Aug 20, 2019 City Council on 2019-08-20 12:00 PM

Welcome, everybody, to this meeting of the Denton City Council on Tuesday, August 20, 2019. It is 12.02 p.m. just after noon. We do have a quorum, so I'll call this meeting to order. First item on the report is citizen comments on consent agenda items. Seeing none, next item is request for clarification on agenda items listed for this agenda. Councilmember Briggs? >> The noise exemptions, are those the same that we've been doing every year so far? Or is there any change? Like timing and- >> Good afternoon, Laura Behrens, Assistant Director for Parks and Recreation. It's the one that we receive annually for the Blues Festival, yes, ma'am. >> Okay, just clarifying there weren't any changes from what we're used to on the noise level. >> Councilmember Ryan? >> On agenda item 5C, the boards and commissions, I would like to pull Annetta Ramsey for individual consideration. >> Okay. Anybody else? Clarification? >> Mayor, I need to inform the council, we're gonna be asking that agenda item 4A be pulled, the petitioner's advisory request asking for one more day to serve liquor- >> 4A and- >> I'm sorry, 4A. >> Okay. >> And then also, 4D needs a little bit more research, so we'll bring that back in the next week or two. >> So 4A and 4D- >> Yes. >> Will be pulled to be reconsidered. And I do have a question for either city attorney or city secretary. I know that on the nominee that was pulled, there was a delinquent tax suit filed in 2018 naming the nominee and Randy Hunt for delinquent taxes, 16, 17, and 18 delinquent taxes. So we just need to know, we have a rule that if there's delinquent taxes, council members, you have to be paid up. And they may be paid up. I just need some verification on that, because I know it's still active April or May. I appreciate that. Okay. Anybody else? All right. We'll go on through our work session reports, agenda item 3A, receive a report, hold discussion, give staff direction regarding the- oh, I'm sorry. We're moving forward. Yep. >> Yeah. >> We've got a change of plans. To provide the most current information on the tax rate, we're going to take the development of services agenda item first, because depending on the discussion for that item will have an impact on the budget presentation, both now and in the general meeting. So agenda item 3B, receive a report, hold discussion, give staff direction regarding the cost recovery and resource allocation study for the development services department. >> David Gaines, director of finance. We first brought a high level view of this presentation to you in June, as we entered into a contract for a full cost of service study. And we've obviously talked through- referenced this cost of service study as we've gone through the budget process throughout the past few months. So I'm going to introduce Courtney Ramos, who's going to- from Matrix Consulting, who has done this study for us, has worked very closely with development service staff, with finance staff to this point. And obviously, as we go through this presentation, it will be tied in a lot of ways to the budget presentation, so we'll be ready to answer questions on that piece of how it- what any changes or direction given would impact the budget presentation. But for now, I will turn it over to Courtney. >> Thanks, David. My name is Courtney Ramos, and I'm here from Matrix Consulting group. Good afternoon, everyone. >> Good afternoon. >> Just barely. So I'm here to walk you through the super exciting cost of service study that we did. I don't know how many of you have ever been through one of these. Wait. There we go. Okay. Got to find out which button to push. So what I wanted to do was kind of give you guys an overview of what a fee study is, which is essentially a document that looks at what are fee-related services, what are the service level assumptions associated with those. So as an example, number of plan reviews or number of inspections, what do we consider to be that service that we're paying for. And then what is the full cost associated with that service? And I'll go into a little bit more detail about what is full cost in a minute. But some of the benefits or uses of a cost of service study is that it can ensure compliance with state and local laws. If we have certain things where we're not allowed to charge a certain amount for things, make sure that we are in compliance with those so that we didn't just automatically adjust our fee over the next couple of years and somehow we've now surpassed what a state or a local ordinance says we can charge for something. It looks at both the full cost, direct and indirect cost, associated with providing a service. It can help streamline the fee schedule, eliminate outdated processes or permits that we have on the schedule because we no longer provide those services as well as incorporate new services or just generally clean things up, make the wording a little easier to understand for both the applicant as well as the people behind the counter who have to administer this. And then also incorporate new fees and new services if there are things that we are now doing that we weren't previously doing and we didn't have a mechanism for charging for them before we can put that in there. Courtney, I'm sorry to interrupt. No. Sort of as a housekeeping, I'd like what to do is hold questions until there's a natural break in your presentation because we've got several slides, so I don't want to necessarily say hold it until the end of the presentation. But if you hit a natural break where there's some questions that you might be able to entertain, that'd be great. I apologize for interrupting you. No, absolutely. I'm used to being interrupted, it's fine. So the general process of a fee study, you start by cataloging the existing fees for service. Then you look at time estimates by position for each service that's being provided. You look at calculating a fully burdened hourly rate, incorporating direct and indirect costs. Then you analyze the gaps between what is it you're charging and what is it that it's costing. And then you look at current cost recovery levels and goals. Do you want to recover 100% cost recovery? Do you want to subsidize it? If so, by how much? So having those discussions, that's the general overarching process. So if we go into detail a little bit, when we're updating the fee schedules, we worked with staff to ensure that the schedules for planning and building are reflective of the current services. So we kind of looked at what is the schedule that's online, that's handed out at the counter, and is that reflective of the services that we're providing? We got rid of a couple of items that were associated with things that aren't necessarily being provided anymore. We expanded some fee categories and condensed others, basically looking at how is the service provided and how is cost affecting that service. So for example, if it doesn't matter the number of acres, then we would kind of get rid of a per acre thing, just as an example of a way in which you could streamline a fee schedule. Any questions on that? No? Okay. When we look at establishing time estimates, which is one of the key components for determining cost of service, we asked staff how much time on average it takes to provide the service. And we looked at this, breaking it down component by component. So if I'm intaking the application, making sure that everything is complete, putting it in the system, routing it to all of the departments who need to review it and need to provide comments, that initial review, how many reviews, and then also looking at really briefly here, the service level assumption, is it one review, two reviews, three reviews? What are we gonna let be our level of service before we say we need to move, you're using us to do this project for you, essentially? Looking at the final review and then issuing the permit so that somebody can move forward. We looked at time estimates by position, so we didn't just kind of build a blended departmental hourly rate. We looked at hourly rates by position. We took into, like I said, the desired level of service, so how many reviews on average, how many inspections on average are we looking at? But we also didn't take the simplest or the most complex project when we were getting these time estimates. So we didn't look at what's the most time you've ever spent on this type of an inspection or this type of a plan review. What we wanted to do was look at, on average, how much time should it take for these different reviews or these different inspections? Any questions on this one? So then when we look at total cost, there are essentially three main components. There are the direct costs, the salary and benefits associated with the staff who are providing the service. There's departmental overhead, so that can be services and supplies such as pens and pencils and the lights in the building and things like that, as well as staff who primarily just support other people in there, so admin staff, some supervisory staff, where their core function is really just to support the people who are in that department. And then the other component is citywide overhead, which is something that is not necessarily factored into a department's budget, but is calculated every year. So looking at what is the cost associated with the city for finance support, HR support, as it pertains to planning and building, city clerk support, city council support, and adding that number in too so that we can see what does it truly cost us to provide these services. Any questions on that? So then we get to the big stuff, the results overview. So when we looked at comparing the budgeted 1920 costs with budgeted 1920 revenue, the city is projected to under recover for development services by approximately $5 million. So and part of that, we have planning, we have building, we have engineering development component, and then we also have something called the community benefit, which is services that are provided in those departments, but for which we don't necessarily charge a fee. So if I just look at building and planning related costs, there's a deficit of about $4.1 million. So they're at about 59% cost recovery. Let's get into more detail. So I talked a little bit about community development. So those are services that are provided by development staff that relate to city services. So things like citywide GIS. So we have GIS people who are budgeted in planning, but they don't just support planning. They also provide services to other city departments. They create maps and do all those great things that allow us to see the city in a different way, if you will. And so those costs aren't then loaded onto fees, because they're not fee related. Something like historic preservation. While we do have historic preservation fees, there are a lot of services that are done vis-a-vis historic preservation that are not fee related, that are more about the city and the city's goals and objectives in relation to historic preservation. So long range planning, as well as zoning enforcement. So because all of these services are not fee related, they're therefore funded through taxes or other revenue sources. So if we get into planning, so the planning division is currently recovering about 16% of its fee related costs. And today the department is proposing to go to 100% cost recovery. But there are a few exceptions. So while the department does want to move closer to 100% cost recovery, there are a few items where they think it would be appropriate to subsidize certain fees. One of them would be the historical landmark designation in historical conservation district. They're proposing no fee for that. The minor plat for residential is a proposed fee of $300, which would take it to 23% cost recovery. The specific use permit for B&Bs, daycare, group homes, et cetera, that would go to $500 and would be about a 6% cost recovery. And then the zoning board of adjustment, variance, or appeals, which would be proposed at $250 or a 6% cost recovery. >> Yeah, we'll probably take -- they're probably writing down questions. So in a couple slides, we'll sort of queue up the questions. >> All right. >> Thank you. >> I'll just pause just in case. You never know. >> No, absolutely. I appreciate that. Thank you very much. >> So what are some of the impacts of taking planning to 100%? >> So if you were to increase costs to 100% with the exceptions that we noted previously, cost recovery would increase to 84% and revenue would increase by approximately $1 million. So the bar on the left is kind of where you're at now with the blue being the revenue that you have. The bar on the right is what it would be proposed at. So obviously, we'd really decrease that gap between revenue and expenses. So when we look at building, the building division is currently recovering about 74% of its fee-related costs. And similar to planning, the department is proposing to go to 100% cost recovery. But there are, again, some exceptions, alterations for single-family duplex, triplex, and town homes, a proposed fee of 25 cents a square foot, which would result in 14% cost recovery, as well as various minor permits, which are meant to kind of, the subsidy is meant to encourage compliance. And so these would be set at $50, things like a water heater installer upgrade, above-ground spa or hot tub, residential demolition, and some re-inspection fees. So the impacts of that would be that building would go to 93% cost recovery and would generate increased revenue of about $2.2 million. So then if we look at engineering as it pertains to development services here, they're currently recovering about 31% of their costs annually, and similarly are being proposed to go to 100% cost recovery. And so there would be no gap between revenue and expenditures there with no subsidies. So then we get to kind of the summary impacts. So this first table here mirrors what I originally showed you with the 48% subsidy, 52% cost recovery. So if you were to implement the proposed fees by staff, going to 100% cost recovery with the exceptions noted, the cost recovery would increase to about 87% with only a 13% subsidy. And the revenue increase from building and planning would be about $3.3 million. You were right, and I didn't know if you were copying down. Oh, no, no. I've got a question now. But we'll save it. I think there's a -- yeah. So then what we did was we put together some examples so that you guys could kind of see what the difference would be. So on a project of 395 lot residential subdivision, the total cost currently would be about $818,000. The proposed fee would increase that to a little over a million dollars. Obviously both planning and building would increase. Their fees would increase. However, when you look at this, 395 lots, you spread that increase out. It's actually very minimal, not only on a per lot basis, but also when you think about the longevity of that project and how long it would be here. Oops, went too far. The next one is a 20 lot residential subdivision that would go from about 42, almost $43,000 to about $70,000. Again when you look at what that impact would be on a per lot basis is not that significant of an increase, as well as, again, looking at the longevity of that project, how long that's going to be there. It's not a one time -- you know, it's a one time fee, but, you know, that subdivision will be there for many years. When we look at a 5,000, roughly 5,000 square foot non-residential development, the current fee would go from about seven, almost $8,000, to about $17,000. With the biggest increase, obviously, with planning, and that's because they had such a low cost recovery to begin with. Next example would be about a 10,000 square foot non-residential development. Again it would go from about 14, almost $15,000 to about 28, $29,000. Again the biggest increase does relate to planning fees because they had the lowest cost recovery. So the previous tables showed you how it would impact development here, but I'm sure everybody always wants to know what is everybody else doing. So what we did is we looked around at some other jurisdictions, but what I didn't want to do is just show fees without giving some context. So some key important things to know about when you're looking at another jurisdiction's fee schedule. When did they do their last fee study? And when was their last fee update? And as you can see here, the first five up here haven't done one in at least over five years, and the unknowns are well beyond five years. They just don't know when. And oftentimes what happens is they'll maybe do an internal study, or more often than not what they'll do is they'll just look around and see what their neighbors are charging and set their fees approximately there. You might be able to pick out a couple of those in the next couple of graphs. But another thing to consider is when was the last time a fee update was actually done? So you might not have done a study, but at least you increased your fees annually by an MOU or a CPI or something like that. So Allen and Frisco had done one most recently. Lewisville, it's been at least four or almost nine years, depending on the department. McKinney was 2015, and Roanoke was 2003. So they're not included in the graphs on the next one, they were just too low to compare. But what we did want to do was also include Austin and Dallas. Austin recently just went through a massive study to look at what is their cost for service. Part of their reasoning for that was so that they could become an enterprise fund. But so they did just go through this intensive study. So we wanted to be able to show you what your fees looked like compared to a jurisdiction like that, as well as Dallas. Dallas looks at every single one of their fee departments every four years. However, I will say that with Dallas and with everyone else, I know for Austin that they have to go for 100% cost recovery because they're going to be an enterprise fund. But for everybody else, what we don't know here is what level of cost recovery they were going for. Whether they only wanted to cover departmental costs, departmental and city-wide costs, or whether they chose to subsidize even further beyond that. So with all of those caveats, oops, going the wrong direction, here we go. So if we look at site plan for 20 acres, and this is just looking at planning fees. So while the tables before kind of had planning and building, this is only looking at planning fees for a site plan for 20 acres. You can see where Denton here at the beginning, current fee versus the proposed fee compared to Allen, McKinney, Lewisville, and Frisco. And again, I will highlight that we don't know what their cost recovery is. We also don't know what their service level assumptions are. Whether that's for one review or one inspection, or whether it's for multiple reviews. And then if we look at the same comparison, but we look at compared to Austin and Dallas, Denton would be much more in line with those costs and those services. Then if we look at the specific use permit for 20 acres, obviously the current fee is above but in line with everybody else, and the proposed fee obviously a lot higher. And then comparatively if we put that in, in comparison to Austin and Dallas, obviously Austin a little higher, Dallas lower. So then if we look at a single family home, and we compare to other local jurisdictions, both the current and the proposed fee are above other local jurisdictions. But then if we look at it in comparison to Austin and Dallas, still a little bit above. Both Austin and Dallas. And I believe this is the final one in looking at new commercial building when we compare it across all kind of the local agencies, roughly about the same, a little bit higher than the average. Lewisville obviously being the lowest there. And then finally when we look at it in comparison to Austin and Dallas, roughly right in the same neighborhood there. So with all of this information that's just been thrown at you, obviously there are some decisions to be made. And some of the key decisions that we think need to be thought about are cost recovery policies and annual updates. Because regardless, if you want to recover full cost recovery, like the departments are proposing, that's great. But also documenting any subsidies that you might want to implement, just so that there is a record of why those subsidies were put in place, so that they can be reviewed. Because what you don't want to see happen is you put in place a subsidy in order to encourage something and then you no longer need to encourage that behavior, but you still provide the subsidy. So if you document those policies and put them out there, then they can be reviewed and then changed or altered if they need to be changed or altered. Also looking at whatever you decide your cost recovery level to be, thinking about having an annual update factor so that you don't just leave your fees stagnant the way they have been at the same price year after year after year after year. Because otherwise, your cost recovery level slowly starts to slip when you do that. So implementing some sort of factor, whether it's an MOU or a labor increase that's more specific to Denton, or looking at some sort of regional CPI factor to increase your fees so that if nothing else, you maintain the cost recovery level that you have proposed year after year. Going the wrong way again. Okay. And that's it. >> All right. Questions? Council Member Ryan. >> On the building permits, it seemed like our current and proposed were basically about the same. And I know that when the legislature recently met, there was a change that we couldn't do cost of the building. We now have to do based on square footage. Have any of the other cities -- because it seemed like we were high across the board. Have any of the other cities already done that update, any of that data? >> I would say no based on when the last time they updated their fees. >> Right. >> But I can't say for sure. But based on just that anecdotal evidence, I would say no. >> Yes. >> Yes, Mayor Baumgartner. >> So thank you. I think we definitely should do a study like this every year, or every other year, but definitely regularly. I was wondering if -- to your knowledge, do any other cities take any of this revenue from certain areas and put it in a special fund? Is that something that is a standard practice, for instance, an affordable housing fund? That was a question that I've been researching and I wasn't able to find that on my own. >> I wouldn't say that they take the funds and put them in a special fund for those purposes. However, when you aren't subsidizing something, so like this roughly $3.3 million, that's $3.3 million that you then have to spend on other services, right? So whether it's affordable housing, whether it's parks and rec, whether it's police and fire, whatever it is, it's extra funds that you now have revenue coming in. >> Exactly. Yeah. So that's where my -- I've got a very housing-centered mind. So that's what I'm thinking. But anyway, either way, it's great to have this study done, and too bad we didn't have this earlier, but thank you very much. >> Yeah. >> For the items where you weren't recommending, you know, targeting full-cost recovery, what was the basis for the price points that you are recommending? >> I'm going to defer that one to Charlie. >> So for the items that we were recommending a subsidy on, many of those are just carryovers from a lower rate that we already have in our fee schedule for like the daycare -- an SEP for a daycare, for example, or an appeal before the Zoning Board of Adjustments. That's just a continuation of the rate that we already charged for those items. So rather than increasing that, we've just carried that forward. >> I think the idea is that they're trying to pick out these areas that are fairly simple to inspect, to get through the process and not have a burden on the mom-and-pop shops and some of the one-offs and the easier inspections, and basically trying to be a little bit more -- trying to be as sensitive to that as possible. >> Yes, Councilmember Davis. >> This may be a Charlie question, but whoever feels like answering it, go for it. So I understand that this was a fee study that we're specifically looking at cost recovery, but in the process, did we notice anything where we could be controlling costs better internally, some things that we do that perhaps are costing us more than we really need to be? >> I don't think we have, like, staff redundancies or something, places where we could reduce our costs not by increasing fees, but actually reducing the cost of service. >> I think when we were going through this process, it became very clear, I mean, we are -- we probably are still short planning staff. I mean, one of the biggest issues we got from the planning community is just our ability to respond to them in a timely manner, because time is money, and I think we're probably at least one body short in the planning side right now. Building inspections, that exercise actually was done a couple of years ago. Right before Scott got on board, I had brought in a firm to comb through our building permit processes and they came up with several checklists of items to enhance efficiencies, so he's actually running right now with fewer staff than they had a few years ago with a case load that's most likely 25 to 30% higher. The engineering side, that one really needs to be treated in a vacuum. We wouldn't be incurring those costs but for new development. This is simply the staff that when somebody comes in with a site plan or a development plan, they are -- this is the staff that works directly with the development community to get their site plans through the process, so that one is 100% purely related to development coming in. So we have gone through those processes. We are still short on the engineering development side. If you talk to anyone in the development community, they will tell you that the planning and building inspections has improved immensely. Engineering is getting there, but we are still short resources there, so as you're seeing in the new budget, we're looking at actually bringing two more engineering facilitators on board in order to try to respond and turn their plans around more quickly, compounded with the 30-day shot clock we're working within on these projects. So we're having to incur another $600,000 or $700,000 of cost this next year in direct response to that law and in direct response to the development community's needs. >> On the minor fee, there was a slide there where we have fee increases and minimal cost recovery. I'm just curious, just for clarification, were those -- >> Was it the graph? >> No, it was further back in the presentation. >> It's one of these? >> No, further back. Here and then I think there was another slide that addressed these. So that when we have a proposed fee, are those increases from no fee at all or from no fee at all? Are they slightly increases or are they reduction in cost? >> Like with the minor plat in the specific use? >> It is an increase. I would have to look, though, and see what it's an increase from. >> Okay. So whatever it was before was hardly any cost recovery. So it's not 100% cost recovery, but we're getting a little bit back from it. So that's what that's -- okay. >> So these ones up here are all the same as our current rate. Except for the historical landmark, we do charge a small fee now of $65 for those landmarking and we're proposing just to charge no fee on that one. >> Okay. >> Does anyone else have -- >> I'm kind of waiting to hear comments. I mean, it's -- you know, cost recovery is an important benchmark when you set prices in non-profit -- I mean, in for-profit, it's just one of three legs of the pricing stool, right? You want to consider customer value as well as competition. So we kind of have looked at competition here. You know, I think it's -- it might be taken as like a big not open for business sign, you know, hung undead. So I'm very interested in hearing the opinions of those who are kind of, you know, in that world. But if the customer value is really there, it's just hard to imagine that it wouldn't be, you know, significant tapping of the brakes on pace of development, which might not be a bad thing, but I'd be interested in hearing thoughts on that. >> It's -- do you want me to answer or not? >> Well, no, I've got a comment. >> Okay. >> Go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah. >> I can certainly see that perspective. They're reaching out and asking and kind of talking to the development community about this, and I think what we get by and large in terms of feedback from them is if you just improve the service, we'll pay it because it's going to be less than the cost of you holding us up bluntly. And so I think that's one response. The other one is when we're comparing fees around here, hardly any of these communities in the DFW area are budgeting to the effect of rate. So if we're going to continue this philosophy, you're going to see more and more communities following our lead trying to recoup some of their costs back in terms of -- from fees. It costs us $60 million next year, for instance, just to provide salaries for police, fire and dispatch. We're collecting $50 million in property taxes. So as we continue moving forward with the effective rate philosophy, this type of a cost recovery notion is going to be important just to preserve core services. I don't think it's going to have a major impact on folks. I mean, the market's so hot here, but you've always got the ability to come back and revisit this every year or two. I think the thing that we're really challenging counsel and asking for your feedback on is do you think it's appropriate that we're seeing, you know, $4 or $5 million subsidy on the taxpayers when you're trying to hold the effective rate? My comment on that is -- not on your comment, but on your comment, Councilmember Melserous. When you look at it as far as just initially with a $4 or $5 million increase, that seems like -- and it is a lot of money. But when you look at -- and if, David, if you have those figures, our new value from new construction, this tax year was, what, was it $350 or $400 million? So it's $400 million of new value from new construction. So that equates to about -- somebody do the math, is that a percent? It's about a percent. $4 million would be a percent of that. So I think from the standpoint of cost, nobody likes to pay more money. But you're going to see that in the grand scheme of things, they'll either be able to absorb it and/or they'll just pass that along. So you're looking at maybe something that might cost a half a percent or three quarters of a percent more. So it's going to be a little bit of heartburn. However, I think if you get the services that come along with that as far as the turnaround, as far as the efficiencies, because a project that is delayed or stalled is going to cost the developer a lot more than 1% of their project cost. I mean, if it's delayed six months or a year, we're already hearing construction costs, supply costs go up a percent a month. So a delay of any size project is probably going to cost more than if we're able to provide. Again, that's a big -- and as part of this, I think cost recovery, not alone, but just as you had said, the customer service portion. So I hear you. I think it may, but Denton is well located and well situated in the Metroplex that I don't think it will provide as big a bump as -- if we can get them through timely. If you hit them with the cost increase and we still can't get them through timely, then we hit them twice. So, yeah. >> You know, I think if the shot clock can really work and get, you know, and deliver decisions, not just sort of always be used as a deferral, you know, which I think is the fear that I heard in the Developer Town Hall, then I think that it could look like value for money. >> Yeah. Ms. Briggs, I think you had -- >> Are we needing to provide discussion and direction on this right now because I'm okay with this? >> I think so. >> Yeah. I feel like we should move forward. When I hear taxpayer subsidy of $4 million, I just -- I'm shocked. I think we need to cost recover in development services, and as long as the service is there for the clients, or for the developers, I don't think that we're going to have an issue. So I feel like -- especially now when I'm hearing people talk about their taxes being raised and then they see a presentation where they're subsidizing a development community, that's not real favorable, and so I feel like we should go ahead with these increases. >> Any alternative direction in that regard? >> Councilmember Davis. >> I just want to say in the final analysis, I think I agree with that. I think I agree with the way that the city manager and our consultant have kind of laid out the case. I do want to say, though, I have some heartburn about disparate impact. One of the reasons why I asked for the comparisons on a smaller lot or smaller commercial development when we're talking about a big subdivision, a developer that has the wherewithal to develop 300, almost 400 lots, we're talking about a fee increase of about 23% under the new model. And if you can't build that into your, you know, almost 400 lots project, well, then you maybe don't need to be in that line of business. But then when we look at a medium-sized commercial, about a 10,000 square foot building, or about a four-acre parcel, for the one, for the four-acre parcel, that could be a family developing a pocket subdivision, about 20 lots, that could be, you know, somebody who wouldn't fit the model of what we think of as a big developer, that's a 64% increase. And then when you look at that 10,000 square foot commercial space, again, that could be a family developing a piece of land they've had for a long time and putting some retail there. That's 170% fee increase. So I just want to make sure we're going into this with eyes open, that we understand that this is not a thing about, you know, just shifting the burden to the big developers, to the folks whose signs we see all the time, that this is also, there's a part of the development community that is very local, that is very invested in this community, and they're going to be shouldering some of this also. So it doesn't mean it needs to stay with the taxpayers, it just means in our conversation, our community conversations, we need to know where this is going. Just to respond to that, and I know this is kind of, you know, two different sides of the same coin, but, you know, the way I see it, because we've been undercharging for so long, I mean, yes, this is a big percentage increase, but it's over, you know, a huge discount, huge percentage discount that we've been giving everybody for so long. And I understand it's felt as a raising the cost, because it is raising the cost, but because we've been undercharging for so long, you know, to me, as long as we can justify it and we can with this, to say, you know, we're not trying to make a profit off this just to recover our costs, I think that's perfectly reasonable. Well and to address that, when you look at the percentages of the cost, like I'm looking at the 5,000 square foot commercial development, it was from 9,500 to 25,000, yeah, you could say that's a two and a half times increase, which is, what is that, $16,000. But when you look at a 5,000 square foot retail building or whatever building, non-residential, average construction cost is $150 to $200 a foot. That's a million dollars. Well, when you're looking at the actual dollar amount, it's 25,000 or an additional 14,000 on a million dollar project, I would probably share a similar sentiment of if somebody's struggling with a 300 lot development and incorporating. So the percentages sound ominous. I think when you also look at the actual dollar amount compared to the project amount, sometimes it sort of doesn't seem as large as it might based on a percentage approach. But either way, it's a cost, it's an increased cost, and those are probably going to get passed along. I'm not sure so many people are going to be wanting to pay for that out of their pocket. They're going to want to pass it along in either rents or sales prices or things such as that. So I think we certainly need to understand that going into this discussion. But I think what I've heard is, so correct me if I'm wrong, there's some caveats we want to be aware of and that there's maybe some policy discussions down the road of if small developers, small projects are impacted to a greater extent, do we want to come back and modify that. But yet, when you're talking $4 million, then the community has been subsidizing residential and commercial development. So yes, Council Member Davis. Just to follow up on that, it just may look to a casual spectator like this is money we shook out of the couch cushions to borrow a