Aug 26, 2019 Public Utilities Board on 2019-08-26 6:00 PM

>> Okay, it's 6.03, we had some technical difficulties so we're a little bit behind schedule. We'll call to order the Public Utilities Board Meeting of Monday, August 26th, 2019. Before we hop into work sessions, we have two new board members that we'd like to welcome. Ed, is it Soph? Do I say-- >> Soph, yeah. >> Soph and Russ Bafford. So maybe you could tell everybody a little bit about your background. >> Okay, should I use this? Yep. >> I've lived in Denton, about 32 years. And before that, I attended University of North Texas in 1963 to '68, went to New York to seek fame and fortune, stayed up there 20 years, and then came back here in 1987. And as a first-time homeowner, my whole perspective on life changed in regard to city matters and things that affected quality of life. >> Could you check his mic? Is your mic on? >> It was. >> There you go. >> So as I say, when I became a first-time homeowner with a young child and a wife, my whole perspective changed and I actually started becoming involved in city activities and found it to be very rewarding. Made some great friendships and acquaintances and I'm very honored to be able to serve with you on this board. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Glad you could serve. >> Is this on? >> The little light will tell me. >> Is this on? >> This little green light should be on. Okay. >> Now it's on. >> Now it's on, okay. >> Can you hear me now? I'm Russ Bafford. I'm a retired engineer. My week consists of six Saturdays and a Sunday. That's the work schedule I like. I worked for-- have a degree in civil engineering and one in mining engineering. I worked for-- I retired from a 1,100 megawatt coal-fired power plant on the southern tip of Illinois. It's right on the Ohio River in Massac County. We had six units. When it was built in the early '50s, it was the largest steam turbine General Electric made. The first unit came online in 1953 and it's still running today believe it or not. I worked there for almost 20 years, retired. And my wife and I moved here most recently from Utah. I did a short stand out there working for a consulting firm. We had some industrial clients out there. So I'm anxious to help out wherever I can. >> All right, thank you. All right, now on to business. First order is receive a report and hold a discussion and give staff direction on the proposed solid waste rates for fiscal year 2019-2020. >> Good afternoon Chair, PB members, Nick Vincent, the city's budget manager. Happy to see the new members on the board tonight. We have a two-part presentation. The first part of the presentation, I'll walk you through the proposed '19-'20 solid waste rates. Second part of the presentation, Brian Burner, the director of solid waste to come up and present information regarding the valet service and also some contracting possibilities. So this slide summarizes the proposed landfill rate changes. We are looking to introduce a non-city resident and business rate this fiscal year. Currently these customers are paying $44 a ton. Moving forward, we are looking forward to these customers paying $46 a ton. I do want to point out this does not impact the city and residents and businesses. Their rate will stay at $44 a ton. Appliances electronic, the drop-off fee, we are looking to reduce both of these rates to $10 per item. You can see that right there. Compacted and uncompacted MSW, we are looking to make rate adjustments based on the cost of service of disposing of MSW which is municipal solid waste. These rates are only applied, are charged to customers in the event of a scale house outage. If there is an outage at the scale house, we do charge these rates. Tires, we are looking to discontinue the acceptance of tires. There are currently various sizes that come into the facility. About 300 per year, we will request customers to take those to other disposal sites, retailers around the community. Crushed concrete, we do currently have a crushed concrete at a rate of $8 a ton, we are looking to do away with this rate of moving forward into the future. >> So just doing away with the product? >> Yeah, we don't have adequate inventory on hand to sell to the public, what we do produce and have on hand, we use on site at the facility. >> Can we ask questions? >> Yes sir, anytime you get a question, please ask. >> What percentage roughly is a non-resident use of our landfill? >> The only $2 difference, cost per ton. What would you guess? >> I actually, let me ask Brian to come up and address the question really quick. >> Yeah, of the cash customers that come across our scales, roughly 1/3 to 1/2, depending on the day of the month, it can be out of non-City of Dent residents. >> Yeah. Yes sir. >> Will people actually be given a list of places where they can take their used tires? >> No, what you will do though is go to any tire retailer and by state law they're required to be able to take those back, you will pay a fee just like you would if at the City of Denton's landfill. But any retail will take those if you're commercial operation, you're required by law to maintain a contract with a tire disposal company. >> Okay, well I hope that this will be publicized because having done some creek cleaning, the tire situation was just terrible. And I think like a lot of things, it's a matter of education. So I hope that in mailers, etc., that you'll let people know that just because the city isn't taking them doesn't mean that they can dump them. >> The ability to take them to just any tire retailer will be part of our outreach. >> Great, thank you. >> And the cost, the $8 per cubic yard compared to $14.50 per cubic yard for the compacted waste, that's a pretty big difference. I'm trying to understand that. >> So uncompacted would be MSW that comes in in roll-off containers, it's not compacted. Compacted would be a lot of times that you see at the big box retailers. Kroger would be a perfect example. They have a compacted self-contained unit sitting there. Those units actually compact roughly a 3 to 1 ratio so the rate is a little bit more expensive per cubic yard because you have more density, it's denser in the compacted units. >> And we had a recent cost of service study done, that's why the rates are being adjusted. >> That's correct. And these rates are only charged, so if a customer comes in say with a compacted unit or an uncompacted unit, they're billed at $44 a ton if they're sitting in a resident or business. If in the event the electricity was to go out in a scale house or the network's down, we would bill these rates. That's the only time these rates are charged. >> Okay, thank you. >> As a point of reference, I understand last decade, we've never charged this rate because our system's always been up, but state law requires us to have a stopgap to be able to charge and track this waste for reporting purposes. >> All right, any more questions on this slide, we'll be happy to address them. Okay. That concludes landfill rate adjustments. We'll get into residential now. There is two slides on residential rate adjustments. First, we are looking to implement a subscription yard based service for residents this fiscal year. Council did see this last week. And they did approve us to move forward with this, so we do want to walk you through the proposed changes. There are two different types of collection that customers can choose from, one being a craft bag and the other being a cart. If a resident does choose to have their yard waste collected with a cart, there is a one-time cart purchase fee of $20. It is just a one-time fee. The only reoccurring cost would either be the dollar per month or the 50 cents a month based on what type of service you would like. Excess brush and greater than four cubic yards. Currently, four cubic yard of brush is included in your weekly collection service. If you go above that, we've currently been charging per cubic yard. It is difficult to explain to a customer exactly how much a cubic yard is. So moving forward, we're looking to change this to an hourly rate of $75 an hour. We'll be building on quarter hour increments. So if it only takes us 15 minutes to collect it, you'd be building a quarter of $75. >> Can you explain how that craft bag option is going to work? >> Yep. >> Today, you could go to Home Depot, you could go to Lowe's, you could go to almost any hardware store in the city of Denton and buy a craft bag. They usually come basically packaged in five bags per package. You buy one of those and use it just like a plastic bag. You fill up your material, put it on your curb on the collection day for the yard waste, and then it's picked up manually just like it is now. Instead of having to tear open the plastic bags like we do, because again, this yard waste actually go is one of the raw products that we use to manufacture dino dirt. So we have