to do phases phase six first so you can kind of see the the large nine nine million and six million would be phase six then we would go to phase five with three the three million for design then seven and a half million there to complete phase five and then stage phase seven would come later that's all changed now with with some new um assumptions that that we haven't implemented into the schedule we can definitely get into detail on that with todd estes um but we as we looked at it we don't see the debt issuance changing too much because it'll still be early on in the process so it'll probably it'll move some of those latter years up um but i don't anticipate it'll have too big of an impact but you're right bonnie bray as i said these those are going to be assumptions that change throughout but that's a good example of one that's already changed since this was developed just yesterday okay thank you i appreciate this graphic it's great thank you very much uh and i have a question on the indoor frying range is is that you or our chief right uh so thank you and so my question is someone approached me and asked would is there going to be a space and time where the public could either book time there or have access or is it going to be private use only 100% of the time i don't think that decision has been made entirely at this point okay so and i'm not pressing you to do that now but i would say you know if if when we go out to you know when we get further along or we're advocating or we kind of have printed materials at that point if we can kind of flesh that out to understand what that would be if there's if there's a window let's say once a month when people aren't there because the way it's phrased to me and it's always you know it's it's a it's a loaded box but it's like oh what's publicly funded you know and so i think fair point but but you know you know hey i just uh i hear it and bring it back uh but anyway that that's kind of my thought is um i if if we had once a month if there's some kind of mechanism that makes sense if it doesn't make sense and there's security issues that's fine but if there's a way for it to make sense then i'd love to i just want to explore i guess yeah i think we need a chance to sit out with our legal department as well before we give you any answer on that sure yeah no not pressing just saying that you know that one's coming okay i can tell you historically just a little bit of history on with our current range yes please we've had citizen groups that have come out but they only require they always require police supervision and so for example citizens police academy has always historically been allowed to come out to our range and under supervision just sample the different weapon systems that we have and so but if you're talking about a monthly type schedule you're going to have to have city staff uh trained staff they're on hand so those are some of the considerations yeah no i think that i think that's fair and whatever those parameters are as you get into it with legal if there's some there's a threshold and that's fine too so thank you yeah i guess i liken it to when the fire trucks aren't being used we don't let people come out there and jump on them and drive them around but anyway i just i have some real concerns about that somebody asked me that question too and i said uh probably not um councilmember armature yes actually uh so question since we're on this subject sorry you just went and sat down uh bobby um another couple questions on that um so i'm glad that question got brought i actually have been asked that too so uh you know can the public and you know my answer was i assume not i assume not but anyway i i would just put in my own kind of personal plug um you know not only for kind of public safety issues but also you know when we're issuing a bond election you know the implication is that this is about public need and if we had the public come out to shoot i'm not talking about like the citizens academy you know that you mentioned but uh for recreational usage you know i don't want people to feel like hey i voted on this because you know that as a training facility and the police needing it and now it's being used for recreation uh and i would feel that way whether or not um there was a fee uh you know but a fee would that would concern concern me too so i'd be inclined uh you know whenever that discussion is had i know where i'd where i would stand on that um but a question about the the cost um you know i i had one of my recent questions had been and i got an answer to it what was um well uh you know could we do i was looking at how um you know the cost could maybe maybe be lowered and while still meeting the need the training need um and i had asked about well what about going down to uh to to five lanes since it had been my understanding that at one point we had gone down to five lanes but then i found out uh no you know there aren't any five lane uh shooting ranges i had i was i wasn't aware of that but anyway i just wanted to uh to to let to clarify and you know let you know that i had had read that and seen that duly noted but i do remember that um at one point it was going to be 10 lanes at one point we were talking about 10 million dollars for 10 lanes and now that the cost has gone down so much from 15 million dollars to 15 lanes to five million for five lanes what about uh a 10 a 10 lane uh facility and you might not be able to speak about the cost of that you know but it would seem to me looking at the need uh that it would still serve serve the need while potentially shaving off you know some of the some of the cost again i don't expect you to speak to the cost but the use i i can speak to the the operational aspects of it when it comes to say like a 15 lane i mean currently our our ranges we have 15 15 targets that essentially lanes and so that really accommodates your your training situation you you bring out maybe 15 students you might even bring more and run two different relays but the problem is if you get down to two few lanes you're talking about downtime downtime is the enemy in a training environment you have a certain amount of time to train people and you've got to make the most of it and so you if you got down to five seven ten lanes you're going to have people standing around doing nothing and so that's where you run into that you know you're losing valuable training time and and thank you that that makes sense i was you know what what he confused me was that at one at one point we were talking about spending 10 million you know twice as much on uh on on uh only 10 lanes so that was why you know i had assumed that that met that that met the need but i anyway i understand and thank you thank you for uh for explaining that and i and i want to clear that up because chief dixon i think clarified that point last week the the initial budget because there were there hasn't been one of these built