phrase, but there is no such thing as free money. We're making a policy decision here today, and I just want everyone to be very clear that that's what we're doing. And to Council Member Meltzer's point, if it does tap the brakes on development, growth is there until it's not, and we base our budget upon continued growth. And so the policy decisions we make today may have an impact in the future. I hope they don't. I hope it stays a hot market. I hope the the proper development that we've been cultivating here continues, but just something to be aware of. Absolutely. Yes, Council Member. Can you move forward to the results of view of building? Yeah, I had some concerns when I saw what was originally in our backup that had a proposed on the minor permits. It was more of a square footage as to how that was really going to play out. But seeing this presentation, I'm much more comfortable with that. My big concern was, are we going to have people that start work at five o'clock on Friday and finish up the project by Sunday evening type of work, and by keeping that feed where it's at? Or I think that's just a minor increase, isn't it? It's the same. It's the same. Okay. Yeah, and this is... So... I mean, some of the minor permits will have a slight increase, but ultimately on the alterations, not as much. So... Right. But yeah, I'm very comfortable with this because of this adjustment to what was in our presentation. Because this is really... I'm sorry. Go ahead, Mayor Pro Tem. I was just going to ask the city manager if we could get, because I too am in agreement. I think policy-wise, I think the key is for me, and I've said it before, it's focusing more on larger commercial development that then takes, continues to take the pressure off the rooftops. And you look across all those that were compared, and I did a quick look just now, I mean, we're leading the pack, even trying to... The work we've done, we're leading the pack of the tax rate on the rooftops. I mean, and it's just, we've got to... You look at Plano and Frisco, those type areas, they take that pressure off. And so I think that's the policy I'd like. I mean, because those fees also line up to be consistent with what's already going on. So it's not an increase, and it takes the pressure off of rooftops. But Mr. City Manager, I'd like for you to formulate whatever you think works best to then bring that feedback to us. As it's kind of rolled out, incrementally, we can kind of build a database or network of kind of feedback thoughts, and in that way, when we do revisit, we have kind of an escalating look at thoughts. And so it's not reactionary, it's not, "Oh, over time, we've kind of built this database." Because I'm encouraged by sitting in on the meeting with Scott and his team and the developers, and I mean, he's having to ask them for feedback and kind of prompt a few questions. And so I don't think that would have been the case a year or so ago. I think you would have gotten all you could handle without. So I think it's a really good sign that if we can produce, that it'll prove beneficial. We're very open to, if there's issues that are hardships that are being created, we can certainly look at the cost recovery percentage on smaller businesses, that sort of thing, as well as put some kind of a grant program in place down the road if we're having an adverse impact on especially the affordable housing. But these are policy decisions that we can certainly bring back to you. We've sort of been planning for it, and we'll see how we impact the market. I think with the big developments, it's going to have little to no impact at all. They just want out of our planning process faster. So I think one other thing, I'm sorry, Scott, I think one other thing to address Councilmember Hudspeth's comments, Denton's got a couple things that really differentiate it. There's no 4A, 4B issue here, which some of these other cities can take a lot of the costs out of their budget that we can't. So that can't be left on the table. I mean, that's several hundred thousands of dollars that can be shifted that we're currently not doing, and I think that's a big thing. And I'll tell you, other than Frisco, which is the first time I've seen them do this, these cities are not budgeting the effective rate, or maybe it was Plano this year. There is an absolute opposite thing occurring out there in almost every city I'm reading about. They're going right under the rollback rate, getting as much as they can, and they're going to do it next year. So you're going to see more and more cities. When I was in Arizona, this is exactly what happened. You tax capped us, you could only go out for debt elections, and you would go in and update your fees every year. And that's essentially what I think you're going to start seeing happen here after this year. Council Member Husser. Yeah, I think the sensitivities on small business and affordable housing are appropriate, and I think we should be prepared and are tracking to sort of see the impact by class of construction against the fee. You know, so we can sort of see kind of laffer curve effects, you know, or are you affecting the overall volume and how do you end up with the -- how does your total, you know, tax and fee production end up, and then we can adjust, right? This isn't forever. Yes. Council Member Davis. Very quickly. Thank you, Mayor. So we're giving ourselves a little more wiggle room now for policy decisions. Now, as we understand this now as a policy decision, then in the future, I'd like to kind of put a pin in the idea of future policy decisions, green building incentives and permits and how those interact, affordable housing incentives and permits and all those kind of things. So for future conversations, we've given ourselves more room in the formula now to be able to do those kind of things. Okay. All right. Anything else? I might just like to add a couple of things. If I think -- well, understanding, I think I hear consensus here that we would bring back a proposed fee structure September 17th. I also will be having another developer town hall, so we filled the commission chambers and ultimately -- or council chambers, excuse me. And the feedback was decent. I don't know that I heard anything that was derogatory when referencing that we are looking at this very thing. Having some one-off conversations with the development community to the city manager's point is if we deliver, that's not an issue. And as the mayor indicated, that time value of money. So it's the cost of them having to be stuck in a circular process that costs them more than what that actually -- that fee would be. And that's on all levels of development. So it has a greater impact even on those smaller developments when it is that they're stuck in something because their sense of urgency is even much greater. So I'm committed to doing that and continuing to communicate with the development community and I'll provide that feedback to you. >> And one final comment. I really appreciate to some degree holding the line on the building and as I read that, these are building permits, this is where people come in, our ordinary citizens come in to get a permit for a pool, for a fence, for an addition, I mean, those kinds of things. So it's really not going to impact those in our community who are really just trying to improve the quality of their property. So I appreciate that. >> Thank you. >> We certainly believe that permits protect and we encourage our citizens to come see us and we want to help them through the process. >> Okay. Any other questions on this? I believe -- go ahead. >> I'd like to just point out, because this will obviously have an impact on our discussion later on the budget. >> Yes. >> I just wanted to point out a couple of numbers as we have that conversation. So as we -- based on the direction we're hearing now, if we went to the proposed rates, it would be $3.3 million additional just in the general fund. So we'll continue to have more discussions on engineering. This is in the engineering fund where we'd see that subsidy essentially go away. Obviously we'll have more discussions on what the differences look like, but at least the subsidy would go away and we're anticipating that would reduce the transfer from the general fund to the engineering fund by about $500,000. So those will be numbers we reference in the next presentation, but I wanted to point that out to everyone at this time. >> Great. All right. Okay. So that will conclude this item. I believe staff has sufficient direction on this agenda item. We'll go back to our scheduled order, which is 3A, receive report, hold discussion and give staff direction regarding the draft 2019 historic preservation plan. Mayor and council, I'm Roman McAllen, the historic preservation officer for the city of Denton. I'm just here today to introduce Nick and Siraj from the Lakota group who have come down to present a summary of the draft historic preservation plan that they've been working on for the last year. As you know, the 1986 preservation plan that we have was adopted by Mayor Ray Stevens in 1986, so it's about time to replace that old one, and I want to introduce Nick here with the Lakota group. >> Thanks, Roman. Roman can't pronounce my last name. It's Calla Jeresis. >> Okay. >> And it's Greek for Smith, just in case you wanted to figure that out. Thank you, Roman. My name is Nick Calla Jeresis. I'm with the Lakota group. We're planning for a base in Chicago, Illinois. It's a pleasure to be here to give you an update on the historic preservation plan. We've been working with Roman, Scott, and Ron, and Development Services Department as well as the greater community on developing this plan the last ten months. And we just wanted to give you an overview of what's inside the plan, the major recommendations and major observations that we have. I do want to say that the impetus for this plan is not only to update your old plan, it's old, it needs to be updated, but it was a recommendation in your Denton 2030 comprehensive plan to also recommend it, so you're implementing that aspect of that plan. Just to start off, we just wanted to give you some of the key dates in preservation here in Denton, because you do have a long history of preservation efforts. Most communities did not start their historic preservation program until the 1970s. In 1966, the US Congress established the National Register of Historic Places. That's the nation's list of historic sites worthy of preservation, and I'll talk more about that as we go along. So that was kind of the starting point for many communities to get their own preservation programs together. And since 1966, you started out in 1977. The very first landmark to be listed in the National Register was the Denton County Courthouse. And then your first ordinance was adopted in 1980. And then after that, as Roman said, the first historic preservation plan was adopted in 1985. And just to give you a perspective, in 1985, back in the 70s and 80s, those preservation plans really focused on key bits of architecture in communities. You're a high style buildings, you're important historical figures, and so we looked at those places to landmark. We also looked at places that were important before World War II. And I'll talk more about that as well. So we really focused on a lot of those things. Today, historic preservation plans kind of focus on economic development, focus on neighborhood stability. Those are key elements to our communities, obviously. And obviously promoting the visual appearance in our community identity. So we look at those aspects as well. In 1989, the city became a certified local government. It's a designation granted by the Texas Historical Commission and the National Park Service. It allows the community to receive grants to undertake planning activities. And a certified local government grant was received to do this historic preservation plan. And then on to the 2000s, the very first National Register Historic District was put in place in your county courthouse area in the downtown. In 2008, the West Oak Area Local Historic District was designated by the city. In 2014, Denton Main Street celebrated 25 years of existence. And I think your Denton Main Street program is very exceptional. It's a long running program. Not many communities can claim that they have a main street program operating for more than 30 years. And it's done quite a lot for your community. And then your latest historic district is the Bella Avenue District, used to be a conservation district, now it's a local historic district. And just to give you a little bit of background as I go forward, a national register landmark or district is an honorary designation given by the Texas Historical Commission and the National Park Service. There are no restrictions to national registered districts, it's just an honorary. However, commercial buildings in general are allowed to receive tax credits, so there's a financial incentive involved. Local landmarks and local districts are designated by through your Denton Development Code. So it's a zoning action and it sort of overlays to your zoning code. So overall, since 1980, you have 62 local landmarks and three local districts. I think that's really good. That's a good number of landmarks to have. You have two districts in the Nash Register. You have four buildings listed in the Nash Register individually. So that's kind of the result of your last 20 or 30 years in preservation. What is a historic preservation plan? It functions very much like a comprehensive plan or a downtown plan. It's really just a policy document, just to guide decision making for the city and for your other preservation partners. And it really talks about, again, future historic districts and landmarks. We do talk about historic preservation and economic development. How do we manage the program here within the city and how effective it is and how does it operate? And last but not least, the most important thing I think is education and advocacy. When it comes to historic preservation, there's always a need to educate people about the benefits of it. What does it do for the community? How does it help the city grow and maintain its identity? How does it become an effective sustainability strategy for the community? Because the best thing you can do is to keep your old buildings and not have them lined up in a landfill. So it is the most effective sustainability strategy, in my opinion. And last but not least, we want to try to involve more of the private sector in preservation here locally. So a lot of our recommendations focus on how to get developers and investors and property owners to be involved in the program. The preservation plan, the contents, basically the front part of the document is the plan. There's a set of goals and policies. We'll talk more about that later. There is an implementation section. There's also a section about historic resources, what's significant here locally in Denton, what are the types of buildings and history and architecture that are really key for this city. We do talk about policies and city planning and how do you integrate preservation in your city planning policies. We do have a section that summarizes our community engagement work. We did have a good community engagement set of activities. And we garnered, I think, a pretty good cross section of the community in terms of their ideas and opinions about preservation. So we'll talk about that a little bit later. And last but not least, there's a bunch of appendices in the plan, just really kind of stating, just including the copies of the ordinance and things like that. There was just two phases to this process. We started back last October. We came on site and worked with Roman and staff on doing field work. We had a series of stakeholder interviews and focus group sessions with some of you, but with a broad cross section of the community. We had an open house workshop and then we produced a state of the city report, which is just a summary of your current preservation program in March of this year. And then the second phase is basically putting the plan together. What you have, what we're presenting today is really the draft preservation plan, is our hope to finalize that in the next month and to complete that going forward. When we develop a historic preservation plan, there are three standards, actually. These standards were developed by the National Park Service and how do you develop a historic preservation plan. And we follow those standards in all the preservation plans that we do at Lakota. The first standard is the most important standard and it's really kind of looking at the historic context of the community. And what that means, the historic context, is what are the forces of history that shape the development of your city. So going back all the way to the founding of the city to today. And one of the things that we'll talk about later is that that early generation of historic preservation plans looked at anything before 1930. Because generally in the National Register, or any city preservation program, any property that's over 50 years old is considered historic. So when I started out in preservation, and I have to say that I'm National Register eligible myself now, is that when I started out, anything before 1940 was considered historic. Now that I've become National Register eligible, we're looking in the 50s and 60s now of what's considered significant. And so there are many cities now, we've worked in a couple of them recently, in Houston and in Tyler, Texas. They've started to designate neighborhoods as historic districts that were built in the 50s and 60s. So time moves on, so those contexts are really important. And then the last two standards is those contexts help us establish goals and priorities. And also, the other standard is to try to encourage as much community participation in the decision making for this plan. The community engagement, just to summarize, we had two community workshops over this ten month process. We had probably around 150, 160 people participate in both of those workshops. We had stakeholder reviews, so we talked about 45 people during those sessions. And then we had two online surveys, and we had an incredible response on those two online surveys. 400 plus respondents to those surveys. And so that gave us quite a lot of good qualitative information about where they want to see the preservation program go here in the future. The preservation plan organization, basically in a nutshell, there are just four major goals of the plan. And I'll talk about those in a moment. And there are just 32 recommendations over on the plan, spanning four different areas. Survey and documentation, education, advocacy, community development, sustainability, and program and administration. To, at least in our opinion, to have a really good, effective community preservation program, you have to have these four elements in place. First is survey and documentation. One is you have to know what's significant out there. What are those pieces of architecture that are really important? Pieces of your neighborhoods that are important. And the only way to do that is to do ongoing survey and documentation work. And the city has been doing that over the years. I believe there's four or five major survey projects that have been undertaken here in the city. Some of them underwritten through the CLG program. And so a lot of the information, a lot of the goals that we have out of this plan come out of that survey work. So there's been a lot of good survey work. We do make recommendations for additional survey work. The second part is having some good incentives in place. Every city has to have some set of incentive to encourage the private sector to participate in the preservation program. And again, I already talked about administration and management. They really kind of focuses on what the city does. And then the last component is educating and advocating about the benefits of preservation. So just a few more slides, just to give you sort of the key recommendations. This is probably the major part of the preservation plan is where are there future historic districts. But first of all, we recommend seven additional survey areas. And if you look on the slide, the areas that are in blue are areas that we think the city should survey in the future. We don't lay out a specific timeline when that should happen, but these are areas we think that the city should focus on. And if you can tell on the map, the areas that we've circled are post World War II neighborhoods. These are neighborhoods with ranches, styled ranches, different resources that are now considered significant. So we need to find out if there are potential historic districts there. So we have seven future survey areas. There are five potential national registered districts, and those are in the red. A few of those recommendations have come out of previous survey work. But we've also included some additional recommendations as well. The two local districts, the West Oak and the Oak-Hickory, local historic districts we think could also be national registered districts. We do recommend a boundary expansion for the Oak-Hickory local historic district. So we believe that needs to be expanded to include some resources that were probably left out originally. We do recommend five potential conservation districts. And then eight potential Texas recorded landmarks. One of those potentials we're sitting in right now, we think. So those are kind of the future work for the city in terms of serving, designating, going forward. And again, I'm not going to go into too great detail here, but in terms of context, the post World War II development's really important. Obviously, after World War II, returning servicemen and mortgage financing and experienced developers began to come in and build big subdivisions, and so those areas are now significant. So the ranch housing types, they may seem very plain, not exciting like the 1920s housing, but they're now considered historic. And then there's some remaining O'Neill Ford buildings that could be landmarked. O'Neill Ford being probably your most significant architect here in Denton. And then some remaining industrial buildings, and then sort of looking at the African American experience here. And are there buildings in places that are worth recognizing? The next thing is community development sustainability. We just have a few recommendations here. The plan does have a draft set of sustainable design guidelines for historic buildings and districts in there. And the reason why we put that in there is that any future design guidelines or manuals that the city may decide to develop, you can incorporate that information in there. So we do include a section on there. We do have a few recommendations on incentives, maybe potentially expanding the tax abatement program to contributing properties in the local historic districts. Really looking at targeting adaptive use opportunities. Educating property owners on disaster mitigation. And then really looking at doing some smaller scale heritage tourism marketing. We feel that there's a need to do more of that type of marketing here. There's not enough of that. So that's important. And then last, the cultural district, trying to implement that in your downtown. The program administration, again, this is kind of focusing on the city and the administration of the city's program. As I've said, looking at developing maybe a potential design manual that includes sustainable design recommendations for property owners. We do have some suggestions on updating the historic preservation ordinance. We know that that has already been updated as part of the zoning development code update. But down the road, there may be things you may want to add to the development code, one being the demolition delay provision. This is something that many Texas cities have, Fort Worth and Dallas have a demolition delay. And what that is, is that you may have properties that have been surveyed. They may be significant architecturally and historically to Denton, but they're not landmarked. They're not inside a local historic district. So in case that there may be a demolition threat on those properties, you could, through a demolition delay provision, delay that demolition up to a period of time. To work with that property owner on some alternative solutions to demolition. So it is a provision that many Texas communities have and maybe something to think about here in Denton. And then last, securing future CLG grants for national registered district nominations. There's, as far as I know, the Texas Historical Commission will continue to give out CLG grants. And you probably should use those for future survey and designation activities down the road. And last but not least, the education advocacy part. We just have a few highlights there. One thing that we think the city could do is there's a lot of survey information out there. There's been a lot of research and data collection that's happened on a lot of properties here in the city. It would be good to try to digitize that information and make it available to the public. In case if there's somebody who wants to buy a house in one of the districts and they want to find out about the history or who designed the house, they can go online and get that information. So a lot of communities are now digitizing all their survey information and make it more widely available. Expanding a partnership with the Denton County Office of History and Culture. They have a number of programs that they do to promote preservation here in the county. I think they would be a worthwhile partner on other education advocacy initiatives. And then doing more hands on preservation learning workshops here locally. And one example is that several, well many years ago we did the preservation plan for San Antonio, Texas, and we recommended that they do some hands on workshops to educate people about what they can do with their properties. And every year, well I think twice a year, they do a workshop on restoring historic windows. And there's nothing more sustainable than trying to keep your older windows rather than throwing them in the landfill. So doing hands on workshops I think are pretty important. Then last but not least, the plan, we do have an implementation chart in there. There's a priority timelines, partners that can be involved in the preservation program, and additional funding sources that are out there beyond just the certified local government grants. And then last but not least, there are many different benefits to preservation. I think I've mentioned them all, so I'm not going to go over them in too many great detail. But we recognize that preservation has had a pretty pivotal role here in Denton. It has contributed to the overall identity of the community. It's built civic pride here in the neighborhoods, and people value the historic resources as a link to the past, so that's it. And just the next steps going forward in terms of the next set of reviews. >> Comments, questions? >> That's my mom's turn. >> Yeah, so I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about what you understand to be the historic value of the part of southeast Denton that had formerly been Quaker town, moved from Quaker town. I appreciated seeing the Denton African American experience listed in there. So anyway, I was wondering if you could talk about that and where that fits in on the map. And as you see historic preservation in Denton, just as an example. >> Sure, a few things. One is just to elaborate, there's been a lot of research in writing in the African American community here. And there's been some interpretation of that history, obviously. There's plaques here in the park that talk about Quaker town, and there's plaques about, and I forget, it's along one of the trails. I just can't remember off of my hand. Yes, thank you. And so there's been a lot of research, and so there's a lot of information out there. We think that there should be a development of an overall context statement. And what I mean by that, it's a research document that would help the city and the community better understand what remains. What are the links to that past that we don't know of? Because there may be properties out there in places that we don't know of that could be culturally significant to the community and that you may want to landmark in the future. But to have that information in all in one place in a context statement would really help, I think. I believe we do make a recommendation on surveying the southeast side, having a more in depth survey. We're not sure if there's potential districts there. There could be maybe a local district there. We think you could probably use a conservation district tool in those neighborhoods, but perhaps to protect what remains of that history, even if it's not eligible as a district. So I think the first step is really developing that context statement and really getting an understanding of what remains. And I think that's still kind of unclear to a lot of people what remains. If there are no real physical links that are worthy of landmarking or protecting, I think that there are other ways to commemorate that through oral histories and other documentation. The plan also recommends increasing use of the internet to try to get information out to recognize that history. A long time ago, or actually a few years ago, I got a chance to work in Richmond, Virginia. And there's an African American neighborhood there that kind of resembles the southeast side quite a lot. And what they did is they developed a crowd source website where they allowed people in that neighborhood to sort of upload historic photos, old deeds, all sorts of stuff onto the website. So it allows people to have a place to go to to try to learn the history of that place. And so there are many different ways to try to understand that. The other thing too is, we also mentioned the report about the Hispanic American community in Denton as well. And that's something also that should be subject of some context research. >> And thank you, I think that you'll find that there are a number of remaining structures from when people were moved from Quaker Town. A number, and I think that you'll also find the community has a lot of information that I would hope anyway would meet the qualifications for. It seems to me that it does, and so I'm bad at, so when I look at a map, unless there are the street names, and I can zoom in, I'm bad at being able to tell exactly. So was the Southeast Denton not one of the? >> It is. >> It is, okay, that's what I thought, that's what I thought, so thank you. >> I believe so. >> All right, any other questions? >> Councilmember Meltzer and then Councilmember Davis. >> At risk of being a bit of a Philistine, maybe you can help me on the post-war stuff. Like you, I'm a qualified for national register status, and I have a hard time seeing the sort of valued, sometimes, stuff built in my own lifetime that's historic. But should there be more than just the 50-year mark as the indicator of kind of preservation worthiness? Should there be also a connection to something historical and or architectural significance, distinctive architectural significance? Or is it just, once you hit 50, you know? >> That's an excellent question, allow me to elaborate. Yes, you're looking for more than just 50 years. That's just one, that's kind of the baseline evaluation criteria that you have. There's two other sets of criteria. There's the criteria that the national registry uses, there's four basic criteria. One of them is, it has to be architecturally significant. There could be a historical significance, too. So that's another layer. And then the second layer is your city local landmark criteria, too. So that's a whole other set that they have to meet. So when you do a survey, you evaluate the properties to see if they meet those criteria. And they may not, they may not. And if they may not, they may. So that's the purpose of the survey. We didn't want to make a recommendation on those areas being districts, because we don't know for certain either. >> Thank you. >> All right, yes, Council Member Davis. >> So I'm just a tad frustrated that we don't have the text of the plan. When can we expect the text of the plan? And we've got a September 30th shot clock on this to have grant funding for paying for the plan. So when do we expect we'll have a draft of it? >> Within the week, I hope. Right, right? Yeah, within the week. Hopefully sooner. >> And then HLC will see it on the 9th, is what we expect? >> Yes. >> Thank you. >> Yes, Council Member Briggs. >> So in the presentation, there's a little slide here, and it says 100% of participants strongly believe protecting the views of the Denton County Courthouse. I thought that was pretty interesting that 100% of participants agreed on that. I know we had some conversations here about that, but I don't know that if we've ever agreed to have any protections in place, will the plan discuss that? Or is that something, a policy level here that the Council will need to do in another type of discussion? >> Well, I guess I would defer to the City Attorney if, I mean- >> I don't mean in this conversation right now. >> I understand what you're asking is, will the plan provide that protection if and when it's approved? Or does there need to be some other type of ordinance, either that predates the plan if you want protection sooner, or after if the plan doesn't satisfy that? >> Yes, sir. >> I just want to say, off the top of my head, I don't know the answer to that, but we'll be happy to look into that issue to make sure that we're correct on the law. >> Thank you. >> Anything else? Okay. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. I appreciate it. >> Thank you, City Council. Thank you. >> All right. Before we go on to the next agenda item, let's just take a little quick five-minute break and we'll come back and do agenda item 3C. Welcome back to this meeting of the Dent City Council on August the 20th, 2019. It is 1.27 p.m. Moving through our work session reports, we are now on work session 3C. We report hold the discussion of staff direction regarding 2439 and 3167 House Bill Draft Ordinances and Amendments to the 2019 Denton Development Code. >> Good afternoon, Mayor, Council, Richard Canone, Development Services. I've got a short presentation just to go through, maybe dive a little bit deeper into some of these House Bills. There are these ordinances on tonight's public hearing agenda as well. Just to give sort of a brief overview of what these ordinances do, they really serve as a stopgap ordinance. And what we're really dealing with is a preemption of our home rule authorities is really the just of it. There were three bills that were adopted, signed, and are effective September 1st. And what these stopgap ordinances really do is really allow us to fully digest it, look at all of the codes, and make sure that we address those adequately. And so the first one addresses House Bill 2439 and 2497. 