to de-plasticize everything that comes in now. We're seeing a lot of worker injury, repetitive motion injury. By using the craft bags, we just put it in the cart. It gets ground up. It actually becomes part of the dino dirt itself. So again, it's very simple, very low tech, but again, very beneficial to the process and really helps us from a worker injury standpoint. >> That's one craft bag per week? >> No. As many as you want to put out. >> You pay a dollar a month. >> Yeah. A dollar a month basically gets you skin in the game. What we're trying to do is make routes more efficient. Right now we drive by every house every week to see if there's yard waste out. By getting citizens to partner with us in this system, we can create efficient routes. So if we know that we have 200 homes to pick up this week, we go to 200 homes, not 33,000 homes. >> Yeah. Good. >> Okay. >> Is there any more questions on residential services on this slide? >> Yeah. This may be the wrong time to ask it. So if it is, tell me. >> No, go ahead. >> Is there going to be any collection of household chemicals like they used to be? >> There's always been. We have not stopped that process. >> Okay. >> And you call in 8700 and you can schedule a collection or probably more conveniently you can run it out to our facility. We're open 7 to 4 every day, Monday through Friday. We're going to be extending the hours after October 1st and as we extend those hours be somewhere in the neighborhood or 5 or 6 o'clock in the evening and open on Saturday which is when most people are cleaning this material out. So we will publicize that as it comes out. But right now bring it to us or just call 8700 and we will schedule a pick up. >> So is it still $10 for a bundled? Is that-- >> A bundle of-- >> Of chemicals? >> No, it's-- >> On the-- I don't know, maybe this is out of date. On the June 11th work session. >> No, we're-- throw that one away. That was a preliminary presentation that we gave to council for some consideration. We've gone back, these are the rates that we're going to be including in the rate study or in the rate ordinance. >> So the home collection, chemical collection will be included in this? >> Yes. >> Okay, great. >> It'll stay included. >> Great, thank you. >> Thank you. >> It is included in a residence monthly bill. I'm going to think to answer your question too, so. So this is residential rate changes continued. We are looking to change or do away with our excess refuse reload fee. Currently, if a customer requests to have their cart reloaded with refuse, there's a $7 fee. Moving forward, we're looking to do away with this. We will continue to offer this service if customers call in. We just aren't looking to charge in the future for this. Bulky waste items currently, we charge for anything greater than four items per year. Moving forward, we're looking to charge for greater than two items per collection. Anything greater than two items per collection would be $5. So we're actually increasing the frequency and decreasing the fee. Same day cart changeout fee is currently $65. Based on the cost of service model we mentioned earlier, it is recommended we reduce this fee to $50. Moving forward to the next fiscal year. Commercial rate changes, there is one major change we want to make you aware of. We are looking to introduce a commercial bulky waste collection this fiscal year. This would include multifamily complexes and apartments. So if a customer called in to have a mattress collected or a mattress and a couch, for one item it would be 25. If it was two, it would be 30. So there's a trip fee of 20 and a per item fee of $5. >> Okay. >> That concludes the right portion of the presentation. If there's no other questions, I'll turn it over to Brian to proceed to the rest of the presentation. >> Thank you. >> Well, good evening. My name is Brian Barnard. I'm Director of Solid Waste for the City of Denton. I do appreciate the opportunity to come and talk a little bit about our valley service that will be rolling out in the downtown area. And then I'll be talking a little bit about some contracting opportunities we're going to take advantage of. This presentation was presented to council last week and has been approved to go forward. So this is informational, but I'd be glad to answer any questions you might have. Hopefully everybody read their Denton Record Chronicle over the weekend and saw on the business pages where we talked about our valley service. Back on June 11th, we proposed a proof of concept back on Industrial Street, which is, what, roosters and Steve's wine bar and the other, you know, Texas tapas and fuzzies and just that wonderful area, you know, to go in and actually look at the way that we do garbage there. Downtown, we have a series of what we call shared dumpsters because it's so tight space we cannot locate a dumpster for commercial service at every building. So again, what we have is a series of shared service dumpsters throughout the downtown area. They're usually sitting in the right-of-way. They're taking up parking. They smell. They're done sightly. What we wanted to do is actually roll out this program and a proof of concept which began on June 24th was to last, you know, up to 120 days, but after 45 days it was like, this is so successful. We're not going to wait any longer. We're going to roll it out, make these improvements in the entire downtown area. Basically what it is, it's a back door collection to each of these shared service opportunities. We have about 141 businesses and downtown residents that are currently on the service. So what we would do is actually incorporate them into a collection depending on your usage size, anywhere from maybe one time, two times a week, up to three or four times a day depending on how much garbage that you're-- and recycling that you generated. Remove the public containers and as we start rolling out and seeing how much free time is available for our collectors, you know, start doing litter abatement, pressure washing, just general cleanliness downtown. So again, we began with the industrial street and as I said, it was so popular and successful, we decided to move to the rest of the downtown area. Some of the benefits we originally identified was improved aesthetics and odors. And I got a couple of slides here in a moment you're going to see really the benefit of the area. Adding parking spots. Parking is at a premium downtown. Just by removing two dumpsters in the Russell Street, behind Industrial Street here, freed up two spots. By removing all of our shared dumpsters, we anticipate we can get up to 20 additional parking spaces downtown. So again, a lot of that depends on orientation and everything else but, you know, 20 is a million when you're talking about downtown and the need that goes on there. So again, improved service efficiency just because we're working with our businesses downtown, we have a higher level of service due to the increased frequency. We're reducing our trucks from about 16 a week to two a week. And again, on and on, there's just benefits out there and they continue to grow. >> Sixteen to two. >> Correct. >> Wow. >> Yeah. >> Think of the emissions that are not-- >> Exactly, you know, the wear and tear of the street. >> And the wear and tear of the street. >> And, you know, if you're one of those residents that's in an apartment downtown, you know, we start early so that we're not blocked in by parking. So that truck comes rumbling by at what, 5 o'clock in the morning? I don't know about you but I appreciate a little extra sleep in the morning and not be awakened. So again, you know, just another benefit. So, okay. So here's some before and after pictures. This is behind Steve's Wine Bar. This is the old garbage container that was there. And you'll notice in the six weeks that since it's been removed, it's a little bit cleaner and Steve has actually constructed a patio back there for his patrons to use. So again, it's improving the aesthetics and the business in the area. Behind roosters and fuzzies, again, you know, we've removed the recycle container and again, it's opened up the street. You can see how much cleaner it looks back in that area. So again, just some immediate benefits from working in that area. Here's something I want to talk about when we talk about shared service. Again, you know, basically anybody in the area can throw trash in those shared dumpsters and technically, you've got an assigned dumpster or set of dumpsters to use but what we found prior to starting the valet service, we had about 56 cubic yards of service there every week between garbage and recycling which equates to almost 10 tons of material. When we started actually counting and weighing the bags in the valet, we found that we were only servicing about 3.16 which means there's almost 7 tons of illegal dump material in that Russell Street area every