in quite a while was based upon a fire range that had been built in collin county and that was you ended up being much more than we needed because it's a multi-jurisdictional um shooting range we brought in a an expert in this particular area asked him if we needed something that lasts to last us for the next 10 15 20 years that we didn't have to expand knowing that we're adding you know five to seven officers a year over the next several years what would we need in order to ensure that we could train them in appropriate fashion in an efficient fashion because there's not probably going to be an opportunity to expand this anytime soon and he came back best practices said basically here your design budget is going to be x and we think it's going to be about 5.3 million dollars we further brought the number down because we believe that by packaging the police station renovation with the substation in the fire range at one time we can recognize economies of scale from the trades so that's how that went went through staff did not uh you know bank on the 15 million dollar number we went out immediately started questioning whether that was the right number and how do we get this thing lower and brought in that expert unfortunately uh we got the final report a few days before the uh the last meeting of the bond committee and the time was unfortunate but we felt like we needed to do that to make sure you had all the facts so i just want to be sure that you know that we're representing that conversation appropriately and thank you and i i completely understand i read that duly noted you know my question was not so much about how did the cost go obviously that was my question at first when it first came to us but now it was but now the question is just about the 10 lanes being sufficient so and so follow-up question if i may um so if kind of the more lanes the less downtime um what about uh and again the reason i'm asking this now is because it wasn't until i think last week as you mentioned that we got that information in about why not five lanes um you know a bit a uh uh one of those you know um metal metal buildings you know like basically a big a big shed you know i used to train in one of those um uh they're they either look like portable buildings or they are portable buildings but i know sometimes you have gun ranges like that where you've just got a big one of those big metal buildings and then some some hay you know and you're like shooting the hay if we could have something like that and have and be able to afford to have 20 25 30 obviously that space concerns lanes um and if that could mean less downtime you know more officers uh you know on the beat you know uh taking care of what they need to take care of you know that could be cost savings in more ways than one if that's possible i was wondering if you could speak to that before you answer that this council gave direction last week on this particular proposal i know you don't agree with it i know you want something either less expensive less lanes i'm not sure what we just had the city manager talk for five minutes or 10 minutes about the very exact same information that was discussed last week so before you answer i don't want to get into trying to micromanage this process when staff has given not staff council has given direction here so i want you to answer first of all the the concept of a shed with hay for a shooting range i don't that's not something that i as a member of the denton city council would want for our city to represent but i'm going to allow you to speak to this but we need to move on with this presentation we've gone over many times the firing range and we spent a lot of time talking about the firing range so let's wrap up the firing range if we could before that i just want to respond to say this information it came in the other week but we haven't had a chance to discuss it yet you know and i have been uh asking questions as as they come up and waiting you know patiently for answers and then asking follow-up questions when i receive the answers so that's the has been the reason for the timing of all of this go ahead chief ma'am i can sum this up pretty i think pretty succinctly here with it's about it's about safety the number one priority our current situation the only reason we're really talking about a new range right now is safety we um i mean our facilities are not the best but really safety is paramount here if we're potentially losing rounds over our berm if you if you don't have the the infrastructure to protect those rounds from exiting the building then that's what you still have a safety concern for your citizens so i think that's really the the primary concern here is to protect our citizenry oh yeah okay absolutely and that was and my question was you know would because i understand the current range is unsafe because it's just open air that would you know a simple facility like that a a portable building i mean wouldn't that stop but i just i just want to understand make sure again the public you know people might be more inclined to vote on this if they get answers to questions including myself i can clarify you could take the existing range and you could put uh you could put a structure that's called baffling and you could build along and you could keep rounds from from going into the horizon that that that is something that was looked at early on in this procedure that's something that when we were looking at options and we had discussions with the city city management over that so if that's what you're talking about if you're talking about a structure that you could put in place that would stop rounds from going that that is a that's a possibility okay and so and why and the decision not to do baffling so with baffling if that could increase the number of lanes and decrease downtime right i mean that's a city management decision the idea was to put all this on one campus with training facilities near the substation and you had it all right there on on one particular campus even if you went and put a shell around it you're not saving very much money so it just didn't make a lot of sense long term and we're looking at a uh you know potentially two decades solution here also i'd like to add something to you're talking about your your range now i mean you're still dealing with the weather elements and sometimes you end up having to cancel courses and have some downtime an indoor range facility would take weather completely out of the equation and then it also any sort of i mean just basically any environmental considerations could be completely taken out and you can still continue training and i'm i'm all for indoor i was just thinking of them the simplest indoor so the baffling is just the basically what would be like walls without a roof is that or basically the opposite essentially a roof that so that rounds could not go in enough okay okay so it would be all around okay okay