2439 was the prohibition of regulating building materials, 2497 related to rules and appeals to the Board of Adjustment. The second ordinance is 3167 that deals with the 30-day shot clock for PLAT and PLAN applications. And so looking at 2439, really what this does, just to kind of put it in context, this would supersede any previous Council actions. That would include any conditions of approval or zoning overlay restrictions. If you recall, we've had a couple that have come up where we've had certain materials for multifamily buildings. On September 1, we can no longer enforce those. In addition, what this ordinance will allow us to do is suspend enforcement of other DDC standards. If you recall, in the new DDC, we had standards that related to masonry and some other design requirements we will no longer be able to enforce. But this also stretches to local amendments to the construction code. One example, I believe our current local amendment prohibits aluminum wiring, for example. I know there are some other cities that prohibit wood shaker shingles. That can no longer be regulated. One thing and also what we wanted to do is clarify to our citizens that this is not a city-initiated change. This was really the act of the state eroding our local authority. There was one change when this went to planning and zoning commission last week. There was a whereas clause in the ordinance related to 3167 regarding the legislature to reconsider this at the earliest moment. That same whereas clause, they suggest it be in this ordinance as well. Just briefly on 2497. What this does is it requires council approval if there's any rules related to the board of adjustment. It amends the appeal procedures for administrative decisions. Right now, what it does currently is it breaks it into really two different categories. One related to a project and one not related to the project. Previously, it didn't really address it. There's also a time frame that they put in that the appeal must be filed no later than 20 days after the date the decision is made. I think the current language in the local government code, I think it states something as quickly as possible. There's some very vague language. What this does is really just tighten that up. The last one that's probably caused the most heartburn for all of us is House Bill 3167. Really what this ordinance does is suspends any conflicting applications. It can no longer ask for waivers of the 30-day. There's a 30-day requirement now that requires action on a plat, not necessarily approval or denial, just action on the plat. But there's the ability to do a waiver under 3167 that the municipality is no longer able to ask for a waiver of the 30 days. And so if it is not approved, denied, or approved with conditions within those 30 days, then it is automatically approved. And that's really related to, again, plans related to plats, meaning our subdivision construction plans and any plat that would be considered. So this would apply to the 2002 DDC for one month, essentially, and then to 2019 DDC once that becomes effective October 1. And with that, I'll be happy to answer any questions. >> Any questions? Councilmember Meltzer? >> I think I might know the answer to this, but why is it necessary for us to do local ordinances to reflect the state ordinance? I mean, wouldn't it have the same effect if we just aren't able to enforce those that are no longer enforceable? In other words, why do we have to sort of ratify that? Is it just -- and I'm guessing the answer is to avoid confusion that somebody would look up our law and think it applied. >> I think that's correct. We're looking at that now whether to -- part of the discussion has been do we keep the stopgap ordinances in place or do we amend the codes altogether? And that's kind of where we're at now. It is very confusing to have those regulations in place, but then to realize, oh, they're not -- we're not enforcing them. On the zoning side, on the building side, a little bit different since it's the national -- or the international building code, and then a lot of times each city or jurisdiction will adopt their own amendments to that code. >> So we intend these as stopgap measures until we kind of digest, as you said. What's our timeline for doing that? When do we expect -- granted, we have an entirely new development code coming on board here, but what do we expect is the timeline for doing something more permanent? >> I don't have an exact date. I would venture to guess hopefully the last quarter of this year. I know we have some amendments that we're looking at now, but it would definitely be after that October 1st in action date. >> It's my understanding that on the building material restriction -- this is sort of stopgap ordinances, but it's sort of an understanding -- a clear understanding of that legislation. That doesn't apply to fence material. It's just simply building material on a building. Is that correct? >> That's correct. Building -- or aesthetic methods, I think they also -- >> Okay. I appreciate that. Any other questions for this agenda item? All right. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you, Richard. All right. Move on to agenda item 3D. Receive report and hold discussion of solid waste matters, including the proposed 2019-20 solid waste rates. >> Good afternoon, council, mayor. Sorry, I'm a little out of breath. I was running in the hallway. Let me pull up the presentation. All right. So we have a two-part presentation for you today. I'll be presenting the first half of the presentation. The second half, Brian Burner, the director of solid waste will come up and give the second half of the presentation. Feel free to stop me throughout the presentation if you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them. First, I want to review some of the landfill rate changes we are proposing this fiscal year. We are proposing to increase the non-city/denton/resident disposal fee to $46. I do want to point out that this does not pertain to city/denton/residents or businesses. Their rate would stay consistent at $44 going into the next fiscal year. We are also looking to decrease the appliance electronic drop-off fee to $10 this upcoming fiscal year. We are also looking to make adjustments to the uncompacted MSW and compacted MSW rates. Uncompacted MSW we are proposing to decrease from $7.80 to $7.50. Compacted we are proposing to increase from $8 to $14.50. But these adjustments are based on cost of service model that we have internally. These rates only come into play if there is an outage at the scale house at the landfill. If there is, we use these fees to charge those customers. What's MSW? Municipal solid waste. We are also looking to discontinue the acceptance of tires at the city/denton landfill in the next fiscal year, so starting October 1st. We are also looking to discontinue the crushed concrete rate of $8 a ton moving forward. This slide summarizes the residential rate changes coming up October 1st. We are looking to implement a subscription yard waste service for residential customers. There will be two types of service customers can subscribe to, one being collection via craft bag and the other being carts. The craft bags we are proposing the subscription rate to be $1 a month. Carts will be $0.50, you can see that right here. If customers do decide to use carts, there is a one-time purchase cart fee of $20. Excess brush is currently being billed, an excess of four cubic yards per collection is being billed on a per cubic yard basis. Moving forward for billing purposes and easier to explain to customers how much a cubic yard is, we are looking to change this to an hourly rate. It would be billed on quarter hour increments moving forward, so the rate would be $75 an hour. >> Let's wait until he gets finished with his presentation. >> This is the residential rates continued. All these rates are recommended for the meeting from June 11th that we have with city council. I forgot to mention that before. Excess refuse, so currently there is a $7 fee to reload a residential cart today. We are recommended to do away with this fee. We are going to propose to keep doing the service if customers call in in advance to schedule that, but we are proposing to do away with the rate. Bulky waste collection, currently there is a charge if you have greater than four items collected per year. Moving forward, we are looking to change this to greater than two items per collection, so actually increasing the frequency of that collection of bulky waste. If customers, that rate going from $7 to $5. The same day cart change out fee, we are looking to reduce it from $65 to $50. This is if a customer wants same day service and wants their cart changed on the same day. If they call in for it to be scheduled on their normal collection day, there is no charge for that service. Commercial rate changes in the upcoming fiscal year, we are recommending to implement a bulky waste collection for commercial customers. This would include apartment complexes and multifamily complexes. There are two components that make up this rate, trip fee and per item fee. The trip fee would be $20 that we are proposing, the per item fee would be $5. If a customer called in to have a couch collected, it would be $25. If they had a couch and a chair, it would be $30. That concludes the rate portion of the presentation. Like I said, Brian will be presenting the valet service and then some outside contract possibilities too. Questions on this? >> We had a moment to get back to the slide I had the question about. >> Okay. Councilmember Briggs? >> Sorry, yes. I was eating a brownie. I have a few questions. So on just starting with this one, so how -- what about illegal dumping? Because you do have people who come and just drop stuff off. Is that -- is there a way to prove that it's legal dumping or will the commercial owner still be responsible for paying this $25 fee for every time somebody just drops off something. >> By a dumpster at the facility. Let me ask Brian to come up and speak to that and how that will be monitored moving forward. >> This is only familiar to me because I've had a couple of people just within the last year have this situation happen. Again, as we always try to reduce and eliminate illegal dumping across the city, at a commercial site anything that presents itself as bulk that's called in for collection at the commercial site will be billed according to this schedule here. If we can work with the landowner to determine that it was illegal dumping, we can work with our community improvement group to try to backtrack on that, but again there will be a fee charged. >> Okay, may I continue, because this kind of leads me to the question about the rate for bulky waste for residential individuals. I think it's -- it was something about going from so many items to -- can you go back to that one slide? And is that -- are any of these per collection free and then after the four items then it's $5 an item? >> Well, if you look here at bulky waste it says you get two items per week and again this goes to a weekly basis. So again, you're actually getting an increased level of service. So you get two items per week. Anything else that presents itself at the curb as a bulky item will be charged at the $5 an item. And again, a chest of drawers is not six drawers and a chest, that's not seven items, that is one item. So it would be helpful so that it says two items free per collection, anything additional would be $5. So if you had, you know, three items out there, it would only be a $5 fee for that item. But are -- do we -- are we still responsible for paying a trip fee of $20? >> No. >> No. >> Trip fee is only for commercial customers only. The fee for additional above two items is $5 and that's the only fee you would pay. Because I feel like these are sort of connected. I -- hopefully, if the residents are familiar and individuals know that you have two items per week that are free, then the illegal dumping would, you know, reduce so that the commercial businesses wouldn't have to keep picking up that. >> Well, again, I think we anticipate that a lot of what we're going to encounter from a commercial standpoint is not illegal dumping. >> Right. >> It's the apartment complex that when you have a move in or move out, you end up with that headboard or that chest of drawers or the table that just sits there by the dumpster and it's extremely unsafe for our -- to put it in the dumpster and have our people try to manage it through the equipment, what we want to be able to do is to get the right people with the right pieces of equipment to be able to manage it safely and get it all out of there. I mean, like a cancer, when it sits there, that pile just continues to grow and grow and grow. So if there's material there, the apartment manager calls and on a schedule, we come and pick it up as efficiently as we possibly can. >> Okay. So I have just a couple more, but I can wait until everybody gets a turn. >> Yeah. That's good. Mayor Pro Tem? And then Council Member Ryan. >> Yeah. Really just reflecting on our conversation we had earlier, even in advance of preparing for this feedback, I think it's important to note we had this very conversation about illegal dumping when it was brought up, kind of trying to mandate dumpsters at every apartment complex for recycling that, hey, this opens the door for people to then incur unintended fees and it has unintended consequences. So I think it's important and I thank you for pointing that out because that's noteworthy. And I think also I had a question about in our previous conversation we talked about the larger yard waste, extra limbs, that sort of thing. Do I read this right, that that is -- that falls under -- if it's not in a card, it's that $75 an hour, right? >> Well, if it's a limb, piece of brush, thing that you can pick up, then, again, that falls under the excess brush, which, again, you get four yards included as part of your rate that you pay. So anything beyond four yards that we collect, it would fall under that $75 an hour. Yard waste such as lawn clippings, hedge clippings, those small organic pieces, that's what would go in your craft bags or your yard cart. >> Okay. And so we feel good about I guess in that conversation it was the lawn service that, you know, stacks up a half block long, just where that captures our cost to go out and I know there was some safety components raised, that $75 per hour kind of puts us in good shape. >> It does. Yes. And, again, to remind you, where we found the abuse of the system was a little old lady that had $900 worth of brush at her curb and we went out on an hourly basis and it ended up less than $100 for us to collect it. So again, we feel it is a whole lot more equitable to manage it this way for our citizens but also try to drive our yard maintenance services to managing the waste appropriately, bringing it out to the landfill and putting it into our Beneficial Use Program, which this material goes anyway but, again, it doesn't get handled twice. >> Okay. And so, Mr. City Manager, as we're kind of publishing this information, I think that's important to empower homeowners to say don't, you know, don't put me in a bad spot as far as stacking stuff on the curb or that type of -- something to empower homeowners to know either have that conversation up front, how much does this cost for you to haul it off, versus me having to pay this fee later on my bills. So it's just something to kind of educate homeowners that they have options and they can make the best decision for them. >> Yeah. One of the things I'm considering after listening to all the questions that come up, it's obviously a complex topic, but we may very well send a specific brochure to each homeowner and, you know, that we provide solid waste service to just to further explain these and make sure that they know who they can call for any questions. I think that if there's any misunderstand, we'll do our best to try to get out ahead of that through our PCO department. >> Councilmember Ryan, I believe, is next. >> It's on this slide right here. Have we already purchased the carts or will they be purchased in time that we're not having craft bag only for a period of time that -- >> We've placed an initial order and we're anticipating receipt prior to, but depending on how much of a request that we have, there may be a slight variation or a slight lag in getting carts to everybody who requests them. We're going to be working diligently to make sure that we can fulfill those in the time that it takes. >> Okay. I guess my ask then would be that in the interim until we get those carts out that we not pick up because they're in plastic bags? >> We anticipate there will be -- I mean, while we want to start this on October 1st, we anticipate that there will be a transition and education period throughout the month of October and as we're getting the materials out to the customers to manage this. >> And do we have any plans for what we're going to do to -- besides just sitting out of, you know, a cart, for customers that don't read their mail, they say, oh, it's not from the city, let me just chunk it, if it's not a bill, they're going to throw it away, to inform them the first time there's plastic bags, maybe have a door hanger that we put out and says we picked it up this time, but next time we won't. >> We had meetings yesterday with public outreach and I think we're all on the same line right now but the things that need to happen to ensure that our customers and citizens are aware of the changes that are going to occur. So I think we're all in one mindset. >> Okay. Well, I'd say put me down for a cart, but I'm not authorized to order anything on my account. [ Laughter ] >> Okay. You want a question? You have a question? I'm going to go Mel, sir, and then Councilmember Arnton, you can come up with your follow-ups. >> I don't have a better answer, but I feel I need to ask, don't the craft bags kind of fall apart in the rain? >> No, they don't. >> Great. >> Having over 12 years of experience at City of Fort Worth implementing the same program, we had very minimal problems with craft bags after they had gotten wet. >> Very relieved to hear that. And just a suggestion that the customer communications, maybe just for an extra set of eyes, if there's time, run it through the Committee on Citizen Engagement. I know we've had some awkwardnesses with public communications in the past where an extra pair of eyes might have helped, just to give you feedback. >> Councilmember Arnton? >> Yeah. I like that idea about extra pair of eyes. >> Did you consider a sticker on the current bins, the trash or recycling bins, as maybe a way to notify people about the upcoming changes? >> We have not. >> And I don't know what the comparable cost of that is, but people might throw out a brochure, but they're not going to throw out their trash bin. Doesn't mean they'll necessarily read it, but anyway. >> But my question now about the subscription service, when we initially discussed that, I wasn't in favor, but I understand the majority wants that, so I want to focus on how can that be as simple as possible, and I'm sure you've already put a lot of thought into how that's going to go. I don't know if there was an actual subscription service for it in Fort Worth, but I'm wondering, is it just going to show up in your utility bill if you use it, or do you have to -- is there some sort of proactive measure that an individual homeowner needs to do to subscribe? >> This will be an opt-in, opt-out. So we get into growing season, we're starting to generate yard waste, I know that instead of composting it in my own backyard or doing something else with it, I'm going to be utilizing the service. I pick up the phone, call 8700, it initiates it. We get it onto our route, which we're trying to do this for efficiency basis. The minute it gets warm, you stop generating yard waste. If you want to stop the $1.50 a month on your bill, then you call 8700, say cease the service, it comes off the route, we stop servicing your house until you initiate it again. So again, as a partnership, the resident says, I need this service, and the city will step up and provide it. When you decide that you don't want it anymore, you cease it, and we will start coming in and servicing that. >> And that just will show up on the utility bill? >> Correct, on your monthly bill, it will show that dollar a month. >> I want to suggest, and by the way, there might be a good answer, a good reason why this is not feasible, but I'm imagining when this is first rolled out that there are going to be people who no matter if there's billboards placed in everybody's yard, people aren't going to know, and they're going to put out their yard waste. And so what about if yard waste is put out and you see yard waste, what about collecting that and then putting in notice a door hanger or something like that saying, oh, we see you have yard waste, we collected it, we'll be putting in extra dollar or 50 cents on your bill, or maybe saying, this time is gratis, but call this number to subscribe. See what I'm saying? >> There's a lot of yard waste that's not collected in a lot of confusion and anger, some sort of measure. >> As I stated earlier, this implementation is going to be a little bit of a dance. We understand that there is going to be some continued education, and as we find this, we're not going to penalize people. We want compliance as opposed to sort of enforcement. So again, as we find at least initially bags that are set not in compliance, we'll reach out to the customers, we'll make notice, and then we'll get them on a route, get them signed up and get them working with the system. But again, we're trying to focus on efficiencies, building a route about point to point as opposed to driving down every street. We spend a lot of time just in our vehicles driving and expending gas and making emissions just looking for this stuff right now. So by going point to point to point, it's much more environmentally friendly and we have so many more benefits. >> Oh, yeah, and that, yeah, that I'm fine with. It's the -- >> Correct. >> The cost. So one more -- one recommendation, Mr. City Manager, and I'd mentioned this before, but I don't know if this got recorded for the record. If there could be when this happens, when this is rolled out, if there could be some communication with code enforcement to not, you know, penalize people, at least that would be my recommendation, I don't know how others would feel about that, you know, for having yard waste out that's uncollected while people are still getting used to the new -- the new policy. Thank you. >> After that. Councilmember Briggs. >> Thank you. I have a few clarification questions. And so on the opt in, opt out, is that something that we can do on Engage Ditten app now? >> You probably could. >> Okay. But I don't know about specifically now because we don't have the script set up, but that is something that we could incorporate into that, if need be. >> I know in one of our conversations, the easier it is, if there's a place you can go on the website, you know, somewhere you can do it on your app, it would be more likely because if you're talking about doing it for a couple of months and then not doing it anymore and said, you know, when you have a subscription service, sometimes you forget and then it just goes on and on and you're like, wait a second. So the easier we make it to opt in and opt out, that would be my recommendation. We try that. >> And on the excess brush, so if you could just help me understand here. So if you have in '18, '19, you had four cubic yards, it was free. But if you had any extra, it was $7 per yard. >> Yard. >> Yard. Okay. So that would be just $7 if you had five, right? Five cubic yards. >> Correct. >> So now-- >> Plus what you're currently paying in your bill for the four yards. >> Right. >> Okay. >> Right. It's built in. I'm just talking about an extra charge. >> Correct. >> Because now, if you have five yards, it's going to be $75 instead of just seven. Correct? >> No. >> No. So because we don't have 30 minutes, we don't have 15 minutes, we just have up to an hour. So say if you have four, five, six, seven cubic yards, right, but it only takes 10 minutes. Do you not charge or do you charge a $75 for that extra time? >> It would be a quarter, quarter-hour increment. So no, 15 minutes is worth of effort is what we would charge. >> Okay. So it's not always just that full-- >> No. It's a quarter. So if it takes-- if we're there for 15 minutes, that's what it takes us. If we're there for 25 minutes, then we'll charge for 30. >> Okay. All right. So it's a little bit more complicated now with the new rate structure, so I'm just trying to make sure that if this video is rewatched, that somebody can understand what's going on. So that answers that. And on the red line, the list of the charges, the Denton-- I think you have it here on the first. If you're a Denton resident, it is $44, great rate, and it used to be 44 for non-Denton as well, but now it's just 46, which is-- >> It will be 46, correct. >> -- which is just a $2 charge more. >> Correct. >> And used to, it said you used to have to show your utility bill that proves you're a Denton resident. Now you're not going to have to do that. So are we going to be looking at driver's license, and why just the $2? Because when I think about other charges like parks and rec or libraries, it's like $5 charge for non-City of Denton residents to use our services. >> Correct. And, you know, we'll take any form of ID, whether, you know, it shows your physical address. If you have a driver's license, if you have an insurance card, if you bring in your utility bill, we can use that as proof of-- or proof of residence for City of Denton both inside and outside. The $2 is really sort of-- it's the additional cost recovery, you know, running the landfill is fixed cost. So what we're really trying to do is to put a premium on people outside the city to be able to use this facility. So the City of Denton residents actually get a little bit more benefit because they are-- it is within the City of Denton and it is our facility. >> Oh, no. I completely agree. I'm just wondering why it's not more than just $2. >> $2 at least initially seemed equitable, and we want to be able to gauge that, and then maybe next year we'll do something different. We want to see what kind of impact that does have as far as tonnage across the scale, traffic, things of that nature. >> Okay. So on the residential opt-in, opt-out, another question about that, is it-- so it's optional. Do you have to-- so if you buy a cart, right, and if you're opting out of the service, are you still paying monthly for the cart? >> No. The cart is a one-time purchase, $20, and it's yours. >> Okay. And so the 50 cents is just for the pickup service. >> Correct. >> So you're not paying for the cart if you're not using the service because you've already purchased it and it's yours? >> Correct. >> Good. Good. Okay. And I just-- one more. One more. On the-- there's an organ-- there's a organics commercial organics collection service charge. Is that compost? >> No. That is for our big box retailers that have pre-consumer organic materials such as lettuce that's gone bad and things of that nature. That material is brought to the landfill and we put-- we do turn it into the dino dirt. So that's the charge for it to come across the scale. >> Okay. And that's just for commercial but there's no-- that's not for residential. >> Well, here's the beauty about our yard waste program. Pre-consumer vegetative waste can go into your yard bag and it can go into your cart. So again, you know, you're cutting off the lettuce, you take the heel end off of it, a couple of bad leaves, that can go into your yard cart or into your craft bag and that will go into our compost program. >> Okay. Fantastic. >> Okay. >> Thank you. Thank you for that. >> Yeah. Just a couple of comments. On the subscription service, is there a minimum time frame for that? I mean, I mean, are we just going to have people opting in for a dollar, opting out when they have something? I mean, what's the minimum for that? Is there a minimum time frame? >> There is not a minimum at this point when-- you know, but the charge is monthly so you opt in, you will pay that dollar for that month, you know, even if you opt out the next week. >> Okay. All right. And as far as the $2 difference on the outside, the city gate collection, when you're talking about illegal dumping and what would foster or what would create the potential for more illegal dumping, to me, that's what it would be because the higher that gets, that means people aren't going to be driving to Denton to get rid of-- they're going to-- they may be on the way, dump it off on the side of the road. The illegal dumping with commercial dumpsters, I get it. I'm sure there's been some people who have been driving by with a couch, dump it off at my dumpster. I would much rather be able to have an opportunity and from the people I've talked to, to call and say, hey, we'll pay these additional fees to have somebody come pick this up because it's going to be almost impossible to determine who it was unless there's a trash bag there with mail and something like that, something identifiable in it, which that's happened. So but the subscription service, I was just like, well, if you're opting in and opting out as you need, I guess as long as that doesn't make it inefficient and drive up the cost. That was my only question. Well, again, it should make it more efficient because, again, we're only going to the routes that have subscriptions. So the minute you-- even though it's the middle of the month, you say, I want to unsubscribe, you're off the list. Yeah. So does that mean if you're on the list and you don't have anything there, you're still dropping by that address? We're still going to drop by that address, but we will capture that information. We may reach out and with contact, say, hey, you didn't have anything out. Is everything OK? Or follow up with that matter. OK. OK. All right. Boy, it sure would be great if there was a way to have some type of software that if people set something out that you could-- because if you got 5,000 people subscribed and only 2,500 put out on any given day, you're going to 5,000 stops. Well, in one of the supplemental packages that hopefully y'all will approve here in a couple of weeks for solid waste, we are including some software for some routing, which will include in-cab information so that if the driver comes by and it's not set out, he'll punch the screen and it'll trigger back information. It may shoot an email if we've got that on file or whatever, but it'll make that communication more easy, but then it will also help us in the next week know that there wasn't anything there and to follow up to see if we need to go back to that address. OK. All right. Council Member Armitage, if there's not anymore, we'll wrap up this part of the presentation. Yeah, just real quick. And I love the idea about the individual pickup. My problem before and question now is about the cost, is it-- as I recall, the justification for that, the dollar and 50 cents a month, that it wasn't so much like a cost to service because it's more than that, but kind of like a collateral, like they're putting it-- you're making an investment in your subscription, is that-- That is correct. Yeah. And is that-- in Fort Worth, is that what they did when-- It's been 10 years since I worked with City of Fort Worth, but initially when it was set up, there was an additional charge that was included in the fee for your bulk and brush collection. But again, it was serviced every week by-- through every address. How they've changed that in the past few years, I don't know. One of the things that we're looking forward to in the future is potentially looking at drop-off stations, which again, more convenience to allow you to bring it somewhere to be collected and hauled away, as opposed to at your curb. So-- Would that be instead of or in addition? Are we talking about Fort Worth? Well, that's what-- It's sort of looking forward, but again, I'm just-- OK. I'm just waxing out here, hopefully, but in the future-- and again, this is four or five years down the road as a result of potentially some long-term planning, but a couple of drop-off stations or maybe even a transfer station here or there that allows you to bring this-- something a little more convenient to your home as opposed to coming to the landfill, dropping it off. So it doesn't have to set. You can manage it when it's generated as opposed to having to try to figure out, do I call? Do I do this? Do I do that? Do I do that for the citizen? Thank you. All right. All right. Thank you so much. I guess you're up for the next part of the presentation. I'm up for the next Tuesday. All right. You bet. You've got a little more of me here. Yep. OK. OK. So with that, you may remember back on July 11th when we originally rolled out some of these feeds, we also talked about a proof of concept for downtown valet collection service along what we're calling Industrial Street. It's-- it actually-- we implemented it on the 24th of June, and we anticipated it was going to take us between 30 and 120 days to figure out what was going on, how it was going to work. Well, you know, it's worked better than any of us could have ever thought. In 45 days now, we're ready to come back and say, OK, let's take these next steps and extend it into the downtown area. Just as a reminder, what this service included was basically doorstep collection, three, four collections, whatever the business needed to manage their waste on a daily basis and taking that material away, doing litter abatement, looking at doing pressure washing in the future. But again, it was a seven-day-a-week job. And again, we did look at Industrial Street. Some of the things that we con-- we were anticipating the benefits of this valet service was improved aesthetics and odor. And in the next couple of slides, I want to show you some really remarkable pictures. Another key was adding some parking spaces initially-- or immediately when we pulled the two dumpsters out behind Russell Street, which is the backside of Industrial Street, we gained two parking spots. By pushing this throughout the downtown area, we could potentially gain up to about 20 parking spots in the downtown area, depending on how they're oriented. So again, some great benefits there. Our high level of service improves the looks and the feel of the area. We've reduced heavy solid waste trucks downtown from 16 trips a week down to two. Illegal dumping, contamination. There's going to be some really interesting statistics I'm going to show you here about illegal dumping. And really what's happened is the carts have right-sized the waste demand to the business itself. So as far as ease of use, there's no special instructions or specialized equipment that the businesses had to learn or use. So again, it was a win-win for everybody. When we look back down behind what's now Steve's Wine Bar, before we had the trash dumpster and in the six weeks, not only have we removed the dumpster, but Steve's put a patio on the back. Looks really nice. You'll see that it's nice and clean back there. Again, back behind roosters and fuzzies, same thing. We've removed the dumpster. It's cleaned up the area just aesthetically. It's really good. We've heard just remarkable and anecdotal feedback from the workers, from the managers, even the patrons of this area. They really enjoy the look and the feel of what we're seeing here. So again, we're really excited, really proud of our employees who've been working this too. They love working this time period. They're really becoming sort of the brand ambassadors for the city of Denton in this area. They're there all the time. People are seeing up and down. They're asking them questions. So again, a lot of benefits to having people intensively in this area. Before we implemented our valet program, we were servicing basically 56 cubic yards of material down there a week. That's both recycling and garbage on an estimated weight of about 10 tons a week. Anecdotally, the drivers would say those dumpsters were full every day when they went and dumped them. When we pulled those and now we come to our valet service, we're only seeing 3.16 tons of garbage a week in that area. So somewhere, there's seven tons of waste that's floating around. We don't know where it came from. We don't know where it went. But again, it was not assigned to that shared service in that area. And if it's indicative of what's happening on Russell Street, what can we assume that it's happening all in the downtown area where the shared services are? Same thing. There's a tremendous amount of illegal use of these dumpsters that are downtown. So again, what we were trying to do is to create some equity for the people that are using this service. Looking at the trash, about two and a quarter ton a week in the area. Recycling we've had almost a ton. Our recycling rate is tremendous at 28.61% and I say it's tremendous when you look across all the other commercial sectors in the city of Denton right now. We're struggling to get up to about 15% right now. So again, it's almost double. The contamination rate, that was what I really want to focus on, it's less than 8%. Actually that should be zero. And the reason being it's 8% is one week we had a worker that forgot to put the lid on an old fire oil jug and it ended up -- the oil in there, the excess oil contaminated a load of cardboard. So again, had that one piece not happened, we would have a 0% contamination rate for this area in our tier or in our trial area. So again, education outreach, we've had discussions with everybody. The last couple of loads that have come in have been pristine again. So again, opportunities to really improve the quality of the contamination, increase the price and our ability to go out and service these areas. It's been wonderful. So based on all this good news, what we want to try to do is to go ahead and implement this throughout downtown. Starting next week, what we want to try to do is to move through six phases in through the downtown area. Everybody that is on a shared service right now, we want to convert them to a valet service. So what we want to do is starting here in phase one, sort of the Mulberry south of the square, coordinate with that group, go ahead, start meeting with people, do the waste audits. And then work our way north of the square, east and west. Go back in around our industrial street, north and south, because we still have some shared containers in that area to affect. And then by the mid to end of November, hit our Fry Street area and