week. And if it's just in Russell Street, what's happened on Hickory and Austin and Cedar and all those others that we have down there. So again, there's a high level of service that was happening. We're still-- you know, our guys are downtown, they're working hard, they're trying to see if this material is going somewhere else but again, you know, it's highlighting a problem that again, the next step is trying to figure out how we're going to address this material as it continues to identify it and then how we're going to address it. When you look at the tonnage, about 2-- a little more than 2 tons a week was garbage, almost a full ton a week was recycling which is tremendous. It gets our recycling rate up to about almost 29%. When you look across the commercial sector in the city of Denton, we're doing good to get 15% every week. And in this area, we've been able to get to 29. And part of that has to go with the fact that we're actually working with the business owners and the people that are doing the work about how to recycle right. What they can recycle, what they can pull out of their trash. What I really want to focus on here is this contamination rate. Again, it's less than 8%. Right now, across the rest of the business sectors in the city of Denton, we're anywhere from about 40 to 50%. It is just really bad. Actually, that number should be less than 1%. In one load in one week, we had a person that was refilling the fryer with oil and forgot to put the cap on as tight as they should. And when they went in to compact it, the residual oil actually contaminated. But we actually-- what was it, last week or the week before, we had a load come through with 0% contamination. And by working intensely with these businesses and looking at what's going in there and going back and having those conversations, we can really clean up those recycling loads. So again, and the good part about that is it reduces the amount of waste. It increases the value of the recycling. So it really helps us as we're moving along. As we start looking at the phase in of the valet through the downtown area, we're going to be looking at it in several phases. Starting today, we began a two-week audit period. We're going to start with phase one south of downtown. We're still talking about whether we could do phase two north of the courthouse or east of the courthouse, but we may swap these two. Go to phase four. Finish up the area around the industrial street going north and south. And then in phase six in November, come all the way over to Fry Street. We do have some shared dumpsters over there. But again, this whole auditing is actually going in, working with the management of the staff. As they take out a load of garbage, they put it on an old-fashioned tick sheet. You know, this is garbage at 8 o'clock, 9 o'clock. What that does, it helps us build the route, determine how many carts are going to need, what kind of capacity, so on and so forth. So again, we don't want garbage sitting at the back door. We don't want liquids going everywhere. We're going to get it out and get it out of the way, clean up the downtown. And again, we anticipate completion by the end of November through all the phases. Again, there's going to be a new billing paradigm that we'll talk about here in just a minute. It's based on a tier assignment, based on basically what your usage is. We don't think that a single-family resident should be paying the same rate as a very, very heavy industrial, you know, bar, grill type of thing. So again, we've got different tiers set up. We're going to go through this, and as people clean up their waste generation, reduce the amount of waste, we'll do a true-up in 2020, such that you're paying, everybody's paying the appropriate level. It gives you an opportunity to actually lower your waste bill in the process. Currently, it cost us almost $155,000 a year, or we're receiving about $155,000 a year in payment. But based on the illegal dumping and the actual cost that it tossed us to service that area, we're under-collecting about $80,000 a year. This valet service, again, is more expensive. It's about $123,000 more, only because it's so intense on the personnel side. But again, we're collecting litter, we'll be power washing. These guys downtown have become our brand ambassadors. They are going to be what people see as the city of Denton. They'll be giving directions and doing other things. But again, they're going to be out there intensively working in these areas and see and be seen. So they'll be making a good impression for us. When we talk about the different shared service rates, again, tier one is your office and your residential, maybe a bag of garbage every two or three days. Right now, we're seeing people in what we're calling a tier one paying anywhere from $24.72 all the way up to almost $200. And that's just because of how wacky the current system is. It's really hard to try to figure out how the rates came up with in the first place. What we propose is anybody in phase one or in tier one would go to $24.70. And on down, you'll see the different descriptions, the number of customers we have. Under this system, like I said, we currently have about 141 businesses and residents on shared service. Right now, almost 100 of these businesses and residents would actually see a rate decrease as a result of this tiered service. We have probably about a half dozen businesses right now that aren't paying anything. They never had solid waste services set up. And so we'll be getting them in line and paying their fair share as we go along with this. And as a result, continue working with everybody to get their rate as low as possible but equitable for what they're going to be producing. So with that, any questions on the valet or the shared service? I think it sounds great. As long as you can handle the labor costs, are you hiring anybody -- going to need to hire anybody in addition to cover the -- Yes. We actually are hiring a crew of -- a five -- a crew leader and then four field service workers to actually run this program exclusively downtown. They're not on any other truck. They don't have other assignments. That will be their job. All right? Yeah. Very good. If not, the last thing we'll talk about is some contracted rates and waste volumes. Currently in the city of Denton, we have four private companies and one municipality bringing waste to the city of Denton's landfill. They are not under contract but they are enjoying a rate of $24.50, much less than the $44. This is an internal rate that we basically charge ourself to process material and dispose of the waste. Over the years, though, other companies came in and they were allowed to enjoy this rate really with no contract or no direction. So what we're trying to do is a little bit of cleanup and try to memorialize some of this in a contracted situation. Currently we're receiving almost 9,000 tons of waste a month from these companies with close to $2.7 million in annual revenue. This is important because what it does, it allows us to bridge a financial gap that we currently have in the system. We have some long-term debt that if we pulled this, we would actually have to raise rates for both our business and residential customers. So it allows us to keep the rates as low as possible but maintain some financial stability as we're going through here. What we've done is we've met with representatives of each of these entities and asked them to propose a guaranteed tonnage rate and a guaranteed amount of tonnage they would bring in here and a rate. And commonly that's called a put or pay. So basically you say you're going to bring X amount and regardless of how much you bring, you're obligated to pay us for that tonnage. So if you say you're going to bring 200 tons and you only bring 150, you still owe us for that additional 50 and you're going to pay the rate at which you're proposed. This would be under a three-year contract with an annual escalator like the CPI and we do a true-up on tonnage at the end of the year so everybody paid their fair share. While we were doing these meetings, we actually had an additional government step forward and say we want to bring some waste to you. So again, we throw that out to them and said how much you want to bring and what do you pay us to take it. So here's really what we've come back with. So the tonnage and the rates, they're sort of all over the board, but what it does, it basically brings us about 3,300 additional tons a month, but with these 33 additional tons we actually gain almost $1.4 million additional revenue annually. It's an estimated loss of about 80 days of airspace over the three-year period, but when you look at, you know, we've got 17 years left in the life of this landfill, you know, three years is within the margin of error, operational error, and when we look at our landfill expansion, we've got