okay okay thank you thank you appreciate it all right david oh yes because i know you want one more comment on firing range uh just uh just to respond to uh the fact that in the last discussion i was a little troubled by the fact that the bond committee hadn't reached consensus and i wanted to understand you know why that was i'll just share that i re-watched the conversation i found it completely unenlightening uh you really could not tell why they voted the way they voted so but i did uh hear you know the chief's presentation at that time and i think a point that hasn't really been brought out much that he shared there was that five other agencies currently share our current facility and run from us and would continue to use this as well which i thought was you know given our interest in finding efficiencies i thought that was helpful to know thank you appreciate that go ahead well the only other point i wanted to make on the schedule itself is obviously as as we mentioned as you talked about the bonding bray it'll change it will change as we move forward um but we will have an over bond oversight committee that will utilize we're actually we have a meeting with our 2014 bond oversight meeting committee tomorrow obviously we'll be coming back to council throughout this process each year before we would issue bonds and as we'd have those project schedules here are some estimated construction timelines based on the issuance schedule we saw um the the facilities i think those are we feel pretty pretty good about those being the estimates that we're looking at right now and those are the similar numbers that we've been um that have have been shown to council over the past few weeks bonnie bray obviously that's going to change soon hickory creek we have pushed that out slightly based on current plans um just um given given the scope of that project and the street where we have in sidewalk programs and the rest of these are really going to be year to year based on how much we can issue knowing what the um what the goal is to get with each of those programs council member breaks my question is hickory creek because that addressed the area that was extremely dangerous correct and so we're pushing it out i mean it would make more sense to me to to get on it as soon as possible as soon as they were um they were approved sure so i mean i'm just can you explain that to me yeah it all depends on the amount of time it's going to take the council in the public to go through we had at what's been given direction last time to put together a kind of a public you know information campaign on that once once we get through the bond package we can't do it right now and whether we're going to go to the i-35 uh as the 1999 um mobility plan suggested or whether or not we're just going to make it a shorter um i guess route from river pass to country club so it's the same amount of dollars there's no way we can get through the uh process uh that kind of a process the mobility plan update and get the funding in place uh within 12 months the other thing is as david has just taken you through um we've got to estimate um you know where we're going to be in terms of the growth factor he is he's trying to get as much lodged into this first two years as he possibly can if we end up with some some larger eav numbers this could change these numbers but it really depends on what hickory creek program we're building well yeah i mean i wasn't in favor of it going all the way to 35 and being as wide as the pros anyway but i am concerned that part of the reason that hickory creek is on here is because of the urgency to um fix that area that one section that's extremely dangerous and so um you've got you you have you have an academic exercise here and basically if if we decide that if the council gave us direction tomorrow that i-35 is off the table we're only we're only going to build um you know to 1830 we would go back through and take a look at how we would issue debt moving forward and again depending when we get the next set of um eab numbers in next year i guarantee you this chart is going to look different so he's doing his best exercise right now based on the fact we don't have clear direction on hickory creek is the county going to contribute to hickory creek um i've had conversations with county um with judge edes and i need to end with um commissioner colman we need to get back to them again we find out what what exactly the program is when we're doing it and they would try they agreed that they would try to work with us the next bond package they get into to contribute so we've not nailed we've not nailed anything down because i don't know what project we're trying to nail down yet so i'm mr city manager so you'd mentioned you know if we got consensus today on the hickory creek how much of hickory creek quick quick to do question um is that is that actually some something that we could give direction on today under this agenda uh posting because it's just is it broad enough i mean it does say just a discuss the bond uh it's just discussing the overall bond package you're wanting to go further and actually give direction on when a particular project should start i think that's going a little bit beyond this posting okay so then if that's the case then um you know that's a discussion i would like to have for the reasons you know councilmember briggs had said and you know i too i'm um i i'm nervous about the i uh the idea or i i should just say i don't approve of kind of jumping the gun on the expansion um of hickory creek further down uh and i'm also at the same time i want uh the safety concerns of the present addressed as soon as possible so um if we could have you know the next time this comes before us to uh uh have it post you know i guess that would be um anyway i don't know you know when we could when we could do that but i would like to at some point soon be able to have us to have a discussion about that uh and to have it posted in such a way so we could get consensus and then if the consensus is to move forward with those safety concerns uh to move forward as quickly as possible okay all right we'll work on that yes councilmember davis i just kind of want to say for the record if you go drive hickory creek today it's a different hickory creek than you would have driven two years ago or even a year ago so some safety measures are in place we haven't ignored safety out there uh we've taken some real steps what we're talking about is kind of a more long term project and i think it's appropriate to look at it funding it in this kind of more long-term way i don't think there's an additional safety risk out on hickory creek by waiting a little bit to do our due diligence okay all right so another follow-up item was the ballot language obviously uh most of the discussion on the ballot language at the last meeting centered around proposition c the the land acquisition proposition our bond council