get that area cleaned up too. Again, working to anticipate, you know, every two weeks we're rolling a new area in. Starting, you know, first with meeting and talking with managers, auditing these areas, identifying where carts are going to go, right sizing their waste service to the area that or to the business that it's going to have. What we want to be doing is start billing to begin one month after our cart placement. And that billing is going to be related to a tier assignment, which we'll discuss here in just a minute. And it's based on waste generation. And then once everybody's completely implemented, we'll do a true up in 2020. No, I'm just going to instruct the council to wait on questions until we -- are you at a different -- are you at a slide change or? Yeah, I'm going to go away. Okay. So we'll go ahead and take questions here. Council Member Briggs and then Council Member Armitage. Yeah. Well, mine is -- it's about the valet service rates, because I'm looking at the five different tiers. We'll get to that here in a minute. Right. Okay. So my question -- do all of the areas, do all the businesses have to participate in one of these tiers? And when you do, we do talk about that, because I see the rates seem reasonable, but I don't know what they were paying. So I'm just looking for that. I will cover that when I get to that slide. Okay. Council Member Armitage. So first of all, bravo to our department, our collectors, and also to those businesses that are doing such a great job and their workers who, you know, aren't -- who are keeping such a low contamination rate. How many -- when we go -- or assuming we give direction to do the -- all of downtown, how many new parking spaces will that open up? Up to 20. Yeah. I think it was in the presentation. And again, that depends on whether you're parallel parking, whether you're angle parking, and a lot of that goes back into whether you're one-way or two-way streets, so there's a lot of discussion around that. But again, we could have up to 20, depending on how they work it. Yeah. I think I saw that in the presentation. Council Member -- Mayor Pro Tem. Yeah. Question, and I guess for you and city management, I have a -- I think it's -- so it's north Austin between East Oak and Hickory, so I think that's phase three-ish. Okay. Yes. And so I'd like to see if we could take a phased approach to the phasing. So Mayor Pro Tem, if we could -- that's sort of a discussion for, I think, once he finishes the presentation. If we could get through the slides and then -- because that's more of the policy direction, so if we could do that, if that's possible, could we -- Certainly. Okay. All right. Thank you. Yeah. Go ahead. Okay. Now we get into the less fun part about the presentation, but the cost of service. Right now, people in the downtown area on shared service are currently paying this annually. When we look at the total volume we have out there, we are under recovering by about $80,000 per year. And again, a lot of that's due to the oversized -- the full loads, things of that nature. The valet service, again, will be increased about 123,000 additional over that, and again, that relies basically because we're going to have to add additional FTE and buy some equipment for that area. But again, the recovery on this, we feel, will affect this, plus also some over recovery in other areas. We'll be able to subsidize this area, and that's why we want to wait until 2020 to do the true up. So again, that's just from a full cost accounting standpoint. That's what we're looking at for the cost of the service in the downtown area. We did talk about looking at five different tiers based on NAASIC codes to define what your rate would be. Currently we really don't have any rhyme or reason about what people are paying in the downtown area, and that's really all I'm going to say about that. I don't know how they were originally assigned. I don't know why they're still paying some of those rates. We currently have 141 people on our businesses and residents on shared services. Currently in the tier one, which is your lightest level, you know, your real estate office that may have one bag of garbage a day or your residential rate, we found that people were paying between $272 and almost $200 a month, basically for equivalent service. So what we want to do is knock that down to a proposed $24.70. Tier two, small retail, bars, no food, again, going up to your tier five, which is your full service restaurants, your very intensive businesses that are in that area. As I said, we have 141 residents or businesses in this area. We anticipate 96 or more will actually be paying less under this rate tiered situation than they currently are right now. The remainder will be paying a few tens more. There will be a few of these that will be paying a couple hundred more, only because they've been misassigned or they're not paying any fee right now. We found during an audit about five or six businesses right now that are not paying for solid waste service in the downtown area. As a result, there may be some outcries as a result of that, but again, everybody needs to be carrying their fair share of the load on garbage. So again, it allows us to better control what's being paid. Also, as we're going through the audit process and in this month where we're starting to collect garbage, we can move people in and up or down tiers, depending on what their waste generation actually is. Currently, as I said, NACIS codes have been used to assign businesses to tiers. However, if it shows that they're actually generating less garbage, we can move them down a tier and actually reduce their garbage. So we'll be working closely with the businesses in this area to make this change. Councilmember Briggs, you had a question on this, I believe. I was looking in the actual rate ordinance, and I couldn't find the current charge, and I guess that's because there's such a large variety of where it could be. And so I was just kind of trying to find the equivalent to what we were doing, and I couldn't find it in the red line version, and I see now why. Correct. Yeah. Councilmember Armitage? Thank you. Thank you, Councilmember Briggs. What I would need to see, and I didn't ask for this in advance because I know it would take a while, before I could approve of these rates would be to see kind of a breakdown restaurant by restaurant, or the kind of tier two to tier five, including the bars and restaurants, which are currently paying which rate, or maybe if for some reason that's private information, then at least how many in this area, say, are paying $395 in tier two versus $24.72. My concern, obviously, it would be about the impact on small business owners in an area where rents are increasing. Councilmember Armitage? As I did with Mayor Pro Tem, that's sort of giving him direction. If we could wait until the end of the presentation, because that's going to sound like something that staff's going to have to research anyway. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Well, anyway, I would like to see some sort of breakdown to be able to decide, to be able to weigh in. All right. Thank you. All right. So, that ends it for my presentation for the valet. Third thing I would like to talk about today is the -- Yeah. Say that one more time. I have a question. Yeah, yeah. No. We'll break it here. Mayor Pro Tem, you had a question about the shared services, so we'll go ahead and entertain those questions at the end of the valet. Got it. Thank you. And then Councilmember Armitage. So, what I'd like to do is -- North Austin there, there's two dumpsters. It's right behind where the mini mall used to be. And so, I'd like to ask, and I think it's more city manager and you in conjunction. I'd like to see, can we move forward with cleaning up and lining up the parking? I would sell you on angle parking. Should we do that and have the dumpsters in the middle, and obviously we'll get there, but it's kind of like a -- my concern is this. September is great timing-wise, I think, but the problem, I would feel a little pinched because we'll have day of the dead shortly thereafter, which, you know, a ton of people descend on that area. So, I'd really like to have kind of parking-identified habits kind of established. And then there'll be that middle segment where the dumpsters currently are that would need to be phased out and you come stripe that, but at least some of the heavy lifting's kind of done in advance if that's an option. I don't know what goes into kind of the pre-planning, but that would be my ask if it's doable. And credit to you and those that work with you on your initial meeting with the sample set there, that's significant, and then if -- I don't know that you're phasing touched on it. Does -- where does Hoochie's fall on that? So that's right on the other side of Industrial Street? Yeah, so that would be in phase five. Okay. And so I'd ask us to maybe relook at that because that -- I think theirs would line up with the -- either the parking lot or the park, both high-visibility areas that maybe if we could shift the order of things -- I don't know what goes into that. That's just a thought. We'll take that into consideration. We can certainly rethink some of the phasing if Council wants. And I'd like to get back to Councilmember Armitage's question. We've got all the rates that folks are currently paying. I think the thing that Brian needs a little bit of opportunity for and why we're rolling this out in two-week increments is to sit down with the businesses, let them know that there are -- there are opportunities as well for folks to perhaps even move to a different tier or something like that, depending on how much they really need. So it's not going to be something where, you know, it's -- that they're going to necessarily -- I think there's very few that are actually going to be undergoing increases anyway. But there's probably going to be an opportunity for some to lower the bill and get down to another tier. That's not something you're going to be able to set through a rate. That's going to be something that through his conversations and talking with them, they'll choose that level of service and whether they can adhere to it after watching their behavior for a little while. So that's ultimately how this is going to work. But I think that you've already got all the bills and there's very few that, as I recall, that were paying more under this scenario. There were some. Well, like I said, there was close to 100 that -- of the 141 will actually realize a rate reduction. Okay. Of that 41 that remain, we'll be working with them to try to get them into a better tier than what they're currently -- And those 41 are in the tiers two through five? Actually, yes, tiers two through five. So if there's opportunities to move them up into a tier that doesn't require the level of service, they might be able to even save money again. But that's why he's wanting to get a couple weeks for each one of them is to kind of watch their behavior, see if their recycling comes up, and if they're really overpaying for a level of service they don't need. So you're not going to be able to solve that by looking at their current rates. Councilmember Briggs. So are we talking about getting rid of every single large dumpster and every single giant recycling container in this area? In the shared service area, correct. So there's not really going to be -- this is pretty much going to be a mandatory service for the businesses to -- Correct. To be in. There's not really going to be another option. So I appreciate that you are willing to work with them on their usage and tier. So William Square, that section's going to go away as well? The ones there? Yeah. All those dumpsters will go away, and again, William Square, and then I forget the location on the northwest portion, will ultimately become where we put some stationary compactors to manage the waste that we're picking up. So yeah, I mean, I just -- I see when we're talking about the different tiers and less waste generation as an opportunity, you know, we have our green business program now. If more people are inclined to do the recycling and do less waste, I see a pretty good incentive there. But I do want to just go ahead and give you guys kudos, because I talked to a couple of business owners, and part of their issue was late at night, sending their employees out far down to -- they wouldn't send women out alone, and now they don't really have to worry about that. So their safety is a priority now, and I just want to -- that's an aspect that we don't really think about, but it is a good benefit of the service. It is a benefit, and I appreciate that. Yeah. Thank you. First, I just want to say, home run, I think it's going to be so appreciated, what a transformative thing. I wonder a little bit about the observation that there's that -- you know, all that illegal waste that must have gone somewhere, so, you know, don't -- wouldn't we expect to see kind of heavier pressure on the kind of other places to put public waste, and do we have to, you know, have a strategy to keep up with that? You would expect to see that. We're not seeing it in other dumpsters, but, again, as we start removing the dumpsters, that's when we're going to have to keep a better eye out. So, you know, and our guys out there right now, you know, they're only working one block, so they're trying to gain information as they're out there, and right now we can't put a finger on exactly where this waste was coming from or where it went, but, again, you know, they are the eyes and the feet on the ground, so they're giving us information as they find it, so. >> Thank you so much for the innovation and the creativity. >> You're welcome. >> Because we've been working on this for many, many, many years. >> Well, again, it's -- you know, we just had a concept, but it's really the guys that are out in the field that they are dedicated to this, they've got the right mindset, and they want to see this work. >> Well, and I want to really extend appreciation to the businesses who are understanding and willing to be flexible and also understand the benefit of this, so just -- I'm just glad that, you know, we've got some really forward-thinking staff and businesses who really want to create the space in the downtown that we've really all been working hard to do, so I appreciate that. >> You're welcome. Thank you. >> So we've got one other section on this presentation. >> Yes, we do. Yes, we do. >> Which is acceptance of guaranteed landfill tonnage under contract. >> Correct. Under our current scenario, we currently have four private companies and one municipality bringing us about 8,800 tons of waste per month on average, and with an annual revenue of almost $2.7 million. This is important to us because basically it closes the gap that we need for financing the operations of the landfill. We had several of them reach out wanting us to think about guaranteeing some rates as they move forward to allow them an operation to enter into some contracts with other customers that they have, so we decided to go ahead and meet with representatives of everybody that was really bringing this third-party waste and asked them to propose a guaranteed tonnage rate. What would you bring us -- if we could enter under contract, what would you bring us from a tonnage standpoint and what would you be willing to pay for it? Under a three-year contract, using an annual escalator, and a true up at the end. So typically these are called put or pay. Either you put the waste here or you pay for that difference that you didn't put here. So again, it's guaranteed revenue into us regardless of how much tonnage they bring up to a ceiling level. So again, in this time that we were having these discussions, we actually had one additional government entity approach us as far as entering into a contract from a put or pay standpoint. So we went ahead and had discussions with them also and included them in this evaluation. Now the two charts I'm going to show you will be slightly different than the ones you may have received in your packet only because we reached out to a couple of the entities that submitted and said we think you can sweeten the deal just a little bit. So as of yesterday afternoon, we finally got their second bites at the apple so to speak back and I think you'll be relatively pleased at least what the results of that were. Again, we're still waiting for one firm to submit a number to us. This is a government entity. Their administrative head is away from the office and they weren't able to certify the bid back to us or the proposal back to us so they're not included right now. But we actually had-- let's see, one, two-- we had five firms go ahead and submit a proposed cap on a monthly tonnage as well as a rate. So anyway, we've got rates anywhere from $26 to $34 per ton. With this, if we went ahead and took all of the proposals as was submitted here, we'd see an additional tonnage over and above what's currently being brought to the city of Denton of about 3,300 additional tons but that would be-- that would net us an additional one point-- almost $1.4 million revenue annually in addition to what we're currently collecting. And the annual estimated loss of this additional airspace over the three-year period would be approximately 80 days or almost three months. So again, just to put it in perspective, we have 17 years left in our current landfill life with our permit expansion which we expect the first part of next year. That's an additional 30 to 80 depending on how high we go. So anywhere from about 50 to almost 90 years, we're talking about three months in 50 to 90 years worth of capacity. On the net on this, over and above what the potential losses for the revenue in that three-month period, that would be almost $2.1 million net to us positive. >> Councilmember Armitage? >> And so all of these entities including the municipality, did they-- would they not be using our landfill if they had to pay the new $46 rate? >> That is a really good question. And with the exception of possibly two of these firms, the answer would be yes. And part of that-- >> Yes, they wouldn't-- >> They would not be using our facility. And part of that goes back to several of them have long-term contracts set up with the other entities that they serve based on a disposal-- an assumption of a disposal rate. So again, they've got to work within that assumption range to basically remain liquid and be able to continue operating themselves. So again, I'm not saying I want to subsidize them, but what this does sort of this attempt in addition to keeping us whole for the year, what it also does is shows really what the value is. So the next time we go out for this, it basically-- or if somebody has to-- is going to be bidding on a new contract, a third-party firm, they're going to know that really instead of this number down here for tonnage, they need to be approaching this number up here when they're estimating their bid and their disposal capacity, bringing it to the city of Denver. So it's really assigning a market rate to what we're currently doing. >> And can you repeat again what you said about how many out of these A through F you had said initially, all of them, or this many, I feel like it was five out of six, maybe I misheard, would not-- >> All but two entities. >> All but two. >> All but two. >> All but two. >> Okay. >> All but two. >> Yeah. And which of the two-- I'm trying to figure out the tonnage of trash. You don't have to name them, obviously, just D and E, A and whatever. >> Well, again, I believe A and B would be-- >> The tonnage of trash. >> A and B are obviously the ones that are most aggressive in there. >> That's what I figured. I figured that we would potentially not risk losing if we decided to charge everybody 46. >> Okay. >> Councilmember Meltzer. >> There's no reason you think they only need the service of three years, right? I mean, wouldn't you assume this is an ongoing need? >> I would assume it would be an ongoing thing, but again, in three years, one thing that's good for us, that's when a lot of our debt falls off from the landfill standpoint. And for lack of a better term, we don't need this to bridge the gap from a financial standpoint. So, again, after three years, we come back to this agreement and we can re-up if we want to or we can make a decision to go in another direction. But again, typically, when you look-- interest you why these agreements are at three-year basis. >> But just to kind of understand the comparison points, if it's-- let's say we have 18 years of life just 'cause I can do that math in my head, so, you know, that might be six terms of three years. >> Potentially. >> So, it's 80 days in each of those three years, then it's 480 days over the expected life, you know, which is more like close to a year and a half out of our-- out of our 17 years. >> Correct. >> Okay. >> Good. Any other comments, questions? You had a-- Council Member Briggs? >> So, you mentioned cost of service, though it's not really capturing cost of service, but we don't want to-- I mean, can you-- >> Can you say what you said again because we just had a full presentation, we started out the meeting today. >> Right. >> About taxpayers subsidizing, you know, other-- so I'm just trying to-- is this cost of service or is it not? Are they getting a little better deal because it's income and it keeps us whole or are we eventually going to try to get to that point? >> Again, we're moving to a full cost of service. >> Okay. >> Again, because of the debt that we have incurred over the past 10 years at the landfill that we're still trying to pay off, we have this incremental gap that we have to cover, which is what the third party currently does. In three years, that falls away and again, our rates should more closely align with what we're seeing up here as opposed to the 44 and 46 that we're having to charge right now at the gate. >> When we were going through the cost of service study on solid waste, prior council's management had made a decision to accept significant quantities around $24, I want to say a ton, and became very dependent on that, you know, so what Brian has done is ask them for rates to see where the market really was. Obviously, it's higher than $24 a ton and I had him go back last week and ask them to sharpen their pencils one more time before we saw you. So you're getting a little bit better idea of where the market is before, especially with the C&D before they moved their business elsewhere, but it was really an attempt to try to start weaning, you know, us off them, at least giving the council in the next three or four years the ability to wean themselves off these types of agreements without hurting the fund. I think the other thing it does is if you choose to put these put-or-pay agreements in place right now, it provides another revenue stream if you want to continue expanding our services. So that's kind of how you need to look at it and as we deconstructed this fund, this was one of the places we found that it was particularly vulnerable and that deal had been in place. So it adds the impact, it adds additional tons monthly and you may have already done this but I have not done this math in my head and we had 16 years of 17 years left. So by continuing to do this for the three years, does it impact that 17 years to less than that or is that included in accepting this tonnage? It's about an 80-day impact in the first three years. Okay. So as Councilman Melcher was saying, you know, over the life of the 17 years, it's about a year and a half. Less. Less. Just for the three years or if you continue? For the entire life of the landfill. Okay. If we decided to continue going three-year, three-year, three-year but again, if we only look at this, you know, in perspective of the three-year of this contract, it's only 80 days. Okay. So the decision point is if you did a three-year deal, you'd be able to maintain rates and maybe give us additional flexibility if we needed to lower them or add programs but in three years when the debt starts falling off, you'd have a decision whether you'd want to continue in this business. For just 80 days less. Yes. Okay. Thank you. That helps. Councilman Armitage? Yeah. I was just Googling what does 12,000 tons of trash look like, you know, to get a picture of how much we'd be taking in per month. So I guess I'll leave it at that because my subsequent question and comment is probably more of a -- fits into the discussion. But, you know, I do understand and appreciate this plan that you've worked out even though I'm probably going to give direction to raise the rates and to wean them off more abruptly for a cold turkey, I guess, really, if that would not wean them. Okay. All right. One other option that we have here also is -- Is this your last slide on this or do you have other slides? I have one more slide. Okay. All right. Go ahead. Again, looking at this, if we wanted to try to stay relatively neutral to what our revenue or current waste volumes are, and again, we're at about, as I said, about 8,800. Here we're under 8,800 taking the next firm in. If we just took firms A through D and they did not take a bid or enter into contract with ENF, that would take our total tonnage down to about 11,500. So about 2,800 additional tons a month. Additional revenue would be about $1.2 million. Estimated loss of life of landfill is 66 days. So again, for 15 days, you're losing a considerable amount of revenue that should be positive. So again, but that is another option we could potentially look at as you're moving forward. All right. Thank you. Okay. So with that, from a next step standpoint, again, just wrapping up here from a rate standpoint, we're going to be returning to PUB next Monday to present the rate study or the rate information to them, and then you will see the rate ordinance to be presented to the City Council for final approval. Valley service, we're going to begin implementation again next week through the downtown shared service footprint. And then based on your direction today, we'll finalize, negotiate, and bring forward contracts for council consideration on the contracted rates with volumes. All right. Questions, comments? All right. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Oh, yes. Councilman, I didn't see you. Mayor Pro Tem. Yeah. Well, no, go ahead, Councilman Matson and Mayor Pro Tem. Yeah. You raised your hand? Yeah. Okay. Go ahead. Sorry. Didn't see you. Yeah. I appreciate the ingenuity. I'm interested in extending the life of the landfill for local use. Okay. Mayor Pro Tem. Yeah. No matter the direction, it would be the option to include A through E for their interim, and obviously those stuff I'm happy with. And I do take your point about the impact our employees will have that Valley service increasing that visibility around the square. That's really dynamic. I like that. And back to the Valley conversation, I think that's really neat. Okay. Councilmember Davis. So my direction would be to move forward with the firms that you've been negotiating with. I think the misunderstanding is that we are weaning the firms off of our landfill. We're weaning the landfill off of these firms. Right now we use their money to subsidize our trash operations. So right now we need it. In three years with these contracts in place, their trash is going to go someplace where it's here or somewhere else. So in three years, if we bridge that gap, pay it off the debt that's starting to falling off, then we can have a real conversation about not operating this kind of service and not burdening our rate payers with the operation we have going on. Okay. Councilmember Milder. So I'm with Councilmember Milder. I prefer to, at least as I understood, to extend the life of the landfill for local use and we're working on encouraging local people to recycle and reuse and reduce instead of using our landfill. I definitely don't want to take on new contracts, so I'm firmly against E and F. I would rather do nothing, not do nothing, but rather get rid of all of those contracts or actually really just say, you know, you have to pay the same rate as everybody else and so if you want to do that, that's fine, otherwise, bye-bye. I'm keenly aware of the people who live near the landfill, so we're adding, you know, additional outside trash to their backyard. So again, I would prefer to just cut everyone off cold turkey by charging everybody the same rate. My farthest and second choice would be the second option of only A through D. Okay. All right. Councilmember Ryan. Yep. I'm with Councilmember Davis and Husbeth for the full thing. Again, this is outside of the city, people paying to pay off our debt and when you can take it off of our ratepayers and our taxpayers, that's for 80 days' worth of landfill, that's maybe not the best deal we can get, but it's a damn good deal. All right. Such profanity. I'm sorry, I didn't even know how to respond to that. Yeah, I would share not all of those exact sentiments, but some of those sentiments. And moving forward, understanding that if we didn't do anything, if we decided we're not going to accept any outside waste, then we're going to have to go in and modify these solid waste rates on our current customers to pay that difference. And so that three years -- and I want to -- if you could go back to the slide that shows the amount of tonnage, because I want to make sure I understand it. You're showing 12,100 proposed tons per month. The impacts is that's an additional 33. So already, if we did nothing like this, we're still getting in 9,000 additional tons. About 9,000 tons as part of our current waste profile every month is coming in from these third parties. All right. So if we cut out all third parties -- I mean, I don't know if that's what some have proposed here today, but if we say we cut out all third party trash haulers coming in, it's only for city of Denton residents, well, then that additional revenue, this is only for these additional contracts. If you cut out those 9,000 tons, then you're also cutting out that revenue, which if it's proportional, that number is going to go up three times almost, which now you're looking at $4 million that somehow we've got to find in our ratepayers structure. So I just want to make sure -- I mean, everybody's entitled to their direction they want to get, but I want to make sure that the public has an opportunity to know, you know, the implications of that. Okay. So I'm with Mayor Pro Tem, Councilmember Davis, and Councilmember Ryan. I don't know exactly where Councilmember Briggs is, but did you give direction, Councilmember Briggs? So I do want to conserve space at the landfill and keep it as long as we can for our residents to use, but I also don't want to increase the rates for our customers at the moment. And so I feel like three-year time period, although it's not ideal and it's not what I prefer to do, it's the wise thing to do so that we can figure out a better way to move forward in three years. I'm not going to be in favor of this. I think that that's where, you know, we need to draw the line and cut off this supplemental funding, but we are accustomed to it, and I don't want to make up rates, you know, $1,300,000 from our users next year, so that's where I stand. We're going to end this up real quick. Councilmember Pro Tem and Councilmember Armitage, I'm going to have the last word. So I'm going to use Councilmember Davis's word. So put a pin in the 12,100,000 tons, and then can we go back to slide 10, please? 12,000. So we're saving, if I'm reading this right top line, six tons a week. Roughly about seven tons a week are not being collected now that we're being collected in the future. Right. And then where we left, there's 12 tons a month coming in. So downtown alone we -- yeah, I'm sorry, I'm all over -- a million, a hundred -- I won't go into decimals in a minute, but yeah, so I think that, to me, speaks -- I mean, you're talking about there was almost more generated downtown or the equivalent downtown weekly, right? Nine? No, you're off by a magnitude couple -- Okay. So what is that? 9.8? 