anywhere from 30 to 50 years on top of that. So again, it's an opportunity for us to regain some revenue, possibly provide some fundings for some projects that we've got coming up or provide some rate relief. At the end of the day though, what this does, this three-year, it allows us to get out of that debt circle. So in three years if we decide not to renew contracts with any of these companies from a financial standpoint, we won't have to worry about that debt that would have rolled off by that time and we can go back and not renew this, have them pay $46 or whatever the rate gate rate is. If they want to use this grade, if not, that would be fine, but our rate payers would not be negatively affected by not accepting the waste at this time. Well, you guessed what my question was going to be on airspace, so yeah. So what is the -- Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead, Russ. Can you define for me airspace? Yeah, airspace basically is how we convert volume or how we convert weight to volume. So basically you can fit so much trash in so many cubic yards of space and because the height of the landfill is regular by the permit, it basically defines how much of the permit is eaten up by this activity. So we anticipate we've got about 17, 18 years of life, 80 days of that would be consumed by this activity. I had a two-part question, but that was the answer to the first one. The second one is you've listed your additional revenues that you'll be earning, what's your additional cost? There is no additional cost. So it's zero for you to take? It cost us zero because again, running a landfill is a fixed-based enterprise. So if you get more waste, do you steal it and cost you more? No. You guys are great. I want to know that formula. You've got to do that. Well, you know, whether you take one ton of waste or whether you take 2,000 tons of waste -- Well, if you take 50 people, it takes you more to take 100 people. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I don't buy it, but okay. It doesn't matter because you've already passed it through council. I don't know why we're talking about it. So anyway, this was another scenario, but they didn't go that route. So at the end of the day, we do have rating ordinances. We're bringing it back to you today and it will be brought back to the city council, I believe, on the 10th. This is on the individual consideration to be approved today. It will be approved for city council on September 17th. Okay. Excuse me. And as I said, we've begun the initial implementation in phase one in the downtown service area. And again, we're finalizing the contracting on the rates and volumes for the third-party haulers. Those contracts we'll bring back and for consideration. All right. Questions? Any other questions? All right. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Brian. All right. Next item is receive a report and hold a discussion and give staff direction regarding the Denton Municipal Electric Fiscal Year 2019-2020 schedules of rates for electrical services. Good evening, board members and new board members. Sorry, my presentation is not going to be near as exciting as the landfill presentation. And like Nick has spoken up, we kind of got out of sequence here with some PV meetings. So this item has already been to the city council along with the solid waste rates. They've given us direction. We should note that we were-- if we would have followed the right sequence, we had two options that would be a no rate increase or a tiered rate increase of 3 percent with one and a half being each year. So those options were presented to the council and they gave us guidance to go with the no increase. So along with that, the caveat to that is we let them know that we'll probably be bringing this issue back to them by the end of the year to possibly address raising the ECA rate. So as I stated, there's no rate changes at all to the rate book for the electric rates for the 2019 to 2020 year. There's some minor changes here that are some terminology and some units and we're adding a LED security light rate and I'll cover these as we go. Any questions? No change is good. So what we have here is we'll start with the residential rates. These rates would be the same and this are going forward as they were last year. The facility charge, the usage charge and the ECA charge are all the same. So we have our three types of residential rates here. We have our standard residential rate, a renewable service. The difference there would be the RCA charge, that $4.80 charge and then our prepaid service which I believe came online this year. That's a program where citizens can elect to prepay for the electric service. So as you'll note on here, the facility charge is about $7 and some change more than the standard facility charge. That is the cost to administer the program. So this third party vendor actually is administering the program for this prepaid service. And the benefit to that we should say is there's no deposit. So for some accounts that have gotten behind, this is a way for them to get current. So there's no deposit and there's no reconnect fee. So if the citizen is disconnected because their account went to zero, they charge their account, electricity would be turned back on, there'd be no charge to the rate payer. Our commercial rates, general service, they're the same as they were last year, kind of have general service, small, medium and large. We've shown some just typical bills and the proponents of that bill along with just kind of give you some idea of what type of entities are serviced with each rate. LED security lights, so I believe on September 9th there'll be an item coming before you which would be an LED street light program for the city of Denton. So in lieu of that, this is for the security lights which is its own individual rate. So these lights are not metered. So they're just a standard usage based on the manufacturer data. So we noticed that as we move forward with LEDs after the street lights, if it's approved and they're implemented, they will start to change out some of the security lights with the LED lights. So all this does is simply state that it accounts for the efficiency of the LED bulbs. So on the 100 watt, there's an example there on the 100 watt sodium vapor that's replaced with equivalent LED, you can see there's a small change. But over time when all lights get converted, this would be a significant energy savings. And finally, and for transparency sake and in the past, the rate book has always had the ECA and the RCA and has the formula of how you calculate it but it was never stated in the manual. So it was stated in the budget, it was stated on the website. So to be more transparent, we thought we would just post that rate in the rate book and if we do need to come back to you, it'll take an ordinance to change this rate. At that time, we would update the rate book with whatever rate is selected. Like that. Any questions? Pretty dry. Sometimes we're more excited than this. Does the ECA, this is my second stint here, I don't know how you do it now, does the ECA come through the PUB for approval or does it go directly to the council? No sir, it goes through both. But because we didn't have a quorum, they needed to take it forward to council. We tried to stay in the, if we know what the budget cycle is coming up. Yes sir. So there is. So it would have been approved through PUB Monday and then Tuesday council would have seen it, like 24 hour period, correct? Yes sir. That's the way it was scheduled, correct? Correct. Correct. And then it got bumped by, because there wasn't that meeting, so that's how it kind of got out of cycle. We just went straight to council. Correct. And then Tuesday on that we went straight to council and then. I understand. Yeah. And the ECA rate, the rate is written where it's a formula, it's an over or under collected, but there's a discretion of the DME director to bring that to PUB and council as they see fit. We have to have some speculation, that's for sure. Yes sir, you're sure. Why is the RCA higher than the ECA? The RCA is the cost of the rec. Renewable energy credit. Renewable energy credit. So that's the ECA, it's the EC rate plus that .004 cents, that's the cost of the rec. So this is a rate that'll stay on the books as directed for the, when we go 100% renewable, at that time this rate would not be applicable, but it is on the rate book until we get to that point. And it is not changed? No ma'am. Yeah. It's not changed. Okay. And the only other change we had on there that kind of skipped over was our demand charge, it doesn't affect businesses at all, but it's just a unit change from KVA to KW. So that as these accounts cross from one account or one level to the next, it takes a firmware upgrade in the meters to capture that KVA. So changing it to KW would be a better way that our meter