uh is here today and after as follow-up to that meeting had a discussion with with him to change this language to acquisition for land for parks it previously said park systems improvements we've limited that just to say for parks and everyone feels comfortable with that language and that was the direction of council do you have a question councilmember priggs well yeah and i just um having the improvements part taking out of it i think was you know what was the main issue but having open space taken out of it excuse me thank you is is concerning to me to to not have that in there because acquisition of land for parks i mean it could be i mean i guess it gets to the point but when people are talking about open space and um it could be either or right so um just having it left out instead of saying and for parks or open space for parks and um i i briefly talked to the um bond council out and said that there was a not really a complete definition for open space and so um anyway so i would just like to have it back in so when people are voting on it they know that what we have in mind not only for parks for a 10-minute walk but also we're considering having you know some some open space in there that it's not just going to be playgrounds after playground after playground is pretty important i think to to distinguish between i guess so my question for you is when you're saying you want open space in there is that because of a legal requirement or you're trying to say because when you say that it's just going to be playground after playground after playground that that's it i mean acquisition of land for parks there's nothing in there that says i mean do do we have parks that don't have playgrounds on them do we have parks that are open space so i'm i'm having a hard time it seems like you're reading a lot into that or that people are going to assume it just means x when if you just look acquisition of land for parks now if you assume that a park always contains a playground if that's someone's assumption i get it but but did you say you discussed with the bond council that open space is is ill defined and therefore it would be difficult to be on there in fact let's just yeah let's just bring the bond council right well what i what i meant what i you can do that too but i'm just mean for anybody who's voting right so anybody who's reading um i know that our intent is for it to be for open space as well and so it was just in the i guess for just transparency for when somebody is going to to look at it that it's not just you know for a 10-minute walk to a park when a park is a small i mean it could be anything so yeah yeah an open space it restricts it kind of gives a little restriction which means that you can't build so much within it so that if it's a bond and it passes and it has open space then it makes certain that that space stays open without a certain level of development in it well oh okay i didn't follow that but yeah go ahead greg checker with mccall parkers bond council for the city uh there there is not a statutory definition of open space or necessarily even parks but i think the general perception of open space is that it's really a kind of a subset of parks as a type of a park so adding open space in the bond proposition would limit you to that type of uh of a park and i think the general perception would be that open space is more of a more open area less developed less vertical development um a type of a park okay so that would be the concern with adding open space is that you are limiting it to a certain type of park okay uh okay i tell you what we've been going at this while we're going to take a five-minute break and we'll come back so you'll be back up on deck when we get back okay yep welcome back to this meeting of the dent city council on august 13th 2019 it is about 3 30 we're on agenda item three it's a g and just for housekeeping h we're not going to be discussing uh three h and then we're also going to go into we're going to move the closed session to the end so that you know staff can be released if they're doing the recordings to be doing some other assignments for dtv okay i believe council member armature had a question queued up for the i don't know if it's for the bond council or not but yeah well so uh just based on what we had uh just been discussing i think council member briggs makes a good point about about open open space so if we could and i like the acquisition of land for parks um if we could put the word open in there ideally open space as well i think another uh advantage to that is the consistency you know much in the same way with the public safety facilities for the police department we've kept that uh the words public safety in there so those people who have been following they still see there's a public safety category you know we've taken the fire department out so now it's public safety for police department so i think when we change some wording uh it's good to keep a little bit of uh what was there before to show that this is not something something new so i anyway that's why i support the uh putting in some way either just the word open or open space you know acquisition of open space for parks uh but um open land i don't know but but maybe open space might be better um and i just wanted to reiterate um for uh for uh proposition a for the street improvements i had mentioned previously that the the numbering though one one three and four uh is you know for me it doesn't resonate as much as naming naming neighborhoods southeast denton uh you know whatever the various names for the different neighborhoods uh and i in fact just recently in asking a question about one of them i was asking about number two it turns out i meant number four so that's my fault you know but but i think that that would help uh the the bond project feel more personal to people people would have a better sense of what they're voting on again this doesn't change the language the way it is um uh at least i don't think so listed on the ballot but in terms of the language that we use on the website to describe uh the the different aspects of it and as i understand it there's some there's going to be or will there be some kind of link doesn't there have to be stuff post information posted about the bond and the polling locations or you know so if there's a if there's a link there you know if we could have those neighborhoods named as well as numbered on the map i think that would be really helpful councilmember um uh melzer and then mayor pro tem yeah i like the idea of naming the neighborhoods on proposition c i think this might be a question uh for gary uh but aren't some of the kinds of places that might be acquired for let's say linear parks or more commonly trails is that sort of in our list gary pack and director parks recreation so yes uh in short answers yes i'll take a short answer that's right so thanks okay i thought so i wasn't 100 sure