9.8 tons a week. A week. That's 50 tons a year. That's 50 tons a year versus 10,000 a month. Okay. So -- but when we roll that out, what do you expect to save across downtown? Across downtown? Well, a lot of it depends on how much illegal dumping, but again, if we applied it to this, you could save several hundred tons a week of space. Yeah. So I think I like that approach, just kind of narrowing across the board, narrowing the data, and then narrowing the usage, and I think we'll find other opportunities for that, for similar services to show a reduction and to move towards -- I mean, I think that's everyone's goal, is to extend the life -- Yes. -- as much as possible. So thank you. Thank you. Councilmember Armitage? Yeah, so just really quickly to respond to something else that was said, I do understand that under the current scenario, you know, the way that the rates are -- have been determined that to raise the rates for those firms would put the burden onto all the rate payers had there been a different direction, you know, there are other ways to structure rates specifically so that the burden is on the biggest producers of trash and not on the local small businesses and residents. So I'm not going to go into that, but that would have been possible. So I just want to make clear I'm not for raising residential or small business rates either. So just real quick question and clarification so that I understand. If you go back to your chart that shows the -- that one right there. So let's say, for example, in three years, these contracts expire and we do not renew these contracts. So we've still got that 9,000 tons that are not part of this particular -- so I'm wanting to make sure that -- Yeah, if we fail to re-up any of these contracts, whether through new negotiated prices tonnage, we would lose all the tonnage. Got you. 12,000 total. Got you. Not just the increment. We would lose the 9,000 also. But the $1.4 million additional revenue is just on that 3.3 additional tons. Correct. All right. Just want to make sure I understand. All right. So if we lose the 12 -- It's on the increment here, but it's also the excess revenue on that 9,000. The difference that they would be paying between the 2450 and what their current proposed rate would be. Okay. So you get a buck or two there, and then you get whatever their proposed rate is on the additional tonnage. So let's just take this chart away for a second. The 9,000 tons that we've got right now, that gives us how much additional revenue that is going to help fund the operations of the landfill. If you don't know -- I don't know that number. I'll have to talk to my head. Okay. Report would be -- I'm just trying to get a benchmark. Go ahead. Roughly $1.3 million is what that represents. For those 9,000 tons. That's correct. So these additional contracts would generate an additional 1.38. Is that correct based on that slide that I just saw? That's correct. Okay. Just want to make sure I understand the math. Yep. All right. Thank you. Nick, in three years, I think the point we're trying to make here, the debt that falls off by then is how much annually? Wean off all of it. Yeah. Roughly $4 to $5 million. Okay. Weaned off all of it. This is why it can go away in three years. Okay. Got you. All right. Okay. I think you have direction on that. And if we could, before we go to our next agenda item, which is 3E, let's just take a 10-minute break to get staff time to prepare. Thank you. Welcome back to this meeting of the Dent City Council on Tuesday, August the 20th, 2019. It is about 2.56. We're back on our work session reports. We're at work session 3E. Receive a report and hold discussion. You have staff direction regarding the FY 2019-20 budget. Good afternoon. David Gaines, Director of Finance. Obviously, this is a continuation of the budget discussions we've had over the past month or two, and specifically, there are changes to the budget presentation from the discussion earlier on development services. I just emailed out a presentation to City Council, the updated presentation, and we'll get that posted online as well to the online agenda following the meeting. So we're going to touch on the budget calendar, talk through the changes that we've seen to the proposed budget since we last saw it. There's quite a few, so we have a couple of slides detailing all of the changes. We'll take a look at what the general fund forecast looks like right now with all of the assumptions that we have, talk through the supplemental packages, and then look at our next step as we approach budget adoption on September 17th. So here are those key dates. Obviously, later today, we have our first public hearing on the tax rate. On September 10th, we have both a public hearing on the tax rate and a public hearing on the proposed budget, and then ultimately, budget approval would be on September 17th. So the next two slides, I'm going to touch on changes that we have to the budget since the proposed budget was submitted a few weeks ago. Some of these are direction to Council. Some of these are just small changes that we made at Council's direction as well. So the first two here relate directly to what we discussed earlier. We have increased development service fee revenue by $2.8 million in the proposed budget in the forecast that you'll see. That was, if you looked at the slides earlier, it was $3.3 million. What we've done here is just put $2.8 million knowing that it is such a change in revenue that we wanted to have some contingency in there, but also understanding as we talk through the fees in specific, if we do decide to go to a different subsidy level on some to give us at least some room to work with. So that was the thought, but not putting the full 3.3 into the general fund budget. So that delta would just be contained in the fund balance and so that if later in the budget cycle Council decided that small businesses or things such as that are negatively impacted by this new fee structure, we have a way to make that sort of change midstream. Correct. Right. Yeah, we're not relying on it. So it's just there. So we have, and this is as we discussed at the original presentation that went out, we had two options and one of those options was if we went forward with increased development fees, we would have the opportunity to go down to the effective tax rate. So the forecast that we'll talk through today is, has our proposed tax rate at the effective tax rate up to this point and in the proposed budget, we were one and a half cents over the effective tax rate as we've discussed multiple times. So in conjunction with, and so these first three are really directly related to the conversation earlier, we've increased the amount allocated for assistance or some kind of development fee grant program by $150,000. We currently have 150,000 budgeted for that. So to say we want to bump that up to 300,000, again, I think that's especially the first year to see how it goes to give that flexibility as we continue to have discussions and see what the impact of the development fees will ultimately be. We also have now decreased the transfer from engineering services. Engineering services operates as an internal service fund. So anything they don't offset with revenues is funded through transfers from both the general fund and the utility funds to some degree. And by changing that fee structure, we're able to eliminate an additional 500,000 that we had budgeted to send over to the engineering services internal service fund. We have increased the meet and confer, obviously right now ongoing our meet and confer negotiations or discussions with both police and fire. We've increased that total amount in the budget to $510,000. We've had that placeholder in there up to this point and we feel like that's a good amount for us as we continue to talk with both the police and fire associations. And then based on previous council discussion, we have increased the council contingency budget to $1,700 from $1,600. The next one, we've updated what we were calling the barrier funds housing, which was one of those tier one supplementals related to homeless initiatives to rapid, to calling it just name changing the nomenclature to rapid rehousing and updated that funding from 50,000 to 100,000. We have a slide just after these slides in a couple that we can discuss that in more detail to talk through what that change, why that change is being proposed at this time. Previously we had a number of public safety technology supplementals that were on an internal service fund list. And as we had flexibility to move those up, we felt like those were a priority as we talked with both police and tech services, knowing that some of those were related to redundancy within the servers, but also with some of the body cam equipment and things like that that we've decided to move up. You previously saw submitted white papers on those, but we can definitely answer any questions as we go through the supplemental list. We've added the 20, the comprehensive plan update for the 2030 plan, which will be updated with a new comprehensive plan. We've been showing this as a tier four supplemental based on the discussions with council, especially as we got through the bond program and other discussions have decided have moved that up to where it is funded now for $95,000. Yeah. Council member Ron Trump, go ahead and recognize it for your question. But then I started it off, so I made a mistake after your question. Let's hold the questions till the end of the presentation, but yeah, go ahead and ask a question. Sure. Yeah. That was the one that I had the question about on this list, the funding, the 2030 comprehensive plan update. I know it's something I've heard come up, but we haven't, as I recall, at least since I've been on council, we haven't discussed it and what would be involved. Is that an estimated cost for a new consultant? Is that the idea, or? Yes. To freshen it up, it's due for an update. It's been sitting in the tier four supplemental list for all along, really, so once we dealt with the development fees, that was the issue, is going back in, trying to fund some additional tier four supplemental items, as well as getting back down to the effective rate. So this is, again, a recommended budget. Yeah. Okay. And thank you for that correction. Yeah, I hadn't asked about it since it wasn't tier four, now suddenly it's here. That's why I'm asking. I definitely think we need to update it, at the very least edit it, but there's a lot that I like about it, and we hadn't had that discussion, the current plan, we hadn't had the discussion yet, so that's why I was asking. Yeah. Yeah, and let's hold the questions in the presentation, I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Yeah. So the remainder of these are items that we have added, really, as capacity grew within the tier four, what can be moved over. The first one, the planning and permitting software maintenance, is with the new planning software that is ongoing right now, at least the proposals have gone out, we've gotten bids in to start to go forward with getting a new planning and permitting software, but as we've kind of put somewhat of a pause on that, as we went through development services fee discussion, because the intent all along was if we were going to increase those fees, they would pay for the ongoing maintenance of the software, so we had the pause button on that until we got through the discussion we had earlier today, so now we have funded that ongoing maintenance for that software, that has been a software that's been discussed with council over the past couple of years, but definitely we have staff that can talk to that. We've added $15,000 in total, this is total funding for additional security at Our Daily Bread, which we have folks that can talk to specifics on that, but increased, I believe the county provides that service, so increased funding to Our Daily Bread for that service from the county. We've added $150,000 for recreation capital, I just want to clarify, David. The security is to help them offset security costs for opening one hour earlier. I think it's at 9 o'clock, is that right? So that was the incremental asset they had at this point. Is that clarification? Okay. Did you, just to clarify, you said 9 o'clock in the morning, so they'll be opening at 9 o'clock? Yeah, one hour earlier, and we're also working with DCTA right now to try to arrange bus service as well between MKSC and Our Daily Bread as well. Thank you. Oh, no, sure. We've added $150,000 for recreation capital replacements. This was a request within the recreation fund just for some of their ongoing maintenance for a lot of the recreation equipment at the community centers and recreation centers that they've requested for replacement. Previously, that was at a lower tier. We moved that up with the additional capacity as well. And then we've funded the additional animal services officers and volunteer coordinator positions out at the animal shelter, and added two additional traffic operations, FTEs, from signal marking and signal repair. So again, take any questions. Obviously, we can talk about supplementals as we go through the process. Yeah, we're going to probably have a robust discussion at the end. Of course. I think I can hand the podium over as we talk about the housing response, that additional from 50 to 100, if Danny wants to come up. Afternoon, Mayor, Council, Danny Shaw, Community Development. We're looking at, this image just kind of shows a sort of simplified overview of what our housing crisis response system is to kind of give you a view of how this is based on a continuum of care through the cross section of services, ultimately everything we're doing is housing focused. The system thrives because we look for balanced funding in all of these areas, but unfortunately right now we're out of balance with the funding. And so we're actually about to take another hit to that balance with the rapid rehousing funds here. Back in July, we knew that one of our partners who typically applies for the emergency solutions grant did not meet the application deadline. And that meant we would be losing dollars in those areas that were traditionally funded. And then as of yesterday, we learned that another of the three partners is not receiving funding at all, including emergency shelter funding. So it's a huge hit to what we're doing to try to get people from homeless to house. And so this request sort of takes an original request of the $50,000 in the barriers fund for the landlord and risk mitigation fund and asking to move that for rapid rehousing and then to increase it by an additional $50,000 so that we have an additional $100,000. So what we're recommending in concept is to take those dollars, that $100,000, give it directly to the shelters who are serving those folks who are experiencing homelessness so that they can do rapid rehousing right from the shelter services to make sure we're getting those housing outcomes. And then it's also then benefited by existing programs that we already have that are going to support that funding. So the barriers fund that already exists has been successful in taking small dollar amounts and helping people get from homeless to house or diverted from homelessness. And then the housing navigator has been successful at opening 53 doors in the first three quarters both in Denton and Lewisville to get people, more doors open to get people housing. So we have those supports that are already in place and they've proven to be successful. And so what we're looking at is leveraging those resources and then tracking those outcomes with this additional funding to make sure we're meeting those housing outcomes that we proposed with that $400,000 that we were already asking for in Monsignor King with the supplemental. >> Questions? With this part of the presentation because this is sort of -- Council Member Armitage and Council Member Melser. >> So first of all, I'm really sorry to hear about the two agencies that didn't get funding. And so am I understanding it correctly? Because I didn't -- when preparing for this, I didn't quite make the connection. So are you saying that at our Daily Bread and Monsignor King, people will be able to get rapid rehousing services right there? >> That's our concept. What we're proposing, we'll take this $100,000 and make sure the shelters have those case managers that we're putting there and case managers that exist in those programs to have access to rapid rehousing rather than having to wait on any other housing agency to provide that support. >> Well, I love that. I love that so much and the people served by that will love it. That's that much less going all around town and, you know, and even for the -- people should be celebrating who don't want to see, you know, people experiencing homelessness out on the street. You know, they're not going to have to go around out on the street. They don't want to be parading all around town either just like we don't. So it's just -- it's better for everyone. It's one stop shopping. But I'm sorry to hear about the -- you know, those two agencies. But I think this is an excellent solution. >> Councilmember Meltzer? >> I'm just a little unclear on what the funds are for. Is that for, like, checks for rental assistance or is that salaries for -- >> No. This would be funding straight for rental assistance. So the other funding will come in for case managers through the existing agency's processes and tools. The idea is Danny's department will be filling the gap that giving hope had been since they didn't get their grant in on time. So we felt like we could not let this pass by. You know, we're investing so much in MKOC that without the rapid rehousing connection with the social workers, it would have undermined our MKOC proposal to you. >> Absolutely. >> Councilmember Briggs? >> So who is going to -- where is the $100,000 going to be? >> Yeah, we don't have a set process yet, what we're looking at concept-wise is that community development will award those grants directly to the shelters to do that work. >> Okay. >> So it will come through us, straight through the shelters. >> Okay. So then we'll have a better idea of tracking and how it's being used. >> Right. We'll take that data back for whoever takes that funding. Again, whoever is willing to take that funding, we'll track the metrics and the outcomes. And we have those already set based on what we wanted to do with Monsignor King and what we're already doing in our housing crisis response system. So I'm comfortable that we'll be able to get the data we need to make sure we're moving people from homeless to housing, be able to track that success. >> Okay. And so since it will be -- may I follow up? >> Sure. >> So since it will be coming from the city of Denton department and going to other shelters located in the city of Denton, are we going to make sure -- will the people be housed in Denton or are we going to just wherever in Denton -- will the rental assistance -- >> Yeah, can I answer that from a philosophical response? >> Sure. Housing is a choice, so we would like to give and we try to do in every instance give a choice to the client who's looking for housing where they want to go. But we also have limited resources, so we'll offer them those options, and they will select from that. So we don't tell people where to live. We just look for available options, offer those resources, and then support it when they take advantage of that. >> My question came from the 53 doors that were opened from the housing navigator. >> Yeah, it's in mix of Denton and Louisville, right? >> Okay. >> Yeah. >> Okay. So again, she's proven very successful. We just don't have the housing dollars to move people. So this will help that, help even improve her success even more. >> Okay. Anything else from you on this one? >> No, sir. >> All right. Thank you. >> Just to clarify -- >> Oh, yes. Go ahead. >> So the -- nothing is going to go to the barriers fund now? It's all going to go -- >> No, there's still the $40,000 to the barriers fund for diversion, which is down here, which we're proposing also to do as a match, so we're going to solicit the community to help match that $40,000, so that will double that fund, hopefully, to $80,000. But we already are getting funding in there, so -- but the supplemental still has the $40,000 for this piece of it. >> Okay. Thanks. >> Yes. >> One question on that. On that match for the barriers fund, when are we planning on sort of rolling that out to make that -- the community aware of that and how they can go through that process? >> The United Way has already been exploring what that will look like, so as soon as the funding is approved, if it's approved, we will be able to launch fairly quickly. >> Okay. Thank you. Appreciate it. >> All right. I will continue on. So we do want to just make it clear where we are now with our proposed tax rate. Obviously, this has changed from our previous discussion, so now we are showing our proposed tax rate based on today's discussion equal to the effective tax rate of that 59.04 cents. So a slide we've seen previously, obviously, with the different proposed tax rate, but you can see the effective tax rate, the current rollback tax rate, 63 cents, and then our projection of what the future 3.5 cent cap would be next year. >> Real quick, David. Before the cost of service recovery for the planning and building -- the planning services, what was the proposed tax rate, which was the effective rate, plus the 1.5 cents? Do you remember? >> It was 60.5 cents. So it was this number. It was just 60.5. >> Oh, plus 1.5. >> Yeah. >> Got you. Sorry. My math skills linger as the day moves on. >> And I will say, as we look forward to tonight or as we have the public hearing on the tax rate, we'll have a somewhat comprehensive budget presentation to go through these, and this will be updated at that time so that we make anyone who's there for the public hearing aware that this is now the tax rate that's being considered. >> Okay. Great. >> So here's what the changes that we've discussed so far due to our five-year forecast. Really the way that we've -- everything is kind of offset with the revenue changes from the tax rate to the development service changes in projection. No real change in what we're looking at from a change in fund balance perspective. For example, a balance budget in '19-'20, and then in the out years staying within our 20 to 25% fund balance threshold. In these out years, obviously, we are assuming the effective tax rate as we've discussed, but we do not have kind of those supplemental increases in those future years outside of this 800,000, which is directly related to the final -- the third year of the Fire Station 8 staffing plan that we've undertaken for the past three years. We've plugged that in because that's something we've known that we were planning on doing. >> On that -- so I just need to understand the chart. So when I look at proposed 2021, base expenditures -- I'm looking for the asterisk, but I'm not seeing the asterisk. >> Oh, there -- it was on there -- >> Okay. >> -- 30 minutes ago. >> No, no. >> It said that we took the $500,000 engineering transfer out of the base expenditures. So then my thought or assumption is on the base expenditures for 2021, those are equal to the base expenditures for this proposed budget plus the new recurring expenses and new one-time -- well, not one-time expenses, but the new recurring. But that seems to be different. There's about a $3 million or $2 million difference. >> We have some other assumptions in there, too, and through them -- >> Oh, the 3% -- >> That was like 3% increases -- >> Got you. No, you're good. Thank you. Yep, you're right. Yep, sorry. Okay. So obviously this is a slide that we've been referencing throughout the budget presentations to try to discuss the supplemental items and how they would -- how they fall in a tiered structure. Obviously, we've seen the tier -- the first three tiers have been funded for the most part throughout our budget discussions with some slight changes. And then now we -- with the way the picture looks now, we are able to fund a portion of tier four. And we'll go through all those. I just discussed what those items were in the previous presentation, but you'll be able to see those laid out. And then there's still 440,000 of those tier fund -- tier four unfunded supplemental requests that you'll see as well that are currently not in this new forecast, and tier five is not currently funded either. So this is somewhat of a new slide, just laying these out a little differently so that you all can see them -- see all the supplements, and if you have any suggestions on things that you want to kind of move between blocks, you can let us know. But you can see tier one, these are those council initiatives that we've talked through multiple times with council, the biggest being the integrated pest management and those homeless initiatives. Tier two really focused on public safety in addition to the construction guide and the temporary kennel technicians, the rest being public safety. Tier three, including some public safety, obviously some new positions, also dispatcher increases, parks maintenance, which we discussed with council that over 500,000 to increase maintenance on parks that we've taken over the past couple years, overdue fines, and you can see the remainder there, and then the tier four items that we just discussed. Any questions on these? Yes, sure. So there's two in tier one now there's street outreach program and street outreach team, which is different. In the past, tier one, it just had street outreach for 64,600, and so I'm wondering what that means. Sure. Let me just pull up -- I think it's a duplication, David. Yeah, I think so, too. I was just confirming. Just a duplication. So I'll just pull these up. Oh, okay. So it's just an accident. There's not like two. Right. Yeah. So we have the 64,000 for the street outreach team, and then you can see the remainder, the rest of those homeless initiatives, the barrier funds diversion, the 40,000 that we discussed earlier, the 100,000 total in increase of 50,000, the 400,000 for MKOC shelter, 480,000, and then the 64,000 for the street outreach team. Is your question on this slide, which he's going to get to, or is it back on the slide he was on? On this one. I assume we're going to get into -- Yes, yes, that's why I'm trying to let it get -- Yeah. Okay. That's fine. Yeah. Okay. So here's the -- with our new tax rate, you can see the change in tax rate. We have a line chart that shows this as well, but now we're looking at about a 59-cent tax rate, you can see just from a few years ago, we have dropped the tax rate from that 68 cents as we really, over the past few years, focused on the effective tax rate being our starting point as we go into budget discussions, that the tax rate is now down to that 59 cents. Obviously, that's largely impacted by increased assessed values, so you can see the average tax bill, how that's changed over the years. Here's just a graph of that showing that decrease starting 2017, fiscal year 2017, and the total property tax rate directly related to our operations rate as the debt service tax rate stayed stable over those ten years. So the next step, as we discussed, we have the public hearings today and on the 10th, and then we just had the cost of service discussion, then budget adoption on the 17th. That is where we are. Great. Council Member Meltzer. So looking in site tier one, I hadn't been present for the integrated pest management work session, so I rewatched it last night, and that option 2A was shown as 381,000, and I'm looking at it because it's such a big item, and now it's 460,000, something change? No, nothing changed. The exact numbers are put in the budget from that May 7th workshop, and Laura did let the council know at that time it was additive, and it would be, and that was the dollar amount, so it may have been a little confusing because you were having to add different columns together, but that was it. Okay, so it's not something new. It's exactly the direction we're given. And the other one, just one that I just can't say I really understand if you wouldn't mind looking at the tier one drill down slide. Sure. Yeah, I don't really know what Creation of Coast Sponsorship Special Event Fund is. It's a lot of, it's a big number, so. That is a policy decision, as Laura brought to you a couple months ago during a workshop. That is the amount of money that the police, fire, streets departments are currently subsidizing for all the special events that go on in the city. So when we provide free security or a fire service, whatever, we wanted it rolled up into one line item, so you knew exactly what it was costing us to provide overtime services to those events. So it's not new activity. Yeah. It was very difficult for the departments to track, so we created a fund that we basically could track it within that fund and match it up to every budget request that comes before you throughout the year. Okay. Obviously, I was looking for places where there might be a little room to move some of the tiles around. And I think the direction, yeah, I think the direction we received is the council didn't want to charge those organizations for these fees, so we wanted to budget for them and show them to you. No, thank you for your quick work, David, and staff, and all that kind of point. I thank the city manager for his efficiencies and approach. I mean, you think about it. Tony wears more hats doing GM work, math, et cetera. I mean, so I just appreciate you taking a hard line to those. I mean, obviously, the other tiers, I'd love to have, but we continue to chip away at those things. I have two questions, one to ask, one question, not directly related to budgeting, but just want to make sure we're on solid ground here. So first, and I don't know if this is kind of a message for you, Mr. City Manager, that you can kind of get in the right hands, I'd love to see, based on what United Way and Danny's group has worked out, I'd love to get their feedback on what they see, better said, how developers can help us in this way. So we're going to have large developments continue to come here. We've approved several, and that question always comes up. How, is it land, is it, you know, what helps that process that they've laid out to a new developer? So if a new developer comes in and we can have an organized ask to say, if you want to help us with our unhoused or our workforce housing, here's how you can help and here's how we've researched it, and that way we could hit the ground running and have something to kind of disseminate to those that would come before us and want to develop the week, we kind of have an answer, you know, that is effective and folds into that program. So that's my ask, and then if I could borrow Melissa to talk tech, yes. Is it related to any of the supplemental items or is it something? No, but I may make a pitch if we're not in good shape. So in the news, what is it, 23 cities hit with ransomware? Oh, you've been keeping up this past Friday, yes sir, Melissa Craft from the CTO. Yes, no, that's, and so I want to understand, are we good, do you have tools that you would help you in that regard, because, I mean, it all comes to use or error, right, so it's me clicking on an email and opening an attachment that then makes the whole, puts the whole system in jeopardy. So I want to understand your redundancies or whatever, just make sure you have everything you need. So I can kind of elaborate more as to how that came about, so again, this isn't official, but based on talking to our peer networks and some of the surrounding cities, there was a vulnerability that was released back in October of 2018. There was a patch that came out through Microsoft, we immediately patched within that month. As a result of that, there was a third-party vendor that was unpatched, which this vendor provided a service to some of the smaller cities and some of the others. So it was through a third-party vendor that they were able to compromise all of the cities. So as part of our tech CIP plan, we do have a five-year plan, which includes kind of security, some of the components, and as you notice at some of the tier levels, we do include a new firewall and some security components too. We also provide a third-party assessment where we bring in a third-party vendor to come in and assess kind of a vulnerability assessment and also penetration testing. We also spend training tools and materials with internal staff. So I'm proud to say I actually have a certified ethical hacker on staff that does monthly assessments internally, and we actually provide that service for smaller cities as well. So from that regard, I feel like we're funded appropriately, but it's something we're always evaluating and looking to. So does that answer your question? So no, I don't think we need anything additional than what we've requested in our tier funding at this time as a supplemental. Excellent, I just wanted to make sure. Thank you. Thanks. Yes, Councilmember Armitage? So this is a question, I guess, for Danny again, one that I had not thought of when you were up there before. Yeah, you. Yeah. Or someone else named Danny, anyone named Danny. So again, you know, I hadn't quite realized that the lack of federal funding, you know, to those two agencies, you know, one of whom giving hope, and anyway, I'm sad to hear that. I really appreciate the response to increase this funding to centralize at ODB and MKOC. About how much in federal funding are we, I say we, as in the, you know, the community kind of losing for rehousing, because I know, I love that we're putting in this additional 50,000 more. How much have we lost? Yeah, the current funding was really just going through giving hope and didn't count any friends of the family, so it was just under 100,000 for rapid rehousing. The ask that was potential for this new grant year for the emergency solutions grant was going to be 140,000, 150,000 approximately. So again, giving hope, missed a deadline, wasn't even able to apply. The Salvation Army was going to add rapid rehousing to its program options, but was not funded at all for any of, including shelter, and the friends of the family asked for rapid rehousing. We got funding for homeless prevention and emergency shelter, but did not get it for rapid rehousing in this competitive process. And to make one other thing clear, while it is federal funding, this particular source comes through the state, because we're not large enough to get a direct allocation from HUD for this grant. Okay, okay. So it comes through TDHCA. Okay, so we're, I guess that would be, so behind like 40,000 from what we would have had, we were going to be asking for potentially, yes. Okay. Okay. So people can, if people want to help to donate, members of the public to kind of make up the difference to, you know, to donate, to donate to MKOCODB or to the rapid rehousing fund that they can donate to. I think each of these agencies would certainly accept donations in support of their housing programs. I wouldn't know which ones to advocate for, to call for, and then the barriers fund would be another way in which it does the same support, which is to provide that assistance. It gives a little bit more flexibility as well. So when people donate to Giving Hope, Salvation Army, Friends of the Family, it will hand Monsignor King, ODB, all of these, it'll help, it'll help towards. Yeah, I don't think any nonprofit would say no to a donation. No, no, no, no, of course not, but I'm thinking specifically about, you know, rapid rehousing. Yes, not all of them had that existing program, so this, again, this concept is being proposed. We'll actually ask some of those shelters to operate differently than they have as well. Yeah, okay, well, thank you. Yes, ma'am. We'll go with Councilmember Briggs and Councilmember Messer. Still me? Yes. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So I noticed that some of these are, let's see, four or five, in ongoing cost, so it's going to be, you know, every year we're going to be considering these. It's not just a one-time cost. Yeah, as a recommendation goes, us being able to contribute in some part to help and keep the funding balanced for this housing crisis response system that we've invested in is, I think, a helpful tool. Okay. It'll help the agencies then relieve some of that effort so they can go fundraise and increase the dollars to the community. And so I know that I asked some questions earlier, and I'm just curious about the street outreach team expansion of $64,600 as an ongoing cost because when it came up first, I asked them questions like, you know, where are they going to be housed? Is it going to be a city of Denton employee? You know, what qualifications do they need? Are we going to go out? I mean, is the $64,000, is it going to cover more than a couple hours every two weeks? You know, I feel like there needs to be, if it's an ongoing cost, there needs to be some sort of parameters. And when I reached out to the current street outreach team, one of the things that we're lacking, and if you talk to anyone in our city, substance abuse counseling is lacking. And so that would be a qualification that I would prefer that, you know, the outreach team had. And so how much input in that position are we going to have, and is the county or anyone else adding to this $64,000 to make it more of a -- Yeah, there's no current additional funding other than what is already being contributed by our partner agencies like Vision Ministries providing a staff member or Giving Hope providing a staff member for street outreach currently. So this would just enhance their ability to get out more frequently and to have that person who has that expertise that you're talking about, whether it's mental health or behavioral health, and it's currently not being supported by any other entity. Well, it's my understanding there's already MHMR that goes out with them? MHMR does go out on occasion with this team. They also have their own team called the crew team, but it's more for people who are in real crisis, and it's a very specific target, and they may or may not be experiencing homelessness, whereas the street outreach team has more of a relational goal to have -- to build that relationship and get people comfortable and trusting to move to other solutions when possible. Yes, Councilmember Meltzer? Yeah, not for you, Tammy. Not for me? Yeah. Actually, digging into a Tier 5 item, I'd ask, maybe you have the ability to say today, did there turn out to be any full-time, non-seasonal employees making less than $15 an hour? Yeah, we have. So this was -- this slide is in relation to the question at the last meeting. Regarding -- of that $15 living wage analysis, how are those broken down between full-time, part-time, three-quarter time, seasonal and temporary? So you can see total number of employees, the difference at $15 an hour, and the difference at $20 an hour there for comparison as well. So that would be the increase of $630,000. Yeah, I -- you know, we could discuss what you'd trade off, but I think that's -- it's worth addressing -- it's also so small -- addressing the full-time, non-seasonal folks making less than $15 and bringing them up to $15. You know, me personally, I would do that and closed captioning, a couple of other things, and I'd be willing to kick the can down the road another year on redoing comprehensive plan. But I think, like, white-hot market is probably not a -- is not the best time to -- when the people have dollar signs in their eyes, you know, it's not a great time to do long-term planning. Well, remember, the comprehensive plan is a one-time cost, and these are ongoing. But, you know, if we want to do that, that's fine. I know the question's been asked about, you know, the living wage. I think it's -- I just want to address that. You know, this is a council policy decision, and it's an arbitrary number. You know, when we look at -- we look at the city of San Antonio, they're at 14.25 is their living wage. Dallas is 11.50 is their living wage. They'll pass those $10, and then I think you've got Austin at 15. So each council has picked sort of an arbitrary number they think is a living wage and made a policy decision there. If that is this council's desire that it should be $15, that's fine. But there's -- we were only able to find about four cities in Texas that have done it, and they're wildly varying. I don't view this as necessarily a management issue, and those areas in the city where we've had significant retention issues, it's mostly been in the construction trades. You know, we've just simply gone in and adjusted the salaries to meet the market demands so we could fill our crews up. This is a different discussion for me, and I think it's just something -- if this is where the council wants to set that policy, it's fine, but it's not a management issue, and it's not a management problem. It's more of a policy concern, whether you want it this set. >> Just to respond, I just -- I'm not looking at it in terms of some abstract principles, just trying to be a good employer. >> Yeah. >> Councilmember Armitage, then Councilmember Davis. >> Yeah. So I want to suggest a couple of things. First, I want to say I think Councilmember Meltzer had some really good ideas just there. I support that, and I would agree with city manager. It is an arbitrary number. Actually this 15, if you look up really what the cost of living is, it's closer to -- it's in the 20s, you know, by most cost of living calculators. So I think of it as like living wage in quotes. I picked that number 15 because there's, you