shop can see when they need to change that rate. So but there's no cost to the businesses. All right, other questions? All right, thank you for your time. Thank you. And the next work session item, receive a report and hold a discussion and give staff direction regarding credit collections, performance and processes. Madam Chair, board members, Krista Foster, customer service, welcome to our new members this evening. So I'm here this evening to do a little bit of follow up again on our credit and collections processes in the customer service division. In February of 2018, we had some council directed changes to the way that we managed our credit and collections. We added about $25,000 a year to our plus one utility assistance program. We also broadened those scope of that program so that we can assist families more than once during the calendar year and we can assist with deposits. We also introduced some additional deposit waiver options, including the bank draft deposit, a recurring payment deposit waiver and a homelessness deposit waiver that's part of the rapid rehousing program. The more important changes that were made to this were we changed the internal credit rating scale and that's what a lot of the things we're talking about today are related to. So what we did is we changed the way that we calculate some of the points that cause us to do an increased deposit. We also now have changed the credit scoring so it requires a greater number of events before a deposit is required on the account and for a lot of customers, it reduced the amount of deposit that's required by half. So what has happened with this is it has allowed us to charge fewer deposits or charge a lot less in deposits and we're providing some feedback on how that's going and what's happening with our performance. In March of 2019, we were asked to come back at a year into the program to provide some updates. We also came with Navigant Consulting. That's the company that had helped with us putting our processes into place and meeting some of the best practices. So we wanted them to review how our performance is going as well as to provide an update related to the changes that had been made. As a result of that, we issued an informal staff report in June so that City Council could have some of their additional follow-up questions answered and they asked a few clarifying questions in the June 4th session when we were before them then. So what we're doing is we're addressing some of those clarifications tonight. >> Can I ask on that first slide, I'm not sure what you meant by interest no longer counts as a -- >> So what happened is we have different types of events like a late payment or interest when you would accrue interest on your account, it would be counted toward your internal credit score as a negative. So that was removed from it. So the number of points that are accrued by a customer for their payment behaviors were modified slightly and that's the one that was changed there. So in the beginning of March, we only had just the very first portions of the bad debt data that had happened after these changes were made. So since we're coming back, we wanted to again continue to provide feedback on that. We were asked to closely monitor that. So again, just so that our new members can know, in 2010 is when we began implementing credit and collection practices to mimic best practices of the industry and what happened is we found that our annual bad debt was over $1.1 million that fiscal year. And so once we put a program into place, we began following some of the different standards that we followed today. We saw that reduce all the way down to $381,000 a year, just continually throughout that time period through FY '16-'17. FY '17-'18 was the first time since introduction of those policies that we've seen a growth in the annual amount of bad debt. That is the year we're partway through we've made these changes to our collection practices. The more concerning thing for us currently is that we had mentioned before that as we're just starting to see the data, it's a very volatile number. So over the first quarter of FY '18-'19, we've already seen a 44% increase in bad debt over the first quarter of the previous year. So we are still very closely monitoring these numbers. And that was before the hot weather. And that was before the hot weather. And the high bills. And right now, we're looking at we have an additional 3,000 residential accounts that have been added in the last year. But we're at $850,000 fewer deposits on file than we would have had prior. So another quick summary so everyone can kind of see year over or quarter over quarter for the last three years, that in '15-'16, we followed the same practices that had been implemented in FY 2010. In '16-'17, we followed the same practices that we had followed in 2010. And then as you see in FY '17-'18, it's the point where you see the black outline. This is the quarters that represent the changes to our policy over time. And then of course, the FY '18-'19 is there as well. The thing that's most alarming to us at this point is that over the last 13 consecutive quarters, we've only seen bad debt exceed an average of $50,000 a month three times and two of those are the last two consecutive quarters. So there's still a lot of need for us to continue to closely monitor what's going on with this performance of debt. One of the questions that we were asked to provide a little additional clarification on is the relation of late fees and interest to bad debt. We were specifically asked what part of late fees, interest and deposits make up bad debt. So first I want to make sure that it's clarified. Deposits are never a contributor in a negative way to bad debt. That money belongs to the customer. We are simply holding it on their behalf. Once that account closes, we refund the balance of that plus interest to the customer so it only ever offsets the numbers for bad debt. The second thing that's important to note is that final balances are not subject to late fees or interest. At the point the customer initiates that termination request, that balance is no longer subject to a late fee. So anytime there is a late fee that's part of a write-off balance, it means that those fees existed prior to the customer requesting service termination. That being said, for our residential accounts, the average write-off is $278. And of that, $8 is fees and $0.75 would be interest on average. It accounts for about 3% of our bad debt. And only 35% of those write-off accounts actually have some form of fear interest that was included. Excuse me, just a quick question, how is the interest determined on how you're going to pay interest on the deposit back to the customer? We follow the federal interest rates. Okay. Which one? I don't know. Okay. I know. I'm off the top of my head. I can get the information and provide it back. I was just thinking about putting some money in the deposit. I don't think you'd pay that much bill. I will allow Tiffany to address that. Good evening, Tiffany Thompson, Director of Customer Service. I would not recommend putting your money there. It is a very small amount, but we do work with finance on what that is updated, but we work with the federal reserves on what that amount is, but it's very small. I wouldn't -- I care about you, don't do it. Any other questions? Okay. So, the other things that we were talking about, one of them is the way that late fees are assessed. So I wanted to address late fees and payment behavior. So in FY 2010, we increased our late fee from $10 to $20. We are one of the few municipalities that charges a flat late fee versus a percentage, which is where the question was raised. So as we're looking at this, what happened is we found that the $10 fee was not significant enough to deter the behaviors in the payment patterns. As soon as that fee changed to a $20 flat fee, we saw an immediate 29% month over month increase. And across eight years, that has resulted in over 42% fewer account delinquencies. The fewer delinquent accounts, the fewer customers who are being impacted negatively with fees, with interest, or with additional deposits. So we recommend, you know, that this stays as it is because it is an effective deterrent to keep customers out of situations where they may be charged additional funds. Another area that we had questions about was the way we handle our deposits on transfers of service. We are an outlier. A lot of the different utilities actually transfer everything with the service. What we do internally is we will actually take the account that you're at today. We finalize the account. We apply your deposit and interest back to that final balance. We assess to see if you still require a deposit at the new account and assess that at the new account. The customer does have the option if there isn't a deposit assessed that they can make arrangements on that. This gives that customer more access to fluid assets during that time that they're moving than if we were to follow some of the other practices. Most utilities will actually take at the time that account finalizes, they just transfer the deposit as well as all of the final balances. That means that immediately that customer could be in jeopardy of additional fees or interruptions at the new account. If that customer maybe would have to pay a lower deposit or no deposit at all, it doesn't take that into consideration. What we actually found was only 8% of our customers who have transferred service over the last 12 months actually were assessed a deposit at their new location. 