given the scope of this so then and and i would um argue that yeah parks does kind of uh conjure like developed parks although i would agree it would include the category of undeveloped parkland but it definitely doesn't automatically conjure for people trails just because it's linear so my my suggestion would be and i know this is maybe a little long but acquisition of land for parks trails and open space i think that would really you know give the picture okay mayor pro tem and council member ryan yeah so i just want to make sure i understand right so this is the language that the bond council recommended based on the feedback i provided at the direction i heard from council this is what he provided yes right and it how long have you been in the bond business oh i feel yeah i think i know where this is going to go uh yeah i don't want to i don't want to submit your cv into the record but if you can just tell me how long you've been at it uh since 1996 so yeah yeah i'm good with the language that he proposed they proposed uh council member i'm good with the language as well i'm afraid if we add open space we are limiting it's the same reason that we pull public art out of the parks portion of it so that we can use it in others other spaces you know i think the estimate was we would get about 62 and a half acres roughly uh out of this it may be one five acre track that we're going to put apart put actual playground equipment on and then we wouldn't be able to do that if we if we say open space council member armature yeah i i actually thought that what we had decided on and never mind the language the actual substance of what we wanted in the bond package was what we're calling open space i mean i i did not realize that we were talking about putting a playground once you open it up that could be a another uh soccer tennis complex or something like that so um i think i mean that this is this slippage this is a good example of why words matter i think that the bond council with with all his years of experience i think he he showed that it does uh in his answer to council member brings this question that it does make it make a difference um in people's minds anyway what we think of when we think of open open space so i think this is a good example of why it's important to put that in there you know it needs to be it needs to be clear to the public what we're talking about if it wasn't even clear to to us um i mean us as a council again i thought i i didn't think that that was even on the table having a playground uh i thought we were talking about preservation of open space wow okay i'm not sure if i'm sitting in the same meetings that you all are sitting in i mean i remember last time we discussed this i heard everything from we need to have it to to meet the the the goal of 10 minute walk to a park i heard that was mentioned i heard playgrounds were mentioned i heard trails were mentioned i heard open space i heard buying space for trees i heard all these kinds of things and it just seems like that somehow we we're going to rehash this whole thing again now what i heard the bond council just say was that there's no statutory definition for open space is that is that what you said that would be applicable to the city right okay so if if the language is acquisition of land for parks we'll go ahead and throw in council member melzer's additional term trails and open space would that be language that you uh would either recommend or would you have some concern with that from the legal perspective as bond council not a policy discussion not you know what your personal opinion is but from your expertise as the bond attorney that we hire to help us with these kinds of things is that language that is acceptable or you would have concerns or what are your thoughts about that and i'm not trying to give you an opinion to say whether it's right or wrong i'm just trying to get some direction here so we can move on from this to try to figure out exactly what we're trying to do here if um the term open space was used instead of parks i would recommend that um additional descriptors be added such as open space including trails um uh whatever whatever categories you might want as part of what you view as open space i guess to kind of define it or to at least define it to include you know certain things that might be otherwise in question um right going forward and when you actually acquire and and and make improvements to whatever land that you purchase for it so now you said if you if you don't use the word parks but if it was acquisition of land for parks do you have an issue with trails does trails is that still sort of general and kind of or is that something that's trails would be considered part of parks parks is the broadest term possible which would come bring all of those things into the realm which i think was what we had in several drafts ago to describe parks as including a number of different types of facilities okay so parks is the the broadest language that we could use that allow the greatest flexibility to the policy makers at the time that because all these acquisitions are going to come back to the city council at the time for under this bond program right the city council is going to be the person the the governing body the the entity deciding what constitutes um a facility that fits into the bond proposition and if it's if it's simply open space then that's a determination by the city council but my concern is if it's simply open space that's open to interpretation and challenge frankly and and then when you said if you put in additional descriptions to sort of clarify open space do you not then box yourself in to the definite in other words you either have to be everything you think open space can be or if you put that level of specificity you cannot deviate outside of those descriptors is that my understanding or no i think the descriptors would help with the defining what open space means but if you did it oh i'm sorry but if you decided to do something that was not did not fit in within those descriptors if they were on the ballot language for the proposition do you run do you have a concern that you could be limiting yourself or is it okay i think you would be limiting yourself um especially if you move outside of open space if you put a playground in the corner of an open space is that have you moved out of the okay what the public views is open space okay etc council member yeah i just want to get back to the intent the intent of this council when we talked about open space the intent of um having open space without facilities having parks and trails in open space and i don't i personally don't think you know a a small playground is going to it's not a facility it's still open it's open air and it's not um so i mean i'm not i'm not really that concerned about somebody raising an issue of the playground in in an open space so much but it's the intent of what