know, kind of a nationwide movement, and it's a number that would have raised a lot of eyebrows even just a couple years ago before it caught on, and now people feel more comfortable with it, but it's, you know, still woefully insufficient. And so, you know, I would encourage, you know, since we're, again, you know, going back to the top dressing question, even to, you know, shave some off that cost, especially considering that a number of these are parks employees, you know, shave some of that park top dressing cost off, which means more weeds come up, you know, but we get more weeds, and we're able to pay our employees in parks better. I think that's a fair tradeoff. I'd also like to suggest that we shave off, in that tier four, you know, shave off either some of that top dressing cost or the street outreach. You know, I'd prefer the top dressing because, again, it just means, as I understand it anyway, more, you know, little more weeds coming up to make up the difference of that $40,000 for the rapid rehousing. So I'd be curious if anybody would be interested in that since, again, we're talking about, as I understand it, just a little more weeds at Denia, I believe it's mostly for the Denia, maybe not, but anyway, but that would be the outcome, and then the tradeoff would be we help to level out what, you know, giving hope would have received for rapid rehousing. So I'm going to recognize you, Council Member Davis, before I do that. Now, what I don't want to do is this to sort of devolve into a debate after everybody's made their position on particularly this issue. This is an issue that the last time this was considered, I watched it, there was a lot of discussion around this, so as we each state our positions, I don't want to have two or three rounds of trying to convince other people what needs to happen here. So let's just, whatever position you're in, whatever you come across on this, let's each one respect each other's position so that we're not going to spend a bunch of time trying to decide to convince people otherwise. So if we vote for it, if there's a consensus to do it, we'll do it, if not, we'll move forward. Council Member Davis. I have a question first for the city manager, I think, and then a statement on my position. So if I'm reading the chart right, looking just at full-time and part-time, folks, the ongoing cost is the 14 plus the 7,000 in change. Is that correct? To go up to 15 from where we are now, we're kind of 11 covered, after we went up to with some other changes, 11 became Canada. And does that mean, if we go up to 15 as a floor, does that mean we need to rescale? Let's say you have somebody who's making $14.50 because they do one kind of job, and the market floor for that is right now $14.50, and you have somebody else who's making $15 as the floor because they can do a different kind of job in the market. Do we have to then, if we up everybody to a floor of $15, do we have to rescale all of our hourly folks and adjust them up that same difference? It's very possible that could happen, looking over at Carla here, to see what the compression would be like. I don't have that answer for you right now how much of a spillover there would be, but it's possible you could have some compression. I'm doubting it's going to be very big. This issue also, according to our pay scales, tends to get a little bit skewed because we're really not bringing people. We just can in this economy bring people in down at the low end of the market anyway. My guess is it could probably happen somewhat, but I don't think it would be marketable impact. Not with this little money. That question impacts, I think, my position on this. Recognizing that $15 is somewhat arbitrary. Someone somewhere has worked up $15 as the number to do interesting math with and to tell us how much things cost and what your annual take home might be at $15. I still think, though, we also in the news this week had a number of Fortune 500 CEOs sit down and draft an agreement together saying that it affects their bottom line in a positive way to go put their stockholders' neck out for their employees. If we're looking at a budget item in the low $20,000 a year, if we're looking at our council initiatives, a tradeoff I'd be willing to make is the special council internal audit. That's a council initiative, something we asked for. I think we horse trade with ourselves and switch those out and do a $15 living wage for just those full-time and part-time. The seasonal, I understand the argument there. I'm just a whole lot less concerned about our kids who are lifeguards and that kind of stuff, and we don't have to be as competitive with those kind of things. It's just a completely different ball of wax than people who work for us all year long, whether it's full-time or part-time. So if there's a good tradeoff in a higher tier, and I kind of threw that one out there, then I could be okay with the living wage adjustment just for full-time and part-time. Kind of draw that line in the sand and say we're willing to make that, put ourselves out there for our employees that way. >> Anybody else? We've still got comments. Councilmember Briggs. >> Could we -- could you give me an update or remind me what the special council internal audit is and how much money that -- >> I believe 20,000, right, 20,000 for -- related to the ethics board, I believe, was the request from the internal auditor, a special council devoted to the ethics board. I don't have too much other detail unless -- >> Could I get a little bit more detail? So it would be a council that would be for the ethics board to help them with opinions? >> Yeah, that's one I probably wouldn't recommend cutting. I will say this. I think we're in solid enough shape right now. If you want to make this policy decision, let's just do it and move on. You know, $20,000 ongoing is not going to hurt us. I really don't want to take that away from the mesh in the ethics panel in case they need that outside help. >> So I am in favor of the top two, the full-time and the part-time. For now, moving up, I know that there's several, you know, individuals who have families who work part-time who this will benefit. >> Can you flip back over to the -- that's the other slide, yeah. $14,000 divided by 214, that's about $65 a year per employee. >> Yeah, the 214 is associated with the latter column, so it's going to be far less. We can get that number, but it would be -- >> Okay. Yeah, I want to see more data on that to know where it falls out. >> What did you just say about the number count here? >> I -- well, we can get this in more detail, but I think this 214 applies to the right column, the $20 an hour difference. >> There was another question asked, what would the impact be if we went up to $20 for a minimum wage, too? >> So we don't know what the count is for people who are under 15. >> We can get it fairly quickly. >> We can get it. >> Okay. Yeah, I wasn't here at that discussion when you all had this discussion before. I'm not going to squabble over $14,000 or $7,000, but my concern is, I don't know if I want to make that necessarily a policy, because what you don't -- what we learned in Audit Finance Committee today, I mean, let's face it, this is not -- in fact, if you really take the salaries, the benefits that the city offers far outweighs anything in the private sector, for sure, because you have TMRS contribution, which is how much? How much does TMRS contribute? Is it 18%? 17%? 14%? And so we also make the Social Security contribution as well, which as a city, there was an election to do that at one point in our history. A city could choose whether to provide the TMRS and/or the Social Security. So this city chose both. Learned today that the city is very generous on vacation time being included in time worked as defined for overtime. So if this were much larger, I wouldn't be for this, but what really is interesting to me is that some on this council voted against a business to bring in 100 jobs making $20 an hour. Some on this council voted to provide $250,000 a year to a developer for affordable housing, which quite frankly, people who are making $15 an hour cannot live in the housing that that developer provides because it's too expensive. So I'm not going to quibble over $14,000 or $21,000. What I just simply say is let's try to also think about our decisions in a larger context of consistency and strategy on what we're really trying to achieve, not just for our employees but for all of our citizens here. So I'm okay with that. I'm okay with not trading it off with anything because I think we can -- and outside of this change, I'm real okay with the manager's recommended budget. I mean, I think that the manager, city manager, and staff have done a yeoman's work on taking a budget, especially in this legislative climate, to maximize the hard-earned tax dollars that our citizens pay. And I think to be able to say we're going to get more money from our developmental services that we were under collecting and to provide an avenue to fund half of tier 4 is phenomenal. And we haven't even done the recreational fund, which that might be a little bit more robust conversation in that regard. But I'm okay with this, but I just really want to make sure that we all understand that these decisions are not made in a vacuum, that there's all kinds of decisions that impact how our citizens, how our employees navigate and have their quality of life in our town. And this isn't just the only isolated one. So what I'm understanding is this is so small that most people are already at that, maybe just a few at 14 something. So in two or three years, they're going to be to that level probably almost anyway based upon just the attrition and things such as that. Again, I want to emphasize, don't get fixated on just the dollar amount of the salary because the city of Denton provides 14% in retirement funding. And I challenge anybody in this room to find a private company that does that, excluding Social Security outside of stock contribution plans and things such as that. So it sounds like if I've got my numbers right, I know Mayor Pro Tem hasn't, you want to weigh in on this? You're counting, as you say, you're counting heads. >> Yeah, no thank you. It's moot. >> Okay. All right. So I think the consensus is to move that forward on those two categories only, the full-time and the part-time. Now, I'm going to leave it up to the discretion of management to decide how to implement that over the budget year. So however you guys want to do that, that's fine. >> I'll just point out real quickly, I know in the back they don't like when we bring up Excel sheets, but -- >> When we bring up what? >> Excel sheets. Full-time 22 employees would be affected by the $15 an hour and the seasonal employees would be 396. It's a full-time or permanent part-time benefit positions. >> Okay. Yeah, the seasonal -- but we're not talking about seasonal employees in this discussion. >> Correct. Yeah, so it's just the 22. >> Okay. Both full-time -- >> And permanent part-time. >> And part-time. >> Benefited part-time positions. >> Okay. All right. Okay. Well, how many employees do we have? >> 1,600. >> Okay. All right. >> Yeah. 1,600. >> Okay. All right. Thank you. Yes, Councilman. Any other questions on the budget presentation? Because we have an action item tonight on approval of the proposed rate. And I do want to -- oh, no, we don't. It's a public hearing. >> Just a public hearing. I want to echo what the city manager said. If you've read articles, and I won't name the city, but many cities are going up to 7% increase because of the legislation -- the action in the legislature this year about capping it. So they're basically ramping it up. And I really appreciate, Todd, your leadership and staff's leadership and everybody's hard work. Because over the years, we've been able to keep it at the effective rate. And I don't think anybody -- certainly I don't think the city -- this is your recommended budget, so it's not like we're leaving something undone that you believe is a critical component of this city. Okay. Thank you. Yes, Councilmember Briggs. >> I have a question that's something the city manager said, and it was either earlier in this discussion or in the last discussion, but it has to do with the budget. Just for clarification. So you said that it's $60 million for fire and police, but we only are collecting $50 million in property taxes. Is that this year or is that for -- >> That's proposed. That's just salaries. Not the department costs. That's just salaries. So sometimes we get into these discussions, property taxes, you know, we've got to pay for a lot of things when they're about 35 to 40% of our budget. I just want that to sink in to everybody, but you're going to see cities doing exactly -- having exactly the same conversations we just did because of that issue in the property taxes. These folks that are going up to 7.9% or whatever this year, you're going to start seeing them relying more heavily on fees down the road. >> I just thought it was a pretty important comment because, you know, I've been on -- somebody keeps tagging me on next door as far as the budget discussion and the tax rate, and they say, you know, just spend. You're spending on everything. Spend, spend, spend. But really, I mean, a large part of it is, you know, we're not just spending on things we don't need or anything. So it's pretty -- it was an important thing to hear just then. So I wanted to clarify that that was the case. >> Yeah, and I appreciate you saying that. There's a lot of places that they believe holding the rate the same amount each year is kind of spiking the football. We get the same complaints and concerns from our residents. I mean, it's sort of a mixed bag. Your housing value is going up, you're getting taxed on it, but at the same time, you know, it's sort of a good thing and a bad thing at the same time. We realize it's taking the average tax bill up, too, so we're doing what we can to prevent rate increases and that sort of thing and live within our means. And especially when we're going to ask people, you know, do you want us to -- you know, you want to put a bond in place, might have to tax yourself extra. I mean, the management team is -- there's no question they're on board with this strategy and they understand it. >> Okay. >> Well, thank you. >> Councilmember Meltzer and then Councilmember Davis. >> Something we all probably know but not everybody listening probably knows, when you get your tax bill, right, the city portion is 15% of it, something like that. So when, you know, what this body is supporting city management and doing is trying not to raise your tax bill. We only control about 15% of your tax bill. If you see the other parts go up, that wasn't us. >> Councilmember Davis. >> Very briefly. I want to echo the praise for the management team on the whole team on putting this package together and to wrap it back to our last conversation on direction a little while ago, I would be shocked if there's another North Texas city that is at the effective rate taking the bite out of homelessness that we're doing, guaranteeing a living wage for their own employees, tackling cyber security that we just heard about, funding public safety at the level that we're doing. So I think it's all a piece, and the things that we're able to say that we are now fully funding at the effective tax rate, that's -- it's phenomenal. It's absolutely phenomenal. >> Anybody else? I had a comment, but I don't remember what it was. I forgot it. Yeah, I forgot. Well, I think part of it was the personnel is -- I mean, all personnel, is it 70%? 65 to 70% of our general fund -- of the general fund, and the effective tax rate, hypothetically, is to collect the same amount of tax as you did last year except for new growth and new construction. Now, if your appraisal goes up more than 8% -- I think what the appraisals go up, average? >> 11%. >> 11%. So if your appraisals went up more than 11%, you're going to see a tax increase. This was just the average tax increase. If your appraisals stayed the same, your taxes -- because our tax rate is going down. If your appraisal stayed the same or your appraisal went down, your property taxes for the City of Denton are going down. So again, any other questions on this? We're going to have a public hearing just to hear from the public, but all right. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. >> Thank you. We have a work session report, so I will now convene -- we have a closed session, I believe. >> I don't know. >> No? >> I think it's a placeholder. >> Oh, it's a placeholder? >> Just in case we needed it. >> For what issue? >> Solid Ways, putter pay agreements. >> Oh, any questions for closed session on the contracts that we discussed in our public work session? Okay. We will then adjourn this public work session at 4 -- no, 354, and we will reconvene in Council chambers at 630. >> Welcome, everybody, to this meeting of the Denton City Council on August the 20th, 2019. It is 630. We do have a quorum. I'll call this meeting to order. Our first item on the agenda is pledge to the U.S. and Texas flag, if you'll stand with me if you're able. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Our first proclamation is payroll week for the City of Denton. Who's -- come on down. Introduce yourself and tell us about this proclamation. >> Sure. My name is Kelly. I am the government relations director for the Dallas chapter of the American payroll association, and we are celebrating national payroll week, the first week in September. Yes, and we appreciate the support of the City of Denton in this proclamation. >> Sure. Thank you. All right. I'll read this proclamation. This is a proclamation by the mayor of the City of Denton, whereas the American payroll association and its more than 20,000 members have launched a nationwide public awareness campaign that pays tribute to the nearly 150 million people who work in the United States and the payroll professionals who support the American system by paying wages, reporting worker earnings, and withholding federal employment taxes. And whereas payroll professionals in Denton, Texas play a key role in maintaining the economic health of the City of Denton, carrying out such diverse tasks as paying into the unemployment insurance system, providing information for child support enforcement, and carrying out tax withholding, reporting, and depositing. And whereas payroll departments collectively spend more than $2.4 trillion annually complying with a merit of federal and state wage and tax laws. And whereas payroll professionals play an increasingly important role ensuring the economic security of American families by helping to identify non-custodial parents and making sure they comply with their child support mandates. And whereas payroll professionals have become increasingly proactive in educating both the business community and the public at large about the payroll tax withholding system. And whereas payroll professionals meet regularly with federal and state officials to discuss both improving compliance with government procedures and how compliance can be achieved at less cost to both government and businesses. Now therefore, I, Chris Watts, Mayor of the City of Denton, Texas, do hereby proclaim the week of September the 1st through September the 7th, 2019 as Payroll Week for the City of Denton and would encourage the citizens of the City of Denton to support the efforts of the people who work here in Denton and of the payroll profession. So thank you so much for bringing this to our attention. Overdose Awareness Day. Who's here? Anybody here for overdose? Come on down, tell us a little bit about what we're what we're going to be honoring on. I think it's August the 31st in this proclamation. Yes, International Overdose Awareness Day is, as the name suggests, an international event. It's a day for our community to let people who are struggling with substance use know what resources are available to help them counseling, treatment, that type of thing. It's also a day to be mindful of and be respectful of those who have lost their lives or succumbed to substance use. And so we're putting on the event on August 31st on the Denton Courthouse on the square. It'll be from 630 to 830, we'll have folks there from different treatment facilities. We'll have activities to pay respect and in memory of people who have lost their lives to overdose and speakers, yes, lots of speakers from across the community. If you could introduce introduce yourself. Sure. My name is George Rowland. I'm a criminal defense lawyer in Denton. And I'm Sharon Rowland. It's my pleasure to read this. Thank you so much for bringing this to the attention of our community this year and also last year beginning this tradition. Thank you. Thank you. You bet. This is a proclamation by the mayor of the city of Denton, Texas, whereas International Overdose Awareness Day is a global event held on the 31st day of August each year, and aims to raise awareness of drug overdose and to reduce the stigma of a drug related death. And whereas International Overdose Awareness Day acknowledges the grief felt by families and friends remembering those who have died or had a permanent injury as a result of drug overdose. And whereas International Overdose Awareness Day spreads the message that the tragedy of drug overdose deaths are preventable. And whereas thousands of people from all walks of life die each year from drug overdose, and it is imperative that we set aside a day for remembrance and education. Now therefore I, Chris Watts, mayor of the city of Denton, do hereby declare and proclaim every August 31st as Overdose Awareness Day in the city of Denton, and to urge all citizens to remember those who we have lost due to drug addiction and overdose. So thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone here from the special citizens board advisory committee or bond committee, excuse me, citizens bond advisory somehow, come on down, how are you, doing well, let y'all introduce yourselves, who's going to be the any patch you're the, yeah, just so you'll be able to tell us a little bit about what what we're, yeah, we are we are broadcasting this, right? No, I'm just kidding. If y'all could introduce yourself, Pat Smith. Jane Janata Montgomery. Jennifer Collins. Kate Linus. John crew. Susie rumor. David gains staff liaison to the committee. So tell us what your group did for I read this. Well we were appointed by you all the City Council to consider bond proposals and proving back a recommendation to you all the City Council, and we met for two months, starting in late May through the end of July, and had a very diverse group of, I think, 19 people and want to thank the city staff David gains and his team they did a marvelous job of answering questions and looking at things and exploring ideas and we hope to a bond package that the city can support and citizens will support and make them a better place to live. Well I know this isn't all of you and so but I want to thank you all for being here and those who aren't here. Thank you so much for your service to our community because I know you spent several weeks pouring over numbers projects and things such as that so really appreciate your service to our community. This is a proclamation by the mayor of the city of Denton, whereas in recognition of the citizens of Denton who were appointed by City Council in order to serve on the special citizens bond advisory committee. And whereas this committee met eight separate times between May the 30th and July 25th, in order to provide recommendations on specific projects to include in the 2019 bond programs. Whereas after careful consideration and deliberation, the special citizens bond advisory committee recommended a 221 519,000, I can't even say the number $221 million, what I'm gonna say bond program. And whereas this committee has provided an important service to the community by making significant recommendations that will help improve the infrastructure and quality of life for Denton residents while planning for future growth. Now therefore I Chris Watts mayor of the city of Denton do hereby recognize the special citizens bond advisory committee for their outstanding contributions to our community. Thank you all again so much for your service. is agenda item three presentation from members of the public if we could roll the review of procedures for addressing the City Council. The Denton City Council has adopted rules of procedure including a code of conduct that applies to citizens as well as council members. These rules were enacted to promote an orderly process and to preserve decorum. Here is a brief review of the rules that apply to citizen reports. Citizens will have four minutes to give a scheduled citizen report and four minutes to give an open mic report. There will be an electronic bell when time has expired. If the remarks are not concluded by that time the citizen will be asked to stop speaking. If the citizen does not cease and a second request is made the mayor will request to have the citizen removed from the council chamber. Citizens are asked not to approach the dais. If a citizen has papers or other materials to hand out to the council please let the city secretary know in advance. For scheduled citizen reports the council may initiate discussion or questions following each citizen report. For non-scheduled open mic citizen reports the council may listen to citizens speak. However because no notice of the subject of the open mic report has been provided to the public in advance the Texas Open Meetings Act limits any deliberation or decision by the council to a proposal to place the item on a future agenda, a statement of factual policy or a recitation of existing policy. Citizens are asked to direct all remarks and questions to the council as a whole and not to any individual member. Please refrain from making abusive, personal, impertinent, profane or slanderous remarks. Anyone who violates this council rule of procedure may be immediately removed from the council chamber. Thank you in advance. Copies of the rules of procedure are available from the city secretary. We do not have any scheduled citizens reports but we do have one open mic card from Mr. William Freeman. If you will come down and state your name and address your time will begin. We do have a new feature at Ardeus there is another separate little monitor that is to the left of the speaker that will show the time I believe as it runs. Hello, my name is William Freeman, I live at 711 Southkill Boulevard. The SPLC is a hate group and Councilman Armentor is its agent, therefore I am asking that Debra Armentor step down immediately. Should Councilman persist a recall will be subsequently initiated. I have complete confidence that this measure will qualify for the ballot. Armentor's relationship with the hate group known as the Southern Poverty Law Center is one of close and deep affection despite numerous warnings of their disgusting history from her constituency. This Councilman has not only supported a racially discriminative but also a sexually predatory cabal. Armentor has taken extraordinary measures to make sure her allegiance to the SPLC remains obfuscated and shrouded. At Armentor's election June 16th, 2018 she pleaded with her constituents to "hold me accountable, let me know what to do because I look to keep..." Mr. Freeman, according to the rules, if you could address your comments to the entire Council instead of one specific, I would appreciate that. Yes, I'd like to address all of you with specific regards to one of you. Okay. Thank you very much. If you could just refrain from using personal names as far as individual Councilmembers. I don't mind if he uses my name. Okay, well, all right. At the Councilman's election June 16th, 2018 she pleaded with her constituents to "hold me accountable, let me know what to do because I look to the people for instructions." She said this despite illegally censoring her voters from social media, silencing the very voices she said she would acknowledge, represent, and hold dear. She said this despite continuously insulting the native heritage of our noble city. She has reviled the ancestry and citizens of this peaceful community for far too long. When she defended a revenge porn aficionado in December of 2018, she did so in the most opportunistic fashion to install the aforementioned SPLC on campus. When she defended violent, out-of-town antifa communists July 30th, 2019, she did so to install the aforementioned SPLC into our city. This trend would suggest she is not serving the community, but instead using her position as a launchpad or CV for her future ventures back at the revolving door of the ivory tower. In summation, Deborah Armentor and the Truth are strangers. I look forward to speaking with you all again soon so that we may better preserve Denton to our greater ability. I would like to thank you for your time and for your service to this proud but increasingly concerned native. I didn't realize that I have a cease and desist order I'd like to drop off. I can leave it with the secretary. Okay, well, yeah, and we'll get it to the right people. Thank you. Thank you very much. We'll move on to the next agenda item, which is our consent agenda. We're going to pull consent agenda item A and consent agenda item D, as in David, which we're not considering. There's no staff report. This isn't pulling for items of individual consideration. This is pulling it all together. Yes. Yes, that's correct. I had a comment I'd like to make that's a statement of factual policy regarding the citizen comment. I don't -- Could you make a statement of factual policy? I'd -- Rather not? I'm going to have to ask the city attorney about that. We could make a statement of factual policy following an open mic. That is one of the three permissible actions by council, one being a statement of factual policy. Okay. The other policy is that we permit citizens to say whatever they'd like, however repugnant. Okay. All right. Thank you. All right. Consent agenda item, council member Briggs. I move to approve with regards to removing A and D. So approval -- move to approve the consent agenda item, say, for agenda items A and D. A and D. Okay. All right. Council member Ryan? I move to approve motion and a second for the consent agenda items except for agenda items A and D. Let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries, 7-0. Moving on to agenda items for individual consideration, 5-A, consider approval of a resolution of the City of Denton to support all citizens and urge them to demonstrate kindness at every level of interaction with one another and providing an effective date. I don't believe we have a staff presentation on this, but this is a result, I believe, of council member Briggs and council member Armitage's request for this resolution in light of the events here in our city a couple weeks ago and also the events that took place, those tragic events in our country, one in El Paso and Dayton and then out in California. So this is -- this resolution is a result of those requests based upon those events. Council member Briggs? I would like to move to approve and appreciate that this resolution is done in a positive light and I'm just very grateful that it's here and there's nothing wrong with kindness and we could all use a little bit more in the world. Thank you. Council member Meltzer? It couldn't be more timely, I second. We have a motion and a second. Let's vote on the board, please. Motion carried, 7-0. Agenda item 5B is consider nominations appointments to the city's economic development partnership board. Good evening, mayor and council members, Jessica Rogers, director of economic development. I will be presenting just a few quick slides regarding the nomination process. So our goal tonight would be to consider the slate of nominees to the economic development partnership board. Some quick background, there are membership specific categories to which the members of the board of economic development partnership board must fall, city council, UNT, TWU, the black chamber of commerce, the Hispanic chamber of commerce, aviation and at large. Members serve two year terms and they can serve up to three consecutive terms. The economic development partnership board has a specific nominating process that goes through a nominating committee. Two council members and one chamber member were appointed on July 16th with council member Davis, mayor Watts and chamber member Marty Rivers serving as the 2019 nominating committee. The committee had met and verified the appointment of members and in your backup you have a list that includes what term each member would be appointed to, whether it's their first, second, third. And this also included the appointment to an unexpired term that council member Hudspeth would be stepping down from and the slate of nominees for each position is in front of you for your consideration. Council member Meltzer. I move approval of the slate. Mayor Pro Tem. Second. Motion and a second for agenda item five B. Let's vote on the board please. Motion carries seven zero agenda item five C. Consider nominations appointments to the city boards commissions and committees. Council member Ryan. I move approval with the exception of Anita Ramsey. So the remaining ones you're saying as a block approval, is that correct? Okay. We have a motion. Do we see a second? Council member Davis. I second the motion. We have a motion and a second for the nominees as listed in our backup, except for the one that has been pulled. Let's vote on the board please. I had a question about this process. So will that name come up separately as an individual? So it's not complete. We'll have a separate vote. Yes. I mean I say that. I mean. Okay. Thank you. Motion carries seven zero. Okay. Now we'll take up the individual name for a nomination to which I think it was. Which, which committee was it? Okay. Council member Meltzer. I move approval of Anita Ramsey for appointment to the Board of Ethics. I think she'd make a fine addition. Okay. Council member Armitter. I second. Yeah. And I had an outstanding question about the delinquencies on seven, 16, 17 and I believe 18 property taxes. I believe we've received confirmation that that has been satisfied this year. Is that correct? That is correct. Okay. All right. Okay. So we have a motion and a second for approval of Anita Ramsey for the Board of Ethics. Let's vote on the board please. Motion carries four to three. Moving on to public hearings. Agenda item six A. Oh, we had a, we had a blue card too. Did you want to speak Ms. Ramsey? You had a blue card you were wishing to speak? Sorry I overlooked that. It was sitting right here. I find it interesting that at a time when you've passed a kindness resolution that you're kind of going, sneaking around to black, while someone else like you did at the last meeting. I question this process, you don't, I didn't get to know what was coming up or didn't get a chance to defend myself until someone told me. I don't want to say that I would have called the current code, I know I've been outspoken in thinking that it's too narrow, but I would really like to work to change it. I believe in the process too, I just don't always believe in the players in the process. We did have an unpaid tax lawsuit, I think it was kind of interesting that the lawsuit came up right after my husband filed a complaint, and I think it was accelerated and we probably should have questioned that process, but we didn't. So we have paid everything, and I will say that the way the appraisal district charges historic houses is pretty heavy. We have a lot of taxes to pay. But my experience with counsel is that anyone who disagrees or opposes something gets bad things said about them or written about them, and in my case both of those have happened. So in closing I want to say that I've talked almost daily to people who are very discouraged with this city, with this council as a whole, and who have thought very seriously about moving because they're so unhappy, and these are people who love this city as I do, and that makes me really, really sad. I do believe in the process, I want to make it work. I feel like this is kind of a blackball attempt. Thank you. >> Councilmember Armitage? >> I just wanted to thank you for your service and to say just kind of for the record, obviously you know this, but you've been fully vetted by the city secretary, which is why your name even appeared on the agenda. Were you not up to date in your taxes, your name wouldn't have even appeared. So I was surprised when this was brought up as an issue, and I'm glad that that is clear. I want to say that I'm sorry, I understand that people feel this way, and I just wanted to mention that one of the things that I like about the petition ordinance is that it has an ethics board that is not handpicked by council. As happy as I am to handpick you, I would rather have an ethics board judging me that's not picked by me or anyone else up here. I'm not a fan of self-policing, so I just wanted to highlight that the people who put that together foresaw, you know, these kinds of issues, so anyway, the petition is one way to go, another way to go, which I'm going to try to do from here is to try to help make the ethics ordinance better, but I wanted to thank you for what you've done, not just by being on the board, but for all your help with ethics in City of Denton, you're writing for the Denton Record Chronicle, so I applaud you and your service. Thank you. >> Thank you. Yeah. No, I was -- it fixed itself. >> Okay. All right. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Yep. All right. Moving on to agenda item 6, public hearing 6A, hold a public hearing on proposal to adopt a tax rate of -- this is different. Do we know what it is? Okay. So -- oh, it's got to be read this way. Okay. Public hearing on a proposal to adopt a tax rate of .605450 with a maximum allowable rate of .628802 cents per 100 valuation, $100 valuation, which will exceed the lower of the effective or rollback tax rate. >> Good evening, mayor and members of council. This -- as stated, this item is for our first public hearing for the tax rate, and as noted in -- while reading the caption, the proposed tax rate is different than it was even when the caption was written based on the discussion today. So I'm going to go over the budget at a high level and touch on the tax rate as it compares to previous years and to the effective tax rate. Here are our key budget dates and where we sit today with our first public hearing. On August 20th, you can see this has been a process throughout the summer to get to this point, and on September 10th, we'll have our second public hearing on the tax rate and a public hearing on the proposed budget as well. A few of the revenue assumptions that we've been working -- that have been built into the budget along the way assess value increases of 11.5 percent in total and 11.3 percent of our frozen values, and you can see here our proposed tax rate as of now is 59 cents, which is 3 cents below our current tax rate of approximately 62 cents. So we now have a proposed tax rate at the effective tax rate, 3 cents below last year, and you can see how we got there on the debt service and operations side on the debt service tax rate has decreased 1 cent, and our maintenance and operations tax rate portion of the tax rate has decreased approximately 2 cents to make up that 3 cent decrease in the total tax rate. Sales tax, as discussed with council previously, we are budgeting a 3.5 percent increase on our revised estimate for 2018-19, and as we look at the five-year forecast, you can see that 3.5 percent increase carry forward in future years. Franchise fees, as we've discussed with council throughout the summer as a result of the legislation from the state, we have reduced our franchise fees assumptions by $650,000 based on legislation to do with right-of-way, and then just as an updated bullet as of today with our work session item, and as a result of the cost of service study for development services, we have plugged in an increase of $2.8 million for development services fees above our base budget. So here is our current tax rate, this 18-19 tax rate, at 62 cents. Our total tax rate, as mentioned previously, at 59 cents, which is equal to the effective rate. You can see our rollback tax rate, which this will be the final year where the rollback tax rate is capped at 8 percent or has a voter petition after 8 percent. In future years, that rollback rate will be at 3.5 percent, and we'll have a hard cap where it would go straight to the voters for a rate over 3.5 percent increase on the operation side plus the debt service side, and we have estimated what we anticipate that rate would have been this year at 61 cents. So you can see by staying at the effective tax rate, we are well below both the rollback and the future rollback rate. And also, you can see there's total taxable values there that equate to the 11.5 and 11.3 percent increases that we noted earlier. Here's a breakdown of our tax rate over the past 10 years. I would note, as we've discussed previously, our tax rate stayed pretty stable up until 2017, where we began this focus on the effective tax rate. You can really see the past three years, that significant decline in our total tax rate as we've gone into the budget process with the goal, or at least benchmark, of the effective tax rate, and as taxable values have increased, it's allowed that total tax rate to come down. We've also calculated the average tax bill for a home at the average taxable value, and you can see that there on the right side, how that's changed over the past 10 years. Again, this is the same information, just showing this in graph form, where you can really see that sharp decline of 10 cents over the past few years since 2017. We have updated a few of these charts based on today's conversation. Here are our total revenues. You can see property tax revenues make up 35 percent, 36 percent of our total general fund revenues, sales tax close to 30 percent, 28 percent, and then you can see the remainder transfers from our utility funds and other internal service funds, our return on investment, and then you can see our permits and our service fees, which include the changes from development service fees. Our expenditures by category, as consistent with previous budgets, the biggest piece of the portion of our general fund budget is personnel services, where it's 68 percent of our total expenditures in the general fund are directly related to personnel services, and then the remainder operations, some of those other transfers between our internal service funds and the remainder, somewhat minor categories compared to the total. Looking at the same pie split up by departments, you can see that public safety makes up just about the majority of our total budget at 26 percent for police and 23.4 percent for fire. From that point forward, we have a number of various departments, some of the smaller departments in the other category noted here, parks and recreation, making up the third biggest component of our general fund budget. Obviously, we have a number of other funds within our proposed budget, from our utility funds, from our internal service funds, but for the purpose of this discussion, we are showing the general fund here. Here's our five-year forecast with all the [inaudible] previously, and you can see our goal each year is to have a fund balance between 20 and 25 percent. We are anticipating to end the current fiscal year well within that range, and then stay within the range throughout the entirety of the five-year forecast, and go into 19-20 with a budget that is balanced. We have noted here new recurring and one-time expenses, and I'll touch on those briefly over the next couple slides as we talk about supplemental increases to our budget. Supplemental increases really are those additions to our budget that are above baseline, baseline expenditures, or current level of service. So we've shown here the four tiers that are currently in the proposed budget, as discussed earlier today, and in total $5.2 million of supplemental increases through these four tiers. This has been a conversation throughout the summer as we took this tiered approach as we looked at the supplementals with city council. And I'll go through the next slides where we detail each of those. I won't touch on every one, but if there's any questions, I'm happy to answer them. The first tier that we went into the budget saying this was the first set of supplementals we wanted to fund this year were really council initiatives, and you can see many of them are based on homeless initiatives and also a concerted effort for the integrated pest management that you can see there at $461,000. Our next tier, the second tier that we added to the budget, we've really focused heavily on public safety. You can see an increase of four sworn officers and police and funding for our meet and confer agreements, and then some civilian jailers and some other items there in tier two. Tier three had a number of increases as well, a number of tech services increases, which is an internal service fund, but these are items directly related to the general fund. We also had a significant increase for our parks maintenance, which are really directly related to parks that have come on board over the past couple years that we anticipate next year that have required maintenance associated with them. Finally, the fourth tier, about $790,000 that has been added to the budget as to date, increased again our animal services with a few FTEs that are much needed at the animal shelter and added a couple of positions for traffic operations, and another initiative with our daily bread security, and you can see the remainder there. Our next steps after today's public hearing would be that second tax rate public hearing on the 10th, along with the budget public hearing on the 10th, and then ultimately budget adoption on the 17th. I'll take any questions and then open it up for the public hearing. >> All right. Councilman Meltzer, is your question for staff or comment? >> It's a comment that I think will be helpful for the public hearing. >> Okay. >> You know, if you don't follow this sort of thing closely and you hear this term, effective tax rate, it kind of makes your mind go numb, and it doesn't sound anything like what it actually means. I don't know what it's effective at. It's just an unclear term, but what it actually is, is setting the rate so that your tax bill ought to be about the same. It could vary, but it's taking into account the fact that we know that valuations are likely to rise. There's a prediction, and considering that valuations rise, it's the tax rate that ought to bring the same amount of revenue to the city. So that's the intention. So if you're wondering what effective tax rate means, that's what it means. >> Yeah, so just to clarify -- not clarify, but add to that, the effective tax rate really -- the interplay between that and the assessed values are twofold. First of all, new construction that comes on the rolls for that year is not included in that calculation. Is that correct? >> Correct. >> So the effective tax rate is supposed to be the tax rate that applied to the then existing assessed value outside of the new value that would bring the same amount of tax revenue as the prior year. >> Exactly. >> That's what he said. I wanted to make sure we got the new construction party. >> Absolutely. >> It sounds much better when you say it. >> I don't know about that, but -- okay. So this is a -- any more questions for staff before we open the public hearing? Okay. Thank you. I will now open the public hearing for item 6A. There's no action required on council. This is simply for a public hearing on the budget as presented. Anybody wishing to come down, please state your name and address. Your time will begin. You don't need a blue card. So anybody wishing to speak, come down and state your name and address. Your time will begin. Anybody wishing to speak? One more time. And we've got a couple more opportunities, I believe, for this in the future under the next steps. Yeah. All right. Yeah, I will -- could you put the next steps back up there again before I -- the dates? >> Sure. September 10th. >> Okay. September 10th is the next public hearing. >> Well, two public hearings on the 10th, one for the tax rate, one for the budget. >> Okay. All right. Okay. One more call. Anybody wishing to speak on the budget? All right. I will close this public hearing. Thank you very much, David. >> Great. >> So with no action, we'll move on to agenda item 6B, which is hold a public hearing on proposal to adopt a resolution of no objection to the proposed new construction of Denton and Grove apartments in Denton to provide affordable and market rate rental housing, which will facilitate the developer's application for 4% housing tax credit. Is that captured? >> Good evening, Mayor, Council. We're here to have a public hearing in regards to a 4% housing tax credit request by a developer who's seeking to do a new construction development in the city of Denton. This public hearing will listen to comments and hear feedback on this particular request and then potentially look at approving that resolution at the next council meeting. >> Do you know if anybody from the applicant is here? >> Yes. Yes. They're here. >> Okay. All right. >> Yes. And so they'll be available to answer any questions as well. So just a little bit of background on the information about the housing tax credit program. It is -- there are two types of housing tax credits, the 4% and the 9%. The 9% is a competitive process that actually has a schedule that happens. The 4% is noncompetitive. Within the 9% program, applications are submitted by developers to TDHCA and their awarded points based on the support from their respective communities like ours. And then for the 4% applications, they just require threshold documents and this is one of those that's required for the developer in order to apply for these funds. City Council did approve a housing tax credit policy in May of 2018 and that's how we are seeking and receiving applications for those folks who are interested in seeking housing tax credits. This is very small but is a map to show an overview of where multifamily is happening in the community as well as where tax credit properties are. So a little bit of information about the developer. And this is just a snapshot of some of their tax credit properties in Texas. There's also additional information of all of their tax credit experience across the country in the backup of the application in Exhibit 2. And then they are in the process of actually doing three more tax credit properties in Texas ongoing through 2019. This particular project currently is proposed to be 276 units on a 15.4-acre property. It is currently zoned CMG will be SC once the new zoning comes into effect. The project did already have its pre-development meeting with planning. It is proposed as such in the image, a 2-3-2 story with one, two, and three-bedroom units. The units are proposed to be ranging from 733 square feet to 1,221 square feet. I just want to make sure it's clear to council that this housing tax credit approval of this resolution does not approve the development. It only approves this resolution to help them apply for the 4% tax credit. So it will still have to go through the development review process as any other development would. A little bit about what the project will offer to the residents. Some services including proximity to grocery stores and pharmacies and restaurants based on where it's located. It is in close proximity to transportation. It's also close to a service provider called Serve Denton. And then some of the amenities are included here as well. This is a snapshot based on the application of how they are planning to allocate the units. As you can see, they are currently proposing 100% of the units be available to individuals who are at 60% of area median income. It also does show a snapshot of what those estimated rents are and the square footage of each of those units available. This development will pay property taxes. And that's the final slide is for your consideration for the public hearing. But the options will be on August 27th to provide that resolution with no objection or to not approve it. I've got a question. And this may be for the applicant, but just on the caption, it says this will be a combination of affordable and market rate rental housing. I thought these were typically based upon either 50% or 60% or below. I didn't know there was going to be any market rate. And I see somebody shaking their head. So we might get the applicant. Yeah, we can get them to answer that. We left the caption a little bit more vague for housing tax credits because they have flexibility later on. But they are proposing 100% at 60% or below for this project. Okay. All right. Thank you. Okay. Any more questions for staff? All right. Thank you, Dan. All right. This is a public hearing. I will now open the public hearing. Jean, you'll -- forgive me for -- what is it -- Latscha? Latscha? Yes. Come on down. You're going to correct me anyway. Sorry. I couldn't remember. And state your name and address. Your time will begin. You've got it. All right. I'm Latscha. I live in Austin, Texas. But I'm really here, just available for questions. I know I've met with a few of you. And that's -- and I think Danny did a great job of explaining what we're trying to do. And we're excited to be a part of it. I've got the question about the market rate. Sure. The rentals share a little bit about that as far as -- are there going to be market rate rentals or is this -- No. Right now, we are proposing 100% of the units at 60% AMI. Okay. Right. Danny was correct. And that AMI is not necessarily Denton County or Denton AMI. That's right. It's Dallas or the region. That's right. It's Dallas MSA. Right now, that is $83,100 is the -- that's the 100% four-person family AMI. So the income levels that would be served here would be -- range from around $35,000 to $58,000 a year, depending on household size. Okay. All right. Great. Okay. Any questions, Regine? I'm seeing none. Thank you. Our next speaker is John Crew. If you'll come down and state your name and address, your time will begin. Hello. My name is John Crew. Do I need to do my address or anything? I live on 141 Spring Tree Street in Denton, which is off East McKinney, not too far away from this development. And I'm really concerned that there's a lot of low-income developments already in this part of Denton. I feel nothing against apartments. I think highly of apartments. I remember when I was actually looking for an apartment years ago, I was not qualified because my income was too high. And that's one of the problems in Denton is there's not enough apartments for the average person that just was looking for an apartment. You get turned down. It's very odd to go to an apartment complex and they say, "No, I'm sorry. You need to leave." It's because we have more money, I guess, I don't know, but it just seems like it's reverse discrimination of some kind. So I really think this area already has too much low-income housing, low-income developments. I feel like if they want to build something like that, maybe it should be in a different part of town. And I'm a supporter of growth and progress, but I think it should be fair for all. And by allowing this to happen, it's actually making it unfair because, like I said, it turns away people that could normally afford the market rate. And that's my argument is that this should be built at market rates or maybe the committee or the council could decide to split it. Maybe say you require a certain percentage of it to be at market rate and a certain percentage of it to get the tax credit. That would be my suggestion, maybe kind of a mix, but to have everything coming in where it's always got to be 60% or less is unfair to those that would normally look for an apartment and can't get one. That's really all I have to say. Okay. Thank you. Thanks. Mayor Pro Tem has a question, I believe. Yeah. Hey. Thank you. Appreciate your comments and, again, thank you for your service on the bond committee. So when you see kind of your area, help me kind of draw some boundaries, just so I can think on it. I'm on East McKinney across from the majestic park apartments that they're building right now and any development that's in that area, it's going to increase traffic also on East McKinney. Everybody that moves into this apartment complex at some point is going to drive downtown. They're going to be on East McKinney Street. So 257, that's going to be, you know, if everyone is doing downtown twice a day, that's 500 more trips. But as far as my area, I would consider this to be part of my area all the way to Loop 28, really, because that's affecting the traffic in our neighborhood. So McKinney, because I know where your street is. East McKinney, yes. Yeah, yeah. So in your mind, you envision McKinney east to Loop 28 and then south to? I mean, you know, you draw a small circle of a quarter mile or half a mile or something like that. That's helpful. But that's what I would consider to be. I think neighborhoods are larger. I think a city, for me, East Denton is from downtown all the way to 288, I guess. But that's just my consideration of that. But I do feel like we have a lot in that area. In fact, there was a map that accompanied this that you probably already got. And there are a lot of apartments in that area that already meet this requirement of offering low income housing to neighborhoods, to people in this area. I would doubt that it's the same way if you looked in south Denton, or even north for that matter. That's fair. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. This is a public hearing. Anybody wishing to speak on this item? Please come down, state your name and address. Your time will begin. Anybody else wishing to speak? I do have one more question for the applicant, for Eugene. Do you all have an idea of what the rental range would be for your one and twos and threes? Sure. If we were to open up right now, a one bedroom would be around 830, a two bedroom at 995, and a three bedroom at 1140. The timeline for these is quite long. We wouldn't be, if everything goes the way we would like, we wouldn't be breaking ground probably for another year, and wouldn't have units leasing until another, let's say, 15 to 18 months after that. That's a snapshot in time right now. As far as the statement that you're going to have these all affordable, I mean, honestly, I think we understand what the concerns were by the speaker, but I think also we have a shortage of apartments for workforce housing in that 35 to $50,000 range. As far as, there's nothing in the resolution, if it gets approved, that mandates that you maintain these all affordable. It's just more of an agreement, I guess. So do you all have mixed market and affordable, or mainly do your other projects, are they just primarily affordable units? Our other projects in Texas have been 100% affordable, yes. Okay. All right. Fantastic. Thank you. Council Member Armitage, do you have a question for the speaker? No. I'll just make it. No. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I just wanted to get that, I don't know. Yeah. Okay. Council Member Meltzer, a question for the speaker, or no? Well, I imagine between you, Mr. Mayor, and the speaker, I might be able to get the answer. Forgive my ignorance. How do you qualify for this tax credit if you're not actually bound to maintain affordable rentals? And perhaps I should expand on the first part of that question. What this resolution is doing is part of a lot of eligibility criteria that we have to meet to apply for those tax credits for the state. So we have to have a certain amount of experience, the site has to meet certain qualifications, and then we have to have the support of council, this resolution, in order to turn in our application for those tax credits. But the tax credit is not related to the grid of rents that would be charged? It is. We have not submitted that application yet. We wouldn't do so for probably another six months or so. When we do, as I said, our proposal right now, and I don't see it really changing, would be 100% at that 60%. Now, the state would allow us to change that a little bit if we so chose to. After a period of time? No. After the application. Whatever we say in our application is what we have to do for 35 years. Okay. Great. Thank you. Councilmember Briggs. So does your company, do you stay and manage the property or do you hire, do you have someone from the outside come in? I mean, what is that relationship? So if, say, an individual tenant has an issue, how easy is it for them to get that addressed? I mean, are you, do the developers stay included in the property? We do self-manage. Okay. We have an affiliate management company. We've been in business for over 30 years, have developed 21,000 units over 19 states and manage all of them. We do not farm that out to a third-party management company. So I'm very proud of our management company as well. A lot of our executives have been around for 20 years plus in PEDCOR. We have a great reputation and it's also, I would say a lot of times that really is something that's important to the community because the commitments that we make now to you here, we can live up to those commitments because we'll be the owners and the managers of that property in 15, 20, 25 years. That's good to know. Thank you. Did you withdraw your request to speak? Okay. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. One more call for speakers in this public hearing. Anybody else wishing to speak? All right. I will now close the public hearing. I don't believe there's any action on this. Is that correct? Is this a resolution? Yes. Adopt. I don't know why. I thought I heard a date later on. Okay. Yep. Okay. Anymore presentation from staff? I think not. Councilmember Armitage? Yes. I very happily approve a resolution of no objection. All right. Is there a second? No. Councilmember Briggs? I'll second. All right. We have a motion to second for agenda item 6B. Let's vote on the board, please. Oh, Councilmember Pro Tem, you had a question? Yes. Thank you. A comment. So I want to say to Mr. Crew that I -- you'll find no greater advocate than diversifying housing and the focusing of it, and so I'm sensitive to that, and I'll do some due diligence when we have time, and I think they are outstanding based on my research. I think the thing that's compelling to me in this instance particularly is that its location and traffic-wise, and I just don't think anything else fits there, and I think it solves one of your other concerns, McKinney Street, because hopefully we'll punch through on the backside of that as we get development going, and there's a path even just behind this to where we can kind of do hopefully some connectivity. So I've looked at that, very serious about that. So I appreciate your comments, and we'll continue to talk and work around that. But I'm absolutely dialed in to what's going on and kind of how resources are focused in the district. So thank you. Sorry. This is just a public hearing. So we'll be bringing the resolution on the 27th. I wasn't sure if that was clear. That's what I thought. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's what I thought, and then -- sorry about that. Spoiler alert. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. I do have a question for staff. Okay. You do have a question for staff, yeah, because we haven't closed the agenda item out yet. So Councilmember Briggs. Yeah. So I was going to ask, because of the comment about McKinney, that is supposed to be scheduled to be widened, correct? Is that in the future? From Loop 288 out just east of Ryan High School. Yes. Okay. But not the section from -- not yet, but it is in the future, I remember, from 288 down a little farther to Audra, I think. I need to double-check with Todd Estes on that. I don't want to give you any incorrect information. I will follow up with Council though. Okay. Thank you. Any more questions for staff before we close out this agenda item? Thank you. Appreciate the clarification. Yeah. All right. Okay. We'll move on. Agenda item 6C, staff is requesting that the item be withdrawn. I don't believe we'd take any action on that, is that correct, Mr. City Attorney? Yes. That is correct. Okay. And then agenda item 6D, staff is requesting that this item be withdrawn again. I don't believe we'd take any action on this agenda item. So that moves us down to agenda item 6E, which is hold a public hearing and consider adoption of an ordinance of the City of Denton, Texas, amending ordinance 2015-217 to revise the overlay conditions on approximately 30.7 acres. Good evening. I'm Julie Wyatt, Senior Planner with the City of Denton. And I'm presenting to you tonight Z196 Fireside Park. So the request before you is to amend Ordinance 2015-217 to revise the overlay conditions on about 30 acres of land. It's zoned Neighborhood Residential 3 District, and it is located on the southwest corner of Windsor Drive and Hinkle Drive. You can see it outlined here in yellow, you can see the platted lots internal to it. Just to let you know, this request isn't to change the underlying zoning or to increase the density or change the uses on the site, but the purpose really is to amend design considerations, design standards. So first we'll talk about the background of the zoning on the site. It's had a few zoning requests associated with it. In 2002, the property was zoned NR2 during the citywide rezoning. A developer approached the city in 2007, they had a very specific site plan associated with that proposal, and they were requesting a rezoning from NR2 to NR3. And as part of that rezoning, there were overlay restrictions put on the property, and those were in relationship to that specific site plan. And that project never developed. And so in 2015, a new developer came in, and he was wanting to develop the property in accordance with that NR3 zoning, so a single family neighborhood, but with deed restrictions restricting the residents to ages 55 and older. And because of his specific site plan, he requested a modification of those overlay restrictions. And those are shown here, one through four, they essentially addressed a wrought iron perimeter fence, a 50-foot setback from that existing curb on Windsor and Hinkle, a 100% masonry requirement on the houses, and three car garages should not face the street. And then as part of that also was added that any ingress or egress to the site would not remove any on-street bike lanes to Hinkle Drive. So that was approved in 2015, those modified overlay restrictions. That project did not move forward. And so a new developer, a new property owner came to the city in 2017, and at that time he plotted the property in accordance with that NR3 zoning for a single family neighborhood. That plot was approved in 2018, and the site is currently under construction. They're putting in the streets and getting ready to build. So he is developing a single family neighborhood, and as part of that, the property owner is requesting a modification to those overlay conditions to allow for opaque perimeter fencing, a reduced setback, and varied exterior building materials. Once again, it would not change that underlying use. Those are platted lots, and they're moving forward. So here's what the current property owner is requesting. He's requesting to modify the materials for the perimeter fence to a six-foot-tall board-on-board cedar fence with a top rail and cap, also to include brick or stone columns every 100 linear feet along that street perimeter and at any corners and terminus. A vertical landscape element would be placed in between those columns, so a kind of 50-foot center. And then street trees would be added as part of this request, if approved. And it would be a street tree planted every 20 linear feet, and it would be alternating shade and ornamental trees. He's also requesting a reduction in that 50-foot setback to 40 feet. He's also requesting to reduce that 100% masonry down to a 70% masonry within 30% secondary materials. There have been recent laws enacted by the state that have preempted the city's ability to require a minimum masonry. So as part of that, just for clarity, staff just recommended to remove that condition. And then to keep that three-car garage provision and the ingress and egress and the bike lane in place, those wouldn't change. So here is a rendering of what the applicant is proposing. You can see the board-on-board fence, the masonry columns, and then that vertical landscape element along with those alternating street trees. This is what that corridor, if approved, would look like along Windsor and then Hinkle. And here is an illustration of those setbacks. So here is Hinkle Drive. Here's the subject property here with the platted lots you can see. Here's this box in yellow. That is that 50-foot setback. So from the curb to this location, that would be approximately 50 feet. He is proposing to shrink that to 40 feet, and that is this red box here. And so from the curb to here is that 40-foot setback. Per the 2019 Denton Development Code, a 10-foot rear setback is required. So this area in green is actually what is permitted by code for single-family neighborhoods for the R3 zoning district. So you can see even with that decreased rear setback, it still would exceed those minimum code requirements. This is on Hinkle. This is on Windsor. And it's a little less visible on Windsor just because that curb is set so far back from those property lines. So the criteria for approval for any rezoning cases in subchapter 3 of the Denton Development Code, first, is it conformed to the future land use element of the Denton Plan 2030? And then does it provide for adequate public infrastructure? So first we look at the Denton Plan 2030. The future land use is low residential. This is intended for single-family neighborhoods up to four dwelling units per acre. The finding is the existing zoning of NR3 is consistent with the future land use because it permits a maximum density of three and a half dwelling units per acre. So the request does meet this criterion in the Denton Development Code. But because this request isn't really dealing with use or the intensity of the use, we did look at the element 4 of the Denton Plan 2030, which really talks to more site design principles. And our findings were that first, the proposal does exceed the 2002 and the 2019 DDC requirements, that an opaque fence would provide backyard privacy and screening for future homeowners adjacent to those streets. The proposed brick columns, landscaping, and street trees would provide that visual consistency along those corridors. It would provide that rhythm and create a sense of arrival, also enhance those corridors, and provide the street trees that our code and our comprehensive plan want to see on our corridors. The rear setback of 40 feet is not anticipated to reduce neighborhood quality since it actually exceeds the code requirements. And then, as I said before, since the City of Denton can no longer enforce the minimum masonry requirement, the applicant did request to reduce that minimum masonry to 70 percent. And during the Planning and Zoning Commission meeting, he did say that would be something that he would put in the HOA restrictions to require that minimum masonry. A criterion, too, for adequate public improvements, because this isn't increasing the density, there wasn't a TIA required. But as part of the development, pedestrian improvements would be required along Windsor and Hankel five-foot and then eight-foot sidewalks. There are also capital improvements in the area. If you've been near Hankel lately, you know that it's under construction, and that is because they are installing new box culverts to carry that stormwater runoff to the south. Once installed, that pavement will be replaced, including those bike lanes. And then, the applicant did have a neighborhood meeting earlier this year, and part of what was discussed was concerns about safety at the intersection of Windsor and Hankel, that as you're traveling north on Hankel, as you approach that Windsor intersection, it can be dangerous because the visibility is low, because as you look to the west, you almost have to look behind you. So in response to those neighborhood concerns, the city has actually installed two additional stop signs on Windsor Drive to create a three-way intersection there. And that is intended to slow down traffic on Windsor, to calm that traffic, and to provide a safer passage for pedestrians getting to the park, and also for cars who are trying to turn either left or right onto Windsor. As part of any development, roadway impact fees are required in order to implement our mobility plan. For the 107 single-family dwelling units, that would be about $214,000 for this development. And then, of course, with any development, residential development, you have your park dedication at Platting, and then the park development fee with building permits. Water and wastewater are available to the site, as well as being constructed within the site. There is adequate capacity for the schools. The development is expected to generate about 24 elementary students, 12 middle school students, and then 16 high school students, and there is a fire station within an eight-minute or less response time boundary. A notification for the proposal was sent out. We have received seven in opposition. One of those is within that 200-foot boundary. So that's at 1.29% opposition. There were five signs posted