20% of our customers who had deposits got their deposit refunded and didn't require a deposit at their new location. So we're giving them that benefit of being able to have better access to those funds. So for next steps, our recommendations are that we continue to monitor the uncollectible debt trend over the next quarter. In December of 2019, if we still continue to see the climb and the rates going up as they are today, we will be coming back looking for some containment strategies to help mitigate that before we see a significant amount of bad debt at the end of the year. We also would recommend postponing or avoiding any kind of policy or procedure updates that are going to contribute to the growth of that current uncollectible bad debt that we maintain our existing late fee structure as an effective deterrent to help prevent that from happening. And that we continue with our current deposit process. We actually did a little bit of surveying over the customers in the month of June, all customers who had transferred service. We did see one who said that he felt like he would rather have everything transferred over but largely the customers like that process. They felt like it was very easy to understand and they felt like it was beneficial to them to be able to have that deposit pay off their final balances. And we also want to continue to monitor and grow our pay as you go prepaid metering program because of the -- it's the way that we can relieve burden to customers without having an impact on uncollectible debt. >> I remember we reduced it from a two-month balance to a one-month balance and utility industry is two months because we don't even know yet that you're going bad if it's just one month. Do you think that is the contributing factor? >> That is definitely a contributor to this because when a customer leaves the city and they terminate an account, they're going to have their current bill as well as another month of service that has yet to bill. So that is typically why that standard is in place. When we do still charge a two-month deposit on the lowest tiers of that credit score but in that credit scale, we do have an entire section that is a one-month. >> Okay. Thank you. >> Any additional questions? >> You know how this -- how does this debt picture compare with other municipalities of a similar size? >> It is actually fairly difficult to be able to pull so that we -- Tiffany, do we have that from the Navigant study? >> If not, I'll provide that back to you. We had provided some information in March related to that. Only a handful of the other municipalities had actually provided some of their bad debt statistics. But I can certainly provide that back to you. >> I have another question but it's gone. Any other questions? >> All right. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Oh, did you have something else? >> No. >> Okay. >> Okay. Next item then is consent agenda. >> Did you find them? >> Oh. Okay. >> Thank you for the question. Whenever we did the Navigant consultant, City of Denton came in quite favorable for our bad debt, what we had. We had Denton, Austin, DeSoto, Houston, and some of those like Austin had .45%, Lubbock was .54%, we were .15%, so we came out very favorable with our policies that were in place with that so they were actually kind of recommending us as being the model to other utilities. Does that answer your question? >> Prior to the changes or after? >> Prior to the changes. But that's where we're still at whenever we were reporting this. >> Okay. Thank you. >> I wanted to get that answered this evening. >> Thank you. >> Okay. Now we're onto the consent agenda and I believe we have just one item. Does the board, any board member wish to pull that item? All right. Then do we have a motion to approve the consent agenda? >> I move approval. >> I'll second. >> All in favor say aye. >> Aye. >> Opposed? Carries. Okay. Items for individual consideration. The minutes of July 22, 2019, did anyone have any changes or corrections? Okay, then they'll stand approved as presented. Next item is consider recommending the adoption of an ordinance for the municipal electric fiscal year 2019-2020 schedule of rates for electric service. Since we already had a presentation, do we have a motion to approve? >> Unless there's any additional information on it, I make a motion to approve. >> I second. >> Okay. All in favor say aye. >> Aye. >> Opposed? That one carries. Consider recommending adoption of an ordinance from the City of Denton, Texas, Home Rule Municipal Corporation authorizing the city manager to execute a contract with Archer Western Construction for the construction of Lake Louisville water treatment plant dewatering facility. I'm not going to read it all for the amount of $8,124,640. >> Oops, I grabbed the wrong presentation on my flash drive. >> Okay. >> Good evening, Madam Chair, PUB. I am Frank Pugsley, the Director of Water Utilities here to discuss the Lake Louisville water treatment plant dewatering facility, let me see if I can get this full screen. Here we go. Well, it's not working out for me as well as I'd like. The Louisville dewatering project, historically the Lake Louisville water treatment plant has discharged our water treatment plant solids to the sanitary sewer for ultimate treatment and removal at the Pecan Creek wastewater treatment facility. In about 2015, after the new phosphorus removal regulations, the discharge of the solids to the wastewater plant became problematic and interfered with their process for phosphorus removal. They requested that we cease discharging solids and in 2017, we took steps to do that, installed some additional pumps at the plant and began discharging our water treatment plant residuals to the existing lagoon that's present on site. The lagoon has finite capacity and we have been adding solids to it since 2017, knowing that we would either have to routinely dewater the solids in the lagoon or come up with another solution. We have added a dewatering system at the plant. Garver engineers were selected for that project and the ultimate design is a belt filter press facility and some gravity thickeners to be installed at the plant. Requests for bids were sent out and two bids were received, one being Archer Western. The bid from Archer Western was $8.124 million and change, the two bids are actually very close, they're within $70,000 each other. Let's just know we at least had probably a good set of plans and competitive bidding and the staff recommendation for that is to award the contract to Archer Western construction. So the total is very close, but the pay items are not. True. So any explanation for that whatsoever? I mean, I've seen a lot of bids and people think put money in different places. Yeah, that's the only explanation we can have without having to dig into it, the two contractors as they're trying to load their profit in one place or another. Archer Western or Red River may have more expertise in one position or maybe using subs in one place where they're wanting to add profit rather than the other. This would love some, right? Yes, I believe so. Can I ask a question? Yes, sir. I'm just curious, what are the new phosphate regulations? I don't have that information on me, but it's a wastewater treatment issue. It's just to remove the phosphate from the ultimate discharge to Pecan Creek, reducing the phosphate loads going to Lake Louisville. Are there any primary sources that this comes from, fertilizer or? Things like fertilizer, yes, are a source. Thank you. Sure. There's no chance of eliminating the belt filter presses and dumps surveyor, is there? To eliminate the belt filter press altogether? Yes. No, we have to have some means to dewater the sludge enough that we can haul it off and we need to get it down to a nice dry cake rather than have it be heavy and wet. The belt filter press one, we did a pretty exhaustive evaluation of different dewatering technologies. I was just trying to find an angle, what the angle is here for that to be such a lower price than the other construction company. Trust that you guys know what you're doing. Has Archer Western done this before? Yes, Archer Western is