the the the bond committee talked about um the proposition doesn't look like anything they talked about really um it was about open space and to have it completely removed is just not something i'm personally in favor of um and when you say not putting it in there having this right here it you know if you put it in there it limits us well i think that was the intent it was to to limit development right i mean that's originally what what we talked about um so and i and i understand that if it's like this and the money gets approved then we can use it for different things or a facility could be built but again that's not the intent or it's not mine at least so all right council member so if parks is the broadest most inclusive term and trails and open space are subsets of parks is that accurate correct so then wouldn't the clearest language that wouldn't box us in and that would you know kind of invoke the right intent be acquisition of land for parks including trails and open space well yeah okay the intent that we discussed last time was all over the board the only thing that might have not been that was probably more of a consensus was to put in a facility like a tennis court or something like that but again i heard parks for neighborhood parks or the 10 minute the 10 minute walk that the policy that we've adopted well that's not necessarily open space that's not necessarily that may be a trail with your new definition including parks and trails that still doesn't i mean sounds like council member briggs your concern is it's too broad that it's it's too broad and that it encompasses too much and that somehow um that this money won't be spent on what you're saying is the intent of open space which is without some kind of vertical development other than a playground facility or something like that something very minor compared to you know a full blown park facility or recreational facility is that my understanding right well if if it's left this like this then it then it could be vertical construction it could be anything right yes and so that's what i mean just including open space back into it it it helps yes into the proposition because that's what the bond committee talked about it's what they approve no no i that's fine i don't have an issue with it when my bond council tells me they might have an issue with it i i want to stand up and listen because that's what we engage them for is that that level of expertise i agree uh we're going to go with council member davis and then mayor pro tem i i prefer the way that it is and i think my i think my confusion kind of is if you look at the percentage of our park land that is quote unquote developed enclosed by a structure or a pavilion or something like that kind of leaving out the open space elements it's just so it's just so minimal the concern is that the five million will be used to buy some plot of land that's going to be completely covered up with a soccer field or an auditorium or something like that i guess i understand that but the program that's been presented if you look at the matrix that parks put together it's for filling out some of those goals that we talked about i think that's why the mayor says the discussion was all over the place last time because it fulfills a number of different goals within the larger scope of what parks is doing when i look at that matrix that was in the backup for the bond committee i didn't see a lot of land acquisition for soccer fields and auditoriums and and rec centers and that kind of thing what i saw was the the linear park you know the town to lake trail what i saw was a large park in the kind of the southern part of town so i'm fine with it the way that it is i'm fine with giving future councils that are actually going to decide how this these bonds are issued and how this money is spent the freedom to do what they need to to respond to whatever piece of land is available we're not talking about a specific piece of land with this bond we're talking about a program that will roll out over many years i think this gives us the the best the best way to adjust to what we need at the time okay mayor pro tem yeah no briefly i just want to save a moment in time because this is exactly my concern i raised it day one i want to re-raise it that this is that's my problem with this proposition is the interpretation is all over the place and we could spend we have two million dollars to spend today we could allocate more money next year into the budget and achieve the same thing and avoid all this confusion and have all the freedom we need so that's my problem with this and i think you're going to see it bear out when the voters go to the poll so we've got a proposed language up here who's in favor of the who's not in favor of the proposed language okay so i'm assuming that everybody else who didn't raise their hand is in favor of the proposed language okay any objections okay i think yes go ahead just want to make sure i'm clear that the bond proposition would only allow you to use the bond money to buy the land you can't use the money to make any improvements on it because we took out improvement correct yeah and it's the purpose is to acquire even with the term park improvements in there it's still the purpose is to acquire land and so this bond money can't be used to build facilities or improvements on the land it's just to simply acquire the land okay all right okay appreciate any more questions about the potential ballot language for any of the other propositions all right the following slides were distributed this sent out this morning and i think these are streets that we'll you'll see in a lot of our promotional or informational materials moving forward as we as we put out information for the bond election so what we've done what the capitals project staff has done is is identify streets at in each of these categories that we have for the street rehab program obviously as we've discussed multiple times we're having this approach where we're tackling uh three neighborhoods but also going after all those uh streets with 20 oci or less throughout the city so obviously this is a small type here um but you all have this information on each of the the streets these are those ones that are 20 or less that are not included in the neighborhood sections already that will be um that the intent is to address with the 70 million uh street rehab dollars in this bond program definitely answer any questions on these but um i know there's a lot of names here so we can follow up with any questions as well any other questions council member riggs um when it says from and to those are just smaller smaller sections of a larger street um and so if and is that just because that section of the street falls below what what we think and then because i know that some of these streets they they're not too far away from being you know needing to be replaced so will that right these are all the street