on the site, and as I stated before, they did have a neighborhood meeting. So this item did go before the Planning and Zoning Commission earlier this month, and they recommended approval of the modified overlay conditions. Staff also analyzed the request, and is recommending approval as it meets the criteria in the Denton Development Code. And the recommendation is to revise the perimeter fence materials in that overlay condition one, also adding in the additional street trees and landscaping to reduce that setback to 40 feet along Hinkle and Windsor to make sure those three car garages do not face the street and to make sure the bike lanes stay in place on Hinkle Drive. The applicant is here, and I will stand for any questions. >> Council Member Armitage. >> So my question is, can you go back to the bird's-eye view, photograph view? >> Does that work? >> The one that was kind of more of a close-up, I should have taught the number. >> How about that? Is that good? Sorry. Let me go back to -- >> Was it setbacks? >> Yeah. >> Oh, okay. >> Yes, that's right. >> Ah, yes. >> The one that had the different -- there we go. >> Okay. >> There we go. Thank you. So my only question about the concern about this -- and by the way, I think the fence looks great, so that's nice -- about the reduction in setback, I noticed that there's two -- are those transmission lines along there, or is that -- what kind of line is that? >> There are within the right-of-way. I don't know if those are distribution or transmission lines, but -- >> Yeah, probably. My guess would be transmission. And so just my question was, is there, you know, whatever the proper distance -- depending on what kind of lines there are, I know that there's a required distance between, you know, from the line to the -- to the wall, wherever the wall of the residence is going to be. So what's the requirement for that? >> As part of the plot, DME reviewed the plot and requested any easements associated with those lines so that no structures could be built with any easements. I believe those are all within the right-of-way, so it wouldn't affect any homes. >> Okay. Okay. So DME has already looked at that, and they have the set easement, and so you don't happen to have offhand how big the easement is. I was just curious. >> I don't. >> Okay, that's fine. >> I don't believe it's the -- it's not their large easement. I think this is their smaller -- >> It's their smaller one, yes. >> Correct. >> So it's not a high-voltage line. >> No. >> Okay. Okay. Thank you. That was my question. >> The whole board lit up. Councilmember Briggs? >> Can you tell me or remind me, I didn't watch the video on P&Z. There was the one, I think it was an abstention or something. It was six to one. Why the one person didn't vote? >> There was one in opposition. >> Oh, it was opposition. >> Correct. >> Oh, okay. All right. Thank you. >> Sure. >> Councilmember Ryan? >> This is considered a perimeter fence, correct? >> Yes, sir. >> That we're trying to make a change to. And if I remember right, in the new code that we've adopted, because this is part of an overlay that they've got to use, the wrought iron, and we've quite a bit of discussion on this in the -- when we're working out the new code, and they're allowed now to use, per code, wrought iron, masonry, or an elevated wood that -- where you've got a masonry at the bottom, but you're keeping that wood up off the ground, so that wood would last longer, because -- is that correct? >> I know it has to allow for drainage. So yes. Any perimeter fence would have to allow for drainage underneath it. >> I'm just saying that we don't have anything that allows the perimeter fence to be wood all the way down to the ground under the new code. Perimeter wood fences are permitted, but all perimeter fences do have to allow for drainage underneath them. So -- >> On the new code? >> I'll give -- y'all can look it up, and we'll come back to that. >> Yeah, we'll look it up. Sure, sure. >> We've got some other questions, so if y'all could sort of do some research on that, that'd be great. Councilmember Davis? >> Hi. A couple quick questions. Back on slide 3, we've got, I think, the existing overlay conditions, and one of those is that the setback of the fence is 50-foot minimum from the existing curb. Does that apply only to Windsor on the Windsor side, or is there -- >> It would be -- it would be Windsor and Hinkle. So yes, they're requesting to change that to 40 feet for the homes. I guess my confusion may be in the way that it's worded. It says the setback of the fence will be 50 feet minimum. So that sounds to me like a fence that is 50 feet, not setback from the fence, or -- can you help me understand what the current condition -- that doesn't read like what you're saying. >> Well, and that was having to do with those specific design guidelines, because the previous projects had internal walking trails that were on the exterior, and so they did not have residential homes backing up to Windsor and Hinkle. So that is probably why that provision was put in there. >> So the overlay condition as it is now actually does read that a fence would have to be, that that would have been 50 feet of open space, not fenced in, even though it was part of a residential lot. >> Let me check the ordinance just to make sure, so. >> I only ask because that's the way it reads now, is a fence that is 50 feet from a curb. >> I apologize. There is a typo in my presentation. The existing ordinance says the setback of the proposed homes will be a minimum 50 feet from the existing curb. So I apologize. >> That's okay. Thank you for clarifying that. I just want to make sure we're kind of working from the same. Was there discussion at PNZ about going to the 40 foot setback on the Windsor side, but staying at a 50 foot setback on the Hinkle side? I think there's some concern from the neighborhood that some of these will be two story homes and that a reduced setback, you'd put a second story window, line of sight into backyards and that kind of thing. >> That didn't come up at the planning and zoning commission. They really, they didn't discuss a different setback for the different streets. >> Thank you. Mayor Potem. >> Could we, councilmember Armitage's question about the power lines had me take a look. Can I give you an address to look at on street view, on Google maps, is that okay? If you could go to 721 West Windsor. >> Thank you. >> It's on the corner, correct? >> Yes, really close, yes. Thank you. And then, you know, so obviously across the street there, down a little ways. Down Hinkle. >> Oh, down. >> Yeah, turn left. Okay. That's good. No, no. So looking at the lot? Perfect. Nope. Other way. >> Other way. >> Perfect. Right there. Can you help me understand where Hinkle's being reconstructed? Are some of those power lines being moved? >> I don't believe so. Those are actually within the right of way. So as part of their plat, they did have to dedicate right of way along Hinkle. >> Right. So then help me visualize, they have to add a sidewalk. >> Correct. >> So sidewalk is on the other side. >> Yes. >> And then there's green space or is it all cement and just a wider sidewalk, right? Because you got to have ADA clearance. >> Right. >> And so you're either going to have to have extra sidewalk or this patch of grass, which I don't think we're going to do. So can you help me understand what we'd be looking at once it's done? >> There is a small parkway between the street and the sidewalk. And then the street trees will either go behind that sidewalk or between the street and the sidewalk and the parkway. And then the fence would be set behind that along the property line of the single family homeowners. >> So parkway. >> Yes. >> Do we have that -- do we have a graphic of that? >> We don't. It is -- it's just the space between the back of the curb and the sidewalk. And that's per our DENT development code is actually where street trees are supposed to go within the city, is that they're supposed to be placed between the sidewalk and the back of the curb. >> Seems like that would be a little larger -- do you have the dimensions by chance? >> I don't have it with me. >> Okay. Is there somewhere else I can look? Do we have it someplace -- I'm sorry, but I just -- I need to see that to understand it better. >> Sure. Let me see if I can pull a plat and see if we're -- >> Yeah, we'll work on that. >> Thank you. >> Because we got a public hearing. >> Okay, Ron can answer a question, I believe. He's right behind you. >> Oh. >> So just to answer Councilman Ryan's comment or question, the new code, which I believe this applicant is applying under the old code, but for your clarification, it states that perimeter fences adjacent to fronting public right of way for new developments, allowable materials include only masonry, wrought iron, elevated and sealed wood, or a combination of the following. So they have all the options that they can if they choose to. If they're not required to do one or the other, it's however they choose to build their perimeter wall or fence. >> Councilman Ryan? >> So help me understand how the and, elevated and sealed, so it's got to be elevated and it's got to be sealed. It's not just -- >> If they choose to do both, yes. >> It's not an or, if you want to use wood, you've got to elevate it and seal it? >> That's what it states, yes. >> Okay, right. >> We want to make sure the wood fence does last long. >> That's the way I thought I understood it. >> All right. We'll go ahead and open the public hearing. We'll get back to Mayor Pro Tem's question as far as how that looks. So this is a public hearing. Anybody wishing to speak on this agenda item, please come down and state your name and address and your time will begin. I know the applicant's here, but anybody wishing to speak? >> Hi, my name is John, I live at 141 Spring Tree Street. And actually I was here listening to this, I didn't intend to comment on this, but being aware of the easements and things, I did want to ask a question. If you're going to have a four foot area and then a sidewalk that's about six feet, you've got ten feet, I guess, to the edge of the sidewalk, you're wanting to decrease that setback from 50 to 40. Well, now you've got 30, I guess, if you put the fence right along the sidewalk. But assuming you don't do that, because you're going to have landscaping in there, you're going to have plants and trees and things, how much space do you need for the landscaping before you end up having a 15 foot backyard or a 10 foot backyard? So my only question would be reducing that down from 50 to 40, you may actually be having tiny little backyards that may the developer will deal with selling on his part, but it's going to make a very small neighborhood as far as what you'd be able to do in your backyard. And of course that also adds to maybe sheds, if you're doing this, you're maybe putting sheds right next to the fence, I don't know where your laws are on later when the homeowner wants to put something back there. So that's just, I think it's a neat development, but I might be concerned about reducing that. That's all I want to say. Thank you. Thank you. Anybody else wish to speak? Any questions for the applicant? Mr. Hath? Go ahead. I just want to give you all an opportunity if there's questions. Go ahead. Did you have any questions? Oh, okay. All right. One more call. This is a public hearing. Anybody wishing to speak on this agenda item? Okay. We will now close the public hearing on agenda item 6E. Chair would entertain action and/or discussion. Councilmember Briggs? So I want to say that I'm absolutely against this being district two and that I represent the neighborhood, which is directly across from the development and they have followed this along and gone through this process and have seen it change. And what it is today, although it would be nice, it's not what they thought they were getting or what they agreed to many years ago. I would prefer that the setbacks stay the same and I'm not okay going less than what you agreed upon with the wrought iron. If you want to change the fencing, if we want to agree to that, then I believe it needs to be a combination of stone and wrought iron. We can upgrade it so that it continues to look nice, but to have it go down to wood, I'm not in agreement of that. When the individuals brought this development, they were aware of this overlay. So this isn't -- what they're dealing with isn't anything new. So I'm just -- it's just changed so much for me that I'm not going to be able to support it. >> Councilmember Davis. >> So I'm not dead set against the requested changes. I do have a lot of concerns about them and I'm not quite there yet. The requested change is not exactly what I'd like to see and I don't think what the neighbors would like to see. I'm not so much concerned about going from wrought iron to wood. I think you're talking about a project now that you would want some privacy in the backyard, some opacity, and I think also from a maintenance standpoint, I think you're more likely to find an HOA that doesn't have the means to replace or repaint or repair a wrought iron fence as opposed to an HOA that has the wherewithal to replace a wood fence. However, I would want to see a fence that's in compliance with our new code. I realize you're developing under the old code, but if our new standard that is coming online is that you have elevated wood, if you're going to do wood for a perimeter fence, I think it's reasonable to request that this project comply with that. I'd also like to see -- you have brick columns currently in your proposed change. You have brick columns every hundred feet. That's just much too far. The existing overlay condition is that columns or at least a taller post are at every corner of every lot. These look to be about 55, 60 foot lots. So I'd like to see at least a column every -- the corner of every lot. And I'd like to see those setbacks stay the same. I'm less concerned about the setback on Windsor than I am the setback on Hinkle, but then when you look at Windsor, it's park-like. I think the 50-foot setback makes sense with preserving kind of the park-like setting, even though you have the good city easement and kind of a built-in setback there. So I can get on board with the fence if you're in compliance with the new code and if your columns are every -- at the corner of every lot, but the setbacks, I'd like to stay. >> Councilmember Ryan? >> I'm very much in agreement with that. I see that you've got -- wrought iron is a condition of the overlay and I can definitely understand the need for that privacy and there are other options that are available through our new code that one of those would have been acceptable to me, but I look at several areas of the city. Teasley Lane is a prime example of what happens over a short period of time, 20, 25 years, to that perimeter fencing changing because everybody is putting up their own and they're all painting their own different colors and that type of thing, and that was what we were trying to get away from with our new code changes on what perimeter fence should be. >> Councilmember Armitage? >> Will this be an appropriate time to ask a question to the developer? >> Sure. Let me first see. Do we have an answer to Mayor Pro Tem's question but we don't. I'd like to get the discussion, if there's any more comments, then the developer can answer them all at once. Any more questions or comments? I've got just a couple. Councilmember Briggs? >> I just wanted to give everybody an idea. There's a house -- there's a development on Old North and Chibi that has -- since Old North is an active road with lots of vehicles driving down, they have a masonry fence. So if you wanted to go on Google Earth and look at that, that would be an image of one that a development had done -- or has done. >> I guess my comment is -- I mean, I hear -- and I did watch the PNZ meeting. I think I watched it live, which tells you I've got a lot going on. But I did hear questions about privacy and these kinds of things. But I believe the overlay -- so correct me if I'm wrong -- the overlay was for residential. It was -- it might have been an age restricted, but it was still residential. Am I correct on that? So yeah, if somebody could just -- >> The overlay was for a residential development. >> So -- but it seems like there's the discussion or the comments that it's going to residential -- maybe not age restricted, which maybe means more families and so forth, but -- so therefore more privacy is expected or required, but still residential is residential. Okay. Okay. Councilmember Briggs, and then we'll hear from the applicant if they have some comments. >> It was my understanding originally, not that it just was residential with age restriction. It was that there was a height. It wasn't going to be -- the units weren't going to be as tall. They were single story. >> The proposal in 2015 did call for single story residences. That wasn't part of the overlay. It was just what he intended to build. >> Right. So the single story, that's when the neighborhood approved it and accepted it as that. So not just that it was residential. So I just wanted -- >> Well, but I think what I just heard, so correct me if I'm wrong, that the single story was not necessarily a condition of the overlay, but somebody said, well, that's why it's important if people represent something that it's memorialized. So the single story wasn't part of the overlay. So the overlay, as it currently exists, they could build single or two story. All right. I want to give the applicant an opportunity to come address the questions. If you would, just state your name and address and your time will begin. >> Good evening. I'm Casey McInnis. I reside in Frisco, Texas. And trying to get these in order to Mrs. Briggs' concern about the property, you know, the overlay and zoning that was done in the past, I had absolutely nothing to do with. We purchased the property at the beginning of 2018, so the zoning was already in place. So that, you know, that was something a little out of our control. It changed because the other developer who set that stuff in the zoning overlay couldn't perform for one reason or another. And so back to the wrought iron fence, the purpose for the wrought iron fence and for the setback was to accommodate a green belt. They were going to have a walking trail inside of the community, and they wanted some transparency as opposed to just having a, you know, a brick thin wall or a wood wall. They wanted to be able to see out into the community. That was the whole purpose for the wrought iron fence. That's the purpose for the setback, is it had to accommodate this green space, and then there was going to be a backyard into these homes. The one we're proposing is still three times the size of what's required in the city of Denton. It just is. It's three times that we're not having, we don't have the green belt back there. My thought process on having a solid fence as opposed to the wrought iron, as you said, we're perfectly capable of going in and putting the wrought iron fence, but on a situation where these are going to be the backyards right up to the wrought iron fence, and to your question earlier about the parkway, I believe the parkway is 11 feet, so you have the perimeter, you have the back fence, you have 6 to 12 inches of a grass area, 5 feet of sidewalk, so that's 6 feet, and then the remaining 5 feet to curb, and that's pretty much what that looks like. So in this scenario, the sidewalk is directly next to a wrought iron fence, where you could have unfriendly pets. You're going to be able to see through to every individual's backyard. Now keep in mind, there is nothing, if we go the wrought iron route, there is nothing to prevent each homeowner who would like privacy to come up right behind it and put their own wood fence. And I heard a council member earlier saying we're trying to get away from this checkerboard looking situation. That's what you'd have. For every individual that wants privacy, they could come up and put that. And even if they all did it, you can't control how they maintain it inside their property line, what stain color it has. I think that would, that would, I think it would cause the exact effect that you're trying to get away from. And so when we came and met with, when we had our community meeting and then came and met with staff after that and to Mrs. Wyatt, she did a very good job of taking meticulous notes. We came back and sat down with them and said okay, let's go through each of these legitimate concerns and see how do we, how do we address those. And so the street trees were one of those. Even though we've still got a 40 foot setback, we said let's, we'll put in shade trees to block that view. Now with the zoning, we're certainly very capable of putting a two story house wherever we want to. That's just the underlying zoning. But we wanted to accommodate those concerns, so we came up with the street trees. The wrought iron fence, I think from the city's perspective, my perspective, would be a look along these adjacent parkways that no one would be happy with. You know, back under the old plan, if it was going to be a greenbelt inside, I understand that, but you're going to have swing sets, barbecue pits, sheds, private fences, people that mow their yard, people that don't mow their yard. Now granted, we have an HOA that will watchdog those provisions, but you know, it's still difficult to have all those look uniform, tidy and things of that nature. So I think the opaque perimeter fence really accommodates or accomplishes a lot of these different goals. The fence will be sealed, it will be off the ground, it will not be sitting on the ground, which I think adheres to your current, your code and requirement. The, you know, one thing that was left out, you know, we're adding over 300 trees to the community. Currently the 30 acres has zero, there's not a tree on it. And we'll be adding over 300 trees to the 30 acres. We're accommodating the city parks and the drainage system by, we've got two large detention ponds that, you know, in a residential development of this size, it's very unusual to have these, but we're doing that to accommodate the surrounding drainage situation. We got a couple more questions. I know we brought you up to answer questions, so I want to make sure that we get to the questions. Mayor Pro Tem? Thank you. Julie, I have a question. So thank you for your specs. I'm going to ask, I'm going to pull up a graphic. Okay. And then have you kind of help me see it, right? Sure. So if you go to the corner of Wind River Lane and Ottawa Lane, thank you, John, for you helped me remember that neighborhood has wrought our offenses, has a sidewalk, and that'll help me out. And someone else can ask questions while she's pulling up. Yeah, sure. Councilmember Davis, do you have a question for the applicant? I do. And this could sound like we're in the weeds for a second, but I promise we're not. When we're talking about street trees, do you have a specific species of tree that you're talking about? I think the city calls out what the definition of a shade tree is. Right. But my question is, do you know what species of tree, we're talking about under those power lines, do you know what species of tree you'll be planting there? If you could step a little bit closer to the mic, too, because we're -- I understand that there are certain trees that are called out on the code as street trees. I'm asking you, what trees are you going to be planting? Well, we'd certainly want to limit ourselves to those definitions. So if you had a recommendation, I'd be -- I've got open ears. At this point, you know, we're kind of waiting to see kind of where this went and then kind of take it from there. But I understand your concerns with the power line. So we'd want something that could get tall enough, bushy enough, but not too tall where it would make maintenance concerns. So I do understand that. Thank you. All right. So we're pulling up something. Yes, sir. Julie, near that corner of Ottawa, there's the -- just -- is it Ottawa? Yes. Ottawa. So a little -- Ottawa. Yes, right there. Right here? Yes, right there. If you can drop it right there, that'd be perfect. Yes. Okay. So, Mr. McGinnis, right? Yes. Help me understand what I'm looking at. There's the -- and you can manipulate it to the other side. There's a wrought iron fence if you want to use that, for example. But just trying to understand, is that your vision of what the green -- what do you call it? No, I call it grass. The right-of-way? The parkway? Yeah. The patch of grass that you envision for the sidewalk. So the sidewalk, you said -- so you said 11 feet? I believe that's right. Is the -- That looks very similar, yes. Okay. And so, Julie, if you could help me. So you envision a -- that telephone pole going in that size green space with trees periodically? No. Yes. So as you could see -- It'll be bigger? Yeah. They have landscaping within that parkway as well, so you can kind of see -- But they don't have power lines. That's right. I could add to that, too, that DME has an approved tree list of trees that can be planted near their power lines. Make sure that they don't achieve really high height. So they've got -- they've got approved trees that we typically provide to the applicants when it's near this area. I'm sorry, Councilman. The power line area. That's what I'm trying to understand. If the green space is going to be this size, how do you get a telephone pole in there? I mean, it's already there, but how do you work around it? That doesn't seem like enough space. I'm just trying to see it -- They would have to make sure they don't interact. So I'm going to make a proposal here. I'm just going to make an observation. There's a lot of outstanding questions here. I mean, there's -- we're all over the place. We've got people who want the new code fencing enforced. Some want sent back, some don't. What I think we need to do is -- I mean, I think we need to postpone this until we can gather these questions, because you're going to try to -- I don't expect you to try to answer all these and come up with these decisions on the fly tonight. I just -- I don't think that's reasonable, but it sounds like there's enough concern or observations to try to figure out how do we, number one, get all these to you so you can address them, and then how we can get a schematic or a site plan, if you will, of that parkway, because when you see those power lines -- and this isn't about your development. I don't know why the city still demands street trees under power lines. That's the question for another day. But those are sort of my thoughts, but that's just me. I'm not going to make a motion to postpone. We can move through this on a vote, but those are sort of my observations. Councilmember Armitage. So I want to ask -- and maybe I was misunderstanding, but I thought from the picture, it looked like the tree -- I'm pointing to that tree, even though it's not -- we're not talking about that tree, but the trees are going to be along the line of the fence and not in the right-of-way under the power lines, but it sounds like by what others are saying I was misunderstanding that. No, the shade tree and ornamental trees that are alternating every 20 feet will be in that first four or five feet between the curb and the sidewalk. Okay, so it will be -- Right. Now, the vertical landscape element that goes directly in between each column will be up against the fence. Okay, so I was conflating those two. So thank you for clarifying. To clarify on the telephone poles, most of those are 12 to 24 inches to back a curb, and so obviously if we've got a conflict in there, we'll have to sit there and look at it and say, okay, this tree fits or it doesn't. We may have to shift them down or left or right a little bit to accommodate those. But they're there and the right-of-way kind of is what it is. You know, that's city utilities mandated. I really don't have a whole lot to do with that. Mayor Pro Tem, do you have a question for the speaker? Well, yes. Because if not, I was going to just go ahead. Yeah, and then I'm going to tell you, I agree with you, but I'm not going to make the motion postponed. I don't want to do that to you. I'll wait and see what my peers think. But, Mr. McGinnis, I guess that's my concern is if we -- if I support what's proposed tonight and reduce that setback and then all of a sudden all that won't fit between there, I'm -- you know, then that's a problem. So I wouldn't support it unless someone can show me where it all goes. Can I make -- the setback has nothing to do with the right-of-way. It doesn't affect the right-of-way at all. What it is, it's the fence in that scenario to the back of the house. So in our scenario, we're proposing 40 feet. You have a 40-foot backyard, the fence, and then your 11-foot right-of-way. The right-of-way isn't encroached on at all. Okay. The city code allows for a 10-foot backyard. We're requesting a 40. Got it. Four times the minimum. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. And I -- you know, to your point, if that's what -- I agree. I think we should postpone it and kind of not only talk through what's being proposed, but also I'd like for everyone to understand, if it's not approved, at the end of the day, what does this look like? If we do go with the right-iron fence and talk about the downfalls or pitfalls that maybe we hadn't thought about. Yeah, okay. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. Sure. Councilmember Meltzer? Yeah, I'll move postponement to a date certain. Is that, like, a week? I would probably think it's going to need a couple weeks to get our questions compiled through staff to them and to really begin to think through some issues or some proposals or concerns. So that's the third -- oh, the 10th? Okay. So I move postponement to September 10th. Okay. Councilmember Briggs? And will we have a list of trees? Because when I think about street trees and then with the poles, I don't want to see a whole lot of trees that look like this because they've been trimmed out. That doesn't really help for aesthetics. And the reason they were proposed is to help with privacy. And so now they're not shade trees. They're crepe myrtles. So that takes away from the whole reason if you were trying to address the neighborhood concern on privacy by adding these trees, crepe myrtle is not going to do it. So just a little bit more in-depth information on that plan would be good. Sure. I can provide the DME list of the trees that are permitted. Sure. And as odd as this sounds, which is -- it's just a fact or a piece of data, I'd like to know what the footage is for those overhead distribution lines and if there's an option to maybe put those underground, moving down through there, either through a combination of public, private or -- just a piece of data, that's all. Nobody's required to do it. The overlay doesn't require it. It's just I'd like to know what that -- understand what that piece of data is. What point of order? Shouldn't we acknowledge the second vote on that, on the postponement? And then -- No. Well, I think what we're trying to do is figure out whether we want to postpone it or not, trying to get some data. So I will recognize the second -- I will recognize Councilmember Ryan right now. Okay. Yeah. I've got a quick comment first. Just one more thing that I believe we put into the 2019 code that, like, a little research on is I thought we had to make sure that we didn't end up with abandoned space, that there had to be a certain distance between fences so that you couldn't -- if your neighbor puts up a fence and you don't like it, you can't put one within X distance, but I can't remember if that made it in or not. So -- but with that, I will second the postponement. Okay. So we now have a motion to second. Is there any further discussion? All right. Let's vote on the board, please, for a motion to postpone to a date certain of September the 10th, I believe. Motion carries 6 to 1. Let's go ahead and take a quick break. We've been going at it a little bit. A little 10-minute break, huh? No. No, we've still got two more. Come back to this meeting of the Denton City Council at 8.23 p.m. on August the 20th, 2019. We're moving on to our agenda items 6F and 6G. We'll call agenda item 6F, which is hold a public hearing, consider adoption of an ordinance of the City of Denton, Texas, suspending enforcement of regulations prescribing the types of materials, products, or aesthetic methods used for construction and renovation of residential and commercial buildings. We have a presentation that has both items. I don't know if you want to open up the other one as well. I'll call them both. But we'll need to vote on them separately, and I guess we can have a joint public hearing as well. Yes. Okay. We've got a lot of people out here, so hold a public hearing, consider adoption of an ordinance of the City of Denton, Texas, suspending any conflicting application of those permitting and approving procedures related to subdivision development plans or PLATs contained in either the Denton Development Code or the 2019 Denton Development Code, and this is for agenda item 6G. Great. Thank you, Mayor, Madam, Mr. Council, Ron, and Gate Development Services, Principal Planner. Item for you to consider today is our two ordinances. Often what we are referring to is House Bill Stop Gap Ordinances. As read into the introduction, the two ordinances, the first one is DCA 19006, relates to House Bill 2439, which prohibits the regulations of building materials. House Bill 2497 related to rules of and appeals to the Board of Adjustment. The second ordinance, DCA 1907, relates to House Bill 3167, which is the 30-day shot clock automatic approval of PLAT and plan applications. As presented during the work session, these House Bills preempts our authority, our home rule authority, again, as it relates to building materials, appeal procedures, as well as the approval for PLATs and plan applications. I just wanted to state that the House Bills or the regulations were not city initiated and that, in fact, they were act of the state eroding our local authority. These House Bills will go into effect September 1st. With that quick timeline and effectiveness, these ordinances are meant to help us prepare for any code amendments, if necessary, to address these House Bills after the effective date of September 1st. The Planning and Zoning Commission received this same presentation, and they recommended approval of DCA 1960, with a recommendation that the following whereas be included as part of the ordinance. The ordinance that you have in front of you or has been included in the backup already has this whereas, but just wanted to make sure that you were aware that the Planning and Zoning Commission wanted this whereas also included in DCA 19006 ordinance. The Planning and Zoning Commission also recommended approval of the second ordinance, which is DCA 1900760. That concludes my presentation. I'd be happy to answer any questions. This is a public hearing. I will open the public hearing. Anyone wishing to speak on these agenda items 6F or 6G? Please come down and state your name and address. Your time will begin. Anybody wishing to speak? Seeing none, we will close the public hearing for agenda item 6F and 6G. We will take these up on separate votes. So we'll first consider agenda item 6F. Mayor Pro Tem? I move approval of item 6F, including the whereas addition. As presented by staff? Yes, sir. Recommended by PNZ. Councilmember Armitage? And I second that. I didn't need the whereas, but I'm okay with it. All right. So we have a motion to second for approval of agenda item 6F with the recommendation by PNZ of the inclusion of the whereas. Let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries 7-0. We'll now take up consideration for agenda item 6G. 6G. Councilmember Meltzer? I move approval. Councilmember Ryan? I second. We have a motion to second for agenda item 6G. Let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries 7-0. We're now to concluding items. If we could. We talked about it at the retreat. We have not passed any official policies, but if we could just be mindful of the time on concluding items and the purpose thereof. Mayor Pro Tem? Just thank you. Briefly wanted to encourage those that are listening, watching to the North Texas Fair continues through the weekend, so please go see the rodeo and support those vendors. And it's a great time in our city. Thank you. Councilmember Briggs? Mike, just wanted to remind everyone or just to say that on Thursday, our Daily Red is having their millionth meal celebration. And that's a pretty great achievement. And I just wanted to acknowledge that and hope to see some of you there. Thank you very much. Any other concluding items? Seeing none, all right. We will stand adjourned at about 829. Is that right?