a very reputable well-known contractor in the water treatment industry particularly. This was within what we thought it was going to cost? Correct. I believe the engineer's estimate was around eight and a half, nine million. That's what my memory said. Yes. It was a number. All right. Any other questions? Do we have a motion to approve? So moved. Oh. You'll be the second, okay. Or second. Yeah. He raised his hand and you spoke. We'll do Ed and then Charlie. Okay. All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Motion carries. Consider recommending adoption of an ordinance establishing rates for water and water service providing for repealer and providing a several clause that you can sever and providing for an effective date. We're just seeking approval, I did have a presentation if you want to run through it I'd be happy to otherwise we're looking just for approval today. Presentation anyone? New board members? No. Okay. Do we have a motion to approve? So moved. Second. All in favor say aye. Aye. All right. Consider recommending adoption of an ordinance establishing the schedule of rates for wastewater service providing for repealer same clause and an effective date. I'm not going to try it twice. Similar to water if anybody wants a presentation I'll have be happy to walk through it with you. Otherwise do we have a motion for approval? I move. We approve. Second. All in favor? Say aye. Aye. Okay. Then consider recommending the adoption for the rates for solid waste and recycling collection service. As you saw this presentation so moved approval. All right. Second. All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Motion carries. All right. Next item receive nominations to elect a vice chair. So do we have any nominations for vice chair? I'd like to nominate Billy Cheek. Okay. Do we have any other nominations? Okay then we need a motion to approve his nomination so do we have a motion to approve Billy's nomination? Mr. Cheek's nomination. Mr. Cheek. I so move. Board member Cheek. I move. We approve that. Okay. First of all Bruce. Second. All right. All in favor say aye. Aye. All right. Welcome aboard. Receive nominations to select a secretary and for the two new members you don't really take minutes you just have to be the backup to the vice chair. So it's if I'm gone and Mr. Cheek is gone somebody needs to run the meeting. So nomination for that. Anybody? Any volunteers? Any volunteers? That'd be first. It very rarely does it very rarely happens. We did have a situation a couple of months ago where the chair and vice chair and we had not elected a secretary in a while so in the moment we had to the board had to nominate a chair and Ms. Bynum was was nominated for that for that day so just FYI. So yeah in the last four years I think it happened once right so if anybody would like to volunteer. I'll volunteer. Well thank you. Well I'll nominate you. So do we still I suppose we still need to motion to approve all right second all in favor say aye aye aye thank you ACM update yes madam chair members of the board for the new board members we provide the assistant city manager update ACM for short update what it is is typically just memorandums or other pieces of correspondence that have gone to the council that it may be pertinent to to the board it's intended to provide you all with staff reports avoid to have to make presentations things that nature to get your get through your agenda however this is tonight's is rather lengthy because we've had a number of items we wanted to present to you those first two were actually action items that would have been on your board agenda last time but we did not have a quorum so we had to cancel a meeting so obviously there's no point of going through that process has already been approved by council but we wanted to provide it to you just as a FYI for the board again the other items are there for your for your your reading enjoyment if you have any questions we've got members of staff here that can answer specific questions about any of these reports and then if you have items that you would like for follow-up we typically bring those to you back in a as an ACM update just again to get your agenda moving and also just to verify that for you and also for the record so if you have any questions for me or staff would be happy to answer any of these questions regarding regarding these items and items five and six was in response to uh brenda carroll's that's correct former board member carroll uh had requested information regarding the city's recycling program and so again uh with his departure um uh we weren't unable to get that on in time for him to be able to review that but again it's it was been on the uh the new business matrix and so we would like to present it to you all again if you have any questions be happy to answer them then it also at least in staff's opinion fulfills the the request on the new business matrix and just kind of give you an idea when uh through um if you have follow-up items and you would like to request out of staff uh we would go through that through concluding items we put on a new business matrix try to give you all uh an understanding of when we would be able to present that information either through a work session or through the ACM update and that way you can you can at least be a prize of that information from staff i have a comment a question i was looking through the recycling powerpoint and i saw that the uh i guess it was the mixed use paper uh revenue was 56 dollars in change per ton couple years ago and it dropped to seven dollars a ton in the last in at least on the slide your powerpoint slide have you got a feel for what's going on there yes he does with that drop the city is really fortunate there's a thing that's happened in the past couple of years called the national sword prior to about beginning of 2017 probably eighty percent of all recyclables uh in the united states of america was actually shipped to china and into the asian countries for processing they were they were basically taking in as raw materials and then processing it and making new materials out of it however in 2017 they did a couple things happen first of all they had they were overwhelmed by the amount of recyclables that were sent there but second of all probably 50 percent of everything that was sent was actually garbage and in a measure to control waste and to basically heat garbage in the united states they they closed their borders with their their national sword as a result all recycled cost or the value of all recyclables in the united states of america have dropped tremendously which means that the our our responsibility to increase the quality of the recyclable material that we collect curb size extremely important in my previous presentation i talked about how you know less than eight percent contamination that is that is wonderful because that means that that the value of that material is just tremendously more valuable than than something that would have come in on off of a load and as a result of the glut in the market in the united states right now because there's just so much paper out there you know so the law of supply and demand there's too much supply so or this and not enough demand so the cost really drops right now so that's whether it be mixed paper whether it be cardboard whether it be plastics whether it be glass it's falling right now we actually still get paid for the recyclables we collect curbside most cities right now are re-evaluating the recycling contracts because they're going up many in the east and northeast and some on the west coast have actually stopped collecting recyclables just because it's it's costing so much right now the anticipated cost if we were to bid out our contract again we would actually be paying a processor 95 dollars a ton to manage that material some places up in the northeast it's 350 up to 400 dollars a ton to manage it's a tough one it is a tough one and that's one reason why we focus on cleanliness and compliance with our program material but pratt also uses the pratt uses our recycled paper yes yeah and that and that's really one of our saving grace for lack of a better term because pratt is the paper market in north america and because they are so closely tied with the city of dentons program they they need our paper they need our fiber so it's a very very good relationship that we have with them on the fiber but still from a market standpoint that the prices are extremely depressed but there's hope that we're starting to do our own here in the united our own recycling we have our own in in market processors here in the united state that is correct and there's developments going on and there's currently between what the state of texas did the last legislative session and some things that are happening at the epa level right now they're actually trying to spin up some