segments so from one intersection to another that fall with an oci of 20 or less okay there are pieces in between them that do fall in the 20 to 45 and some are higher than that so it does not attack any of those particular pieces of roadway that would be something we would have to work with in a different funding avenue uh you're also saying this is roughly i think it was 89 streets that are listed here some of them are a couple of different stretches of the same street but it does encompass more segments than just that 90 total between the neighborhood segments themselves and these oci 20 or less it's you're looking at somewhere between 270 to 280 street segments that would be improved with this bond package okay thank you for explaining that okay so we uh staff has done the same thing with each of the neighborhoods um identify with the calling out the streets and we've seen those on maps in previous presentations but with the actual names of the streets identified obviously uh neighborhoods one um three and four listed here are the neighborhoods that would be that is our plan to be addressed with this bond program so neighborhood one you can see the total number of streets there um for a total of 10.8 million dollars and 12.9 lane miles neighborhood three 21.3 lane miles at 18 almost 18 million dollars and you can see the streets listed there and neighborhood four the southeast end neighborhood um at 10.7 million dollars from the bond program obviously previous discussions we also talked about the sidewalks dollars that would be going toward toward this neighborhood in this bond program and some other utility funding that's going toward this um neighborhood around the same time and you can see the streets listed there as well yes so on some of those with the um the wastewater cip um will those go back in because i know is that in the street so will it be tearing up the street and will that also be included in fixing the street or will it be worse because i i'm just or is it like off off street so in the past where we have maybe done a roadway and then come back and repair a water line later or a wastewater line a year or two after that this is a holistic reconstruction of all utilities that exist in the street so if we're going to be tearing up since we're going to be rebuilding the street anyway it'd be better to go ahead and do this infrastructure now this is predominantly infrastructure water wastewater lines that are midstream or longer into their lifespan so they may be 30 40 years old they need to be replaced anyway within the next 20 years uh so this would go ahead and give another 40 to 50 years of wastewater water infrastructure life as well as ongoing uh improvements to the roadway itself so you're going to do this is a complete reconstruct of all infrastructure on those streets okay so just because i see a green line that says wastewater cip that doesn't mean you're not going to come in and redo the street afterwards oh no it's just no we're doing all of that all together if we're doing them deep if we're doing the water in the wastewater we're doing the street okay and if there's some way to explain that to make sure that the people seeing that because for me when i just originally thought oh well if they're going to do the wastewater but there's not a a blue line which in my mind meant a street redo so i don't know if there's a way to the blue lines by themselves really just mean any line you see here that's highlighted whether it's green yellow blue red whatever it is the street's going to be redone okay if it's just blue it's just that we don't have utilities in that area there are either newer utilities or we don't have utilities there that need to be replaced well just in our in our promotions or just our education um that that's very helpful knowing that because if i saw that i thought well that's going to make the street worse and there's not a blue line to cover it up so i appreciate that clarification thank you yeah i i agree and i i would suggest um see how on uh is it on sycamore part sycamore there's like a blue line with some green inside of it you know i think it would be nice to do that um it's as long as right all of the streets that the utility work will be done on has a zero to 45 oci right so that yeah then to just have blue underneath all of that then people will know how much of it is is street okay any other questions i have a question yes about um this bond i mean i know that once it's um set there's not a lot that we can do or say about it but are we at this point are we allowed to share these presentations or these maps with our districts or yes okay as soon as council uh approves the the language and calls the election you can share anything you need okay thank you well we'll obviously be keeping council up to date with the information that we're putting out we're going to have a website devoted to it um and then this week on the friday report we'll send out some information from bond council with those the procedures for advocacy versus information and those kind of for everyone's education okay so the next step obviously is just the the bond election ordinance for consideration today and then um then early voting in october any more questions any other questions fantastic thank you very much appreciate it okay that ends our work session reports as discussed earlier we'll now uh following the open session work session reports we will convene in a special call meeting to consider the following we'll convene at 3 55 pm and we'll go we'll have our closed session after this meeting so the and i'll call that special call meeting to order so the consent agenda i don't believe we pulled any items off the consent agenda council member briggs a motion to approve we have a motion to approve council member melton second all in favor of approving the consent agenda please signify by raising your right hand carries unanimously moving into items for individual consideration consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of denton at texas home home rule municipal corporation authorizing the approval of the third amendment to professional services agreement between the city of denton and hazen and sawyer pc it's supposed to be pre-loaded maybe it's not i'll survive good afternoon uh mayor and council frank pugsley the uh water utilities director i was right in the middle on on the top just missed it um here to discuss and field any questions for our third amendment to the contract for hazen and sawyer are consulting engineers who are working and have finished the design of the hickory creek system peak flow detention facility the hickory creek lift station redesign and the um peak flow pump station and storage basin located at the pecan creek uh water reclamation facility and this third amendment covers the construction phase services for all three of those projects and just to go over these are this project's been ongoing for a long