additional markets related to the the reuse of plastics so next couple of years there's gonna be a couple studies out and i think it will really help as we approach when our contract comes up in in about six years and hopefully we'll be back on really good feet and and it the cost differential won't affect us at that time i have a question about multi-family yes cycling i was looking at this backup material and i see where the committee on the environment one of their recommendations was to evaluate the implementation of mandatory rather than voluntary multifamily has there been any movement in that direction not specifically what we are proposing to do is to uh excuse me is to go and actually look at this the the city wide our entire comprehensive solid waste management plan and actually you know looking at both what we're doing residentially as well as commercially and from a multifamily standpoint and from that standpoint you know moving forward to to more holistically manage the waste that we have instead of individual programs as we're looking at them now thank you all right i have a question on the denton energy center dashboard is it okay i see a number on the dashboard of 2.44 million projected loss for 2018 19 is that right uh yes sir terry nalte assistant general manager for the month of june that's showing uh or i'm sorry through the end of june that was a negative two million dollar net income number now we have done much better obviously in the last several weeks with july july was actually a very bad month for us very mild weather uh but august has been a record month for us with uh significant revenues and gross margins produced because of very high temperatures and very high prices i do have uh some data i can show you on that but you have to bear with me a second i can bear terry i'd be careful uh going out too far outside the agenda too far outside the agenda if you would like to provide something as a as a acm update for a future board meeting it's just because the way this item was posted is absolutely something in the past not for something in the future or current yeah apologize actually i think that would be a really good we're going to have four new board members i think that would be really good to have some of these things kind of an education process right so the thing i'll add is that you know uh the deck as a as a generation resource is uh is dispatched based upon the market price of energy and so as as the market price of energy is higher the deck uh dispatches more and more and uh through june although we were showing a negative uh two million dollar net income we were actually right on budget through june um all of our money most of the money that we make from the deck or the margin that we generate from the deck comes in july and august during the hot the very hot months where we have the highest prices okay all right thank you and then our final item oh go ahead one more comment oh sure when i when i look at item number one and a i c s and try to delve into it it looks a lot like item number two we attached all the hazen and stuff item number one oh it was duplicate yeah we can fix that yeah just yeah yeah not that i'm going to read all hundred how many pages okay then our final item is uh eminent domain good evening madam chair and pub i'm diana cody deputy director of capital projects and real estate and tonight i have for you um the hickory creek sanitary sewer interceptor project phases one and two this is a location map that shows that um the properties are located in between um let's go back 377 and 35 and with anticipated growth in southwest portion of the city it's necessary to complete the installation of uh the hickory creek sanitary sewer interceptor there are about four property owners that are being impacted on the project and um we're approaching them for permanent and temporary easements that are needed for the installation so if if a favorable recommendation from the pub is received today this item will go before city council tomorrow to consider approval to authorize the city manager and the city attorney or their designees to acquire the property interest by agreement including making all offers required by law and to authorize the city attorney or his designee to file imminent domain proceedings if necessary and to authorize the expenditure of funds therefore and to provide for the chair's favorite word severability and to provide an effective date so this is just an exhibit to the actual ordinance that will be presented tomorrow that identifies the properties um the location and the property owners any questions so really what we're we're just establishing it so that we can move forward yes okay it's to provide a recommendation it's not going to eminent domain it's starting down the entire process no no no it's authorizing the acquisitions and discussion yes and discussion just making it clear how often has the city gone to eminent donate domain for easements like this small parcels uh it happens on occasion um generally speaking we're able to negotiate acquisitions and so easements we don't often end up in eminent domain it's a very small percentage of the time that that happens and you need this to even start those discussions we've started the discussions with the property owners the negotiations yes all right do you know if there are any uh private improvements on the land that you're seeking to have an easement for off the top of my head i can't say with certainty i think the majority of the properties are raw land vacant land if you'll see one of them one of the property owners says 195 dentin partners it's owned by 195 dentin partners they own 195 acres so there's not a whole heck of a lot out there yeah a lot of floodplain yeah a lot of floodplains a lot in the floodplain all right okay thank you do we have a motion so moved all in favor say aye aye motion carries okay concluding items uh there any item that a board member would wish to have on the future agenda like the the deck and the environmental concerns or okay we uh i missed an opportunity to comment on something but that's okay i'm new here um the in the purchasing process i know there's a normally written into the conditions we have an opportunity to audit vendors and particularly the one that's doing the billing i wondered uh if we had ever audited that process in the past uh to check to see that the amount uh that we know is billed is actually being sent out and how that matches with what's coming back and so forth and that can add that to the new business to the new business matrix and report back if i'm might clarify what you said about the environmental i think um what i would like when it's available obviously uh any developments with mandatory multi-family recycling that moves is that moves along just so we can see if it's positive or negative whatever thank you just a question do you please still do board member orientations doesn't seem we have a new city secretary and they are looking at revamping the boards of procedures for board members and it was really helpful when i did it a long time ago me too okay you brought in an hour with different department heads and just got to ask questions sure we can pass that information on all right any other items well we are going to be saying goodbye to two of our board members tonight both charlie and lilia are it's our last meeting thank you for serving i was surprised lilia how many years now uh i've been on the board for since 2012 so that's what seven years yeah so you almost turned out yeah yeah about seven years but charlie i did want to say if you don't mind that um that thank you for allowing me to serve i have really enjoyed serving on this board i was appointed by kevin rodin and i've enjoyed learning all about dm e and the water and wastewater department and the solid waste department and going on tours i've been on two tours of the and if you haven't been on a tour yet you really need to go because it's it'll make you very proud of where of how far we've come and where we stand in in in texas um some incredibly dedicated people who are on staff here working for the city they've been very patient very respectful and very thorough in answering my questions and i appreciate the hard work and the sacrifices that they make in service to the people of denton and like i said i've enjoyed meeting and working with good people on the pub board um i'm glad that i was able to work with billy again because we had worked together before on this board and uh i've enjoyed being a volunteer for the better part of my life and i will continue to do so and um thanks again for the opportunity it was it was wonderful thank you are you just gonna wait okay how can you follow that right you know it's been interesting in times and it's been a hoot and it's been a hoot okay all right we have a motion to adjourn all right we're adjourned