time it's wanted to touch on a few of the uh chain of events originally contracted in 2015 to design the detention facility which is located in west denton off country club road to shave peak flow off of that basin to extend the life of our wastewater plant without having to expand it uh and we amended that in april of 2016 to add the west peak flow storage basin and pump station at the plant and then again in 2017 to add the hickory creek lift station which is our largest lift station in town off old alton road by the old alton bridge this one is a modification for some design changes in the amount of about eighty nine thousand nine hundred dollars and construction phase services for three hundred and eighty five hundred and forty four dollars and here's just a map to show the kind of spatial location of these projects so this covers the design that's been completed and then the construction administration services by the consultant through the construction duration of all three of these sites and uh inspection is going to be done in-house we don't have any actual construction inspection services any other questions any questions all right thank you very much chair would entertain action council member ryan move approval for agenda item 2a we have the second mayor pro tem second all in favor please signify by raising your right hand all opposed by like sign carries unanimously thank you agenda item 2b is considered option of ordinance of the city council the city of den texas calling an election to be held on november 5th 2019 do we even need a presentation on this if you do not want one i don't i mean we just spent i can do it i can do it again no no i mean yeah we just had it so yeah i nothing more to add um this election would always just this ordinance would just call the election okay all right chair would entertain any action mayor pro tem move approval item 2b council member ryan second we have a motion and second all in favor please signify by raising for excuse me we have a motion and a second for agenda item 2b everybody in favor please signify by raising your right hand all opposed by like sign motion carries six to one going to agenda item 2c consider nominations and appointments to the city boards commissions and committees any questions council member husband i mean mayor pro tem husband move approval yeah council member um so there's a so last time my uh nominee was uh separated and turned down so then i made a new recommendation she's turned in her application can i can i get that in there so that she can attend i don't approve i don't i don't know who it is it's uh annetta ramsey hi i'm rosa rios your city secretary and um we're actually doing the vetting now okay and we're hoping to have a ready by monday okay okay the next meeting tuesday okay great so for the next meeting for the next meeting okay thanks thank you all right we have a motion council member briggs i have a question for the city secretary um so my uh planning and zoning um nominee or a current had turned in a was an intention to resign at the end of august but um was on um has agreed to stay on through until i can find another um person willing to to serve in that position um and i i thought that he was on the list last week to to be approved but i'm just kind of seeking clarification if not if i can go ahead and recommend um larry back to pnz currently now and then um he's agreed to stay on until i find someone and then we could do that process then so that way that seat does not sit empty sit empty all right um well he was actually already approved and adopted um now the individual's name doesn't appear on the exhibit for consideration but we can schedule him for the 20th so it would be just a matter of days maybe that the position would be vacant but i would defer to the city council in general the law doesn't like vacancies so your board members continue to serve until the replacement is appointed and sworn in at that point they they leave so uh and we do this every year we have some board members who stay on till october november because it's hard to find new people to do that so okay he would continue until you get you find a person okay thank you so much we're good thank you okay all right so we have a motion and a second for the slate of nominees presented in the staff report point of order i don't think we have received a second oh i thought we started discussion oh oh sorry council member brig second sorry all right we have a motion to second all in favor please signify by raising your right hand all opposed by like sign motion carries unanimously concluding items are you concluding items council member briggs so i have um a couple um i was going through the engineering magazine and i came across a um denton county greenbelt plan and in it it's um it's pretty interesting but my my question is i want to make sure that the city of denton is coordinating um the our zoning our mobility plan and look at our 2030 plan um and see if it's an alignment with a denton county greenbelt plan um so i just want to put that out there it's uh it's it was in the the summer 2019 engineering magazine and i hadn't heard or we hadn't talked about it in any of our committees so i just wanted to put that out there to see okay if we were coordinating anything else yes okay um i also want to know whose responsibility it is to clean up um street or construction signs um after the construction is over i've seen abandoned signs for months and some of them are blocking right aways they're just right in the middle of sidewalks and i've messaged and sent pictures to have some of them removed but it seems to be consistent and so i'm just wondering whose responsibility that is if it's the contractor or if someone comes through with a truck to pick them up is this for city projects or private projects or both um well anything that's going on in the city that uses an orange sign and i don't know if it's you know and if it's uh i guess it would be city or contractor okay or what but they're everywhere and there's so many already in use that are purposeful that seeing abandoned signs that have been there forever it's just really it's confusing okay anything else council member ryan yeah um there's we've had several discussions here recently on what's in the 2030 plan and that plan right now is about five years old so i think it's uh time to start looking i know we've got a lot of plans we're working through right now but to start working on an update to that 2030 plan i'd like to put that out there that we start to investigate that okay all right anything else okay we'll close this open meeting of the dent city council at 405 and then we will go ahead and convene the closed session at 405 we will consider the following items consultation with attorneys under text code section 551.071 and deliberations regarding certain public power utilities competitive matters let's take just a real quick five minute break you